batman begins bluray special edition is awesome. i'm loving the popup menu feature though i was confused at first when it just started playing and menu button said "operation not supported"... though an accidental press of the square button on the ps3 remote and i was all better.
the commentary track with pop in video balloons showing talking heads and behind the scenes shots was spectacular and the first 6 minutes of dark knight in hd really gets me jazzed, just 10 more days!
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we totally use xml files to load all our data into our flash sites... waiting on you google, are you just gonna grab 'em? are you going to figure out how to play nice? are you going to give away everybody's media files just because they load them somewhere in their flash file? strange business is afoot...
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when oh when can we really end support for IE6, i envy you 37signals!
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i'm wondering about obama now that he's letting fisa go without a fight on the immunity part... but then he made that very definitive i will end this war statement... still light years better than mccain in my opinion
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the new jiffy firebug firefox extension is awesome for debugging execution hangups
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I AM VOTING FOR BARACK OBAMA AND YOU SHOULD TOO!
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we went to buffalo wild wings last night
and they had $3 long islands
we ordered them and they came in full size soda glasses
and were like 3/4 sour mix
and maybe a little liquor
we sent them back, saying we really didn't want them, that long islands were supposed to be like 95% liquor
they came back like 5 minutes later with 'the bartender wants to see if you'll like these better', shorter glasses,
seemed okay-ish maybe but i just decided i'd drink it and never order a liquor drink from there again, but they were still kinda overly sweet
anna didn't drink hers, but i had mine and then hers cause i had the wild sauce which is very nicely spicy
also of course right then, we made the joke that they prolly put something in the drink
today i am feeling seriously sick
haha
:(
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oh yeah, and i just hooked myself up with a little right click on a link or a page and save it to the site firefox extension, so look for more frequent updates in the link column because now i can just grab 'em without having to come to this form and fill it in
still need an improvement so that i can add my own descriptions for commentary, but the things is i don't want to have to go to a pre-filled web form and fill in a password (and there will not be a hidden posting form that has no password), i want the extension to pop up a modal dialgue box and have me make any edits i want, so that way, everytime i don't want to make an edit i can just press enter, eh, we'll do that later
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MUSIC
went to the chris cornell show at the hard rock live, it was awesome, they played some of everything-- pretty noose, the day i tried to live, black hole sun, spoonman, jesus christ pose, hungry, sunshower, a bunch of audioslave, blah blah, they seemed to be having so much fun up there, tons of energy and the set was forever long, ?two and a half hours?, the show was pretty empty though, we had seats but we went down on the floor part of the way, the crowd sounded huge though, they roared and it was a good time
picked up a cd at the show from the opener, earl greyhound, they really rocked the stage and the double vocals (one guy and one girl) made it very interesting, i think they were better live than the cd shows, its just seemed so much more in your face, but doesn't live music always?..., i also haven't been able to really give it a full listen yet because...
i just bought three other albums on itunes, first i grabbed the new puscifer album, i figured it had to be good since its some maynard side project, i made it to track 4 or 5 and it was the first one that really grabbed me as very cool, it was the slower one, i'm sure i'll know the song's name next week, but then the cd that i had burned skipped in the 12 year old cd player that has the strangely best sound of any method of playing music in the house, so i gave up and put in otep's new album 'the ascension' and i made it through one track and annas kinda getting sleepy so i figured it wasn't the time to play something that rocks that hard, and the first song does indeed rock your face off, if every song is as good as the first i'll be very happy, it sounded bigger and harder than their old stuff but also exactly the same, which is really all you can ever ask for out of a band in their genre
and i got the new serj tankian album, 'elect the dead' and i haven't heard it much, like it was on at work, but then i was all over the place while it was on, seems cool, i think i'll prolly ending up loving a few songs as much if not more than i love a few certain system of a down songs but i'm not sure how many times i'm going to listen to the whole album
tori concert coming up !
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i just finished reading "the witling" by vernor vinge, it was awesome, i really love his stories, this book was from 1976 and it mentions ramscoops, which are a type of spaceship, heavily detailed in later books, this book was touching, it was exciting, it was everything i want out of sci-fi books, please keep writing vernor, i can't wait for the next story
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media roundup:
the resident evil movies were just so so, the newest one was the best, but maybe thats just because we saw it in the theater
eastern promises was awesome, cronenberg rules, the movie was just so raw
finally saw close encounters of the third kind, i was very impressed with the special effects considering when it was made
new donnas and new foo fighters albums just aren't grabbing me, might not listen to them too many more times, at least not specifically, its not so bad that i'd skip them if they came up on shuffle
i've been reading the hell out of the anne rice vampire books (again), i've read the vampire lestat, memnoch the devil, blood and gold, and pandora and i'm currently reading queen of the damned
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sago palms, onions, and chocolate are all also very bad for your dog
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DO NOT GIVE GRAPES TO DOGS -- it will kill them (same goes for raisins)
just learned this and grapes seem like such an innocuous little treat
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watched the strangers with candy movie, it was good, if you like that sort of thing, and i totally love that sort of thing
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i really want a plugin for iphoto to let me upload to youtube. when i import my photos, my videos come with them and end up in iphoto, grouped nicely with the pictures i took them with but i can't find a good plugin to allow me to upload them to youtube, so hook me up internet, please?
