Microsoft’s new ad campaign has officially kicked off with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld now.

This is Microsoft’s long overdue response to Vista’s publicity woes and Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, which have gotten progressively more aggressive against Microsoft over time.

Enjoy

Dany

I just got back from watching Woody Allen’s new movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. This film really has not gotten a lot of press coverage, I haven’t really seen any ads for it, but shows like Filmspotting (subscribe here), The Totally Rad Show (subscribe here), along with the always trusty Roger Ebert and James Berardinelli have also tried to bring this film into the light of day.

I try and make a point of seeing any new Woody Allen film I hear about and this is definitely one of those times where I feel completely rewarded for this policy. This movie is wonderfully wild, especially as the film progresses and yes Scarlett Johansson is insanely beautiful and sexy, but with this movie, I can see specifically what it is that Woody saw in her to have her star in 3 of his last 4 films, while I liked Match Point more than this movie, I thought she gave her best performance here as Cristina. Johansson has a restless, exuberant innocence that is wonderful.

I don’t always like the use of a narrator and I didn’t always like it in this movie either. It was useful for explaining which Spanish landmarks were being visited and which artists and sculptures were being admired throughout the film, but it got a bit annoying when, for example being told that the characters were tasting chocolates at a local chocolatier, while on screen, we can see Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem walking in and eating those chocolates.

It has been a long time since I saw a film with Penélope Cruz and her sensuous and wild performance reminded me of the first time I ever saw her, back in Abre los ojos (the role that also inspired Tom Cruise to remake that film into Vanilla Sky with her starring in it as well) and it shames me to think that I still have not gotten to see her in Volver up to this point! I NEED to put that film on my list of things to see on dvd now.

I think this is a wonderful movie and I just loved it, especially with all the photography featured in the film, I love photography and I wish I could get my shots to come out looking as good as some of those taken in this film. Thanks to VickyCristinaBarcelona.WordPress.com for the above pic.

On a side note, throughout the film, I kept identifying with the Doug character (Chris Messina), no matter how much I wanted this to not be so, while at the same time, I wish I acted more like Juan Antonio in my dealings with women and relationships.

Enjoy

Dany

I feel a bit silly about publishing this this review, since I wrote it a week ago… I just saved it without clicking the Publish button… I guess that’s what happens sometimes with a new medium like this. Anyway, here is my review.

After seeing Tropic Thunder, I realize that there are two parts to this review. First, for the squeamish and the easily offended, it’s time for you to leave. Do not buy a ticket, this movie is not for you. You WILL get offended and will not have fun… unless you want to get offended.

Now, for all you people who don’t fall under that former category, get ready for a fun ride. This is not a great movie, but it had me cracking up during enough scenes that I lost count, probably the two most memorable parts were the film’s fake movie trailers, which completely took me off guard and had me laughing out loud (especially the one with featuring Tobey Maguire). My other favorite part of the film was Robert Downey Jr’s entire performance. This man has had an amazing year, most actors are lucky if they’re in a good movie every couple of years, but between his performance here and earlier in Iron Man, he’s having a great year.

The movie is about a group of actors trying to make an epic Vietnam War movie, based on the writings of a GREAT grizzled and hand-less Nick Nolte, but they end up having production problems and the creators of the film decide that to try and shake up the production, they would strand the actors deep in the jungle to try and scare them into making a great authentic feeling movie and let’s just say that things start to go wrong FAST!

This really wasn’t really a tour de force for Ben Stiller’s acting and his pacing (as a director) felt off at times, there were times when Jack Black was funny, but at other times he just didn’t really cut it and Danny McBride wasn’t as much fun as in Pineapple Express, but even with that, Stiller made a funny movie that I had a lot of fun watching this movie.

Thanks to ScreenRant for the above pic.

Enjoy

Dany

Oh yeah, also, watch out for Tom Cruise, that’s all I’m going to say.

After watching the short claymation film Chainsaw Maid from The Digg Reel (subscribe here), I knew that I had to share it. Claymation has always had a place in my heart starting with Gumby and Penny (from Pee Wee’s Playhouse) and more recently with Knox toons, but this is quite different… and much more violent.

Enjoy the short film, but remember, I warned you.

Dany

Throughout this week, the Democratic National Convention is going on in Denver (catch the live HD feed here), but for all those people who are too busy to catch the speeches and spectacle live, their official website is presenting all the video on demand in HD, you can even subscribe here to their feed to get all the updated videos as they’re released or just check out their video gallery here.

Just check out Ted Kennedy’s speech from earlier in the week to get an idea of the quality here. I just hope the Republican National Convention coming up is as technologically savvy!

Thanks to Minnesota Public Radio for the above pic.

Enjoy

Dany

I thought you’d appreciate the crazy… I wanted to order some minor electronics to help me build an LED circuit (a capacitor and a timer), which totaled $3 and change, but when I saw that the shipping charge alone was over $6 and the fact that RadioShack.com has a similar deal to Amazon (free shipping on $25+ orders).

