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Archive for August, 2009

Lordy, Lordy…

Aug 31

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | 2 Comments

257205275_132b5a7ea3_o[1]…I’m coming up on 40!

OK, it doesn’t have the ring to it that the actual “Matt is 40″ would have, but due to schedule constraints we had to have the party last weekend, a week early, so I guess it will have to do.

We had attended a 40th birthday party before at the private room at Incred-a-Bowl before, and it was a blast.  Bowling, cash bar, cake — what else could you ask for?  So when the time came around to where we were looking for a venue for my party, we remembered the bowling experience and looked into it.

The evening ended up being pretty fun.  We kept the guest list down a bit; it was a combination of family, some friends from work, our church small group, dinner club, and some other friends we’ve known for a while.  The groups mixed very well, with some interesting connections between folks that were discovered as they talked.

There was just enough time in the two hours we had the lanes to get in 3 lines of bowling, which went well.  I bowl so seldom any more that by the time I’m warmed up my hand is getting tired, so I never broke 150, but it was still a lot of fun.  I don’t think “feed the chicken” will ever have the same connotations for me again.  I avoided drunk bowling, although from the sounds of the other lanes those who did probably had the most fun, if not the highest scores.

At any rate, I actually turn 40 in about a week (September 6th) so I’ll report back then whether there are any immediate physiological changes once I get to the date proper.

Back to School

Aug 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

42-15725302The kids are off to school now; Thomas to second grade and Katherine to Kindergarten.  They both are starting off well.  Thomas is really enjoying his new teacher and is getting along well with his classmates — he seems to be taking back to school like a frog hopping back in the pond, although not all of his homework  has been making it home, and he has been known to mistakenly bring home another kid’s folder rather than his own.

Katherine is doing afternoon Kindergarten this year, and that is also going well.  She has a paraeducator in the class that helps her to participate with the classroom activities, and she gets pulled out for resource room activities when there are activities going on in class that she can’t participate in.  She has been asking to go to school pretty much every day, including on the weekends, so we’re pretty sure she’s liking it!

Both the kids’ teachers this year are awesome; we’re very glad they have the teacher assignments they have.  It’s been an interesting transition getting the kids ready for school this year, but we’re grateful that everything has gone as well as it has!

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A Bit About Katherine

Aug 27

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

A2006 Dec Zoo KI’ve written quite a bit about Thomas in the past, but you haven’t heard me write much about my daughter Katherine, except in passing.  There’s a reason for that.  One of the main reasons I stopped writing this blog several years ago, in fact, was because Katherine was diagnosed with autism in March 2006. We did exhaustive research and learned that there were cases where early intervention seemed to lead to complete or near-complete recovery, and since this was a possibility, we decided we were going to try to keep her condition as close to the vest as we could, in view of her future privacy.  If Katherine was indeed able to overcome her disability, she shouldn’t have to live with a label the rest of her life.

We told few people outside the immediate family and the folks I see at work every day.  I felt I couldn’t write about what we were going through, and since for months, then years, we were focusing all our efforts on research and therapy, that meant I couldn’t really write about the bulk of what was fundamentally important in my life.  So I kept silent, waiting for her to close the developmental gap between her and her peers.

Well, that’s not going to happen.  I love my daughter dearly, and she has made wonderful progress through the diligent efforts of Robin and her Applied Behavioral Analysis team, but it has become obvious over the years that the particular issues Katherine has are not going to go away with time.

One of the problems with “autism” as a diagnostic category is that it is so vague and encompasses so many variations in condition that it tells you almost nothing to know that someone “has autism”.  It tells you nothing other than the basic fact that they have some degree of cognitive issues dealing with social behavior, communication, and sensory input, with other possible deficits tacked on.

Katherine’s autism is atypical in many ways.  She’s actually reasonably accessible socially; her eye contact is good, you can get and keep her attention fairly easily, she has very good physical coordination, and she’s interested in watching and imitating what peers and adults do to at least a moderate degree.  She’s not the life of the party, but she’s not a total wallflower either.  She has a charm all her own and she will melt your heart if you find a way to connect with her.

