Born Weird

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Inception. Go see it (it’s good), then read this.

It’s been about a week now since I went to see Inception.I thought it was quite good, but not fabulous, which seems to have me in the minority, at least within my demographic. It’s definitely kept me thinking about it, which is a good sign.

But the reason I didn’t think it was fabulous is that it left me with too many questions. And not the good kind, the ones that leave you pondering something about the world or humanity or some deep life mystery. And not the intentionally-left-hanging kind, like “was it all a dream?” No, these are a different kind of question, the “even within the framework of the film, how does that make sense?” kind of questions.

Some of these may be flaws in the script. Others may simply be flaws of misunderstanding, or even of poor recall (it’s been an entire week after all). Regardless, any light anyone can shed on any of them would be much appreciated.

1. What’s to stop a totem in a dream from behaving like a totem in the real world?

As I understand it, an individual should never let anyone else get ahold of their totem lest it be mimicked within a dream. Thus, the only way a totem can behave consistently (like never toppling) from dream to dream is if the totem’s owner is the one responsible for bringing it into the dream — that’s entirely the point really: a totem is carried into the dream by its owner, right? But if that’s the case, what’s to stop the owner from projecting it within a dream as exactly the same as it is in reality? Particularly in limbo, wouldn’t you be likely to replicate the totem exactly as it is in reality? Or am I wrong about totems, and they’re actually placed into the dream by the architect somehow, who benevolently recreates the totems of his/her allies with the necessary flaws?

2. What’s Fischer’s dad doing in that room at the end, saying those things? Who put him there?

This is kind of an important one. Let’s recap what we know going into the situation in the winter dream: Fischer believes his subconscious is under attack by his godfather, lawyer Peter Browning. He’s, um, trying to uncover what Browning’s after, or something like that (I’ll admit even this was a little fuzzy but I think Fischer thinks he’s invading Browning’s dream?). If that’s the case, why would Fischer project his father into that room and have him say that? Clearly Cobb and company hadn’t really done much at that point to persuade Fischer to break up the company, why would his subconscious have his father do that? And why would Cobb take it to mean anything if he thinks he’s in Browning’s dream?

Alternately, if his father isn’t a projection of Fischer’s own, who does he belong to? Who put him there? I don’t think anyone else in the dream would be capable of projecting an accurate version of his father, except Eames (the only one who’d met the father) and if he were going to project the father, why didn’t he just “forge” him in the first place (as he did Browning the van dream)?

3. Why doesn’t Fischer get suspicious when he wakes from the van dream?

In the winter dream, Fischer is aware he’s in a dream and allied with Cobb. In the hotel dream, he’s been convinced he’s in a dream and allows himself to be convinced by Cobb that Browning is attacking him. In the van dream, he doesn’t recognize it’s a dream at all. But in all of these, his subconscious “projections” are hard at work defending himself from attack, so clearly he’s been trained to recognize dream malfeasance. So as he goes through the wakeup sequence, why does he tell Browning/Eames in van-dream that he wants to breakup the company if he thought Browning was suspect? And why, after waking up from that dream, isn’t he suspicious that all the people around him on the plane were in his dreams, but Browning isn’t there? Even if it “was all just a dream,” as someone clearly trained to recognize dream-attacks, wouldn’t he at least be wary?

4. Why so literal?

I don’t know about you, but in my dreams the people, the setting, the things around me are often all in flux, changing from one moment to the next. I recognize that part of Cobb’s objective in dream-crime is to keep things are “normal” as possible so that the target doesn’t realize s/he is dreaming, but other than some clever stuff by Ariadne-in-training (and limbo, I guess), everything seems excruciatingly normal. I guess this isn’t a question so much as a disappointment. I mean, if you’d given this basic plot outline to, say, Tim Burton, things would have been much more weird and dream-like, no?

5. Why is Cobb’s wounded psyche the only thing that seems to be able to project people into a dream, other than the target?

I get it: targets are defending themselves against “attack” by projecting assailants into the dream world, regardless of whose dream it is. Cobb’s messed-up soul inadvertently projects a sort of malicious Mal into the dreams due to his guilt. But what about the other members of Cobb’s team, aware that it’s a dream? Why can’t they summon legions of their own combatants to protect them from the target’s? Or physical objects? If Mal and the target’s defenders can bring their own firearms, why can’t Arthur fabricate a giant slingshot to “kick” the floating hotel people?

6. Why’s limbo so hard to leave?

Okay, I get that to leave limbo, you have to choose to kill yourself to get out. Whatever, fine. But why’s that so hard? If you’ve got a totem with you (as Mal did the first time around), shouldn’t it tell you you’re dreaming, and after a while there wouldn’t you want to try leaving? Cobb and Ariadne seemed to have no problems late in the film recognizing where they were and knowing what they needed to do to leave. Why didn’t Saito know? Or Mal, the first time around? Or the obviously-dream-trained Fischer?

