IT Insights Blog — At the Movies

There's a marker in Riverside, Iowa, declaring the tiny rural town to be the "future birthplace" of Captain James T. Kirk. Yes, that Captain James T. Kirk. The official town motto is "Where the Trek Begins." There's even a Star Trek Museum, the Voyage Home Riverside History Center. All of this apparently goes back to a book written by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek, in which Roddenberry asserts that Kirk was — or, you know, will be — born in Iowa.

Hackers have a pretty tarnished reputation and, if you think about it, that's probably always been the case. Has "hacking" anything really ever been looked on as being productive, positive, or beneficial? Prior to the information age, "hacking" was probably most often something done with machetes and, before that, swords. And unless you were say, hacking your way through dense jungle foliage, there's a pretty good change that what was getting hacked was human limbs.

A day of reckoning is nearly upon us. Coming up next week, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, just as men and women everywhere are sleeping off the hedonistic revels of the four-day holiday weekend, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will politely request the attention of people from across the nation and around the world as they make a very special announcement that 3D movie projection ought to be banned forever.

Just before the end of 2018, a movie called Bird Box debuted on Netflix. Based on our extensive research, consisting mostly of surfing around on Google for a couple of minutes, we have been able to determine that the movie is not really about either birds or boxes. It's more of a survival thriller thing about a monster or monsters whose appearance somehow causes people who look directly at it (or them) to experience a psychotic break and kill themselves. Ewww.

Don't look now, but NASA just landed a spacecraft on Mars. Somehow, news of the landing broke Monday and Tuesday with (more or less) zero fanfare. Which is odd, considering that we just completed a successful process that involves flinging a spacecraft way up into the exosphere, piloting it across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and safely getting it down to surface, intact ...