Movies: I took a break from my usual weekend chores on Saturday afternoon to see "Rules of Engagement". Like Roger Ebert, I thought the screenplay was a little bumpy, not the tightly written script of "A Few Good Men", but stars Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson kept the emotional tension tightly drawn. I think the film would have had more impact if there had been more scenes depicting the frustration and alcoholism suffered by Tommy Lee Jones character as dramatic background to his court presentation. Except for the single scene where he gets drunk coming back from Yemen because of his treatment there and his inability to disprove the charges against his friend, we are informed in only a brief exchange along with some eye rolling at a family gathering that Jones' character has been less than stellar in his legal career. Of course, this shortcoming could have been a result of film editing and not necessarily the result of a less than polished script. Still, I think it is definitely worth purchasing for my collection when it is released on DVD.

Each day I go up on http://www.reel.com and play their movie trivia game. If you get an answer correct, you receive a 12 cent credit and if you get an answer wrong you get at least get a 6 cent credit. When you save up at least $10 worth of credits you can request a certificate that you can use to reduce the price of any of their merchandise. I saved up $10 worth and ordered "Three Kings". My sister had really liked this film starring George Clooney and, although I seldom buy one without seeing it first, I took a chance on this one. It was definitely different. Being a "veteran" of many war films, I found the main characters' lack of military bearing a bit disconcerting. They seemed more like undisciplined teenagers at a paint ball parlor than my "image" of American soldiers. I thought the plot resembled Clint Eastwood's "Kelly's Heroes" but with a heavy dose of political criticism and a much harder edge.

I had saved up another $10 worth and ordered "The Thirteenth Warrior". (I reviewed this film in my September 26 journal and discussed the book on which it is based in my October 3 journal). I think I enjoyed this film even more the second time than I did the first time. I think after reading Crichton's book, "Eaters of The Dead", and hearing his narrative about his efforts to portray the Viking culture accurately and meet the challenge to incorporate the old Beowulf legend into a drama that would be interesting to modern readers, I appreciated the cultural aspects of the film more.

As a technologist, I was totally awed by the combination of physical effects (puppetry and live action video) and computer generated imagery the British producers used in the Discovery Channel's presentation of "Walking With Dinosaurs". The narrative style of the program that included little vignettes of daily life of these long dead creatures reminded me of the original Disney nature series I viewed as a child, like "Killers of the High Country". I also thoroughly enjoyed the followup program "The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs". I think this feature will need to be the target of my next $10 coupon.

I also enjoyed another program on Discovery's The Learning Channel about Napoleon's obsession with Egypt. I attended a marvelous exhibit of Napoleonic artifacts and memorabilia at the International Culture Center in Memphis Tennessee seven years ago but haven't studied a lot about this enigmatic historical legend. The more I learn about him, however, the more I am confused as to why he is viewed as such a military genius. He embarked his French troops dressed in woolen uniforms on a forced march through the Egyptian desert in July with inadequate water supplies. He lost so many men, it is amazing that he was able to defeat the Marmalukes in the so-called "Battle of the Pyramids". I'm sure the victory was only assured because of French firepower. Then the program related how, upon hearing the Turks were massing an army to oppose him, he marched north into what is now Israel and captured 3,000 Turks. But, he didn't have the soldiers to guard them or the food to feed them and couldn't afford to let them return to the opposing forces so he ordered them assembled on a beach near modern day Tel-Aviv and then ordered his men to bayonet them since he couldn't spare the ammunition to shoot them. It took his men three days to slaughter that many prisoners that way. I realize from a military perspective he didn't really have any other option but what a brutal waste of humanity. It reminded me of the German massacre of American prisoners at Malmady during the Battle of the Bulge.

I also watched an interesting program on the American capture of U-505. This program was sponsored by the studio producing the new submarine flick "U-571". I read a review of the new film that scoffed at the plot featuring Americans capturing a sub and its valuable enigma code machines because the reviewer claimed the British captured the enigma machines and did all the work of decoding Nazi dispatches. They even made a point of saying that the U-505, a German U-boat on display at a Chicago museum, had no engima machines on board at the time of its seizure. So, I was surprised when I watched the TLC program which showed actual footage of the capture and stated that two enigma machines and an entire cache of secret documents was obtained. The reviewer obviously didn't check his sources carefully.

