I don't think that his size has anything to do with his being a nerd. It's his obsession with golf and his drive to be the greatest golfer of all time. That kind of preoccupation with a job, hobby, or activity, to the exclusion of everything else, could be seen as a nerdy trait. But I admit he's not the first guy I thought of when I read the headline or the article. I think the writer is stretching a bit by including him.
There's no way those synopses of Episodes 7-9 are the work of George Lucas. Aside from his many recent denials that he's ever going to make those movies, the stories read like lame Star Wars novels. Whoever wrote them just threw in elements of Timothy Zahn's trilogy and the books about the Death Star superlaser and the Sun Crusher and made up some more nonsense. GL should be upset that his name is even on the same page as that crap.
I don't need the database feature to organize my music -- that's what the filetree system is for. I spent lots of time organizing my music into folders, and I don't need iTunes to come along and mess with it. Which did happen once, on my laptop. Luckily I keep a second copy of my MP3 collection on my home PC. And I did end up manually editing my tags, but only so the pieces would read properly in the player screen. With iTunes and presumably the iPod, some of my classical albums wouldn't have played properly without serious playlist tinkering, and I didn't see any reason to go to that much trouble.
As for the shuffle, I hardly use it, so the lack of a "true" shuffle isn't a problem for me. I usually listen to complete albums in order rather than random tracks from all over my collection. The H120/H140 does have a shuffle feature, but it shuffles your music once and keeps the files in that order. You have to add/remove files to force the player to create a new "random" shuffle. Or just create a playlist of all your music and shuffle that before copying it to the player. I agree that the hacks don't come close to what the iPod offers. And if I were buying a HD player for my wife (who's not as gadget-savvy) I'd get her an iPod. But I like to be different, and the iRiver player suits me just fine.
I used a Treo 600 with a 256 MB SD card for MP3s for most of 2004 until I got tired of constantly copying music back and forth from my PC to the card. I thought about buying an iPod for about 10 seconds, then discounted it and looked at other manufacturers instead. I have never liked iTunes and the way it forces you to tag your MP3s properly. About half my CD collection is classical music, and the CDDB entries for classical albums vary wildly in how they tag files. Listening to classical albums in iTunes is a real pain if the CDs have works by different composers or different artists -- if those works are tagged differently then they may not show up as part of the same album. Since I had ripped my CDs with an eye toward listening to them on my non-iTunes/iPod Treo/SD combo, I didn't need to focus on the tags. I just wanted to listen to the albums.
I ended up buying an iRiver H140. It doesn't do photos, and the database is a joke, and there's no real shuffle feature (though you can hack something together for that), but it appears as a regular USB HD when you hook it up to your PC. So you don't need any drivers or software to copy anything you want to the device. The day I got it, I connected it to my laptop and copied my entire MP3 collection to it. I can browse my collection using the same filetree system I used on my laptop, and I can play WAV, OGG, and a few other formats I haven't even tried yet. The sound quality beats the Treo hands-down. It also has a radio, a record function, and optical line-out for the day when I finally upgrade my home stereo to something with digital inputs. And the remote that comes in the box is excellent. Plus I get the ease of a portable HD for storing backups and sharing software like Firefox and ZoneAlarm when I make tech support house calls.
I hope your cell phone has better MP3 playback sound than my Treo 600, because when I moved up to an iRiver H140, the difference in sound quality was phenomenal. And I use the same headphones that I used on the Treo. Just because my cellphone can play MP3s doesn't mean it's the best option for music. I'll take a dedicated MP3 player any day over a cellphone with that capability.
My father works for a university, but has a side job installing and maintaining DVD video systems for a company that provides health-related programming via DVD to hospital TV systems. There are a few hospitals in my area that have these systems installed, and since my father lives elsewhere, sometimes his boss sends me to these hospitals to fix playback problems, modem issues (usually unsuccessfully), or just to change the time on the box that controls the DVD players. The company uses the modems to talk to the controllers to update the clocks for DST and change the programming, but sometimes the modems don't work so I make a service call and fix things manually. The hospitals usually put the cabinet with our equipment in a machine room on the roof, next to the elevator systems, so it's always hot, noisy, and dirty -- the opposite of a well-maintained server room. It's not really IT work, but I get paid well for my time and I get to ride all over the city in taxis instead of buses and subways. And occasionally my dad gets to visit me all expenses paid when he comes here to work on the systems.
