Brent gives this movie 2.5/5

I am an avid reader of rottentomatoes.com. More often than not, I agree with the overall percentage of ‘fresh’ reviews that a movie gets. The day before it’s release, War of the Worlds had 100% fresh reviews (14 out of 14) so I was excited. The previews didn’t show much, and that made me think of Jurassic Park. I remember going to that and thinking it was a kids movie.

War of the Worlds left me confused. Not because the plot was complicated. Actually, quite the opposite. The plot is simplified to the point where there is almost no plot at all. The movie was very good at creating fear. But the by the end, you felt a little ripped off. The fear was only for fears sake, it seemed. It built and built and built…only to deliver no real climax.

I was also confused as we left the theatre. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. Almost nothing was explained about the alien invasion. And even less was explained about the defeat (oops, did I give away the ending? Well, the book is more than 100 years old, so get with it). If not for Morgan Freeman’s introduction and conclusion, I would have been totally lost.

The most insightful comment of the night came from Holly: “They were defeated by the army they didn’t see.” I thought, if the movie made any sort of poetic point, Holly hit it right on the head.

Some really cool pictures from around the world. Check out the pics of the Rockies, they’re awesome.

Terra Galleria

So, this is mist creek 2005

First, a disclaimer. I’ll do my best to explain my weekend, but I just can’t relate to you the entire atmosphere that was around the trip. I will do my best to arrange the following words to tell the story as best I can.

Being out in the mountains with those people is such a relaxing and peaceful experience. The trip was from Saturday morning to Sunday night, but it really felt like quite a bit longer … kinda like I stepped outside of time for a bit. There were 20 of us, and through all the things I describe below, just imagine groups of people sitting around and laughing. ‘Cause we laughed. A lot.

Our destination was a nice area on the Mist Creek Trail, which will take you into the Sheep River Valley (and on towards Tombstone) if you cross the Mist Ridge. It’s a great hike, we camped just south-west of where the mist creek trail crosses the mist ridge into Sheep River Valley. This’ll all make sense to those who love maps (read: Jeff) Picture a big open field, a river running through one end, the other side being the start of Storm Mountain, and then directly opposite Storm is Mist Ridge, with trees boxing us in all around, and you’ve got a great idea of what we were in. No stalls, no sites, no campgrounds, no washrooms - just wilderness and what we brought.

On the way there, I was slowed down by the K100, which is a huge rally race. Kudos for those hundreds of people who were out running at 6am on those roads, by the time I got there it looked like they were having a great time … well the people that were done their leg, anyway :)

So, we pull into the staging area and setup the 3 pack horses and Bryan’s horse. He rode and led the 3 pack horses. It was fun helping him setup ’cause horses are pretty interesting animals, and you really have to respect them - they can kick pretty damn hard. We tied all the packs to the horses, then tarps over it all with double-diamond knots. That’s a tricky knot, and I still don’t know how to tie it, but I hope to learn a bit more about knots. They looked cool, and I guess it’s a good thing that all the gear would stay up on the horses the whole ride.

Anyway, so while we’re setting up, I meet a guy staying with Bryan and Tina, and that’s Ed Brown. Here’s a quick description: http://www.seniorscope.com/spotlight_5.html#brown. Ed and Bryan are cowboys who I think would have been comfortable living about 100 years ago as easily as today. Sometimes I like to think I know lots about backpacking and living out in the wilderness, but I really know nothing next to those guys. Anyone who can survive out in the wilderness and live off the land for weeks at a time is pretty impressive by me.

So, the weather was nice enough to hold out while we all got ready and gave the horses all our heavy stuff, and we shortly took off up the trail, and after a few hours we made it to the site. I was with 2 kids who kept calling me Van Helsing due to the overcoat and hat, and the 3 of us were the next on the trail after Bryan and the horses (who went quite a bit ahead.) It was a perfect hike, the sun was alternately out and hidden, and the temps were perfect for the walk. It was a great way to spend Saturday morning.

To anyone who’s been camping when there’s rain threatening, you’ll know your first order of business is to setup the camp, setup your tent and get a fire going. We setup a few huge tarps to kick back under and Bill got the fire up and running nice and quickly with some of his magic. The tarps were setup, and then we set ourselves to build our tent city, which looked great. I had a great spot, and with the tarp extending my tent and all my gear under that, I was ready for the rain. As soon as the last tent was up, it rained for about 10 minutes, just to prove it could, then cleared back up. I think I’d have to give the best setup to Ed who found two big pine trees about 10 feet apart, cleared a little area for himself in the ground, tied a rope about 2 feet over the ground, and then a tarp over that over each side of him. With all the branches over him, the tarp, and the canvas bag he was in, I’d say it would have had to be a really really big storm before he would have felt any water.

