Thursday, 29 Aug 2002

memento - I think I found one error in this film. It was marvellously done though.
ghostbusters - still funny after all these years. Bill Murray is the consumate lecher.

Thursday, 29 Aug 2002

Ever notice how the boundaries between video/computer games and movies is a blurry one? Movies have videogames based on them (Alien, Predator, , and videogames get turned into movies (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy) some people are really blurring the lines by making movies using game engines . A couple of diehard game fanatics maybe? Must be more than that if someone as mainstream as Roger Ebert bothers to comment on the phenomenon. Also check out Machinima. Then of course one could argue that the computer software that generates, animates and renders the massive armies in films like Lord of the Rings by creating individual computer generated creatures with their own “brains” is much closer to a videogame than it is anything like traditional moviemaking. [reprint of an older item]

Thursday, 22 Aug 2002

8/18 16 hour 40mph road trip

Blue at the Mizzen - (I listened to the audio book)

Thursday, 22 Aug 2002

Family Camping Enjoyed visiting and camping with family (including the newest member of the extended family - Samuel) over the weekend, and touring the Gettysburg battlefield was a sobering experience.

Road Trip Unfortunately the transmission started acting funky on the way south and so on the way back we rented a car to drive the kids back in and flipped a coin to see who would drive the 380 miles back at 40mph or less. I won the toss so got to drive the slow car. It was a really long drive on mostly secondary roads, made much more difficult because national travel atlases don’t always pay the amount of attention to where various roads connect to make navigating while driving a successful endevor. I missed one junction where I thought one road was going to turn into another and ended up driving a good hour and a half northwest when I should have been travelling east. Ah well, at least I wasn’t driving due west. All in all I left at 9:30AM and went over 500 miles before I arrived home at 3:30AM.

The ride was much less tedious than I would have imagined due in no small part to an unabridged Book on CD that my brother-in-law’s brother loaned me for the trip. I have never been a fan of historical nautical adventure novels but Blue at the Mizzen did hold my interest and engage my brain much more than random radio or the CDs I brought would have. Funny, I wasn’t aware of it while reading it but I just did an online search on the book and found out that it is the 20th book in this particular series! The first one was written over 30 years ago. That strikes me as odd, because although the main characters had semi-elevated stations in life I couldn’t imagine 20 novels worth of seafaring adventures that could have happened prior to this story - unless of course the author was doing a Harry Potter type of thing where one book equals one year in the character’s lives.

Some random things I noted on the drive - Best town name: Lava. Business Name Pun: Cycledelic Choppers. Oddest official town feature: Streetlights shaped and colored to look like Hershey Kisses (both wrapped and unwrapped) in Hershey, PA.
Also, an odd thing I noticed was that in PA, every gas station I stopped at had bathrooms, many of them inside the store itself. It was later by the time I got to western NY (8pm or so) but NONE of the gas stations I stopped at had gas stations. I stopped at 4 or 5 and either they didn’t have a bathroom or at three of them I was told “it’s out of order”. Funny coincidence that. When I explained that I had been driving for 5-6 hours and asked if he knew of any place that would have a working bathroom nearby one owner directed me to the 24 hour McDonalds across the street. The 24 hour DRIVE-THRU ONLY McDonalds. The walk-in part was locked up for the night and unfortunately I didn’t notice a drive through bathroom. Moral of the story? When travelling, try to go to the bathroom BEFORE you enter the state of New York.

Wednesday, 7 Aug 2002

“Someone’s got a crush on you” Sound familiar? If you’ve ever gotten one of those emails you probably wondered whether they were legit or not. Seems you aren’t alone. Salon has an article that explores whether these crush emails are genuine or the result of an email harvesting scheme that preys on people.