Like most other IT geeks I know, I am always asked to provide free computer advice and repairs for friends. If it's a friend, I don't mind, but I have accepted payment from acquaintances and from other companies the few times I've performed consulting work for them. A few years ago my wife worked for a startup that was laying off its staff. After they cut loose the IT guy, they had e-mail problems, so they called me in for emergency support. I had no problem taking their money for my efforts, even though it was an Exchange system, and I was a GroupWise admin at the time. E-mail is e-mail, right? I'm sure my work had nothing to do with the company's eventual collapse a few months later.
I'm an educated IT professional who regularly shops at Best Buy. I've bought the extended warranty from them twice. Both were purchases for my wife. The first was a Compaq laptop in 1999 and I took their warranty after they told me that they'd replace the LCD screen if it failed. I was working for a small company at the time with Compaq laptops and I'd had to replace three LCDs already, so I knew it was a possibility. We ended up using the warranty to get the motherboard replaced about 18 months later and while it was a pain in the neck to use Best Buy's service department (it took 2 months for them to fix it) we did get another few years' use out of a $2000 laptop. The other time was a few weeks ago when my wife bought a Tungsten E. She can write off the purchase as a business expense so adding the warranty to the price didn't make much difference. And if the Palm dies before the warranty is up, she can get a new model if the old one isn't available anymore. I'm sure there's a catch but it sounded like a decent deal to me, and it's her money.
That said, if I'm the one doing the buying, I'm less likely to get the extended warranty. I can usually fix things myself (LCD panel excepted) and most of the time I'm not spending enough money to justify the extra cost of the warranty. I bought a TV there once and declined the warranty when I figured that it would be more trouble to get the TV back to them for repairs in a taxi (I don't own a car) and back home again than to just go out and buy a new one.
I love my ThinkPad T41. My company has issued ThinkPads to most of its employees for years, so I've had an X20, T20, T22, T30, and now the T41. I can get 4-5 hours of use without the power supply, and it's light enough to carry home from work every night. I've been to Europe twice this summer and I'm going to Asia later this month on business, and I've got the air/auto adapter to power the laptop through all the movies and MP3s I can take. (So I don't have to worry about carrying extra batteries just for the plane ride.) My only complaint is that my company takes the cheap route on the video cards (16 MB of video RAM!?), so I can't play anything newer than Age of Empires II on it. But for wireless surfing, DVDs, and getting my work done, it's the best. If I ever leave this job, I'll have to get my own ThinkPad, as I've gotten too used to having one to live without it.
So that's what that movie was about! I'd forgotten it -- I saw it so long ago. Well, Shakespeare's been cribbed, borrowed, mutilated, and spindled so many times that no one cares anymore. Why can't filmmakers do the same thing for Kurosawa? I'm sure no one would remember Battle Beyond the Stars if there were a SW version of Seven Samurai.
...there's always the hope that George Lucas will let someone else make more films in the saga. If he insists on making more himself, he could do worse than to rip off Kurosawa. He already did it with Hidden Fortress for the original Star Wars. I just saw The Seven Samurai, and I think that a remake of it, with Jedi instead of the samurai, could be a big hit. Toss in a space battle and some Sith lords instead of the bandits, and you've got yourself a box office winner.
I've got a Treo 600 as well, but mine comes from AT&T, and I'm not paying $80/month for their unlimited data service. Maybe I'm old school, but I prefer listening to my MP3s via the SD card slot. It's no iPod, but I can fit 3-5 albums on a 256 MB SD card and I don't have to worry about losing my WiFi signal (and thus the music) when I ride the subway to work. Plus, the Internet radio stations I listen to at work play annoying ads or the same music clips instead of over-the-air ads. At work I don't mind dealing with them, but on my commute all I want is the music. Internet radio would be too much of a hassle for me, when MP3 support is practically built-in to the Treo (Pocket Tunes is a free download after you register your Treo 600 with Handspring, and it supports MP3, Ogg, streaming audio, etc.).
I find it interesting that they schedule TV Turnoff Week in late April, instead of during the big May "sweeps" period. I guess organizers figure that they're more likely to get people to join in their crusade if there isn't THAT much good TV on during the week they pick, odd new episodes aside. If they tried this idea in mid-May, no one would pay any attention.
I've devoured and loved all of Stephenson's books. Reading Cryptonomicon was the highlight of the summer of 2000 for me, and Quicksilver kept me entertained throughout the autumn of 2003. I read The Diamond Age on vacation in 2002, and anytime I think of that trip, I think of the book.
