Matrix Revolutions Review

The first ⅓ to ½ of the movie was extremely weak.  The dialogue in particular was very cringe around how Tom was a nerd too scared to talk to Tiffany.  In the original Matrix, Thomas Anderson was like a dark web hacker doing illegal shit, and now Thomas Anderson is a rich coward apparently.  Also the movie felt like extremely anti-video-game? Like they harped on it a lot that video games were bad, which is weird considering the cross-promotion with Unreal.

The whole thing with “Morpheus” was so convoluted I still don’t understand it.  Was he an agent?  Some piece of software Neo wrote and injected into the Matrix somehow even though he doesn’t know it exists?  What was the point of the character at all?  

The fight scenes were a real low point too.  The thing that made the original Matrix fight scenes cool was originality.  This one had zero of that, it was really just punching and kicking like in basically every movie.  Basically no superpowers on display at any time.  Getting smashed into a stone wall is not cool or new in the age of Avengers movies.  Neo stopping bullets was nice to see but then he did it for like 5 straight minutes.  The “bot swarm” scene at the end was indistinguishable from any recent zombie movie and just as much of a timesink – didn’t look cool, didn’t  do anything for the plot.  The fight scenes were boring, unoriginal, way too long, and pointless.  

Agent Smith – why?  If “Smith” was a “virus” inside the Matrix how did he end up becoming Neo’s boss inside the game company, yet unaware that Neo – his employee – was his archenemy?  What’s the point of him being Jonathan Groff?  Why did Trinity look like Trinity to Neo?  What was the point of Neo actually looking like some old man with an eyepatch to the rest of the world but looking like himself in the mirror?

The incessant “flashbacks” to previous movies… why?  

Also as others mentioned, Trinity was treated as basically a plot device for the first 90% of the movie with no development of her own. And when she ditched her family with basically 5 seconds internal debate, and gave that ultra cringe mini speech (“I fucking hate being called Tiffany!”)… oof.  

The ending was exactly what I had predicted and feared when I sat down to watch it – Trinity is the one with the superpower, not Neo.  But to my surprise it wasn’t as ham-handed as I expected and I kind of liked it, and they didn’t draw it out that much.  

The final scene with the Analyst made me laugh out loud, but in the end I still don’t understand why the humans care about Neo anymore.  Like they sort of explained why the Analyst resurrected him and Trinity, though the whole premise of humans as fuel seems even dumber now than it did in 1999.  But if the new Matrix 4.0 is so much better than the one that Neo escaped from, who’s wanting to be free? It wasn’t the green dystopia of Matrix 1 anymore, it looked fine.  What’s the advantage of being “free” and living in Io for most humans? And what was the point of saying that the events of Matrix 3 happened 60 years ago?  And what was the deal with the Analyst’s cat?  In the coffee shop fight scene he looks like he’s trying to reach for it like a witch’s familiar but nothing ever comes of it.  Feels like something was cut out in the editing room that would explain it.

Despite all that I did sort like it and got chills a few times so I give it a B-.  It was way too long though.  Lop off 30-45 minutes and it would probably be a better movie.

Get your COVID Vaccine do-whatever-you-want maskless t-shirt!

Last week the CDC came out with their new guidance that vaccinated people basically never have to wear a mask. To celebrate I made this t-shirt with their infographic, on CustomInk.

Custom T-shirts – Design Your Own T-Shirts Online – Free Shipping! (customink.com)

I ordered one and it arrived yesterday. It looks great! Get yours to let everybody know how great vaccinated life is!

Not much to say?

I forgot I had this site. Life continues, not much interesting to report. Been working from home since March 10, 2020, about 4 months ago. Glad to have the office, but need air conditioning down here.

2010 Hyundai Sonata review – 10 years later

It’s been nearly ten years since I bought my 2010 Hyundai Sonata.  It was a big milestone for me because it was the first new car I ever bought, and I got a pretty great deal on it. It’s been a pretty good car, but it’s starting to show its age and enough minor things are starting to break that I think it’s time to replace it.  

First, let me say that the car has been for the most part fantastic.  We drove it to Florida and back in 2011 (which was pretty cramped, but it did great), and even today it gets 32-33 miles per gallon on the highway, even with a 3.3L V6. It’s pretty peppy and I still think it looks great.

Stuff started breaking about two years ago.  The first thing that happened was the driver’s window-down button stopped bouncing back up when you’d press it down.  I had to manually pull it back up. This was so minor I didn’t do anything about it for a year, and then when I brought it into the shop they had to replace the whole mirror switch panel (all 4 switches) which was ~$200.

Then in the winter I tried to open the passenger front door, which was frozen shut, and the door handle broke off in my hand.  I got this replaced (with a spare from a junkyard) and it happened to the rear passenger door handle a couple months later. 

Also around two years ago, when I got into my car after work one day it wouldn’t start.  I called AAA and ended up having to have it towed to a service station, where it turned out the fuel filter was clogged.  That was a relatively cheap fix.

