Dirkon – The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz] [via BoingBoing]: Let’s see. I take pics. I do paper engineering and modeling. I play music with a Czech man.

How can I NOT link to this?

Mars Exploration Rover: The Mission.

Starting, uh, NOW, Some West Coast NASA folks will be busy for a while. Check back with them around 9:30p and again at 11:30p for more info.

Late word is that Ken Goldstein is hard at work on his detailed recounting of The Illuminated Donkey Holiday Extravaganza 2003 Live From Los Angeles and Las Vegas – and as I noted here a few days ago, Dr. Goldstein and myself had the pleasure of a brunch with a noted LA-area television producer, who has worked with America’s most trusted sources of news and photojournalism, and a public relations professional who has a great deal of experience in developing products targeted to the enhancement of animal rights and quality of life issues.

Keep an eye on the Donk for updates and information about the trip, and make no mistake – there’s news afoot.

free Wifi hotspots locations directory Washington: Nice long list. Could have used this in DC. Doesn’t apparently show ad-hoc hotspots, such as my neighbors.

As I have said, ex-co-worker and NJ blogger KG of the ID headed to LA, CA and LV, NV for R’n’R. With New Year’s Day on the doorstep, it should be noted that hard on the heels of the well–ridiculed FBI alert concerning the consultation of almanacs (or as I’ve seen it, al manaqi), an unexpected snowstorm dusted the usually leaflet-littered reaches of the Strip, just in advance of the holiday that is being discussed as the probable locus of the recent Paris-LAX hubbub.

Somehow, I feel certain that this is related. If only I had total information awareness. I shall remain vigilant.

So far the blog-oriented search-and-parse site called BlogRunner has done the best job of sorting, parsing, and summarizing both media pro and blog-land reaction and coverage of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King – in particular, I’m interested in reading bad reviews, not because I expect them to be particularly enlightening – most will be penned by folks allergic to the genre – but because it’s the only place I expect to find thoughtful critical writing amidst the general rush to fellate.

Here’s the most thoughtful review of the film I’ve read: The End of the Ring.

The review is written by Jonathan V. Last, ‘the online editor of the Weekly Standard,’ and the subhead reads “‘The Return of the King’ is a flawed, disappointing end to Peter Jackson’s exceptional Lord of the Rings trilogy,” so I assume Mr. Last has seen the sub and feels it accurately summarizes his review. I don’t; if I wrote the sub it’d be something like “‘The Return of the King’ fails to live up to Peter Jackson’s exceptional Lord of the Rings trilogy,” as Last’s review describes both positive and negative things about ROTK.

His take on the film – and the trilogy – is quite like my own, as you will see shortly. Some of my quibbles issue from regions I presume to be off-limits to Mr. Last; but I find his thoughtful critique – grounded on frustration with the way in which Jackson and company’s cinematic streamlining undermines the literary structures of the original work – worth reading.

I find it more than a little amusing that a conservative publication’s online editor should be disappointed at the modernizing influences brought to bear on the most conservative piece of popular literature of the twentieth century in its’ transformation to film – and I find it even more amusing that I fundamentally share his viewpoint.

The Wind and Rain (April 19, 2003)

Gratefully, I stepped out of the wind and rain into the careful recreation of the 1903 cabin, each item neatly stocked and ranked with the appropriate precision of the engineer. Turning to look back into the blow, I noted a short, metal-topped wooden rail a few feet beyond the door of the cabin, about an inch wide along the top surface and about two-and-one half inches tall, running for fifteen feet or so in the sandy scrub. I took it for a path boundary from an earlier landscaping effort, overlooked by strapped groundskeepers.

For no particular reason I walked out to the rail. I began to teeter my way along it, balancing arms out, leaning into the wind.

The wind caught me and steadied me as I moved down the rail; I raised my head and the rain spattered my glasses and stung my face. Suddenly, I realized this rail was a recreation, as the cabin, of the rail the Wrights rode into the sky on December 17, 1903. The river of wind I faced and leaned on was the wind that launched us to the sky. Since earliest childhood, I’d ridden its’ tributaries around the world. The rushing sound of it ouside the portholed cabin remains a drowsy lullaby for me to this day.

