Keeping the Intel Cam

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Sorry, folks, I changed my mind on selling the Intel Easy PC Camera. The Aiptek Mini isn’t a very good webcam; poor light sensitivity, no color compensation, and quirky drivers which occasionally crash my webcam software. On the up side, it’s a fairly decent entry-level digital camera, and fits right in my pocket or the palm of my hand. I’ll find time to walk around Washington tomorrow and take a few photos, but the Intel webcam stays by my laptop for now.

Now where’s my whip?

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(I’m bringing this entry back up because I forgot to mention Liam Neeson.)

I wonder if anyone has noticed this strange cinematic synchronicity:

In Hunt for Red October, Alec Baldwin played Jack Ryan from Tom Clancy’s novel, across from Sean Connery as a Soviet submarine captain. Later on, Harrison Ford picked up the Jack Ryan character in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger — a casting decision which prompted me to wonder what a waste it was that Ford didn’t play Jack Ryan back in Red October, where he could have revived the acting chemistry he shared with Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Now, just as Ben Affleck takes on a reprised Jack Ryan role in Sum of all Fears, Harrison Ford is back — this time in Sean Connery’s type of role as a Soviet submarine commander in K-19: The Widowmaker. His co-star: Liam Neeson, who played a Jedi master in The Phantom Menace, prequel to the movie trilogy where Ford played Han Solo.

All this, just as talk rises up of a new Indiana Jones movie in the works — with a quip by myself quoted regarding Harrison Ford.

I think we can see where this is leading.

Clearly, I am destined to be the next Indiana Jones.

Now where’s my whip?

Mmmm, whip…

Leaving the Country is a Cowardly Choice

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I was reading the Inquirer letters section today, when I came across this specific missive. Its title was an hostile and un-judicious generalization, and its text, while onstensibly well-meaning, was incoherent and rambling, so full of trite, hackneyed cliches that I almost laughed out loud reading it. Towards the end, the letter-writer’s sweeping accusations of “murderous schemes” and “nasty attitudes” were so poorly phrased that I wondered about his sanity — and English proficiency.

Then I saw the signature at the end of it, and I could only roll my eyes and mutter, “No wonder.”

The Uninformed Filipino Electorate

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An Uninformed Electorate:

Apart from harassment, vote-buying and patronage politics, we are saddled with a poorly informed electorate that picks candidates because they look good or can sing, dance and speak well in the movies or on television.

Yeah, that about sums it up. And as an Issues PEXer opined last week, it’s actually advantageous to the average Filipino politician to keep the voters uneducated. :(

Rapatronic Photographs

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Rapatronic photographs of test nuclear explosions in the 1950s. Each shot was taken at intervals of millionths of a second. Even milliseconds after detonation, the deadly fireball had already engulfed the blast tower. Amazing.

Update, March 2019: I updated the now-dead link here because I got a Dell SEO contractor email asking me to remove “irrelevant” old VCE.com hyperlinks, which I find hilarious.