We split our time between movie-going, eating and shopping, this year. The shopping gods did not favor us at all, though; we should have seen more movies instead. Here's what we did see:  

Friday, 9:30am [1]
Hainan Ji Fan (Rice Rhapsody)  

Sweet enough, if you don't object from the beginning to a mother being inconsolably distraught at the thought that the third of her three sons might also be gay, and obliviously attempting to force-feed him to a loopy French exchange student to cultivate his heterosexuality.  

I love seeing other places in movies, but I don't have a much better idea of
Singapore after this movie than I did before. The people speak more English than I realized, and apparently airport security is relaxed enough that you can have bike races even after checking in for your flight. Everybody's mind seems thoroughly blown by the wildly innovative idea of Hainan Duck Rice, despite having grown up on the traditional staple of Hainan Chicken Rice, and I have no idea whether these two concepts really are radically different to a Singapore rice-eater, or I was supposed to understand the exaggeration of a subtle distinction as allegorical irony.  

Shot and assembled cleanly and professionally, but without any particular individual style.  
 

Friday, 5pm [2]
Sex hopp och kärlek (Sex, Hope and Love)  

The host of a Swedish TV dating show goes back to his small hometown for a funeral and semi-wittingly perturbs it. The town, not the funeral. Actually, come to think of it, they never showed the funeral, did they?  

B and I both find Swedish domesticity familiar and appealing somehow, which is distantly explicable on genetic grounds, but not really based on anything more tangible. The characters in this revolving romantic farce are encouragingly normal and confused and real, and even when they freak out it seems fairly reasonable.  
 

Saturday, 9:30am [3]
KussKuss  

A well-intentioned Berlin lab-tech brings home an illegal Algerian cleaning woman after inadvertently almost betraying her to the police. Her boyfriend isn't entirely supportive, and her father has an unnerving habit of standing outside their apartment door whenever they open it. It's not clear whether he's standing there all the time, or if it's opening the door that causes him to appear. Naturally the cleaning woman is beautiful, and eventually they figure out that she isn't mute, she just speaks something called "French".  

Good acting, and pretty well done for a debut film, but a first half spent building up interesting complexities collapses regrettably into a second half in which the most predictable surprises mostly happen, and none of what might have been puzzle pieces turn out to be part of any puzzles.  

Still, after taking Spanish courses in Boston, and then traveling to Japan and Bali, and then being in bilingual Montreal, it was interesting to see a movie in which believable real life moved so fluidly between languages. The couple are German, but she talks with her father in something Slavic and unsubtitled, they speak to the Algerian in a melange of German and French and English, and the Algerian is actually trying to get to Sweden.  
 

Saturday, 7:00pm [4]
Stiilipidu (Shop of Dreams)  

After a TV studio is abruptly shut down, three women from the wardrobe and makeup department take the costumes and start a rental shop.  

Estonians are gorgeous. And costumes are cool. Another sweet Scandinavian movie, and a rather sunnier one than most of the others we've seen, but maybe not as coherent as it might have been, and more over-plotted than it needed to be.  

And as it became clear that our movie-going rationale was virtual tourism, we definitely wanted to see more of Tallinn. But the American version would have had them being miraculously successful and popularly ubiquitous in a way that would have told you lots about movie America and nothing about real cities. Better brief glimpses of a real place than fake insight into irrelevant facades.  
 

Sunday, 9:30am [5]
Shonen to Hoshi to Jitensha (Satoru - Fourteen)  

Great pre-film intro, with director Fukuhara Susumu providing historio-cultural background about Christianity in Amakusa and the expectations around Japanese boys turning 14, his interpreter translating his long and detailed remarks into English, and a hopelessly overwhelmed festival worker trying gamely to render the English into wildly paraphrased and/or baldly inaccurate French.  

The film itself, sadly, was god-awful, like an after-school special as a stern warning to potential soundtrack assemblers of the nauseating effects of pounding every tiny emotional point into a mushy and indigestible pulp. Yeep. A mildly disgruntled fourteen-year-old takes to following a lumbering Polynesian clown around, and they meet some other issue-brandishing kids and their dopey and patronizing adult minders. Easily the worst thing we saw.  
 

