Oh That Kristina... (Vol. 2 "The Nail Polish Incident")

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When my family first moved into a new house, my mom caught my sister painting her nails on the carpet several times. She would always warn her not to have the nail polish in the living room and time after time my sister would still do it, just when my mom wasn't around.

One day, Kristina was painting her toe nails while home alone when she spilled the nail polish at the tip of her leg stretched out towards the television. She slightly panicked just in time to hear the door open as my mom arrived home from work.

"Hey, Kristina, I'm home."
My mom announced herself as my sister quickly sat down on the nail polish stain, not but two feet from the television set.

"Why are you sitting so close to the TV?"
my mom inquired as she walked into the room.

Searching for a good excuse, my sister arrived at
"Oh ... Just stretching."

As these comics have no legs, I found it easier to go with the "I need glasses" angle. One quick tip, if you or your sister or daughter or an au pair ever spills nail polish on the carpet, Nail Polish Remover works wonders! (Seems so simple, doesn't it?)

Oh That Kristina... (Vol. 1 "The Chalk Incident")

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Once my sister was drawing her name on our basement walls with Chalk.
All over the basement "K R I S T I N A".
In cursive.
In print.
In all caps.
Etc.

My mom came down the stairs to find her up to no good and shouted,
"Kristina! What are you doing? Your dad is going to be so mad!"

Startled, yet still thinking on her feet, my sister quickly came up with a plan.
She looked innocently at my mom and responded,
"Don't tell him who did it"

My Generation in 140 Characters or Less

I recently saw Watchmen (a little late, I know, but hell, it was only 75 cents) and I have got to say I was bored out of my mind for nearly the entire movie. I made some observations about not just Watchmen, but the the entire movies, television and video industry in general. When I was younger, I used to cling onto every minute of a movie and feel disappointed when the end credits started rolling. Yet lately, I find myself constantly wondering "How much longer is this going to take?". In fact, there aren't many movies I have seen in the past year that I didn't think could have been trimmed down a little. I would wonder is this just something that comes with age, but my parents don't seem share the same feelings. What seperates my recent lack of attention span from their own?It's not just movies. I constantly find myself sitting through television shows wishing Tivo had the ability to speed it up, maybe just 20 percent faster, or god forbid, the crew cut out some unnecessary parts and just fill in the rest of the time slot with commercials or something. Nothing annoys me more than a lingering pace, much like the one I saw in the nearly 3 hour Watchmen - much of which could have been pushed into a montage or the opening credits (much like Wolverine's opening credits - Perfect!). Even YouTube videos that exceed about a 7 minutes mark tend to have me moving on to the Related Videos or More from this User panel.

Not until I started going to bed last did I find a possible answer as to what has triggered this Video-A.D.D. I've acquired as I started watching [adultswim]. A large majority of this station's programming is fulfilled with a collection of scenes no longer than two minutes each. In fact, some of their shows are barely over 10 minutes total running time such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Frisky Dingo to name some of my favorites. Even the flagship of the station, Family Guy cuts up its scenes and kicks the pacing into 5th gear by splicing flash backs and reference videos about every other minutes or so. And Robot Chicken, well, that's the pot of gold for people like me. Was that sketch funny? Doesn't matter, it was only 5 seconds long. On to the next one!

[adult swim] is not alone in fueling this condition. YouTube plays probably just as big of a role in my developing habit. With the information super highway at my fingertip, I'm not shooting through videos like fruit at the grocery store. If it doesn't grab my attention within the first 10 seconds, I skip to the middle. If nothing interesting is happening at the random point I drop my mouse, so much for that video and on to the next.

And how about that Smart Phone? It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry, not matter what you cannot stand in a line alone anymore without playing with it. Facebook, Twitter, Chat, Email, the World Wide Web available anywhere in the world. I don't even need a newspaper anymore, I can get everything I need from this little 4 oz computer that I carry with me at all times, not to mention, most of the headlines have to grab my attention in 140 characters or less.

