Captain Marvel thoughts -- Don't read if you don't want spoilers:
We saw it Sunday and for the most part I liked it, but it's that "for the most part" that has been bugging me as I've tried to figure why I just couldn't fully buy it. It was a good movie but not a great one. Brie Larson seems to be a popular target for criticism but while the movie had its flaws I really don't think Brie was one of them. Rather the parts of the movie that trouble me were directorial and editing related resulting in a movie that came across as surprisingly disjointed. It didn't feel like a consistent whole, it literally felt like a bunch of individual scenes stitched together with not much concern for whether those scenes flowed naturally.
1) It sometimes came off more "Men In Black" than MCU. Goose -- tentacles -- a cat sized thing able to swallow entire groups of full-sized people: I'm looking at you! Goose's abilities make perfect sense if you know him/her from the comics, but no context is given in the movie at all except "it's a Flerken" so he ends up coming across cute but dangerous in a silly way, more in keeping with Men In Black.
2) Unless I missed it, Goose is never explained at all. He's just there. Which would be fine if this was Guardians of the Galaxy with aliens plenty, but it's 90's Earth. And even after Goose's secret is out nobody seems concerned with the next most basic questions - "Why is there a Flerken on Earth?", "Are there more of them?", "What other aliens are here?" Given that Fury (SHIELD) is discovering the existence of aliens on Earth for the first time this complete lack of concern played out on screen even a little is out of character.
3) People in the film often didn't seem to care much about their own world, and it's hard for me to buy the sense of danger or concern for the people in the movie when the people in that world don't seem to much care about it either.
a) Fury crashes into a bus and comes to a stop for example, just seconds later that entire bus is gone and Fury is in the street alone more like he had hit a light pole than a bus full of people, or at least a driver.
b) Carol beats up an "old woman" on the train and though there are some minor comical bystander reactions the scene as a whole looks flat and staged.
4) Character reactions aren't believable:
a) When Fury loses his eye, his reaction is so casual that I was sure at the time that the movie was still teasing us in build-up to how he would actually lose his eye.
b) Fury and Carol are taken to a waiting room, ominously discover they are locked in, and then they get out. And that's it. After that Fury and Carol just walk openly around the base hallways without any apparent sense of urgency or needing to hide from anyone, adopt a cat, and then openly blast a locked security door open to get to a records room. There's no display of stealth or fear of being discovered by the base personnel that locked them up in the first place. Oh yeah, but then some Agents of SHIELD show up.
c) Just before her breakout moment of realization, she's secured and forced to commune with the Supreme AI of Hala. As she breaks free she begins to glow, and power up, and meanwhile her captors of the elite Starforce just stand there agape ready to get beaten up like they're minions in an old Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris movie. This elite force of people see her power buildup and defiance coming... and just stand there dope-faced and snarling.
Again, I generally liked the movie and I'll probably see it again for fun, but so far as recent MCU movies go the character development, storytelling, and overall movie-making here fell far short of what I have come to expect from MCU films. I don't blame the actors at all, I squarely think the directors and producers dropped the ball -- I don't know if they got lazy, apathetic, both, or something else. I don't know, but the movie ultimately was just "meh", and it could've been so much more.
3/19/2019
1/12/2019
Job 1 and 2
Highlight
Explain
Apply
Respond
- Job was concerned with the spiritual welfare of his children. 1:5
- Satan seems to have thought Job was only faithful to God because he had it so easy. 1:10-11
- Satan was allowed to test Job by threatening his blessings, but not Job directly.
- "In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong." 1:22
- To what degree is/was the Sons of God meeting with God normal and routine? 2:1
- Satan argued that Job was still faithful because at least he himself was OK. So God allowed Satan to smite job albeit not to take his life. 2:4-5
- Job's wife seems to have had enough, but Job himself remained faithful. 2:9-10
- Job wasn't looking too good 2:11-13
Explain
- Seems to me that Satan sought to embarrass God by perverting even faithful Job. If Job would curse God after losing abundant blessing then that made God look like he only got good followers so long as they were blessed. But Job remained faithful even when those around him did not.
Apply
- Blessings are good but if they are the source of our faith or confidence then we will be more easily shaken.
