A few weeks ago we had a free preview weekend of HBO and Cinemax from our cable company, and while I was flipping around to see what was on (probably Saturday afternoon), I caught the end of Star Trek: Generations. (Actually, probably the last quarter of the movie or so.) And of course, being the Star Trek nerd that I am, I watched the rest of it.

And, well, I had to write about it too. Feel free to completely skip this post if you have no interest in Star Trek whatsoever. Yeah, it’s like that.

Now, Generations is problematic, there’s no doubt. While I was watching, I was mentally tallying up the various problems and hence, this post.

Their intentions were in the right place: it was the first Star Trek movie featuring the cast from The Next Generation, whose series had just wrapped, so they wanted to go big. How big? Well let’s see… they gave Data emotions, explained the origin of Guinan, destroyed the Enterprise, and oh yeah, had Captain Picard meet Captain Kirk. And killed Kirk.

In order to do this latter bit, the writers contrived a thin plot around a supposed "Nexus" in Time that looked like a big sparkling ribbon flying through space. People can enter this Nexus where Time stands still and they are granted whatever they wish (while inside of it). Kind of like the ultimate virtual reality where you never age and you can have anything you want.

The token villain (played by Malcolm McDowell) was in the Nexus once before and wants to go back. So he’s blowing up stars to change the gravitational influence on the Nexus as it travels through space, just so he can direct it to a planet that he’ll be standing on at a pre-arranged time—all so the Nexus will suck him back into it when it gets to the planet.

While the movie had some good bits, there are so many things wrong with this plot, it’s embarrassing. And then, they went and got the science behind it utterly wrong.

Point: Soran (the villain) didn’t need to blow up stars or anything remotely cosmic to re-enter the Nexus. He could have just flown a shuttlecraft into it. Or barring that, open the airlock and launch himself physically into it from the back of said shuttlecraft—he could survive the vacuum of space for the three seconds it would take to accomplish this. Kirk did, after all.

In other words, shitty plotting and unimaginative writing.

Point: During the battle between the Enterprise and the Klingon ship that results in the Enterprise‘s destruction, we see that the Klingons are spying on the ship’s shield frequency modulation via LaForge’s visor—thus enabling them to shoot photon torpedoes that pass through the shields as if they weren’t there.

However, the Enterprise crew makes no effort to alter the shield modulation—something they did repeatedly during the TV series (especially versus the Borg)! How could something so fundamental get by them?

It would have been an easy fix, too: just show the Klingons (who were spying on them, remember) getting the new shield frequency every time it was changed. Would it really have cost that much more to film?

Point: When the Enterprise finally is able to fire back, Riker tells Worf to have a "full spread" of torpedoes ready to fire. When they get their moment, only one torpedo launches.

What the hell?

Point: In what is probably the worst production/science gaffe they could possibly make, Soran launches his missile from the planet towards the sun (to blow it up, remember) just as the Nexus is nearing. Immediately the sun darkens and explodes. Do you see what’s wrong with this picture?

The sun should not have appeared to change for at least 8 full minutes. Not even counting the time it would take for the missile to reach the sun—let’s suppose it has warp capabilities, to get around that issue—the light (and gravity) from the sun can only travel at the speed of light. And since they were on an Earth-looking planet, which is 8 light-minutes away from the sun, then that means there’s no possible way the sun would appear to darken immediately—and the gravitational effect on the Nexus would be similarly delayed.

Huge, huge blunder. Somebody (preferably the writers) should have been fired for that one.

Point: Picard is now in the Nexus. The planet (and the remains of the Enterprise and its crew) all blew up. Picard (with the help of Kirk) escapes the Nexus, jumps back in time to just before the missile is launched (the Nexus can let you go to any place and time, apparently), and saves the day, altering the events that already transpired. Time travel.

Thus, an alternate timeline was created, in which Soran succeeds and the Enterprise is lost with all hands.

(For that matter, why didn’t Picard return hours earlier and destroy Soran’s base and missile before any of that happened? Or any other convenient time to stop Soran?)

Point: Picard is now in the Nexus. He has been told (as have we, the viewers) that the Nexus grants your fondest desire; it gives you whatever you want. The ultimate virtual reality, remember. Well, once Picard figured out what was going on, his fondest desire was to leave the Nexus. But wouldn’t the Nexus grant that desire and give Picard a (virtual) reality where he left the Nexus and stopped Soran?

