Author Archives: bluedepth

Zooroona's

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Last night we tried Zooroona’s. It’s owned by the same people who own Tiffany’s and Saffron, the high-quality Indian Restaurant. I went on an invitation by my friend, Jeramiah. Zooroona’s caters to Middle Eastern and Arabic cuisines and we started out with Turkish Coffee. It was hot and curiously strong and served in a demitasse cups. We were supposed to have an apparizer called ‘batata’ but our server forgot it off our order. I ordered Chicken Schwarma and Miah got Beef with Figs. I have to admit that the food we got was top-notch. It was everything I was expecting and the garlic aioli was perhaps the most delicious spread I’ve ever had in my life. It was amazing. We ended with dessert, a piece of baklava for me and an unusual cake/mozzarella pastry for Miah. The food value was well worth it and I’m really looking forward to coming back. I can easily overlook the botched appetizer order, with service and food being so good.

This helps restore my faith that there are some restaurants hehe in Kalamazoo that are worthy. Overall rating 9/10. Only ding was forgotten order.

B'witched Deli

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We decided to try something new and went to the B’witched Deli on West Main.

We were welcomed warmly by the fellow manning the checkout area and he was extremely engaging.

I had the Adam Bomb sandwich and Scott had the White Russian sandwich. The quality of the food was excellent, the ingredients were honest and the waffle fries were just perfect.

The restaurant is clean and orderly, the staff are exceptionally nice and the food is very good.

I give B’Witched a 10/10. Good job!

Cleverness is Punishable

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Chock one up in the oops column. This whole past week I’ve been yarking at OIT to put my Savin Copier on an access control list for our plain-jane SMTP server here on campus. Through a labyrinth of miscommunication it turns out the task was done in December 2009, but I didn’t learn of that fact until a week ago, somewhat through 2011! Oh well, bygones. So now I have my copier set up to send email and yesterday I started to clean my office.

Let me repeat that bit. I. CLEANED. MY. OFFICE.

Yes, that’s right. God help us all. So I started putting order into the bitter waters of the chaotic sea. Mostly it was sorting wheat and chaff. There is only a bit of wheat (the mac stuff) in comparison to the chaff (everything else). Mostly it was sorting legacy bullshit into legacy bullshit containers, so everything with a PS/2 connector, bullshit. Everything that was vogue pre-2005, bullshit. The blizzard of little Blackberry devices? Utter bullshit. So all of it went into boxes, marked with a Sharpie and stacked neat as ya please. I even got a chance to move Frankenserver into the machine room. For those that don’t know, Frankenserver is the nickname I gave to a Mac Mini that is running OS X Snow Leopard, then that runs VirtualBox, which has a Windows 2003 Server image loaded on that. In there is SQL Server 2000 SP4, IIS 6 (or 7, don’t care which) and a copy of our production database’s sample database for training. It’s slow, but it works and I got it done without having to buy a single G-D thing.

Along with all of this meandering malarkey, I also had a giant pile of dead paper that was in a Z-filer on a platform that now supports a rather viney plant. The paper mocks me. It just sits there, dead and cryptic. Yes I could leaf through it, but the minute I do I feel this odd laziness come over me. It would be so much better if all of it was in PDF format and up on Evernote. Frankly my dear, everything ends up in Evernote. I drank the kool-aid, and I liked it. So I got it in my head to pull all the staples out of this paperwork and try out my copier’s new handy-dandy Scan-to-Email which is set to my Evernote Email Address. I loaded up the giant stack and let the ADF chew through it. Voop veep voop veep. I then gathered it all up and threw it in our fancy new “Security Level 4” crosscut shredder. Done and done.

I felt quite satisfied that I had tamed a bit of the paper tiger in my office and confident that what I had scanned was safely stuffed away in my Evernote archive. This morning I opened Evernote and looked through the results. This is where my punishment reigns supreme. A list of files, “FILE 1/5” and when I looked into them, they weren’t PDF’s but 2MB chunks of text! Hells Bells. What had happened was I had scanned so much that the scanner in the copier converted all my PDF files into base64 text files and then split them up into 2MB segments and mailed them out. So there they were, all my files, in a funky format and not very handy to have. I extracted the files, one at a time, renamed them, then used the ‘cat’ command to join them all together in the right order, stripped off the SMTP wrapper at the beginning and fed them all into this neat little command:

openssl base64 -d -in-out

Thanks for this little gem goes to Mac OSX Hints and a fellow named Chris Janton. I knew that openssl did a lot of heavy-lifting in OSX, but not this far! I should have assumed it did. So passing my stupid base64 text chunk into openssl, spit out my hefty PDF files and then I cleaned up Evernote, re-added the hefty PDF files and alls-well-that-ends-well.

