I don’t usually write here about movies we watch on DVD, but I thought I would make an exception for Atonement, which we finished watching last night.

Atonement is easily the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t seen many comments on it’s cinematography but shot after shot are amazing - they look like paintings from a time when paintings mattered.

I had much more mixed thoughts on the rest of the movie. The performances are quite good, as is the editing and dialogue, but the overall structure of the movie didn’t impress me. The shifting backwards and forwards in time worked well in the first part of the movie, showing the different viewpoints and how they affected what happened, but in the second, darker, half of the movie, it felt more forced and disjointed and also made the characters more of a cipher. I assume some of this criticism actually falls on Ian McEwan’s novel, since this is supposed to be a very faithful adaptation, but if that is the case, the failure is in the adaptation since one of the key responsibilities of a filmmaker working from a novel is to change what is needed to make it work as a film. I will probably pick up the book at some point to see how it works as a novel.

Yesterday I finished Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer.

Sawyer is probably the most prominent current Canadian SF author and he likes to use Canadian locations in his books to add colour. He also has a very laid back, casual style that is quite different from most other authors in the field.

Usually I like his approach, and I've liked most of his books a lot, but it doesn't work as well in his latest novel. The little touches of local colour seem more of a distraction from the main story. Also, the main story itself is less engaging than most of his novels. The main characters undergoes a rejuvenation procedure along with his wife, but it succeeds for him and fails for her. There is also a background story of first contact with an alien species going on at the same time, but the two plots don't integrate well and the novel seems to meander along before wrapping up where most novels would begin.

It's an interesting effort to address the effects of aging, and how a person would react to returning to their youth, but ultimately failed to move me.

I just finished The Born Queen by Greg Keyes, the last book in his latest fantasy series called The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone.

I wrote about the last two books in the series here, and was glad that this book wrapped up the series, instead of diluting their impact by adding more and more installments like the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, or the George R.R. Martin Game of Thrones series.

Keyes did an excellent job of creating a very fresh dark fantasy series, with interesting and believable characters and I'll definitely check out whatever his next book is.

Before I left for Yosemite, I finished The Difference Engine by Doron Swade, a curator at the Science Museum in London and head of a team that built a version of the Difference Engine #2 in the 90's.

There are two parts of the book - the main section of the book details Babbage's quest to build the Difference Engine and design of the Analytical Engine. The second, smaller section, is about the quest to build a version of the Engine in time for Babbage's bicentennial. Both parts are quite interesting. I had read about Babbage and his engines before but learned a few new things from this book. For example, I didn't know that a Swedish printer named Georg Scheutz was inspired by Babbage's design and succeeded where Babbage failed and built a version of a difference engine of his own design within Babbage's lifetime. Sadly, it was a commercial failure and didn't lead to anything more than Babbage's work.

This afternoon, we went and saw Iron Man.

It's quite enjoyable, but also a by-the-numbers superhero movie with lots of wooden writing and characters. If a stiffer, or less charismatic actor than Robert Downey Jr. had been cast, I think it would have been a total flop rather than the success it is.

I just got back from four days camping at Yosemite. Since it was during the week, and spring, we were able to get a reservation at one of the campsites in Yosemite Valley. For both those reasons, it also wasn't particularly crowded. We did some easy hikes (since we are wimps), saw some great scenery and I even did a little bouldering at Camp 4, the climber's mecca. The weather was nice and the rivers and waterfalls were very full with winter runoff. There are a few photos here.

I spent most of the weekend getting my geek on at the 2008 Maker Faire. I wrote about last year's event here.

This year was also cool, but I wonder if this event is heading the way of San Francisco's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival - an event that has grown to such a size that it is less fun to attend. This year, it felt like there were a lot of attendees who were just there because they heard it was a the place to be, rather than because they are interested in the DIY culture the event celebrates. I got there early on Saturday and it took 20+ minutes to get from the freeway into the parking lot and I heard it got a lot worse later in the day.

I saw lots of interesting lectures, some very cool sculptures and some good bands, including Total Annihilation, Microfiche and Culann's Hounds.

Here are a few pictures I posted from this year's event.

I spent a large part of the weekend taking a class at The Crucible, a cool, local non-profit that focuses on the more industrial parts of arts. I was taking a general welding class that exposed us to all four main types of welding - arc/stick, MIG, TIG and oxyacetylene.

It was a very interesting class and once I decide what I want to do with it, I will probably take some follow on in-depth classes. One surprising thing to me was the quality of the teachers. Having taking a number of classes in different things, I've found that people who are good at doing something aren't always good at teaching it. In this case, each of the different types of welding was taught by a different teacher and they were all excellent.

Out of the four types, oxyacetylene was the most fun and MIG seemed the most practical. TIG would also be useful, but I'm not sure if the extra cost, and difficulty, would be worth it unless I was going to do something that required it like working with aluminum. Arc/stick welding seemed nicely affordable but was by far the most difficult and the most work.