A nerdy interlude: reflections on The Fellowship of the Ring

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As a Tolkien nut, but a relative non-“purist” when it comes to Peter Jackson’s brilliant movies, I’ve always felt that The Fellowship of the Ring is the best adaptation out of the three films, whereas The Return of the King is the best movie on its own merits. And to that I hold. But, re-watching the first half of Fellowship with Becky the last two nights (in an effort to scare the baby into being born!), I found myself thinking of the movie — or, more precisely, the movie-as-adaptation — in a slightly different way: imagining myself as an anxious fanboy going to see the first LOTR film for the first time, wondering what it will be like — and being overwhelmed with glee at the result, particularly in the first 30 minutes or so.

I have to “imagine” this because, believe it or not, I was not really a “fanboy” when I went to see Fellowship for the first time in 2001. I hadn’t read the books in years, and although Tolkien references were deeply subsumed into my family’s internal lore and lexicon — for instance, we would routinely refer to barren-looking vistas as “Mordorish”; we used “Balrog” as a verb, meaning roughly “to bother”; my Dad and I used to play the “You cannot pass!” game frequently when we would cross a bridge on foot; etc., etc. — I hadn’t really given the actual books, the source materials for all this inside-baseball family nonsense, much thought in ages. Indeed, to give you an idea how much my little-kid Tolkien fandom had fallen by the wayside, I actually didn’t remember at first, when we went to see FOTR in the theater, that Saruman was evil!

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You got your Google in my OS!

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When it comes to buying a computer today, you pretty much have two choices for the Operating System (OS): the heavyweight champ Microsoft’s Windows, or the scrappy underdog Apple’s MacOS X.  (Some people will try and tell you there is a third option called Linux; ignore them. They are nerds and for the most part they are wrong.)

Well, that may soon change, as search giant Google announced Wednesday that they will be releasing their own OS next year.  Called Google Chrome OS, it will be a light-weight OS based on Linux (hey I said the nerds were MOSTLY wrong about it being a third option) and the company’s Chrome web browser.  So does this mean you’ll be picking up your next Dell box with Chrome OS on it by Christmas 2010?  Welllllll, no, probably not.  Chrome OS is going to be targeted, initially at least, for use on netbooks, the small, lightweight sub-laptops that companies such as Acer, Dell and HP have been releasing recently.

Why netbooks?  Well, the Chrome OS isn’t going to be like Windows and MacOS X.  It won’t be a full-fledged OS.  You won’t install normal applications onto your computer, you won’t be editing videos on it, playing games like Halo 3 or Starcraft II, or other intensive tasks.  Chrome OS is going to be designed around using Google’s existing web apps for e-mailing, web browsing, document editing, etc., for fulfilling your basic computer needs.  Google is betting that they can give you a faster and safer experience by cutting out a lot of the high-powered extras and focusing on the lightweight tasks.  This will be especially helpful on netbooks, which are much less powerful than the regular laptops and desktop computers you are used to using.

So will it work?  Maybe, but there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical.  

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Blurry ISS

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Tonight’s directly-overhead flyover by the International Space Station was as spectacular as promised. That thing is really bright now!

Unfortunately, my efforts to photograph it were somewhat less spectacular. My SLR’s shutter problem has now evolved into a focus problem — it can fill the frame again, but autofocus is completely busted — and my hasty efforts at manually focusing the lens as the ISS was appearing over the horizon were, well, rather off. (You’d think the “infinity” setting, all the way to the left, would focus correctly on the sky, but nooooo.) So what I have is a blurry fisheye view of the ISS passing overhead:

Blurry ISS

Well, it was a good idea, anyway. 🙂

To view upcoming flyovers by the ISS and other satellites at your location, go to SpaceWeather.com’s Simple Satellite Tracker, or for more detailed info, Heavens Above.