Make sure you see the original Manchurian Candidate. It’s a great movie, and a masterfully told story. I’m not saying the new movie is bad, I haven’t seen it yet. Just see the original one first so that it doesn’t get spoiled by the redux. This is one of the few cases where I think knowing the ending will spoil the movie. I’m not against remakes per se. I thought the new Italian Job was fantastic and definitely deserved to be remade. (The original was a muddled story which seemed to have run out of money halfway through production and makes little sense). If you do it in reverse order, you’ll be missing out.
Well I’ve been netflixing TV shows that are on DVD now, and it’s been great. Whenever I feel like watching TV, I know I have some commercial free quality to watch. I just finished HBO’s Band of Brothers series and was really impressed. Just recently I’ve been watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I think this may be one of the greatest TV series ever on the air. Basically each episode is like a small independent film, the character development is really rich, the protaganists are complicated with a myriad of foibles and flaws. I think Homicide has a gripping realism that is absent in most dramas and literature today. The critics loved it at the time, PBS even did a special on Homicide. No one could figure out why it was struggling so much in the ratings. They were competing with Nash Bridges and LOSING!?!?!?
Well my friend Gogol said once, “You’ll never lose money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” And maybe that’s it, Homicide was just too smart, too complex, and too well acted for Joe Sixpack to enjoy. However I think the real reason is that when people watch TV, they want fantasy, something that distracts them from real life for an hour. Homicide was too realistic for people who wanted some escapism.
I guess what really sticks in my craw is that now CSI and L&O are ratings juggernauts that they can make two CSI’s and three L&O’s. Three L&O’s don’t even come close to one Homicide as far as quality. In fact I hate watching L&O and seeing how they’ve killed Det. Munch’s character. Now he’s just a two-dimensional crime solving shell, a mere vehicle to wrap up a nice 1 hour cut and dry case.
So do yourself a favor, rent Homicide Seasons 1 & 2 and let me know what you think.
People say I’m grumpy. I’d like to say I’m situationally discriminating. I didn’t watch any of the DNC. Why, because I was dealing with AD and Microsoft documentation which fulfilled my monthly BS quota. I listened to Bill Maher being interviewed by Terry Gross and I have to agree with him - the DNC over-optimism was absolutely nauseating. We’ll lift up every American, we can be a better country, healthcare for everybody, blah blah blah. They had 8 years with Clinton to lift everybody up, gee what happened? The truth is if we wanted universal healthcare and equal opportunity for all we could have accomplished it a long time ago. The American public couldn’t care less about helping everybody else. Why? Because we’re the most selfish nation on earth. It’s the ironic axiom that makes us the greatest country in the world and the most vile. Slavery, Carnegie, railroad barons, Trail of Tears, Spanish American war, United Fruit Company, Haymarket Riot, Enron… we didn’t get two car garages for the middle class by being nice to everyone.
This administration has got to go. I personally don’t think Bush is a bad guy, I’d play horshoes with him at a picnic, but I think his administration is absolutely detestable. They’ve done nothing but abuse the public trust and have mismanaged this country with nary an apology, and with disastrous consequence. On the other hand I loathe Kerry. He has no new ideas, doesn’t really take any substantive policy stand against the Bush administration and tries to ply us with this saccharine sweet “we’ll make the US fun again” rhetoric.
I’d vote for Kerry if he had said this instead at the DNC. “Things are bad, not apocalyptic bad, but bad. If you can’t see that then you’re far too partisan to have any realistic opinions. We’re all partially responsible for things getting out of hand. I should have done more in the Senate to keep things from getting to this point. I’m sorry, but we need to move on and get a new plan. Do I have all the answers? I don’t have enough answers, but I do have some new ideas, and we need to try some new ideas because the old ways, conservative or liberal haven’t worked, because we still have the same problems. The big thing is I need you to get off your duff and start getting involved. The Democratic Party can’t save your country, but neither can the Republicans it’s gonna take all of us, and we need to let go of some of our dogmas. The next few years are probably gonna stink, but if you can get your 5 second attention spans to follow me for the next 4 years, then we might have a chance.”
The major unexpected AD pain in the ass was surprisingly Mozilla Thunderbird. Why would AD effect Thunderbird you say? Beats me but it did. Migrating the Mozilla profile from one Windows user profile to the new one wreaked havoc. A lot of users lost their mail or couldn’t view recent mail. Sometimes it would leave all folders intact but hose the inbox. Sometimes it would duplicate every mail in their folders. Sometimes it would corrupt the Thunderbird profile and force you to create another one. Almost every user had a different situation. A lot of the problem seems to be in how Thunderbird installs and writes to the registry hive. Hey Thunderbird developers, pat yourself on the back, you’ve finally made a mailer as crappy as Outlook. It’s email people not rocket science, stop making mail clients so bloomin hard to use and administer. The funny thing is all the releases of Thunderbird before they made one with a Windows Installer, were reliable easy to migrate, easy to use, and easy to administer. Oh and Thunderbird developers, why don’t you write a freaking Netscape 7 to Thunderbird import tool? It’s only the same code! And while you’re at it right a backup and recovery tool for Thunderbird, and don’t you dare tell me to look at the source code or write it myself. If you ever want to be taken seriously by the enterprise, you’re gonna have to deliver more. I’d rather chew glass than use Outlook, but the past weekend has taught me I’ll never deploy Thunderbird on another desktop at work again. At this rate I’ll be moving everyone to pine.
Well I’ve just finished my 12th straight day at work. I suppose many of you veterans in the IT biz scoff at that, but for me that’s a long time. We migrated some twenty users in one office to Active Directory. I really didn’t think it would be that bad. It’s simple right? Back up some data, create some users and some OU’s, change some settings and you’re done?
Wrong!
I’m still kind of recovering from this experience but I was amazed at just how terribly it went. I feel like a virtual bull just ran through our virtual china shop. It seemed to break everything and every user experienced things breaking in different ways. There was no consistency. The whole point of AD was to make management easier and things more consistent. So far I’ve found AD unable to really deliver on its promise. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, I can’t figure out how large enterprises migrate thousands of users to AD and make everything work. Just a handful of users made me want to pull my teeth out.
My major criticisms of AD so far:
- There’s no logic as to when a change in AD takes effect. You make a change to a user object and it won’t happen. You logon/off, you reboot, you reboot again. Sometimes changes happen immediately sometimes they happen in a few minutes, sometimes they happen in a day, sometimes they never happen.
- SUS, just don’t work consistently. We even called Microsoft themselves and they said “SUS is a free utility not a product, so we don’t offer any support. It’s released as is” Typical Redmond.
- Everything is a pain to install and configure for users if they don’t have local admin rights. We actually gave everyone domain admin rights when we initially setup their boxes just to get over all the installation hurdles. The “run as” option is a weak substitute for sudo and often doesn’t work.
I have a lot more minor beefs with AD, but I gotta let this go or I’m gonna go nuts. The odd thing is I got really nostalgic for the old days of computing. AD made me long for Novell Netware 4 and Netscape 4. Sure these were imperfect products, but they were understandable. No unreadable registry keys and LDAP schemas, just plain text files and logon scripts that made sense. It makes me frightened of what new products will come out that will make me pine for AD.