I borrowed The miraculous journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo (author of Because of Winn-Dixie) as a book on CD from the library. I was drawn by the gorgeous cover art by Bagram Ibatoulline of a small, well-dressed bunny walking toward a well-lit human-sized house at night. I’m glad I did as I found something I didn’t imagine possible: a toy bunny story at least as good as Marjory Williams’ 1922 renowned children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. This book is a more mature version with Edward, and the listener, discovering what it means to love along his wanderings. The bunny cannot move and can only passively witness people and events; it is what he and we see along the way that affects us.
Judith Ivey reads and manages to seamlessly give each character their separate voice in a wonderful performance. Recommended highly to those who aren’t afraid of some tears.
Archive for December, 2007
The Lives of Others
This movie (originally called Das Leben der Anderen) is a virtuoso feature film writing and directorial debut by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck that very much deserves all the many awards it was collected. Prompted by my sister-in-law’s brother’s advice (Thanks Doug!) I put the DVD on hold at the library and finally watched it last night with my wife. This is a most impressive film and should be seen by all who are interested in history or in exceptional film-making or if you are an adult.
The performance of the late Ulrich Mühe, in particular, is outstanding. Exceptional. He is one of those performers who, after watching this movie, you just want to see everything he has done. I only wish I understood German half as well as Donnersmarck understands English so I could actually do that. And when you learn how this actor’s life in the GDR so closely mirrored the monitoring of artists in the film… you just have to shudder.
Donnersmarck, too, is someone whose future work I will be very keen to follow. His painstaking research and incredible attention to detail in capturing 1984 Communist Germany is inspiring. I especially appreciate his picking of that particular year. Besides being appropriate historically it also is more than a nod to George Orwell and his Ministry of Truth. I’ve often thought that Orwell should not have picked a date as the title for his book but, with Donnersmarck’s help, I now see his chillingly exacting foresight.
I was also impressed by the acting of Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck and Ulrich Tukur.
I understand Hollywood wishes to do a remake. My only question is “Why?” What a waste that would be. Put the money into America’s own dark closets of history and Ministry of Information if you really want to acknowledge the greatness of Donnersmarck’s work. Do some more research on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI or, even closer to home for Hollywood, the McCarthy hearings and you’d be better served.
A must see!
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
A short book by Mohsin Hamid, this is a story of a Pakistani man’s reaction to America and is narrated as a one-sided conversation by Changez, the protagonist. If you are interested in the clash of culture between Pakistan and the States, both pre and post 9/11, then I would definitely recommend this book, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It’s beautifully written and brilliantly lends flesh and bone to some of the important elements making up the distrust we can easily witness all around us today between East and West.
I’m not usually interested in novels about current events although I am certainly interested in East versus West issues and Pakistan, in particular, as one of my favourite uncles was born there. And, of course, it certainly is a timely piece to read with Benazir Bhutto’s assassination concentrating world attention now.
But what got me to read this book was a short excerpt from the beginning of the book in the newspaper which can be also be found online here. Changez’ conversation with an American visitor to Pakistan worked very well as a literary device for me. It sparked my interest enough for me to seek the book at the library. I likely will buy it and look forward to reading Hamid’s other novel and future efforts. He is well worth following.
The projects path for SQL Server Management Studio cannot be changed easily. It tries to save your scripts and other documents in a projects directory under your “My Documents” directory. If you don’t want SQL files stored in, say,
%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio Express\Projects\
(if you use SQL Server Express) you have to dig deeper to change it. I have found myself often annoyed at management studio’s insistence on putting files there. I had to change 7 keynames (including, for example, DefaultOpenSolutionLocation) Registry Keys for SSMSE files at the following location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\ShellSEM
to my preferred path (I used an absolute path in this example):
C:\my-svn
for my Subversion Working directory. Then everything was cool.
The man spoke
As he spoke I realized how much I was missing.
I struggled to seize the moment more out of civility
than desire
I was tired from staying up the night before
trying to be all that the Master Chief could be.
But my foggy perception settled a little and I noticed
there was something of interest being said.
So the man spoke and I heard
him discuss the history he had gleaned from many references.
It surprised and excited my attention.
And I saw myself or, more to the truth,
I saw what I wanted to be
in those who survived the hell of the past.
