The terrorists are bugs!

 Society  No Responses »
Sep 132005
 

Not to hurt the good name of bugs by association, but I think this comparison really works. It was after watching and reading a lot about terrorists lately and then watching a documentary and reading an article on bug stings and bites that I realized the similarities.

Insect stings cause a lot of pain without causing a serious amount of damage relative to the whole organism. Enough pain so they the immediate response is to swat (kill the bug) or run away, and the long-term response is to fear another bite or sting. The bug is giving you a message which most of the time means leave to it alone.

The terrorists cause death and pain, yes, but the damage physically done to the body being attacked as a whole is minimal. Their message often times is to leave them alone – Al Qaeda wants us out of the middle east, and they hope that the fear they have caused is enough to deter future involvement.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t keep watching them to make sure they don’t get too capable of inflicting damage or from being able to stop them. It’s just another perspective for looking at them.

 Posted by at 12:36 pm

A Sound of Thunder

 Movie talk  No Responses »
Sep 112005
 

This is the worst movie of the year. I haven’t even seen close to all of them, but as a person who saw every movie for 6 years, I know the worst movie of the year when I see it. It actually might not be the worst, this movie was made 2 years ago which is usually a bad sign, but there are about 5 other movies made two years ago coming out this year. I will saw thuis movie is pretty dumb, and not very attractive, but it was entertaining enough. I only checked my watched once and it didn’t hit boring. So why did I see it? I like the short story it’s based on a lot. I even thought it was what was meant by the butterfly effect when I first heard about that

Spoilers coming below:

What’s bad about it?
The CG effects look unfinished. I’m guessing they ran out of money (even though they filmed in the Czech Republic) and finally decided to just put what they had in theaters. Everything has a shiny untextured look, sometimes it has a bad frame-rate, and it’s some of the worst compositing I’ve seen in a movie since it was all done by hand before we had computers.I don’t even think tv shows had CG effects this bad.

The time-wave idea is pretty lame, especially the physically throwing you around part.

That apparently no one lives in this huge city. People would be all over the place trying to get out of there. There would be crashed cars, huge messes, which would make plenty for the babboon lizards to eat. Instead the poor things must have been starving!

You have guns that can bust up a statue but can’t hurt the babboon lizards?

Of course you have a chair sitting in your linear accelerator.

Who cares about Jenny? Travis is supposed to be looking out for her. Why? How does that change the movie at all?

Don’t see this movie, rent Jurassic Park and watch that again. Or maybe even Carnosaur so you get some campiness.

 Posted by at 12:06 am

The 40 Year Old Virgin

 Movie talk  No Responses »
Sep 102005
 

I saw the poster for this movie and thought it didn’t look too promising. Then I saw the trailer and realized that this is a must-see movie. Yeah, I’m a little late, but so was he!

I was right, this was a must-see movie for me. I enjoyed it from beginning to end and there characters give you a great ride in getting there. It wasn’t consistent laughs from start to finish but it’s not too far between them. I’ve enjoyed watching Seth Rogen in everything I’ve seen him in. I look forward to seeing Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart in the Get Smart remake next year.

If you haven’t seen it you should.

 Posted by at 11:09 pm

I won something!

 boingboingboing!  2 Responses »
Sep 092005
 

So I entered the TopCoder Open sponsor track competition (since I work for a sponsoring company I couldn’t compete in the main competition (not that I had ever heard of it before)) and since there was no prize money for the sponsor track my company said they would give prizes for the top 3 employees. At the Friday social today they announced the three winners and two came from our building so the guy in charge here is pretty happy and they even had a cake for us with our names on it.

There weren’t many entries in the sponsor track due to late notice and probably general apathy and I came in 3rd in my company and about midway overall! I think they’re fun competitions and good practice (when not interrupted too much) and I’ll continue to participate in the competitions. Next year I think a lot more people are going to sign up.

 Posted by at 5:03 pm

Updated link for Yellow

 Movie talk  No Responses »
Sep 072005
 

It looks like the link DVB gave me for our CinemaSports film, Yellow, is not available anymore (bandwidth exceeded?). Anyway, I’ve put a copy up in the ftp space I get from my provider so if you couldn’t download it before, here you go.

Requires QuickTime 7 or QuickTime7 Public Preview 3 (or newer) if you are using Windows.

 Posted by at 2:23 pm

I talked to the allergist

 Science  No Responses »
Sep 072005
 

He agreed with my stopping the Nasonex and just continuing with Allegra for now. I also told him that although the allergies were getting better there were times that even with the drugs in effect that stuff still hit me. He felt that my 3rd shot has so much random stuff in it that I’m probably not getting the full amount I need so he’s going to reformulate it into two shots bringing the total up to four. I haven’t seen anyone else get four shots, only three or fewer.

I also mentioned that when I exercise that in the first 15 minutes I feel asthma starting but then it goes away. He told me that most exercise induced asthma follows one of two patterns. Either you get it in the first 10-15 minutes and can work through it (or not), or you get it when you are done exercising. I get both of those so he told me to get an air-flow measurement tool so I can track it for awhile and report back to him and we can go from there.

 Posted by at 2:17 pm

Testing

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 052005
 

New version of LivePress.

 Posted by at 9:21 pm

Yellow – The fruits of CinemaSports

 Movie talk  No Responses »
Sep 052005
 

The film that D4 (Dan, Dallas, David, and myself) made last weekend have been put into a downloadable format here. If you want to see what kind of short film you can make in 10 hours (plus a little post-processing by David this past week) you should watch it. It’s about 47MB and requires QuickTime 7 (or QuickTime 7 Public Preview 3 for the Windows users).

 Posted by at 2:45 pm

Icelandic Coke

 Food, Thanks!  No Responses »
Sep 052005
 

mo brought me back some Coca-Cola from Iceland it comes in a fairly tall 0.5L can (16.8 fl.oz. for those of you using english units). It has the same 5 ingredients as Coke here, but the feel of it is smoother with almost a soft fuzzy feel. You could get a similar feel by chewing up a SweeTart (not the soft chewy kind) and drinking Coke before you swallow it. I never thought that water would play such a large role in the Coke experience but I guess that’s to be expected since water is the main ingredient.

Thanks mo!

 Posted by at 9:14 am

Saw

 Movie talk  No Responses »
Sep 052005
 

I wanted to see Saw when I noticed that the dvd box for it was clear and the dvd was printed to look like a saw blade. Now that I have seen it, I’d had to say that it is a pretty good and suspenseful movie and if you like those then you should see it. I will also say that Saw is one of the most graphic and intense movies I’ve seen in a long time. If you don’t like personal violence or torture do not see this movie.

Saw II is apparently coming out shortly. One of the same writers but a different director. I don’t think it can or will hold up to this one and my predictions are that the antagonist will be shown a lot more, thus ruining the feeling of the movie. I also think that if the series goes on it will get increasingly abstract and less personal in the violence and turn into a generic slasher flick.

 Posted by at 9:08 am
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