getluky.net

Except for the ridiculous domain name, everything else about The Fall was incredible. Thanks to Neil for the recommendation. I had an inkling that i’d love it when I saw the trailer; i’m a sucker for heavily stylized dream sequences. I kept getting more and more engrossed in the film as I was watching it, and I came away extremely impressed with the realization of this plot.

Trying not to spoil the movie is difficult; the basic premise is that a young girl with a broken arm befriends an injured man in a hospital, and he recounts an epic tale to her about several travelers throughout the film. Her imagination is rendered vividly with gorgeous, thrilling dream sequences, and reality and imagination blend in the way that reminds the audience of the vastly different world we inhabited as children.

The dream story is designed so colorfully and beautifully that it’s hard to describe. The most strikingly rendered details were those which were re-imagined from the viewpoint of the imagination of a child only partially familiar with the world of adults and the English language. In one scene, a group of secondary characters is said to have been found tortured and hung (oh yeah, this movie can be pretty dark). In the dream sequence, they are found roped together attached to the ceiling, hanging from the waist down as part of a macabre chandelier.

The darkness of this movie does not belie its inspiring effect on the audience that makes it through. This is a movie that makes you wonder if the creators have gone too far; placing a child in a role where she must deal with darkness in a way that is completely out of bounds for the moral preferences of modern America. Although this tack may have been responsible for its lack of widespread distribution, I believe the underlying message is surprising; that the imagination and love of a child is stronger than the darkness of growing up. And with that, I believe that I should give you my recommendation to go see this movie in the theaters before it is gone.

I’ve been having very odd intermittent problems with the Lift-Master garage door opener where I live. On the occasional hot afternoon, it has refused to close. It would click several times, and sometimes pop down and up. However, the problem invariably resolved itself after a half hour or so, which led me to believe that yet another deity of mischief had found his way to my dwelling. At first, I thought it was an overheating issue. I also found some clues in a forum, but they all sounded so complex. I read in the FAQ that the behavior is normal IF an obstruction is detected in the path of the sensors.

I looked into them, and had some trouble seeing one of the LED’s, because it was so bright, but sure enough, it looked fine. There were some spiderwebs near the sensors, so I swept those up, but no dice. Hmm… intermittent problem, behavior is similar to a sensor detecting an obstruction, and it only happened so far on hot summer afternoons.

A head-slapping realization came to me quickly, and I turned around to confirm the hunch. That LED that I couldn’t see because it was so bright happened to be in the direct path of the fiendishly aligned afternoon sun. At this precise time of day, that LED was just as bathed in direct sunlight as the sensor was. To test my theory, I stood outside the garage, blocked the sunlight with my silhouette, and hit the remote. The door closed with satisfaction. Or, more likely, I imagine that the door closed with contempt, as I walked away in satisfaction. It was kind of an Indiana Jones moment, realizing that fate has conspired to make an unusual alignment of cosmic rays interfere in your life in a very surreal way.

This post is a question addressed to the Rails folks who read this blog:

In the event that you were asked for help to work on a legacy Rails project from a while back (say, the pre-1.2 days), how would you even begin to find out how to port the thing to a modern version? What are the compelling reasons to do so? I’m not really a Rails or Ruby developer by trade, so basic advice is still appreciated.

If the decision is made to just stay with the legacy version to keep it quick, I guess there’s no real way to get any documentation from a specific version? If so, that seems to be a real drag on maintainability of real-world projects that get built and left alone for a while.