Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • The Matrix Rebooted

    Yes indeed, saw The Matrix Reloaded Saturday (the 31st), and my short review is: I liked it a lot. Oddly, though, I’ve been seeing some interesting things about this movie: there’s a large portion of people who were big fans of the first movie that hate this movie. My wife seems to be one of them.

    As we left the theater, she said: “Was the first movie that stupid?”

    Upon further clarification, what she means is that there was too much talking and not enough action (although the action that it does have is great). This seems odd to me, because I remember re-watching The Matrix for the first or second time since I originally saw it, and I was struck by how relatively little action there actually was.

    Anyway.

    So I’m not entirely sure why people hated this movie; I have yet to find a good answer, other than of the “there was too much talking” variety which people mean to be slow for them: too much unnecessary filler between action scenes, the rave scene was too long and pointless, etc. etc. If anyone can give me a good, coherent answer to why you might have hated this movie, drop me a line.

    To each his own, I guess. As I said, I liked it quite a lot. The action was great, and the effects were flawless; as I mentioned in my X2 post, there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be done in movie effects anymore. I enjoyed the story, too, and I think most of it makes sense to me… there’s still a few things I’m mulling over.

    I’m thinking I’ll need to see it again before it leaves the theaters; the effects are that good, and it’s definitely a multi-tiered movie that warrants multiple viewings.

  • Some Items.

    Item 1. My in-laws are in town, from today until Sunday. This always causes some tension around here, as my wife doesn’t get along very well with her parents, but the kids just love them, so all’s well. Plus, they’ll watch the kids one night so we can finally go see The Matrix Reloaded.

    Item 2. The free ebooks section of my site here is definitely generating traffic; I get more hits from search engines (mostly Google and MSN) to this page than anywhere else on the site. I’ve also noticed some hits coming in from Google to the page with my PHP porter stemming algorithm.

    Item 3. Never, ever watch the movie SwimFan.

    Item 4. I’m writing up a long, geeky rant on comic books to post here sometime soon. If you’re into comics, keep an eye out. If not, no worries.

    Item 5. I actually can’t think of an “Item 5,” so that’s all, folks.

  • X2

    I saw X2 (X-Men 2, for the uninitiated) Saturday, and I’ll say right off, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was better than the original, which is a bold thing to say for a sequel, but it’s true. And I quite liked the first movie.

    About the only thing I didn’t like about it was the title; the subtitle to X2 was X-Men United, which didn’t really make any sense and certainly didn’t add anything to the movie; sort of like Star Wars Episode II‘s subtitle. At any rate, they could have just called the movie X2 and left it at that; it has a nicer ring to it, I think.

    Things I liked:

    • The overall plot and script was better than the last movie, too, much more coherent and sensible (well, as sensible as fantasy can be).
    • The special effects are spot on. I think we’re finally at the time where there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be done or depicted on the screen.
    • Consistent use of actors and characters. Nothing bothers me more than when a character in one movie was played by a certain actor, only to then pop up in another movie being played by a different actor. Not a problem here. Minor roles from the first movie are played by the same actors here.
    • Halle Berry does a much better job of portraying Storm this time. Her wig looks real, too.
    • Magneto is dangerous and more ruthless this time around, which is appropriate, but they haven’t elevated him to ridiculous power levels or made him a savage lunatic like they tend to do in the comics.
    • Wolverine kicks SO much ass. The way Wolverine should be done.
    • The School for mutants is actually a school (like in the first movie), not just a mutant paramilitary training ground, as it was almost always portrayed in the comics prior to the first movie.

    Overall, great movie. Go see it.

  • Lunar eclipse

    In case you live in a cave somewhere and don’t look up into the night sky, there was a total lunar eclipse tonight. Unfortunately, here on the west coast we missed most of the show; by the time the moon rose over the cloudy horizon, it was just past totality and starting to emerge from the Earth’s shadow.

    Still totally cool.

    Took some pictures with our digital camera, on the night mode setting. This is about the best one, I think:

    Lunar eclipse
    click to view larger image

    Pretty neat, eh?

