This has been a whirlwind presidential campaign and one man that has seemed to have been left behind is Mike Gravel. He is technically still in the race… he is just going nowhere, FAST.
During some free time over at the Internet TV Revision3 studios, a wide array of nutty Rev3 employees teamed up to group lip dub/sync the INXS song Need You Tonight.
One of my favorite movies is Punch-Drunk Love, it is by far the best (and most out of character) performances by Adam Sandler. One of the best parts of this film though (for me) is the song on the soundtrack, He Needs Me. What I didn’t know about it though, was that the recording of the song in the film was lifted from the 1980 movie, Popeye, with Shelley Duvall performing the song. It makes me want to get Popeye, even though I have heard that it was not very good and even hurt Robert Altman’s career.
I saw the trailer for the Mamma Mia! movie last time I went to the movies. Now, I didn’t have any idea what the Broadway musical, that this film is based on, was about… actually, my only knowledge of it comes solely from this poster:
I may not be the biggest music fan, but when I can see Europe’s rock/metal The Final Countdown covered via cello orchestra(!), there’s not much I can do but bow down to the awesomeness.
I think Guitar Hero is fun, I’ve played it, but I’d rather not play the game, since you don’t actually learn to play the guitar. After watching the latest episode of dl.tv I found out about the upcoming game Guitar Rising, where you will be able to plug in a REAL guitar into a computer’s microphone port and see different frets onscreen and you can learn to play the guitar while you play the game.
I can’t wait until this game comes out… I may even buy a guitar if the game is as good as it looks.
Remeber the game Doom? I used to spend HOURS with this game, but I completely forgot just how powerful some of the weapons in the game were. At the risk of being Rick Rolled, check out the great video below, it’s only 31 seconds and it’s hilarious!
I know that NO ONE wants to back up their data. If anyone has to remember to do it and it is harder than brainless, people just are not going to do it. I know this and even I don’t back up my data like I should. I will usually keep a copy of important documents saved onto my portable usb flash drive and maybe also on a second computer, but I definitely do NOT keep those files backed up and updated regularly. I also don’t really want to pay much money to backup my data (I know I’m cheap but it has served me well thus far).
After a bit of searching I found Xdrive. It used to be a tiny company… until AOLbought them. Xdrive offers 5 gigs of free automated online storage. Let me repeat that, in case you thought you read that wrong. You can get, for FREE, 5 gigabytes of online storage! That’s more space then most people buy when they get usb flash drives! To sign up, you can use your AIM screen name, AOL email account or if you don’t have either of these already, you can just sign up for a free AOL Mail or AOL Instant Message account. At this very moment, I’m uploading almost 800 megabytes of data to start out. If you need more than 5 gigs of storage though, maybe for a large music collection or even a modest video collection (maybe you want to back up all those movies or tv shows on that iPod), this is probably not the service for you. You can upgrade to their paid service: 50 gigs of storage for a little under $10 per month.
Instead of doing that though, I’d recommend using one of the more flexible online backup services. Carbonite (unlimited storage space for less than $50 per year, less than $90 total when you sign up for two years), Mozy (another unlimited storage service, for less than $5 per month for each computer you want to back up, less than $105 per computer if you sign up for 2 years), Amazon’s S3 (more of an a la carte service, charging per month for storage and upload/download transfer rates) or Jungle Disk (which is based on Amazon S3, but also offers some extra services of their own).
Thanks to Xdrive for the above pic. This article was inspired by Leo Laporte. He is constantly promoting the idea of regularly backing up your data on the many shows on his TWIT Podcast Network.
Barely Political (podcast, also available via iTunes) got on my radar after their Obama Girl music video spread virally across the internet and this newer video they came out with is a great spoof of Batman using all the major Presidential candidates as the mainstay characters, called Primary Knight.
There are a lot of media players on the market and I’ve tried a whole heck of a lot of them. There seem to be more media players than there are media formats… and there are a LOT of media formats.
The most well known all-in-one player is probably the VLC player. This is a great player for playing almost any audio or movie format you can think of, dvds, iso, divx, mp4, mp3, the list goes on and on and you can also use this player for transcoding these files into one of the other formats as well. This program works with pretty much any system, Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS and BSD!
There are some people who do not like this player. For those of you who fall into this category who run Windows, you might want to try GOM player. I tried it 2+ years ago and enjoyed using it, it looks nicer than VLC, but since I hadn’t really had any problems with VLC, I didn’t really need GOM player, especially since VLC handled dvd playback better.