Discovering this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my morning, but at least I wasn’t lost on how to fix it. I spent only a bit of time considering what your “average computer user” would have done, and they would have likely just deleted the Evernote bits and declared the entire thing a loss. It’s rather a shame that my estimation for other people’s cleverness with computers is so abysmally low. But that’s another blog post altogether. 🙂

Location, Location, Location!

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People are asking me what I think about the location-gate kerfuffle surrounding Apple. So, it seems an apropos topic to write about here. What exactly is/was Apple doing? It turns out the iPhone 4 was recording cellular tower geographic information and when iTunes backed up the device it also grabbed a file called consolidated.db, which contained latitude and longitude data. The clever and curious started to poke around this data and discovered that the iPhone had data that appeared to indicate where the phone had been and then they mapped the data to make the entire deal visual and accessible by many people who are already very skitterish about location.

Everyone had an immediate attack over this. Claims that Apple was spying on its customers, that it was an invasion of privacy. Claims ranging from the charming right down to the purest of malevolence on Apple’s behalf. Apple noticed the powder keg of negativity that the discovery of consolidated.db brought about and changed iOS to better protect users tender privacy concerns.

Yes, I suppose if you didn’t know the intent and found location data on your phone you might be concerned, but what is this mad rush to the absolute worst possibility? That Apple is spying on you, that it’s collecting location information to use against you? This is the claim of the lazy paranoid with too much time on their hands. What is the value of that data? If you were an international person of mystery and you had grave life-or-death secrets to protect then perhaps you’d have some ground to stand on, but last I checked the average iPhone-toting American leads a very tiny life, unremarkable to anyone at all, and even if it is divulging location, with all the location-based check-in services like FourSquare and Facebook, aren’t you already giving away the keys to your very dull and lame kingdom? I’ll be the first to admit that I fall right into this slot. My life is EXCEPTIONALLY DULL. I travel in circuits that are OBVIOUS and BORING. I’m like a ping-pong ball in a game played with robots that do the same thing every time. I bounce from home to work, from home to Meijers, from home to the comic book store. Boing Boing Boing. What am I protecting? Not a god-damned thing. That’s why I don’t have a problem with online advertisements, tracking cookies, my location leaking out around the edges, or any of that stuff. It’s mind-achingly dull! It runs right along with my feelings of people turning on the iSight camera on my iMac and SPYING ON ME. Knock your socks off! First, I’m not all that pleasant to look at, so that hurts you more than it hurts me, and secondly, what deep dark secrets will you uncover? Perhaps you’ll uncover my most coveted secret of all, that once I develop 5 o’clock shadow I can’t stop itching. There, I’ve saved you all the work and trouble. Dull, isn’t it? Yes. Exceedingly so.

So what is it that people are so worked up about? I think it has more to do with how people want to be seen than actually what is seen. They want to have grand lives full of drama and intrigue, not lives spent planning on how much sour cream to buy tonight to make that one dish come out better this time. It isn’t about what they are protecting, but the image that there is actually something to protect. We are all predictable, regular, non-exceptional, and above all else, magnificently dull creatures! Whatever really awesome specialness we do possess is almost always popping in and out of existence between our ears. Every once in a while we write something down and stuff it away, sometimes we even act on it, but when you take the long view of human behavior it’s more of a dull repetitive machine with little tremors of specialness in between great swaths of inexorably dull events.

So what of Apple’s Location-Gate? Get over yourselves. You aren’t that important. Your lives, frankly, aren’t that interesting. Accept it and move on to the next thing you feel the need to squawk and twitter about ineffectually.

Franco's Sub-Station & Italian Pizzeria

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A few days ago Scott and I followed a recommendation and went to Franco’s Pizzeria in Portage Michigan. This place is very tiny, but has a setting and atmosphere that is really close to what I imagine a pizzeria in NYC would look like. The building it’s housed in is exceptionally, remarkably tiny and the parking is unfortunately very limited.

