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Here it is, my home page. Yee ha. Most of the material
here dates back to a period from 1997 to 2004... about the only
section that's had much attention since then is "Music and Movies",
particularly the section known as Cape Jeer.
Use the links over there on the left to see this site's various
topic areas. For instance, under "Photography"
you'll find my old film-era online gallery
of nature photography, my taxonomic index of bird
species I've photographed, and so on. The "Muckraking"
section contains my feature monitoring political corruption in and
around the energy industry during the period 2001-2004, called
Enron & Friends, plus miscellaneous other
political writing. "Music and Movies" contains my subsite for reviews
of superhero movies, Cape Jeer, and
other film and music related content. And so on for the other topics.
Each link will list the material related to its topic here in
this box. (If you had a modern browser and scripting enabled,
those links would use DHTML to put different content here in this
box without reloading the page, but since you aren't set up that
way, we'll just fake it.)
Besides this website, I also have a little blog, which at present
is dominated by bird pictures. They make up at least half of
the content; the rest is a bit of everything. It is located
here.
Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you find something you enjoy.
For some reason, I started writing brief capsule reviews of movies based on
comic books. Then I started seeing more comic book movies in order to
review them: everything from Hulk to Howard the Duck, over a
hundred in all. Witness the
result. For those who want assistance in separating the mighty
from the meek in the current deluge of superhero cinema, or those who find
amusement (as I do) in reviews of crappy movies. Some of these films are
so bad that that they really must not be missed. This is now a
separate website with its own domain name... it's called
CAPE JEER!
Now with the magic of John Stanley!
See the author of the Creature Features
Movie Guide give four stars to Jean-Claude van Damme! Plus, the layout is
now completely redesigned — no more old-style frames.
The newest review is Hancock, added 3/11/13.
The next most recent is The Fantastic Four (1994), added 1/20/13.
You may wonder why someone put that much time into such a silly-ass
project. Honestly, I wonder myself.
Here are some other film reviews I was asked to do, unrelated to
comics. They've mostly got something to do with politics — this group
of reviews originally got started as part of the Enron &
Friends section.
The index of titles is here. The most
recently added title is Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
(season 6). (Yeah, that's not very current events.)
Finally, there's another section of reviews of miscellaneous B
movies, springing from my participation in the B-Movie Message Board. The
latest addition is not really a B movie: The
Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus — in context. Before that was
Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me.
Now, music-related items:
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Every once in a while, you listen to a record expecting something
ordinary and get blown away by something fantastically good that you never
expected. This is my list of great
albums that have come at me from out of left field in that way, with a description
of each. Most of them are relatively unknown. I'd love to hear
your list of such albums. (updated 12/30/01)
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I have a bit of my own home-recorded music here.
Nothing shockingly original... just something that answers the question:
What if Richard Berry's immortal rock classic "Louie, Louie" had
been instead written by Peter Gabriel? Download
Shock the Louie.mp3
(2.5 MB) to find out. (6/1/00)
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Oh, and here's a little midi file
of a silly tune I wrote for my cat
Vespertilio. And here's
a waltz I wrote for the wedding of a couple of folk-music
geeks. I had to keep it simple enough for the pick-up band to
sight-read...
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And here for nostalgia value is another midi file:
my very first attempt at computer
composition, circa 1989, written somewhat under the
influence of the modern composer Conlon Nancarrow. I'm still
a bit surprised at how complex it managed to be, given that it's
only forty seconds long.
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And finally, the thing that first motivated me to put up
a home page way back in 1997 or so: a fan tribute to my favorite
musician, Eric McFadden.
(last updated 6/21/04)
I've been drawn to nature photography since I got my first camera at somewhere
around age eight, and by now, I think I'm starting to get kind of good at
it. My original online gallery has pictures
spanning more than 25 years, covering most of my pre-digital years. It
has got to be one of the most neglected areas in this whole website.
(The gallery was last updated 1/27/02.)
I haven't yet made a gallery of my newer DSLR work. But here's something:
in the last year or so I've concentrated mostly on birds -- often not even
bringing any wide angle lens when I go out -- and I have started to turn more
and more into something embarrassingly like a birder. And what I've
made of that is a page that lists all the species I've seen and
all the local species I expect to see by taxonomy, with links to pictures
on those kinds of birds that I have managed to photograph so far.
