Being a big James Cameron fan I have been anticipating the Avatar release for some time. I’m happy to report that it lives up to the hype, it really is the 3D special effects epic it is billed as. I’m sure many people will complain about the predictable and obvious story, but the story is not what the audience is meant to focus on. Avatar is now the technical benchmark for 3D films. Let’s see who uses the technology next. No doubt that it should clock all of the technical Oscars next year.
Archive for the 'general' Category
Got home to find that my bike frame has arrived back from Armourtex and it looks fab. I’m glad it didn’t turn out too shiny, and the minor glittery effect does actually work quite well. Still waiting on my cranks and brakes to show up. Need to get a seatpost and pedals still, but those I will pickup at the weekend. I still need to also spray my front wheel, done 2 coats of primer so far over the last two weekends. I will take some pictures of the frame before I start assembling the rest of bike, and post them on flickr.
Well I just got back from the late showing of Green Zone. The Damon and Greengrass combination has kicked it once more. Green Zone is a well thought out action thriller, set against the background of the war in Iraqi. It ventures in to a fictional reason for the US government justifying the invasion. The story is well thought out and quite plausible in many ways, in fact I’m sure some people will actually take the story portrayed as being fact. I don’t know if that was the intention, but some people will. Some of the reviews call it the next Bourne, which in some ways it is, but in terms of action, I wouldn’t agree. But it clearly is very well acted. Greg Kinnear plays the bad polictican extremely well, and the rest of the supporting cast Jason Isaacs and Brendan Gleeson do a fine job too.
So The Hurt Locker took best picture at the Oscars last night. I wasn’t expecting that. I have seen all of the other contenders with the exception off Invictus and Crazy Heart. I personally thought on paper Invictus was going to get it. In the end it didn’t get a single oscar. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Hurt Locker, but Best Film seems a little off. I will grab the DVD and watch it again.
Any way I’m happy for Bigelow since she definately deserves some recognition for her films. I hadn’t realised that she is the first woman to win the ‘Best Director’ gong. Plus I’m sure she is loving the fact that she pipped her ex-husband (James Cameroon) to the Oscar this time round. I have always liked her films. Point Break, Near Dark and Blue Steel were all good in their own ways. I think Strange Days is a classic, when it came out it was a very underated film. Thankfully its fan base has grown since it came out. LOL, I just looked up the IMDB url for this post and noted it was made in 1995, damn that was a long time ago.
I’m sure Jeremy Renner is not going to be short of work now either, glad to see him get some credit too for this film.
Avatar got the technical awards as expected, glad that Christoph Waltz got the best supporting actor for Basterds, truely a great performance. I hope he makes more english films! The rest of the winners were pretty much as expected Sandra Bullock took the best actress award for The Blind Side (Not seen that yet either, no UK release yet.) Which actually must be ok if she got an Oscar for it. I need to watch A Single Man and Precious. I watched a Serious Man last week, whilst I like all Cohen Brother’s film, it did strike me as a little strange. I think the opening segment was really good, shame it had nothing to do with the rest of the film.
Got a new bike of gumtree for the purpose building my first fixed gear/single speed bike. Needs a fair bit of work, there is a lot of rust. Have posted a few pictures on flickr.
The iPhone 3GS camera is pretty good for these kind of photos, way better than I was expecting.
The plan is to get a new saddle, replace the handlebars. Get rid of the front and back deraileurs. Going to paint the frame, split between black and purple at the moment.
Well Apple broke news of their next device the iPad, the very much expected tablet. Already I’m still not sure at this point, was expecting something more. Again I get why they went with iPhone OS, but a full tablet would have been more appealing to me. However the idea of pitching it as a reader, web, email and multimedia device does seem like a winning combination. Lets see what they do to iPhone OS to pull this off. Hopefully multitasking isn’t to far off officially now.
Well I played Warcraft only twice this month. So I have gone and put the subscription on hold again. I can’t bring myself to delete my account. I might give it another go in a few months if I have nothing better to do.
Been trying to grow a proper beard over the Christmas break. The usual problem off not getting much growth after the two week mark hit again but this time I will give it four weeks before shaving.
Renewed my Warcraft subscription today so I could try out patch 3.3 been reading about all the changes, not played in 6 months. So Im hoping I get to play over the christmas break.
I might level up one of my alts to while I’m at it.
Well I finally did it, I got my jesus phone today. So far so good, the iPhone OS 3.1 seem better than 2.0 from what I remember anyway. Been installing apps like crazy, not happy about going back to iTunes since Songbird and the like don’t support the iPhone. My hackintosh is still not 100% sound is still not working properly, but at least I can use it for iPhone dev now. I have also ordered a few iPhone dev books from Amazon, the plan is to do some hacking over the christmas period.
I’m going to jailbreak of course, but thought I would go a week just using it normally to see what the standard iPhone experience it like. I’m using the google complete integration so all my contacts, calendars and email are always in sync. So no desktop syncing for me, everything is Over The Air.
Was meant to go along to Modern warfare launch event but it freezing and Mati managed to get a copy from one of our local stores early. So I have now have it! First impressions ae what Expected. Wil start the the story properly when I get my own copy in the morning. Sainsbury is selling the game for 26 quid. So that will be the first port of call, othrwise Hmv will do.