We ordered a large pizza with extra cheese. The cook time was acceptable and the quality was good. Neither one of us was really impressed however and that may have been because what we ordered was very plain. The total came to about $18 which was right down the middle of the road for what we expected. We likely won’t return, but not because of the food. Mostly for the cramped environment and the parking challenge.

I can’t help but compare this pizzeria with our current favorite place, Erbelli’s. There really isn’t any comparison. Erbelli’s does cost a bit more but I got more of a NYC Pizza experience at Erbelli’s than I did at Franco’s. To be fair, I am not recommending against Franco’s Pizzeria, some people prefer their pizza a certain way and it is well-executed pizza, but it’s just not for us.

Overcast

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While talking to several of my coworkers about the ways I organize my digital life it struck me that I have never detailed the what, the how, and the why. To me organization has set me free. There are only a few places where information is kept and so finding it is just a matter of checking a few places and almost always I can find, or remember, what I need.

Here at Western we have changed our email infrastructure to what is called “WebMail Plus” and I affectionately refer to by the initialism WMP. WMP runs on Zimbra servers out of our ISP in Ann Arbor Michigan and ever since the changeover I’ve never been very comfortable in the new system. I don’t like the web-based interface and I don’t like my email to stay in Ann Arbor for very long if I can help it. It’s purely a personal thing and I don’t expect everyone to have the same resistance to WMP as I have. There is a significant amount of history between me and WMP that goes quite a bit back.To that end, I store my email somewhere else and I store some files in other places as well, depending on where I’ll use them most of all.

Tools

I use these tools in order to better organize my digital world:

  1. Mail.app
    1. The native Mac Mail.app is set to pull in my WMP Mail over the IMAP protocol. This protocol allows me to select the Mail.app interface and bolt it on, covering up the less liked WMP Native website interface. Several key benefits to this are how I can configure all the aspects of Mail.app’s fonts to suit me and make it easier for me to read text. Mail.app also has a Bayesian Filter for identifying Junk Mail. I teach it what is and what isn’t Junk mail and it does a pretty kickass job identifying future Junk and getting it out of my way. The other feature of Mail.app that I have come to rely on is the “Redirect” command. This command allows me to effectively ‘resend’ an incoming email somewhere else as if it was always destined for that other address. This feature is a ‘killer feature’ when combined with other cloud services that I’ll write about further along in this post.
  2. iCal.app
    1. Just as much as I don’t like WMP when it comes to email, I also do not like it when it comes to Calendaring. I prefer to use iCal for my calendaring needs. Thanks to Zimbra’s adherence to standards I can have my cake and eat it too. WMP provides a CalDAV service which I can subscribe to using iCal. Not only can I have my local calendars off my home server subscribed on my iCal, but I can also have my WMP calendars as well.
  3. AddressBook.app
    1. As with iCal, the AddressBook.app application can subscribe to CardDAV Services that WMP provides. With all three in concert I have effectively replaced my need to use the native WMP interface and instead replaced it with a far more friendly Mac-based interface.
  4. Evernote
    1. Evernote is a cloud service that “remembers everything” and is only limited by the amount of information you send to your Evernote system, but not how much material you store there. Each free Evernote account comes with an “Evernote Email Address” that is private to the user and can be the destination of emails and when you do send an email to that address it is just like you have clipped the text directly into Evernote with a client. In this regard, the “Redirect” command and the “Evernote Email Address” are a match made in heaven.
  5. Toodledo
    1. Toodledo is an online cloud-based To Do List manager. There is a website that manages the Toodledo system very well and Toodledo provides a CalDAV compliant feed so I can subscribe my iCal client to my Toodledo task calendar and see everything, including my tasks, on one central iCal calendar. Toodledo also has its own “Toodledo Email Address” that inserts Redirected email into my task list. I can use a shorthand notation in the subject line to enrich the task so that when it is added to my Toodledo system it gets the appropriate context, date, time, and folder. Within Toodledo I have three contexts, Home, Work, and None. I have a gaggle of Folders such as “Email” and “Millennium” and “Personal” and the date system is very flexible. I can write an email to my Toodledo Email Address, set the subject as “Add Files to Folder @work #tomorrow =5pm *email” and the task is created with the body of the incoming email being the attached note of the task and the context is set to Work, the due-date set for 5/6/2011 (tomorrow), the due-time set to 5:00pm and the folder set for Email.
  6. Instapaper
    1. Instapaper also has a “Instapaper Email Address” and anything you send to that address gets queued up in your Instapaper queue. It’s really quite useful if you get a link in your Inbox and want to read it eventually, but not now.
  7. Dropbox
    1. Dropbox is a cloud-based file storage system that synchronizes a folder on every computer or device you use and a central folder stored in the cloud.

