Cidade de Deus (City of God) is now on DVD. I highly recommend this movie.
City of God is about a young photographer in Rio de Janeiro surrounded by crime, drugs, and pre-teen gangs. Amazingly it's based on a true story.
The cinematography is beautiful, the surround sound is great.
The DVD also had an excellent documentary about the favelas - the Brazilian ghettos of tightly intertwined shacks protected by drug dealers.
BrickFest, the LEGO convention& model display, is returning to the Washington, DC area August 13-15, 2004.
If you were into LEGO as a child, or just want to see some massively incredible creations, you need to sign up now.
While kids are welcome, this is mostly an adult thing, with competitions, information sessions, LEGO-made stop-actionanimations, and lots of awesome Mindstorm, Technic, Space, Train, Castle, and other creations built with LEGO bricks.
I highly recommend going. I went last year for the first time and had a blast.
Item one:
Last year there was a recall of exploding frying pans. For some reason I found this funny.
"The pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying," the safety commission said in a statement.It explodes when you fry something in it.
Apparently "frying stuff" was not in the test plan for the frying pans.
Item two:
During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.
The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.
Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta.
Source: Exploding frying pansand Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter.
Both of these I read on Raymond Chen'sblog The Old New Thing. His blog is often fascinating and humorous as he explains the history behind seemingly strange and awkward decisions Microsoft (and others) has made that we now live with. Here aresome classics:
"Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time," writes BBC News.
They can only do one atom at a time for now.
Hopefully they've seen The Fly and know the potential issues involved when simultaneously transporting multiple entities.
According to the article they are not doing this to forever change our gas-dependent transportation methods. They are doing this to make faster computers, probably so they can have a sweet machine for playing Half Life, which takes place at Black Mesa, the secret government research facility that specializes in teleporatation technologies.
New beta version of my favorite RSS reader is now available!
Why do I use intraVnews?
What's new in the 1.1 beta:
I highly recommend checking intraVnews out.
They've reviewed Fahrenheit 9/11, and guess what they thought about it...
It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.
No, really, I'm not making this up! Yes, that FOX News!
Here are some more quotes:
Readers of this column may recall that I had a lot of problems with Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," particularly where I thought he took gratuitous shots at helpless targets like Charlton Heston. "Columbine" too easily succeeded by shooting fish in a barrel, as they used to say. Not so with "F9/11," which instead relies on lots of film footage and actual interviews to make its case against the war in Iraq and tell the story of the intertwining histories of the Bush and Bin Laden families.
Now, unless you've been living under a rock you know that this movie has been the cause of a lot of trouble. Miramax and Disney have gone to war over it, and "The Passion of the Christ" seems like "Mary Poppins" in retrospect. Before anyone's even seen it, there have been partisan debates over which way Moore may have spun this or that to get a desired effect.
But, really, in the end, not seeing "F9/11" would be like allowing your first amendment rights to be abrogated, no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. The film does Bush no favors, that's for sure, but it also finds an unexpectedly poignant and universal groove in the story of Lila Lipscombe, a Flint, Michigan mother who sends her kids into the Army for the opportunities it can provide - just like the commercials say - and lives to regret it. Lipscombe's story is so powerful, and so completely Middle American, that I think it will take Moore's critics by surprise. She will certainly move to tears everyone who encounters her.
The most indelible is President Bush's reaction to hearing on the morning of September 11, 2001, that the first plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Bush was reading to a grade school class in Florida at that moment. Instead of jumping up and leaving, he instead sat in front of the class, with an unfortunate look of confusion, for nearly 11 minutes. Moore obtained the footage from a teacher at the school who videotaped the morning program. There Bush sits, with no access to his advisers, while New York is being viciously attacked. I guarantee you that no one who sees this film forgets this episode.
The FOX News editor writes "It simply cannot be missed."
That, coming from FOX News, should mean a lot to everybody.
Here's some links:
It will be in theaters Friday, June 25th.
Funny, Dell Tech Support is using my blog to help their customers.
This is a comment from How to fix USB not working with Dell XPS and Windows XP Professional.