What kind of food do you eat when you have pack horses to take the weight?! How about 30 nice big steaks, 3 loaves of garlic bread, 30 potatoes in tin foil, boiled carrots, lots of bread, coffee, cake, rice crispy squares, and hot chocolate?! Yeah, it was a glorious supper, alright. Turns out the best place to throw out your food scraps is into the river, just fyi. The bears can still smell food after it’s been burnt.

With that out of the way, we all sat around the fire and chatted. Occasionally Bryan or Ed would break out with a poem, and Ed entertained us with some songs as well. There were some great stories too - Edgar had a great one of a renegade bull that ran loose in Calgary just a week ago, and had to be shot.

Turns out Ed’s a cowboy poet like Uncle Bryan and has a few CDs out. He and Bryan are recording one together now, with Bryan telling his stories. He’s been a trapper and seen more of wilderness than I could ever describe. A really great guy and sang some awesome songs, particularly the bluesy ones that he played after everyone went to bed. We had some awesome philosophical discussions and figured out the worlds problems.

The river rushing right by the camp, the sound of the fire, and the horses bells clanking as they wandered around was all fantastic background noise. We listened to scores of stories, and had some great discussions ranging from neat backpacking trips in the NWT to the internet, the government, and just about anything else we could think of. At the same time we did our best to lighten the load the horses would have to take the next day and drank as much port and whiskey as we could.

That took us until about 2 in the morning - it was a beautiful night, went to lots of stars in the sky. It got quite cold, but I kept warm with my coat over my sleeping bag. Woke up to sausages, scrambled eggs, potatoes and ham, with some left over steak. Yeah, pretty rough, alright :)

Then we packed up and went for a walk, which was really a 4 hour hike up Mist Ridge, from which you had a great view of the Sheep River Valley, as well as the one we were just in. There wasn’t too much snow up there, but there was some, which was awesome to slide down. The Ridge isn’t that high compared to the ranges around them, though. From there, Bryan led us down some old unmarked sheep trails back to camp. It was bushwacking and Bryan brought us out right by our camp, quite cool. Most of us were thoroughly lost about an hour into the trip … and I reminded myself that’s why I definitely do not want to get lost in the woods :)

At thus begins the end of my tale - we packed up the horses and our gear, hiked back to the cars, and drove off into the sunset. Honestly, a trip like that deserves the term legendary.

I wanted to write about my new iPod and what I thought about it when I first got it. But that would have been premature, and now that I have had a chance to really use it for the past 2 weeks, I can write something a little more balanced.

First, let me say, the iPod Shuffle was not meant to compete with the feature rich MP3 players out there. It doesn’t have an LCD, it doesn’t have a lot of features, it was not meant as a storage device. The target market is people who already have an iPod (or something other mass storage device, ahem, heysteve) and is designed to be easy to use, light to carry. So if you want to get all bent out of shape about how it has no features, you are comparing Apples and oranges….ha, good pun huh?

My 1 GB Shuffle holds about 180-200 songs, even though it says it will hold 240. I don’t mind that much. Not everyone is listening to the music I am. I like a couple of 16+ min songs. Battery life is quite good. The indicator light is also quite genius, only showing battery usage when asked for, thus preserving more battery for the important stuff, the music!

This thing is stupid easy to use. And I liked that. I didn’t need to read anything or think about it. Right out of the box, it was like I had owned it for years. It is an over-simplified design, and most people would sit back and say “so what? big deal.” But anyone who has ever had to design and test user interfaces knows that it is extremely tricky to design something as intuitive as the iPod. Props to Apple for this.

Now, lets get to the bad stuff. The thing I hate about the Shuffle is not the device itself. It’s the software. iTunes sucks for managing a Shuffle. It rules for managing an iPod. There are no options at all for managing a Shuffle. Let me get more specific.

If you plug in a regular iPod to charge, iTunes pops open, it starts charging, you can remove songs from the iPod, add songs, manage playlists…really anything you want. But, when you put in the Shuffle, it tries to re-sync it with your library. If there is something on your Shuffle that is not in your library, it will be removed. That pisses me off so much. Why do that? Now, with a regular iPod, there is an option to turn off this auto-sync feature by saying “Manually update iPod” (or something like that). There is no such option for managing a Shuffle. It just does it. So everytime I charge, I lose my tunes, cause I don’t keep a collection of thousands and thousands of tunes on my laptop. I need my harddrive. I have a server to hold that stuff.