(Latest additions are from Albuquerque: white-winged dove, sora, and a
pair of wood ducks. Plus a batch from Minnesota: ring-necked duck,
american tree sparrow, purple finch, black-capped chickadee, common grackle,
and northern cardinal, 5/4/13.)
Formerly, there were a couple of other collections of non-fine-art photographs
online here: some from a trip to Saline Valley, and some from the 2000 annual
How Berkeley Can You Be? parade. Both have now been taken offline for
reasons of space. And irrelevance.
I used to participate in the LiveJournal Photo Contest
community, where photographers attempt each week to produce the best
image they can on a given theme announced in advance. (That page will take a long time to download if you're on
dialup.) Here are a few images I've come up with for some past themes:
For those who may be photo-equipment geeks, here's what I shoot with:
Through 2006, I used semi-vintage Olympus SLRs -- I got them off of Ebay and
have spares for when one breaks. (I've used up about one and a half
bodies.) My most-used lens was a Tokina superzoom that I'm sure any real
professional would sneer at. Its flaws are mostly at the telephoto
end. The oldest pictures were shot with an all-mechanical classic: the
Pentax K1000. I used to use the Kodak PhotoCD service to digitize the
pictures, but it went downhill so I got an Acer film scanner. (Which
comes with a world of color-management headaches included free.) I mainly
used Fuji slide films. For everyday snapshottery, in latter days I used a
Canon A60 digital -- two whole megapixels. The "photocontest" shots above
all came from that camera.
In 2007 I said goodbye to shooting with film, and got a Pentax K10D ten
megapixel SLR. My main lenses for it are a Sigma 17-70 Macro and a Pentax
DA 55-300 telephoto (replacing a DA 50-200). I have a fast fifty, and have
gone through about five other lenses, mainly telephotos, that I ended up not
keeping. I of course need a longer telephoto, and also a superwide.
This is all older material. If you want any thoughts on the
politics of the current year, you'll find some here and there on
my little blog.
If you really want to single out political posts, look under the
"Categories" header on the right sidebar, and click "Rantation and
Politicizing".
The freshest item here is probably my review of the documentary
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.
I end up talking a lot more about the history of Enron than about the film...
Corruption watch!
(last updated 8/25/04)
In 2001, I had a page about the evolving California electricity
crisis, and the mounting evidence that power companies were
creating an artificial shortage to drive prices sky-high.
Now it's about the Enron scandal and the others that came after
it, and their revelations of corruption in the White House; it's
called "Enron & Friends".
I gradually came to cover more and more stories of corruption. I
finally ran out of gas with this project in 2004.
(2001's original electricity crisis page is
here, cut off at a
point just before the Enron collapse. There is also a
page of miscellaneous other energy-related topics
here.)
Here is a list of other political articles I've written:
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Are you one of those who is itching to get rid of the obsolete
and cantankerous apparatus known as the Electoral College? Read this
discussion of some of the many reform alternatives
available. If you're a defender of the old system, you might
find options here that are more appealing than what you've heard previously.
(minor update 2/22/03)
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(This one's also in the Humor section.) Take a trip back to
those unforgettable fun-filled years of the Reagan administration, with a little
software item called The Reagan Years.
Any day you run the The Reagan Years program, it will write out
a screenful of news about various events that happened on the same calendar
day during the nineteen eighties. All the scandals, embarrassments,
and fuckups, gathered into a single package organized by date. Go
to the The Reagan Years page to read about
it and/or get a desktop version, or go directly to http://paulkienitz.net/reagan/
to see today's Reagan history right in your browser. (Current
version is release 3; further material for release 4 is being accumulated.)
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There's also a rant about
economics here, as is natural in any discussion of Reagan.
If you have ever wondered why the economy has done so well in the Clinton
administration compared to the Reagan years, here's my theory about why.
(updated 10/21/01 with new statistics)
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Here's a rant about why
Republicans never seem to let the government get out of debt, which
has become relevant again as Dubya has made a push for a further big tax cut
for businesses and upper income individuals -- the same groups who, as
investors, are already receiving a large part of your tax bill
as interest payments on the national debt. (updated 4/15/03)
(If you're interested, you can view a copy, preserved
for historical and archival value, of my pre-election screed on
just how lame a candidate
George W. Bush was in my view. Updated 4/15/03 with
a postscript: "How well did I guess?")
