Categories
Culture From The Archives Review

Episode III: RotS (litterally?)

Egad, I’m glad that debacle is finally over. Star Wars episodes I-III has got to be one of the worst trilogies of movies ever. As a moderate Star Wars nerd, I’ve been waiting a good 8 or 10 years (since the first rumours of EPI) for this moment. I can honestly say my teenage boy dreams are feeling a little shattered. I need to use my next day off to purge myself, who wants to come over for an EP IV,V,VI marathon Friday?

I started writing the post a few days ago, i was going to talk about how much I hated episode III right here. But I keep changing my mind. I need to watch it one more time. My only comment at this point will be that the last half of the movie seemed like a checklist of things that had to be covered by episode IV. Lucas seemed to go through this list without much thought. Other than that, action and effects were awesome!

I’ve done some thinking about the differences between the original trilogy (OT) and the prequel trilogy (PT). The main difference has got to be childhood. Watching star wars as a kid i was fully engrossed by everything about it, everything was new and completely amazing. The OT literally brings a young boy’s imagination to life. Also, even when I first watched the movies in ’86 or so, the technology was still quite groundbreaking. Much fresher than the current effects. There is also something about the presentation of the Star Wars Universe in the OT, everything is thrown at the audience at face value. For example, we don’t: understand R2D2, know what “e chu ta” means, know who yoda used to be, care who built ATATs, understand the nature of the force in scientific detail, etc. The PT trilogy spends far too much time on exposition, but again, this could be a product of my age.

That’s all for now.
I will probably launching the php section later on today or tomorrow, in anticipation of a few hits from potential employers

Categories
Culture From The Archives

F.O.O.D.

I cannot believe the only php related job (that is, with the keyword ‘php’ ) listed on the Government of Canada Job Bank pays $8.75/hr for 10hrs/week and is only open to students of the U of M. Absolute bullshit. Looking for work seems like too much work when I already have a full time job, even though it’s a crappy one. It could be worse. On a related matter, I’m pretty sure cocoon branding is the coolest place to work in winnipeg. I had an interview with them a few year ago, when they were called Gator Design. They were cool then, now they’re cool AND award winning. *swoon* Sometimes I like to send them my resume, they don’t ever respond. I should probably work on the php section of the site and send out some resumes. My web ninja skills have got to be in the top 5% of everyone else in Winnipeg, I know it. There are too many horrible web development companies in this city for it to be any other way.

As you can see (if you’re viewing my site in a modern browser) css experiment 1.0 is complete. I’ve successfully created a completely new layout using only css. The internet is amazing, css is amazing. I ripped the css switching javascript off A List Apart. Next I will be creating a handheld stylesheet, but before I can do that i’ll have to compartmentalize my layout quite a bit more.

Categories
From The Archives Random

The Door

A few days ago I started a bit of a curfuffle about LeoLaporte on digg.com, see: Call For Help Tracker.. GreatTorrents… As you can see if you read the thread, I said that I thought L LaP was “the biggest puppet ever,” based on his performance on Call For Help Canada. If you haven’t had the chance to watch the show, don’t waste the time and bandwidth. The show is generally an hour of Mr TheDoor (apparently) having a hard time answering caller’s extremely banal questions and more or less being a knob – with even more unintelligent cohosts. I don’t have a problem with the show per se, it fills a niche and probably teaches a lot things the did not know. I do have a problem with are the people who revere Leo. I really don’t understand it why these extremely tech savvy individual see him as some sort of tech god. gah…it’s too unbelievable for words. After watching CFH(ca) for a few weeks, I began to notice Leo clearly listening to an earpiece on some of the more “difficult” questions. It strikes me as extremely odd for a supposed computer genius to need any additional help for the types of questions he’s asked on this show. Leo’s resume is impressive, he really should know things, but on CFH he really does not appear to know much of anything.And why is his website so bad?!

Speaking of websites, fixed a couple of things around here: finally worked out the bugs in the email post code, added a much needed background image and fixed the links in the rss feed.

Thanks all for now folks.peace out.

Categories
From The Archives Websites

Mutton Button

The old adage about wolves in sheep’s clothes is probably applicable to my new favorite interweb site, start.com/1/. Start.com is essentially a really simple web based rss reader (really simple really simple syndication?) combined with the recently improved MSN search engine. I like the page so much that i’ve made it my homepage, causing me to feel a little dirty every time I load up firefox. I’ve always been a really big fan of RSS, but I’ve never really been able to justify running another application just to check RSS feeds. Things like konfabulator widgets and the firefox ‘live bookmarks’ (or whatever) are ok, but they lack the ‘description’ contents. Unlike most other web-based RSS readers, start.com is completely cookie based, no login required. blah, blah, blah, i love microsoft, send me to hell.

[a few site updates, and probably a news update later.]

Categories
From The Archives Web Development

Eureka!

I am presently writing this post from Mozilla Thunderbird. The latest behind the scenes addition to my awesome website. Inspired by my recent adventures in moblogging, I wrote a script to check a specific (supersecret) email box for new mail. The mail is then parsed for relevant data (thanks to Ian for pointing pointing out php’s imap functionality). This little script should hypothetically allow me to post from my phone via text message to email, and obviously any other email enabled device. I am teh r0x0r. Additionally, I have not had the time or energy to create a proper administration panel for my content management system, allowing me to compose posts in an email client is a lot less tedious than manually updating the database.

Next up. While at work today something dawned on me. The windows bug discussed in this post, might actually be a feature of 802.11. When setting up a large wireless network – over say a university campus, or a metropolitan area – this feature allows clients to seamlessly move from one physical AP to another. Since wifi (evidentially) connects entirely based on SSID the client will never loss it’s connection. I totally knew this.

I’ve also added NotIan’s litebrite, right below my digg’s where people can ignore if it’s offensive. Speaking of digg, it’s not to late to digg the litebrite, come onnnn.

Time for bed.