CNN.com – iRobot co-founder comes clean – May 30, 2005
Nice little article about one of the co-founders of iRobot, the company that makes those Roomba vaccuum cleaners, as well as “PackBot” for the military.
Pardon me for being so old-fashioned, but I must admit I was surprised to find out she was a woman.
Need a little light reading for your PDA? How about a free Dr. Who e-book?
There are bad movies, and then there are BAD movies. House of the Dead is a BAD movie. It isn’t even entertaining in its bad-ness. In fact, there are only two redeeming qualities to the movie.
First, director Uwe Boll does pay homage to the Sega video games that the movie is based on. Both in the title credits and in little ‘cut scene’ transitions between movie scenes, we see brief clips of the game. Often they match what’s going on on-screen.
Second is Ona Grauer as Alicia. This lady looks hot in a bustier, and Boll pays loving attention to her, ahem, assets in some slow motion clips that really educate the viewer on the effect of physics and inertia on the female anatomy. 🙂
Skip this one. It just plain sucks.
Since I bought my new iMac I’ve been spending almost all my time in OS X “Tiger”. I even shelled out $100 for a .Mac account so I could sync bookmarks and mail accounts and stuff between my 3 active Macs.
Then I found out that .Mac only syncs Safari bookmarks. Doh! But I’m kind of liking Safari 2.0, especially the quick and easy RSS reading.
But I really hated losing Firefox’s cool “Find at you type” feature. So I went back to the ‘fox (not a bad thing, mind you…its an excellent browser).
Then today, I stumbled upon AcidSearch. This is a little ‘plug in’ for Safari that gives you mega-super-duper search options from the search bar, AND the ‘find-as-you-type’ feature I’d been missing out on.
So far it seems to work great. And better yet, its freeware. Check it out, Mac users!
CNN.com – New planet found in Milky Way – May 26, 2005
Check out the incredible picture on this page!
Apple’s Jobs says company will support Podcasts
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) will support and organize podcasts in the next version of its iTunes and iPod software, the company said on Monday.
read the rest…
Sweet, even though I’ve already shelled out $20 for iPodderX. But its a little flakey. In fact, every client I’ve used has been a little flakey. This news kind of lends legitamacy to Podcasting, and hopefully Apple will do it right.
So I’ve become a little bit addicted to Bawls Mints lately. And of course I went through all the obvious jokes, but eventually they wear off.
Anyway, they come in a metal tin, and I had a tin in my front pocket the other day. I was walking somewhere with a female co-worker and with every stride the tin shook, and the mints knocked against the sides.
“What’s that noise?” she asks me.
“Oh, that’s just my Bawls rattling.” I said.
“You’re disgusting!” she says, and hits me.
It took me a few seconds to realize what had upset her… 🙂
CNN.com – Brain downloads ‘possible by 2050’
Nice. So I’m like the last generation that gets to die! Unless I live an extra special long time and get fabulously wealthy by then.
OTOH, let’s face it…who wants to live forever, anyway?
Wow, what a trip. House of Flying Daggers is a rather amazing spectacle. It’s full of crazy martial arts special effects similar to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but without going so far as to seem totally silly. And the cinematography was just stunning. The Bamboo Forest scenes alone were worth the price of admission.
The story itself is a classic love triangle affair, with a nice dose of espionage and things not being what they seem. “House of Flying Daggers” is the name of an rebel outfit. If you’re more up on Chinese history than I am, you could probably name the government and tell me if it was really corrupt. Anyway, their ‘special talent’ is, obviously, throwing daggers. But they’re darn good swordsmen as well.
One of their agents, a blind dancer (played by the lovely Ziyi Zhang) is caught by the local police/army. One of the officers then poses as a bandit and frees her, after which he tries to get her to lead him back to Flying Daggers HQ. But as I said, all is not what it appears.
Absolutely a fantastic movie. If you have *any* taste for martial arts, get this film. Even if you feel neutral about martial arts, still get it!
One thing to note, though. If you buy it, play it right away. It would appear that there are some bad copies out in retail. My first copy started to skip about two thirds of the way through, and a Google search tells me there’ve been a lot of problems with the DVD. A second copy worked fine. Also, frankly, the print isn’t as good as it should be. I’d love to see a collector’s edition come out with a better quality print and more extras!
I watched Secretary tonight, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Short synopsis. Gyllenhaal is the secretary, fresh out of a mental institute where she was placed for self-mutilation. Spader is the lawyer in need of a new employee. His gig is that he’s a “Dom” and so drives most of his employees away. We get an inkling of this when, right under his shingle is a carefully painted “Secretary Wanted” sign with a set of lights around it, like a Vacancy sign at a motel.
Mix these two together and you get a quick exploration of the D/s lifestyle. It was pretty interesting to see such a niche fetish getting the Hollywood treatment. Lee (Gyllenhaal) thrives more and more as lawyer Grey (Spader) gets more and more demanding, until they come to a climax, so to speak, and Grey starts feeling guilty/remorseful, not believe that Lee is really into this lifestyle.
Some folks will be disgusted by the movie, others, like me, will just find it an interesting curiosity, and you D/s folks will find it a total turn-on.