Really, this is my only complaint about the Shuffle. How about a firmware upgrade, Apple? or a new version of iTunes tweaked for the Shuffle? This might be my only complaint, but it’s huge. Every time I plug it in to charge, it’s starting all over from scratch. If you are using iTunes to actually manage your stored music, then I guess you won’t have this problem. But for those of us who do not want iTunes managing our storage, we will remain frustrated until we get some help from Apple.

Thought I’d put in a few words about the movie, too. You can see Brent’s post about Batman cuz I pretty much agree with everything he said. I don’t care for the other Batman movies (yes, even the first one) ‘cuz they bore me and don’t hold my interest. I don’t know much about the “Batman Story” … but I know there’s supposed to be some sort of psychological real-life trauma thing or something. That was totally shown in this movie. To me that makes the movie way more applicable, and I might actually be able to take something out of it. Granted, it’s an action movie and not meant to be ‘introspective’, but I made me thing of a couple things.

First - a quote which encapsulates a thought I often have, and can’t express. “It’s not what’s in your heart underneath, but what you do that defines you.” That girl says it to Batman when he says he cares about Gotham, but really his actions are selfish. Meaning - it’s more about what you do than “who you are”. Cuz underneath we’re all honest, hard working, good people (well, except for the occasional psycopathic murderer and stuff). So that deadbeat you’re thinking of right now - guess what? Deep down he probably thinks he’s just as hard working as you think you are. So what’s the difference? It’s what you do that defines you. Do you think you’re a hard worker? Guess what - so does the deadbeat. So what do you do? Are you really honest? Are you really a hard worker? I like that because it’s cutting and I realize I’m probably not as good as I think I am, and so have room to grow. You have to be careful here of hypocrisy, but that’s a whole other discussion. Suffice to say - make sure what you do is in line with your heart, and you’re not faking it. Cuz that’s lame.

The other thing I thought was cool was how Batman, and the bad guy (Brotherhood of shadows, or whatever) were totally dedicated to their cause. They knew what they were about and they dedicated themselves to it. That means believing in yourself and working hard. That’s the only way you can truly become great - by dedicating yourself to what you believe and committing to acheive. Just make sure your greatness doesn’t lead you to vaporize the city’s water supply and try to take over the world.

I was confused about one thing - weren’t his parents killed by the Joker? And didn’t the Joker not exist until Batman ‘created’ him … ? I don’t know, but I’m also not that worried about it. They’re just supposed to be fun movies.

Basketball. What a fantastic game. After playing again tonight, I had forgotten some of the qualities that the sport had taught me. It’s a great game, and as with many things in life, you get out of it only what you put into it. I can recall hours upon hours of practice on my home court during my highschool years - practicing to shoot just to make the games more fun. The physical requirements are quite high for the game - not only do you have to haul your ass up and down the court, but when you make it to each end, you have to play the game. This involves great strength, stamina, coordination, communication and strategy.

What I really enjoyed? I started to remember my old skills. I started to remember how much I loved the sport, and that linked me to the friends and family I used to play with every day back home. I got some great excercise. I didn’t think about anything other than the game and what was going on for 2 hours. It was like a siesta from life, where nothing really mattered except having a good time.

It was fantastic playing among good people again. Call your fouls, and call things as they really happen. Nobody’s playing just to win, everyone’s playing to have a great time, get some excercise, play some ball, and after those requirements, win a game. When someone makes a great move, you applaud them, whether you’re on their team or not. The game intrinsically teaches fair play, sportsmanship and just a general positive attitude. When you have a good crowd like was there tonight, you have the opportunity to just play at your best and the rest of the team just plays that level too. Calling out short commands are understood, and by the end of the night, everyone was starting to get a better feel for what each player could handle, and you started to see some really great plays forming.

Anyway, after a few hours of the game tonight, I feel better than I’ve felt this year. A fantastic game, worthy of anyone’s dedication.

I was driving to work today behind this total clown. I couldn’t believe how ridiculously they were driving. Turned out to be this old lady with curlers (yes, good old fashioned hair curlers) driving around. But here’s the silly part. It was some of the worst driving I’ve ever seen … and she was in an A-1 Auto Body “Courtesy Car”!!!