Many posters here have complained about Stephenson's prose: too much detail, not enough character development, and so on. I disagree with all of them. With Stephenson, you get scientific, historical, and technical knowledge along with characters that will grow on you if you let them. I think that by spending so many pages on information, he gives the characters a foundation in their environment. They have a depth that they would lack without the benefit of their surroundings, which are best explained the way he does it.
Another thing I love about his books, but especially Quicksilver, is the mixture of fictional characters and real people. The political intrigue of England in the 1680s was fascinating to me, as I'm a big fan of English history. I knew little about the people of that era before I read the book, but now I've sought out other materials on the time period and I'm looking forward to learning more. I've been to London several times, and I enjoyed picturing the city as it looked 320 years ago.
I do agree with those who say that his recent books have been too long, but not with their reasons. I take the subway to work, and I like to read to pass the time. Lugging Quicksilver back and forth to work for two months wasn't much fun. If he'd published the trilogy as a series of 300-page books instead, I'd be happier. But I'll gladly put up with the extra weight to enjoy Stephenson's writings again. You can only read a book for the first time once.
"Clerks" is a good example, but "Pulp Fiction" is an even better one. Who, aside from a few cinema fans, knew of Quentin Tarantino before 1994? Suddenly, here's "Pulp Fiction," a quasi-independent movie where gangsters talk about cheeseburgers, scripture, and blow people away, on purpose and accidentally. It made stars of Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson, resurrected John Travolta's career, inspired a whole new audience of filmmakers, and created countless lookalike movies. Not bad for one movie.
Actually, it sounds a lot like what happened to John Carmack and John Romero after DOOM came out. And it happened about the same time. Curious....
The backstory elements of Godfather Part II were in the original novel "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo. The novel covers the story of the first movie and the backstory parts of the second movie, plus some extra stuff that's not in either film (but nothing from Part III, AFAIK, I haven't seen it). Anyway, I don't think you can combine elements of The Hobbit and the Scouring of the Shire into one movie. Peter Jackson's Middle-earth doesn't include the Scouring and it's never going to be a part of that universe. I'd rather see either a straight movie version of "The Hobbit" or a movie of part(s) of "The Silmarillion."
BTW, if you've never read "The Godfather," you should. It's an excellent book in its own right.
I think Chris Stone is more likely to reveal new strategies for Novell and Linux at the first keynote speech at Brainshare 2004. I'm sure he'll have similar things to say at the MySQL conference, but I hope that those of us who attend Brainshare get the scoop first. I'm looking forward to attending the conference again (I first went in 2002); Chris Stone was the featured speaker at the first keynote then, and he was entertaining and informative. Something about being a former drummer for Aerosmith seems to help him with crowds.
Yes, it's at least as large as the entire LOTR trilogy, if not in page length then in scope, but why not take part of the story, like Beren and Luthien, and adapt it into a two- or three-hour movie? Or the Fall of Gondolin, the destruction of Numenor, the assault on Thangorodrim? There's plenty of material to go around. It might be easier to make a screenplay from that book, since there isn't as much dialogue to constrain a screenwriter. They'd have free rein to tell the story in a film-friendly fashion.
BTW, Peter Jackson just said on live TV (E! Network) that New Line has the rights to film The Hobbit, but MGM/UA has the rights to distribute it. Lots of lawyers have lots of negotiating ahead of them to clear the way for a film adaptation of the book. He also said he'd want Ian McKellen back as Gandalf and to make it feel like it was part of the same story as LOTR.
The sad part is that he WILL bother, and Episode III will invariably disappoint us, even with the lowered expectations we have following Phantom Menace and AOTC. I'll still go see it, but I'm not sorry to say that my childhood dreams of being a Jedi have been replaced by thoughts of leading the armies of Men and Elves against Orcs and Balrogs. Watching each LOTR movie on opening day is an experience I will treasure, and I can't say the same about any of the recent Star Wars movies.
Um, not really. The show was entertaining, but there were NO surprises. All the front-runners with the oddsmakers for acting awards went home with Oscars. Anytime LOTR was nominated, it won. I loved LOTR and am ecstatic that ROTK received the recognition it so richly deserved, but there were some other excellent films this year that weren't rewarded. It wouldn't have taken anything away from ROTK's night if Master and Commander or Pirates of the Caribbean had won a few of the technical awards. I'm most excited about Best Director and Best Picture. Everything else is just gravy.
