Archive for January, 2005
I was looking up a word in Google today, and noticed that they changed the link that shows up in the upper right the definitions of the words you searched for. The links used to go to Dictionary.com, but now they go to Answers.com. There are no press releases from Google nor GuruNet (owns Answers.com), but I did a news search and found TONS of people reporting about it from as early as Jan 20th. I usually get my tech news from Slashdot, so I did a search on their site and nothing references answers.com, which is very suprising. Maybe I’ll make a submission and this will be the first one to get accepted! Anyway, the change is good because Answers.com doesn’t just give you the definition, but also serves up the thesaurus, lexicons, legal definitions, sign language, other topics the word is mentioned in, etc. So, kudos to Google and GuruNet for making me even lazier!
January 31st, 2005
Shaun of the Dead was a great change of pace in the genre of horror movies. It’s obviously a satire of Dawn of the Dead, but the effects were pretty well done and there were actually elements of suspense throughout the movie. As far as the plot goes, the movie is about an almost-30 slacker, Shaun (Simon Pegg), that overcomes his slackerness to save his group of friends and mother from the flesh-eating zombies of London. His best friend and super-slacker room mate, Ed (Nick Frost), is hilarious and makes for most of the comedy in the film.
The reasons the movie got points knocked off were 1) since it’s British, I couldn’t understand them sometimes, and 2) the movie started actually getting serious towards the end. I know the first is unavoidable, but the second isn’t. There may actually be value in making the story more serious towards the end since things start to look pretty grim, and it is also a way to captivate the viewer and hold them to the end. But, the first 3/4 of the movie isn’t and that’s what made it so funny! The part when they first find the zombies and are trying to figure out how to kill them is unforgettable. Other notables are the writing, the acting, and especially the camera work. The film had just the right amount of shake during the suspensful parts and worked really nice. And if you really like it, the DVD has some good extras, which I also enjoyed.
January 31st, 2005
I had recently been interested in getting more traffic to my blog since I have been putting more posts in at regular interval. Obviously, I would like some sort of return on my investment or some feedback so that it doesn’t seem completely pointless. So, I started looking at how to add my blog to blog directories or online RSS aggregators. At first, I figured I would never use an online aggregator if I could have one installed at work and home that would alert me whenever a new post came up on a feed. But, I visited a site called Kinja which is starting to make me think that I may want to supplement my Windows aggregator.
I started out by exporting my RSS Bandit feed list to an OPML file and tried importing it into my Kinja account by doing an upload, but it didn’t take. The only other option was to point it to a url of an OPML file. So, I tried importing the file into my Bloglines account and it worked. There was a little organization that had to be done, but after that, I made my Bloglines feed public so I could get a url for my OPML file. I copied it and pasted it into the field to import it into Kinja and it worked. Then, I went ahead and imported that OPML url into my Blogrolling account and my Feedster account with not problems.
Kinja was by far the best looking of them all, and they even give you a list of Editor’s Feeds like Showcase, Technology, News, Politics, Music, etc. that are handpicked feeds for those subjects. The Showcase feed is their “best of the web”, I guess. But the only problem with Kinja is that it only shows you the latest posts from your feeds and doesn’t mark if you read them or not. Bloglines handles this feature very well and makes the feeds pretty easy to read, but doesn’t look near as good as Kinja. Feedster just doesn’t look very good and I keep having problems with bugs on the site, so I think I’ll stay away until they do an overhaul. I also tried the web edition of NewsGator, but couldn’t get the OPML to import. If I get it to work and if it impresses me, I’ll post it.
My friend, Trey, just sent me a link to Lektora, which is an aggregator you use in your browser. The nice thing is that it supports IE and Firefox, but it only works on Windows. It looks really good, so I’ll probably try it out, but that’s a whole different review that should include others like Pluck.
January 28th, 2005
King Arthur, starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley, was an attempt at a realistic depiction of how the legend came to be. So, depending on how you viewed the legend before seeing this movie will most likely affect your opinion of it. In this story, Arthur is raised from a child to be the steward of a distant outpost of the Roman Empire in England. But, to help him protect this outpost, native boys are handpicked by the Romans to serve Arthur for 15 years. After we are given this information, you are brought 15 years later to the day before their release and Arthur’s exit to Rome. However, the bishop sent to England to give them their deeds sends them on one final quest, which will determine their fate.
Clive Owen does a pretty good job as Arthur, and Knightley does almost as good of a job as Guinevere but the rest of the cast, including Stellan Skarsgard, only do OK. I think that has mostly to do with the fact that there isn’t enough time, even in this 2.5 hour movie, to develop their supporting character roles. My favorite character was Bors (played by Ray Winstone), who is Arthur’s most bloodthirsty knight. The effects and battle sequences were pretty good, especially at the end. I had the director’s cut DVD, and I heard that the battle sequences in the theatre weren’t near as gorey. I have to give the writers credit for handling a very complex legend with lots of characters and putting it into a short timeframe. The end was wrapped up well, wasn’t hokey, and tried to stay realistic. The reason I’m not giving this a very high rating is just for the fact that King Arthur isn’t supposed to be realistic and there were parts in the movie that just drug on a little too much. I prefer to watch a long movie without noticing the time and this one had me watching the clock.