News broke a few hours ago that Michael Jackson has passed away. So far the cause of death has been given as Cardiac Arrest, the official report is expected some time tomorrow.
Was watching TV, Waj was over he left and I went and woke my computer, took a quick glance at Facebook and people were posting RIP MJ status messages. Naturally I thought it was some internet hoax. So I immediately fired up Google News, and there it was as the top story.
I have been in a state of shock since. I headed back to the telly and watched the Sky News live coverage, till the point that the interviews and coverage was looping. So I was flicking through the channels, naturally I ended up at the music channels. MTV decided to run their Top 40 MJ Tracks program – hosted by David Guest, on all their channels. This was obviously recorded some years ago. David Guest has been Jackson’s friend since childhood, and had some really cool stories about the various songs and videos. As I write this it is still on just got to ’15′ which is ‘Leave Me Alone’, amazingly Thriller went by ages ago charting at 30.
When Thriller came out I must have been seven or eight years old, I remember it especially since me and my friend were rushing home to watch Top of the Pops which was premiering the video that evening. My friend had a VCR so it got recorded, in those days TotPs was on thursdays, so friday evening, most of saturday and sunday we must have watched Thriller back to back at least 50 times. We were leaving marks on the carpet trying to moonwalk or moving the furniture so we could dance like zombies.
Still sitting here watching the program for the last few of hours has reminded me how truly great Michael Jackson was. I haven’t heard some of these songs in years, yet I know the words. Even the lesser songs from the Dangerous and History albums. Yet it’s strange if someone asked me to name 30 MJ tracks I don’t think I could do it.
Mati and me tried to get MJ tickets for the London comeback tour. However 02′s advanced ticket option failed us, since the majority of tickets went in a flash. When they added more dates we had realised it was not meant to be and did not even try again to get tickets. Our reasoning was that Jackson had not toured in years, the majority of dates were probably going to get cancelled or moved. (I hate being right!)
There had been lots of mixed press about the dates set to start next month, some stories indicating problems with Jackson’s health, that 50 nights was going to be very tough for him. When the promoters announced a few weeks ago that they were delaying the tour by a few days. All sorts of rumors started coming out, firstly MJ never wanted to do 50 dates, only 5. Then it came out he only agreed to 50 since he would be allowed to lip sync as opposed to actually perform. For some night he could even use doubles. After my previous bad experiences of seeing acts that I hold in high regard, do comeback tours, and turn out to be crap, is heartbreaking. So in many ways I was happy I did not get tickets. I figured if the tour worked out well, there would be new material resulting in more tour dates in the future, how wrong I was.
The news had a segment were they had the editor of NME at Glastonbury give a quick interview, he was clearly shaken up from the news. He must be in his mid-30′s so I guess being in the same age group I agree with the sentiment of what he said. Which was basically everyone should put away all the negative things we have heard about Jackson in the last 10 years, and that he should be remembered for most his music and his contribution to pop culture. To my generation he was and always will be the King of Pop.
The commute into work is going to be an interesting one, for some the cover of Metro will be the first they hear of the news, so obviously there will be some shocked looks on the tube in the morning. It will also be interesting to see how the organisers of the Michael Jackson concerts handle ticket refunds.
Was planning on watching the inauguration at work, but just realised the movers have already taken the Plasma to the new offices. Looks like one of the many streams is the way to go. Lets see how the net melts down this afternoon, since I’m sure people all over the world will be tuning in!
Just realised that WP doesn’t have a bulk operations feature. I want to toggle the ‘Published’ state of over 80 drafts, thinking I will just do what MT does, but it actually can’t. So I have to visit each post, the expanded view in the post list is a little helpful. In that I don’t have to open the ‘Edit’ post screen for each post, but it will still take a little while to do. Might put that off for another day then!
I just dinged 80, at last. Not amazing feat by any means, especially since I was turned off from playing for about 2 weeks thanks to computer issues. Going to go finish off the remaining instances, then do the heroics. Need gear for PvP also. Should also get my epic flying mount soon.
Just got back from attending Jo an Richard’s wedding had an excellent time. I failed to re-charge my camera so I didn’t take it with me. I’m sure others will post their pics soon enough so I will link them.
Amazingly not all that tired so I think, I’m going to play some Warcraft, not far from 80 now so I think I will have it in an hour or so. Re-speccing has really helped since my DPS has increased a great deal now. I’m not working tomorrow so I might even spend some time do some of the new dailies I can now do.
I just installed the new power supply and started Warcraft in Windows and it hasn’t crashed.
Yipee! At last, it has only taken 3 weeks to get the upgraded system working properly. Going to let it burn in for 24 hours, then switch back to Linux. I think it is probably safe to delete Windows again, though of course I have a Virtual Machine for work VPN access etc.
Another big comedy came out last week Sex Drive, with a bunch of young unknowns plus James Marsden and Seth Green. Actually I think James Marden stole this film by playing the twat older brother role, pretty well. It’s basically the Sure Thing updated into a teenage comedy drive flick. Pretty funny on the whole, worth watching. Having said that there are just too many good films out at the moment. Next up for me is probably Seven Pounds or Defiance which I have avoided so far since they seem quite deep.
Left the first two episodes of 24 downloading before leaving for work. So I should be able to watch them this evening. Also they are on Sky1 tonight, so if they turn out being bad it is not that much of an issue. I can’t wait!!!