I can't believe that people have modded this post insightful. I would guess that the poster and the mods were not pet owners. We need a mod tag for "insensitive." A pet is an integral part of someone's life. You wouldn't get rid of a child because it chewed on something in your house, would you?
My wife and I have three cats in a two-bedroom apartment and they have plenty of room to run around. However, we used to live in a tiny one-bedroom (and it was only called a 1 BR because of the door between the two rooms) and the cats had lots of fun chasing each other in the limited space we had. My suggestion would not be to get rid of the one cat because of space, but add a second cat to give the first one a playmate. That should distract the cats from the computer. Our cats enjoy playing with each other more than they do with us, and they leave my computer equipment alone. One of my cats does like to nibble on my office laptop's AC adapter cable, so I've made a habit of hiding the cable under the couch when I'm not using it. When I am using it and he starts nibbling, I discipline him to try, usually in vain, to teach him that chewing the cable is bad.
It's not a perfect system but I'd rather replace cables than get rid of my cats.
I've been using a Mr. Coffee Iced Tea maker for about five years with no problems. My wife and I think it makes delicious tea, and sometimes I don't even need to add sugar or lemon to it, it's good just by itself over ice. The only drawback is having enough ice on hand to brew the tea and serve it. Also, since it takes about 10 minutes to brew, I have to think ahead if I feel like drinking fresh tea with dinner, so I end up drinking powdered Lipton tea instead.
First of all, it's blatantly sexist. Oscar balloting is secret, so how does this poster know that all the women vote for the romances? Does this mean that the male voters always pick the most violent movie nominated?
Second, just because romances are nominated doesn't mean that they will win. How does this sexism theory explain Best Picture winners like Gladiator (2000), Braveheart (1995), Schindler's List (1993), Unforgiven (1992), and Platoon (1986)? Gladiator beat Chocolat and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, both of which could be considered romances (or at least had prominent love stories). Yes, sometimes the romance beats the epic war movie, but there are other factors. I have read that one of the reasons that Shakespeare in Love beat Private Ryan was due to the Academy's heavy use of screener tapes. SPR's epic scope was lost when it was taken out of the movie theater, while SiL looked great at home on the small screen.
In the end, it doesn't matter whether ROTK wins Best Picture or not. Yes, I'll be happy if the movie wins, but if it doesn't, does that take anything away from the greatness of the movie or the trilogy as a whole? The movie isn't changed by the award, and I'll enjoy it just as much in future years whether or not it has the words "Academy Award Winner: Best Picture of 2003" on the DVD cover. Besides, it's not like *I* get an Oscar if the movie wins. It's like if your favorite team wins a championship. Sure, you feel great about it, but it's not like you were a part of the victory.
I completely disagree. The scores for all three LOTR movies have been spectacular and sublime. The role of a movie soundtrack is to underscore the action and help convey emotions to the audience. And it should never distract you from the on-screen action. In this regard, Howard Shore's music does an amazing job. For the battle scenes, there are sweeping orchestral fanfares, for the quieter scenes there are moving undercurrents that help tell the story. Every major group gets an appropriate theme and you always know subconsciously which character the emphasis is on. The theme for the Rohirrim is one of my favorites, and I always get chills when I think of it.
My only complaint about the music is in one scene out of three movies. When the Ents march on Isengard, Tolkien writes of the sounds of horns and trumpets as the Ents move. Shore's music for that scene didn't have any brass, which disappointed me. But that's it, out of 10 hours of movie and music. I can live with that.
When I first started out as a PC technician, I worked for the university from which I'd just graduated. My office was in a sub-basement, in a small oversized closet we called the "War Room," though it was just a few desks and lots of PCs. The space was cramped, hot, dark, and every few months the entire basement would be infused with the aroma of raw sewage. The garage for the university's fleet of trucks, including the garbage trucks, was directly underneath our floor. Every few months they'd power-wash the trucks and the smell of all that trash would come up through the floor. People would have to go home instead of work when the smell got that bad.
Also, during the winter, sometimes they would warm up the trucks in the garage instead of outside. So we would get carbon monoxide fumes in the office, which were equally nauseating. I don't want to think about all the brain cells I lost during the 15 months I worked down there. The good thing about my job, at least as far as working conditions were concerned, was that I had to support PCs and networks in other buildings on campus, so I had plenty of opportunity to leave my desk and walk around outside. When the stench got really awful I'd take a laptop and work from one of the other buildings.
