Rick's World

Last night, I went and saw Superman Returns at the 10pm showing. I was kind of expecting a midnight showing. This is the first time I've seen a 10pm 'midnight showing'. 10pm on a Tuesday night is an odd time to start showing a movie.

I got to the theater, bought my ticket and went in. The theater, as I expected was packed. Nearly every seat was taken. One of the previews shown before the movie was the new preview for the Spiderman 3 movie coming out next year. This preview got huge chears from the audience. It sounds like the audience clearly understood what was hinted at in the preview. But that's a subject for another blog...

The movie started. It opened with a nice CGI sequence if flying through space. Then the classic theme music from the previous Superman movies starts up. It was a really cool feeling to hear this music on the new movie. Brandon Roush, who plays Superman in this movie, looks and sounds a lot like Christopher Reeve in this movie. It's kinda freaky to see. It's almost like seeing another Christopher Reeve movie. Yes, he looks different in the costume, but as Clark Kent, he looks and sounds nearly identical. The special effects are also fantastic. Much better than any previous Superman movie. Also, this movie has much less 'cheese' than the previous Superman movies. It is a very serious movie. Lex Luther is downright evil in this movie. In the previous Superman movies, he was kind of a 'cornball' bad guy. Not here. He is serious and downright mean throughout the movie.

I won't spoil the movie by giving away much of the plot. Sufice it to say, it is an entertaining movie and for the most part, the story makes sense.

All in all, I would have to say this is one of the best comic book movies I've ever seen. It's better than all the X-Men movies. It's better than the Spiderman movies. It's much better than the Fantastic Four movie. This was the first comic book movie I've seen in a long time that didn't seem to have that 'cheese' factor in it. It was the most serious comic book movie I've ever seen.

Go see this movie. You won't be dissapointed.

This really sucks.

For the last two days, I've been heading by the gym after work in order to get a workout in. Both days, the entire parking lot has been full beyond capacity. There was literally not one stinkin' parking place anywhere. In fact, they were so low on parking spaces there were at least a dozen cars or so that made their own parking spaces by parking on the grass, etc.

It's kind of hard to get a workout in if you can't even park your car! Sheesh.

I've been wearing Oakley sunglasses for the last few years. They are great sunglasses. They fit my face perfectly, then block out the UV and all in all, I've had no complaints. Right now, my main pair of glasses is a pair of Oakley X Metal XX Sunglasses.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost one of the rubber nose pieces for the glasses. I spent the last couple of weeks going to every Oakley store I could find trying to buy a replacement set of them. I figured it couldn't be that expensive - maybe $5-10. I was never able to find any to match my glasses. The salesman recommended that I contact Oakley's customer service department to get a replacement. Finally, today I did call them. I was all ready to whip out the credit card and spend $10 bucks or so on a set, but they told me they would send me a new set for free! I guess since I've only had this pair less than a year, they consider it a warranty repair. I was really suprised and pleased by this. Since I lost the piece I really didn't think it would qualify as a warranty repair. It was my fault that the piece got lost, after all, not theirs.

Thank you Oakley for having some good customer support!

Well how about that? Several months ago, I downloaded the Open Source package Wget. This software package is used to recursively download all the web pages of a site to your computer, so you can view the site offline. I had downloaded the software because I was trying to understand how to do Base64 encoding and decoding. In the process of studying their source code, I came across a buffer overflow bug in their code. I wrote them an email explaining the bug and providing a fix for it. This was months ago. I never heard back from them until a couple days ago. They accepted my patch and added it to the program! I am now officially an open source developer!

I don't see a new version of the package available for download yet though. I guess maybe they haven't released the version with my fix in it. I'll have to keep an eye on it and watch for it's release. I hope they didn't put my change in just some other software package and ignore this one...