Respond
- Be mindful that at all times and in all cases, God is God and I am not. I don't serve and worship God because he makes things easy for me. I am not afraid to enjoy those times of blessing while they last but they are not deserved or due me. Death and loss come to even the most righteous, this is not our home and our anchor is not in what it has to offer.
4/04/2018
God Made Me Do It ?
"God is leading me" is perhaps the most abused modern day form of taking God's name in vain I can think of. I'm not saying God doesn't lead people, but I think this all too often gets pulled out of our bag of "Christian-speak" when what we really mean is "I made a questionable decision but I don't want to have to defend, explain, or be accountable for it so... 'God led me to do it'... now leave me alone."
How do you know the difference? Or can you?
Thoughts? Thanks.
3/15/2017
iPhone -- Party like it's 1990!
iPhones stink. The more I use one (for work) the more I wonder why anybody uses them. First, the very limited and rigid interface is straight out of the 80's. And today my iPhone randomly decided to not show any of my widgets on the widget screen. A reboot brought them back but I thought iPhones were "so stable." Pfft!
Just some examples of why I'm "less than impressed" with iPhones:
* The iPhone "desktop" is just a group of icons... period.. like a flashback to Windows 3.1 and the interface concepts from the 1980's that led up to it -- you can't put anything actually useful on the desktop, like a weather widget, music controls, etc.
* The closest iPhone comes to supporting widgets is having a dedicated but separate "widget" screen but it's not very flexible as everything on the widget screen is forced into a simple and inefficient top-down stack of widgets.
* Similarly, the desktop icons are forced into a top-left to bottom-right "reading" layout. There is, for example, no way to move a single icon to the bottom-right corner if you want it to stand out for some reason.
* There is no native "swipe' keyboard, and though you can install one from the app store Apple doesn't allow any 3rd-party keyboard app to access the microphone which means to gain swipe-typing you give up easy access to voice-typing.
* iPhones support being mobile hotspots, which is convenient for laptops etc when travelling, but the iPhone only supports doing so on the 2.4GHz band -- using 5GHz or even selecting a specific 2.4GHz channel is not even an option.
* The interface is inconsistent -- there is no universal way of going "back", for example. Each app is left to itself to decide where the "back" option is (if it even has one) and what it's labeled. Some put it in the top-left, others in the top-right. And I've seen it called anything from back, cancel, exit, done, or even just an x or a back-pointing arrow. It's functional, but odd that an interface and phone that is touted for its ease-of-use and supposed integration and consistency lacks such basic integration and consistency.
* iPhones don't support something as simple and basic as standard Bluetooth file exchange. Of course, they make it simple for file transfer between 2 iPhones or a Mac, but if you want to direct file transfer to an Android or Windows PC you have to jump through some hoops.
* iPhones don't allow apps to directly access signal information. This means you can't easily use an iPhone to get even basic WiFi information like what channel or speed you're connected at, or get anything more than basic cell signal information. For example, to know what LTE band you're using, or to get precise dBm signal information, you have to go into Field Test Mode.
There's more, but that's the gist of what I find most glaringly perplexing and limiting to using an iPhone to do anything technically interesting.
Just some examples of why I'm "less than impressed" with iPhones:
* The iPhone "desktop" is just a group of icons... period.. like a flashback to Windows 3.1 and the interface concepts from the 1980's that led up to it -- you can't put anything actually useful on the desktop, like a weather widget, music controls, etc.
* The closest iPhone comes to supporting widgets is having a dedicated but separate "widget" screen but it's not very flexible as everything on the widget screen is forced into a simple and inefficient top-down stack of widgets.
* Similarly, the desktop icons are forced into a top-left to bottom-right "reading" layout. There is, for example, no way to move a single icon to the bottom-right corner if you want it to stand out for some reason.
* There is no native "swipe' keyboard, and though you can install one from the app store Apple doesn't allow any 3rd-party keyboard app to access the microphone which means to gain swipe-typing you give up easy access to voice-typing.
* iPhones support being mobile hotspots, which is convenient for laptops etc when travelling, but the iPhone only supports doing so on the 2.4GHz band -- using 5GHz or even selecting a specific 2.4GHz channel is not even an option.