She’s turning six at the end of October, just starting Kindergarten this year.  She knows her alphabet, numbers to twenty, colors and shapes, and can read sight words and even sound out many basic three-letter words phonetically.  From a skills perspective she’s about where she needs to be for Kindergarten.  The problem is that she just can’t seem to take in more than about 3-4 spoken words at a time.  There is some sort of disconnect between her ears and the language centers in her brain that we don’t think we’ll be able to get around.

Since she doesn’t absorb many words at a time if you speak to her in normal sentences she misses most or all of it. So if we want to effectively communicate with her we need to use “Katherinese” — abbreviated, telegraphic sentences like “First store, then movie”.  As long as she has been taught the appropriate grammatical constructs — an ongoing process — she can understand this and generally responds well.  She’s very sweet-tempered and sanguine as long as she understands what is going on in her life, which is a great blessing.

We have evidence that her eyes are better connected to her language centers and hope to leverage that to increase her communication skill, but without the ability to follow normal conversation, Katherine will never fully blend in.  Spoken language affects pretty much everything in her life to some degree.  When she can’t understand, she can’t respond.  And even when she does understand, her verbal output is also limited, so making her wants and needs known can be very problematic for her.  She can’t express herself with language that she doesn’t know and it is very hard for her to learn language with so little of it getting into her brain in the first place.

Interestingly, like some people who stutter, music seems like an “out of band” channel for her.  She can memorize long songs and sing them on key, and we’ve experimented with seeing whether she can understand more words when they are sung to her than when they are spoken.  It does seem to work a bit better, but it’s not a drastic improvement.

So expect to see some more about what’s going on with Katherine, alongside the other updates on Thomas and Robin and Baby Boy to be Named Later.  Our little girl is not what we expected, and we’re still working as hard as we can to prepare her for her future life, but we’re proud of her — both of who she is and of what she’s accomplished so far — nevertheless.

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IFComp Update #11

Aug 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction | No Comments

3502226287_5067edb5d4[1]Another good week; not stellar, but good.  I added polish, finished up Scene 3 and moved on to almost complete the rough cut of Scene 4.  Progress seems pretty steady, and since I deleted the Champions Online beta to avoid further distraction, I’ve been doing OK.

The major issue I ran into this week was documentation-related, actually.  One of the things I needed to do was to restrict operations against certain objects.  I have a viewscreen in the game, and generally you can only examine objects on it.  In some cases, however, you have people on the screen, and you can talk to them as well.

The Inform documentation describes rules of the form:

Instead of doing something other than examining, taking or dropping with the dagger: say "Don't fool around with that dagger. It's exceedingly sharp."

This type of example might work, or might not (I didn’t try this exact form) but I do know that the almost-identical version:

Instead of doing something other than examining or telling it about to the foozle: say "You know, it's not really there..."

…doesn’t work. And any conceivable variant of it that I could come up with failed as well. I was very frustrated until I found, buried deep in the examples, a solitary example of an alternate formulation:

Instead of doing something:
		if examining, continue the action;
		if searching, continue the action;
		if looking, continue the action;
		if asking Jenna to try doing something, continue the action;

This is a bit more cumbersome, but it does work and was adaptable to do what I needed.

The more Inform 7 I write, the more I’m convinced I really need to curl up with the entire user manual and printout of the Standard Rules and read them through several times to really get good at it. I think I’m going to be able to do well with implementing this game, but after I’m finished I’m definitely going to plow some effort into learning the intricacies before starting on my next project.

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Great Quotation

Aug 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

wallace[1]An interesting quotation from David Foster Wallace (by way of the often crass but occasionally insightful K5)…

Sums up much of my opinion on political media from both sides of the aisle…

As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds.

There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

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The Basement Room is Finished!

Aug 24

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

New_Room 004Finally!  The paint and carpet were done last week, so I wired up all the outlets and the light over the weekend.  After confirming there were no electrical fires and everything worked as it should, we started to bring some furniture and shelving in.

It’s a big load off my mind to have this done; I hate having multiple projects hanging over my head at the same time, so getting this off my list really helped to lower my stress over everything I have on my plate at present.

Here are some pictures of the completed room:

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Movie Review: District 9

Aug 21

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

restroomd9-440x586[1]Alien Nation meets… Cry Freedom?