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
- Linus' Law

Ok, the spammers finally pissed me off enough to go and do it. I finally went and disabled trackbacks for all blogs on my site. In the last 3 days I've gotten over 200 trackback spams, and those things are a pain to get rid of. Thankfully, my blog software is open source and I have full access to the database, so I was able to find the table containing all the trackback spam I received. I went in this table and extracted a complete list of the IP addresses that sent all these trackback spams. I then added these IPs to my site's .htaccess file. This means those spammers are now permanently banned from my site. Once I did this, I was able to go in and in one fell swoop delete all the trackback spam!

You gotta love open source!

Yesterday, I bought a new Nintendo DS Lite, on the day it was released, here in the U.S. I gotta say, this is one really fun toy!

I fully expected to have to spend all afternoon driving all over town trying to find one. I figured that since yesterday was the release date, that everyone would be trying to get one. I expected lines, and stores sold out everywhere. To my surprise, I found one at the first place I stopped - Best Buy. I walked in and found 3 other guys who were also there to buy one. The salesman went back and got 4 of them for us. One of the other guys who was there mentioned that there was a coupon online for Best Buy that if you buy the DS, they give you a copy of Brain Age for free! Unfortunately, I didn't know about this so I didn't have the coupon. He had a couple of extra coupons so he gave me one and I was able to walk out with a free game! That was really nice of the guy. I also bought a copy of Super Mario Brothers and a case / charger pack for the thing.

I brought it home, opened it up and put in Brain Age, to try it out. That game is strangely addicting. Brain Age is an educational game designed to give you various thinking exercises to test your 'Brain Age'. The more exercises you do, the younger your brain age becomes. My brain age started at 58... I have a long way to go! :) It has various games like drilling you on simple math problems, Sudoku and a few other things. Sudoku is an interesting game. It's a number game where you've got a 3x3 grid of 9 boxes. Each group of 9 boxes has numbers in it. You have to find the right combination of numbers for each box in the 3x3 grid of boxes to solve the puzzle. It's a great game. The game is also interesting in that it has an animated head of the designer of the game who talks to you throughout the game. At one point, I was playing it late last night and the talking head reminded me not to stay up late and get some sleep! The game also makes a pleasant 'writing sound' whenever you write on the tablet. It kind of reminds me of the sound of someone writing on a chalkboard. It seems like a very appropriate sound for the situation and seems to fit just right.

I also played some Super Mario Brothers. A neat game and a lot of fun, but I really stink at those kinda games! I have to play that one some more when I go on my trip next week.

Later that afternoon, I bought a copy of Tetris DS. Now this was a cool experience. Tetris DS is a WiFi enabled game. That means you can play it wirelessly over the Internet with other people all over the world! What's great about this is that this feature is completely free with no registration or anything! You just run the game, say connect and off you go! I was playing Tetris last night with other people all over the world. It's a truly amazing experience to be sitting on my bed, nowhere near my PC and playing on just the DS against someone across the world. I think at one point I was playing someone in Japan (based on the characters in his name). The only problem with this system is that there is no way to chat with other person. It would be truly cool if you could chat, either by voice or text with people all over the world. I can see that feature being truly addicting. You just play the game and that's it. I used to think that I was good at Tetris until I played these people! They soundly kicked my butt in every game! I'll have to practice that game! :)

As for the design of the DS Lite itself, it is quite nice. It resembles a small, white laptop. It is a very clean design that closes easily and looks great. It looks much better than the clumsy look of the old Nintendo DS. I had read an article last week that said that Nintendo seems to have a case of 'Apple Envy', in that they tend to follow Apple's designs in their own products. This certainly seems to be true from the look of the DS Lite! It looks very similar to the iPod. It has that same, shiny, slightly off-white look of the iPod. It seems to be made of the exact same material. The two screens are also very bright and easy to read.

All in all, I think Nintendo has a potential winner here.

Wow!

It's not often I see a movie that just completely blows me away! The Incredibles did this, Princess Mononoke did this, Spirited Away did this, and this movie - Howl's Moving Castle did it. This is one of the most incredible movies I've ever seen.

