So, some words...

Wow!

Alright, so, there's not a lot to be said... about Operating Systems, healing wounds, Firefox, Google, Social networking, Movies (bad ones...) and so much more. I'm going to get right to it... please click the read more... and let's get on with this thing!


Disturbia

Holy shit. Melissa and I went out to see this tonight. I wanted to see the Invisible, or Fracture. She's seen the latter, and wasn't interested in the former. Were it not for the company, I would have said it was one of the worst theater experiences I've had since the great Spider-man 3 fiasco...

First, I thought for sure that this movie looked like it was an updated ripoff of Hitchcock's Rear Window. I was right, but they did a really poor job at it.

Unless it was supposed to be a lame ass romantic comedy, then they did a really good job at screwing that up.

I will say that there was one thing about this movie that I must applaud. They did a pretty good job with product placement and more than a fair job of getting electronics to 'act' realistically. Normally when you see someone use a gadget, a video game, or some other piece of technology, it's never remotely accurate to how the items actually work. In this case, they actually did alright with it. Not great... but alright. Sadly, that's the best thing that I can say about this.

The movie begins with an attempted tear inducing sad scene. They try really hard to get you into the mood, so you understand this brooding kid. They would have done it too, if it weren't for the fact that he can't act at all. Also, throughout the film they seemed more interested in setting up bad one-liners and jokes, which doesn't play nicely with the the idea that he's a sad / angry kid.

There's also a terrible romantic sub-plot that really doesn't make any sense. Personally, I don't believe that it's remotely plausible I could spy on my next door neighbor and spin the story in such as way that she thinks I'm really 'sweet'.

Finally, for a suspense type movie, there's hardly any suspense until the final 20 minutes. Mostly it's filler story, none of which does anything to advance the plot of the movie. Finally, when it comes down to it, there's a final battle that's so anti-climactic that I actually groaned out loud.

I recommend people see this if they love bad suspense / horror flicks. It seems like they could have really done something with this movie, but it just fell flat. Like Final Destination 3.



I'm healing...

This photo was taken the night after I incurred my injuries. You can see that there's still a lot of gravel in there, and it seems that it's not interested in closing up at all. The next 2 days, however, the white blood cells started finally filling in. This morning I finally took the bandage off to let the scab set in, figuring that the deepest gash was finally filled in enough that it would heal a little more evenly.

It seems to have worked. This was taken a few minutes ago. You can see where it's all healing around the outside and there's a real evenness to the scabbing. I will be posting soon an article from the paper where you can see how I'm so familiar with this type of injury...

The abbreviated version is that while my family and I were driving back from California during the summer before my 7th grade year, I had a bad dream in the back of our pick-up truck. In it, the truck was rolling away and I was being told to jump. I did so, and hit the pavement at 70+ MPH. I rolled several times, and when I stood, I realized that I wasn't where I should be. I didn't know that I was in Sydney, NE, nor did I know that it was 2 o'clock in the morning. I started walking along the highway toward the only lights I could see.

After being knocked over by several semi-trucks as they drove by, all of which apparently radioed the State Police who picked me up about 15 - 20 minutes later. I was taken to the local Hospital. Eventually my parents were located and brought to me. I had no broken bones or head injuries, but the flesh had been mostly torn from about 60% of my body. I went home looking like a mummy.

I can tell you that I remember every moment on that highway, thinking that I might die out there, thinking that I needed to get to people, flagging down cars as they drove past, wondering how long until my parents found me. It's not the kind of fear I like to remember.



Ubuntu Studio.


If you hadn't heard, the newest version of Ubuntu Linux just dropped recently, Feisty Fawn v. 7.04. It's gotten some favorable reviews, especially as a free replacement for Windows. Even Dell is offering new machines running Ubuntu instead of Windows. I've used several versions of Ubuntu over the years, and I have to admit that they've made some great strides. As long as you have an idea of how to find the help you need, you'll be golden.



In addition, there's a new Ubuntu distro (yes, a distribution of a distribution) called Ubuntu Studio. This is actually geared toward graphic / movie / sound engineering. I've been playing around with it a little under VMWare, and I'm pretty impressed. The only thing I can't really do is work with the sound, mostly because the VMWare sound pass through driver, while working flawlessly under XP as a guest, does not perform well under this version of Linux as a guest.

Overall, my impressions are good. I've not played with the standard Feisty enough yet to tell you how they compare, but it seems everything is there and works right out of the box. And the pre-installed apps are amazing. As I said, there's a few things I can't test out, being that it's being virtualized, but what I have used is impressive.

Still... I'm waiting for this.


Happy 40th Video Games!

1up.com has a great article about the dawn of video games! If you've never heard the story of how Pong began... you might want to give it a read. It's good stuff.



I don't get this...

Social Networking must be stopped. If it's not, there'll soon be social networking games that work like MMORPG's and that would--

Oh, there already is. I'm in like with you. Wow.



Google is making us dumber.

According to this guy's rant, Google is making us dumber. When we don't need to remember how to figure things out on our own, and just Google everything, our society is heading down the toilet.

I content that Google is making us more brilliant, and has, if nothing else, improved the majority of people's ability to research information. If I don't have to remember the Pythagorean Theorem, and can just search google... it leaves my brain free for more important stuff. Like how to reset the hardware on a Mac (Control + Open Apple + O + F during boot - then type RESET-ALL). Of course, I found that out by Googling... so, it's all moot anyway.



A super cute URL...

for a reasonably good idea. a.placebetween.us is a site that uses Google Maps to find locations to meet between two locations. It's kinda neat.



Twirling Tower could Power itself...

and ten other buildings too. There's an article about this Architectural abomination. I can't imagine it, I don't want to imagine it... it scares the shit out of me just looking at it. There's even a video of how it might work.



Tab Scope

It occurs to me that I need to make a post of some of the great Firefox extensions that are out there. Extensions are one of the biggest reasons to shun Internet Explorer. That and the fact that Firefox actually shows web pages correctly, interpreting all the various mark-up languages correctly.

Anyway, I will highlight one tool that's just damn neat. I've found it very very useful in all my browsing.

TabScope. It's basically a tool that lets you look at other tabs without having to leave the page you're on, you can even navigate about inside of the tab. It doesn't really show embedded content, like flash animations, but it's still dead useful.



And with that, I'm out.

But, there's plenty more up my sleeve... trust that. I will drop it all on you sooner rather than later. Peace out internet brothers and sisters! I love you all.