This weekend, TLC is airing a special on Roman gladiators to whip up interest in the new Ridley Scott film "The Gladiator" scheduled for release May 5. With my fascination for ancient Rome, I can hardly wait. I looked at some of the screenshots from the film and it looks like it will be a breathtaking marriage of history and technology. I do hope the film is truly an epic blockbuster. Now that computer generated graphics have made it possible to recreate almost any environment, I am hopeful Hollywood will return to the wealth of drama that can be extracted from history.

Readings: I listened to John Saul's "The Presence". It's an interesting story about a nodule discovered off the coast of Maui that gives off a gas that makes people able to breathe pollution but no longer able to breathe oxygen. A sinister company is conducting experiments on unsuspecting tourists in an effort to develop a product that will be worth millions. It worked for me until the end which sort of fell flat. Of course, the author sort of painted himself into a corner by exposing the son of the heroine to the gas but wanting a happy ending.

I also listened to "River God" by Wilbur A. Smith. I enjoyed this tale of ancient Egypt very much although would have liked more detail. Since the story was abridged to only 4.5 hours on audio, I think I will try to obtain a full hardcover version. I would also be interested in learning more about the real events surrounding the Hyksos invasion and the acquisition of the wheel and steel technologies by the ancient Egyptians.

Technology:

I am continuing my search for a decent text-to-speech product to ease my eye strain. I ordered Lernout & Hauspie's Madison product but was very disappointed in the speech quality - very robotic. I was also irritated that when I emailed their tech support to see if it would be compatible with the more natural sounding voice databases developed for the MBROLA project they said the Madison product was really a discontinued product and they had made no improvements in it since 1997. They certainly don't mention that on their web page! One of my web searches turned up another company called Fonix that produces a product called Accuvoice. They sent me a thirty-day demo (for an outrageous shipping fee of $15) . The synthesized speech is a definite improvement over Madison and provides the capability to correct the pronunciation of words or names which I really liked. The personal version retails for $99. However, I have now found another program called ReadPlease that is available with minimum features for free (capable of reading up to 16,000 bits) and full featured for $49.95. I think it's voices are even slightly better than Accuvoice and the full version includes the ability to modify word pronunciations (Although it did a better job of pronouncing names like Gaius Marius right from the get-go than Accuvoice), record output to a wave file, edit web pages (I don't know why that is included - html pages are only text so any text editor, even Notepad, can be used to edit web pages), and read any size document (without the 16,000 bit limitation). I wish I could get the free MBROLA engine to install because I really like the sound of their US female and British male voices but every time I try to install it, the install fails at 68% claiming my Temp directory may be too full. I have deleted everything out of my temp directory so I know this is not the problem but no one has answered my email requests for assistance.

I have always wanted to include sound elements in my web pages but have been reluctant to do so because of slow download times. After reading a post on the Adobe GoLive discussion list about converting .wav files to .mp3 files to improve download times for embedded sound in a web page, I attempted to follow the recommendation. I went up on ZDnet and downloaded Media Jukebox, an MP3 encoder with a five star rating. Then I opened a 60k 8bit, 11,025 Hz mono .wav file of a helicopter rotor beat and selected Tools, convert, and selected the internal .mp3 option. I was told the file was converted but when I tried to play it back, I just heard a shriek. So I went back up on ZDnet and downloaded Simple MP3 to try it. This time I got an error message that the file was not a 16 bit file. So, I loaded the file into Sound Forge XP and saved it out as a 16 bit file and tried it again in Media Jukebox. This time it played but way too fast. I noticed that Media Jukebox's speed setting is based on k/bits and only goes down to 32, which is three times faster than my sample clip. I had also noticed Sound Forge XP gave me the option to save the clip as a Real Audio file so I thought I would try that instead. I successfully converted the clip to an .rm file and noticed that it was as small (16k) as the MP3 file so I finally was making some progress.

