Favorite Movies

Ginger at Ramble Ramble is running weekly writing prompts. I haven't participated much, mostly because I have a backlog of things I want to write about and a shortage of blogging time. But this week, she posted a prompt that sort of wormed its way into my subconscious, and I feel compelled to write about- namely, to list my top ten favorite movies of all time.

Anyone who knows me in real life is probably surprised that this prompt is the one that I felt compelled to write about. To say I am not a big movie-goer is a monumental understatement. I almost never watch a movie, either in the theater or on TV. Last week, I told Mr. Snarky I wanted to see Pacific Rim, and I think he seriously suspected I'd been kidnapped by aliens, not so much for the particular movie I wanted to see (although that was a little out of character for me), but for the fact that I wanted to go see a movie at all.

(We went and saw it, and it was fun. So there.)

But I couldn't stop trying to come up with a list of my top ten favorites movies, so here it is. I've organized it into three sections: the obvious ones (things I've seen multiple times and clearly love), the ones I had to think about but that once I thought of were obvious, and the ones I had to rationalize before I'd put them on the list. Within each section, the movies are in no particular order.

The Obvious Ones

• Charade
  - the original, with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant
• The Princess Bride
  - DUH
• Arsenic & Old Lace
  - I've seen it many times, and it still cracks me up
• The Philadelphia Story
  - Katharine Hepburn is awesome. And so is Cary Grant.

The Almost Obvious Ones

• Star Wars
  - Episode IV, of course. I'm just of the right age that this movie is part of my childhood.
• Notorious
  - the 1946 one, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman
• The Secret of Roan Inish - this is a really great kids' movie that I have loved since well before I had kids. My kids aren't old enough for it yet, but I look forward to showing it to them. (A different sort of 6 year old could watch it- but mine is particularly sensitive to anything even remotely scary.)
• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
  - it is just too much fun. And he's a professor at my alma mater!

The Ones That Need a Reason

• Sense & Sensibility
  -  Jane Austen is my favorite author, and this is Jane Austen brought to the big screen by someone who clearly loves her, too (Emma Thompson)
• The Matrix
  - I can't help it. The computer geek jokes delight me, and the concept is just cool.

The last spot was surprisingly tough. I almost went with Gattaca.But I decided I like The Matrix a little more.

What about you? You should play along! You can leave your list in the comments, or write a post and join Ginger's link up.

Trip Story: Taupo

This is the third trip story about or recent family vacation in New Zealand. The first and second stories were about our time in Auckland.

After spending several days in Auckland, we headed south. Our ultimate destination was Wellington, where my in laws live. It is possible to make the drive in one day, but it would have been a long, unpleasant day, so we chose instead to split the drive into two, and spend a couple of days in Taupo.

Taupo is a small town on the shores of Lake Taupo, the largest lake in New Zealand. I spent a night there during my very first visit to New Zealand, so this was another stop that induced some nostalgia.

The drive down to Taupo from Auckland takes you through Hamilton. Hamilton is the only major New Zealand city that isn't on the coast, and is subject to much abuse because of this. On my first trip, we stopped in Hamilton for lunch, and I thought that it looked to have a nice riverside walk. I'm sure it is actually a very nice city. But we didn't stop to explore this time, either, preferring to drive on to the town of Cambridge for lunch.

Cambridge is an excellent example of the small Kiwi town. It had a couple of main shopping streets, with a few restaurants and cafes. Everything was clean and everyone was friendly. We had lunch at a Robert Harris- I was still wanting my caramel slice fix after our failure to visit one in Auckland. Their caramel slices were as good as I remembered, but again, there is probably a healthy dose of nostalgia in that assessment. A Robert Harris caramel slice was the first distinctively Kiwi thing I ate on my first day in New Zealand. Unless you count the pancakes with bananas on top, which I don't. New Zealanders do seem determined to put bananas on top of any pancakes they find, but you can get that a lot of places. The caramel slice is one of the gifts New Zealand has given the world.

Anyway, the nice lady at the Robert Harris directed us to an awesome playground that we would never have found on our own, and the girls had a blast burning off their excess energy before we loaded them back into the car and drove on towards Taupo.

Mr. Snarky made us stop at Lake Karapiro on our way out of town, because his father used to stop there on their family drives. Or something like that. It was pretty.

Not shown: the Ferrari that sped across the bridge. Apparently, the houses on the other side are quite pricey!

We made decent time, and got to the Taupo area by 4:30. We thought that would give us enough time to visit Craters of the Moon, a geothermal site, but the people who run that site disagreed, and were closing up when we got there. So we went across the highway to Huka Falls, which you absolutely must visit if you ever go to Taupo. This is another site Mr. Snarky and I visited on my first NZ tour, so we always knew we'd be returning on this trip. We did not expect to return at sunset, though, and were pleasantly surprised by how beautiful the area was at that time of day.