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movie roundup:
havoc - umm, s'okay, sure anne hathaway gets naked and so does bijou phillips but the story just didn't grab me, i really didn't care what happened to any of the characters, maybe i just wasn't in the mood to be sad
the invasion - again, s'okay, had it moments with really good "scary movie tense moments", but it was so heavy handed, at least we saw it for free
little children - absolutely excellent, quirky, entertaining, a little disturbing, and the narration worked very well, i really liked this movie
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picked up a couple of used movies at blockbuster when we went to rent talladega nights, we got the departed, reno 911, and pans labyrinth -- pretty sweet
we went to see superbad this weekend and it was pretty awesome
we watched reno 911 and some of the extras, the extended scenes are really great
we also watched parts of the documentary rize about krumping and right now i am watching a version of fahrenheit 451 made in 1966 (the only version?) and it is really kinda boring
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don't you hate it when you go to the dentist and you are supposed to get a filling but then your tooth just falls apart and you have to get a post and crown, yeah i hate that too and thats how i spent friday
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and i've just removed snapshots, i didn't particularly like it, it got old real fast, i think i just liked thinking about the technology behind it
and it was buggy in camino on the mac at home, the scroll bars of the worship column go over their pop over preview
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the wonderful thing about reading a russell banks book is the number of times you stop and re-read a section, stop and think about what little or large observations he teases out through the hearts and minds of his characters
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i just added Snap Shots from snap.com to my site. if you hover over any external link a preview window should pop up, it even does special things for wikipedia, imdb, flickr, youtube, amazon and many other sites ... seemed useful to let users see what they are about to click on
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big spaced out fonts, trendy and readable-- delicious
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i've got this little programming project going for work that i'm mostly working on at home after everything client-wise is taken care and i'm loving it... hopefully everyone can see it pretty soon.
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recent media encounters
music
yeah yeah yeahs "is is" - absolutely awesome, track 2 "down boy" is my favorite, though i love them all. when will there be more? i want more!
movies
simpsons - loved it, i mean it wasn't amazing but it did a great job of not sucking, and most movies that come from tv shows suck, it was a veritable laugh riot for the first twenty minutes and really pretty great for the rest of the time, it was like an episode of the tv show, only longer, bigger, a bit better graphics... really, go see it
epic movie - funny, sometimes, sorta, don't bother
ghostrider - really pretty bad, but i've like nicholas cage ever since i saw leaving las vegas so i watched it
stranger than fiction - great for the first 30-45 minutes, so-so after that, make sure you are in the mood for not just a comedy but a bit of sappiness and you'll do just fine
transporter 2 - straight up action, good as long as you don't need realism, the scene where the plane is tumbling out of the sky for minutes is hilarious, also after it crashes, the underwater scenes, wow, enjoyable, mindless
my super ex-girlfriend - eh, funny, til they broke up, which is suprisingly far in, didn't really keep my interest in the second half
books
"rant: an oral biography of buster casey" by chuck palahnuik -- great, same ole deal, a story filled with wonderfully obscene twists. time travel gets thrown in near the end, delightful to read, loved the way it he constructed the story by intertwining snatches of conversationally toned "interviews"
"stardust" by neil gaiman - delightfully fun, cute, magical and all those other words people use for absolutely perfect little fantasy novels, now i'm excited to see the movie
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most web workers are sci-fi geeks at heart, optimistic for the future and what technology can bring to our society. i think that is why i became a web designer. the open nature of the internet feels like it has the potential to turn our society into something greater.
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how do you build something to connect it all, to build the truly personalizable online life station that bring its all together?
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douglas coupland's the gum theif captures the human spirit so artfully.
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the new harry potter was good but anti climactic, which i guess makes sense considering its movie 5 of 7
live free or die hard was awesome except for the obvious overdubs
transformers did its job for me although i don't really remember watching it as a kid so there were no expectations to spoil for me
watched the fountain again and all of the dvd extras, i really hope a deluxe edition is eventually released with a commentary track
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i wonder if sometime well after the oil runs out if they'll ever be able to go back and say, "there, that was when we hit the peak oil moment"
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google, yahoo, microsoft, and others have all adopted that new sitemap standard to help search engines crawl your sites and it just adds one more thing to do to make a really complete and good website.
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i'm so into nano technology these days but not like keeping up with current developments, just dreaming about the future it can create
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safari has a really cool new inspector, its very useful for optimizing your site load times
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its bad when the ping time for most of your servers is somewhere between 40 and 60 ms but one of your servers is at 300 ms, and if your processor and ram are not being overly taxed then you just might just be using the whole 10 mb connection and its time for a 100 mb connection
the ping time is back down to 60 ms on that server now
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what will safari for windows mean to me once it is out of beta? i mean i see the problems with fonts but have any other major bug or rendering differences been found? is there a site tracking this stuff somewhere?
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i received and read the comic book/graphic novel, a history of violence, today after work. it was way more brutal that the movie and really good, the black and white ink sketchy type drawings were refreshingly different (this is actually one of the few really long comic books that deserves the title graphic novel, err at least the book is sized and shaped a lot like a regular paper back book)
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cryptonomicon was a great book, really really long but an amazing far reaching story
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is google gears really the next coolest thing on (and off!) the internet...hmmmm...what to build with that, whats the most useful...webpage like frontend to a collabrative document editing program with subversion like controls? there are so many good apps for which a web version or a desktop version exists...what one or two would really benefit from being portable in an offline manner...you need something that people are gonna wanna do out in the world on a laptop or from lots of different locations and the thing better have a major advantage to its browser interface over its software interface or at least not be hindered by it
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anna and i watched a bunch of movies this weekend.
knocked up - A+, 5 stars, great, etc etc
for your consideration - not bad, not great, not as great as best in show but better than spinal tap in my opinion
art school confidential - okayish, funny for its wonderful ensemble cast of stereotypes
we also watched a good portion of the early 90s rollerblading classic "airborn" and it had some cool skating scenese but overall was fantastically bad and filled with montages
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possibilities is a strange word, i think it just feels weird typing that many i's like that, my brain must be thinking "what are you doing? words don't have letters in an order like that, i, other letter, i, other letter, i, other letter, i, other letter... stop making up words"
then i have to look closely and convince myself that i am spelling it right