3:10 to Robert Ford

I hooked up a couple Westerns on the Amazon Unbox recently. The first was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Much like its title, the film is over-long, but it features some great cinematography and some mighty fine performances -- especially from Casey Affleck and Sam Rockwell. I was amused at one point when the narration describing Jesse James mentioned that he had a condition that caused him to blink a lot... and there's Brad Pitt, doing his standard scruffy-faced, wide-eye, unblinking crazy face.... Um, yeah... OK, Brad. That said, Pitt is generally good, too, but it's a role that isn't much of a stretch for him. Anyway, the movie itself is good enough that I would certainly recommend it "if that's your sort of thing" -- by which I guess I'd mean low-action, semi-cerebral period pieces with pretty pictures.

Then last night I watched 3:10 to Yuma. More action to this one -- it's what you'd call a straight up Western. Christian Bale and Russell Crowe are both quite good, and it was a treat to see that guy from Firefly again. Best of all was a scene-stealing Ben Foster as Charlie Prince -- that character is a perfect Western villain. If you like people shooting at other people from horseback, this is your choice.

Unfortunately, I'm puzzled by the climax... (Spoilers ahoy!)

The actions of Crowe's character, Ben Wade, in the finale don't make sense to me at all. He decides to go along with Bale's Dan Evans to get on the train, but doesn't call off his boys, who are trying their damnedest to kill Evans. He actually behaves as if he is running from his own gang. Only as he gets on the train does he make any effort -- too late -- to keep Evans from being killed. He then proceeds to dispatch his entire gang in seeming revenge. WTF? Then he goes ahead and hops into the cage on the train to be taken to prison, but that's revealed to be something he does only to make Evans's son feel better (or something) because he calls his horse to follow along, implying an escape in the near future....

*boggle*

Why would he go along tot he train and not call off his gang? If he wasn't going to call off his boys, why would he shoot them all after they killed Evans? Why would he do all of this if he was just going to escape and start over? At least I'm not alone:

Without giving anything away, let’s just say that in the interests of a socko finale Wade behaves in ways even Crowe can’t make us swallow.

Like I said, I don't get it.

UPDATE: I should have checked Rod's fake script first:

CHRISTIAN BALE (clutching chest) I did it, son!

CHRISTIAN BALE’S KID Did what? Managed to be so pathetic that Crowe took pity on you and volunteered to go to jail so that you could feel like a hero, despite being such a complete loser?

CHRISTIAN BALE Yeah, I totally did that. (dies)

Baby's New Toy

This past weekend The Wife and I got ourselves an XBox 360. I say that in terms of "us" and "we", but really the purchase was precipitated by my girl's strong desire to rock out with a little game called Karaoke Revolution. Make no mistake, she was a dancer for good reason, but the ability to actually sing really doesn't help you much (if at all) in this game. We were first introduced to it at brother-in-law Chris's house the last time we went to LA to see him and his SO, Kate. Me being me, I totally douched out and refused to play. (I don't dance in public, either.) My not-so-secret plan was to get the game and practice by myself until I was comfortable enough to do it in front of other people. I was just going to get it for the Wii, but then it turns out the XBox and PS3 version have downloadable songs, which made it worth the wait in my mind.

I'm still finding my way with the game... (I can sing just well enough to really screw things up, it seems.) "Satisfaction" from the Rolling Stones is my rock solid joint at the moment. I've also done passable jobs at "In the Air Tonight", "Come Sail Away With Me", and Haddaway's "What Is Love" (on which I actually did better the first time ever seeing the lyrics). Songs that frustrated me so far, but which think I can rock hard with a little work: "Tainted Love", GnR's version of "Knocking on Heaven's Door", and "(Hit Me) Baby One More Time". The wife on the other hand is a machine, scoring perfect scores (we're playing on "Easy", of course) after perfect scores. Our duet goal is Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", although "Midnight Train to Georgia" is a real ass kicker, too. It's hard to be a Pip!

Yes, there is no shame in karaoke. Point of fact: I score better if I sing the "What Is Love" lyrics like "Whuddizluff? Doanherdmee. Doanherdmee...No more." It's very strange. I also picked up .skate as my "boy game", and it's proving to be very cool, though rather difficult for a Tony Hawk Pro Skater veteran like myself.

The only other game I have on my short list right now is Beautiful Katamari, but I'm sure that will change over time.

Needless to say, the fun times never stop at the Sutton household.