Does that seem funny to anyone else? I mean, come on - I can see the conversation at the autobody shop … 400 year old women with thick glasses comes in “I wrecked my car … this is the 4th time this month….” “Oh, well, here’s of ours!”. Who are these auto body people? You are giving your own cars to known car wreckers!!!. That would be, like, if you senslessly beat your pet dog, took it to the vet, and they gave you another persons perfectly good dog!

Okay, well, maybe it’s not quite like that…. but I still found that funny this morning.

When you are 16, you dream of getting a car. Sure, you want a Mustang or a Ferrari, but really, any car will do. For me, it was a Honda Accord. I remember the talk from my parents about being responsible, about budgetting money for gas, car paymetns and insurance. I thought I had it all figured out. And I actually did have it figured out, until I moved to the big city.

Parking. I will tell you now kids, budget about $100/month if you plan on doing anything at all downtown. The most expensive 5′ x 8′ plot in the entire city…

That is the hidden cost. I had never payed for parking in my life until I moved to Calgary. At first, I thought it was kind of cool: being downtonw, paying for parking like they do on TV. It was a romantic idea. I was an adult. I was paying for parking!

The last straw came today when the parking nazis followed me home. They were measuring with an actual tape to see how far I was from a hydrant and a handicap spot on my street. I guess I was exactly in between the two, because I didn’t get a ticket or get towed. But they measured. ATTENTION CITY GOV’T: Find a new stream of income! Stop following me!

I don’t know where I crossed the line, but I hate paying for parking. I hate it. I still am a little fuzzy on how anyone can get away with charging that much for essentially nothing. Let’s break this problem down a bit. How do I pay for parking? Let me count the ways:

1. I pay to work.
I used to work downtown, at several different jobs. Each time, parking was my problem. I had to find it, I had to pay for it, and let me tell you it is not cheap. I had figured out that almost the first hour of my day was dedicated to paying for parking. How can this be? Without me, what is downtown? Who is providing the services? I am. So why do I have to pay for the right to work? You might say “Well, then, it’s the responsibility of the employer to provide their staff with parking”. I agree. But I don’t know anyone who does, unless you are someone important at one of these companies. It is just too expensive for a company to provide parking for their staff. But what about the intern? What about the new guy? We need to work and park just like the CEO!

2. I have to pay to shop.
This is a similar problem to paying for parking while I am working. If this is not a way to discourage me from shopping downtown, I don’t know what is. You might as well put up a sign that says “Everything you see, +10 dollars!”. So if I bought this at another mall, not in the downtown, it would be 10 bucks cheaper? So, tell me why I am going downtown to shop again?

3. I have to pay for concerts, sports, events, the hospital (can you believe the hospital!),etc.
I already bought a ticket, didn’t that pay for anything? These are not proffesionals I am dealing with, I have seen people renting out their front lawn for $10 a car so I can go to a hockey game I already had to pay too much for. This is frustrating, usually I let it slide cause I don’t want to look cheap in front of the girl. As far as hospitals are concerned, no one is at the hosptial because they are having fun, so give the people a break, you greedy leaches!

What good is a rant without a solution. I believe there is a real problem. Parking is too much. Public transportation is running at more than capacity into the downtown. Have you been on the train lately? It’s insane! So what is my solution: validation.

Yes, it’s nothing new. If you have a valid reason for being downtown, I think you should get to be there for free. Otherwise, you pay and pay a lot. Each lot in the downtown would have a booth. When you come in to park, you don’t pay. You pick up a card. Every store/business in the downtown that wants to join the “Parking Association” or whatever we will call it, pays a modest monthly fee, but they can advertise that they can validate your parking. Then if you buy something, parking is free. Obviously, you could set a minimum purchase amount to qualify for the free parking, but I will leave that to the ecconomists. If you are working, that’s valid too. If you aren’t validate, prepare to pay for being stupid. I would support even tripling the cost of parking for such.

Each lot would be patrolled, if you are there for more than 24 hrs, you are towed. Sorry. No one should be downtown for more than 24 hrs. If you are, then get outside for a break, move the car. But I can’t see a situation where you would need to be in your office for 24 hrs.

Perhaps sporting events, concerts, etc will still be a problem, I am not sure how to deal with this. But I think paying for shopping, working or the hospital is out of the question. Our city government should put something together for us. Shopping, working and hospitals. All valid reasons to be at a place. I have outlined a way to create some jobs and keep the working class happy. Please, comment if you can, let’s get some ideas going, because I am serious about sending a letter to my city alderman.

