well, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones lived up to my expectations. (we took a long lunch to catch it before the friday crowds.) i know many people who didn’t like Episode I, but i enjoyed it and i think II is better. of course the graphics are amazing! but the story’s pretty good too. the acting is fair - good for a sci-fi flick. ewan mcgregor is great. and yoda gets the deserved screen time he should! i’m not a star wars geek, but i’ve enjoyed all the movies thus far. people say II is predicatable, well in a way it has to be! it is a prequel to what is already known! star wars has never been the “mental candy” of the sci-fi genre (two posts in one day using “genre”, cool) as some films, such as dune and gattaca, but they’ve alway been entertaining and mostly very creative. i’m also happy to see the C3PO humor back and the all-to-childish jarjar binks kept to a minimum.

we’re planning to see it again next week in the DLP (Digital Projection) theater and will post a comparision in quality - i haven’t seen a movie on the DLP screen yet.

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well i finished snow crash in two weeks. not bad for me! it’s a great book. i kinda dig the “cyber-punk” genre or whatever you want to call it. i still think i liked cryptonomicon better, although snow crash is more action-packed and tech oriented. cryptonomicon was more “mental tech”. now on to about a boy by nick hornby which i bought ages ago after reading high fidelity. (my favorite book ever - which i read way before the movie came out - which just might be my favorite movie as well.)

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i must have writer’s block. my posts (well, post - singular, as in only one) this week have been paltry. i was quite prolific for a while. hmmm…. been busy at work doing both client and server side stuff - pretty cool heavy duty object oriented stuff. we know java’s powerful for the server side, but javascript’s not too shabby either for down on the client. that could be blocking things. anyway… i got some ideas floating around in my head for some good posts, but can get the words out yet…

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longbets purpose is to promote long-term thinking. the first bet is A computer - or “machine intelligence” - will pass the Turing Test by 2029 by Mitchell Kapor and Ray Kurzweil. great stuff!

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today was that six month bi-annual cleaning. good thing: leaving work early on a friday and no cavities or other dental anomalies to report. bad thing: the teeth hurt after all that prodding and poking! once again i was reminded that i need to get my wisdom teeth out - only one’s come in, but i’ve gotta get ‘em all out. biding my time…

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this la times article was posted to slashdot, but i had to post as well. this artist changed a california highway sign to correct the original sign’s bad design. no one noticed for months - that’s how convincing it was! there’s a video clip that you have to check out.

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when i was younger i was only into comics a little bit. i had a few of the usuals… spider-man, x-men, sandman, etc. and some more “unusual”, namely howard the duck. (i’m a bit odd!) and of course i grew up with cartoons on tv - tom and jerry rules! (i’ve got the chuck jones set on laser disc. now if only i had a laser disc player…)

i never felt i fully “grew up” and hope i never do and i still enjoy comics. i’m more in tune with user friendly than say, bugs bunny nowadays, but you get my drift.

i even enjoy some anime on occasion — well, cowboy bebop’s the only one i really watch.

anyway, scott mccloud has some great comics and ideas going on and books such as reinventing comics, as well as links to other outstanding and innovative cartoonists.

doodle flak is a flash-based strip with a really unique navigation system. super cool, though quite on the “wacked” side of things!

also nowhere girl seems rather interesting. i just started with a few frames and it seems cool so far… good dark mood and a smiths poster on the wall.

on a “too-stupid-that-i-shouldn’t-mention-it” note… in the sixth grade (or fifth, maybe) i actually wrote a series of comics of strange characters that came together in the world of “mv” - “music videos”, based roughly on mtv. the really sad part is that i made an audio tape to go along with it - including everything from silly voices and sound effects to bastardized versions of michael jackson songs. that tape - for better or worse - has since been destroyed. i don’t know what happened to the comics…

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i just realized that david lynch directed dune! although dune is a bit strange, it doens’t fall under the “normal” stuff i know from david lynch. maybe it’s just me, but i found it odd to learn that.

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well, i installed redhat 7.3 last night on my home box (ultra) and guess what? yup… snow crash! (ok, i’m really getting into snow crash, the book i’m reading.) the install went fine, using my (well, tony’s) ati radeon all-in-wonder pci during x configuration. it was able to start x with no problem, but only for the install. after rebooting, first, eth0 didn’t come up. fixed that. start x - then x froze - not just x, the whole system! strange. rebooted. went into reconfig x, now it would only choose my secondary pci vid card not the radeon, but it would use my main 21″ compac monitor. arg. anyway, i stopped playing with it at that point - going on 1:00am - and went back to reading snow crash.

note: redhat 7.3 doesn’t like the pci version of the ati radeon all-in-wonder, only the agp version…

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well, hey… i got around to installing photoshop 6 on my work machine finally so i hacked up a little shwango! blog logo up top. (yeah, ps6 is old, but i was still using 3! i take what i can get!) and i started playing around with movable type’s upload feature - pretty cool stuff - but how do you manage the uploads once they’re uploaded? hmm….

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