I heard a few of my favorite podcasts (Tekzilla and Windows Weekly) talk about GOM player today though, so that reminded me about this player and now that there is a lot more HD content available compared to 2 years ago, it’s important to note that GOM player seems to handle HD files a bit better than VLC (at least on my humble XPlaptop).
This was not one of the best movies I’ve seen recently, but I did enjoy this film quite a bit. I thought Tim Burton does an amazing job of making what must have been buckets of blood look absolutely beautiful. I haven’t seen such amazing blown out colors in a film and blood treated so beautifully since Dario Argento’s Giallo masterpiece Susperia. I was just a bit disappointed by the music and story
Johnny Depp keeps making a great leading man for Burton. His performance, especially when he gets to play off of Helena Bonham Carter (who is enthralling to watch as the ghostly bleached white, sickly brown eyeshadowed partner/potential lover for the former Edward Scissorhands). The performances of the supporting Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall were just a pleasure to watch whenever they were allowed to overtake the screen.
One of the biggest problems is that the songs were not all that great, but I WAS surprised at how some of them sounded, I wasn’t sure how they would turn out with the main actors doing their own singing, even though I thought there may have been too many times when the characters broke into song. The beginning and end of this film are pretty tightly done, the mid section is a bit story thin though.
Let me go back to the production values though, because THIS is where the film really shines. Most every scene is shot perfectly. over 95% of this film portrays the gloomiest London, very similar to the way Burton shot Sleepy Hollow, but it was never more noticeable than after Carter’s BEST hopes and dreams musical number which brought all those blown out colors to the screen, that are a stark contrast to the rest of the movie. I must say though, there was one scene, when Depp was getting off the ship where Burton makes the mistake of lighting him with a warm street lamp, which gives him a slight rosy glow which is a total mismatch for EVERY other scene in the film for his character. Other than that scene, the film looks absolutely amazing.
There are a lot of podcasts that I listen to through iTunes and Unwired is one of the newest ones I’ve subscribed to, but it has quickly become one of the first ones I end up watching whenever they come out with a new episode.
I was really excited about Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, I love John C. Reilly, but while watching this movie, I realized that this movie was a huge flop and that I wished I hadn’t even sat down to see this movie.
I VEHEMENTLY recommend: DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE, I don’t care how excited you are about it, just DON’T! If you aren’t going to listen to me anyway about this, at least wait til it gets to DVD and rent it, but I can’t even recommend that!
Judd Apatow co-wrote this with the film’s writer/director Jake Kasdan and as I’ve said before, I think Apatow’s work has gone down over time instead of improved with experience. This movie, an attempt at parodying musical biopics (like Ray and Walk the Line), works for maybe the first five to ten minutes, after that, it all seems to go downhill. Bringing the Superbad kid, Jonah Hill into the film as an older, more vulgar ghost was just one of the ideas that flat out didn’t work in this movie.
Seeing all the cameos in the the trailer for this film got me excited and the movie features tons of sketch comedy familiar faces from SNL, 30 Rock and The Office. Too bad I didn’t find the few and far between funny scenes worth wading through all the unfunny content though.
It’s such a shame, I hate giving bad reviews, but hopefully this will prevent others from making the same mistake I made.
Let me preface this by saying I’m normally not a huge fan of Snoop Dogg… or even most music in general, if the music hasn’t been featured in a major motion picture, then I generally don’t care about it… some have even said that I hate music, but after hearing that Snoop decided to make a 70’s style music video, I thought that was a pretty interesting idea. I must say, seeing all the different 70’s style pimpin beard styles, clothing and rotating beds was a fun few minutes.
There are many thins that can be said about Richard Kelly’s sophomore directorial outing, but the main thing I realized while watching this film was just how much Kelly has and tries to satiate his End of the World fetish. If the Saw series of movies helped to start a theme of Torture Porn, then Kelly is trying to create what I’m dubbing End World porn or trying to make an Epic Comedy, maybe even making both.
The problem is that here, in Southland Tales, it doesn’t work. There are a lot of great actors, some amazing visuals, the camera work and set design were completely enriching and a joy to take in… but the story and characters were completely off the wall. The film was so absurd that people were just laughing at the movie in all the places laughter was not intended. The only actors left unscathed were Wallace Shawn, who I’m convinced can pull off ANYTHING, his description of Liquid Karma, while on a beach in a silver, form fitting jumpsuit was probably the highlight of the film and also, Justin Timberlake (it pains me to say it too). Between his twisted role here (as well as his attempt to make SOME sort of sense of this film’s plot with his narration) and his performance in Black Snake Moan, I could really start to like the guy… if he could stick to movies and drop trying to be cooler than Michael Jackson in the music world.