Most of my other questions (which are legion) are just frustrations at aspects of the film’s scenario not being explained, such as how the architect actually gets the “blueprints,” so to speak, into the mind of whoever’s doing the actual dreaming… since obviously it’s not the architect who’s doing the dreaming. While I’d have preferred a little more explanation on those fronts and perhaps a little less action, I’m fine with them. It’s these fundamental-to-the-plot things (particularly questions 1 and 2) that are really driving me nuts.

I’m sure I’m going to go see Inception again (Martha hasn’t seen it) and maybe the second time around some of these (and other) things will make more sense to me or at least seem less inconsistent with the film’s universe. But for now, they serve to detract from the film’s quality. Maybe you can help me with some answers?

Overlooked, I think, in today’s arrival of the iPad 3G (as differentiated from its non-3G brethren) is its unique potential to act as a disruptive technology — that is, an innovation that reorganizes the operation of the marketplace.

In the run-up to the release of the iPhone in 2007, many analysts and enthusiasts (myself included) were excited by the prospect of Apple’s new device being a game changer. We hoped it wouldn’t just be a shiny new device, but that it would actually transform the mobile marketplace.

Half our hopes were realized; the other half, dashed on the rocks of the telecommunications industry. Read the entire post »

I should know better than to get into a political debate on Twitter. Particularly when I’m very busy working on deadline and don’t have time to be in a debate, in any medium, on any topic. But of course, that’s exactly what I managed to do today, with local friends/web geeks Chris and Gabe.

It all started when @skyhawk133 tweeted the following:

I’m not sure what the big complaint is about tax day… over 50% of the country won’t pay a single penny in federal income tax for 2009.

Yes, 50% of the country won’t have to pay ANYTHING in to the system. Some will even MAKE money.

You may be getting a refund, but how much did you ACTUALLY pay in taxes for the other 50% of the country to live off you for another year?

Eventually this triggered discussion that covered a variety of tax-related topics that involved a few other folks (mostly @signalnine and @danielmclark). I think pretty much everyone involved at some point made a statement that was true (or that I agreed with) as well as something that was ridiculous or false (myself included). Rather than give you a play-by-play and try to respond to every point made or intimated, I’m just going to ramble on about some of what we touched on. Read the entire post »

I’ve been meaning to write a comprehensive post on the whole health care reform thing — integrated with a review of The Healing of America — but circumstances have conspired against that happening. Maybe later.

In the meantime I’d like to briefly address one of the most controversial parts of the health care reform bill (better characterized as a “delayed health insurance tweaks” bill): the individual mandate. You know, the part that says you have to buy health insurance.

It’s taken quite a bit of heat from both the left and the right, for everything from curtailing freedom  to propping up corporatism.

I get those complaints. The idea of being forced to buy something, of having the government make you give your hard-earned money to a for-profit business, stinks. I don’t care for it. But fundamentally, what makes it problematic is not the fact that having insurance is mandatory, it’s that the insurers are for profit.

The most significant thing the new bill does is put an end to many forms of insurer cost-shifting and avoidance, such as rejecting those with pre-existing conditions and setting annual and/or lifetime caps on claims. This is a major change and corrects some of the most reprehensible aspects of our current system. The problem with this, however, is that it threatens to seriously up insurers’ costs.

Critics of the bill rightfully point out that the bill does very little to actually control costs, instead simply doling out subsidies to those who need help paying premiums and encouraging a bit more competition via state-based “exchanges.”

But the individual mandate is actually a significant check against rising costs. To force insurers to cover high-cost individuals without guaranteeing a pool of lower-cost customers would be to send premiums up faster than ever. The individual mandate helps ensure that healthy individuals who might not choose to be covered otherwise still enter the pool, offsetting the expensive folk.

This is a key reason why countries that provide government insurance can actually afford to do so: they collect premiums (or taxes) from everyone, including the healthy, which defrays costs for the sick. The math just doesn’t work out if healthy people can opt out. It’s unsustainable.

I agree that compelling people to give money to private, for-profit enterprises is a terrible idea. But fundamentally the problem is not with the compulsion, which is ultimately necessary, it’s with the who. There need to be guarantees of viable non-profit options (doesn’t really matter if they’re public or private) so that we’re not being forced to give money to shareholders.

Feel free to attack the bill for its many shortcomings, but the mandate isn’t the problem — it’s the lack of appropriate choices for what to do under the mandate.

If you haven’t been paying attention to me on Facebook or Twitter, you may not know that I (well, we) recently got a new car.