The rapids before the falls

After leaving the falls, we drove on to our hotel, which was on the far side of Taupo, in a section that has grown quite a bit since our last visit. We'd picked the Comfort Inn for the details of the room, but the location turned out to be great, too.  It was right on the lake. Although our room was near the road, we could walk through the property out onto a nice lakeside path. We even saw some ducks out there. which delighted the kids.

Ducks rule

There was also frost on the ground, which delighted the kids even more. They had lots of fun stomping around in the frost making footprints.

We went back to Craters of the Moon after morning snack (which we had at a shop that specialized in honey... yum. The grownups and Petunia enjoyed some honey tasting. Pumpkin was too suspicious to partake.) I worried that the kids might not appreciate the scenery at Craters of the Moon, but they did. We were perhaps helped out by the fact that there was a lot of boiling mud at the time we visited, but the kids also seemed impressed by the steam just rising out of the ground.

Steaming ground

After lunch, we let the kids enjoy the large central playground in Taupo, then we headed back to the hotel and Mr. Snarky took them down to jump on the trampoline by the office while I had a rest.

That evening we went to the hot pools, which are thermally heated fresh water swimming pools. I was skeptical of the idea of going for a swim at night in the middle of winter, but I am glad I let Mr. Snarky win this argument. We had a great time, and it really was one of the highlights of the trip for all of us. It was the perfect way to wind up our visit to Taupo- the next morning we packed up the car again and headed on to Wellington.

Our last stop in the Taupo area was to drive up to Chateau Tongariro on Mt. Ruapehu, a ski resort that dates from 1929. Mr. Snarky had never visited and insisted we detour to see it. The lounge was grand. I cannot report on the quality of the high tea, since we were too early to sample it.

On a different sort of trip, I might have waited for it to be tea time

The highlight for the girls was undoubtedly the chance to build a small snowman and throw some snowballs.

Our snowball throwing technique needs work.

I grudgingly admitted it was worth the extra hour or two it added to our drive, if only because now I can say I've been to Whakapapa, which is (in)famous for the careful way in which Kiwi weather announcers must pronounce it. (In Maori, "wh" = f, and the a is said a bit like "uh"... sound it out.)

And on that note, I'll close this installment, and will pick up the rest of the drive to Wellington next time!

Weekend Reading: The Need to Decompress Edition

This week, I've had a far too close for comfort view of the project management problem of people working too many hours. The person in question doesn't report to me and there isn't much I can do about the problem. So I am watching the fallout happen, and trying to mitigate its damage on my own projects (and protect my own team).

Needless to say, this is frustrating, and has left me with more than the usual need to decompress tonight.

So, instead of the interesting and thought-provoking links I intended to share, I'll give you things that have cheered me up this week.

Rands had a great post about project management, in which he writes many great things. I think my favorite is when he writes that project managers "are chaos destroying machines, and each new person you bring onto your team, each dependency you create, adds hard to measure entropy to your team. A good project manager thrives on measuring, controlling, and crushing entropy."

I am in the midst of reworking my team's title structure (one of those things that doesn't matter unless it is really wrong, and then it becomes a staff retention risk), so I started joking that I was going to ask for the title of "Entropy Crusher." But Mr. Snarky heard that as "Ensign Crusher," and with all due respect to Wil Wheaton and the character of Wesley Crusher, that sort of changed the joke. I just consider myself lucky that no one on my team has started making "make it so..." jokes.

A post at Scalzi's place lead me to this awesome song and video:



And Mr. Snarky sent me this video:



Anyone have any other fun, heartwarming, or otherwise smile-inducing things to share? Put a link in the comments.

Solving the Right Problems

I just finished reading Ready Player One,by Ernest Cline. (Yeah, I pretty much never update my "What I'm Reading" sidebar. I am only marginally better about updating GoodReads...) If you haven't read it, I recommend it highly. It was great fun, particularly for someone who grew up in the 80s, but it also raised some interesting things to ponder.

I don't think I am giving anything away by saying that one of the themes of the book is the risk of having people devote all of their time and problem-solving skills to imaginary worlds in the computer while the real world crumbles around them.

That theme intertwines with some things I have been thinking about recently, prompted in part by Cal Newport's recent post about how so many of Dartmouth's valedictorians became investment bankers. He argues that it is due to our shallow vocabulary around career aspirations, but I wonder if it might be something more, similar to the issue raised in Ready Player One, in which people have disengaged from trying to solve important problems to chase something else- in this case, money.

I think we have lost sight of the purpose of money. So many people seem to use money as a kind of score-keeping system, to track who is "winning" at life. I think that is wrong-headed, to say the least. To me, money is just a tool, a way to secure the lifestyle I want. Once I get that lifestyle, I hope I'll have the sense to realize I don't need more money. (I have a pretty nice lifestyle already- all that is missing right now is the flexibility to travel more. I'm working on that.)