District 9

Rating:  5/5

It says something when after a movie is over, the entire theater sits in silence for a minute, and the silence holds as the audience files out.  This movie was very powerful; it took hours for the impact of it to fade to a point where I wasn’t walking around with a stunned expression on my face.  If anyone needed more proof that Peter Jackson knows how to make gripping genre films, District 9 is it.

You get the backstory of the film fairly quickly, at the beginning, so I’ll give you a bit of it here.  If you don’t want any spoilers at all, even mild backstory ones, skip down to the final section.

***

In a near future that looks much like today, a gargantuan alien ship has arrived at the Earth and hovered to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa.  After three weeks of inactivity, humans cut their way onto the ship and discover around a million starving, diseased aliens, quickly dubbed ‘prawns’.  They are airlifted to temporary lodgings just outside of the city, where it’s quickly found that humans and prawn don’t mix well.

The humans resent and fear the influx of a huge number of aliens, whose bizarre and often violent reaction to the squalor they find themselves in doesn’t help their public image any.  It isn’t long before apartheid-style laws are implemented to separate the prawn from the human community, culminating in their eventual lockdown into the eponymous District 9, a fenced shantytown surrounded by security guards and heavy weapon emplacements.

***

The movie is filmed documentary-style, with plenty of shaky-cam scenes.  Normally I don’t like this, but it’s not excessive here and lends to the immediacy of the film.  There are no name actors in the production — all of the actors seem to be South African nationals, and they do a great job.  The writing and plotting is very tight; the movie clocks in at under 2 hours, a rarity these days, and leads you through a very intense, gripping ride without ever leaving you feeling completely overwhelmed.

There are some negative issues with the movie.  There are a few too many convenient coincidences, and a good deal of suspension of disbelief is required with respect to aspects of the alien technology.  While the movie does a fantastic job with the social ramifications of the presence of the aliens, it doesn’t always make sense from a scientific perspective, and there are a number of ways in which the reactions of human society both at the international level and the individual level don’t make a great deal of sense.  The aliens are not immune to this either, even granting that they are alien and that we don’t know even 10% of their full story.

Most of these (fairly minor) shortcomings are easily overcome with a good dose of willing suspension of disbelief, and the compelling power of this movie will make you want to take it completely at face value.  It’s very worth seeing, and I hope that this heralds the start of a great career for writer/director Neill Blomkamp.  If you like science fiction at all and can handle an intense film with moderate gore and profanity, District 9 is a must-see.

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Movie Review: Twilight

Aug 20

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

twilight-poster1[1]We liked the books, so we couldn’t resist checking out the movie…

Twilight

Rating: 3/5

I really wanted to like this more; I’d heard from a couple of people that the movie was very good — even better than the book.

It isn’t.

There are a lot of ways movies can get off track when trying to carry forward the core identity of a novel onto the screen:

  • The actors don’t act like the characters in the book (this is not always “bad acting” — it’s more often bad screenwriting or bad direction, in my opinion).
  • The actors don’t look like the characters in the book.  This is often subjective, but if the character is specified to look a certain way and he or she doesn’t, there’s cognitive dissonance.
  • They leave out critical scenes.  Even the gold standard of book-to-film conversions, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, had to cut stuff out.  But you can’t cut out parts that are critical to character development or central to the plot, particularly if you then fall into the next problem…
  • They change scenes into unrecognizability or simply add new scenes out of whole cloth.  Sometimes you have to change scenes so they’re filmable, but there’s no excuse for just jamming new, unrelated material into the film, particularly when the original scene from the novel would have worked better.
  • The special effects don’t live up to the imagery from the book.

Unfortunately, the movie adaptation of Twilight falls into most of these traps.  Although most of the characters act appropriately most of the time, the main character of Bella (Kristen Stewart) never cheers up, never cracks more than one or two smiles in the whole film, which seems strongly at odds with her behavior in the latter half of the novel.  Of course, much of those scenes were cut in favor of more action.

In terms of appearance, I thought the characters were generally well-cast.  But when many of the characters are supposed to be supernaturally attractive, having them played by human actors and actresses with little in the way of augmenting special effects leaves them a bit short of the mark.  Rosalie (Nikki Reed), for example, is supposed to be the most gorgeous person in the world.  She’s pretty, but not in any kind of jaw-dropping sense, particularly as she appears in the movie.