Sunday, 9:30pm [6]
Krama mig! (Love and Happiness)  

A good finale, though, with what we both thought was the best movie of the six. Mostly just small-town life in Sweden: a girl, her father and stepmother and brother and sister, her best friend, some boys, the factory, the movie theater, learning to drive, driving around in circles, wondering what it's like somewhere else, a stranger coming to visit (with his dog), eventually going to find out. The family is a bit dopey, but not pathetic or psychotic. The boys are all dense, but none of them are pathological. The friends are simple, but not corrupt. The town is small and poor, but neither shuttered nor squalid. The girl is naive, but not self-destructive. It sounds mild, but was quite pleasant.  
 
 

Food notes  

- Cheese bagels: still one of the world's great things, even if they aren't what any reasonable person would expect from the words "cheese" and "bagel".  

- Underground food-court Lebanese chicken: better than American mall food, but not likely to be mistaken for restaurant-grade.  

- Zenya: serviceable sushi, but "sake toro" turned out to be cooked, and the gomaae was beyond "chilled" to "frozen into chunks".  

- Frites Alors!: whee! As close to the Belgian frites experience as I've come outside of Brussels.  

- Soupebol: the blandest pho-shaped thing we've ever encountered.  

- Eggspectation: cheerfully abundant brunch, after which I felt kind of yolk-logged for about five hours.  

- Fonduementale: a gluttonous farewell-dinner in fine style. I think the Japanese have worked out the meat part more effectively with shabu-shabu, but they don't serve caribou and wild boar, and they unwisely omit the cheese and chocolate courses.

It will be of interest to approximately nobody, but if this particular approximation misses you, I have written up an unsolicited idea about simplified XML.  

I give this about a 97% chance of being completely pointless, and a 3% chance of being an inspired idea that will ultimately be the foundation of my reputation as an esoteric technical visionary.  

And I wish I knew whether saying 3% is an example of humility or egotism.

The default architectural approach for a dynamic web site, these days, is to put all the content into a relational database system, retrieve pieces of it with SQL queries, and format the content on the fly with some combination of code, style-sheets and style transformations. There are many good reasons for this, among them scalable performance, manageable storage, transactional updating and a full relational query system for use in subsetting and searching.  

When I was writing the forum software for vF, though, my primary goals were statelessness and an absolute minimum of installation dependencies, and I was willing to assume relatively small scales, so instead of using a database I opted to store notes as simple XML files directly in the file system. In my scalability tests this actually worked better than I'd expected, so I used a variation on the same approach for the new architecture for the rest of the site when I recently rewrote it.  

I did wonder, though, how much speed I was giving up in the interest of file-system transparency and simplicity. So today I got around to dumping the back issues of my music-review column into a MySQL database so I could do a couple of performance tests of the two approaches.  

The first test was to build an alphabetized list of issue titles. The SQL version of this is very simple, as the titles are stored in a discreet field, and SQL lets you demand sorting, so a query like "SELECT title,id FROM thistable ORDER BY title" gets the right data in the right order, and some simple post-processing formats it into HTML. The XML version builds a file list by operating-system glob expansion (which is every bit as glamorous as it sounds), reads in each file, uses string-matching to find the content of the appropriate XML mark-up and stuff it into an array of hashes (again, very sexy), and then sorts the array by the title hash key using a custom comparison function. This test is slightly biased in favor of the SQL approach, as my XML code does some extra string-processing in between retrieval and sorting that I left out of the SQL version because there isn't a directly corresponding intermediate step. The XML version could be optimized in several obvious ways, but the SQL version would also be faster with an index.  

