Long ago I used to trust Roger Ebert’s movie reviews. I’ve Tivo’ed Ebert and Siskel and then Ebert and Roeper for as long as I’ve had a Tivo. Well, with his review of Spiderman 2, I’m done. The Jacuzzi he got for saying what he did about the movie had better be worth it.
From EBERT AND ROEPER’S TOP TEN OF 2004
Here’s some exurpts from his review (this is an audio clip from the TV show)
The number 4 film on my list is Spider-Man 2… I’m as amazed as you are that spidey made my top 10 list. This was a really good film. The best super hero movie ever made…
Come on! VC and I watched it and and we’ve got different movie tastes but had the same problems with the movie. Comments like:
- Ok, so you spend your evenings dangling from the tops of buildings from ropes. You have a rope failure that nearly kills you. What do you do? Dangle some more! Oh no! Another rope failure! Dooph!
- Oh man, when she opens up that pizza box, the one that Spidey has been tossing around for the last 10 minutes, it is gonna be GROSS! That’s gonna be pretty funny! Wait, hey…. we didn’t get to see the pizza!
- Isn’t conducting nuclear fusion tests in a downtown manhattan apartment just a little… unwise?
- Ok, so, you built these really friggin cool, giant mechanical octopus arms that would gleefully take control of your brain if proper safeguards weren’t taken… And you’re telling me that the only thing between you and oblivion is…. a little blue light on the back of your neck?!?!?!? Dude, you’re asking for it!
- The entire movie was all about how Peter was totally broke, failing school, and couldn’t keep a job because he was busy being a vigilante… Now that MJ and Peter are going to live happily ever after, how are they pay the rent?
- A new Green Goblin? That’s coo. Wait, the movie’s over. Ughf. A sequel.
Ok, enough with the critisisms… you get the idea. The important thing here is that this was not, by any stretch of the imagination “the best super hero movie ever made.” A legitimate review would have been something like, “A fun ride. Peter is shown to be a real hero with real-life problems. Social elements are stressed over super-powers. Fairly true to the comic, though a lot of details are skipped over for brevity. Very nice effects, ok story, mediocre execution, somehow, it dragged a bit.”
I’m taking Ebert and Roeper off my Tivo Season Pass.
If I put a number and then an apostrophe in the body of my blog, it breaks the RSS and Atom feed but not the RSS2 feed.
1′ breaks the feed
2′ breaks the feed
a’ doesn’t break the feed.
(you might notice that my RSS and Atom feeds are currently showing an “Error: XML Parse Error” error. That’s because of this post.)
WP 1.5 just came out this week so I won’t bug the developers about it. In a month or three (after they’ve worked the bugs out of it… there are always bugs) I’ll probably install it.
Peercast sits out there quitely. Some day in the not too distant future, people are going to start going crazy for it and products like it. It’s a good idea.
What is PeerCast?
PeerCast is a new, free way to listen to radio and watch video on the Internet. It uses P2P technology to let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of traditional streaming. This means you get to hear and watch stations not normally found on commercially funded sites.
…
PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast a radio station to the entire network.
(I have anarchistic visions of there being a few relay points in tropical desert privacy-haven countries really messing things up for the RIAA)
This got me really mad and really sad. I think I’ll go steal some music off the internet and then send the bands I actually listen to donations in small, unmarked bills.
Here’s an exurpt, just to get you in a pissy mood.
You have to pay them [ASCAP and BMI] even if you only play music by non-RIAA artists. This because SoundExchange (the non-incorporated subsidiary of the RIAA who collect the fees) is authorized to collect on behalf of all copyright holders, even non-RIAA members. If you want to avoid these fees, you’ll need a waiver from every artist/publisher you play (in other words, it’s impossible.)
Since the first time I heard the word “groupware” in…. I think it was ’91, referring to Lotus Notes, I have wondered what it was supposed to be. Like, in an ideal world where opening up a Notes database didn’t take 2 minutes. Recall that in Notes, each email you received was stored in “The Database”, so just the act of opening 5 emails would take 10 minutes. It sucked.
In a couple of the companies I’ve worked at, I was asked if I could help design a groupware infrastructure to, in pre-dot-bombeze, “optimize knowledge-flow”. My answer every time, partially in response to some careful review, but more out of visceral instinct, was to stay as far away from those slow, poorly written, hard to maintain, poorly supported, unscalable, unchangeable, non-interoperable, did I mention slow, proprietary “high concept” systems as possible. Good old POP3, SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SMB and maybe that new-fangled IMAP were, in my mind the only systems that worked reliably enough to trust a business’ information to. Exchange? Notes? Domino? Expensive poopie-ka-ka in my experience.
(To be fair, my last review was in 2001. Groupware might have changed since then… might have.)
Why am I telling you this? Because JWZ has written a blog entry that talks a lot about groupware that hits the nail right on the head! Thank you JWZ!
(the entry is below the cut for posterity)
Continue reading ‘Groupware BAD’ »
How about a 1 terabyte CD? I could put all my war3z, movies and music on one disc. kewl.
It’s not science fiction.
From eWeek
…the Tapestry HDS-200R, is expected to hit the market this year. The new version will be a 200GB recordable drive…
I was reading an article on kissing on Yahoo, clicked on a link to get a close-up of people kissing and noticed this odd conglomeration of eye-bites. (like a sound-bite, only…)
What I did to get data off a laptop before a reinstall of Windows:
Boot PHLAK
‘cat /etc/fstab’ (to find the hard drive)
‘mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1’ (to mount hda1)
open a terminal (the hard drive couldn’t be read by the gftp started via right-click on desktop | Apps | Net | gftp. Probably b/c that started gftp with an unprivilaged user)
‘gftp’
cd the local side to ‘/mnt’
log in to 192.168.1.3, user: local
select ../hda1 on the left side and click the transfer button. Woosh…
This gambling thing is too nerve-wracking. I’m invested in a bet at Tradesports that the Iraqi elections will have a turnout of over 8 million people. One would think that it would start to become obvious which outcome is more likely, higher or lower. But we’re now 13 days after the election and just a few hours before the results are to be revealed and we’re no closer to knowing!
(Below the cut is my running analysis and final decisions to make a large trade (IE: bet) at Tradesports.)
Continue reading ‘Gambling on Iraq’s Future’ »
From Jon Udell’s blog… He’s talking about how the Tivo SDK was made available (for you non-geeks, SDK stands for “Software Developers Kit”. It means that normal every-day people will be able to fiddle with the internals of how their Tivo works. He quotes an interview with Arthur van Hoff, an old-sk00l uber-geek:
I have an X10 home lighting system, and I’ve written a Java application that runs on a Linux server in my closet that the TiVo discovers. So I can now control all the lights in my house, and turn on the fountain in the back yard, and stuff like that.
While sitting in his Barkolounger, this guy can control his backyard fountain with his TV remote control (!!)
How cool is that? Errr. How lazy can this guy be? Err….. That’s freaky frickin awsome… errr…