The radio also started doing some weird stuff around 2 years ago.  It would randomly turn off, MP3s wouldn’t play, etc. This is what originally got me started looking for a new car about 18 months ago, but I ended up replacing the radio with a Pioneer head unit last year (the same day I ruptured my Achilles tendon) so I was pretty happy with it for a while.

More recently, in April 2019 I started having some very strange issues, starting with speakers cutting out.  I had installed the radio myself so I figured I had just not done it right, or something had come loose in the wiring.  Additionally the door locks stopped working on the driver’s side doors. I brought the car in to the local mechanic and he worked on this off and on for almost 4 months.  Finally one day he called me at work and informed me that there was a mouse living in the car, it had made a nest in the center console and also inside the door and it had chewed through a bunch of wiring.  He cleaned it all out and fixed the wiring and we had a good laugh and the car was fine again for a while.  

By this point I had already decided to see what the options were for a new car, since it seemed like the car was in the beginning stages of some kind of death spiral.  And then about a month ago the sunroof broke. Some piece of the slider that opens and closes the sunroof cracked and I couldn’t get it closed. I managed to pry it back into place and get it closed, but it can’t be opened, and it was a dealer-installed sunroof so it’s not like I could find parts for it as it’s not even a Hyundai product.  Fortunately it hasn’t leaked so far, but if you press on it it’s not really securely in place and the wind definitely sounds different over it when driving at highway speeds. 

This was really the last straw for me.  I could probably spend a few thousand dollars more to get it back into shape, but I just don’t have the patience for that now.  I don’t demand much of my car, as I normally only put about 10-15 miles a week on it, but it’s already had two door handles break off, the door locks stop working, etc.  My nightmare is I get off the train and head to my car in a blizzard, go to open the door and the handle breaks off, or the doors won’t unlock and I’m just stuck out in the snow.  

Anyway, at this point (October 2019) it’s been 9 years and 6 months since I got the car.  It’s been great and I would definitely recommend Hyundai to anyone, but I’ll probably replace this one in the next couple of months.  Rather than replace it with another sedan I’ll probably get an SUV and use our other car (a 2012 Ford Flex) as my station car.

One Year Later

Today marks one year since I had the Achilles’ tendon repair surgery.  Life has mostly returned to normal and I can do everything I was doing before the injury.  I do get stiffness in the tendon area, but I actually get that on both legs even though it was only my left tendon that ruptured.  And, thinking about it now, I realize that I had had stiffness in both tendons for a while. After sitting for a while, usually an hour or more, when I first stand up I can barely walk for about 10 seconds until it loosens up, and then it’s basically fine.  But I can ride my bike, walk, sprint to catch a train, take stairs two at a time, and have even gone back to the ocean a couple times – which was the real leap of faith, since that’s how I injured it in the first place.  

So for anyone who’s found themselves with a ruptured Achilles’ Tendon, I just want to let you know there’s life after.  It definitely helped that I had a great doctor, great physical therapist, great wife and a great employer (who let me work from home for 2+ months after it happened) and great health insurance for support.  But stick with it and hopefully you can expect a relatively normal life afterwards.

One year ago

Incision scar on my left ankle after 1 year.

Video update I recorded last week in Central Park.

Home NAS with ZFS – failed disk!

It’s been over two years since I built my home NAS box.  A couple days ago I logged in and noticed some file operation was taking a while, so I did a “zpool status” and was shocked to see one of the disks had failed at some point.  I really have no idea when it happened, but the “last scan” date said something about December, so it could have been months.  I was a bad Sysadmin and didn’t have alerting for this case – silent HA failover is a risk most people don’t think of, though coincidentally it’s one of the projects I’m currently working on at work.

Anyway, here’s what the failed zpool looked like:

root@lunix:~# zpool status
  pool: lunix1
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be used because the label is missing or
        invalid.  Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue
        functioning in a degraded state.
action: Replace the device using 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-4J
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 12h54m with 0 errors on Sun Dec  2 14:18:15 2018
config:

        NAME                      STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        lunix1                    DEGRADED     0     0     0
          mirror-0                ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdc                   ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                DEGRADED     0     0     0
            sdd                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            11769402787959493007  UNAVAIL      0     0     0  was /dev/sde1

errors: No known data errors


Fortunately, back when I built this thing, I bought a spare disk which has been sitting on the shelf in the box from Newegg for 2 years. I replaced it a little while ago and ran “zpool import” to bring the zpool back in, and then did the “zpool replace”:

root@lunix:~# zpool replace -f lunix1 11769402787959493007 sdd
root@lunix:~# zpool status
  pool: lunix1
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
  scan: resilver in progress since Fri Apr 26 15:47:41 2019
    21.9M scanned out of 3.71T at 3.12M/s, 345h50m to go
    10.5M resilvered, 0.00% done
config:

        NAME                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        lunix1                      DEGRADED     0     0     0
          mirror-0                  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb                     ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdc                     ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                  DEGRADED     0     0     0
            sde                     ONLINE       0     0     0
            replacing-1             UNAVAIL      0     0     0
              11769402787959493007  FAULTED      0     0     0  was /dev/sde1
              sdd                   ONLINE       0     0     0  (resilvering)

errors: No known data errors

345 hours to go?!  I ran zpool status about 20 minutes later and got a much better number:

root@lunix:~# zpool status
  pool: lunix1
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
  scan: resilver in progress since Fri Apr 26 15:47:41 2019
    125G scanned out of 3.71T at 101M/s, 10h18m to go
    62.3G resilvered, 3.28% done
config:

        NAME                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        lunix1                      DEGRADED     0     0     0
          mirror-0                  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb                     ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdc                     ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                  DEGRADED     0     0     0
            sde                     ONLINE       0     0     0
            replacing-1             UNAVAIL      0     0     0
              11769402787959493007  FAULTED      0     0     0  was /dev/sde1
              sdd                   ONLINE       0     0     0  (resilvering)

errors: No known data errors

Anyway, this was my first experience replacing a failed disk under a ZFS raid, so it was pretty exciting.  The hardest part of the process was figuring out which disk was the failed one.  The bad one didn’t even show up as a device in /dev, so what I ended up doing was “hdparm -i /dev/sd?” for each disk that was there, noting the serial number, and then looking on the outside of each disk to see which one had a serial that wasn’t available to the OS.  Overall it was a pretty good process.

 

 

 

180 days post-op

It’s now 180 days since my Achilles’ tendon repair surgery. Life is sort of back to normal, though my leg is still not back to 100%. I can’t do a single-leg raise on my bad leg, and running isn’t something I want to try, but most of the pain is gone. Physical therapy has helped a lot but I am winding that down now as well. Anyway, just wanted to give an update for anyone facing this surgery.

Continue reading “180 days post-op”

2018: good riddance

As 2018 draws to a close and I look back on it I can’t help but think it has been the worst year of my life. Obviously I’m in a very privileged position but the problems started early on and kept on coming.

First of all, I had resolved at the end of 2017 that this would be the year I “took care of” the ruptured disc in my neck that was impinging on the nerve root. So I spent the first couple months obsessing about whether to have ACDF surgery ( vertebrae fusion) or CDR (replace bad disc with artificial one). So I was already pretty anxious as the year started. Regarding the disc, I ended up with another MRI and a doctor informing me that surgery was only 50% effective in fixing numbness in the fingers, and was really only recommended for cases of extreme pain. So I guess it was good news – doing nothing is the right course of action.

Then in March we had to put our dog Chloe to sleep. I wrote a couple posts about this already, but when it happened it sent me into a depression unlike any I had experienced before.

On Easter, I was playing football at my brother in law’s house and the next day I started feeling a strange pain in my chest. It bounced all around and was very faint. I kept it to myself for a couple weeks because we had a vacation coming up and I didn’t want to ruin that with a bunch of health stuff looming, but it was on my mind the entire trip. When we got home I told my wife about it and went to my doctor. He couldn’t find anything wrong but sent me for a cardio stress test and an EKG. those didn’t find anything wrong either. I went to a cardiologist and had two more stress tests (treadmill) and none found anything wrong.

At some point around April/May I also developed a weird twitch. I’d be sitting at my desk with my hands on my keyboard or mouse and my finger would press a button even though I hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t just my fingers, sometimes it was my arm, or leg (I was awakened a couple times when my leg twitched overnight). I sent back to the doctor who said I should cut out caffeine, but that had no effect. He said it was most likely Benign Fasciculation Syndrome and I should just try to ignore it.

Things started turning around when we got our new dog Maisy, though the day we got her I happened to develop an abscess on my back and ended up having to have a surgeon drain it, and that took a couple weeks to heal., during which time it was very painful to sit down.

Then of course, over July 4th weekend I ruptured my Achilles’ tendon. It’s now over 5 months later and while I can mostly walk normally, it’s far from back to normal and I have rather significant pain when walking. I’ve been going to physical therapy twice a week since September and it’s helped a lot but it’s not magic. On my PT days I work from home, which also lets my leg rest, but the decrease in my exercise has led to gaining a bunch of weight.

Of course, there have been a lot of positive things this year. Mostly seeing my son grow from a little boy to a young man and seeing him succeed on school. But overall this has been a terrible year and I will be glad to put it behind me.

16 weeks post-op

Today is 16 weeks since my Achilles’ tendon repair surgery. I spent the weekend mostly resting and am back at work today. Every step I take now is pretty painful in the ankle area. I’m not sure if it’s inside or just the scar being stretched when I walk but I’m starting to develop a limp because it hurts pretty badly when I walk. Still been doing PT 2 days a week, and it’s helped with flexibility and strength but the pain the past 10 days or so has actually been getting worse. Also my calf and ankle seem a lot more swollen now. Definitely a bummer since I thought my recovery was going pretty well.

Day 106 update

106 days since surgery. Pain is starting to come back now, maybe as nerves are coming back. Had to get some new shoes with lower backs that don’t run against the scar.