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The Magpie Developer
Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer. |
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Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry.
(Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that. |
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Drinking stories that put yours to shame
Via Keith
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood. |
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making vodka pills in 24 hours
Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms. |
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Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz. |
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(Thursday, May 15)
"Sing Us a song the Keanu-man, Sing us a song tonight."
"Whitestallions!!!"
SPOILER WARNING... I AM GONNA TALK ABOUT PARTS OF THE MATRIX RELOADED... BE FORWARNED.
I went and saw it tonight. First off I want to say that it is not the next greatest film. I may even go so far as to saw X2 was a little better of a sequel than Reloaded was, but then again I loved Matrix sooo much more than the first X-men that it would be hard for any movie to compare themselves to the original Matrix. Ok, I will admit that the special fx in this movie blow anything away that I have seen before, just as the original matrix did. It does set a new standard (some of the fight scenes involving multiple copies of the same entity fighting neo looked a little "Harry-Potter-esqe" in some senses but the other scenes (strait up one on one fights, tractor trailers, ending scene) more than make up for it. There are tons of new sfx goodies for Creed and "bad country music factory/industry made boy bands" to copy in their horrid videos. Some of the scenes blew me away some of the were neat, but they relied on a computer moving so fast that you were not supposed to notice that Neo looked like Merlin Dumblesnoot on a Shitcarrier 5000 in the Quiddich Playoffs (In all honesty I actually enjoyed those movies, just not that certain scenes special effects). Still overall i give the sfx a A+. Even with a few rotten eggs the overall picture's sfx lived up to the quality I expect of the WacBros. Now to the story, I think this is one of those movies where I will be in the shower tomorrow morning and finally go �ahhh�� (no, not with the soap in my hand). There is a lot of philosophy floating around in this movie, a lot more so than the first one. The first one asked "What" (is the Matrix) this one kinda asks "Why?". There are parts that show Neo actually knowing he is godlike then a second later questioning the prophecy, the oracle, and him being the chosen. One neat aspect was the info on ghosts, vamps, and lycanthropic peoples, which was a good fit to the story. The French guy and Persephone were neat additions, but kind of odd. The keymaker was great, I thought that was beautifully played out and gives a big "fuck you" to the Neo from the first movies view of fate. One of the biggest things that erked me in the movie was the music. In the first movie the music was a perfect fit in any scene, it all clicked together beautifully, in this one the music was just lame. The whole sex/rave thing was pretty lame, the music made it even lamer. Don�t get me wrong I enjoy seeing a Moss (Carrie Anne not Randy) heiny every now and then, and who can argue with a Keanuman butt shot in a lenon/yoko pose with cool wire hook ups all over there body? Even in the fight scenes though the music sometimes just sounded a little off.
All in all I think I will like this movie a lot more once I can sit down with the DVD and study it and watch it a couple of times. Again not as good as the first one, but still a 8.2 on the 10 scale and a 10 out of 10 for sfx.
If you want to know the reason for the .2 then I am just gonna say that the bros know who digs this movie the most, computer geek, or at least people with a decent knowledge of computer and one thing I appreciated was none of the stupid shit that you see in most movies when people are working on computers and it becomes the focus of attention. No big red bars showing the percentage of encryption left, no percentage countdowns for downloads, I actually got a glimpse of a bourne shell and a ssh prompt in there at some point. Kudos to the bros who did there homework.
That's all for today, I think I have rambled enough.
-E
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And so it begins...
I have been meaning to post a blog containing my ramblings for I don't know how long. I started working on this (meaning one of my many) about a month ago and never was able to get everything how I wanted. I finally am gonna stop playing EQ and PlanetSide long enough to finish it up and atleast get it to where it is semi-how-I-want-it before we move. For those of you who know me IRL (In real life for non EQ players) then you know I can generally get my ideas across very well in spoken word. However my track record in written english is fair, but as many who know me would point out, i like to make up words and use a lot of hyphens. So be forewarned.
I am going to see Matrix tomorrow and I am pretty pumped about it. A friend of mine Tosh went and saw it last night and I told him not to tell me anything about it, but just Rate it 1 through 10. He gave it a 47, and he is one of my only friends that thought Vanilla Sky was as much a masterpiece as I did, so I think it is gonna be as good as the first one. One thing I would like to put into perspective is my view on Xmen 2. I have heard alot of people say it was "better" than the first one, I am gonna have to say that imho that it was almost exactly on par with Xmen 1. Some of the newer characters (Nightcrawler, Siren, Collases(sp?)) were great additions, but I would have like to have seen some more bad mutants rather than Lady D. (I mean I am sure the Sabretooth outfit is still around there somewhere). I also want to say that I expected it to be great because Price directed my all time favorite movie of all time Usual Suspects So I figured it was gonna be great. I think there was a lot more actual killing in this one, specifically with wolverine, but I still want a glimpse of the yellow and blue sometime. Just for shits and giggles.
Also today was a great day just because of 4 mins of video footage that I saw. It is actually two videos First One and the remix Second One both of which must be watched in order and brought me to tears for at least 15 min. I started thinking about it on 400 today and was laughing so hard that I almost had to pull over. Thank Judd for those. Pure Quality.
After typing this it also looks like I love to make everything one big paragraph. So be prepared.
-E
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Travis - The Boy With No Name
Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho. |
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Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross)
One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake. |
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Feist - The Reminder
I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice. |
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Catan - Xbox Live Arcade
I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game. |
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Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare
No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say. |
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Beautiful Evidence (Tufte)
Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting.. |
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Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather
Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better. |
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Game of Thrones (Martin)
I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more. |
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
© Copyright 2003-2007, Eric Thompson |
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