Category Archives: reviews

Reviews / feedback / comments on books, movies, television, technology, food, etc. (These might be short snippets and not long reviews)

The “New” West Wing – Review

Posted on November 28, 2005 | Leave a comment

So I’m starting to come back around to what I call The “New” West Wing. I call it this because it’s like all the other shows that have a spin off. We’ve got Law and Order and CSI:Everywhere but you can’t have “The West Wing:Detroit”, that’s just not right. And I’m not really sure what’s in The East Wing so we have The “New” West Wing, it was really the only way to change it. It’s too bad, I really like the original, I mean I really really liked it. Now it’s just a decent show that’s getting a little better every time I watch it. And while it has some of the same characters, it’s not the same show it was and it’ll never be.

So here’s my point (I actually have one for this post), if you gave it up last season (like I did), it’s time to come back and give it another try. It’ll take a few episodes to get your head back around it, but it’s worth the effort. Just remember, it’s kind of a spinoff…

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Sugar Free Alpha-Bits

Posted on November 14, 2005 | 6 comments

Why would they do this?!? Sugar Free? And the box looks the same! That’s just mean!

So I was going to have a bowl of cereal as a little snack tonight and I was pretty disappointed. I don’t generally keep sugar around the house so I had to use powdered sugar. It actually worked pretty good, just don’t watch anything too funny when you eat it because if you laugh you might accidentally inhale some of the sugar…

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Shopgirl – Review

Posted on November 13, 2005 | 1 comment

I had read the book a while back and enjoyed it, I remember it being odd, but I did enjoy it (it seems to me some of the sex stuff was a little odd, but I don’t recall why).

So (and I bet you saw this coming) I saw the movie Shopgirl last night. It seems to be playing at a limited number of theaters. It’s more of an “arts theater” movie than mainstream. I don’t remember how much they used from the book but it was still enjoyable. So it’s really got an array of odd characters.

  • Mirabelle (Claire Danes), the meek/quiet beautiful woman who’s single and pretty much a cat lady waiting to happen.
  • Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), the eccentric slacker guy she meets at the laundromat and has a disastrous date or two with.
  • Ray (Steve Martin), the older wealthy gentleman who asks Mirabelle out. He wants her but not commitment.

    We’ve got some dry(?) humor, the characters say and do insane things. You know these people, you’ve seen them do and say the stupid things that happen in this movie.

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    The West Wing Live

    Posted on November 6, 2005 | 2 comments

    So what I liked about the live episode of The West Wing was that they referred back to a lot of issues that had come up in old episodes. Actually, I’m thinking Santos referred back to more of them (I think he’ll win the election). Otherwise it was a little boring, I think Ellen should have given us a little more background on the debate. Obviously it was rehearsed to do the free form format. So what was and what wasn’t prepared.

    You can vote on who you think won the debate (scroll down the page). It was 65%-34% when I voted (that’s Santos winning).

    I did see that the west coast is supposed to get a different episode than we did so that’ll be interesting to watch and see how different it turns out to be. I guess the show just wasn’t busy enough for me, that’s part of what I like about the show…

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    1and1 Web Hosting – Review

    Posted on October 27, 2005 | 2 comments

    1And1So I use 1and1 for my web hosting for this site and I really like them. They’ve got $5.99 domain name registration all the time (that’s the best ‘all the time’ price around) and a variety of plans and they really have all sorts of options you can choose from (news on your page, mySQL, SSI, PHP, clipart, some built-in flash, e-mail, ftp, ssh, statistics, photo albums and more). They’ve got plans as low as $2.99 a month and that includes a domain name (lower priced plans don’t have all the features) and 1GB of storage and 150 e-mail accounts.

    My biggest complaint has always been the web interface to manage things was slow, but they just fixed it!!! That’s why you’re getting this pitch, I was just using it and the new interface is much nicer and much faster. And the interface works well with a Mac (at least with Safari on my OSX Tiger machine).

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    New Map Gizmo (from BlogFlux)

    Posted on October 26, 2005 | 3 comments

    BlogFlux Map (from Google)So I adding this new BlogFlux badge to the page (it’s down in the footer). If does two different things:

  • It generates a map showing the last 25 visitors (which then has a link to list a map with more than that and other stats).
  • Lists the location of the last few visitors (I have this in the sidebar on my main page). It’s neat, it’s free and I’ve got a thing for maps…

    I had no idea I had so many overseas readers that that weren’t spam (when you look at a site’s raw stats it’s just jammed with spam sites).

    If you try this tool keep in mind stats are never perfect. It’s not going to list stats that they don’t know where they are geographically and probably won’t list RSS feeds or any pages that don’t have graphics and/or JavaScript activated and proxies will probably affect it in a few different ways.

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    Lost S2E2

    Posted on September 28, 2005 | 1 comment

    So I can’t even tell you how disappointed I was in this weeks episode of Lost (season 2 episode 2). It had two “plots”, don’t worry I’m not going to give much away at all. One was 75% of the show and it was a long elaboration of the last 3 minutes of last week’s episode which offered (pretty much) nothing else and ended at pretty much the same point as last week. The other “plot” was drawn out out on the ocean and you’ll get the gist of it in the intro when you watch it next week. So if you choose Veronica Mars this week (which is probably what they were afraid of) I’m guessing you made the better choice…

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    Flightplan – Review

    Posted on September 25, 2005 | Leave a comment

    So I saw Flight Plan yesterday. I enjoyed it, I definitely wouldn’t have enjoyed the flight. Think Die Hard / Passenger 57 with Jodie Foster as the ultra smart airplane engineer (who has to consider the ideafact that she might be a little crazy) but there is no visible enemy. How do you fight back?

    Flightplan (Widescreen Edition) Robert Schwentke, Karen Inwood SomersSo you’re on a plane and have a hysterical mother who’s missing her child during a flight. What do you do? Even if you don’t believe her, what do you do? Lots of screaming and calming down. The movie made a lot of people look suspicious though, it made it hard to pay attention at first.

    Very cool plane, a LCD TV in every seat, it was bugging me that I couldn’t figure out how the trays came out (but yet didn’t still block the screen). The soundtrack was very mellow, I expected different from James Horner for this type of movie, please note I didn’t say bad or disappointing, I just thought it’d be a little more ala Brainstorm.

    I enjoyed it, it was pretty much what I expected. A few (maybe more than a few) loopholes but it’s a movie and I can can live with that. Most of the reviews I’ve read didn’t seem to like it, but as I said, I enjoyed it.

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