Ken vs. the City

Channel 13 plays old movies every Saturday night. Yesterday they showed Judgement at Nuremberg starring Spencer Tracy. The movie followed one of the post-war trials of civilian Nazi conspirators at Nuremberg, and dealt with the theme of justice in a powerful way. That in itself wouldn’t be enough to inspire me to write, but the characters in the movie create a story so intense that you can almost touch it. Then they add the accusatory question: “If you say nothing against it, are you as guilty as those who committed the deed?”

The characters are almost stock. You have the fanatic, the intelect, the sad widow, the angry prosecutor, the firey young advocate, and the wise and humble judge. Personally, I have no problem with stock characters in a story. We are all characters after all. A so-called “stock” character is simply a type of personality in a story that we immediately identify with. We have all been fanatics at one time. We have all been wise (at least in our own minds). We have all been young and passionate (or at least we wish we could be).

It’s the master storyteller who can weave these stock two-dimensional people into the fabric of the story, tangle them together with each other, and trick us into believing that they are not just representations of some aspect of our personalities, but 3D living people as real as your best friend, or your worst enemy.

The courtroom setting is one of the few ways to introduce passionate statements, emotional breakdowns, and lengthy orations into a story without seeming preachy or cheesy. Court is solemn. Court is also pageantry. Anyone who comes to court brings a question or a mystery with them; a problem begging to be solved. It’s not enough to say something is a courtroom drama. By its very nature, a courtroom is drama.

A lot of my favorite movies emphasize story, dialogue, and character. Interestingly, a lot of my favorite movies are also either older, or based on plays.

I’ve been re-writing a screenplay that I started about two years ago. I remember typing up my first draft and formatting it by hand using the tab and the caps lock key to format it. Microsoft Word is still bloated with features I never use, but this time I found this pretty passable MS Word screenplay template.

All the styles like dialoge and scene heading are there. Just delete all the junk left behind by the creator to illustrate how to use it, and you have a blank slate for a properly formatted screenplay.

I’m not quite sure what a “shiznit” is, but I’m quite sure I’m the first person to ever call John Grisham one. I have an ever-changing leaderboard in my head that contains my favorite writers. The usuals are up there: Lewis, Tolkien, Bradbury, Chesterton, Twain, Caroll, Fitzgerald, Shelley, Card, Sandburg, Blake (yes, i read like a mad schizophrenic). But interestingly, popular author John Grisham consitantly cracks my top 10-ish favorites.

I certainly admire him for the fact that he can crank out about one new best selling novel per year, but there’s something in his writing that I really love. Even in his more formulaic novels (where a southern lawyer skyrockets to lawyerly success, gets consumed by a lawyerly lavish lavish lifestyle, and either crashes and burns, or comes out of it a better man) Grisham has a way with characters and dialogue that makes even the rottenest lawyerly villain come to life in such a way that you wish you could invite them over to your house and chat with them about anything in the world. I still remember the characters from The Testament, the first Grisham novel I ever read.

I recently finished reading The Broker (not his usual formula, but a variation on a theme) and Bleachers (which is an entirely original creation — Grisham is one of novel writing’s 100lb gorillas.) I was really impressed with The Broker as a novel designed to pay the bills. Like some of Grisham’s designed-to-be-best-sellers it kept me on the edge of my seat through the story, but it really fizzled out at the end.

On the other hand, Bleachers was an exquisite example of Grisham’s character-creating expertise. It was an entirely unique story with nary a lawyer in sight. It follows the legacy of a tough-as-nuts highschool football coach in a town ruled by highschool football. For 30 years, he ran the highschool football program with an iron fist, touching lives, making human mistakes, and causing all sorts of human drama. As he lies on his death bed, the players from the glory days return to town, re-opening some old wounds and healing others. Bleachers relies entirely on Grisham’s mastery of character. Not only are there no legal tricks, but there’s also almost no action to speak of.

Another thing of Grisham’s that I find attractive is his constant use of corruption and redemption as a theme. Ever since I read The Testament, it’s been something that stands out like a blazing bat signal in any story of his that I’ve read. Stephen King doesn’t have it, Clive Cussler doesn’t have it, and Michael Crichton doesn’t have it. Frank Peretti has it, but his use of redemption is almost too obvious. No other “popular” author I’ve read can be as subtle with the theme of redemption, and as vivid with character as Grisham.

I was coming home on the subway late yesterday evening from a friend’s place when I happened to see my reflection in the subway car door window. It had been raining earlier. I was wearing a long overcoat, and carrying an umbrella. I also had my bag slung over my shoulder. But what struck me the most was how old I looked.

