gordon's
note to self: Gordon's vodka is NEVER a good idea. Even if there is just a little left and you really just want to get rid of it.
ugh
« June 2003 | Main | August 2003 »
note to self: Gordon's vodka is NEVER a good idea. Even if there is just a little left and you really just want to get rid of it.
ugh
After seeing Gary Winick's Sam the Man at Resfest in 2000, his Tadpole kept nagging me to see it when I started hearing about it last year. I am, however, chronologically spastic with my movie choices, so i just got around to watching it tonight (thanks, Tivo!).
Anyway, Sam the Man was a funny urban romantic comedy that was very well shot. Tadpole was very much like that, but with much more heart (or liver) to it. Oscar, the part-French, 15 year old progranist quotes voltaire, complains that girls at his school have not lived enough for him and is generally seen as ahead of his time. Oh, and he is madly in love with his stepmother, Eve, but ends up having drunken sex with her best friend, Diane. A young girl remarks to him early in the movie that he is "a 40 year old trapped in a 15 year old's body." That is enough about the plot.
The story is loaded with humor, none of it coming from John Ritter. Ever since the "Ted" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have yearned to see more of John Ritter. Just kidding. That episode was horrible, but he is a great asset to this movie. Sigourney Weaver as Eve and Bebe Neuwirth as Diane are both great, as is the young Aaron Stanford. There is charm and wit to spare in this movie, despite the ending being fairly predictable as it nears.
Winick's indigent (independent digital entertainment) production company has really helped spur on more and more interest in digital filmmaking (not the george lucas kind). Blah blah blah. Digital filmmaking is here to stay. End of story. The film has the feel of 16mm film, but more importantly a solid look that fits well with the story.
Also, indigent is releasing the directorial debut from the writer of What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, called Pieces Of April sometime soon. Not sure when soon is, but it should be interesting.
tracey and I started watching Angel - Season One last night. It was not nearly as bad as I remembered. The trademark Joss Whedon humor is intact and the episodes are shot really well. I still don't like the Kate character (tough girl cop, with father/trust issues). The actress that played that role was pretty flat. Although the rest of the Angel gang doesn't file in until season 2 (Wesley's rogue demon hunter is classic), the set is pretty nice.
Oh. Note to fox. Label the DVDs so we can find out which episodes have commentary WITHOUT putting each one in the player and going to EACH AND EVERY STINKIN MENU!!!! The Buffy dvd sets are like that as well. The commentaries on the shows are great, so why make them that hard to find?
I have started on a letter recognition application for juliana. It will have 3 modes, only one of which is active at the moment. ;)
Mode 1: When a letter is pressed on the keyboard, a sound for the letter will play and the letter will be drawn on the screen.
Mode 2: A letter will be drawn on the screen and juliana will have to press the right key on the keyboard.
Mode 3: A letter will be drawn on the screen and a sound will play for that sound. Then juliana will have to press the right key on the keyboard.
Juliana likes this so far, rough though it is. She keeps saying, "I wanna see da letters again! I wanna see da letters again!" Wudda lil ainjil.
view the demo (shockwave 8.5.1 required).
Many thanks go to chuck for the excellent bitmap font and gui objects.
Yay! I couldn't make it out to Portland for OSCon, but Andy Lester's presentation is posted on the O'Reilly site. The talk is one testing large projects. Neat.
hmm.
thoughts to come on "Gangs of New York," "The Pianist," "Terminator 3" and "Adaptation."
Short reviews: great, great, ok, funny
Fellow Chicago.PM'er Andy Lester has this great little article on the O'Reilly Network site called O'Reilly Network: Process improvement on the sly [July 18, 2003].
At my last job, for a while I was a one man development shop and CVS was a lifesaver. Not only did I have a rich set of backups in case I lost (or a client deleted) some code, but a project manager or another developer could look in and get a history of the changes in plain language, not only in code.
Also, as a new convert to automated testing, Andy's first testing talk is a great introduction. I hope that he will put his recent OSCON speech up as well.
Now, armed with only a pdaphone, a server with sendmail, a free sketch program and a 40 dollar palmOS email app, you too can run your very own SKOG!
What is a skog you may be asking yourself? Well, step right up!
SKOG is a gawky combination of the words sketch and log. Kind of like BLOG is part of the word weblog (despite a weblog being, for the most part, an IIS or Apache log file and NOT a journal-ish, slashdot-ish site).
View the very first SKOG right here at multiply.org
http://www.multiply.org/mobilesketches/.
The SKOG setup is a variation on the moblogging stuff I set up for setpixel this weekend. As i clean up the source and add some basic security I will post it up for consumption here. If you are dying to get your hands on it and are comfortable with some perl, email me and let me know that you just gotta have that wacky code!
(side note: I guess the category "doing" will include gaming. :) )
a games category has been added (8/31/2003)
I finished the latest Zelda game less than 24 hours ago. I want to compare it to one of the best games of all time, "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." I need a little time to gather my thoughts.
Short version: "The Wind Waker" is a fabulous game, but not on the level of "Ocarina of Time." Both games had great leaps ahead in terms of technology, but I think that despite "Ocarina" having the more difficult time (first 3D Zelda game on the first 3D Nintendo system), "The Wind Waker" lags behind it in several areas.
Hopefully i will have a more in-depth article tomorrow.
I cranked together a little moblogging script last night that accepts pics and text via email and saves them out to a gallery. Very v0.1 but definitely a good start.
Anyone interested can email me for the code, but you need to have access to a sendmail alias file to make a mobile adddress that will post. Then there are security and permissions concerns. Ah well. It is a start. Email me if you want a copy of the script.
please ignore the fact that there are no balloons in this demo. They are randomly sized grey rectangles.