If you haven't lost interest in reading this blog yet, then chances are you've got a longer attention span than myself. Let me know what your thoughts on it.

IE (vs) FireFox: A New Leader Emerges

For the past 7 years, W3Schools.com has been keeping track of what internet browsers are most commonly used, what screen resolution is at, what operating systems are being run, etc. I checked in on them this past week to find that Internet Explorer is no longer the most commonly used browser (as of Jan '09). After more than a decade of being the leader in internet browsing technology, IE has about 5% less users than Fire Fox. In fact, in looking through FireFox's history, it's done nothing but grown in popularity, except during the release of Google Chrome (which I've not heard great things about, but with a name like Google backing it, I'm sure it will come around soon enough).


There have been two guiding factors behind Internet Explorer's success:
1) It comes pre-installed on your computer.
2) Because it was the leading browser, all developers code for Internet Explorer.

Having it pre-installed on my computer and not having to go download yet another piece of software was what primarily attracted me to Internet Explorer, but I noticed on my new computer at work that it now came both equipped with both IE and FireFox. This could be related to FireFox's recent success in over taking the leading browser spot. It's also got the underdog spirit with it. You'll find a lot of people in the IT industry that claim FireFox is superior simply because it's not made by MicroSoft (whether or not FF > IE). When I meet an IT guy who starts bashing MicroSoft, it's always a turn off, but then again this is probably all better saved for another blog.

Despite having FireFox already installed on my new work computer, I've continued to use IE since it was the leading web browser. In my web development work, it's imperative to write sites for the end user, and while I want to make sure people using FireFox is covered, Internet Explorer was always the highest priority, as it had over 18% more users last year.

But now everything has been changed. With FireFox now being the most common used browser on the market, I'm now getting used to using it for everything. I've noticed that they have improved a lot since their former versions. It doesn't seem to have an issue with javascript anymore. It also tends to load a lot faster initially, but then when I attempt to go to the first site of my session, it takes a little longer than IE. And of course, I've been to several sites where the CSS doesn't quite work all the way; Internet Explorer and FireFox sometimes have different terms for style sheets and some developers don't check their sites with both browsers.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the Google Chrome browser. They talked a big game while it was in production, but it's not had the successful launch it planned for. But, I've rarely come across a piece of Google technology, that in time didn't impress me.

Review of X-Men: Wolverine

I wanted to wait a while and let everything sink in before diving into a little review of the new X-Men movie Wolverine. To start off, I should say that this was my least favorite of the X-men series, but I still enjoyed it. It will be very difficult for any X-Men movie to ever top X2, and I knew that going into Wolverine. I should also mention that Wolverine has never been one of my favorite characters in the comics/cartoon. I think Hugh Jackman does a great job with him, but I just don't really care for the character himself.

When I first saw the preview, I was excited to finally see Gambit in the movies! Gambit has always been my favorite X-men character and it's good to see him get some screen time, after he was written out of X2. It's difficult to say they did him justice because he was only in the movie for maybe 5 minutes of running time, but those 5 minutes were fantastic. I could have used a little more cajun accent out of him, but I'll have to let it slide, because he did at one point use the poker cards as a weapon and I may have yelled "squeeee!" in the theatre at that point. (P.S. You can see poker superstar Daniel Negreanu playing poker with Gambit in one scene)

If you watched the trailer and thought to yourself, "Oh Snap! I finally get to see ______" (Insert any character you saw in the preview besides Wolverine and Sabertooth here), then you'll be mildly disappointed. Most characters don't show up on screen for long, but I guess this is a Wolverine movie, not an X-men movie. Bolt, Blob, Deadpool, Emma Frost, etc etc - None are on screen for a significant amount of time. One cool thing is that there is a lot of talk circulating a Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds. He was great in Wolverine and I really wish we could have seen him more.

