Happy Valemtimes Day!

I hope your Valentines day is going well!

A quick recap of recent stuff… I finished the new Stephen King book Duma Key. Great book. This is some of King’s best work, I think. I enjoyed everything about it. A limited set of strong characters that you really care about, a greatly story that really evolves, written in King’s trademark style. Even if you aren’t a King fan you should check this out.

The missus and I went to a sneak of The Signal last night. While I really enjoyed it, the missus didn’t enjoy it quite as much but she said it sort of grew on her some – but that is understandable, she isn’t really into horror. It is a film (sort of) in three parts about a “signal” (transmitted via tv, radio, phone, etc.) that drives people who see it or hear it “crazy”. The signal “reprograms” most people to be mistrusting / jealous / homicidial, but most people don’t know it is effecting them at all. It is definitely a low budget film, shot (I imagine) mostly using hand-held video cameras. I imagine there was a reasonable amount of improvisation going on, but I think they captured the essence of “going crazy” effectively. For a horror film, I thought it was refreshingly different from the main stream and I can easily imagine it will be popular with folks who enjoy horror films. I’ve seen it described as  a cross between “The Ring” and “28 Days Later”, which seems appropriate to some degree. It reminded me in several ways of the movie Bug – The Signal should appeal to the same audience.

I am looking forward to the new John Grisham book The Appeal. It seems he has finally gotten back to the courtroom stories, which I always liked.

Last, but not least, a friend recently turned us onto Boston Legal which we absolutely love. We’re going back and starting at Season 1 (thanks Netflix!) while we simultaneously watch Season 4. This is a very funny, well written show. I’m not sure how we missed it all these years but I’ll chalk it up to “there’s only so many hours in the day and so many shows on TV”. If you are looking for a new show to try, either tune it in live or add it to your Netflix queue (or check your public library).

360 Goes Into the Shop

My 360 got the infamous red ring of death 14 or 15 months ago. I got a replacement system. Went through the XBLA-DRM fiasco (another mention here and tons more, just search “xbla drm” on Google). They have since increased their warranty, but when I got the original red ring of death I purchased the “Extended Warranty” from Microsoft — at the time the woman at Microsoft Support discouraged me from buying it, but I did it anyway. Lately (a few months), my 360’s eject button often fails to correctly eject the disc and when it does eject the disc, the system often fails to read the game discs (gotten worse over the last month or so). I can work around this issues by being patient and trying multiple times, but I feel I shouldn’t have to – it should “just work”. Now that I have finished Assassin’s Creed and there is nothing coming out in the near future, I placed a call to Microsoft to exercise my extended warranty. The phone call went very smoothly and lasted less than 15 minutes and I was only placed on hold a single time. – my easiest call to Microsoft Support ever. In 3 weeks or a month I should have a replacement 360. Will I have to go through pains with XBLA again? Hopefully not, but we’ll see. For my “inconvenience” the are extending my extended warranty by three months and giving me a free month of Xbox Live, but since I won’t be able to use my system for nearly a month this only seems fair.

Tomato and a western

Like a huge percentage of the world that accesses the Internets&tm; via broadband, I use a Linksys router. I’ve used it for years and I stopped using the stock firmware years ago. I have used various 3rd party firmwares but for the last year or more I have been using DD-WRT. Its a nice piece of software, it has served me very well. It has loads more features than the stock firmware. My only real complaint with it is that it has lots of “release candidate” and “beta” updates but rarely seems to push a new “stable” versions. My experiences are that it runs flawlessly but often when I have wanted to make a change it FIRST required a reboot THEN it would accept changes correctly. Perhaps this is fixed in the current “release candidate” (which I was running since the new years) but I decided to try Tomato. After making notes of all my configuration options (probably more changes than the average user but less than may power users) I installed Tomato. Installation was a piece of cake. Reconfiguration was a breeze. While Tomato may not has quite as many features as DD-WRT, all of the ones I needed were very easy to locate and changes were generally faster than with DD-WRT as DD-WRT often requires a full reboot of the router and Tomato seems to just save settings or just restart portions of the software. I general, I don’t see any reason I would go back to DD-WRT (at least not yet), I think I will be happier with Tomato.

One more movie recommendation… I am a fan  Christian Bale and often like Russell Crowe. I saw 3:10 to Yuma over the weekend and just can’t say enough good things about it. It is a really solid western. Great acting, great script, great characters. Go rent or buy this fine film, I can’t imagine you will be disappointed.