In some ways I still feel like I’m a kid. Sometimes I feel like I’m the same goofy-haired person that graduated from high school in 1998; the same kid that suffered cluelessly through five years of college. I had no idea what friendship was, and I felt so distant from other people, unknowingly craving personal interaction, and closed off in my own little self-imposed, and sometimes self-righteous spiritual hermitage, that I had no inkling of the thoughts and feelings of others. Things were done for me. I had ready resources. But while something inside of me knew that I should be doing more, the wallowing comfort I enjoyed was sometimes more appealing to me than a thousand risky adventures.

Seeing a grown-up face underneath the same goofy hair in the window of the subway door was something of a surprise to me. I don’t make a habit of mirror-gazing. I know what I look like well enough. But the look on my face, the curve of my jaw, and the size of my hands as the gripped the handle of the umbrella reminded me of something that I often frget: I am a man. I am a grown-up. I have ready resources, and it’s time for a risky adventure.

The one important thing that God taught me in college was the mystery of the human heart. It was his version of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. He showed me how to see people from the inside out, how to read them and let them know that there is a God out there who cares. He taught me how to empathize with lonely hearts because I myself have been lonely, and it was God who sent people to me without my knowledge or request to open my eyes to the wonders of personal relationships.

The one important thing that God is teaching me now is how to calculate and take risk. I am a timid person by nature. I won’t step where I can’t see a foothold, and I won’t release something unless I know it will come back to me. The heart of a conserver is the same as the heart of a miser. I’m constantly reminded of the man who buried his one talent in the earth because he was afraid of loosing it. His master called him wicked.

The spiritual art of adventure is just as important as the spiritual art of relationship. But it seems in my case that God has thought it better to develop adventurousness in me now than before. Maybe I was too naive before. Maybe I had to grow up. Whatever the reason, I am a man now, and manhood brings with it the responsibility of risk-taking. My own reflection in a subway car window is not normally something that would catch my attention, but for a brief second in time it was required of me to look back and see where I have been in order to know where I am and where I am going.

I found this neat little program called getCals that will automatically download your Google Calendar iCal feeds to the calendar directory on your iPod.

You have to enable your iPod for disk use and manually configure getCals’s .ini file with your iPod’s Calendar directory, as well as your private Google Calendar iCal feeds. Once that’s done, just run the program and your Google Calendar events magically appear on your iPod.

It’s not a fully automatic sync, since you have to run the program manually, but at least you can access your schedule while you’re on the go. It looks like getCals works like an iCal feed downloader, so my guess is that you can point it to any iCal feeds on the web and download them to any specified directory on (or off) your hard drive.

Google launched their Google Calendar application a few days ago, and I think it blows all the other online calendars out there away. I particularly like that ability to share and subscribe to calendars in the iCal format, the same one used by Apple’s iCal and Mozilla Sunbird. Google Calendar can also share data via RSS.

It looks great. It’s got the same slick interface as Gmail, and I like the ability to create and color-code different types of calendars. I currently have one for my regular day-to-day schedule, one for birthdays (can’t forget those), and one for special one-time events. You can also add holiday information, and search for any iCal .ics files on the internet and subscribe to them as a remote calendar.

Another cool feature I haven’t tried out yet, is the ability to send event reminders to your cell phone via SMS text messages. You can also have Google Calendar send you a daily agenda via email or SMS. Luckily I’m not busy enough yet to need something like that.

I’ve run into a few glitches. Sometimes when you update the calendar with new information, or subscribe to a remote calendar, it will take a few minutes for your Google Calendar to update. Occasionally when you subscribe to a non-Google remote calendar it will balk at you, and you just have to try again. I’ve heard some people say that Google Calendar won’t work with Apple’s Safari web browser, but I don’t own a mac, and I have no way to test it.

For a long time, I’ve been using Rainlendar to keep track of my schedule. Now that Google has finally released their long-anticipated calendar, I can finally access my schedule both at home and at work. My only gripe is that there is no desktop client. I like having my schedule on my desktop without having to open my web browser. Hopefully with Google Calendar’s remote iCal and RSS access somebody will make a Yahoo Konfabulator Widget or something. Now that Google has a calendar, they just need to add a to-do list and combine it all together with Gmail to create some online competition to Microsoft Outlook.

If you’ve ever looked at the source code of a web page, or used Photoshop’s color picker, you have probably seen a six-symbol code that looked something like this: #6775FC.

