The Man from Earth

Imagine if a man from the Stone Age was inexplicably gifted with immunity from aging, and just kept on living until the present. That's the premise of the The Man from Earth, which I watched last night on my laptop (with any feelings of guilt evaporated by the movie's producer, who has thanked people who've raised its profile by distributing it over the internet).

The movie tells the story of a man who was born 14,000 years ago and survives until the present day, currently living as a professor under the name John Oldman (note the clever pun!). He moves from place to place assuming various identities every 10 years or so, or whenever people start to notice that his appearance hasn't aged a day. When his colleagues throw an unexpected farewell party and pressure him to give an explanation for his sudden departure, he gives in and takes the risk of revealing his identity to the stunned group.

A very clever premise! In fact, half of the appeal is in the concept, the idea of someone who's lived for thousands of years, an idea which they take and explore for 90 minutes. The entire movie takes place in a small house, and plays itself out through intelligent conversation among the group. Yes, they take that mind-blowing premise and milk it into a long conversation.

Perhaps this would have been a very different movie if it had the proper budget of a major studio motion picture. But would it be better? Take, for instance, The Island, which took an awesome idea and buried it deep under thick layers of action and special effects. No, this movie isn't the slightest bit interested in the glitz and adrenaline. It just wants to take its idea and get you thinking about the possibilities. What if this guy was a disciple of Buddha? What if he was friends with Van Gogh? What if-- and this is the real bombshell-- what if he was Jesus? All this talk doesn't lead to anything significant, but it's fascinating with the way it tugs at the imagination in all sorts of directions.

The idea of taking an impossible concept and elucidating it to tickle the mind reminds me of The World Without Us, a "speculative fiction" book by Alan Weisman, exploring what would happen to the environment if the human race suddenly disappeared-- how houses would deteriorate, cities would crumble, and lifeforms would evolve on an Earth without people. Well, no I haven't actually read this book, but it's a very cool concept. Just think of it, and the conversation it could make.

MV Princess of the Stars

The waters were calm last night when I boarded the overnight ferry from Dumaguete to Cebu. Crossing the gangplank, my eyes briefly glanced upward at the lifeboats on top of the boat. Slipping into my cot I saw the bright orange life vests right in front of me and let out a reflective sigh. I had planned to depart the previous night, but the weather was not good, and the news on TV was far worse.

The MV Princess of the Stars, an enormous ferry owned by Sulpicio Lines en route to Cebu from Manila with more than 800 people aboard, capsized off the shore of Romblon amidst the height of Typhoon Frank. The shore was just 600 meters away but there were very few survivors, and the death toll is more than I can really put into perspective.

An alphabetized list of passenger and crew names is available at the company's website. I looked through the list of names, perhaps checking if any were familiar (none were). The death toll is merely a number, but seeing the long list of names helps give a scope of the tragedy. You start to realize that the number of dead is staggering, and each name represents a lost human life, yet you haven't gotten a third of the way through the list.

These were people that did not expect and did not deserve to lose their lives as they did. People who put their lives into the hands of Sulpicio Lines and trusted, just as I would, that if the company lets the ferry set sail despite the typhoon warning, then surely they must know what they're doing. Sons who kissed their mothers goodbye in Manila, texted brothers to greet them upon their arrival at the port of Cebu, had plans for the coming weeks, and plans for the rest of their lives that will never come. I wonder if they had come to terms with their fate as the ship overturned amidst the monstrous waves and terrified screams of children, hoping to strike one clear chord to reach the ears of God as they slipped the bonds of earth.

Firefox 3.0

Firefox 3.0 makes it's triumphant debut today, with a hyped up attempt to break the world record for most downloads in a single day. They're expecting the number to easily surpass 5 million. Go get it.


The location of the download was actually leaked to me yesterday, but on their server was a friendly note politely asking people who stumbled upon this secret trove not to start downloading until they say that it's time. Being a considerate bloke, I complied with their wishes.

I like to think of Firefox as an example that successive improvements can bring software infinitely close to perfection. I've been using the browser since before version 1.0, when it was still called Firebird. With each successive version they've fixed bugs, closed memory leaks, corrected annoyances, and added features (while consciously avoiding adding too many features!) until it's arrived at the sleek, polished product it is today. Firefox 2.0 has the bar set so high that I could hardly see what could be changed with a new version without approaching feature bloat or having change for the sake of change.

So anyway, what's new in 3.0? The biggest noticeable change is to the new location bar, informally dubbed the awesome bar, which now lists page titles above their addresses in the pull down menu. It looks clunky compared to the old URL list, but it may just be something that takes some getting used to. More impressive was the improved auto-complete feature that suggests pages based on page title rather than just the address.

Other noticable changes from my first impressions:

• The back button is strangely bigger than the forward button.
• The rest of the buttons have slightly different icons, not necessarily better.
• History opens in a window rather than a sidebar.
• There's an extra seperator line in the Boomarks menu of the menubar, so two lines seperate my personal bookmarks from the rest of the menu
• The icon for broken images is different.
• The Firefox icon is exactly the same.
• The "About Mozilla Firefox" says 3.0 instead of 2.0.0.14.

Ok, that's all the changes there are in Firefox 3. At least that's what I could detect from a few minutes of using it. Well yeah I'm sure there are thousands of backend changes and improvements too.

Also, most of my Firefox extensions are incompatible with Firefox 3.0, with no currently available update. With that, I switched back to Firefox 2. *toink*