Blayne Sucks

I am sometimes surprised at how relaxing vacation can be, even when all you do is go home for a few days. Sometimes the small things can really rejuvenate you. There are tons of stories written about how Americans don’t take or get as much vacation as various other parts of the world. I usually look at those and think something like, “Well, that’s because the rest of the world takes too many vacations.” However, perhaps I’m wrong in thinking that. If a vacation always rejuvenates a person to work better and harder then having a balance of vacation time and work time that leads to a better overall effeciency would make good engineering sense. It’s hard for me to argue with that logic now because I can really feel myself regaining some zeal that must have been lacking.

I watched “Gods and Generals” today. I was familiar with a lot of the story before having seen it because I’ve read a lot on the civil war. It was pretty well made as far as movies go, but there were many times that it seemed more like a historical documentary than a movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would work better if it were advertised as such. Going into a film with the wrong expectation can really make it go from well-made to trash. I don’t think “Gods and Generals” was trash though. It was just not what I expected.

I did learn a few things. I didn’t realize how very religious those Civil War leaders were. They were really quite devout for the most part. I would be curious to see how this compares to the current US Army. It would probably be against the law, but it’s hard to know in situations like war where law applies.

There were also a lot of educated men in the armies. I don’t mean to say that there aren’t now, but it does seem rare to find a professor leave his post to join the army. Perhaps that would not be the case if it the wars we fought were physically more close to home. The distance may not be relevant in reality as a result of the way that technology has shrunk the world, but I think the distance is still a very big part of war in terms of psychology.

Anyhow, the movie was interesting. Movies based on books sometimes convince me that there are some good books out there that I really need to read or some good subjects out there that I should learn more about. Of course, there are also some movies on books that make me want to do quite the opposite. This wasn’t one of those movies though.

I bought a wireless router for my mom’s place today. It cost $50 less than the router I bought for myself three or four years ago, and it’s easily better technologically speaking. The setup was absolutely drop dead simple and it was up and runing within 10 minutes of taking it out of the box. I was quite pleased. Sometimes you don’t notice the progress we’ve made until something like that creeps up on you.