Just about the only entertaining about the film was finding the Donnie Darko homages peppered through the film, like the posters of the iconic giant bunny mask, a large government agency trying to uncover the secrets to the plot (in Darko it was the FAA, now it’s the NSA with the USIdent system) and his fascination with both the end of the world and character’s getting their left eye blown away from a gunshot.
It is really too bad, this movie featured music by Moby and almost the entire cast of California (Including a heavily makeupped Kevin Smith and Janeane Garofalo was in the film originally, until her role was cut in the reediting that took place after the disastrous reception the film received in Cannes).
I’ve heard of people eliminating chairs from their office at work, in an attempt to speed up meetings, but the idea of combining the computer table with the treadmill is something I never thought of… maybe because most people think of multitasking on the computer by running a spreadsheet and listening to music, not simulating running up a mountain while sending that email to all the minions you control under you at work.
Most people spend at least 40 hours a week at work and for a good number of people, spending hours in front of their computer during that time isn’t unheard of. How tired are people going to be at the end of the day from this? Wouldn’t most people just use this for the first week or so, get bored/tired and in the end, pulling up a chair to this and never use it again?
At this point, the number 1 online music store is iTunes. It looks like Amazon has started to try and take a byte (get it, instead of bite, (mega)byte… I’m such a tech geek, sigh) out of Apple’s market share. The way they are trying it though, is by offering not only drm free mp3 music, but they are offering it for less money. On iTunes, all individual songs are $0.99, but if you want to get them drm free (when available), they are $1.29, no questions asked, while with the Amazon mp3 store, most songs are $0.89, while others are $0.99 and for those prices, ALL are drm free! Not to mention that most albums cost anywhere from $7.99 - $12+ in iTunes, while in Amazon’s new store, these albums range from $4 and up. There even some albums that are anywhere from $1-4 cheaper when purchased through Amazon’s mp3 store (after looking at albums from AC/DC, Nirvana and Pink Floyd).
This is an important step because the idea of having cheaper music, people can use on any music device is the first step toward people being willing to pay for downloadable music in larger numbers.
The Darjeeling Limited is a film whose viewing experience should begin with seeing Hotel Chevalier, the free 13 minute prologue. Without seeing this prologue, there are at least two scenes in the film that become insider jokes that you will not be a part of.
Watching this movie, it is obvious just how much of a stamp Wes Anderson puts on his movies stylistically. The music for this movie, even with the Indian theme, felt exactly like Anderson’s other films, he maintained long takes by utilizing extremely deliberate camera pans, zooms and long pauses, which makes the film both look and sound beautiful. The dialogue in this film is also a joy to behold, there are some very quick and witty moments to enjoy.
The film follows three lost brothers, trying to go on a spiritual journey a year after the death of their father. On the way toward this (meticulously itineraried) journey, the movie has some hilarious moments, some are cute, while others cause an outburst from the audience.
This movie has three distinct sections. In the first part, the brothers have an itinerary to take them on a spiritual journey. The second part is them stumbling on a completely different spiritual journey (a spiritual journey that seems to be in the wrong film), bringing the film to a grinding halt and it took me completely out of this film. The last part of the movie, with the brothers completely devastated tries to return to the itinerary, but it doesn’t quite work.
The problem is that the middle section of the movie doesn’t seem to fit with anything that came before it, because it was far too serious for the funny events that preceded it.
I ended up loving seeing the entire train revealed in the end, but even with that, the ending felt flat and unresolved. The other problem I had with this film is that unlike all of Wes Anderson’s other films, I don’t want to rewatch this film over and over again (I can’t remember how many times I’ve rewatched The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore).
Oh, one last thing, Jason Schwartzman should win an award from Apple for funniest and best timed use of an iPod throughout this film.
OK, at first, I thought this was more stupid tech brought to my attention from the glorious Geekologie from their post here. I thought the only use for this would be for casanovas to wear these glasses in bars and clubs, the whole time, looking down the blouses of the women they were talking with… once I read a little about it, I realized, even though this really wouldn’t be terribly useful for consumers to own, if MRI labs in hospitals or in other medical facilities bought a handful of these for their patients, this would be an interesting new way to make, what is normally an uncomfortable 20min-60+min test, a more bareable experience. I know some facilities offer patients headphones, so they can listen to music, but music may not help fight the clawing feeling of claustrophobia as much as a pair of glasses, which allow a patient to see through the MRI tube to the open air outside the machine, instead of having to look directly at the top of the enclosure they are stuck inside for so long.
Thanks to SkyMall for maybe, creating something somewhat useful for once, instead of their usual fare…
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