In other words, Picard never left the Nexus—he just thinks he did, the Nexus granted that wish inside its virtual reality. If he never left, then that alternate timeline I mentioned is in fact the "correct" and current timeline—and all the subsequent Next Generation movies never "happened." (Maybe a bunch of the subsequent TV series, either.)

Actually this last point isn’t really so much of a problem, more of an observation. But it makes for an interesting plot device… once that actually forms the basis for the on-again, off-again dabbling I’ve been doing in Star Trek fan fiction over the years.

(My fan fiction "series" is set in the future—yet another generation—and in the "alternate" timeline in which Picard is still in the Nexus.)

Overall, Generations wasn’t a bad movie, just flawed (severely flawed in some cases) and the weakest of the Next Generation movies.

But then again, I only caught the last half or third of it, after having not seen it for a long time… maybe I’d find a lot more to rant about if I saw it from the beginning…

Last week, we went down to San Diego for a quick(ish) trip to visit my brother and his wife. We left Tuesday afternoon after I was off work, drove all day Wednesday, and then returned on Monday—doing the full San Diego to Bend drive in one day. I won’t recount the full blow-by-blow here (and I’m blogging my beer notes of the trip on The Brew Site, of course), but just a series of notes, observations, and tidbits.

(A big reason for the visit was because my brother and sister-in-law are expecting their first child this August, and the baby shower was on Saturday. So we couldn’t pass up the opportunity.)

At about three and a half hours from Bend, Weed is a town you can’t ignore: it’s the junction of Highway 97 and Interstate 5, and is the first "real" town you hit in California when traveling down 97. (I’d count Dorris, but that seems more like a truck stop/border crossing than a town.) I find the town fascinating: its population is exactly 3000, it sits in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, and in many ways it’s the gateway to Northern California.

And it’s like Bend in several ways: it had its start as a lumber town, has a similar climate and the same elevation, and now derives a good portion of its economy from (mountain) tourism. What little I’ve seen of it—besides the fast food restaurants and gas stations marking it as an Interstate connector—seems charming and picturesque.

Tuesday night we stayed in Anderson, California (just south of Redding) at the Gaia Anderson hotel. Even though it was just a waypoint on the trip, it was actually quite a nice place for a really good price. It’s new and built to "green" specs—energy efficient, with water conservation in mind, and organic and health-conscious. And it’s just off the freeway, which was convenient.

The drive that first afternoon—Bend to Anderson/Redding—took us about 4 hours and 45 minutes. The next day, we drove about 11 hours through to San Diego, hitting rush hour Los Angeles traffic and losing about an hour and half to it.

I completely hate Los Angeles traffic. And that pretty much mars the whole city for me.

Driving through central California, south of Sacramento on that long, lonely stretch of I-5, is long, tedious, and a bit depressing. Desert and failed agriculture, with communities that only seem to have sprung up to service the Interstate. How people can live there is beyond me.

And it’s crazy hot, from Redding on down; on our return trip, it was 105 degrees in Redding! At one point the kids wanted to open the windows so I let them briefly. It was like opening an oven door.

After Wednesday, we were in San Diego four full days before returning on Monday. It was a great trip, and the weather—which had been forecasted to be 70 and overcast the entire time—actually turned out sunny, clear, and nicely hot (but not too hot).

Which was a good thing, because Friday we hit the beach and had a great day—the water is cool but much warmer than the Oregon Coast, so we were able to actually, you know, go in it. My brother and I spent most of the time out in the surf, while I kept an eye on the kids and the women stayed on the beach. At one point I was far enough out so that when a wave crashed over me—intentionally—I couldn’t touch bottom. That was a bit spooky.

Sunday we all went to the San Diego Zoo. Something like 16 of us total. It was a bit chaotic, but a good day. And it was hot—the hottest day in San Diego since we arrived. There were several sunburned people to show for it.

Interesting fact I learned (but didn’t personally verify): apparently the Howard Johnson on Hotel Circle has a lifesize Hulk Hogan statue in the lobby.

As much as I dislike Los Angeles, I like San Diego. The big negatives are (obviously) the traffic and the urban sprawl; everything is very spread out, along freeways, and tuned to the stripmall. Something might be "just across the freeway" but to cross it you might have to jump on, exit a mile down the road, loop around and cross another exchange just to get there. But for that, it’s appealing and likable. And of course, it’s a great beer town.

