They gave me back my story.

Ever since I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in elementary school, I’ve loved Middle Earth.  Like many people, I waited with anticipation and dread for the movies by Peter Jackson.  Would he mangle it as horribly as Bakshi?  Would they actually be good movies?  The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and I was, by and large, pleased.  Jackson had omitted some things and rearranged some others, but the result was good.  There was Tolkien’s work, on the big screen and amazing faithful to the text.

Then came The Two Towers.

At the time, I wrote up a page about what I thought of the movie.  Though that writeup is now lost, it can be summed up pretty succinctly:  I didn’t like it.  Jackson took great liberties with the story, adding bits that were never there and changing bits that were, sometimes for no apparent reason.  It was bad in a very annoying way, because the parts that were right were very good.  A lot of people had the same reaction as I did, and there was much complaining.

At least one person did a bit more than complain.  The Two Towers: The Purist Edit is a reedit of the movie, in a similar spirit to The Phantom Edit.  It removes the worst of Jackson’s additions—Aragorn’s warg battle, the dwarf jokes, the Elves at Helm’s Deep, among others—and fixes some of the changes—the Ents now make the right decision, for instance.  I can’t emphasize how pleased I am with this edit.  It’s much closer to the books that I’ve loved for so long.

It’s not perfect.  It’s from a screener copy from one of the big awards ceremonies, so it occasionally has “For your consideration” written across the bottom of the screen.  Because it’s essentially from the theatrical version, the editors didn’t have all the extra footage in the Extended Edition to draw on, which was too bad in several cases.  While a lot of the editing is pretty good, some causes feelings of abruptness and draws attention the fact that things were excised.  In a couple of instances, people have their lines dubbed over.  Since the lips no longer match the words, the dubs are painfully obvious.  The editors did a good job of removing the elves from Helms Deep.  That means that they cut out a lot of footage, though, and the battle doesn’t have the same grandiose feel to it as in the original movie.  It still works, but it’s not the same.  Because of all the various cuts, the Purist Edit runs about 40 minutes shorter than the theatrical release.  And not everything was fixed.  Fir instance, Helm’s Deep is still won by Gandalf riding in with the Rohirrim, not by the Ents and Huorns.

But the Purist Edit is still a vast improvement, story-wise over Jackson’s telling.  It’s a lot closer to the movie I wish he’d made.  Thank you, whoever you are, for making this edit.

The MTA announced a few days ago that they would be implementing a new system to track and report on the state of their vehicle fleet.  The Baltimore Sun has an article, and the Department of Transportation has some details.  They say they’ll be done by 2006; no indication on when they’ll start putting things in.

It looks like this could be very nice and should address a few of my complaints about the MTA.  The Next Train Arrival signs should nicely handle my complaints about not being notified when things go wrong and trains get delayed, while the Next Vehicle Arrival signs will do the same thing for the buses, a feat that’s currently pretty much impossible.

They tout a public announcement system that “will provide audio announcements at Light Rail, Metro & MARC passenger stations.” Of course, they already have this, at least at Light Rail and MARC stations—the MARC system even gets used.  Perhaps they’re just indicating that they’ll begin to use the ones at Light Rail stops, too.

With the buses being tracked in real time, they’ll be providing real-time trip planning, which will also be a nice added feature.  This will be available via the MTA’s website; with any luck, it’ll be simple enough that I will be able to write a program to get an overview of my trips to and from work right before I leave.

The Automatic Passenger Counter should be nice for redistributing routes and schedules based on actual ridership.

And finally, they mention that the buses will be controlled via wireless LAN.  I hope they’ve got good safeguards on those.

So the new system looks good.  It’s at least got the potential to make public transit in Baltimore a little better.  Just how much of that potential will be realized remains to be seen.

…but who’s surprised?

Bus stop for the 31 at Howard St. and Lombard St.  The 31 schedule was changed on February 1st, sixteen days ago.  Announcements were made, new schedules drawn up, and so on.  The scheduls at the stop is still the one from September of last year.

Convention Center Light Rail stop.  The double tracking message board has two items.  The lefthand one describes the change back to two light rail lines, effective as of February 1st, 2004.  The righthand one has a diagram of the three lines.  On the opposite side of the board is a schedule from 2002 that predates any of the double track changes and is, of course, wildly incorrect.  Not sure whether the presence of dates on the three documents offset the fact that they all convey conflicting information, especially to readers that don’t look closely enough to compare the dates.

I’ve finally gotten emacs working just the way I want with respect to UTF-8.

For entry of non-ascii characters, I most like RFC 1345.  Emacs doesn’t have such an input system, and I don’t feel like writing one.  screen, on the other hand, has support for digraph input, which will do the digraphs from RFC 1345 with the help of a little patch.  (The same digraph input will also do any Unicode character if you know the hex for it, via the “U+xxxx” syntax.)  Using screen instantly gives UTF-8 input support for pretty much every program I use.

The problem with this and Emacs is that if Emacs gets characters with the high bit set, it treats that high bit as a meta key.  This, of course, breaks any method of inputting UTF-8 into emacs from an external source, including cut-and-paste.  I had to M-x customize-variable keyboard-coding-system and set the coding system to utf-8.  That made UTF-8 work, but broke the meta key, since that was indeed how xterm was sending it.

To fix xterm, I set this in my .Xresources:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true

to change the way Meta keys were sent (this also made meta work with a couple more programs, notably irssi).  I also added this to my .xsession:

xmodmap -e "keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L"
xmodmap -e "keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R"

so that Meta would be bound to my Alt key.  (It’s an IBM Model M keyboard—Alt is all I have.  When I had a Windows key, it was bound as Meta.)

I liked The Name of the Rose, so when I saw Foucault's Pendulum at the bookstore, I decided to grab it.  Unfortunately for me, it’s a rather different sort of book than The Name of the Rose.

The Name of the Rose is essentially a detective story.  It’s set in medieval times and is told in a wonderfully baroque manner, but with all the descriptive flourishes pared away its story is relatively straightforward.  Foucault's Pendulum is more of a surrealist book—the journey matters more than the destination, and the book’s climax is just a single element in the tapestry of the narrative, a fact for which I was not completely prepared.

The pacing of the book is also rather slow, and not always in a good way.  In, say, A Fire Upon the Deep, the pace is slow, but there’s a feeling of grandness, of something gradually but inexorably building as the story progresses.  I often felt that Foucault's Pendulum was dragging along without necessarily going anywhere, especially during the elaboration of the Plan, where the characters just keep piling details on details seemingly without end.

I should not that the edition I read had an annoying synopsis on the back cover.  It claimed that the main characters put facts into a computer that drew connections between apparently disparate facts.  In the book, those events don’t take place until about two-thirds of the way in, and the actual details are somewhat different than those which the synopsis implies.  At least it didn’t completely give away things, like the summary text at the beginning of my copy of Archangel.

I’ll discuss the ending below the spoiler barrier.

Spoilers

Again, Foucault's Pendulum is not a straightforward tale.  Since I was expecting one, the ending came as something of a disappointment to me.  Throughout the entire book, the narrator referenced the events of that night in terms that were filled with portent.  When the book actually got around to describing it, I thought it very anticlimactic.  There’s the implication that the main characters have somehow divined something true, but the climax arrives and the reader is told, “No, sorry.  It’s all fake.”

I suppose I should read it again in the right frame of mind, but it’s really dense and I’m not sure the effort would be worth it.  Goes on the “someday, if I get around to it” list.