Category Archives: reviews

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

Aliens of the Deep

Posted on January 27, 2005 | Leave a comment

AliensofthedeepAliens of the Deep in 3D was great! IMAX movies are always great especially when in 3D. It’s James Cameron doing a Jacques Cousteau type movie thousands of feet down. They’ve got beautiful footage some interesting background details and some occasional special effects. They spend a lot of time talking about how some of this is like exploring other worlds and how some of what they do on the ocean floor would be used in deep space (especially if looking in water for life). A bit of how the extremes of space and the ocean can be very similar. Did I say the 3D looked great?!?

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It’s Vegas (finally)

Posted on January 8, 2005 | 1 comment

Lasvegas05Okay, so the past few days I haven’t felt like I was in Las Vegas. All the routes the cabs took were some odd back way so I had never seen “the strip”. Got my hands on tickets for Rod Stewart tonight (Monster Cable put on the show and David scored me tickets) and it was at the other end of town and I finally saw Las Vegas, you know the part they show on television, I feel much better that those images weren’t just special effects…

I wish I had brought a jacket with me so I could have wandered around a bit down that way but it was a little (a lot) chilly out. Maybe I’ll head down there tomorrow.

Rod was great, he was a little raspy at times, but he was great. Did some older songs* (What a Wonderful Life and Addicted to Love) and those were great too. Managed to get up real close for the second half of the show.

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Am I ever tired…

Posted on January 8, 2005 | 1 comment

Lots of walking today at the CES. Saw lots of new electronic “stuff”. Here’s my complaint: I haven’t seen anything “new”. Of course how can that be true there were 500,000 “new” items. Everything was the next generation of things I’ve seen or had. I’m not saying I won’t buy any of the products, just nothing knocked my socks off. Everything was a little bit smaller, a bit brighter, a bit faster, a few more (mega)pixels, longer battery life and a few more devices integrated into one.

Lots of iPod accessories. Lots of HD stuff. Blu-ray DVD (50 GB of storage). Rio Zen is really trying to take the MP3 market.

Sony may have had the best setup. They made you sit through a short show before getting into their area, nice sound and nice images especially for and info-mercial. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that they probably had the best booth I saw today. A beautiful projector for $3,500. HD movies with Blu-ray. Some nice cellphones that play video and have digital cameras. Some beautiful computer displays.

I’ll have to check out “the best of” area, I think I had to cut outside to do that and it was too rainy and too cold!

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Spanglish

Posted on January 2, 2005 | 1 comment

So I just saw Spanglish and Adam Sandler can really act. This is definitely a drama, not a comedy (although I laughed a lot). I had a few edit issues that seemed out of place but there was nothing else to complain about. A lot happened in the two hour movie that probably took place over six(?) months. If you think you’d enjoy it, you probably will. Just remember it’s not a slapstick Adam Sandler movie.

Spanglish James L. BrooksBut I’m not even writing this to give you the review that you see above, I’m writing this because I like one line that Adam Sandler says. I’m intentionally not quoting it exactly but it was something like “but if that happens then I’ll have to work more and not get to do the stuff I like”. Okay so that makes it sound more selfish when it was really more sappy (but it really wasn’t because I changed the words to not give too much away)t. Here’s the point, it made me think more about my recent post and me not getting to do the things I want to do in life. We’re not even talking about stuff like getting married or having kids, just stuff that I enjoy. I need to figure out a way to do more of that stuff.

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Resolutions from The Nice Guy

Posted on January 1, 2005 | Leave a comment

NiceguynewyearSo if you don’t read The Nice Guy, you should check it out. This episode deals with resolutions for the new year. It generally deals with this guy Jeff (the nice guy) and the girl he’s crazy about, and their two friends (here’s the cast).

I’m probably more like the guy than I’d like to admit and the girl is any of a dozen different women I’ve fawned over in my life (who never even noticed).

The archives, which has many comics even funnier than today’s, are located here.

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Arcadian Expressions

Posted on December 30, 2004 | Leave a comment

Diane is back after some intermittent posting and has a brand new layout (she’s actually been posting more regularly the past few weeks now). She’s a Michigan blogger (yeah!), taking classes in Computer Network Systems and is the Mother to five boys; it’s no wonder she’s “usually powered by Diet Coke and Brandy”. And she’s using these new/different smiley type faces as you can see here.

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Documenting the Internet News Information System 1992-2014

Posted on December 28, 2004 | 1 comment

So the title is boring, but the content isn’t. At least watch the movie, preferably listen to the audio and then watch the movie.

So I was listening (3:28) to Future Tense today and they talked about this 8 minute film (watch it). It’s kind of how how personalized information will be presented to you in the future and some of the problems with it. It might be helpful to listen to Jon before watching the movie. It’s interesting.

This is extra interesting to me. I’ve been perfecting my personal daily “news” feed for my iPod. Everyday it automatically gathers a bunch of short shows for me to listen to; some are “real” radio shows and some are podcasts. It’s about 30 minutes of 10-12 shows that include (but not limited to): the news (NPR news, Future Tense and other tech), health, science (stardate astronomy, earth and sky, earthwatch), word of the day, and several fluff human interest stories (I’ll elaborate more on this in some futer posts). I do listen to more, but these are pretty much the for sure ones I listen to. It’s definitely limiting what I’m hearing, but at least it’s stuff I’m interested in. In the future I know these things will be smarter and I’ll get more variety with more choices but the searching just isn’t there yet so I’m manually having to make some generalizations.

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No more WWW

Posted on December 25, 2004 | 3 comments

WARNING: No holiday content in this post!!!

It’s about time to ditch the WWW from web addresses. There is no technical reason to have them there. You want a secret? There never has been a (required) reason* to have them. Since the dark ages of the Internet people have typed that 4 extra characters every time they want a page while most web pages do not require it. It’s actually the http:// that tells the computer it’s a web page (not the WWW) and most web browsers do not require the http:// part either (and haven’t for a long time) since it’s a web browser it’s first assumption is that it is a web page so it views it correctly (most e-mail browsers and word processors like it so they know for sure where to send you).

Nowwwclass-BWhy am I babbling about this today of all days? 1) it’s a pet peeve. 2) I just heard them talking about it on a radio show (which is coincidentally a podcast). 3) I want to expose you all to more podcasts whenever I can so I can get you hooked. Over at Future Tense they discuss it. You could go there and read it or you could just listen to the MP3 file (or the Real Audio file). I don’t know how long they keep the audio files up so listen while you can, it’s under four minutes long. (SORRY, AUDIO DOESN”T WORK ANYMORE.)

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