Apparently, some physicists have figured out how to levitate things. Awesome? Yes.
A Series of Tubes
An archive of old posts.
Tag Archives: Life in general
Bourne Ultimatum
I saw the “final” movie in the Bourne series, “The Bourne Ultimatum” today. It was good, but I haven’t seen any of the others in the series so I really had no idea what was going on at first 😛
It was really action-packed, very few special effects, just tons and tons of crazy action. The ending was sub-par though. I didn’t really like the ending. All the stuff leading up to that kicked ass though. Lots of really blurry close-ups in the action sequences, though…
Still. Great movie. Go see it. 😀
Alas Poor E3, I Knew Him…
For any gamer in the world, E3 was the place to be every year when it rolled around. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, an annual convention/tradeshow for everyone in the gaming industry; from the little 3rd party developers, to the massive players (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft). I remember planning how to get to California, trying to raise the money for a plane ticket, pining away as the date came and left, with me sitting in front of my computer reading about the awesomeness. The gigantic “booths”, the playable demos of games and even consoles never before seen and played by anyone.
Last year’s attendance? 60,000 people. And that was down 10,000 from 05. First-time playables of the Wii and PS3, not to mention the 360.
Why am I going on and on about how huge and good E3 was (and yes, I mean was there)?
Because after last year’s convention, the ESA (Entertainment Software Administration, the group that runs E3) decided to kill it. And it was not a kind, euthanasia-style death. No, the ESA decided to change E3. It would be press-only, and the booths would be much,much smaller. Small enough that it could all fit inside a small hangar. And the press conferences? Microsoft’s was held in a school theater.
Attendance this year? Around 4000. Only 32 companies had booths, from 400 last year.
Even the name is different, E3 Media and Business Summit. Eugh.
ESA, you make me sick. Oh well, there are still other conventions to wish I could be at (yes, that’s right. A convention focused on a webcomic has surpassed E3).
Harry Potter 7 Released
Well, the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter series is officially out. I’ve read it, took me maybe 7 hours. 759 pages, all very dark (well, maybe not the last 10 or so…), and very intriguing.
Yes, I was at the midnight madness gathering at Barnes & Noble. Yes, I had my computer. No, I couldn’t connect to the internet, so no, I had no live coverage for you. Sorry. 🙁
However, I did take this video while I was there (Yes, that’s me in a wizard hat :P):
Does anyone know who the dude with the video camera who briefly interviewed me is? If he’s some internet entity, I’d like to know 🙂
Oh and just because I said I would in the video, Matt’s blog can be found here (caution though, the bastard put a list of everyone who dies in the book on the front page).
Harry Potter 7 Released (Tonight)
Tonight, at midnight, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hollows (the seventh and final book in the series) will be released. I’m going to my local Barnes & Nobles for the midnight madness party.
Yes, I will be wearing a wizard’s hat with a lightning bolt drawn on my forehead.
Yes, I will bring my computer and liveblog the event 😛
Transformers Released (a while ago)
I saw Transformers back on Monday, it really came out the 4th of July though.
I’ll summarize my review:
IT KICKED SO MUCH ASS.
Ok now in-depth: It really did a great job maturing the beloved Transformers franchise, much better than TMNT did with that series. The Autobots were very well-made, though the Decepticons seemed a bit forced, their gathering scene kinda seemed like an excuse to introduce them all at the same time, and not have to develop them at all. Just a side-note: were Bonecrusher and Devastator in the original series? I don’t remember them…
There was one classic line I remember from the movie, Megatron says “You fail me yet again, Starscream.” How classic is that? And the (very) thinly veiled “more than meets the eye” lines? Clever. Very clever.
The action was good, the character development was good, Megan Fox was actually a pretty (gorgeous 😛 ) good choice for Michaela, since they made her more 3D than I thought they would.
One thing though. At the end of the movie, when Optimus is standing over the dying Megatron, one of the two says something along the lines of “I’m sorry, brother.” Did I imagine this? Are the two of them brothers?
Harry Potter 5 Released
The fifth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, opened last night, and I saw it today. The movie was very good, much better than the fourth though not quite as good as the third, I’d say. The director did a very good job cramming the longest book in the series (so far) into a little over 2 hours, whereas the fourth movie seemed to skip around way too much.
The movie was very dark, Harry pulled off an even more realistic emo than Peter Parker did in Spiderman 3. Professor Umbridge was amazingly well-casted, she really was a character you love to hate. My only beefs with the movie are that the Weasly brothers did a lot more in the book when they dropped out of school than just some fancy pyrotechnics. They had swamps in the halls and other things that lasted days, and also Cho Cheng was horribly cast. She’s supposed to be stunningly beautiful, I thought. Oh well. Luna Lovegood was very well done, and Dumbledore as well. Speaking of Dumby, I made a t-shirt for the movie premier:
Tee hee. The back lists such spoilers as “She kills Bill”, “42”, “He’s Luke’s dad”, “Rosebud is the name of his sled”, and “redrum is just murder reversed”. Yay for ironic spoilers 🙂
Ugly Tri-Boot Situation
So my awesome windows/osx86/ubuntu tri-boot machine I set up many moons ago is now pretty much kaput. Reinstalling XP was a really, really, really bad move, it turns out. It overwrote my hacked GRUB menu, so I could only use XP. Then, to make matters worse, XP somehow lost its ethernet card drivers, so I can’t get to the intertubes from the XP partition. So after 30 days, XP commits seppeku since I never activated it, since I couldn’t activate it, since it couldn’t access the net.
So basically I was stuck with a computer with 3 operating systems installed, but the only one which was accessible was the one which didn’t work. Then I discovered that by putting in the OSx86 disk, I can re-access my OSx partition, and re-bless the hard drive to make OSx the default OS. Now this is an improvement over a broken windows, but what I’m really looking for is the Ubuntu. Actually, I want the GRUB menu back so I can pick whichever I want, but I really have need of ubuntu right now.
So I try re-installing ubuntu. Actually, first I try downloading my torrent via the live image (I’m trying to use it as a torrent server), but it can’t see the ext3 partition on the hard drive for some reason, and it can’t write to ntfs or hfs+, so it tries to write it to the live disk and of course that fails, but first it seeds for an hour and a half before telling me it failed. Whee.
So I go to reinstall GRUB, since I know how to do it in Ubuntu, but after about 5 minutes I remember that I’m in the live disk’s filesystem, not the hard drive, and not only is installing GRUB pointless on a CD, it’s also impossible.
Tomorrow I’m going to try…something. Maybe a hammer would fix it up? This could end with me wiping the hard drive and starting over…If all the OS’s used the same filesystem I wouldn’t encounter these problems, because I could mount the mac or windows partition from linux and write the torrented files to them, or edit the GRUB menu on the linux partition from mac…We should all just use zfs…
Circuit City is EVIL
I just got an e-mail from Circuit City about ‘BACK TO SCHOOL SALES!’
IT’S JULY. WTF.
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I’m back home again, going to see Transformers and the iPhone in the next few days, and Harry Potter after that. Basically, expect more posts soon.