If you can believe...

Posting more than once during the course of a day is very unusual, but I urge you not to panic about it. I really just have a couple more things to add...

The Hunting Party

I had the pleasure of watching the movie The Hunting Party this evening, and I have to say that it was one of the best movies I've seen in a while (that I hadn't heard of before).

First, I was intrigued from the beginning by something about the movie that felt very familiar, it wasn't until later, after visiting the great iMDb that I discovered that it was written and directed by Richard Shepard, who was also responsible for the film "The Matador", which, to me anyway, stood out quite clearly in it's uniqueness. To help frame what I am saying here, I also really enjoyed "The Matador" and a lot of the reason for that is because it had a rather unique styling.

So, on to the actual movie. The Hunting Party is, supposedly, based on a 'true story'. The problem is that the entire film is just plain hard to swallow. If some of it was true, then it's a great story, if all of it were true, then it's an amazing story, and if none of it were true, then it is just plain good writing, and I think that is what I really enjoyed about it.

The acting is brilliant all around, Richard Gere delivers brilliantly, as usual, by playing an eccentric war new correspondent (Simon Hunt), fired because of an on-air outburst while covering a particularly tragic event in Sarajavo. His former partner and cameraman, 'Duck' (Terrance Howard, a man that I've yet seen deliver a poor role), is promoted and given a cushy job in New York for the network while Simon basically fades into obscurity. Fast forward 5 years and the pair meet up, Simon is excited to find 'The Fox', the legendary war criminal, most wanted man in Bosnia, which the CIA, the Hague, NATO and the UN can't seem to find. Then we add in Benjamin (Jesse Eisenburg), the fresh from Harvard son of a Network VP, out to prove to his father that he has what it takes to be a hard hitting journalist, and suddently we have an adventure for our motley crew.

Through an interesting series of events, they actually manage to track down the Fox...

The story is hard to believe, but incredibly fun to watch, and there's a lot of story to enjoy. Overall, I have to recommend it because it leaves you feeling good, there's a lot of laughs and plenty of tension throughout, and even in moments where nothing exciting is really happening, you're still deftly coerced toward the edge of your seat. It's just good film making.

Writer

I've been meaning to mention 'writer' for a while now. I hate Blogger's user interface, and really hate their post editor. With a passion. A passion that burns deep within me. Even on a monitor capable of 1920x1200, they insist on giving you a window smaller than 640x480 to work in, and absolutely no way (that I've found) to change it. For a while I used an extension in Firefox that allowed me to change the size of the text box, but somehow, Blogger's team managed to even make that impossible.

So I had been using Notepad to make my posts, but that meant that I still needed to go back to that damn blogger window to add all of my hyper links and things (I use another extension that makes it much easier than hand coding them all).

Meanwhile, I found writer.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking: I know you like online Apps and things, why wouldn't you just use your precious Google Docs & Spreadsheets and publish from there?

The answer is simple: Google Docs sucks for posting to blogger. First, the extension that I use for adding html code doesn't work right inside of the Docs window, second, it doesn't work in plain text mode, only formatted ansi, so everything ends up exactly as I type it, even overriding the CSS of the page, and third... well, the damn thing has never posted anything quite right. Also, for some reason Google Docs is blocked by the firewall where I work, and so I can't use it or Blogger to post anything there, should I want to.

So, I found writer, and being a big fan of online apps like you say, I found it perfect. It works like Dark Room (which is also an incredible piece of software that I highly recommend to anyone that needs to focus on writing), which is a huge plus because it cuts way down on distractions. It works in plain text, keeps everything saved automatically, is easy to read, big enough, and it's free. It's also great for anyone who just needs to write without having to worry constantly about font size, shape and color. Something else that's absolutely brilliant about Writer is that it doesn't post anything directly to your blog, but instead it actually saves it as a draft.

It's great, and it works with Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Live Journal, and Wordpress.


With that...

however, I must bid you, adieu. Whatever that means....


Until next time...