Okay, seriously, this is ubelievable stuff…

First, I’m no web developer, so forgive me. But I have been playing with this thing, and had to share it with the world. Actually, there’s tonnes on this out there, but here it is from me.

I’ve been working on this project - currently dubbed “that xmms web thing”, which is supposed to be a web front end to an xmms daemon running on a server (check out noxmms and xmms-shell on google for daemon info). This was so that I could control XMMS on my main stereo from anywhere in the house. It’s cool stuff, and one day I’ll make the code & crap publicly availabe….

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to have was the player window status automatically update. This is so that, when a song is played, the current time shows up … or if my roomate on another computer changes the volume, it would be cool if the volume changed on my screen. There’s a really dead easy way to do this, but I consider it to be sub-par … the dreaded Meta: Refresh tag. I freakin’ hate that thing….

So ….. what got me interested in this was Google Suggest. Go play with that for a while. If you’re not completley amazed by it in every way, then the rest of this isn’t going to make sense and you might as well go away. What’s happening there is every time you make a keystroke, a new request is sent to google, and it’s sugestions are sent back. Trust me … this is amazing. It’s all done without refreshing the page.

This is similar to the functionality I would like to see. I wanna see my XMMS status and volume and playlist update automatically without refreshing the page. And I’ve done it!

Check out XMLHttpRequest on the web, or AJAX development. AJAX is this new thing, short for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. It means that your browser requests and updates info (via DOM) on the page asynchronously with your browsing. This is how Gmail and Google Suggest do a lot of their really cool things. Now, this stuff is really experimental, an not part of the W3C standard. But it’s amazing, and will (and is) revolutionize the web.

Here’s a snippet of code:

setInterval("updateXmmsStatus()", 1000)
var url = "xmms-status.php"; // The server-side script
function handleHttpResponse() {
if (http.readyState == 4) {
// Split the comma delimited response into an array
document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = http.responseXML.getElementsByTagName('status')[0].firstChild.data;
document.getElementById('volumeStatus').innerHTML = http.responseXML.getElementsByTagName('volume')[0].firstChild.data;
}
}
function updateXmmsStatus() {
http.open("GET", url, true);
http.onreadystatechange = handleHttpResponse;
http.send(null);
}

var http = getHTTPObject(); // We create the HTTP Object


Disclaimer: I’m sure this code is crappy. I literally wrote it about 10 minutes ago. But it works, so bah! I’ve also left out the getHTTPObject() function, cuz it’s not important right now. It returns an XMLHttpRequest object, depending on which browser you are using.

See in updateXmmsStatus() how it does an ‘http.open’ ? This happens ‘behind the scenes’ Every second (see ’setInterval’ above), this func is called, and it does an http.open. Without changing the users’ page, an http request is done, to another script I wrote (xmms-status.php), which returns a well-formed XML document containing two elements - ‘volume’ and ’status’. Using DOM, we assign some ID tags the values from this XML response.

This is amazing! I’m very excited by it, and shocked at how easy it was to do. The posibilities with this thing are endless, and I’m only beginning to touch the tip of the iceberg…

Anyway, this post is long enough. This is just a short explanation of a deep subject, and maybe I’ll elaborate more when I know more, but it was so cool, I had to post it!

One of the first backpacks I have done in the Rockies was to Tombstone, which is located in Elbow Valley - typically it’s closed until mid-June. It’s a beautiful spot that you can easily backpack to in about 3 hours from the trailhead. It’s set right at the base of Mr Rae, and it’s an easy hike to Tombstone lakes or Rae lake from there. The sites are great, there are 11 of them, and there is plenty of firewood and 2 outhouses. Lots of water near by, and your elevation is at 2000m, which is a great height to sit and watch the stars from. They have bear lockers, and there’s actually a nice little rangers cabin hidden nearby. I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader to find it.

A truly beautful spot to spend a few days. You can get to it from Hwy 40, hiking up past the Elbow lake campground. There is still a bit of snow up there in late June, but it’s mostly gone in July. A highly recommended trip, although the first 20 minutes is pretty much straight up - which is rough to deal with right out of the parking lot. Once you’re past the Elbow lake, it’s a nice easy backpack to Tombstone through some amazing ridges.

I’ve done the trip twice, and both times I really enjoyed it. Look forward to hitting that site again.