-2007/12/13-
Alternative Christmas Gifts
If you feel like you have everything you need and want to give a gift that lends itself more to the spirit of Christmas then you’re in the same Ark as I am. But what to buy… what to buy. There are plenty of charities out there who want your money but who will actually do as they advertise with it? Is there some ridiculous cut for administration that you are paying somewhere along the way?
We’ve been talking about buying a goat for a 3rd World Family and this site is helping me and my family make our decision. It’s based in the UK but I imagine it applies to my giving too. Of course goat buying isn’t completely controversy-free… will the goats eat everything in sight and promote desertification in susceptible parts of the world? That may be an exaggeration but it is something to think about.
These profiles help you compare the various options (including an amount specified for what percentage of your money actually goes to charity:
World Vision
Save the Children
In terms of cost this WorldVision site (Canadian) has a goat for $100 whereas Oxfam Canada has one for $58.
I’m going to have to do some more research!
Chapter 2
Diona awoke with the droning of her tiny clock radio. She showered and dressed quickly. Grabbing her book bag she left her room in Howe Hall at a run. With her hair still damp she crept into her biology class in the Life Sciences building from one of the rear doors and after letting the door shut silently. She was quickly into one of the last row seats.
The class had started but only just.
“…this important organelle is the site in which food matter is transformed into energy forms useable by the cell. The theory of mitochondria having an evolutionary history as bacterial symbionts has some interesting corollaries. In fact that will be part of your assignment this week. I want you to give two original ideas about what the theory may imply. Hopefully some of you… that is those who actually enjoy achieving good grades…” Professor Brown paused here and looked around the auditorium of close to 350 students.
“… will know what ‘original’ means. For those who don’t, write this down: original ideas come from my head and not from a book”
The class burst out laughing at this.
“You can use ‘Life’ to learn more about the theory but I’d like you to apply your 3 months of learning and come up with something you find interesting. It can be in the form of question or in the form of a proposal which you think could be investigated. I do not want more than 100 words. Quality is what I’m looking for, not quantity.”
“I’ll give you an example. As we learned last month in embryology, a life form often goes through the evolutionary steps which lead to the species during its early growth. An Example: you all had tails before you were born but I’d bet most of you don’t any more. So if our cells, which nearly all contain mitochondria, divide from a single cell where does the genetic instruction come from in making the new mitochondrion? Does it split too or it is manufactured in place? In fact, ‘Life’ goes into the answer to these questions.”
“Now let’s examine some of the other eukaryotic cell organelles…”
To Diona Professor Brown’s voice faded into the background as she considered the words of the disembodied voice of Nera Demali she’d heard the night previous. She thought about meeting him that night and felt the excitement rise.
‘Who was the man?’ She could not come up with anyone before the words of the prof worked their way into her head again. She put off her speculation and began concentrating on biology.
Tuning SQL Server Queries
As everyone who has worked with a useful database for any length of times knows… they get bigger. And as they get bigger it takes longer to squeeze information or data out. So what’s the problem? You might think it’s the fault of the computer…. blame the system! Heck! I’ve done it. But if you are seeing noticeable degradation of your queries in a short period of time then, 9 times out of 10, you gots to fix da code man.
And that takes experience and learning.
One of the best sources I can give you for really learning the ins and outs of Transact SQL (the Microsoft flavour of SQL in SQL Server) then there’s one book you should look at: Ken Henderson’s The Guru’s Guide to Transact-SQL. It is, hands down, the best book on practical SQL that I use. It never leaves my desk and my only wish is that Ken would write an up dated version. I would buy it right away.
But there are simple things you can do to get a good idea about where your problem areas are. The two settings I like to use are the statistics io and time settings. These really help, especially the first one, to give you a clear idea of the processing ‘cost’ of a database query. The basic commands are:
set statistics io on
and
set statistics time on
Turning them off is easy: just substitute the on with off. Once you’ve done that they’re on for your entire session. When you execute a query you’ll get some additional processing information but, in my opinion, the most important performance counter in them is the logical reads number. This is the number of 8K pages of information it read from the data cache to give you your result. Of course, the less pages, the better. It’s also a useful value because it is independent of a lot of the other ‘background’ noise like other users and locking that most of our queries have to deal with in the read database world. As long as you are returning the same rows of data and using the same command this value should also remain very close to the same amount.
Try it.
