Blog posts

The other day I wanted to break up a search string into its constituent parts. We’re not supporting any fancy operators, but we did want to allow phrases to be specified in double quotes. It’s an easy enough operation, but I googled to see if anyone was offering a particularly efficient way to do that in ruby. Nothing came up and since I’ve not posted in a while I thought I’d offer it for anyone else in that situation. ...

Last night saw us heading to another show at Calvin. This time it was Chris Thile (of Nickel Creek) and How To Grow A Band. I’d been a little disappointed when we saw Nickel Creek a few months back. My response may have been as much a reaction to the remarkably hyped-up crowd as to the band’s performance, but they struck me as being a little over-confident and the show didn’t quite live up to the hype many in its audience were feeling. ...

Detholz played at Calvin last night. It was probably the most enjoyable show I’ve been to there so far this academic year. Rather than talk about it, I’m just going to point to some videos Kari recorded and that I posted on youtube here and here. Tags: detholz, calvin college, live music

With elections coming up in just a couple of weeks the local paper is full of letters endorsing or attacking candidates, and we decided to join the fray with an endorsement of David LaGrand for the State Senate. For those who don’t know David, he’s probably best known around Grand Rapids for his role in the founding of Four Friends Coffee Shop and more recently Wealthy Street Bakery. There’s a tight word limit on letters to the paper and so there’s not much detail, but if you’re interested you can find out more on his website. ...

A few people emailed me over the past few weeks to say that comments weren’t working on this site. To be honest I’ve been enjoying the absence of spam that that brought, but the time came and the comments should now be fixed. So feel free to post away, or not, as you see fit. I’ve also moved my news feeds to a new (to me) service called feedburner that lets me keep better track of how many people are reading them, and possibly add other services in time. If you currently subscribe your newsreader _should_ pick up the change, but if not, or if you want to subscribe for the first time the URL you want is http://www.feedburner.com/jystewart/anthropic ...

It’s been a slow few months for films at UICA, but the schedule seems to be picking up and we made our first visit in a while to see Half Nelson, a film I’d been looking forward to since reading about it in Andrew O’Hehir’s compelling but all too often frustrating (given how few of the films he mentions make it here) column for Salon, Beyond The Multiplex. As O’Hehir makes clear, this is most definitely not another “inspirational-teacher flick” in the vein of To Sir With Love. As befits a film with quite this much indie-cred, its tale is far more ambiguous. Ryan Gosling’s teacher certainly has his moments of inspirational teaching (and his decision to teach history to these disenfranchised minority kids through Marxist influenced dialectics is a daring decision in an America that has yet to get past the Red Scare) but his life is anything but inspiring. ...

Having very much enjoyed The Virgin Suicides and loved Lost In Translation, I tried to ignore the negative buzz around Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It may have been booed in Cannes, but it wasn’t too hard to believe that those reports were overplayed and that some of the response had come from French critics who shared their nation’s resentment towards that most controversial of queens. The film’s scenes are as luscious as was to be expected, the choice and use of music impeccable, the performances are strong, and the timing gives a good sense of the emotional ups and downs we are led to believe Marie Antoinette was experiencing as she negotiated life in the last days of the French court. But overall, it felt like a film of ‘moments’. There are many good pieces but they didn’t come together to form a compelling movie. ...

Today we got our first political phone call of this election cycle. It was a pre-recorded message from some fear-mongering group posing as some sort of ‘family defense’ group (I didn’t catch their actual name) complaining about Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s policies on policing. Apparently she’s not strong enough to defend the poor scared suburban middle classes. Or something like that. But politics I vehemently disagree with aside, I was struck by the didactic tone of the message. I’m used to the pre-recorded messages at least making some attempt to engage the listener, usually by starting with a greeting. This one launched into a tirade without any introduction whatsoever. I couldn’t help but feel like the person scripting it wasn’t used to real human interaction. ...

jQuery keeps picking up speed. The lightweight (but with its plugins, apparently not feature light) javascript library is to be included in the next version of drupal and there appears to be some effort to provide rails helpers that will use jQuery rather than prototype. That project will probably need to provide a drop-in replacement to convert me. Rails makes prototype use so very easy. But if it does, I’m sure I’ll be making use of my friend Karl’s recently announced Learning jQuery blog, which seems a great source of tutorials. ...

There’s always some trepidation when a favourite artist moves into a new medium. Just as many great music video directors have made dreadful movies and songwriters aren’t necessarily the best poets, not all novelists do a great job of writing for the big screen. But I have such faith in Douglas Coupland, that there’s nothing but enthusiasm in my response to the news that he’s shopping a TV series, Extinction Event: ...