Teething

Today I returned to the dentist to have a cavity filled. It's my second filling ever and this one was relatively painless compared to the first that's to the spray on topical anesthetic that numbed my gums and cheek before the dentist got the needle out.

At the same time, Amy had two wisdom teeth removed. I was somewhat disappointed by the lack of agony on her part. It was almost as if nothing happened at the dentist at all with the annoying gauze causing the most frustration and leading to the most grumbling. I guess she was fortunate that her two wisdom teeth had already grown in straight, so they didn't really have to cut down into anything to extract them at an odd angle. She still ate the jello and banana pudding I made her and acted cute which made me feel good.

I'm going over to check on her in a bit. I rescued a plant from Kroger for her that I hope she likes and stays alive for at least a week.

Herbie Fully Loaded

Tonight Amy and I climbed into the bug and zipped on down to the Galaxy Drive-in Theatre just north of Ennis, Texas to catch the latest Herbie offering from Disney, Herbie Fully Loaded. As a driver of a New Beetle and a fan of old VWs and the original Love Bug movie, this movie was a must-see at the drive-in, especially since this movie will go down in history as the last one made by Lindsay Lohan before she lost her figure and her hotness by slimming down alarmingly to play the role of Skeletor in the upcoming He-Man flick. Even with the much discussed CG done to some of the scenes, Ms. Lohan's screen presence in this film is quite impressive.

The Galaxy Drive-in is a new facility, having opened in December 2004, with three screens that each show a double feature. Herbie was playing on screen 2 followed by Mr. & Mrs. Smith, an eye-candy double feature if there ever was one, particularly for VW fans with y chromosomes. Upon arrival, there were a couple dozen aircooleds at the drive-in all parked together; a good variety of bug, bus, ghia and thing models. The aircooled VW owners brought plenty of "frosty beverages" and were pretty rowdy by the time the movie started. Any mention of the words bug, Volkswagen or 1963 brought loud cheers and the phrase "these bugs are great, you just change the oil and it will run forever" nearly brought the house down, well except we were outside at the drive-in but you get my point.

Of course, since we were out in Ennis, the appearance of the various NASCAR drivers drew serious cheers and jeers from the various trucks with the number 3, 8, 18, 20, 88 and/or 24 decals in the back windows.

I thought, as a biased bug owner, that the movie was enjoyable; I mean it could have been a whole lot worse, there could have two musical montages set to Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend". I still prefer the old-school static Herbie to all of the CG expressions Herbie presently has but I guess that is the trend now, remake all of the old films and CG the heck out of them. I'm also going to have the classic "Herbie Theme" running through my head all week... you mean you don't have that on your iPod? Shame on you! I'm also still wondering what exactly they pulled out of the yellow 1.8T New Beetle's engine compartment to install on NASCAR Herbie. It looked like soem sort of external oil cooler, which my 1.8T doesn't appear to have. One final item, was the yellow with black stripes scheme on the New Beetle a tribute to the paint on the rival Thorndyke Special in the original Love Bug or merely a coincidence?

I think the drive-in afforded the most authentic Herbie experience (the Disney-sponsored advance premier in Calrsbad would have been even better). Sitting in one's bug with the Beach Boys playing over the opening sequence with the classic Herbie footage was very cool... even if it was still pretty darn hot out.

Mystic Pizza

This evening was a triumph for me in the kitchen. After years of trying with less than spectacular results, I finally was able to get one of those Chef Boyardee pizza kits to turn out perfectly. Amy and I managed to create two pizzas that were not too burnt and cripsy, and all of the cheese and sauce actually remained in the confines of the crust instead of breaching the barrier and flowing out all over the pan. The finished pizza also had enough stiffness that you could pick it up and eat it without each slice flopping over and sending cheese sliding toward the carpet. It turned out perfectly. It was amazing. If the Iron chef secret ingridient is ever pre-packaged Chef Boyardee dough in a box I will reign victorious. In this world of frozen instant microwavable pre-mad just heat up dinners, it's nice to know that you can actually make something, sort of.