As far as the choice of scenes goes, Twilight hits most of the high points, but the novel takes the main focus of the book, the investigation and pursuit of the mystery of Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) nature, and pushes it down in importance, instead trying to punch up the action levels by inserting gratuitous murders that were not in the novel.  As a result, the filmmakers had to construct cheap visual shortcuts out of whole cloth to use in substitute for characterization.  Examples include:  Bella’s dad cocking a shotgun before opening the door to meet Edward for the first time, and Rosalie’s bowl-smashing scene at the Cullen residence.

I really wanted to like this movie and I have to say that it wasn’t all bad, or even mostly bad.  For all its faults, it did capture the essence of the book, and I thought that the relationship between Bella and Edward (the core of the whole series) was reasonably believable, if not fully developed.

I’m honestly not sure whether I should recommend this movie if you’re a Twilight book series fan or not.  Robin didn’t like it and doesn’t plan to see the others (which means I won’t either…); I’m on the fence.  I guess if seeing movie adaptations of novels you’ve read doesn’t generally bother you, you should be fine.  If not, you might want to give it a pass.

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IFComp Update #10

Aug 19

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

3FWJQWNQFWCZFTKAR8[1]This week I didn’t make significant forward progress on content.  Partially that was due to the fact that I participated in the last instance of the Champions Online closed beta, and partially the fact that I spent my Inform programming time on fixing up infrastructure in what I hope will be the last major structural enhancement I have to do.

What I did was primarily to clean up the implementation of the main computer as a person who moves with the player, and to uncover and implement the appropriate rules required to allow the player to perform an action involving asking the computer to operate on something that isn’t in the immediate area.

The Inform documentation covers this, but in individual bits.  There are several examples covering conversation and persuasion.  There are other examples covering scope and different ways to implement action-at-a-distance.  Putting them together was a touch tricky, but not too bad overall.

So currently I have everything up to the end of Scene 3 complete, with a good basis for moving forward.  This week should be productive, which it needs to be since I need to have the basic implementation complete in two weeks if I’m to have a hope of testing and polishing adequately.

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Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Aug 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

slumdog_millionaire_movie_poster[1]Slumdog Millionaire

Rating:  5/5

When a movie comes along that lives up to its hype, I’m pretty ecstatic.  And Slumdog Millionaire had a whole lot of hype.  The Academy Awards ended up awarding it the Oscar for Best Picture, and it’s easy to see why.  This movie hits on all cylinders:  a gripping plot, smart writing, good pacing, excellent acting, and wonderful cinematography.  Although it’s fundamentally a serious film, it has moments of comedy, many of which are all the more affecting given the subject matter of the film.

Jamal K. Malik (Dev Patel) is a contestant on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, the famous quiz show.  He’s also a “slumdog”, a Muslim denizen of the slums of Mumbai, who works as a “chai wallah” (tea server) in a large call center for outsourced customer service and marketing.  After having advanced all the way to the final question, he’s interrogated/tortured by the police because no one believes that he could possibly know the answers to all the questions he was asked.

In a series of conversations between Jamal and a police inspector (Irrfan Khan) we discover just how Jamal knows the answers to the questions on the show, and in the process get a guided tour of the formative events of Jamal’s hard childhood, and understand the importance of the two most important people in his life — his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), and the fellow slum refugee and childhood sweetheart Latika (Freida Pinto).

When you figure out the structure of the film, it seems perfect, and obvious in retrospect.  But even knowing the overall arc this film describes, it’s impossible to predict the twists and turns that Jamal and his brother encounter growing up.  Instead, you are treated to lushly-framed scenes of Indian slum life and a constant flow of struggles, setbacks, and growth.

Slumdog is unapologetically inspired by Bollywood cinema, with it’s “masala” style incorporating a mixture of tragedy, comedy, action, and romance.  Although there are no song-and-dance numbers within the movie itself, there is one during the credits that is very entertaining.  It’s hard for me to recommend this movie highly enough; it’s much like someone with a Western palate trying an Indian meal:  it’s not anything like you’d expect, but it’s very, very good.

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