It is not all about having a nice car

Which is not to say that I'd turn down more money if it came my way, just that I hope I'd stop chasing it. And I hope I'd then take the excess money and use it to work on some of the really big problems out there.

This is not intended to criticize everyone who has made a bucket of money and chosen to do differently. Who knows? Perhaps they haven't reached the lifestyle they want, or perhaps they just haven't made the time to use their riches for good yet. But I do wish we'd stop lionizing the super wealthy as the people whose lives we should most want to emulate. Getting rich should not be the sole goal in life.

While we're at it, I wish we'd stop holding up tech entrepreneurs who created a company on their own as embodying the one true way to start a company (and get rich, of course, it is always about getting rich). It is just one way to do it.

I am not criticizing the lone techie entrepreneur, either. I am in fact considering trying to start a company that way! But it is not the only way, and it creates serious limitations in the types of problems the company can tackle. Some undertakings inherently require a large team and a lot of capital: drug discovery and energy innovations are two fields that spring to mind. Companies tackling these sorts of problems need people with technical brilliance, but they need people who know how to organize the work and make sure the team works together to get it done, too. No single technical genius is going to bring a drug to market or fix our dependence on fossil fuels. This realization is one of the things keeping me from abandoning my current career. In some ways, I can work on more important problems as an employee in a company than I can as an entrepreneur out on my own.

Since not all companies can be started by a lone techie in his or her garage, the world definitely does need investment bankers. But maybe we don't need quite so many- and we definitely don't need the attitude that the most important thing you can do with your life is make more and more money. If that's the goal we're all chasing, I can almost guarantee that we're not solving the right problems.

Nostaligic in Advance

Recently, the "You Might Also Like" links at the bottom of one of my posts led me to an old post I'd titled "Beach Days, Early Days, These Days." Sometimes, I wince a little when I read an old post, but I rather liked this one. It still rings true to me, although perhaps that is not surprising since it was only written a year ago.

I was struck in particular by the part where I say that I'd tell the me of now six and a bit years ago to "Give up. She isn't going to sleep. And so what if she screams- she'll scream at home, too. Just go out and try to do things." I find myself wondering what the me of six and a bit years from now would tell me to do. I don't know, of course, because if I did, I'd be doing it. That's the way with parenting: you're always just muddling through, sure that you're making grave mistakes. In fact, maybe that's the way with life in general.

I may not know what thing I'm stressing about now that future me will shake her head about and wonder why I couldn't just chill the heck out, but I have a pretty good guess about some of the memories that will bring nostalgic smiles to my face.

I am, for instance, a sucker for a good kid-ism, and both my kids had good ones this weekend. Petunia told me she was putting on her "clapping shoes." I was very puzzled until she started dancing, doing her impression of what a tap dance would look like (she has never taken dance, so she only knows what her friends at day care tell her in this regard). And Pumpkin pointed at a house as we drove past, and asked if it was a "hunted house." She was right: it looked like a classic haunted house.

And then there is gymnastics. I take both girls to gymnastics most Saturdays. They have overlapping but not perfectly aligned classes. Mostly I take the 30 minutes or so during which both girls are in class as a chance to read, but this week I found myself spending most of the time watching their classes.  It takes my breath away to look at Pumpkin and see a full-fledged girl, not a hint of baby left in her. She's lost all four of her front teeth now. The bottom two are growing back in, but her smile is charmingly gap-toothed right now, and somehow that makes her look even older than she looked when only one top tooth was missing.

I'm also a bit amazed by what she can do. Her favorite part of gymnastics is when they get to work on the bars. She loves the high bar in particular, even though (or perhaps because) it used to terrify her. She is confident and strong on it now, able to work her way across, her long, thin legs still dangling awkwardly- they haven't started working on the gymnast's legs together, toes pointed pose. She can also turn herself around six times in a row. She is proud of how strong she has gotten, and I am proud of how she kept with it even when she couldn't make a single turn and was scared she would fall (despite the fact that the coach was standing right there, with his hands up ready to catch her).

Petunia loves gymnastics, too. She loves the trampoline and rings the most, but my favorite is watching her on the balance beam. She is so careful and deliberate, looking at her feet and inching along the beam. She is slower than any other child in her class, but unlike her classmates, she never falls off or loses her balance. Her classmates happily lose their balance, step down, and run around her, so that no matter where she starts in the line, she is always last at the end, and the others have usually lapped her at least twice. If she cares about this, she never shows it- in fact, I'm not even sure she notices them going around her. Her focus is entirely on her own performance. I'm a bit jealous of that. Maybe, in fact, that is the advice that future-me would give me: stop paying attention to what everyone around you is doing, and just do what you need to do, in the way you need to do it.

And spend more time snuggling your girls. They are growing up fast.