This movie is an example of Japanese Anime. Anime is a truly unique form of animation. It makes most American animation look downright tame and dull in comparison. Now Anime takes some getting used to. It is very different from American animation... It tends to be really weird stuff. The characters are very odd looking. Some have big heads, some are little. They are all weird dimensions. But all this weirdness also tends to make the movie very interesting.

With the exception of "The Incredibles", all the movies I mentioned are directed by a Japanese director named Hayao Miyazaki. I first discovered his movies with Princess Mononoke years ago, and ever since I've been very interested in his other movies. They never dissapoint.

Sorry if I'm being vague as to what happens in the movies, but they are kind of hard to explain. All I can say is that they are incredible movies and well worth the effort to see.

I intend to buy this on DVD as soon as I can...

A few weeks back, I bought myself a new acoustic/electric guitar. Why did I buy another expensive guitar, when I already have a nice electric guitar that I can't even play? Well, I bought it because I wanted something 'easier' to learn on. It turns out that 'easy' is a matter of opinion.

The acoustic is easier from a setup point of view. I love how you can just pick it up, and start playing. You don't have to worry about connecting cables, plugging in the amp, adjusting the settings on the amp for the sound you want, etc. You just grab it and go. While it is easier to setup, it's not necessarily easier to play. The body of the acoustic is much thicker than an electric, which means you have to struggle with reaching around that big thing in order to play. It involves having to find an entirely different position to play in, where you can comfortably play without that fat body getting in the way. Also, the action (the height of the strings) is higher. This means you have to push farther down to properly fret the strings.

The electric, while being much more involved on setup is much easier to play, especially on my PRS. The action is much lower and the guitar is much thinner. A lower action means its easier to play, and a thinner body means that it doesn't get in the way like the acoustic's body does.

The odd thing that I am discovering is that at least right now, I'm enjoying the acoustic more than the electric! I never expected this. I've always loved the electric guitar (and I still do) and found acoutic guitar kinda boring when I listen to it. Now I find that the sound from that acoustic is much cleaner and downright beautiful compared to the sound from the electric and the amp. I'm beginning to wonder if the sound coming from the amp sounds so bad because I'm trying to play a high quality guitar through a cheapo amp...

Maybe I'm developing a case of GAS (Gear Aquisition Syndrome) again. That Fender G-DEC is looking more and more appealing...

In two days I start my second 'semester' of my beginner/intermediate guitar class. At the start of this class, the teacher is going to essentially give me my final exam from last semester again. If I pass this 'makeup test', then I get to go to the advanced class.

I am not ready.

I freely admit I haven't been practicing as much as I should. I think I'm taking this class as much to force me to keep practicing as to try to learn how to play the guitar. The fact that I know I'm going to be going to class and I am expected to get better at this stuff is forcing me to continue to practice and try to focus on getting all this stuff straight. The article linked to by this blog shows a good technique for practicing clean chord changes (which I call 'chord transitions'). I'm goint to try this technique tonight and see how it goes...

Recently, I was talking with my parents and they mentioned to me that there was this GE commercial that had a hidden message in it, designed to be found only by people with DVRs. So, today, I happened across one of the commercials and tried to find the message. I found it! It's an odd little thing called One Second Theater which are like little commercials within commercials. To find them, you have to basically start the commercial in your DVR, and then slo-mo through the commercial until you find it. I found the one in the 'Ecomagination' commercial. This is the one with the elephant dancing to 'Singing in the Rain'. Near the end, a few seconds before the end, the One Second Theater comes up. Check the link for this blog to see the actual commercials hidden within these commercials.

This is a very clever way of getting you to actually watch the commercials on a DVR, rather than fast forwarding through them. I like that GE is doing this. It strikes me as a nice way of accepting a new technology and even adapting to a new technology, rather than bitterly trying to fight it.