Movies: As longtime fans of Clint Eastwood, we had to make the obligatory trek down to see his latest film "Space Cowboys". It was a pleasant film and well crafted, as expected with Eastwood's experience and dexterity in the medium acquired from years in the business. The geriatric humor made us smile, especially those of us who have reached an age where our doctors prefer us to eat nearly tasteless food and drink beverages that almost taste like they have indeed been strained through an item of underwear. The plot was a bit predictable, with its required scenes of men with drooping flesh struggling through physical conditioning and of course the climax where the aging Russian satellite they have been sent to repair is not equipped as they were led to believe. But all in all it was enjoyable. My favorite Eastwood movie in a modern setting is still "In The Line of Fire". In that film, his age is part of his charaterization and woven into the plot as a device to build tension. Of course John Malkovitch plays the quintessential psychopath and worthy adversary for Eastwood's considerable talents. My favorite Eastwood western remains "The Outlaw Josey Wales". It has action, a moral message and subtle humor in just the right combination. Even though I have seen it a number of times, the late Chief Dan George's character makes me chuckle every time and Eastwood's line "Dying ain't much of a living boy" is just about as well known as Harry Calahan's "Make my day" .

This week we went to Dennis Quaid's latest film, "Frequency". It was a real seat gripper from beginning to end. It took several hours for my adrenaline level to ease off after watching this movie. The plot revolves around the supernatural effects of solar flares that occur thirty years apart and enable Quaid's character's son to communicate across the thirty years to a father that has been dead for all that time. The son tells his long dead father, a fireman killed in a warehouse fire, the cause of his death and the father is able to make a different decision when called out to fight the warehouse fire and is not killed. But the plot thickens when the son tries to call his mother and she no longer exists. It turns out that she has become a victim of the Nighingale murderer because she went to work as usual instead of staying home that day because of the death of her husband. The son is a homicide detective so the race is on, with the help of his father in the past, to find the serial killer before his mother can become a victim. I always love time travel stories and this one is absolutely outstanding. The plot reminds me of "Time Cop" but with the quality of the screenplay reminicent of "The Sixth Sense". I see the screenplay is written by Toby Emmerich. Hopefully, we'll see a lot more from this young man.

I actually enjoyed "Time Crock" as my son calls it, even though there were major plot inconsistencies like "What happened to the vessel that transported Jean-Claude VanDamme back to the past?" I just ignored that issue and enjoyed the story. I used a clip from "Time Cop" in my final project for a class I took in multimedia design. I devised a Sci-Fi Jeopardy game that rewarded players giving the correct answer with clips from the film upon which the question was based. If they answered incorrectly, they had to solve a puzzle to get back to the main menu to select another category. I developed a question about the movie "Stargate" and if they couldn't answer the question they were faced with a series of symbols and had to select the sixth symbol in the sequence to open the Stargate. One puzzle showed a short clip of the opening sequence of Twilight Zone in which the viewer is told they have crossed over into the Twilight Zone and are told that somewhere on the page is a hidden button to escape. The viewer was presented with a totally black screen and had to click all over hoping to find the linked hotspot to return them to the main menu.

That was back in the days before zip disks so I had to create a video clip that contained enough material to be recognizable from a particular film but still fit on a floppy disk to transport to and from my class. I had to cut the color depth to 8 bit, reduce the screen size to 1/8 screen, drop the frame rate to 12 frames per second, select a video codec with a high compression ratio then judiciously edit the sequence frame by frame. For my question about Time Cop, I selected the climax where the evil politician "meets" himself and, with a shove from VanDamme, collides with himself, dissolving into a shrieking bloody mass. There were actually enough cutaways in that sequence that I was able to reduce the scene to 45 seconds of its "pure" essence.