Tackling the Email Monster

I’m quite fond of achieving what I like to call Inbox Zero at least once a week, and usually on Friday afternoons. For me, email comes in and usually falls into a few neat categories. There are purely informational emails, such as notices from OIT and advisories about the University Trustees and other WMU news, then there are requests for me to do some sort of task, and then there are email discussions about some sort of running topic. I tackle an inbox that has gone out of control by starting with “low-hanging fruit”. I identify and pitch all the informational emails that I don’t need to note or keep storing. Some of this mail is merely meant to expose me to some news item or some event and after I appreciate the contents, they lose all durable value. For these messages I’ll either mark them as Junk or just delete them. The next level is to identify all the tasks-in-email and redirect them to my Toodledo account. Once they are redirected I delete those from my WMP account as well. All that is left, usually are discussions and “durable value” emails that contain something I really should remember. For the latter I redirect those to Evernote and delete them out of my Inbox. The rest are conversations and usually I won’t keep a lot of these floating around anyways. Once I send a reply the entire conversation is pretty well “backed up” in my Sent Items and so there is little point to keep old conversational emails that I don’t need anymore. Any emails that remain I look at and decide if they are conversations, tasks, or something I need to remember. I keep on whittling down on the pile until I run out of Inbox messages. Some people will note that I’m just playing a cup-game with my emails in Evernote. On Sunday I start organizing my Evernote into folders and let all that information build up there. Because Evernote is bottomless I don’t really care how much information I stuff into it since I can pretty much search text and folders to find anything I might need later on. Another hidden gem is that all of these services, Instapaper, Evernote, and Toodledo all have really great iOS apps for both iPhone and iPad, so I can manage everything on any device I like any time I like. I’ve been known to knock several emails out while waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting for a movie to start at the cinema. Every bit helps and if you are vigilant you can whittle all your Inbox down to size and then get into a habit of keeping it that way.

Cloud Data Storage: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

Another need I’ve found is to store data in an easily accessible way between many devices. I have an iPhone, and iPad, a MacBook, a iMac and a Mac Mini. There is always a need for me to keep a certain set of files available on each device. It makes life easier to have them conveniently located and every single machine having the right set of files no matter what. Dropbox suits this need very well. For run-of-the-mill data Dropbox can’t be beat for convenience sake. There is however a problem when it comes to security. Dropbox is secure, but they are vulnerable to search and seizure orders from the government and so they *can* break security on your files in order to comply with a government action. There are some files that I really would like to have available, but I really don’t want to risk having these files exposed. If I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of compatibility (really secure use of Dropbox precludes iOS devices) I have a way to secure files even from Dropbox itself, while still making use of their syncing services. Here’s how you do it. Dropbox is a free service and they kick in 2 gigabytes worth of storage. On a Mac open up Disk Utility, create an AES-256 encrypted sparsebundle disk image file and save it to your Dropbox. Put a nice long password on it and don’t save that password to your Mac’s Keychain system (that makes it really secure, because the password is just in your head) and then you can have your cake and eat it too. The disk image file can be mounted by any Mac computer, you have to type in your access password to mount it. Even if Dropbox were to ship the file to a third-party for analysis the file’s AES-256 encryption (at the moment) ensures that the data within the file is safe. The neat thing about a sparsebundle with Mac computers is that a sparsebundle can be assigned a maximum size, say one gigabyte, and if you only fill it with say 200 megabytes worth of data then the disk image itself isn’t one gigabyte, but instead right around 200 megabytes. The sparsebundle is a lot like a bellows, it expands to contain only the data it needs to. It has a capacity of whatever high-water-mark you’ve set it up for, but it’s efficient in that it only takes up what it’s contents need versus a standard disk image which is a monolithic file. Another neat part of sparsebundle images is that you can issue a rather straightforward CLI command to compact them if you’ve removed data from them. That command is:

“hdiutil compact image.sparsebundle”

So even if a sparsebundle were temporarily carrying a big bulge of data, you can get the storage back out of it by running this command. It’s quite neat and tidy. The only thing that would seal the deal is if the sparsebundles would automatically compact themselves on-the-fly, but even with this command you can still quite enjoy having your cake and eating it too. As it turns out, every removable device I own has an encrypted sparsebundle file stored on it. This is the best way that I know how to have the convenience of this sort of technology and the peace of mind to know that if you lose it, nobody but you can make sense of the contents.

I hope that this makes sense to you all. I’ve found this entire procedure to be quite effective and useful and makes organizing my life much simpler and less burdensome. Perhaps it can do the same for you! 🙂

Furry Mystery

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Just finished a phone consultation with our vet in regards to our youngest male cat, Griffin’s odd behavior. We put him on a 14 day series of Zeniquin antibiotic and that helped him out, and yesterday I noticed we’re starting to see a similar set of behaviors from Griffin. He will visit his litterbox and urinate just a little and then leave, 10 minutes later he’ll be back. It doesn’t happen all the time, and sometimes he urinates more, at least from what I’ve been seeing in the litterbox. The vet said that his X-Rays are clean, pH is right, and there aren’t any blockages or crystals. The vet suggested that we try some bladder-health supplements that might help correct what amounts in the end to being both pee-shy and having a nervous bladder. Griffin’s behavior is completely normal, no pain, no struggling, and no accidents. We’re going to go the supplement route and see how we do. The last thing I want for him is another overnight at the hospital and the dead last thing I want is surgery. One thing that did occur to me is changing the litter type. We have a continuous odor control litter and this problem may be linked to that in some way, perhaps going to a low-dust type would be better. We’ll have to see.

Having a sick pet is worse by far than a sick kid. At least you can talk to a kid and get a clear list of symptoms. All you get with a pet is a head-nudge and staring. I keep on having this recurring fantasy of being able to scan Griffin with a Tricorder. Too much Star Trek dammit. 🙂

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color Review

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Today I got a chance to sit down in private with a Nook Color from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and give it a thorough try. After I’ve used the device for about half an hour, I have many good things and some not-so-good things to say about the device.

The Good

  • The device is small, but not too small. It most resembles a paperback book and that’s both a pleasing shape and comfortable in the hands.
  • The resolution of the display is sharp and crisp, there was very little eye strain.
  • The charger is a standard wall-wart and the plug is a universal mini-flat USB cable. I give B&N mad props for not reinventing some awkward or fragile interface and going with an industry standard.
  • Touch sensitivity is a welcome feature from the original Nook device. The entire screen is touch-sensitive and that goes very far in making the device very person friendly
  • Buttons are where I expect them and function well, except for one which ends up being in the bad column.
  • Apps allowed to work in the background was a nice surprise, also the notification system was pleasant after I noticed how it worked, being in the lower left corner of the display.
  • The keyboard click is surprisingly clean and very crisp. That was a very nice surprise and very good feedback.
  • You can download ePub books from the Internet. I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales. The device opened the ePub book competently and all the features of reading a book worked as I expected them to.
  • Being able to add extended storage via the SD card was a pleasant surprise.

The Bad

  • The Volume Buttons on the right side appear to be too close together. This presents a volume control issue. When I pressed the + Volume button the volume went up, but if I pressed it again, the volume went down. I think it’s because the two buttons, for volume up and for volume down are too close together or the rocker has been damaged by too much use.
  • The keyboard is both too laggy and too sensitive. When I get to entering web addresses I find myself typing in wwww accidentally. Also, related to this problem is the Search bar. When I touch on Search to look for something I notice the Nook volunteers the last searched item, this is fine, but when I go to tap on the X on the right to clear the field, the keyboard expands and pushes the X up and out of the way. Unless you are very watchful and expect this keyboard behavior, you end up searching for whatever was searched before over and over again, or at least until you master the knack.
  • While playing Pandora in the background I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I did something that taxed the processor, the music would stutter. Perhaps Pandora needs a bigger cache, perhaps there is something else afoot. It wasn’t an awful flaw, but it was noticeable.
  • The lack of Bluetooth Technology precludes wireless keyboards which would render the Nook Color a poor blogging tool.
  • Despite the device being run by an Android Operating System it cannot run Android Apps. It will only use Barnes & Noble’s App Store and not the Android Marketplace. This fragmentation may prove to be an Achilles Heel for this class of device and most certainly will detract from someone comparing the Nook Color to an iPad.
  • The device comes with 8GB of storage, 3 of those are reserved for Android itself, so that leaves the user with 5GB of storage. This pales in comparison with the 16GB iPad, and doesn’t even show up on the field when compared to the 32GB or 64GB model of iPad, however, the presence of the SD cards does mitigate this failure somewhat
  • The Nook series of readers can only consume content from the Nook store, there is no way to get iBooks or Kindle content on a Nook.