January 26th, 2005
The Academy Award nominations were released this morning, and here are my picks for each category. I will preceed this with the disclaimer that I haven’t seen hardly any of these movies and these are not my votes, but predictions to what I think will win.
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Leonardo DiCaprio - THE AVIATOR
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Clive Owen - CLOSER
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Hilary Swank - MILLION DOLLAR BABY
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Natalie Portman - CLOSER
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
THE INCREDIBLES
ART DIRECTION
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
CINEMATOGRAPHY
THE AVIATOR
COSTUME DESIGN
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
DIRECTING
THE AVIATOR
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
SUPER SIZE ME
DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
AUTISM IS A WORLD
FILM EDITING
THE AVIATOR
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
THE SEA INSIDE
MAKEUP
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
MUSIC (SCORE)
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
MUSIC (SONG)
“Learn To Be Lonely” - THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
BEST PICTURE
THE AVIATOR
SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)
GOPHER BROKE
SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION)
TWO CARS, ONE NIGHT
SOUND EDITING
SPIDER-MAN 2
SOUND MIXING
THE AVIATOR
VISUAL EFFECTS
SPIDER-MAN 2
WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)
SIDEWAYS
WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY)
THE AVIATOR
Obviously, I think The Aviator will take home most of them, so I’m hedging my bets.
January 25th, 2005
Yes, I know this is a 10 year old movie, but after I saw the trailer for Be Cool and saw that it was basically the sequal to Get Shorty, I had to push it to the top of my Netflix queue. Get Shorty is about a movie-loving mobster named Chili Palmer (John Travolta) that goes from Miami to Vegas to LA to collect a debt from a guy, but gets caught up in the movie business.
I don’t know, maybe I was in a really good mood or something, but I just LOVED this movie. It has a very original story and great acting, cinematography, directing, and screenplay. I’m not in the entertainment business, but I’d like to think I’ve seen enough good and bad movies to know when I see something good. This movie is really funny - just the story in general is funny, but there also a lot of little things that made me laugh too. Like, the fact that this mobster has to drive around Hollywood meeting high-powered producers, actors, and other mobsters in a Oldsmobile Silhouette (the Cadillac of mini vans). And to make it even funnier and to exaggerate how superficial Hollywood is, everyone in the end is driving one to copy Chili. Now, I haven’t seen every movie that John Travolta’s been in, but I’ve seen a lot, and I can’t remember a better role he’s played or a better movie he’s been in outside of Pulp Fiction. It was also nice to see some of James Gandolfini’s earlier work, which I thought he did very well in.
The only negative to watching this movie was that, at the end I was thinking, “Why don’t they make movies like this anymore?” But, thankfully, Be Cool will come out soon and, hopefully, it will be every bit as good.
January 25th, 2005
Paparazzi, starring Cole Hauser and Tom Sizemore and produced by Mel Gibson, was a mildly entertaining movie. The movie is about how a rising Hollywood star, Bo Laramie (Hauser), and his family are chased down by a certain group of paparazzi, who take it too far and cause Bo to wreck his car and put his son in a coma. One of the members of the group dies in a motorcycle “accident” after a run-in with Bo, which triggers him to go after the rest of the group.
I was never quite sure who I was supposed to root for in this movie. Do I side with Bo, who’s family was put into serious danger, but is taking the law into his own hands even though the police are going to probably catch the criminals responsible? Or, do I side with the paparazzi, who are being hunted down by a crazy Hollywood actor? Seriously, I didn’t have much compassion for any of the characters in the movie because they all seemed off their rocker. Also, the main antagonist, played by Sizemore, is depicted as being out to “get” Bo, but we aren’t ever shown why. In fact, we aren’t given any history at all on Sizemore’s character, which annoyed me. And the acting is this movie is sub par - especially Bo’s wife, played by Robin Tunney. But, I guess it’s a pretty good revenge story although the plot and characters aren’t developed very well.
January 24th, 2005
I have been doing a LOT of blog claims in the past couple hours. I want to get as much traffic as humanly possible because…well…because I just want to. So, here’s a link Feedster requires me to have:
No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster
January 21st, 2005
Ever since I found out about the Kubrick theme and visited Binary Bonsai to download it, I’ve been determined to implement many of the features of that site. First, I downloaded the Kubrick theme and installed it. Then, I saw how he used the index.php as a template to create other pages on his blog that provide other useful information. For example, he took the archives list of the side and devoted an entire page to it that makes it much easier to navigate. Eventually, I found all of the plugins that he uses and now I’m trying to see which ones will be useful for me. I plan on adding a nice image background to my header instead of the default blue color, and I also plan on adding useful pages like Michael does. I would really like to shorten the list of Sharepoint blogs by only showing the last 10 updated ones, but I don’t know how easy that’s going to be. It might be more dependent on those blogs pinging a particular blog directory when they posts, and I doubt they all do that.
January 21st, 2005
I finally got around to putting up my Half Life 2 screenshots in my photo gallery. You can view them here.
Oh, and I also found a really good site that explains the story of Half Life at http://hlstory.fragfiles.org/.
January 20th, 2005
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