This week I received the DVD special edition of Julie Taymor's "Titus", a combination modern/historic retelling of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus". It was definitely an "art" film and not something the general public would understand or probably appreciate. My husband, a pretty traditional kind of guy, asked me if someone was smoking dope when they made that picture. I found the costuming and imagery very creative. The modernistic riveted Roman military attire was unique with its metal crest replacing the traditional horse hair. The riveted steel sculpture of the Roman wolf's head and curial chair in the Senate was intriguing and the Hitlerian appearance of the emperor hardly an accident. Taymor also got her point across about the automatonic nature of the military in her opening funeral scene with each soldier walking stiffly like a windup toy. I also thought I glimpsed shades of Leni Reifenstahl, producer of Hitler's propoganda masterpiece, "Triumph of the Will", in the staging of some sequences. However, I'm afraid I must admit I, personally, would have preferred a more historical rendition. I also found the bizarre "Sweeny Todd" climax seemed to me to place old Andronicus totally out of character. I did find Angus MacFadyen , as Lucius, very attractive. He exudes a strength of character tempered with integrity befitting a commander and ruler. In fact, he would have made another excellent Maximus if Russell Crowe had been unavailable for Ridley Scott's "Gladiator". I did not realize that MacFadyen also played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart until I read his filmography. I will have to study his performance in Braveheart more closely when I receive the DVD I have on preorder next month.

I finally had the chance to see the TNT original movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley". This chronicle of the development of the microcomputer and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates rise to fame was really quite revealing. Steve Jobs has always been quite a a skilled manipulator of public relations. I'm sure many Macintosh enthusiasts believed that he was the inspired leader of the creative team that developed the revolutionary new operating system featuring the innovative graphical user interface. Most of us in the profession already knew Jobs simply confiscated the work from a very talented young team at Xerox. Xerox, like IBM during that period, was dominated by stiff, ultra-conservative power brokers who were accustomed to providing extremely expensive technology to corporate America. There were no end users at that time, just glassed-in menageries of code writers who could instruct the behemoth mainframes to spit out reams of lined paper filled with tables of data. So, they saw no value in the concept of a user-friendly computing environment because they saw no reason the average individual would need or want their own personal computer. Xerox's upper management practically handed it to Jobs on a platter.

I think another misconception is that Jobs' MacIntosh team was like a happy family. In reality, if the film is totally accurate, Jobs may know what the public is looking for in the way of technological development but he was about the absolute worst manager or colleague anyone could hope to have. The film depicted his verbal abuse of his employees, publicly degrading them in spite of their endurance of outrageous hours, many working over 90 hours per week. His personal relationships were not much better. He refused to acknowledge the paternity of his first daughter for years although he would try to interject himself into her life. He tore Apple apart by engendering extreme competition between the developers of the MacIntosh and employees producing the earlier Apple II line.

Bill Gates portrayal wasn't particularly flattering either. He was portrayed as a driven, ruthless individual which is no surprise since he has never been an auteur of public relations. He seems to have lived life from the perspective of "fortune favors the bold" and seemed to be a master of the "bluff". I would certainly never attempt to play poker with him. The only thing about his portrayal that surprised me was his rather irresponsible streak. In one scene, his nervous energy is getting the better of him and he and a friend are driving around late at night. He sees two crawler tractors parked at a construction site. He jumps out of the car runs over to them and sees that they still have the keys in them. He climbs up on one of them and starts it up and begins careening around the construction site wildly. Soon his friend follows his lead and gets on the other tractor and it looks like they are enjoying some wild carnival ride. They even accidentally sideswipe their car which is just borrowed from another friend, Paul Allen. The next day Paul confronts Bill about the damage to his car and Bill is not the least bit concerned or remorseful.

Two comparative scenes that were particularly revealing were the depiction of each group "ripping off" the technology that would make them famous. In the first instance, Steve Jobs tells his development team as they walk up to the entrance of the Xerox research facility "Pablo Picasso once said a good artist copies, a great artist steals!". Later in the film, when Steve Jobs invites Bill Gates and his team to visit their MacIntosh development facility, Gates turns to his group just before entering the building and says "Somone once said 'A good artist copies, a great artist steals!'" One of Gates colleagues asks him who said it and Gates replies "I don't know - some artist!". Each entrepreneur had absorbed the lesson from the quote but Jobs made a point of remembering who he was quoting because someone always gives the appearance of superior intellect if he can quote a famous individual and provide an accurate reference. Gates was less concerned with his public appearance than the bottom line of the message. Of course, with this particular quote a founding principle of the microcomputer industry, it is obvious where the prevailing attitude about intellectual property originated.