The second test was to retrieve the back-issues that contain a particular text phrase. Again, in SQL this is very easy: "SELECT title,id,content FROM thistable WHERE content LIKE '%this phrase%'". The XML method is the same as in the first test, plus some arcane string-matching and some even more arcane string-unmatching to avoid matches that occur inside of HTML tags. This second test is more significantly biased in favor of the SQL approach, because my XML code does a whole XML-HTML transformation step that I didn't bother plugging into the SQL version, plus the SQL version would produce false-positives inside tags that in production use would have to be caught in post-processing. There aren't any trivial accelerations for either approach to this problem, and it's a much more processing-intensive example than the first one, so this is the more interesting of the two tests.  

In the first test, the SQL approach reliably generated the title list in about 45 milliseconds, and the XML approach generally took about 89ms, for an SQL advantage of a factor of 2, more or less. This is actually much less of a different than I anticipated, given the absurd brute-force nature of my current XML approach to this problem.  

In the second test, even handicapped by post-processing, the XML method actually beat the SQL method. Every time, although not by a lot: SQL times range from 1.5s to 1.8s, XML times hover more consistently around 1.3s to 1.4s.  

Neither of these tests were remotely scientific, and I have made no attempt to run then in any environment other than the one I really use, or at any scale other than the one I'm really dealing with. So it would be insane to conclude that a global revolution against databases is imminent. But maybe, at least, I'm not as crazy as I feared for trying to see how far I can get without them.

My lifetime running distance, where for running purposes my life only began a year ago June, will hit 1000 miles about halfway through tomorrow's run. My first week of post-run/walk running I covered 9 miles; most weeks now I do 20. As of today I am on track for my arbitrary goal of running 1000 miles during calendar 2005. This isn't very much in serious running terms, but it's as far as I can go in as much time as I care to devote to the cause, and it's appealing to have an order of magnitude for a goal.  

I am slightly behind on my equally arbitrary goal of reading 50 books in 2005. I've finished 28, which suggests 43 or 44 for the year, but the numbers don't account for the fact that I spent most of May and June reading travel guides and grammar manuals, so I expect the current extrapolation underestimates the eventual total. If I get to 46, I'll have read more books in 2005 than in any year since 1996. A graph plotting my reading against my writing would explain most of the fluctuations in the former, as if there is a conservation of the time I spend with written words.  

Out of my goals of gaining and losing zero pounds in 2005, I have so far gained zero pounds and lost zero pounds, both of which trends point to a total calendar-year weight-gain and -loss of zero pounds.  

Out of my goal of having been married for one year during the first year of my marriage, I completed one year, for 100% of my goal. During the first seven days of the second year of my marriage, I have successfully been married for seven days. My goal is to reach two years of marriage by the end of the second year.  

Math is a comfort. If only anything important could be so simply measured.

The Field Mice: "Emma's House" (1.7M mp3)  

I'm still not getting through sunny days without listening to Waltham's blast of uncomplicatedly shallow puppy-romantic zeal at least once, but it's good to have counterpoint, and if Waltham are a recursivist's dream of a band trying to impress girls by playing songs about trying to impress girls by being in a band, then the Field Mice were their polar opposite, a band about trying to figure out how best to end up alone. This one reduces melancholy almost past its essence, understanding perfectly that the core of redemptive loneliness is self-circumscribing, and that in the perfect portrait of sadness details exist only to anchor atmosphere.

She touches three keys with the same fingers she must have run through your hair, and then we are away and I will never have to see you again.  

She stands by windows onto ten worlds, watching a hundred billion people dodge through each other's enmities, and we duel quietly with our convictions about what she hopes to see among them.  

It is only through the invisible mercy of infinitesimal machines that she can breathe in this air and my company.  

You have no idea how much more courage it took to come out here alone with what I know and brought with me than to land on these rocks where we know nothing and owe nothing.  

In the logs it is at first Minerva, and only self-consciously do we leave off the catalog number; and then later Beta, when discovered implications begin to eclipse portaged expectations; and in my mind it is half of the time Home, and half of the time only Without You.

I have switched over to my new site-design. Hopefully everything is working. If you find anything broken, please let me know.  

If the new systems are working, they are even capable of delivering you a new list of complaints about the sixth Harry Potter book, which contains spoilers, so don't read it if you're trying to preserve ignorance.