Monthly Archives: November 2001

Nov 15 2001

Harry vs. Hairy?

##From USA Today

One is a Harry while the other is merely hairy-footed. But both are the brainchildren of teachers-turned-authors who prefer to go by initials, J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien. These unlikely heroes of British fantasy fiction share a common mission: to cast an unbreakable spell at the box office and spark what are hoped to be flourishing franchises…

This article is about how different the stories are so completely different, it doesn’t make any sense to compare them. So why are so many people insisting on making it a competition between the two? I have no idea.

Nov 14 2001

Genealogy

Descendants of the O’Cearnaigh sept whose territory was in the
barony of Carray, Co. Mayo, have adopted Carney as an anglicization of
their name, and families of the name are still to be found today in the
neighborhood of Castlebar. However, the form Carney was also adopted
sometimes rather than the much more frequent form Kearney (q.v.) by
descendants of the Mac Carnaigh sept of Ballymacarney, barony of Dunboyne,
Co. Meath, of the O’Cartharnaigh sept who once held sway in the barony of
Kilcoursey, Co. Offaly, and of an O’Cearnaigh sept anciently established at
Cashel, Co. Tipperary.

[[carney-crest2]]

This is definitely a work in progress. I used “Gene”, a
genealogical program for the Macinitosh to input my information. I’ve been collecting the information slowly over a period of years. Most recently, I obtained much more information at a Doherty family gettogether. Unfortunately, this was a funeral for my Aunt Agnes Doherty-Fallon.

I also used [[SQLFamily]] To help me present the information that I input
with Gene. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I can do this because my Mac is now equiped with [[MacOSX]] which lets me run cool things like [[MySQL]] and [[Apache]] with [[PHP]].

Hopefully soon, family members will be able to update the contents of this site whenever there’s a change to be made (making it much more likely that it’ll be kept up to day).

It’s still kind of experimental, but take a look at the resulting [[Family Tree]].

Nov 14 2001

Cool Comic III

[[ft01114]]

The only danger I see is if the kids start thinking that Dumbledore came first! For a refresher, check out [[Cool Comic II]] and [[Cool Comic]] to see how we got here.

Also, check out: http://aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=10763

For a review of the score for Fellowship! Harry’s in good form here. He reviews the score in what he calls **real time**… as he listened to it, he wrote a review of the current track.

###Tickets

[[TheOneRing.net]] has the news on their site that tickets will be on sale December 5th for the opening on December 19th. Who ya’ gonna call???

Nov 14 2001

What Coaching Means to Me

I’ve been playing and enjoying soccer most of my life, and have been coaching for the last 6 years. I had some wonderful coaches during my childhood that have helped me understand both how the game should be coached and how it should be played.

##Philosophy

When I took the class for my coaching certification, the teacher (A certified and qualified to coach international soccer teams under [FIFA](http://www.fifa.com) made a point about why other county’s soccer teams do so much better than ours. The kids grow up there **playing*’ soccer ‘*by themselves**. They aren’t coached, they don’t have referees, and they don’t have supervision from their parents (which is the same reason that our contry dominates basketball on the international stage). The children in this country are drastically overcoached at a very young age, to the point where they don’t achieve an instinctual understanding of the game.

He also talked about when it’s appropriate to start working the kids with an emphasis on the competition rather than the fun. He made a few important points:

  • Young children play because their parents sign them up
  • Young teenagers play because their friends do
  • Older teenagers play because **they** want to

So don’t worry about winning and loosing until they’re in high school.

The job of the coach, therefore, is to help the children improve their ball handling skills and to **ensure that they have fun so that they want to continue to the next level.**

##Practices

Practices will be each Wednesday evening at 5:30pm. Please make sure to have your child bring a soccer ball, shin guards, and cleats to both practices and games. The league doesn’t give me enough balls for all the kids.

I tend to run practices in what may seem to be an undisciplined manner. Practices always start with a game that emphasises ball handling skills and warms the kids up. After a 10-15 minute warmup, we stretch for several minutes and move on to more games.

The games in the second part of the practice tend to emphasis awareness of other players and ball handling. I try to work in concepts about passing, accuracy, and awareness of what’s happening on the field.