Readings:

I am still listening to the unabridged audio version of Antonia Fraser's "The Warrior Queens". I found the passage about the Palmyran queen Zenobia interesting. Unlike Cleopatra, she submitted herself to the humiliation of a Roman triumph and lived to perpetuate her bloodline by eventually marrying a Roman senator and giving birth to a long line of aristocrats. I found the chapter on Mathilde of Tuscany a little more distasteful primarily because it illustrated how religious belief has been wantonly manipulated for political purposes over the centuries. I still have four more tapes to go before I can move on to a little less serious fiction. I finally obtained a copy of Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" which I am looking forward to "reading" and a copy of Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods". I have never read any of Pratchett's work, since, with the rare exception of Piers Anthony's "On A Pale Horse", I seldom read fantasy. But Pratchett was highly recommended by a friend I met up at Ancient Sites so I'll give it a go.

While researching web sites for my virtual Caesar project, I stumbled across an excellent source of historical novels, texts, and activity books for children. A family-owned bookstore that caters to homeschoolers, The Greenleaf Press (http://www.greanleafpress.com), offers a wonderful variety of books on ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt including fiction for children of all ages. The owners of Greenleaf expressed a concern that too much history is taught as a jumble of events out of sequence and without the humanistic approach of viewing history through the eyes of people who actually lived it. I agree with that perception, as evidenced by my efforts to recreate historical personalities with artificial intelligence software. So, I browsed their catalogue with high expectations and was not disappointed. I love the art of popup books and found one for both Rome and Greece. My sister had mentioned seeing one about ancient Greece at B. Dalton's bookstore in the mall but by the time I had a few spare minutes to go over to the mall and check on it I couldn't find it. So, I was thrilled to find the museum-art quality books at Greenleaf. I also ordered several color books drawn from classical art including one featuring Alexander the Great who will probably be featured in one of my future virtual historical personality projects. I was intrigued by a beautifully illustrated retelling of the Illiad entitled "Black Ships Before Troy" by Rosemary Sutcliff as well. The book's artist was the same illustrator for the 1991 rerelease of "The Lord of the Rings". Sadly, I notice from Amazon's author's notes that Sutcliff has apparently died although she left a wealth of novels as her legacy.

I also noticed an article this week that said Harvard's Loeb Classical Library is releasing new translations of ancient manuscripts that restore the works to their original uncensored content. I welcome this news since I have found trying to read translations by early English writers is as challenging (and often as boring) as trying to read Chaucer. The early scholars' prudish efforts to disguise or omit bawdy references are exasperating. And, since so many scholars from the early periods were monks or at least subject to the harsh scrutiny of intolerant religious zealots, I don't even trust that the translations are accurate either. So, I welcome this news although I still retain a bit of skepticism since Loeb has been renowned for its conservatism.

Technology: My quest for virtual character building software has been rewarded. I reevaluated a product I had looked at a year ago produced by Zabaware, Inc. called Ultra Hal Representative. What a difference a year makes! Besides the fact that the price ($325) of the commercial version of the software is far more reasonable than either Artificial Life or Extempo, I find it really exciting that this product has the capability to include any HTML tag in its responses so they can, in effect, include animations, embedded video and sound, etc. really exciting.

To try out the program, I created a virtual Cleopatra, (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/cleopatra.html), using their free hosted version of the software. Using the free version of their software, the editing tools are all web-based. You simply login to their server with your assigned username and password and the editing options are displayed for your account. The editing process, too, is very simple. They provide three boxes for you to enter three questions. You just type in a question and it is automatically indexed for keywords. I really like the idea of just entering questions rather than editing a cryptic script file. This method is so intuitive that it could be used much more easily by nonprogrammers in a student or class project.

When I create the questions, I try to use different nouns and verbs with each one to expand the pool of indexed keywords for that response. For example, in editing Cleopatra's "brain" I created a response for:

Question 1: Can you read hieroglyphs?

Question 2: Do you know how to translate heiroglyphics?

Questions 3: How many languages do you speak?