The Usual Drill

I went to the dentist this morning and it was a rather new experience for me since the last time I paid a visit to a dentist was in Canada nearly four years ago. It seems that time and the American penchant for bells and whistles have changed a visit to the dentist somewhat dramatically. Now, contrary to public belief, going to the dentist is not free in Canada and good dental plan is a key part of employment as it is here, but I am sure that the Canadian system of standardized medicine somehow spills over to the dental profession. A dental office in Canada is somewhat basic, not bare-bones but also no-frills. Quite the contrast to my experience this morning.

Instead of going down the hall for an x-ray, waiting several minutes for it to be developed and then having the hygenist squint at the tiny blurry images held up to the overhead lights, the digital x-rays were ready in seconds and popped up on LCD panel in front of the chair where we could both view them. A few clicks of the mouse and an algorithm enhances the x-ray mages, improving contrast so that the areas of my molars experiencing decay can be seen much more clearly. After viewing the x-ray and poking around with the dental pick, the hygenist puts a probe-like digital camera in my mouth and snap a few frames of "trouble spots" that I need to pay special attention to and need to be watched for further decay during future visits. Just like the x-rays, they pop up on the LCD screen so I can actually see what other hygenists had vaugely tried (and failed) to describe to me in the past. The images are stored in an electronic file so that the dentist has a baseline for comparison purposes during my next visit. I was so impressed by this extremely useful application of technology that I didn't even so much as flinch during the cleaning and was still feeling warm and fuzzy when the dentist told me that I needed to come back next week to have a small cavity in one of my back molars filled. A little good engineering makes the most bitter pill easier to swallow.

So Tuesday morning I go under the drill. At the same time Amy gets to have her wisdom teeth taken out. I think I got the better deal.

Batman Begins

Tonight the usual suspects were rounded up to go see Batman Begins. I really enjoyed the movie and it was interesting to see the story of Bruce Wayne becoming Batman played out on the big screen, not to mention a pre-Commissioner status Commissioner Gordon as the only honest cop in Gotham. The movie has less of the early comic book campiness that pops up in the other Batman films (more so in B&R and Forver than the original Batman and Batman Returns) and comes across more along the lines of modern comic books, which tend to be darker and edgier than their 50s and 60s predecessors. Amy, who is a conessieur of all things Batman, gave the movie her rating of "awesome". I would agree to that but still reserve my top slot for Batman Returns, which will always untouchable unless a new actress in a new movie can outdo Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. (I'm not even going to get started on that imposter of a Catwoman movie...) When Pfeiffer as Selina is first seen in her sinful black catsuit and her sultry voice says, "I don't know about you Miss Kitty, but I feel... so... much... yummier", I think my journey through puberty that started with Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys was completed. Okay, maybe it wasn't quite that powerful of a moment but that and the scene where Catwoman licks Batman's face and the general heated cat and mouse nature of the relationship that develops between the two will be seared into my brain long after the lukewarm Katie Holmes performance has faded from memory.

Groom's Cake

Today Amy and I attended the wedding of our friends Mike and Laura. Several other friends and people we often see at parties were in the wedding party, making for a joyous occasion, however, the wedding was in a Catholic church leading to much confusion on when to sit, stand, kneel, repeat after the priest, shake hands etc. Obviously we were not alone and were somewhat baffled when the wedding ceremony suddenly drew to a close without the couple having said their vows. It turns out that the priest skipped over this step in what seems like the 64-step process to become married as a Catholic and after the guests had left the church the couple was quickly ushered back in to say their vows before heading to the reception. The reception was fun, but things really didn't get rolling until they broke out the boxed wine.