Not much to say about the Monday drive home except that we went straight through (stopping only for gas, bathroom breaks, and fast food), and made it in 14.5 hours. We left at about 7:30 in the morning and were home by about 10 that night. The kids held up remarkably well, better than I hoped. So it’s doable—but I’m not sure I’d want to do it again.

Although you do save money if you don’t stay overnight…

Over on my beer blog I have an entire section of "Press Releases" that I post but which I don’t want to show up on the main page or in the RSS feed—I don’t want to spam readers with excessive marketing but I like have the repository.

Since I’m now using WordPress, I figured I’d simply grab a plugin that would do the work for me: exclude the category from my "content" portions of the site (like the front page and the feed) but still let people access that category directly so they could see the Press Releases if they so chose.

To that end, I’d been using the "Category Visibility-iPeat Rev" plugin which seemed to do just the trick: I could configure exactly what category shows up in what area: front page, sidebar listings, search results, feeds, and archives. So I’d been using that up until now when I noticed a couple of bugs:

• The individual category feeds weren’t working; that is, when you went to a specific category and added "/feed" to the end of the URL, the RSS feed would load for that category but it would be empty. These normally work in WordPress, and it’s a nice feature to have, and I wanted/needed it to work.
• The plugin specifically excludes tags entirely (though unintentionally): any defined tags in the system were getting recorded into the database with all options off. I’m not using "tag browsing" anywhere on the site (yet), so this didn’t affect me, but I might in the future and other people are complaining about it.

So I spent a little bit yesterday looking at the Category Visibility plugin code to see if I could fix the problem, and then looking at just adding the exclusion code myself to the theme so I could deactivate and remove the plugin entirely.

I couldn’t find anything overtly wrong with the plugin code itself, and I didn’t want to spend too much time digging around WordPress’s core and driving myself insane, so I turned to adding exclusion code to my theme files.

You want to exclude the category ID from the query before the code even runs what WordPress ominously calls "The Loop", so a call to query_posts() is in order. To exclude a specific category, you’ll do this:

query_posts('cat=-3');

The minus sign in front of the category ID (3 in this case) is the exclusion operator. If you omitted it, you’d be telling the query to only include category ID 3.

So I dropped this line inside some logic to check if it was on the home page or the archives page (is_home() and is_archive(), appropriately enough) and then ran into another problem: paging back through "Older entries" was broken.

Turns out just setting 'cat=-3' overrode the entire query WordPress was working with, so telling it to go to "/page/2" wasn’t registering. I dug around online and instead this is what you should do:

query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-3');

That preserves any other query variables that were passed to the system, like what page you were on, and still appends your category exclusion logic. Worked like a charm.

All that was left for my goals was to exclude the Press Releases category from the site’s main feed. After digging around online some more, I determined that a filter hook needed to be applied to the feed query, and found some example code which I adapted to this:

function exclude_pr_feed( $query )
{
  if ( $query->is_feed ) {
    $query->set('cat', '-3');
  }
  return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_pr_feed');

That snippet was put into the theme’s functions.php file and performs the same exclusion logic as above, only when posts are being pulled and the feed output is being built. So far it suppresses Press Releases from the main feed but hasn’t affected the individual category feeds, including that for Press Releases. Which is perfect for my purposes.

The nice thing is that this is overall a relatively minimal impact to the system and I save the overhead of Yet Another Plugin. And hopefully this will prove useful to someone else who wants to accomplish the same thing.

Two books are currently in my "active" pile right now (that is, that I’m actively reading):

Beer in America: The Early Years 1587-1840, by Gregg Smith. Interesting, though I just started. Too soon to tell if it’s grabbing me as much as Ambitious Brew did.

Don Quixote. The "Wordsworth Classics" paperback edition, and truth be told I’m slogging rather slowly through it; I have a theory or two as to why.

First of all, it might be the translation; older or more "literary" translations seem to be drier, somehow, and lose the spirit of the original (e.g., rousing adventure story). I think a fresh(er) approach would work wonders.

Second, and this might be a symptom of translation, the format is incredibly dense and hard to follow—small type with run-on sentences and dialog that are all combined in single paragraphs that can span pages. Just breaking up the dialog into eye-friendly chunks would work wonders.