Then I launched GoLive and noticed that even basic plugins like Real Player are not automatically installed. The manual said to run the plug-in setup program and specify the GoLive plugins folder as a target for the installation but when I reran RealPlayer 7's setup program, it did not give me the option to choose a plugin location. The manual also mentioned I could just copy plugin items from Netscape's plugin folder into GoLive's plugin folder but when I opened Netscape's plugin folder and saw all the multiple files in there I was hesitant. I finally called Adobe's tech support and they suggested I go ahead and copy everything from my Netscape plugins folder into GoLive's plugins folder. I did and GoLive would then crash everytime I tried to launch it. I told tech support I really only wanted the Real Audio plugin so they figured out which .dll file was the plugin for Real Audio and I deleted all of the others. GoLive was once again functional. Then they instructed me to insert a plugin object from the basic palette then see if, when I specified audio as the Mime type, Real Audio would appear as the plugin type in the plugin inspector and it worked. I figured we were finally cooking with gas. I specified my converted .rm file as the source, set the mime type to audio (and Real Audio automatically appeared as the plugin), then gave the clip a name on the More tab. I held my breath and clicked Preview and it worked. My ultimate goal, however, was to trigger the sound from an action. I had an image in a floating box that was set to trigger a Set Image URL action on mouseclick rather than have the sound autoplay. I deselected the autostart attribute in the plugin inspector then I added the Multimedia action to the image to play sound and specified the name of my clip. However, when I clicked the image, the Set Image URL would trigger but I heard no sound. I got a call back from Adobe and the support technician told me the play sound action is designed for Quicktime clips but not for other types of plugins. He suggested I try Beatnik's third party plugin and related third party GoLive Action available at http://www.golivehq.com which I will endeavor to do whenI have time. My only reservation is that Beatnik is not as ubiquitous as Real Audio and most users will be prompted to install Beatnik rather than hear my sounds.

In an effort to encourage other history enthusiasts to assist me with the programming for my virtual Julius Caesar, I joined Ancient Sites, a free online community for people interested in ancient history, and created a link to my Caesar on my web page there (http://www.ancientsites.com/~Libitina_Antonius/) Virtual communities such as AncientSites (http://www.ancientsites.com) are built around a core interest (in this case ancient history) and provide members with the opportunity to create an online persona (complete with theme-based graphical avatars), customize their own "homesite" (which includes the Entry, the Courtyard, a Library, and a Study) with text and a collection of provided graphics or with the member's own graphics (through an upload utility), post to topic-based discussion bulletin boards, create trivia questions for group competitions, participate in "Best Homes" competitions, access a list of recommended links, receive e-mail or engage in an online chat with other members, and design and upload web pages to supplement their Homesite. Obviously this concept is far more complex than a text only interface like MuseNet but it is provided free to the internet community at large by Cybersites. A theme-based community helps to focus the discussions and visiting other users' homesites provides points of reference to initiate dialogues with other members, especially if they have customized their homesites with objects representing their personal interests. For example, as a new member of Ancient Sites I was anxious to discuss ancient history with other enthusiasts but wasn't quite sure how to begin a relationship with people I didn't know. I'm sure young students would probably share my feelings. So, As a "citizen of ancient Rome", I started out by visiting the Homesites of other "citizens of Rome". One member had decorated their Homesite with an example of Greco-Roman mummy portraits from the Faiyum region of Egypt. I am particularly interested in this art form and left a message requesting information as to where they observed the painting and shared links I had found that included images of other portraits and a discussion of the encaustic painting process.

I explained my virtual Julius Caesar project and requested suggestions for questions, responses, and web page references that I could include in his programming. I think this use of artificial intelligence software to recreate historical personalities could be an engaging learning activity for middle to high school students as well as adults so I wanted to see if I could encourage participation in this type of collaborative project. I haven't had too many takers yet but I am hopeful that with my development of new relationships, my new colleagues will feel more comfortable about making an intellectual contribution.