RoR: acts_as_solr Highlighting

This post is pure geekery, so never you mind if that's not your thing... We use a Ruby on Rails plugin called acts_as_solr for full text search on some of our Rails apps at work. This provides an interface to a Solr search engine, which is based on Lucene technology. Lately I've been digging into some of the more advanced features Solr provides, for which I found this QuarkRuby post invaluable.

You'll notice I posted a somewhat confused comment recently. I've been trying to post a follow-up comment to share what I've discovered on the topic, but it's not letting me for some reason, so here it is for the sake of teh intarwebs:

Just to follow up: It turns out AAS doesn't (yet) support some of the hl parameters, including requireFieldMatch.

FYI, though, requireFieldMatch will only return highlights if you searched the highlight fields specifically, so q=(test)+AND+type_t:Post&hl=true \ &hl.fl=body_t,title_t&hl.requireFieldMatch=true will not work, but q=(body_t:test+OR+title_t:test)+AND+type_t:Post \ &hl=true&hl.fl=body_t,title_t&hl.requireFieldMatch=true will return the expected highlights.

In my eyes, that makes that feature kind of "meh"...

Also worth noting, I submitted a patch for rebuild_solr_index. It was ignoring the :if when batch_size was supplied.

I'm kind of excited about the patch. It's totally trivial and perhaps not even the best implementation, but it's my first contribution to an open source project. That's totally cool in the geekiest way possible!

Bullet the Blue Sky

Or... Y'know... A bulleted list of junk from the internets:

That is all.

Nerd Sexy

Today, Rod posted these rejected Star Wars products to our sooper-seekrit IRC channel, prompting the following:

  • Jake: and pants are optional!
  • Rod: hell yes
  • Rod: and then if you're at a halloween party and some girl opens up your sweaty suit to blow you, she can say "and i thought they smelled bad on the outside"
  • Rod: and then you can marry her because she's awesome

That's gold, people. Pure gold!

And then there was this exchange, as well...

New Shoes

Literally. The Wife and I went to an actual running store and bought actual running shoes yesterday, so that we might continue our attempts at jogging with perhaps a bit less agony. Given that I haven't called myself a "runner" since high school, and The Wife never has, we popped into our local Road Runner store to take full advantage of their know-how on the subject.

I had gone in with a strong recommendation from my mother, whose duck feet I was dubiously fortunate enough to inherit, so I told our friendly shoe salesman that I needed to try on a pair of Brooks Beasts and that my dear spouse might need a bit more help in finding the right gear since she's a former ballerina and nobody really understands what's going on with her feet.

So, he took her over to stand on a pressure pad and found out she's much more "normal" than any of us expected. She tried on three different pairs and settled on a pair of Nike Zoom Structures that felt "like little hugs for my feet!"

Meanwhile, I wasn't so sure about the Beasts. This is typical of me. I can never tell if a shoe feels right. Mostly they just never feel all that great to me, but in particular, I have had so many shoes seem fine in the store only to be totally wrong when I get them home. Luckily Road Runner offers a guarantee for just such issues.

Anyway, I was hemming and hawing a bit. I thought maybe I should stand on the pad or whatever, too, in case anything mysterious would be revealed. Once I stood up in my socks and showed our guy how my feet roll inward, though, he said there was no mystery about that at all. And so I tried on a couple other pairs from Asics and Saucony. I ended up on the treadmill which showed my left ankle trying its level best to buckle in a direction that just isn't normal ("We generally want to try to get that a bit straighter, but I think that's as good as you get..." said my new friend with a baffled shrug.), but also revealed that I straighten my stride out fairly well by the time I push off. Good for me. In fact, we were both happy that nobody looked at us and screamed "What in the world are you doing trying to run?!"

Long story longer: The Beast felt the best of the shoes I tried on, and with some adjustments of the lacing pattern I was mostly able to get it to feel alright in the areas that were questionable.

Now it's just a matter of getting out there more than once or twice a week... (At least the days are starting to get longer.)

Trsly

Andre points to Trsly.com, which may be a lot of fun. At the very least it should give me a place to put quick links to all the *boggle* I find on the intarwebs but choose not to post here. I'll need to see about hacking it into my WordPress theme, but in the mean time you can subscribe to my quotes with that wild feed reading technology. (Or not. The user-level feed link is actually busted at the moment, which sucks balls.)

Hit 'Em Again

Here's to having MLK Day off from work! Going for my walk/run today in 15 degree (F) temps wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. Until my calf started cramping. That had nothing to do with the cold, though. It was ready to go from the activity earlier in the weekend.

Junk I've run across: