April 22, 1999
Dear Everyone:
Oberon finally made it up to “Jeannie’s” place last
weekend. I was able to fit
everything into the trunk of my car; but there was no way we could get
the computer cart into the back seat as had seemed originally possible.
Couple more inches of clearance and we would have made it.
Instead, the cart is now tucked away in a corner of
the dining room. “Jeannie”
wasn’t even sure she wanted it until she saw how much of her desk was
taken over by computer components Sunday afternoon.
We have tentative plans to enlist the aid of a friend of
“Jeannie’s” who possesses one of the dreaded
Sport
Utility Vehicles (yes, they do come in handy once in a while) and
can oblige in hauling the cart up to
Concord,
possibly next weekend.
In the meantime, “Jeannie” has barely turned Oberon
on because she wasn’t sure she could remember how to turn him off again.
And the printer wouldn’t work at first.
I suspected the printer cable might be dead, so I took it back
home with me and checked it against my PC and printer and got an
immediate “communications failure” message.
Next day, armed with a brand new cable and the original keyboard
that came with Oberon (“Jeannie” didn’t like the “ergonomic” one that
I’d gotten a few years ago), I went back up to Concord and got Oberon
all set.
Now all we need is a few weekends’ worth of
practical training.
“Jeannie” took one look at all the programs and features and proclaimed,
“It’s going to take me months to learn how to use all this!”
I assured her that no, it would take years.
After all, I’ve been learning computer stuff for over five years
myself. Of course, a lot of
it is obsolete now; but that’s the price we pay for living on “the
bleeding edge of technology”.
Speaking of technology, we went and saw
The
Matrix last weekend.
This movie stars
Keanu Reeves and
Lawrence
Fishburne. It is your
usual “special effects in search of a movie”.
Reeves portrays a computer programmer who works for “a very
large, very successful software company”.
(Gee, who could that be?)
He hates his job and seems to spend most of his time searching
online for some mythical thing called “the Matrix”.
Suddenly, Men In Black arrest him for some unknown
offence. (Kafka?
Party of one, your table is ready.)
Strange things start to happen, then Reeves meets up with
Fishburne who lets him know that everything, his life, the job he hates,
the laws of physics, are all illusion.
It’s all part of “the Matrix”, a kind of “virtual reality world”
created and maintained by machines.
(Shades of
Logan’s
Run.)
None of this really matters, of course.
The whole purpose of the movie is to show off the special effects
that can now be done with computers (there they are again!)
There’s a lot of video-game-like violence (people jumping into
the air and kicking someone six times before returning to “earth”) and
big-screen action scenes; but none of the characters engages you
emotionally because you know they’re nothing more than a world-sized
video game to begin with.
On the other hand, it will never play as well on a
small screen as it does on a large one; so if you’re inclined for
mindless entertainment, and don’t mind holes in the plot the size of an
aircraft carrier,
go ahead and enjoy.
Love, as always,
Pete
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