The two characters I really could have used less of was John Wraith played by Will.I.Am and Stryker. Wow, I never expected Will.I.Am to be such an awful actor. I couldn't wait for him to get killed or fall down a hole or decide to move to the wilderness of Canada to be alone with himself and spare us all. Danny Huston had one of the most difficult jobs in this movie, playing up to Brian Cox's role in the 2003 movie X2. Brian Cox was incredible and Danny Huston just didn't have that same appeal. Since we're comparing anyways, there is a certain magic that Brian Singer brought to the first 2 X-Men movies, whereas somewhat new director Gavin Hood just didn't have the touch.

As far as the plot, as a whole, this just seemed like a bunch of action sequences thrown together with a shot or two of Hugh Jackman naked thrown in for the female audience. They make a small attempt at a story of love and loss with Wolverine, but it is pretty weak compared to the tragedy of Jean Gray and Cyclops in the previous movies. However, I guess its not fair to compare this movies to its predecessors. For an action movie, it did a great job of keeping me entertained. I never once thought, when is this movie going to be over and with the ADD I've been cultivating with YouTube videos lately, that's really saying something. I'm glad I got to see this one in theatres. May is going to be a really good month for Hollywood with Wolverine, Angels & Demons, Star Trek, and Terminator Salvation. I'd put my money on Star Trek to be the movie of the summer.

President Evil: The Web Series

Some of you may know that last November Adam, Jessica, Holden and I attempted to revive the President Evil concept that Jay and I made in college. We filmed three episodes and then Adam moved to Dubai, but he came back and we finally got episodes 2 and 3 off his computer.

President Evil is a web series about a zombie that becomes President and two men who find it their duty to kill the new leader of the free world, President Grogg.

The idea began in 2004 during the George Bush / John Kerry election season. "President Evil: The Beginning" was entered into the Mercer University Halloween Film Festival and won 1st place. Heroes Chip and Jim feel their patriotic duty to slay this surprisingly effective new President to save mankind from zombie...kind

Four years later, while Obama and McCain led campaigns, a new set of heroes found themselves fighting against the zombie executive branch after a re-election keeps President Grogg in office. After saving the economy, balancing the nation budget, mending foreign affairs, and saving the country, President Grogg is still just a zombie to Nick and Mack who are fed up with brains on their pizza in "President Evil: Re-Election Day".

Nick and Mack hit the road bound for Washington DC and with a little help from their friends, they aim to take down the zombie empire with guns blazing.

Episode 1: "Re-Election Day"

Episode 2: "Campaign Strategies"

Episode 3: "Right To Bear Arms"

And, in case you've never seen the original one that Jay and I made in 2004, here it is. As a fair warning, we only had one night to write, film, and edit it. Plus, it ran longer than expected, so we had to cut it short (film festival had a 6 minute limit)

Episode 0: "The Beginning"

The Pirate Bay takes on a Ship Load of Damage

If you have never been to The Pirate Bay website, it's essentially the Napster of the late '00s. Rather than download a program that lets you search for peers with mp3s, The Pirate Bay is a website that allows users to post links to bittorrent files. The bittorrent files are then used in a bittorrent client which uses the file to find users sharing the file you are trying to download.

After a legal battle, The Pirate Bay founders were each sentenced to one year in prison and an alltogether fine of $3.6 million (yowsers!). They were originally charged with "assisting copyright infringement" which was dropped; but were convicted on "assisting making available copyrighted material".

It sounds as if they made up that charge to fit exactly what they were doing. I do agree that they did break that law, if it is in fact a law. I always enjoy seeing the progress of internet law as the internet seems to move much faster than lawmakers can keep up with, but it seems like this time the law won. As we move farther and farther away from cds and dvds and more into pure software, I think we'll see more agressive action on the music, movie, and gaming industry's part to eliminate warez (pirating).

Blockbuster and Netflix both offer forms of watching movies directly over the internet and most television stations have now posted their show episodes online. It's only a short time before Blockbuster ends up having to shut it's stores down and netflix stops mailing you DVDs. I imagine within the next 5 years, we'll see the beginning of the collapse of cable and satellite television. Everything will be streamed via the internet to a small computer hooked up to your TV or straight to your hand held devices. And as history has shown us, the less hardware, the lower cost of pirating.