If there is one hing I have come to appreciate about weddings in the United States, particularly those hear in the South, it is the Groom's Cake. At home, weddings normally featured a single white wedding cake with the iconic tiers and white decorations. Some of these are purely for show and are not even eaten, and those that are often leave this appreciater of fine chocolate somewhat unfulfilled by their overwhelming vanilla pureness. Americans, being the enterprising nation they are, have adopted the custom of including the Groom's Cake, a dark counterpoint to the typical wedding cake, covered with rich chocolate frosting and fudgey goodness. No wedding should be without one. Someday one of my relatives will have the pleasure of flying a suitable cake in to my wedding from Jeanne's Bakery in Winnipeg. It would feel wrong not to have one, as not only are they are just that good, they've been the official cake of every birthday, graduation and anniversary that I can remember.

I am not the only one who shares this sentiment. One fine day at the U of M, my Civ Eng friend Val showed up with a piece of Jeanne's cake packed in his lunch (and the fact that right away it can be identified as Jeanne's cake is testament to it's legendary status). Immediately a new connection was made and we entered into a discussion about the cakes and the best types. Our friends and classmates JR (who hated being called that but it seemed cooler than Jeremy) and Cooze (who preferred that name to Jason) were listening to our conversation and one of them interjected, "The cakes they have at Costco are pretty good..." The looks that val and I shot him before we started laughing like crazy and belittling him with insults. There is no possible way a Costco cake could compare to the fine confectuions of Jeanne's. Accept no substitutes.

Farewell to Kate

Tonight there was a happy hour over by the Dallas office to say farewell to one of my coworkers. This would not be notable if it were not for the fact that for much of the past four years, Kate was my only coworker. We spent the better part of two and a half years locked alone together in the same room, separated only by a thin, fuzzy grey wall. During this time we learned a ton about each other and I had a ready source for music and movie reviews and suggestions, links to odd online articles, and definitions of obscure words. I estimate that Kate has witnessed me consume approximately 250 hamburgers over the course of our time working together. She has one of the coolest cats I've ever met; I maintain that he is part panther. I think of her as more of a friend than a coworker so it makes it harder to say goodbye. However, I am happy that she has the opportunity to return to school, do what she does best and hopefully find a better situation down the road.

And for the last time, I am not high strung.

Star-Spangled Canadian

Today marks six years since I last lived in Canada. That is so strange to think about. Six years is approximately 22 percent of my life and if you subtract the years when I was really small that I can't remember, you could argue that I've spent about a quarter of my life living in the United States. I certainly never envisioned this happening. It's crazy how one impulse decision a little over six years ago completely changed the course of my life. I can't even fathom what the other path would look like.

Normalizing Star Wars

It's been about three weeks since I went to see Star Wars: Episode III on opening night and the hype about it being the most popular movie ever has sort of died down a bit. The media based it's claim of Episode III being the most popular movie ever based on it's record setting take of $158.5 million over it's opening weekend (or technically opening three days starting early Thursday morning at 12:01). I've always wondered about the validity using the opening weekend box office take to measure the popularity of a movie compared to movies in the past. To me using opening weekend box office as a metric seems to suffer from a lack of normalization. In other words, we are measuring something and comparing it across time when that something has a time dependence (ie the cost of a movie ticket is increasing over time, and dollars are not constant). This is a problem that I encountered a lot while analysing stats for my thesis in grad school: the raw number of train derailments has increased but since train traffic had doubled over a certain time period, the rate of accidents per train-mile had decreased. It's really the rate that is important, not the raw number. In a similar manner, I figured that the best measure of a movie's popularity would be the percent of the US population that saw the movie during it's opening weekend. So I decided to set about "normalizing" some of the Star wars numbers to see if Episode III truly was more popular than some older releases.

My first step was to convert $158.5 million into an estimate of the number of actual people who attended the movie. A quick google search revealed the average cost of movie tickets over time and for 2005 it is at $8.50, translating into 18.6 million people attending Episode III during it's first three days. The estimated population f the United States for 2005 is 296 million. Thus, 6.3% of the population of the United States saw Episode III during it's first three days in theatres. I could normalize further by breaking down the population pyramid to remove those under the age of 13 and those over 60 who are unlikely to attend this movie to get a more accurate percentage of the target market but I didn't have quite enough data to go to that level of detail. So we'll run with 6.3& for Ep III.