Believe it or not, but that is a pretty light blue color. These codes are actually really easy to understand and create once you know how to read them. Usually when I design a web site and I need a color somewhere, I find it faster to just type in a color code instead of using a color picker.

The code is broken up into three parts:

#67 75 FC

Each part stands for one of the three primary colors of light: Red, Green, Blue (otherwise known as RGB). The greater the first number, the more red there is. The greater the second, the more green, and the greater the third, the more blue. A color code of #000000 would be completely black, because all the color values are zero.

The reason there are letters in there is because the color code is based on the hexadacimal (or base 16) number system. In other words:

0 = 0
1 = 1
2 = 2
3 = 3
4 = 4
5 = 5
6 = 6
7 = 7
8 = 8
9 = 9
10 = A
11 = B
12 = C
13 = D
14 = E
15 = F

(If figuring out base 16 numbers hurts your head, the Windows calculator can convert them for you. Switch to scientific view, type in your numbers, and then just flip between hex and dec number systems.)

For the color #6775FC, I can tell by looking at the code that it’s mostly blue, because the blue value (FC) is the highest one. I can tell that it’s a lighter blue because the other two colors are about half-way between 00 and FF, and are both at about the same level. In regular numbers, each color can range in brightness from 0 to 255.

To give you a better idea of how it works, here are some basic colors:

White - #FFFFFF
Black - #000000
Red - #FF0000
Green - #00FF00
Blue - #0000FF
Yellow - #FFFF00
Magenta - #FF00FF
Cyan - #00FFFF
Light Gray - #D3D3D3

Occasionally I have seen some instances where these color codes are followed by a fourth set of digits identical to the other three. That’s used to specify the level of opacity.

In HTML you can also type in the name of the color instead of the code (”black,” “yellow,” etc.), but there are only a limited number of them. Using the hex code gives you access to the whole range of colors.

The Through The Bible podcast is the podcasted counterpart of Through The Bible Radio with Dr. J. Vernon McGee. They just finished going through Revelation last week, and have started their 5-year Bible study all over again. As far as I know, the daily podcast is exactly the same as the radio broadcast. I believe they’ve been broadcasting the same the 5-year study since 1967.

I’ve been kind of slacking off as far as proper Bible study discipline goes. I know there’s so much locked up in that book that I need to know. I know that everything that God has been telling me–the message of a fallen world, and a hope for a new, restored life– the same thing he’s been telling to every individual since the beginning of time has been written down and recorded for us in the Bible. Every wise scrap of knowledge I’ve ever prayed for is in there. But since I have moved here, I have found it difficult to crack open the book and read.

It’s probably the tail-end of fear. I pray, and God answers, but it is not enough. Part of me is afraid that if I open the book, and read for myself the things he’s trying to tell me that I’ll find out more unpleasant things about myself. Sure that hurts, but it also feels good because I know I will be healed.

Every gain is accompanied by pain. Not injury, but the pain of healing, or strengthening. When you exercise, you exert energy and your muscles hurt afterwards. When you have to solve a problem, you have to spend time and mental focus to figure out the answer. The pain of exercise sometimes keeps me from exercising, and the need to strip away superfluous activities and influences sometimes keeps me from solving problems.

Right now, it’s the same for me and Bible study. I know I will have to devote my attention to a book that mey reveal information about myself that’s not always pleasant. About a year ago I used Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest as a guide throught the Bible. That seemed to work alright then. This time, I’m going to try and follow along with the TTB podcast. Hopefully that will help me develop the important discipline of regular Bible study.

There are a lot of billboards around town advertising the upcoming Silent Hill movie. I’m not sure how good the movie will be, since the quality of video game-based movies has traditionally been abismal, but at least some people are having a little fun with the advertisements.

I’ll let you guys know if I see anymore Silent Hill fun.

The maker of one of my most favorite games, Malfador Machinations, was purchased by their current publisher, Strategy First. I’ve been a fan of Malfador’s Space Empires series of strategy games since I was in High School and discovered the shareware version Space Empires II on some BBS somewhere. I was a beta tester for Space Empires IV, and I’m currently a beta tester for the upcoming Space Empires V.

Malfador is a one-man show, and I think it’s good that Mr. Malfador himself, Aaron Hall is finally getting some financial backing. Space Empires has a vibrant grass-roots community behind it, and a lot of people are worried that Aaron could loose control of the franchise. There aren’t a lot of independent game developers out there anymore.

Press Release
Aaron’s Response
Shrapnel Forum discussion
Strategy First Forum discussion

The Shrapnel Forum thread is getting an incredible number of posts per hour right now.