Jack F.

I really, really enjoyed TRON.

We've been watching a lot of James Burke recently, going through his late-Seventies "Connections" and mid-Eighties "The Day The Universe Changed". These are amazing, and are highly recommended if you haven't seen them.

A penny dropped the other day: he must have been a source for David Tennant's characterization of the Doctor. The mannerisms are spot-on. "Wellllll..."

joyful_storm: "Well, who else would you choose for explaining things to us and the Companion?"

Ladies and gentlemen, live and in person, for one night only: the pathetic fallacy. D'awwwww. :-(

"The Cat Piano" is a marvelous short film from south Australian studio The People's Republic of Animation.

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Via tor.com's Saturday Morning Cartoons, where Irene Gallo described it as "a beat-noir-feline-Poe-ish horror story".

"A still more glorious dawn awaits /
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise /
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns /
The rising of the Milky Way

The sky calls to us /
If we do not destroy ourselves /
We will one day /
Venture to the stars"

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The truck that hit us two weeks ago is a red Nissan (or similar) small pickup truck, license plate B(1?)48 180, state probably WA. The police have declared the case "Inactive", meaning they didn't find the guy. This leaves us with the insurance deductible and with the smear of a "no-fault" accident on my record -- the major import of which is that we can't buy an affordable liability damage waiver for the next 12 months.

I would deeply appreciate any information leading to this guy's identification to the police. I have the feeling we've seen this truck around Capitol Hill.

Obama just made a blue-pill/red-pill reference in his healthcare Q&A. How mainstream is the Matrix film?

PSA via everywhere: as of tomorrow, US citizens need passports to return across the Canadian border. Mine is currently sitting on my desk, having been returned from Renewal Attempt #1 with insufficient postage. It expires in October, and the photo now looks very strange to me.

Here's what I eventually decided on:

    private PreparedStatement   _actor_mid_statement;
    private String              _actor_mid_sql
        = " SELECT              "
        + "     a.fname         "
        + " ,   a.lname         "
        + " FROM                "
        + "     Actor a         "
        + " ,   Casts c         "
        + " WHERE               "
        + "     c.mid = ?       "
        + " AND c.pid = a.id    "
        + " ORDER BY            "
        + "     a.lname         "
        + " ,   a.fname         "
        + " ;                   "
        ;

It's not perfect -- I don't like those extra tab characters in the string constant -- but it seems like a compelling representation in many respects.

Java fans: what's the prettiest way to embed SQL into your program? I understand the mechanics of using prepared statements and JDBC, but all the examples I can find are ugly. They use a style rather like this:

private String _actor_mid_sql = "SELECT a.fname, a.lname FROM Actor a, Casts c "
    + "WHERE c.mid = ? AND a.id = c.pid ORDER BY a.lname, a.fname; ";

I'd like to write something akin to this:

private String _actor_mid_sql = \HEREDOC;
SELECT
    a.fname
,   a.lname
FROM
    Actor a
,   Casts c
WHERE
    c.mid = ?
AND c.pid = a.id
ORDER BY
    a.lname
,   a.fname
;
HEREDOC

Thanks!