Until just a few days ago, my wife and I shared a 2005 Toyota Prius. The Prius is a great car: we never had any real problems with it, it got great gas mileage, the back hatch was very useful, etc. It had about 78,000 miles on it and was running great. We didn’t really need a new car.

But life is funny sometimes. My wife just spent about six weeks on crutches (she’s still using one occasionally) and both my parents came down from Minnesota to help out with the baby while Martha was laid up. And we recently upgraded from an infant car seat to a larger “convertible” car seat.

These various things (coupled with a few bizarre incidents where the Prius wouldn’t start for a little while) really got me thinking about our long-term vehicle needs. Sure our current car was doing fine, but as the baby gets bigger (and perhaps we have another someday) and our parents get older, interior space and in/egress issues will become more and more important.

It seemed to me like sometime in the next few years we’d need to upgrade from the Prius to something larger, ideally something with a third row of seats. After doing some research it seemed like the RAV4 was an imperfect but pretty good option… just a little too expensive.

Enter the “Toyotathon of Death” in February, followed by crazy good incentives from Toyota in March: zero percent APR for 60 months, plus two years free regular maintenance for returning Toyota customers. Suddenly, it seemed like maybe it was a good time to upgrade.

Long story short: we drove one, thought about it, talked it over, and eventually decided to get one. Here it is:

For those of you who want to know specifics, it’s a 4WD Base V6 with the extra value package (DRLs, roof rails, privacy glass), third row seat, 17″ alloy wheels and tow prep package. I could have done without the 4WD, alloy wheels or tow prep, but this is the only configuration available with a third-row seat anywhere remotely near the Albuquerque area.

With the Prius tradein and a few grand down, we were able to keep the amount financed to about $16k, leading to a pretty affordable monthly payment for a vehicle that goes 0-60 in under seven seconds and holds up to seven passengers (though the ones in the very back need to be small). Check out this PDF overview of specs and test results from a recent Car & Driver comparison of eight CUVs to see how well the RAV4 stacks up to the competition (personally I think it’s obviously superior).

I do miss several things about the Prius (fuel economy, steering-wheel audio controls, never actually taking the key out of my pocket) but the usefulness of the space the RAV4 provides is really, really nice and I’m quite happy with the purchase. It’s fast, spacious, reasonably fuel-efficient considering, and totally interest-free. With any luck, it’ll be our family car for a long, long time.

Got this for my birthday from Drüe and Mical. Thanks guys!

Through a fluke of fate, I’ve spent more time talking in front of groups of people over the last four months than I did during the preceeding four years. Several of those appearances have been work-related, leading all-day (or close to it) discovery sessions where I get to really know a client’s audience, goals and design preferences at the beginning of a redesign process. But two of my recent presentations have been a bit more public. Read the entire post »

“What do you use for doing [task] on your Mac?”

It’s a question that comes up, if not often, then with some degree of regularity. It’s also a question I ask fellow Mac users, in the hopes of either a) confirming I’m using the best tool for the job, or b) learning about something new I should try.

Under the assumption there are others out there who do the same, I humbly present the list of applications I find most useful (excluding those every Mac ships with):

Networking/Communications

XMarks: Keeps bookmarks synced across platforms and browsers. I can bookmark something in Webkit on my iMac and it’ll show up in my favorites in IE8 on my MacBook’s Win7.

Dropbox: The best cloud storage/file sharing tool ever. Totally seamless with different OSes. Works great for everything from design files to 1Password’s keychain.

1Password: Stores usernames, passwords, personal info, and credit card details for near every webform out there, including multiple accounts on the same site. Only wish is that it were cross-platform.

Adium: I hate the default UI and so have installed various Xtras to make it more like iChat. But it has better support for multiple accounts and services (including Facebook).

Transmit: Got to be the best FTP client for the Mac.

Twitterrific: I’m not convinced this is the best desktop Twitter client out there (in fact I strongly suspect it’s not), but it’s what I use  — despite never knowing how to spell it.

Design/Web Development

Coda: A nice, lean integrated development environment for web developers. Nicely integrates FTP, SVN, browser previews, etc.

BBEdit: I spend almost all my time in Coda nowadays, but BBEdit does a few things Coda doesn’t that I sometimes need: code folding, formatting/indenting, and superior grep interface.

Adobe CS4: Expensive bloatware (nearly rivalling Microsoft Office in that regard), but vital for my line of work. Mostly I use Photoshop for web design, and InDesign for print. Keep meaning to learn Flash.

FontExplorer X Pro: Lame name, but when you have around 3000 fonts floating around, Apple’s Font Book just won’t cut it. FEPX makes dealing with so many fonts more manageable.

Aperture: iPhoto is actually fabulous software for photo organizing and editing, but I’m serious enough that I need a bit more power. Aperture competes directly with Adobe’s Lightroom and is probably losing that competition, but it’s the horse I picked so I’m not about to switch. I run the FlickrExport plugin to facilitate uploading.