Brian - Dell Tech Support Badge # 365122 on 6/12/2004 6:49:00 PM (commentID: 3853)
Hi! I am from Dell Tech Support and I have a customer who did the same thing upgraded his Dell 4600 from XP Home to XP Pro and no USB devices worked. After researching on this issue and found your solution, it really worked. I already suggested reinstalling the OS but luckily I found your website, KUDOS for you!
Thanks and have a nice day!
Over three thousand people have visited that blog entry. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that it's the first match in Google for USB not working.
There's always a lot of people on my site, and I sometimes wonder what they're doing here.
My solution: I put togethera script that displays what pages are being looked at looking at right right now. It also shows how many pages that person has looked at, the browser tag, the host name, and when available - the site the person came from to getto this site.
How it works: First time you connect I create a database record with some basic info and the name of the page you're on. Each time you go to another page, I update that record. To ensure it's fast, I use a stored procedure and don't do any fancy queries. The name of the page comes from the template engine I built. The web page does a query of all records modified in the last, which is how long a session last. It's not exact, because you could leave the site after 20 seconds, but I can't tell when you leave, so I just guess that if you're not doing anything for 20 minutes, you probably went elsewhere.
An interesting finding: In addition to the human visitors, I can now see that there is a steady stream of bots constantly looking at my pages. Bots are programs that visit web sites to get copies of the content. This is typicallydone for updating search engines, so you'll see GoogleBot, MSNBot, and Yahoo! Slurp pretty often.
Bots pose an interesting problem for my script: Every time the bot loads a new page, it looks like new user to my script. That's because I use a cookie to see if you're a new visitor or just traveling through the site. Bots don't support cookies so I'm going to have to find another workaround if I want to make this more accurate.
You can always find the a link to the page on the number of Current Visitors on the sidebar. TeacherReviews will have this feature eventually too (it's already working, but I haven't exposed it yet).
A buddy at work that we'll call "Hays" had an interesting question:
An iPod cost about $300. It does music.
A Pocket PC cost about $300. It does music, movies, games, the web, instant messenger, email, and note taking, calendar, and almost anything else a basic PC can do.
Why buy a iPod when the Pocket PC is all that and more?
Obviously the Pocket PC can't store thousands of songs like the iPod, but many Pocket PC models have a memory card slot, or support bluetooth or WiFi. Transferring music is simple because it acts like an external hard drive in Windows. Windows Media Player 9 will also do music syncing.
Unlike the iPod, the playlist on a Pocket PC can be easily modified, songs can be erased, it has the ability to do recording, and voice commands. Plus there's no DRM to worry about when using a Pocket PC.
Hays had another question:
Why don't they put compact flash hard drives in Pocket PC's?
Hmm.... Anybody wanna help us out? I'm guessing most people don't use their Pocket PC's as MP3 players because they aren't marketed as such, so that much space over the 32 to 64 MB they already come with would be overkill.
Related links:
It seems to Hays that the Pocket PC is the MP3 Player of the future, today. Is it just a lack of good marketing preventing the Pocket PC from becoming a mainstream gadget like the iPod?
In the process of adding features to TeacherReviews and DylanGreene.com, I broke some things:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently to point to the new location. This would be fine, except for about 12 hours I had it set to a relative path for the new location instead of using the full URL. This means many RSS readers may need to re-subscribe to my feed. This effected my reader, IntraVnews, which is how I noticed the problem.Added: Image upload for blog entries. I can finally add images to these blog entries without firing up an FTP client.
On the good side, I've enabled the caching code I wrote for TeacherReviews on this site, and it works flawlessly. The site should feel a little faster now.
I'm going to post a new photo album every day or so until I run out of the dozen or so albums not posted online since this past December. All of the photos are with the Canon Digital Rebel 300D.
Why has it taken so long? Well mainly because I've been focusing my free time on TeacherReviews, but also because a few bugs broke photo sorting. Since this site and TeacherReviews share the same code-base, fixing bugs in TeacherReviews could break or improve features on this site.
As I'm now able to post photos once again, the progress of TeacherReviews is going very well.
