Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Dark Knight is great. The best comic or graphic novel film I’ve seen. The fantastic nature of the characters and story line are evolved convincingly but with a pacing that makes it gripping. The contrasts between the characters and how the story effects them really pulls the whole piece together for me and makes it more than a linear action story line. Direction and cinematography are really solid, and the special effects guys flip an 18 wheeler which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
Great performances by everyone involved. I especially liked Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance of Rachel Dawes. She gave more rounded emotion to character than Katie Holmes did. Bale, Caine and Aaron Eckhart develop their characters nicely.Heath Ledger is actually very bloody good indeed and Gary Oldman as usual puts down a great performance.
I’m not suprised it’s grossing so much, $602 million world wide so far, though I think that’s probably taken the studio by suprise.
In the UK the film is rated 12A. No cuts were made to the film and the extended classification is here. I’d probably see it yourself before taking anyone less than 15 so you understand what the classification is referring to.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
This made both me and Rebecca laugh. The canned vegetarian spaghetti bolognaise from Sainsbiry’s proclaims to have “All the Flavour of Meat”.
Well, which meat? Cow, Pig, Squirrel, Gopher? All of the above? It’s as if they thought that the most tempting thing for a vegetarian would be the flavour of meat. Any meat. They won’t know the difference because they’re vegetarian!
All The Flavour Of Meat!
Update: Mildly interesting fact. It’s spelled bolognese in Italian, well ragù alla bolognese. And sauce bolognaise in French. I’ve always used the French spelling, no idea why. Google totally disagrees with me and only accepts bolognese. Damn them.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
It’s true that food has risen in price during the credit crunch, but I don’t know how Sainsbury’s managed to introduce a NaN into their per Kg cost for fish. Made me laugh.
NaN per kg
JotSpot is finally back in the form of Google Sites. Back in the day, we were pretty excited about JotSpot but the result of the Google integration has left it looking like a glorified web page builder that’s trying to be like Share Point. The site themes looks like early 90’s web design, which doesn’t help matters.
Looking at it from a team collaboration perspective using Google Apps For Your Domain:
- Application API is no longer present.
- Pages no longer have their own email address.
- Pretty sure there are less applications / services than there were originally.
- The gadgets available are a bit pointless.
- The Google Docs integration is weak.
I hate having to dig through Google Docs to get a URL, copy it, and paste it into the site properties when they could just as easily pop up a browser for all the domain shared documents by user.
I’m sure it will get better, but right now I’m a bit dissapointed. Can Google actually innovate?
I’m looking towards Open Source, Microsoft, and smaller ISV’s for the more interesting features and and ideas.
Share Point, Trac, Central Desktop, Base Camp, FogBugz are all going in more interesting directions than Google Sites.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
At home one of my desktop PC’s developed a bit of a cough. I say cough but I mean a voilent hard disk grating noise. While I could have fixed the problem with two shiny new hard drives, I thought it would be much more fun to set up a home server and backup the data first.
So using whatever logic you see fit, assume I’ve justified playing with the new Microsoft Windows Home Server product.
My home network set up is:
- DI-604 hub, DHCP, and router to my cable connection.
- DWL-7100AP wireless access point.
- Two desktops running Vista Ultimate.
- One laptop.
- One Xbox 360.
I’ll also be adding a media center to the mix as soon as I can decide what it should actually do, but that’s another story entirely. Suffice to say the server gives me a chance to try out some quiet equipment without it being a disaster if it still sounds like the shuttle taking off.
(Continued)