Then I asked her "Can you speak any languages besides your native Greek?" and she answered correctly. She must have picked out the keywords "languages" and "speak" even though they were not even in the same left to right sequence. Very impressive. With the Alife product I have to create separate entries for each pattern. *speak* *language* or *language* *speak* unless the topic itself is language then I can enter just *speak*. Hieroglyphs would have to be another separate topic section and I would have to enter the misspelling, heiroglyphics, in the filter table to trap for it. I also tested her with language (singular) and she still found the correct match. With the Alife product I must also enter wildcards to compensate for plural usage or enter a plural to singular filter in the filter table.

Since Ultrahal has DHTML capabilities and can display advanced web page formatting,, I open Adobe GoLive to create a miniweb page for the responses that involve more advanced web objects so I can use GoLive's advanced authoring capabilities without trying to hand code the response directly into the Ultrahal response box. I create the response with embedded graphics, bulleted lists, etc. then simply copy everything within the <body> section of the source code and paste it into the Ultrahal response editor.

Cleopatra also loads much faster than my original Caesar based on the Alife product. Also, because of the dynamic HTML nature of her design I can edit her "brain" on the fly without loading and unloading the bot engine at the server console like I have to do with the Alife product. With the free version, since Zabaware runs the server portion on their server, there is also nothing to configure. With the Alife product I had to install the software, identify which ports were available then edit both the commserver and bot engine .ini files, copy the graphics to the appropriate folders, etc. Of course the commercial version of Ultrahal would require server installation and configuration but the free version would be adequate for creating virtual tutors for individual courses. The main limitation of the free version is an inability to adjust the activation levels for some responses and the limit of .5 Mb of space for the knowledgebase. However, the knowledgebase is composed of text so .5Mb is quite a bit of text.

Zabaware also lets you select how much of their "built-in" brain you wish to use. A common complaint by users of Virtual Personalities verbot software is that you can't override her preprogrammed internal responses. Zabaware addresses this issue quite nicely.

I had hoped to use graphics from Impressions Games' titles Pharaoh and Cleopatra. Especially since I noted their own site linked to fansites that featured copyrighted graphics from their games. However, my request was denied because the games themselves were not the subject of my site. Impressions Games' representative did compliment me on the creative nature of my project however and wished me well. As it turns out, it was just as well. I searched other academic sources and found an anatomical reconstruction of the historical Cleopatra based on the analysis of physical structures depicted on coinage of the time. This image would be far more instructional than a glamourous image based on Hollywood mythology anyway.

Because I had received reports that too many academic members of Ancient Sites were using Macs and older versions of the Netscape browser so were not able to converse successfully with Caesar (the Alife product is java-based and javascript was not properly implemented in the Mac version of the Netscape browser before the release of version 4.7), I have begun converting Caesar over to the new Zabaware software. (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/caesarimperator.html) . However, I quickly discovered I needed to turn off the internal Zabaware brain entirely because every time I tried to program a response about Pompey the Great, the word "great" triggered the inappropriate response "I think you're great too" and I could not seem to override it. The capaiblity to turn off the internal "brain" is selected under the Account Options.

I received my Adobe GoLive 5.0 upgrade and was surprised to see that the entire menu interface has been redesigned to emulate the menus of other Adobe products like Photoshop. Fortunately, I am experienced with Photoshop and recognized the structure so I didn't flounder too much. I am pleased that it seems to have corrected a problem I had consistently encountered with GoLive 4.0. On my Sony workstation at home running Windows 98 initial release and equipped with 160 Mb of Ram, I was running out of Windows resources after working for only about fifteen minutes. It was very annoying to have to reboot my system so often when working on a large project. Other Windows users of the product had voiced the same complaint on the GoLive discussion list. I installed GoLive 5.0 on my home workstation yesterday and have worked on it for two days without requiring a reboot in the middle of a session.

I also took advantage of the offer to buy Adobe LiveMotion for only $99 with a GoLive Upgrade. LiveMotion is Adobe's competitive response to Macromedia's Flash animation authoring tool. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet so will report on my impressions in a later journal. I did read an interesting article comparing LiveMotion with Flash at: http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/8171.html .