This figure is easily going to trump any recent releases, but could the inflation in movie ticket prices actually make on older release more popular?

Of the top 80 opening weekends ever (measured by raw unadjusted dollars) only three qualify as being not-so-recent: #54 Jurrassic Park with $47million in 1993, #60 Batman Returns with 46 million in 1992, and #78 Batman with $40 million in 1989. With early 90s average ticket prices around $5, each of these movies drew about 8 million people opening weekend or approximately 3 percent of the US population. So Episode III easily trumps the early 90s blockbusters.

What about the other movie that ended a Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi which smashed records when it was released in 1983? ROTJ took in $23 million on its opening weekend, but at that time the average movie ticket was $2.50, so that translates into about 9.2 million people. The population of the US in 1983 was 234 million, so 3.9% of the US population saw ROTJ opening weekend. So Episode III is about twice as popular as Return of the Jedi when measured in this manner. Interestingly, these figures show that ROTJ was more popular in its time than Jurrasic Park, Batman or Batman Returns.

What of the other original trilogy? Star Wars took in $1.5 million its first weekend, but that was back in 1977, before the idea of seeing a summer blockbuster opening weekend had even entered the conscience of the public. So only 0.4% percent of the US population at the time saw it opening weekend. The Empire Strikes back fared a bit better, with a take of $6.4 million translating into 1.4% of the US population.

Based on these figures, one could say that Episode III is the most popular movie of the past 30 years measured by percent of US population seeing it during its first three days of release. Interestingly, if the top movies were ranked this was, ROTJ (ranked number 230 in terms of all time opening weekend gross) would move all the way up to number 5 behind Episode III, Spider-Man, Shrek 2, and Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban, and into a virtual tie with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom which took in $25 million in 1984.

Of course, one can not overlook the fact that despite earning $1.5 million its first week, Star Wars went on to have a total box office gross of over $780 million. So these numbers are far from perfect and there-in lies the trouble with using opening weekend numbers to gauge popularity. Movies vary wildly in the percentage of total gross earned on the opening weekend. Of the Top 80 ranked by constant dollar gross, Batman from 1989 has the lowest opening weekend percentage with 16.1% ($40.5 million out of $251 million). Hulk meanwhile, is the biggest box office staller with an opening weekend percentage of 47% ($62 million out of $132 million). So opening weekends can be poor indicators of long term popularity but after one week in theatres and a media hungry for an answer on success, it's the only data available. So we're stuck with it. However misleading it might be.

OFP 857

The new herbie movie, Herbie: Fully Loaded opens in a few weeks and as part of the whirlwind of publicity surrounding it, the Herbie & Friends promotional cruise across America stopped in downtown Fort Worth at the new Radio Shack headquarters, just a few blocks from my apartment. Being a proud bug owner, I took my New Beetle over at lunch to meet them and along with any other VW was allowed to pull up onto the sidewalk and park near Herbie. When I say Herbie I mean one of two dozen VW bugs used to portray Herbie in the movie. This one in particular was used in the junkyard scene where Lindsay Lohan's character first finds Herbie. Ms. Lohan, of course, is not making the publicty tour, but a group of young and bubbly marketing students is shepherding him back and forth across the country. There was a big crowd on hand to see Herbie and it's difficult to explain why a VW bug with racing stripes and the number 53 means something to so many people but I guess it does. Herbie is obviously a popular Disney character and is something more than just a person in a constume which I presume adds to the appeal. Disney certainly did their homework when they selected a VW Beetle for the original movie as years later, it's still one of the few cars that can make anybody smile. So it was cool to see Herbie but as far as Disney characters goes, he's no Jessica Rabbit. Speakign of which, how the same company who brought us that pneumatic character decided to spend a million dollars makign Ms. Lohan more family friendly for the Herbie audience I'll never know. I guess we've got Janet Jackson to blame.

Rally Point

What's wrong with delivering a blistering spike during a friendly game of backyard volleyball? And what's wrong with doing it two more times during the game?