After those games comes small team scrimages. Quite often, these will involve some strange rules changes to standard soccer (such as uneven teams, or more than one goal for each team, or more than two teams).

At this point, we might have a short game-simulation, and then finally another stretching sessionas a cool down. It’s just as important to stretch after practice as before.

##Game Time

During games, I coach very little. This is something that’s been stressed in all the classes I’ve taken. You coach during practice, and you **observe** during the game. Most of the time, the most important thing going on (in terms of coaching) is nowhere near the ball.

##Final Thoughts

I hope soccer will prove enjoyable by both the kids and parents this year. I’m looking forward to a great season full of fun soccer practices and matches.

Nov 14 2001

Aliens

Not only one of the best sequels ever made, but one of the best movies ever made! Ripley is back, and she’s pissed. This time it’s take no prisoners!

From the first frame…

I consider [[Aliens]], the sequel to the 1979 science fiction/horror movie, to be one of the best movies ever made. I don’t make this claim lightly. James Cameron has woven together a magnificent script with wonderfully fleshed out characters in a beautifully directed sci-fi/action/horror movie that has a lot more going for it than it’s genres seem to offer. It was good enough to earn Sigourny Weaver an Oscar nomination and the film 6 other nominations.

[[ripley]] As the movie begins we reestablish a connection with the character of Ripley, the heroine of the first film. She’s been adrift in space for the last 57 years. She’s a troubled woman having nightmares about a creature that nobody’s ever heard of that she claims is on a planet that is now settled by colonists. A board of inquiry from the “Weyland-Yutani” company doesn’t believe her story and essentially accuses her of some sort of coverup in the destruction of her ship from the first film.

A short while later we find Ripley living in a small apartment still waking each night with nightmares of the alien creature bursting from her chest as she helplessly watches. We find out from the company man Carter Burke that the company has lost contact with the colony on LV-426 and that the colonial marines have been called in to investigate. He wants Ripley to go with them in an advisory role just in case there really is an alien as described by Ripley there. It’s during this exchange that we find out that Ripley’s been working the cargo docks running loaders and forklifts. This sounds like just some filler material used to explain what the character’s been up to. But it’s much more important than that.

Siezing on the opportunity to confont her nightmare, she reluctantly agrees.

From the halls of Montezuma…

[[marines]] We meet the marines as they’re waking up from the long hyper-sleep on the way to LV-426. During the short scenes leading up to the landing on the planet, we are introduced to each of the marines. It is a testament to the brilliance of the script that by the end of these scenes with each marine having perhaps a line or two we know who they are and care what happens to them. There’s the joker Hudson, the strong, silent Hicks, and the cool Vasquez among others. I’ve never hear a script that so quickly established the personality of the main players.

During the briefing just before the drop onto the planet we find out that the marines are experienced in dealing with exterminating hostile organisms, so this appears to be just another routine mission for them.

Just another bug hunt…

[[alien-profile]] They drop down to the planet and find that the colony is a shambles. There’s no colonists to be found except for a little girl named Rebecca,AKA Newt. They find the remains of some alien facehuggers,in the medlab of the colony. There are two which are still alive (again, a small detail, but an important one for later in the story).

The marines find that the colonists are all inside the main atmosphere processor by finding their personal data transmitters which were surgically implanted in each colonist on a kind of radar display. Not able to tell if the colonists are alive or dead, the marines head off to rescue them.

After a battle with the aliens that wipes out many of the marines it’s clear that for the first time in their careers they are outmatched. Their only option seems to be to head back to their ship and “nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”

I don’t want to give away much more because here’s where the story switches gears and becomes a high-octane action thriller with a climax that has to be seen to be believed.

Some more thoughts

The script for this movie is so tight that every line of dialogue seems to have some sort of significance. The characters are all living breathing people that you care about and want to see survive and be successful. The plot twists keep you on your toes.

Part of the beauty of this movie is in the details. There’s far more than I can cover effectively in this review. If your interested, check out the [[Alien FAQ]]. There’s more information there than you can possibly imagine about this great film.

Nov 14 2001

Free to Think

But how much longer will you be free to surf?

Dave Winer has always been provocative with his essays on http://www.scripting.com, but this one takes the cake. How long do you think it’s going to be before Microsoft really controls all the content on the internet.

Don’t laugh… it could be happening right now.