The book is well written.  It was enjoyable without the need to mentally tie it into the images of the movie, and there is nuance added to the thoughts and movements of the characters that was built from the movie.  Either lots of originality, or lots of watching scenes over and over again (I’ll assume some of both) to catch tons of detail that I missed in the theater.  So, I give the adaptation a thumbs up.

But, I’m just left with an overall negative impression of so much of the Star Trek “canon” of work.  This, of course, is no judgement on Mr. Foster’s work on this book but more of a disappointment in the lack of vision or coherence with the whole Star Trek universe.  ”Franchise coherence loss” is prone to happen when the creator of the series leaves us and the franchise continues to be developed by others.  Star Wars, in contrast, continues to be the vision of George Lucas and is tightly controlled.  Say what you will about the quality of the story, but the database of characters and events maintains its integrity across decades of movies, books, and television.

Star Trek suffers from the loss of original vision.  Sometimes a franchise continues by a single person or family member that keeps the vision and history intact (think “Lord of the Rings”, or “James Bond”).  In the case of Star Trek, the ownership passed from Gene Roddenberry to Paramount Pictures to dozens of others, each seemingly eager to plant their personal imprint on the vision.  We’ve gone through the original series, the next generation, the outpost of Deep Space Nine, the wayward Voyager, the television reboot to the first Enterprise, and now a film reboot to replace all the actors with young sexy ones.  Along the way we’ve had to deal with mind bending developments like “Q”, the Borg, the science of warp drive destroying the environment, navigable wormholes, Kirk living in some twisting Roman Candle, star ships that crash on planets, star ships that can land on planets, and of course the Enterprise which cannot take of or land but seems to be built on Earth.

But nothing hurts my continuity of Star Trek more than the endless series of time traveling adventures leaving behind them a wake of broken history.  The shame of it is that we’ve seen Star Trek use time travel with great positive impact.  The City on the Edge of Forever is a brilliant piece of work, and for 1960′s television a great piece of acting and production as well.  Star Trek 4 had great humorous moments without altering our understanding of the future events of Star Trek.

This story, of course, leaves giant muddy footprints across the library of the Federation.  Vulcan no longer exists, Romulus is informed of a future, violent end, and legions of terrorists now know about a mysterious red goo that can cause a black hole.  Just the Vulcan issue alone throws away tons of known adventures, including Amok Time which established so much of our understanding of the Vulcan people.   For the new Star Trek fan (new with this movie), I’m sure all is fine.  They know that in the future we apparently give starships to crews of 24 year olds with six-pack abs who get to chase future mini-skirts across the galaxy.  But for old-timers like me someone talking about Star Trek makes me ask “which one, original, real old, old, kind of new, or new?”.

Commentary on The Phantom, as published in The Washington Post, February 7, 2012.  

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 to 1 lime
• Ice cubes
• 2 ounces rum, preferably gold or dark (I used Bacardi black label)
• 1/2 ounce gin (he says option, I say not.  I used Beefeaters)
• Coca-Cola, chilled
• 2 dashes Arigostura bitters

Squeeze the lime into a Collins glass, drop in the lime rind.  Add 3 or 4 cubes.  Add run and gin, then fill with Coca-Cola.  Add bitters and stir.

You can find out about Jason Wilson at http://jasonwilson.com.

Life is a series of connected memories, and the best ones are the simple ones you can think about again and again and they are always enjoyable.

Discussion here in an open LinkedIn group: http://tinyurl.com/7ew8aje

Maybe this is really for my technical journal, but its really about bad questions and business decisions.

Lyle Schofield • The original article, like much of the criticism of M/MUMPS, is the usual apples and oranges comparison. M/MUMPS is being compared with a database management system like Oracle or MySQL. MUMPS is a source code for logic expression that creates the illusion of a database management system because of its persistence of data, but does not have the features associated with DBMS of meta-data and relationship structure. So, a comparison of MUMPS to a database as in the original article is like a comparison of Spanish to the Dictionary; they are serving different purposes and aren’t directly comparable (but maybe seem that way because they both have “words”).

The original post here then takes this to the “should we replace MUMPS in EHRs”. I would answer this with “who cares”? Does anyone ask what the source code for Microsoft Word? Quicken? Halo? We’re purchasing applications with functional points, and the important question is whether the product has those functional points.

I suppose the reason we ask these things of healthcare apps (and maybe more generically enterprise apps) is because they don’t satisfy all our functional points, and we know we’re going to need to hire some systems integrators and database people to abstract and convert data, and now we care about the underlying database technology. Back to the linked article, this now gets into the more interesting (to me) place of the business drivers for this. As a builder of IT products, I’ve learned that the most important consideration in the technology choice is what technologies do I or my company know? Trying to turn a Microsoft programmer into a Linux developer is a huge productivity hit. As a former manager of purchased applications I need to find people that can get me the data I need from a limited enterprise product. If the only choices are a small number of boutique shops I’d be worried.

Resource availability is a really important thing to consider, but its pretty far removed from “can you build an EHR in M/MUMPS”. Epic and others seem to have done a fine job building successful products in this technology, so there’s the answer. The fact that some perceive the platforms for some products as limited is more of a sign that the vendor strategy doesn’t include local customization, someone didn’t do a complete job aligning their needs with their purchase, or maybe someone needs more experience in the technology. You can write anything in anything if you want to I suppose. We used to all program in assembler at some point, didn’t we?

And, my opinion doesn’t matter, the market will decide which technologies are viable. I think a lot of the MUMPS criticism is based on old versions of the standard, InterSystems and others have done a fine job adding functionality past the standard into current needs BASIC is hardly the same thing it was in 1980, too. The VA is big, but not big enough to keep MUMPS afloat on its own; the fed was pushing ADA at one point – remember that one? The market controls all.

(background – used to develop in MUMPS a lot, but not in many years at this point.)

Anyway, Guitar Squid has this little YouTube link (audio only) to him talking about a rare opportunity to explore original Beatle’s master tapes. A great story, and it closes with the great sound that reminds us why the Beatles are where they are in music history.

Really think through your on-line life. I’m old enough to remember that embarrassing moments were just moments. Sometimes remembered, but rarely recorded. In the era of internet connect cameras in our pockets, we’re leaving an electronic trail behind us in everything we do. The conclusion is that we’ll all end up regretting a lot of posting and pictures, or we’ll have a society with no sense of shame. They are both bad endings.

Feels like this article was sent to me from people hearing me mutter at my desk.

Woot seems a little ornery today.

You can never have enough coffee mugs, that’s what I always say.  I wooted a few, in case I forget to get someone something for Christmas.

I love the caption on their picture, by the way.  If you don’t regularly shop on Woot, you should at least go there once in a while to read their ad copy each day.  Their writers have both a great sense of humor and way too much time on their hands.

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This is hysterical.  I need to get a dog.