Mad Hot Engineering

Today, one of my coworkers, Kate, and I put on a presentation about engineering for a group of young Boy Scouts at Science Place over in Dallas. The scouts were all 8 to 10 years old and were attending the workshop so they could obtain their engineering merit badge. The fact that there is an engineering merit badge makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. There wasn't such a badge when I was in wolf cub scouts but there were many badges for outdoor activities and athletics. Kids these days who are interested in engineering have so many more programs and outlets available for them, in part because of the rise of computers in the home and the workplace. Where I had to be content with playing with Lego in the basement, today a kid into engineering can compete against other schools building bridges out of drinking straws just as if he were on the football team. I'm not sure if the cheerleaders go for it yet though.

So Kate and I with the help of Amy were given about 15 to 20 minutes to talk about what engineering is, what all the different types of engineers design, what different engineering jobs one can have and what we do at work as engineers ourselves. I think that we did a good job as none of the kids seemed to get really bored and were all eager to answer questions, and the parents were just as interested. We presented them with lists of items and asked them to name items that were not designed by engineers (answers: canned food, milk, websites, mountains) which was enlightening for some I'm sure. Engineers really do design nearly everything. We dressed a volunteer up in PPE (hardhat, safety glasses, orange vest, steel toes) and had him measure the size of the room with a measuring wheel. We rolled out some of our more impressive drawings and sets of plans showing them different items on the aerial photos and designs. Then it was time for them to do some engineering of their own as they set about making bridges out of sugar cubes, drawing a floorplan of the room, looking at some simple circuits and building a catapult, which were tested by launching marshmallows down the hall. At the conclusion of the workshop, the scout were given squishy hard hats, tiny metal engineering scales and calculators courtesy of my employers marketign swag cabinet. It was one of my most fun days as an engineer in recent memory.

Following the workshop and a farewell lunch with Kate, who is leaving the company to return to grad school, Amy and I went to see "Mad Hot Ballroom". It's a documentry about how they teach ballroom dancing to all the Grade 5 students in public schools in New York City and at the end of the 10 week program they have a competition where one school is crowned champion and wins a trophy that is taller than most of the students. The schools take this very seriously and these kids can really dance, and I mean really really dance, complete with perfect Cuban motion and all the attitude and facial expression they can muster. There was one little boy who was way too swauve for his age; he made Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire look like clumsy bumbling nerds. It's highly entertaining, has the same competition factor as "Spellbound" and is just oh-so cute. Go see it.

Mrs. O'leary's Cow

It all began a couple of hours ago when the drone of the helicopters slowly started. One at first, and then another and finally a swarm sweeping across the bits of sky visible from my 6th floor cubicle. The last time this happened was when a van full of prisoners being transferred from jail to court crashed through a window into a western wear store at the corner of 4th and Houston, a block away from my office. So something was up.

I went to the windows facing north to find endless streams of police tape, dozens of fire trucks, a platoon of firemen and all sorts of people wandering around looking confused.

Downtown Fort Worth is on fire.

Perhaps not on the scale of Chicago or London, downtown Fort Worth did see something called a "gas surge", a rapid pressure change in the natural gas lines feeding parts of downtown, which triggered several gas leaks and over a dozen small fires in buildings covering four square blocks of downtown. The fires were small and contained and extinguished quickly, but you should see the magnitude of the emergency response when fires are reported in numerous buildings covering several blocks in a downtown district. It is really quite impressive with every unit in the area rolling into downtown. Many buildings were evacuated because of the fires and suspected gas leaks, leaving many office workers with nothing to do but wander around since their vehicles were parked in garages that were also sealed off with police tape. I suspect many were milling around hoping that they weren't milling around the base of the right building at the wrong time.

One of the most damaging hailstorms on record. One of the few tornados to cut through a major urban city center. Now a fire which could have potentially consumed several blocks of downtown. It seems that downtown cowtown is a nexus for trouble.

Hell's Half Acre indeed.