The Ugly

  • The device is HEAVY. It’s about as heavy as my iPad, or at least it feels like it is. It’s surprisingly heavy for it’s size and I did have a little trouble holding it like I would a paperback book, in the way it’s design most clearly points that it should be held. It wasn’t enough to upset me, but it was enough to comment on.
  • The built-in speaker system is rather tinny and dinky. I suppose if I tried it with headphones the audio experience would have come out better. There is a part of me that really likes to listen to classical music as I read on a device. This was minimally acceptable.
  • The way the Nook Color scrolls with a touch is disconcerting at first, there is almost no scroll inertia and when you scroll quickly the display stutters and you get the sensation that you’ve missed something in the list as it has gone by. After a while of use you get used to this little idiosyncrasy and it wasn’t a show-stopper.
  • While the Nook Color can download and display ePub book files, I didn’t find a way to move those books into the Books section of the Nook. For these files you are relegated to mucking about in the file system explorer in the Nook to get your books and it does shatter the “All My Books In One Place” theme. I would be far happier if the ePub books that I downloaded off of the Web were immediately shunted off the File System itself and off to the Books function where I could see everything I have in one convenient place.

Final Verdict

The Nook Color is certainly a capable and useful device now that it has a more complete and up-to-date Operating System. The ability to access email, calendars, iCal, Exchange, and use of ePub books are all quite nice to see. I assume that if you copied MP3 files over the Nook Color could be an acceptable music player as well. What it really comes down to here is price. The Nook Color retails at $249.00, and with an Employee discount it hovers around $200 flat. This is in comparison to it’s nearest rival, the Apple iPad which hails at $499.00 for the base model. For half the price of an iPad you can get yourself a very good tablet that can do a majority of the things most people would do with tablets. If you are looking for a “Desktop Replacement Tablet” you won’t find that with the B&N Nook Color, for that you’d be better off going with the Apple iPad. For avid readers who aren’t interested in the Apple App Store or doing Desktop tasks with your device, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fantastic device.

Class Act

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Only rarely am I impressed with vendors and companies in general. They serve no interest but their own and it’s almost always thoroughly spiritually corrupt. I just received an email from our database vendor, Sage, and it made me do a triple-take:

“I hope this message finds you safe and unaffected by the recent severe weather and storms.  We are very concerned about the damage you may have experienced.  We know you may have lost infrastructure and connectivity at your office or have employees that are scattered around the region who cannot return for a while to help you resume business operations.If you have been affected by the severe weather and storms, we’d like to offer some assistance. 

We are willing to help get you on our hosted systems and operational at no charge to your organization until you are able to resume normal operations.  We do have capabilities to host Millennium on our secure platform.  However, a backup of your Millennium database will be needed to restore your operations. Please contact us at ***-***-**** so we can discuss and determine your needs.

It is my sincere hope that you are unaffected by these storms.  In the event that you are, Sage would like to help. “

Jaw slack. Eyes goggling. Surety that vendor is inherently malevolent, shaken to the core. Bravo Sage, Bravo. I am impressed.

Blackest Night and Brightest Day

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Just finished off Brightest Day #24 from DC Comics over lunch with Scott. My experience with this twin comic book event started out strong. Blackest Night was done quite well and was a pleasure to read, kept you on the edge of your seat for many issues and was easy to follow.