  • Dog Days

    So last night, the dog eats a bag of Hershey’s Kisses.

    Okay, so not a whole bag, but about 10 ounces out of a 12 ounce bag. And they were the new Kisses, tasty ones with toffee and almonds.

    Anyway, I go downstairs about 10 o’clock, and find the shredded bag on the floor, sans Kisses. Uh oh, I think. This can’t be good.

    Every one was gone. As was most of the foil.

    Gone.

    And you know what happens when dogs eat chocolate, right? Right?

    (Here’s a hint: they die.)

    So my wife calls a 24-hour vet, and they tell us that if a dog eats an ounce of chocolate for each pound of body weight, then they’re in danger, otherwise, they’ll just (probably) end up with some gastrointestinal problems. Since the dog is about 50 pounds, and he only ate 10 ounces of chocolate, there’s nothing to worry about.

    Hell with that. I’m worried about all the damn foil he ate.

  • Mental cases

    Only in Oregon, I suppose. Apparently, Multnomah County needs a Klingon interpreter for mental health patients. The CNN story is here.

    I don’t think any more needs to be said.

  • Site Updates

    I’ve been busy on this site the last few days with updates and revisions. To wit:

    1. Got the search feature working (finally). This is using MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT indexing capabilities; it’s pretty slick, the first time I’ve played with it. It does natural language searches using frequency of keywords to produce relevancy scores… if you understood that, drop me a line because you’re as big a geek as I am…
    2. I’ve been adding new ebooks for the Palm Reader. I finally buckled down and loaded the Dropbook software on the new machine at home, and hacked up a PHP command-line script to do almost all of the work in converting Project Gutenburg texts to PML format. Now I can crank out several ebooks a day.
    3. Added the “Word Stemmer” item to the list of projects on the right. It’s a PHP class I wrote myself available for download; I’ll be putting more up there as I get them prettied up, code-wise.

    There’s been several other tweaks I’ve been doing behind the scenes, too. Nothing overt, but stuff to make things (hopefully) run more smoothly.

  • Survival Tips

    A co-worker has one of those page-a-day calendars, where you tear off each day and it has some interesting content of some kind… normally, they’re comic strips, or trivia, or word-of-the-day things, but this one is a survival calendar. So it has things like “Today in survival history” and “Today’s Hero” and the best, various survival tips.

    Among such choice tips as “How to stop a runaway camel,” “How to escape from a sinking car” and “How to foil an alien abduction” is one that was too good not to share here:

    How to Jump from Roof to Roof

    1. Look for any obstructions like gutters and small walls at the ledge of the roof.
    2. Make certain that you have enough space to land and roll.
    3. Check the distance between the buildings.
      Most people cannot jump farther than 10 feet, even at a full run.
    4. Run at full speed toward the edge.
      You will need 40 to 60 feet to gain enough speed to clear about 10 feet of distance.
    5. Leap.
      Make sure your center of gravity is forward. Try to land on your feet, then immediately tuck your head and tumble sideways onto your shoulders.

  • Is there a doctor in the house?

    My wife and I went to the Bon Jovi concert in Portland Monday night, and talk about a show. Damn right.

    The Goo Goo Dolls opened for them, and they were very good, too. Played to the audience nicely. Good choice to open, the crowd loved them.

    When Bon Jovi hit the stage, though, the audience went nuts. And if the Goo Goo Dolls plays up the crowd, then Bon Jovi has it down to an art form; they love their fans. I mean, the audience sang the entire first verse of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” not just the chorus, which you’d expect.

    Anyway. They played for 2 hours, a great mix of old and new of just about every hit you could name. Interestingly, Richie Sambora sang “I’ll Be There For You” while Jon took a quick break offstage.

    It was a great show, hell yeah.

  • Spring Ahead

    Daylight Savings Time for DummiesDaylight savings.

    Feh.

    I hate daylight savings.

    But I thought this picture would be amusing.

    Enjoy.