* The interface is inconsistent -- there is no universal way of going "back", for example. Each app is left to itself to decide where the "back" option is (if it even has one) and what it's labeled. Some put it in the top-left, others in the top-right. And I've seen it called anything from back, cancel, exit, done, or even just an x or a back-pointing arrow. It's functional, but odd that an interface and phone that is touted for its ease-of-use and supposed integration and consistency lacks such basic integration and consistency.
* iPhones don't support something as simple and basic as standard Bluetooth file exchange. Of course, they make it simple for file transfer between 2 iPhones or a Mac, but if you want to direct file transfer to an Android or Windows PC you have to jump through some hoops.
* iPhones don't allow apps to directly access signal information. This means you can't easily use an iPhone to get even basic WiFi information like what channel or speed you're connected at, or get anything more than basic cell signal information. For example, to know what LTE band you're using, or to get precise dBm signal information, you have to go into Field Test Mode.
There's more, but that's the gist of what I find most glaringly perplexing and limiting to using an iPhone to do anything technically interesting.
5/07/2014
Getting a Linux router to work with a direct connect to Google Fiber
- 22 Sep 2015
- I've had this working for a long time, but wanted to officially post instructs for setting up the IGMP portion for TV service.
- I simply installed igmpproxy and configured it as follows. br-wan is my WAN interface, br-lan is my LAN interface, you'll just need to adjust those interface names for your own environment. This is the entirety of my igmpproxy.conf file and I haven't had any problem with it for months. Technically you should only need the 10.30. and 10.79. altnets, but I was getting intermittent igmpproxy log errors about other 10. unknown upstream IP sources (even though my TV service appeared to be working fine) so I added the 10.16. altnet as a catch-all and that got rid of the errors, and even though my own network runs a 10.
- quickleave
- phyint br-wan upstream ratelimit 0 threshold 1
- altnet 10.16.0.0/16
- altnet 10.30.0.0/16
- altnet 10.79.0.0/16
- phyint br-lan downstream ratelimit 0 threshold 1
- 13 Nov 2014
- Tested this guide with my own setup and it worked exactly as planned.
- Test environment
- GF Jack to a standard (non-managed) 5-port Netgear 1Gb switch
- Netgear switch to two legs
- GF Network Box
- Was running simultaneously, with its own pubic IPv4 and IPv6 address
- OpenSUSE Linux box
- Got a different public IPv4 address
- 12 Nov 2014
- Greatly simplified the CoS settings per the latest FAQ from Google. Simply set default egress CoS to 2.
- I got my install 11/11/2014 and will finally be able to test this myself.
- Google has provided some official-but-vague guidelines for using their service without their network box here: https://support.google.com/fiber/faq/3333053
- This is a work in progress. The content will likely change frequently until the details are worked out so check back often for updated info.
- I'm posting publicly for peer review, questions, and collaboration.
- While being developed, it assumes you already have basic familiarity with the effort and the how, what, and why it is being done.
- Assuming eventual success, I'll rewrite this for a more general audience at that time.
- To completely replace the Google Fiber Network Box (GFNB) with a Linux router
- Capable of full link performance.
- Reliably proxy IGMP for Google Fiber TV (GFTV) functionality.
- note: The GFTV/IGMP aspect is only precursorily addressed at this time by setting the Google-specified VLAN CoS bits for it. I will get to the GFTV/IGMP functionality in more detail if/when the Internet connection itself works as intended.
1. Your Internet interface must be configured for VLAN 2.
ensure the VLAN module is loaded:
--
modprobe 8021q
2. Create VLAN 2 on your Internet interface, eth0 (for example)
--
vconfig add eth0 2
3. Google has said the VLAN CoS bit must be set on packets egressing to the fiber. Without setting the CoS you will likely be limited to 10Mbits/s UPload, if it works at all.
To set CoS for VLAN 2, map (default) skb-priority 0 to CoS 2:
--
vconfig set_egress_map eth0.2 0 2
5. Use your DHCP client to get an IPv4 address for your VLAN 2 interface: (dhclient for example)
--
dhclient eth0.2
As I understand it that should do it for a basic IPv4 connection. IPv6 steps can be extrapolated from the above though I intend to document the IPv6 setup in the final version.
Feedback very much appreciated, thank you.
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