Then the opposite came out, in the guise of Brightest Day. The entire series of Brightest Day was very complex with many players and their sub-stories felt more like meaningless chores than actual meaningful events that I could really get myself wrapped up in. There were a group of incidental characters featured throughout that primarily appeared in the theme of “use ’em or lose ’em” and I couldn’t really form a good emotional bond with any of them. The best thread in the story was how Boston Brand learned how to live again, but that was pretty much squandered in the finale of the story. Many of these second-string characters underwent life-changing events and I couldn’t really care one way or another. The entire series ended with each of the characters setting out on their own separate paths, as if the events of Brightest Day were just a dalliance. I was very excited at the end of Blackest Night, and I was really quite concerned after a few of the first issues of Brightest Day, it felt like the excitement-craft was parked on the tarmac and the engines were very slowly winding up. The entire series felt a lot like that, a kind of regressive, perpetually tripping-on-itself story that always was just on the lead up to the excitement curve but once it started to climb it trembled and fell back away from actual payoff.

The entire two-part story borrowed a lot of creative energy from much of the work that Alan Moore dropped off on DC’s front-steps when he wrote some stories for the Green Lantern series of comic books. The Blackest Night prophesies were the start and at the end of Brightest Day you discover that the major player is “The Green” which is another batch of Alan Moore-inspired material that was injected into DC. I know a lot of professionals regard Alan Moore as a fundamental power in comicdom and I’m sure they would be upset if anyone, let alone little old me, were to tread on any of his hallowed works. In light of that, I can only PRAY TO GOD that we are done with the Alan Moore-inspired stories and we can move on to really creative new stories yet to be told. No more Blackest Night bits, no more Brightest Day “The Green” / “Parliament of Trees” material and get to something, anything else.

Then there is the biggest gyp of the entire series, which comes at the end of Brightest Day. They trot out Swamp Thing, then Alec Holland. There’s some retcon tomfoolery under the covers and a surprising failure of potency in the power of The White. All of a sudden we have to accept Swamp Thing and all the odd “It came from left field” oddity that lays at the core of how this story ended. I never read Swamp Thing, I have no emotional connection to Swamp Thing and the last time I spent any time thinking about that character was after I watched the Swamp Thing B-Movie/80’s rendition of it on VHS tape. I had a dim recollection of Swamp Thing and couldn’t really get into the ending of Brightest Day because all the “momentous” revelations at the end meant very little if anything to me. I still don’t really get what The Green is all about and frankly I don’t care enough to look it up. The crowning moment to Brightest Day was at the very end, they drew a character smoking a cigarette with only one thing to say: “Bollocks”. I had no idea who this character was. As it turns out, Scott knew and let me in on it. It was Constantine, AKA Hellblazer. I didn’t even know that Constantine was even connected with DC, let alone big enough to be the crowning climax of Brightest Day. So this guy is back and he smokes and he swears in an adorable british way. The only thing I have in my memory about Constantine is a rather awful portrayal of the character hacked off by Keanu Reeves. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than he was alive, or dead, or something – that he smoked and had something clever to do with housecats.

So here I sit. I’ve spent a lot of time congratulating Geoff Johns, who was the writer for both of these comic book events and here I sit feeling the opposite of how I did for Blackest Night for Brightest Day. I feel like much of the Brightest Day story was telephoned-in half-heartedly and I fear that Geoff was given too many projects and too much to do and that Brightest Day suffered for it. I don’t want my money back, DC can keep it. I don’t know if I’m going to follow DC anymore with the Flashpoint event. I’m a little leery that we’ll be back to the same feeling of ‘we’re just revving the engines, it’s gonna be cool! just wait for it!” feeling that marked the beginning of Brightest Day. I’m pretty much sitting right on the fence between writing Flashpoint off completely or following it. I suppose I will defer that decision until I read The Flash #11. I have to admit that the way DC has treated their one Flash character, Wally West isn’t helping retain me as a reader. The cagey no-information/why-did-I-sit-through-this feeling I got during C2E2 has me thinking that I could save a lot of time and money pulling away from DC Comics. I don’t really feel a lot of interest for any of Marvel’s projects since I got burned so badly with all the inane Deadpool titles and fell off the event wagon back in Civil War. My weekly take for comic books is right around five bucks and perhaps walking away from them is the best for me. Seeing Geoff Johns’s name as lead writer used to excite me, now I’m filled with wariness and trepidation.