Finally, my current pet theory is that these classic literary authors were working without word processors, so editing and revising was such a pain in the ass that they just published first drafts. Which any editor will tell you are pretty unreadable.

Cervantes could have shaved off a good 50,000 words if he’d just had access to a computer. It would work wonders.

Seems like I do this every year, after the TV season has (mostly) ended. And year after year I seem to be watching the same damn shows. What’s up with that?

Lost was better this year than it has been, but that’s still not saying much as they’ve continued to veer into left field for no discernible reason. Time travel, Egyptian mythology, the sudden retcon of Jacob into everyone’s lives… I swear they keep making this stuff up on the fly, don’t let any talk of a "master plan" tell you different. At this point I feel like I’m slogging through the show more out of inertia than anything. And sometimes it is a slog.

24 started out strong but after the first four or six episodes it jumped the rails somehow. Actually, I have a theory about that: those first few episodes were first written and filmed last year, just before the writer’s strike shut down Hollywood and canceled the season of 24. So they were off to a good start, got shut down for a year (or six months, or whatever), then came back in (possibly with new writers? Not sure) and tried to pick up where they left off—but they’d already lost it. It was just a chore to watch, not unlike Lost.

And what’s with the way it ended? Way too many loose ends and plotlines left dangling. It felt like it didn’t end, actually, which is a problem—not like a cliffhanger, which is a different beast, but like they had another couple of episodes to film and got cut short. Weird.

I was not at all an Adam Lambert fan on American Idol this year. I’m glad Kris Allen won. That’s all I’ll say about that, other than having my faith restored in the collective good taste of the voting American public.

The Office was probably my favorite show again this year. It’s just brilliant and hilarious, outstanding really.

I loves me some Law & Orders, and though I’m a bit tepid on SVU, I’m loving this season’s plain-vanilla L&O and since Criminal Intent is finally back on with their new episodes, it’s one of the few shows I actually look forward to watching. (I know, the "new" CI episodes already aired on the USA channel before the NBC "season" started this month. I don’t watch USA, okay?)

Scrubs was "back" on ABC this time around and it was good… but not as good as before. Just wasn’t feeling it as much. Though I thought they handled the series finale really well.

I started watching The Unusuals and was rather enjoying it, so naturally ABC decided to cancel it. (They were probably sick of my bitching about Lost.) Quirky characters, fast-paced, no overall "mystery storyline" that would require three years to unravel… just a decent cop show.

Speaking of decent cop shows (or not), one thing I simply do not understand is how CSI: Miami can continue to be on TV. It’s the most ridiculous show I’ve ever seen. The only redeeming quality is the opening one-liner. And it seems like even that is starting to consume itself lately.

Of course, when all else fails there’s always Cartoon Network.

The other day in Bend we had a terrific full rainbow fully visible right out our back door. The camera doesn’t have a wide enough angled view to get the whole thing, so I took three pictures and stitched them together:

Click on it for a larger version.

Today marks seven years since I started this blog. Seven! Strangely enough, I launched on Earth Day without even knowing it. So when I talk about the significance of "April 22nd" I’m usually not on the same page as everyone else.

Kind of a gray, cool day so far, contrary to what the weatherman was predicting. Hope everyone’s having a nice Easter morning, and remember, the Easter Bunny goes back to his old self tomorrow…

I mentioned awhile back that I received Neal Stephenson’s Anathem for my birthday. This is his latest novel, a monstrous tome that weighs in at nearly 1000 pages, and was released in the latter half of last year. Early reviews seemed really lukewarm to me, in part because of the reveal that Stephenson employs a large invented vocabulary—which often seems to be a crutch or gimmick in the hands of inexperienced writers (not that Stephenson is one)—and in part because it seemed like following up The Baroque Cycle would be really, really hard.

Well, forget all that. Anathem is a fantastic book, and Stephenson’s best to date. Not only has he matured as a writer (leaps and bounds past his earlier works), he’s put together a tightly-plotted, internally consistent story that’s just dripping with good ideas and has at least one jaw-dropping, mind-blowing concept that, well, becomes a key plot point.

And, this book actually comes to a solid, satisfying conclusion—one of the major criticisms I’ve had with his earlier works.

It’s simply a joy to read, and I actually wanted to re-read it almost as soon as I’d finished. That’s a difficult trick to pull off.