I let the wind take my arms and raise them above my head.

I had dinner Monday night with a good friend, a power geek with years of experience as a programmer. He recently purchased a Mac, the 12″ G4 iBook, and we had a chat about the experience and the operating system.

I promised him a switcher’s guide – helpfully, I found some others and I’ll start with these: The Idea Basket covers the new stuff in 10.3 from a new-to-the-Mac perspective. It’s ten pages long, and as such I only skimmed it. It did not appear to be as technical as I believe my friend might appreciate, I’ll link here because part of my objective here is to provide a useful document for others in addition to my friend.

Zeldman also covered the switch just about a year ago but covers it by comparison with the orientation of a user moving from OS9 to OSX, and highlights some cool little apps.

Speaking of software recommendations, Marc Liyanage not only provides some tasty stuff such as his long-beloved and now-official implementation of MySQL, but he also provides his own list of suggestions.

As The Apple Turns and TidBITS are where I get the majority of my computing news. Interestingly, though, my recent MacWorld announced a digital-only mac-oriented developers magazine, too. I also get MacAddict, which as oriented to less technical (read ‘younger’) users as it has been over the four or five years I’ve been getting it, has also consistently outshone the venerable Macworld with interesting editorial vision including some sorely-needed personality-oriented features (which they should be running every single month, I think).

The MacWorld-backed dev mag is called “Mac Developer Journal” and is a co-venture with the highly-repected O’Reilly house, whose online material has been the single best source of technical information about the new Mac OS for the bast couple of years. Sadly, if the website is an indicator, it’s unlikely to gain an audience – no preview content was easily available. Although you can get to a preview offsite by clicking the ‘subscribe’ button (counterintuitive web design for sure). They do an interview with DragThing’s James Thomson! Damn, I asked him for an interview years ago but never bothered to try to place a story, Oh well. The pub may be a competitor to the venerable MDJ (which, I swear, once was KNOWN as Mac Developer Journal) – and oddly, MDJ has a relationship with O’Reilly.

O’Reilly’s Mac Center has a raft of well-regarded books on OS X, such as the appropriate for my friend “Mac OS X for Unix Geeks” and David Pogue’s well-liked Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition. Despite the impressive book selection, the reason to come back and back to OReilly.com is the online content at, well, macdevcenter.com.

macdevcenter offers this useful collection of articles on working with Apache, email (but nothing on setting up postfix yet, darn it), and developing for OS X, and more.

This brief survey by no means covers all the ground needed: I haven’t covered my own suite of apps and emergency utilities, for example, or addressed backup. But this will do for a start.

Maciej continues his geek’s progress over the lowlands of Holland. He’s prompting me to think guiltily of how I’ve robbed my wife of such a trip over the past couple of years.

Movie Review | ‘The Return of the King’: Triumph Tinged With Regret in Middle Earth – Elvis Mitchell weighs in with hugs all around; the New York Film Critics’ Circle drops some science for the Academy to follow up on, and in general, advance word is good.

Alex Ross looks at Tolkien’s debt to Wagner in the New Yorker, whilst the magazine defers a review proper in this ish.

Not to worry, though: a few trolls are unafraid to loft their black banners in resistance to the praise. The San Diego Union Tribune’s David Elliott says, “The saga sags,” and goes on to mock an online fan. Clearly, he’s pledged to the Dark Lord.

Christopher Tolkien recently denied that he’d gone over to the dark himself, saying, “The suggestions that have been made that I ‘disapprove’ of the films, vent to the extent of thinking ill of those with whom I may differ, are wholly without foundation.”

Director Jackson, for his part, recently expressed interest in shooting the trilogy’s prequel, The Hobbit.

As someone who wrote with joy at great length about both previous movies and the books, I appreciated this sensitive, if brief, analysis of the books by John Garth in the Scotsman.

Tomorrow, the day the film is released, is also the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, and will see a reenactment attempt at 10:35am EST, 7:35am here. I’ll be out of bed looking for coverage.