Luckily, I got another job where I eventually got my own office with an actual window. And no sewage smells.
Those "settlers" left England to escape religious persecution, not because they wanted to explore strange new continents. If a group of people were to go to Mars as colonists, I'd hope they wouldn't be leaving Earth as outcasts.
Comparing Martian 1-way explorers to Christopher Columbus, Francis Drake, or Ferdinand Magellan would be more accurate. Those guys left their home ports looking for new lands, and didn't know if they'd come home.
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I don't think that his size has anything to do with his being a nerd. It's his obsession with golf and his drive to be the greatest golfer of all time. That kind of preoccupation with a job, hobby, or activity, to the exclusion of everything else, could be seen as a nerdy trait. But I admit he's not the first guy I thought of when I read the headline or the article. I think the writer is stretching a bit by including him.
There's no way those synopses of Episodes 7-9 are the work of George Lucas. Aside from his many recent denials that he's ever going to make those movies, the stories read like lame Star Wars novels. Whoever wrote them just threw in elements of Timothy Zahn's trilogy and the books about the Death Star superlaser and the Sun Crusher and made up some more nonsense. GL should be upset that his name is even on the same page as that crap.
As for the shuffle, I hardly use it, so the lack of a "true" shuffle isn't a problem for me. I usually listen to complete albums in order rather than random tracks from all over my collection. The H120/H140 does have a shuffle feature, but it shuffles your music once and keeps the files in that order. You have to add/remove files to force the player to create a new "random" shuffle. Or just create a playlist of all your music and shuffle that before copying it to the player. I agree that the hacks don't come close to what the iPod offers. And if I were buying a HD player for my wife (who's not as gadget-savvy) I'd get her an iPod. But I like to be different, and the iRiver player suits me just fine.
I ended up buying an iRiver H140. It doesn't do photos, and the database is a joke, and there's no real shuffle feature (though you can hack something together for that), but it appears as a regular USB HD when you hook it up to your PC. So you don't need any drivers or software to copy anything you want to the device. The day I got it, I connected it to my laptop and copied my entire MP3 collection to it. I can browse my collection using the same filetree system I used on my laptop, and I can play WAV, OGG, and a few other formats I haven't even tried yet. The sound quality beats the Treo hands-down. It also has a radio, a record function, and optical line-out for the day when I finally upgrade my home stereo to something with digital inputs. And the remote that comes in the box is excellent. Plus I get the ease of a portable HD for storing backups and sharing software like Firefox and ZoneAlarm when I make tech support house calls.
I hope your cell phone has better MP3 playback sound than my Treo 600, because when I moved up to an iRiver H140, the difference in sound quality was phenomenal. And I use the same headphones that I used on the Treo. Just because my cellphone can play MP3s doesn't mean it's the best option for music. I'll take a dedicated MP3 player any day over a cellphone with that capability.
Like most other IT geeks I know, I am always asked to provide free computer advice and repairs for friends. If it's a friend, I don't mind, but I have accepted payment from acquaintances and from other companies the few times I've performed consulting work for them. A few years ago my wife worked for a startup that was laying off its staff. After they cut loose the IT guy, they had e-mail problems, so they called me in for emergency support. I had no problem taking their money for my efforts, even though it was an Exchange system, and I was a GroupWise admin at the time. E-mail is e-mail, right? I'm sure my work had nothing to do with the company's eventual collapse a few months later.
That said, if I'm the one doing the buying, I'm less likely to get the extended warranty. I can usually fix things myself (LCD panel excepted) and most of the time I'm not spending enough money to justify the extra cost of the warranty. I bought a TV there once and declined the warranty when I figured that it would be more trouble to get the TV back to them for repairs in a taxi (I don't own a car) and back home again than to just go out and buy a new one.
Many posters here have complained about Stephenson's prose: too much detail, not enough character development, and so on. I disagree with all of them. With Stephenson, you get scientific, historical, and technical knowledge along with characters that will grow on you if you let them. I think that by spending so many pages on information, he gives the characters a foundation in their environment. They have a depth that they would lack without the benefit of their surroundings, which are best explained the way he does it.
Another thing I love about his books, but especially Quicksilver, is the mixture of fictional characters and real people. The political intrigue of England in the 1680s was fascinating to me, as I'm a big fan of English history. I knew little about the people of that era before I read the book, but now I've sought out other materials on the time period and I'm looking forward to learning more. I've been to London several times, and I enjoyed picturing the city as it looked 320 years ago.