OmniGraffle: Illustrator is great for artwork, but it’s bad for rapidly developing outlines, sitemaps, wireframes, flow charts, etc. For that, OmniGraffle is the way to go.

General Productivity

MS Office: I know there are free altenatives out there, but last time I tried, none of them quite did it for me. Fortunately I don’t need Word or Excel all that often. (Note that I don’t have Apple’s iWork suite.)

Quicksilver: I use it most for app launching, though it can be useful for about a zillion things. This is the single piece of software I most miss when trying to use someone else’s machine.

MenuCalendarClock (for iCal): Replaces Apple’s menubar day/time display with a more useful dropdown calendar that shows what’s on your iCal calendar(s) at just a glance. Even understands shared Exchange calendars iCal loads.

Meteorologist: Handy utility for showing the weather in the menubar, with support for tracking multiple locations. At least, it was handy until it stopped fetching data about a month ago (which I suspect is weather.com’s fault).

VMWare Fusion: I’ve used both this and Parallels in the last few years, and I have a slight preference for Fusion because of the way it handles cross-OS app stuff (read: I can send a URL from Coda straight to PC browser).

OfficeTime: There’s a pretty competitive marketplace out there for invoicing/time tracking software for freelancers. OfficeTime does a a number of fancy things but mainly I just use the menubar stopwatch for time tracking.

Misc. Utilities

OnyX and TechTool Pro: Very different apps, but both are handy for keeping things running smoothly.

Snapz Pro X: A nice screen capture tool. There are quite likely better ones out there these days, but I bought this years ago and haven’t felt a need to change.

SpamSieve: Better junk mail filter than what Mail.app comes with. At least, it sure seems that way to me. Works with nearly every MacOS email client.

Perian and Flip4Mac player: Tools for getting codecs not natively supported by QT/MacOS to play without needed to run VLC, Wndows Media Player, etc. Don’t really need ‘em that often, but when I do…

Growl: Unobtrusive system notifier; best way to know what’s happening. Really ought to be a part of the OS, would encourage more developers (including Apple and Adobe) to utilize it.

PandoraJam: If you spend time listening to Pandora on your Mac, you need to get PandoraJam so that the music stream isn’t handled by the same process as your other web browsing. That’s all PandoraJam is.

———–
That’s it for the major non-Apple stuff. I have a few other tools I like (SlimBatteryMonitor, Synergy, MP3 Trimmer, GrandPerspective, Handbrake, Sequel Pro, Secrets, Airfoil) but I use them rarely or find them handy but not particularly essential.

So, Mac folk… what do you use? Any glaring omissions from my list? Better alternatives?

According to my grand vision for restructuring college football, today would be the second round of the playoffs. But what would they look like this year?

It’s hard to say for sure since my conference realignment plan would affect regular-season scheduling, conference championships, and thus BCS (now P) rankings. But here’s how they might look, assuming:

• SEC, ACC and Big XII championships remain unchanged
• Cincinnati ekes by Pittsburgh in the Big East championship (just like what happened to end the season)
• Ohio State defeats Iowa in the Really Big Ten final
• Oregon beats Arizona in the Pac-12 championship
• TCU wins over Boise State in the Big West final

That leaves us with seven automatic qualifiers and 5 at-large bids, seeded according to BCS/P ranking. Our bracket would then look something like so:

2009 college football playoff bracket, based (more or less) on my reorg plan

You’ll note that these seedings deviate from the final BCS standings, due to the aforementioned conference championship games.

I think this would be fabulous. Maybe a few teams here don’t deserve to be in a playoff (Penn State?) but I think most of the games would be compelling.

FWIW, I’d have BSU, Florida, Oregon and VT advancing past the first round. In today’s games, I’d have Bama over BSU, Florida over Cincy (setting up an SEC title rematch — imagine all the Tebow “redemption” press, ugh), TCU over Oregon in a classic, and VT in a special-teams-driven upset over Texas. You?

When someone does something that’s a bad idea, or puts others at risk, or impedes you in some way, would you prefer them to have done it out of ill-will, or ignorance/thoughtlessness? This is a question I ponder sometimes, often when driving or following politics. It’s also come up recently in my personal life.

For whatever reason, I have internal biases wherein I attribute these “motives” to certain groups with little supporting evidence (generally, the BMW drivers and GOP are classified as malicious, and the minivan drivers and Democrats are idiots).

Anyway, I suspect there isn’t really a blanket answer to this question. While I think that more often than not, stupidity is slightly less upsetting than conscious evil, there are definitely contexts where it’s better to have had a genuine motive than to have been blissfully unawares.

Thoughts?