Another site that has occasionally published my political writing is
Democratic
Underground, such as
this short piece warning how our
adventure in Iraq would end up supporting and funding pro-Iranian groups...
one of the many "surprises" (all quite foreseeable by those who paid attention,
including the torture scandal) that later embarrassed us there.
Assorted crap.
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You know those silly online personality quizzes that some people
create? Well, I threw together a few of them for giggle value, never
intending to show them to more than a few people... they were:
To my surprise, the Science Fiction Writer quiz suddenly became popular among
real science fiction writers. So I figured I'd better let everyone see
these, dumb though they are. (Warning: crude language is used.)
The javascript code they're constructed with is readily adaptable by anyone
wanting to make quizzes of their own. (I heard that someone was planning
to turn the SF writer quiz into a classical author quiz, but if they have,
I haven't found it...)
The rest of this stuff is now pretty darn ancient...
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Does your life revolve around your psychological/spiritual growth
process? Want to meet other geeks in the same condition?
Follow this link to learn about the
Personal Growth Geek Code! No, you won't meet anybody
here, but now you and they will have a tool to know all about each
other at a glance. Well, maybe a prolonged squint.
(current version is 0.5)
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(This is also in the muckraking section.) Take a trip back to
those unforgettable fun-filled years of the Reagan administration, with a little
software item called The Reagan Years.
Any day you run the The Reagan Years program, it will write out
a screenful of news about various events that happened on the same calendar
day during the nineteen eighties. All the scandals, embarrassments,
and fuckups, gathered into a single package organized by date. Go
to the The Reagan Years page to read about
it and/or get a desktop version, or go directly to http://paulkienitz.net/reagan/
to see today's Reagan history right in your browser. (Current
version is release 3; further material for release 4 is being accumulated.)
-
Several years ago, I decided to write a little rant about a
subject I found mildly bothersome, and spent about two days
researching and composing it. It soon became the most
widely-read thing I'd ever done, receiving hundreds of hits
a day. So I had to keep updating and expanding it...
It's called 48 Reasons Not To Get A
Boob Job. Gosh, I just can't puzzle out why a page
about breasts gets so many search engine hits.
There's also a page of even
more reasons sent in by readers. (last updated 10/3/04)
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And finally... Micro-Rants! Here's the
original Micro-Rants page... random opinions and notions that could
have a full rant page written about them, but don't -- items important enough
to mention, but not important enough to put much time or research into.
Something more than a static page and something less than a blog; check back
from time to time. The political
micro-rants and the arts&entertainment
micro-rants pages are spinoffs of this. (last updated 6/22/02)
And oh yeah, there's also the miscellaneous
energy topics micro-rants page. It contains all kinds of
information and advocacy on subjects having to do with energy issues --
particularly eco-gearhead topics such as electric cars.
(updated 11/3/02)
I have programmed a lot of different languages and operating
systems over the years... assembly language on an ancient
IBM mainframe, FORTRAN on a bizarre 36-bit Honeywell, SNOBOL
on a DEC-20, REXX on an Amiga... I even learned TECO once.
(Ah, the memories. Will anyone wax nostalgic someday about
good old .Net?)
Back in those Good Old Days of the 20th Century, I wrote a
bunch of freeware and shareware for the
Amiga.
This page lets anyone who
still uses one of those download any or all of it, including
source code. It includes Amiga versions of the Info-Zip
Group's Zip and Unzip tools, since I was (and
occasionally still am) a contributor to that group, and
maintained the Amiga port.
Coming soon: When I was a student, my very first "big"
software project was an old-school text adventure game called
Lugi. It was pretty silly, and fun. Recently
I dug it up and began porting it into Java... then while I was
at it, started making a parallel version in C#.Net. The
two versions can be kept tightly in sync, because the languages
are so similar. Each can be run with multiple choices of
IO interface: as a command-line program, as a web application,
or in the Java case, as an applet that puts a fake command-line
window in your browser. That latter form, at the very
least, will be available here once it's complete and debugged.
The project isn't ready yet, but if anyone wants to see samples
of my current style in Java code, there's an unlinked URL that will
allow you to view a large subset of the current Lugi source files.
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