Films that I have watched recently:
Crash
This is a fucking weird movie. Fucking weird. There aren’t too many films that I watch and then don’t have clue what the hell they were about. Dudes with an all consuming fetish I guess.

The 6th Day

Arnie delivers more one liners. Like a number of Arnie films, The 6th Day is short on production polish, but it is a thought provoking story on an issue of some sort, this time human cloning. If you know anything about human cloning you will probably think this film is a pile of shite. You may think that it’s a pile of shite anyway, but I liked it.

The Wickerman (again)

Superb, I might buy this one as I could watch again and again the deception and entrapment of a police detective by modern day pagans living on a remote Scottish isle.

High Plains Drifter (again)

Superb – Tash is studying western film at the moment so we’re getting to watch a few. This is one of my
favourites. Clint Eastwood starred and directed.

Unforgiven (again)

Loved this film when I first saw it, although this time some of the shine came off. A brilliant climax though, and Clint stars and directs this archetypal revisionist western.

The Pianist (again)

Moving and amazing. We watch as a the central character, a pianist, has his humanity gradually stripped away until he is reduced to something akin to a giant rodent. At his lowest ebb is he is given hope by a Nazi officer, and allowed to play the piano. A far more sophisticated and subtle depiction of the horrors of the holocaust than Schindler’s List. A testament to the determination and bravery of oppressed peoples.

Casablanca (again)

Super duper.

The Maltese Falcon

Great – Bogie in fine form. Want to see more Noir-esque films like this.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Awesome – great performances all around. To give you an idea of what it’s like, during production it was nicknamed the “Death of a fucking Salesman”.

The Running Man (again)

Tash said this was a bollocks film, but I like it. While delivering a slew of cheesy one-liners, Arnie warns us about the power of the media. I can’t believe that the guy’s a republican.

I had been bitching about how slack the Gravis web site was. I got a hell of a surprise the other day when I went to the Burton website to look at snowboards and saw a Gravis logo on the home page. I guess that Burton have taken over Gravis? Or has Gravis always been part of Burton? Anyhoo, Gravis.com now points to its own section of the Burton web site and I reckon the new site is much better. Hopefully this means that it will be easier to get Gravis gear now. In London it is hard to get anything other than the bags….

Ray Ozzie is pretty cool . I love this bit:

In 1993 or thereabouts, we saw the emergence of TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, Mosaic and the Web. From our perspective, all of these were simplistic emulations of a tiny subset of what we’d been doing in Notes for years. TCP/IP instead of Netbeui or IPX/SPX, HTML instead of CD records, HTTP instead of the Notes client/server protocols, httpd instead of a Notes server. And we were many years ahead in other ways: embedded compound objects, security, composition of documents as opposed to just “browsing” them, and a sophisticated development environment. I am quite embarassed to say that we frankly didn’t “get” what was so innovative about this newfangled “Web” thing, given the capabilities of what had already been built.

On Saturday we had to go into work for the day. We tried to find a radio station to listen to online. After listening to London’s xfm for a while I got sick of the loser DJ (why are all commercial radio DJs such dickheads?). We tried Radio Active in NZ, but it rarely works.

I then thought of having a look at National Radio – you couldn’t listen live online but you can listen to recent shows – morning report from the previous day and so on. The thing that struck me instantly was the accent. It sounded so strong. But then it has been over a year since I’ve been back to the ‘new country’. Of interest to me is how a home grown product compares with international big hitters. I had a spell last year listening to BBC 4, and National Radio is definitely its equal. Kim Hill is great!

hurrah – they’ve posted the 42 Below Vodka ad again. If you’re a NZ’er, enjoy, if not, good luck, this may not make much sense!

I found a site with a list of all(?) the Formula One cars ever. Here’s one of my favs ….

Always seemed to me that the dude got a bit of a hard time. Freedomblog was the first domino blog template that was freely distributed, and quite a few people based their own blogs on this template. I had a poke around it, but of course I could never use someone elses template (maybe just some of the bits I liked). Using a template I hadn’t developed would be like paying a man to fix things around your own house. I’m the kind of guy that will completely trash something that is broken while in the process of attempting to fix it, rather than concede to a tradesman.

Anyhoo, freedom blog was a nice piece of work, it had a full Notes client and web client interface, and many embellishments and fuzzy frills.

Jake at Codestore then released the template for his most excellent blog. Anthony critiqued it (no link sorry). As I remember, it was a fair enough critique, although perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned that Jake had stolen the name DomBlog from Anthony.

This caused Jake to become angry and he had a go at Anthony. From memory, and my memory isn’t the best, a few other people also jumped on Anthony.

After that, Anthony, who had been writing in his blog regularly, just faded away. Then the other day, Heini reported that the site had gone. Now, forgive me if I read this the wrong way, and I’m aware that english is not Heini’s first language, and so I’m probably making something out of this that isn’t there, but even Heini seemed to have a bit of a ‘tude about it:

“Okay, I never used the tool, I rarely visited his site but in some way I do not like if someone leaves without saying good-bye.”

I’ll leave the last word to Ed Brill, and say ‘hear hear and well done mate’ to Anthony in advance:

“Anthony, if you are out there, thanks a lot for kick starting a healthy segment of this community, and good luck in your future.” – Ed Brill

A new second level domain has been created in NZ – .geek (by way of brainsluice.com , which is rather amusing I must say).

brainsluice has lead me to some other discoveries.

1. The Listener has a web site. I was bought up on the Listener, my mum would buy it every week. It is based on a kiwi CMS called Supermodel .

2. This is not related to brainsluice, but it made me think that stuff.co.nz *really* needs a redesign.

3. I actually found brainsluice when I was looking for a hilarious ad for 42Below vodka . The links I had to the ad (psuedo-crudely done in Flash) nearly made me piss my pants it was so darn funny… anyhoo, they have all mysteriously DISAPPEARED!

Does the apostrophe cause you to lose your nerve? Never again with this handy reference ! At last I feel I can take control of this grammatical black spot.