I do agree with those who say that his recent books have been too long, but not with their reasons. I take the subway to work, and I like to read to pass the time. Lugging Quicksilver back and forth to work for two months wasn't much fun. If he'd published the trilogy as a series of 300-page books instead, I'd be happier. But I'll gladly put up with the extra weight to enjoy Stephenson's writings again. You can only read a book for the first time once.
Actually, it sounds a lot like what happened to John Carmack and John Romero after DOOM came out. And it happened about the same time. Curious....
BTW, if you've never read "The Godfather," you should. It's an excellent book in its own right.
BTW, Peter Jackson just said on live TV (E! Network) that New Line has the rights to film The Hobbit, but MGM/UA has the rights to distribute it. Lots of lawyers have lots of negotiating ahead of them to clear the way for a film adaptation of the book. He also said he'd want Ian McKellen back as Gandalf and to make it feel like it was part of the same story as LOTR.
Um, not really. The show was entertaining, but there were NO surprises. All the front-runners with the oddsmakers for acting awards went home with Oscars. Anytime LOTR was nominated, it won. I loved LOTR and am ecstatic that ROTK received the recognition it so richly deserved, but there were some other excellent films this year that weren't rewarded. It wouldn't have taken anything away from ROTK's night if Master and Commander or Pirates of the Caribbean had won a few of the technical awards. I'm most excited about Best Director and Best Picture. Everything else is just gravy.
My wife and I have three cats in a two-bedroom apartment and they have plenty of room to run around. However, we used to live in a tiny one-bedroom (and it was only called a 1 BR because of the door between the two rooms) and the cats had lots of fun chasing each other in the limited space we had. My suggestion would not be to get rid of the one cat because of space, but add a second cat to give the first one a playmate. That should distract the cats from the computer. Our cats enjoy playing with each other more than they do with us, and they leave my computer equipment alone. One of my cats does like to nibble on my office laptop's AC adapter cable, so I've made a habit of hiding the cable under the couch when I'm not using it. When I am using it and he starts nibbling, I discipline him to try, usually in vain, to teach him that chewing the cable is bad. It's not a perfect system but I'd rather replace cables than get rid of my cats.
First of all, it's blatantly sexist. Oscar balloting is secret, so how does this poster know that all the women vote for the romances? Does this mean that the male voters always pick the most violent movie nominated?
Second, just because romances are nominated doesn't mean that they will win. How does this sexism theory explain Best Picture winners like Gladiator (2000), Braveheart (1995), Schindler's List (1993), Unforgiven (1992), and Platoon (1986)? Gladiator beat Chocolat and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, both of which could be considered romances (or at least had prominent love stories). Yes, sometimes the romance beats the epic war movie, but there are other factors. I have read that one of the reasons that Shakespeare in Love beat Private Ryan was due to the Academy's heavy use of screener tapes. SPR's epic scope was lost when it was taken out of the movie theater, while SiL looked great at home on the small screen.
In the end, it doesn't matter whether ROTK wins Best Picture or not. Yes, I'll be happy if the movie wins, but if it doesn't, does that take anything away from the greatness of the movie or the trilogy as a whole? The movie isn't changed by the award, and I'll enjoy it just as much in future years whether or not it has the words "Academy Award Winner: Best Picture of 2003" on the DVD cover. Besides, it's not like *I* get an Oscar if the movie wins. It's like if your favorite team wins a championship. Sure, you feel great about it, but it's not like you were a part of the victory.
My only complaint about the music is in one scene out of three movies. When the Ents march on Isengard, Tolkien writes of the sounds of horns and trumpets as the Ents move. Shore's music for that scene didn't have any brass, which disappointed me. But that's it, out of 10 hours of movie and music. I can live with that.
Also, during the winter, sometimes they would warm up the trucks in the garage instead of outside. So we would get carbon monoxide fumes in the office, which were equally nauseating. I don't want to think about all the brain cells I lost during the 15 months I worked down there. The good thing about my job, at least as far as working conditions were concerned, was that I had to support PCs and networks in other buildings on campus, so I had plenty of opportunity to leave my desk and walk around outside. When the stench got really awful I'd take a laptop and work from one of the other buildings.
Luckily, I got another job where I eventually got my own office with an actual window. And no sewage smells.
Comparing Martian 1-way explorers to Christopher Columbus, Francis Drake, or Ferdinand Magellan would be more accurate. Those guys left their home ports looking for new lands, and didn't know if they'd come home.