Double Hairspray, Double-Double Feature

The missus and I watched the new “Musical Version” of Hairpray – it was a lot of fun. The character selection was good, the music was fun (well, the missus was skeptical toward the beginning of the movie), in general it was a good time. John Travolta did a good job as the “mother” — you could imagine Divine in his character, just not quite as over the top as Divine. I thought Nikki Blonsky was fantastic as Tracy Turnblad, better than Ricki Lake. We followed that up by watching the original John Waters movie of the same name. I would say, with the exception of enjoying the performance by Divine, I think we both liked the new one much better… that said, the original was very “John Waters” which is no suprise.

I followed up this two-fer by visiting our local googol-plex to see Cloverfield and Untraceable. If you take The Blair Witch Project, place it in Manhattan, add Godzilla, then add a couple million dollars to the budget you get Cloverfield. If you can handle the constant shaky-cam and like monster flicks, this is a solid movie. If you hated Blair Witch and/or shaky cam makes you nauseous, you will absolutely hate Cloverfield. Untraceable is a somewhat derivative film, trying to be exactly what you imagine it is trying to be – a hunt the serial killer film with bits of lots of different movies thrown it, but it didn’t do a terrible job at it – pretty passable, but it won’t win any awards. If you have nothing better to watch you could do worse than Untraceable. To its credit, it didn’t completely screw up the technology aspect, which is more than I can for most tech-related movies.

On Sunday the missus and I watched Lost Voyage and Ghost Voyage (both on the Sci-Fi channel). To call these “B” movies is being generous. Both had terrible special effects (in fact, I could easily believe the same special effects team did both movies), laughable scripts, stories that were anything but new, and casts that, umm, probably were having trouble finding work elsewhere (well, there were a couple recognizable character actors in Lost Voyage). For “humor” value both movies served their purposes. The acting was a touch better in Lost Voyage and the story was a touch more interesting in Ghost Voyage, but both movies were exactly what we expected – Sci-Fi channel movies.

One last note, we were in the Phoenix area last weekend and had the joy of visiting an In-N-Out Burger where I got to enjoy a tasty Double-Double and some of their fantastic “well done” fries. I try to hit In-N-Out Burger anytime I am toward the west cost. Mmmm! If you have one near you, don’t forget the Secret Menu.

Books and Movies

I watched Helvetica via streaming video from Netflix. The Netflix streaming quality is really decent and the movie was interesting — it won’t have a lot of mass appeal, it’s a documentary about the creation and use of the Helvetica typeface. I found the movie to be pretty fascinating.

We watched Charlie Wilson’s War. I always enjoy Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman, so it was an easy choice. It was a good movie, very interesting. Well written and acted. At times it felt kind of low-budget, but it didn’t need to be a slick multi-million dollar movie as the point of the movie was to tell the story, which it did well. I would highly recommend it.

I finished listening to the book The Ruins, as the movie trailers looked kind of interesting. The book wasn’t bad – a shortish little thriller. I think it could adapt pretty well to the movie, but the missus doesn’t think so – I guess we’ll see once it comes out. I picked up Stephen King’s latest book Duma Key, on audiobook and am looking forward to starting it.

Peggle, pretty fun

I finished (an obsessive 1000 gamer score) Assassin’s Creed last night. While it was fun doing more free running, the flags just weren’t as satisfying as the orbs in Crackdown. Heck, the game just wasn’t nearly as satisfying as Crackdown, but I still had a good time. I hope they do more with what they have with Assassin’s Creed 2. We’ll see.

After hearing lots and lots of talk about Peggle, I decided to pick it up for my iPod… and discovered it really is a lot of fun. Pretty much it is like Pachinko, but nice graphics and fun gameplay. You can get it iPod Nano with Video, 5th gen iPods, or iPod Classic (not the old Nano or the iPhone). If you are looking for a game to add to your iPod to help pass the time, I feel pretty confident in saying this is the best one available and it’s only $5. For $10 you can play it on the PC via Steam, or if you are adverse to Steam you can get it for $20 from Pop-Cap. If you go the Steam route and like Sudoku, Zen of Sudoku is a really nice game, too. I have also heard Peggle is coming for the 360 via XBLA later this year.

And on the “free software for Windows scene”, Enso is now free — but I still like Launchy better. Enso makes you do a lot more typing, but they are both nice. If you run Windows (any flavor), check out Launchy. Finally, I am always looking for the best “download accelerator” and have recently discovered Free Download Manager and really like it a lot.

ONLY ONE MORE YEAR!

In just one year and 44 minutes GW will no longer be president. Everybody raise a glass and be relieved we only have 365 more days of madness. In the upcoming presidential primaries and actual elections, be sure you get out and vote, and bring two friends with you who might forget to vote.

[flash http://dorffweb.com/BushCountdown.swf w=260 h=100]

Feel free to steal my Flash countdown widget and use it – but if you do, please give credit and point people back to my blog.