So, I went sifting though the Radio Shack site for some other things that I already was going to buy to bump it up to $25. I started with everything on my Amazon wish lists (ex: Hellgate: London and Soon I Will Be Invincible) and got nothing, but I then started looking at video games and stumbled on Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga… I had wanted to get the game for a while, especially since the only real knock against it that I had heard/read was that it was not very new or different from older versions of the game, but since I have never played any version of the game, I figure that I’ll fully enjoy it all for the first time.

So, I ended up getting a $49.99 game that I wanted so that I could avoid $6 shipping on a $3 item.

Just thought I should share the insanity with you.

Dany

Here is Morgan Freeman in The Narrator. If you want the best movie of the year… this is not it, but if you want one of the best narrators in history waxing philosophically about, well, narrating, this is for you. The whole thing is quite meta and extremely soothing.

Thanks to The Digg Reel (subscribe here) for pointing out this video.

Dany

The above video is a great act from Penn & Teller in which they magically produced 1 million bees from thin air and challenged “Siegfried & Leroy” as well as many other performers in the process. I bring up this blast from magic’s past because of a recent episode of Penn Says (subscribe here) where Penn explains the horrifically hilarious back story that went along with that trick.

Enjoy

Dany

Oh yeah, check out that back story below:

I enjoyed Knocked Up and I have been anticipating seeing Pineapple Express ever since I saw Seth Rogen flying off  a ledge to jump on top of Lumbergh… er, Gary Cole, even though I wasn’t looking forward to seeing James Franco as the buddy stoner though since I hated him in all the Spider-Man movies.

As I was watching the film, I had a problem believing how well the main characters were handling the situation they were put in, one minute they were scared stiff (rightfully) and the next they were  doing things no regular person would be  able to do… but once I was able to let go of reality though, I thought this was just a whole lot of fun to watch.

It has been a long time since I saw Rosie Perez in a film and surprisingly, she may be the only woman that makes getting hit in the face hilarious. She did a great job throughout the film, with a role that may have fallen by the wayside with a less talented comedic actress. The best part of the movie in the end though was James Franco, he had me laughing through so many scenes, he was great and that really surprised me.

The other real disappointment was that the movie didn’t have any credit cookies, which I’ve almost come to expect from a comedy movie like this, but if that’s my problem with the movie, I know I had a good time and will probably get this on dvd. Rogen did a great job in writing this film.

Roger Ebert was right in his review that this movie “is the answer to the question, ‘What would happen if a movie like this was made by a great director?’”

Thanks to the Examiner for the above pic.

Dany

I didn’t really think Swing Vote was going to be any good going in and I was not wrong. I saw this film because I love politics and have tried to keep on the bleeding edge of this years Presidential election and I wanted to see what, if anything this film would offer about elections in America. This turned out to be a bad movie, but I was surprised that there were scenes that did manage to make me laugh.

The biggest problem, that I could not get over was that the entire movie glorifies the federal felony committed within the first twenty minutes of the start of the film and what made it worse was that the character who finds out about this and you would expect to DO something about this, sits back and in the end HELPS keep the secret safe!

It was funny watching the fake political ads and seeing Nathan Lane and Dennis Hopper, it may be impossible for either of these two consumate professionals to come to work and give a bad performance. This is also probably the best performance I’ve seen out of Kevin Costner (sad but true) in a LONG time, probably since 3000 Miles to Graceland.

I definately recommend that this movie be skipped, go back and watch The Dark Knight again, you’ll have a much better time.

Dany

I found this little program called Launchy and it is good if your want a quick (just press Alt+Space), simple search that specializes in programs and searching sites like Youtube, but then I went to Microsoft Update and saw that there was an optional update to their desktop search called Windows Search 4.0, it works for all versions of Windows from XP onwards. Download it here.

The big advantage of the Microsoft search tool is that you can add it as a toolbar onto your desktop and it can search the web using your default search engine, so when I tried that option, it actually opened a Firefox window for a Google search, when I was expecting it to open IE and do a Live search. I was pleasantly surprised by that.

It is also a pretty comprehensive search as well, when I used Launchy (which also works for Linux) to search for Backgammon, it came up w/ my backgammon game, but the windows search found my backgammon game as well as two different books I got from Project Gutenberg (A Tale of Two Cities and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) since it searched the text of those docs and found that they both mention backgammon. The search results are also fully accessible to commands like Copy, Rename, Delete, etc via right clicking and accessing the menu bar.

Thanks to WildWheelz for the above pic.

Dany

*Update September 4th 2008* After a few weeks of using both programs, I find Launchy immensly more useful a program and have taken the Windows Search Tool off of my taskbar to save space and system resources, while I have been using Launchy more and more.

OK, it has been a while since I wrote about stupid tech, but when the lovely Denise sent me this, I had to respond publicly.

After watching the video demo from Goatee Saver, I… I… I just can’t believe it has come to this. Do guys REALLY need to chomp on some ginormous contraption that brings us just that much closer to looking like Darth Vader while we shave!?!?!

Why couldn’t this have just remained vaporware?

Thanks to Gizmodo for the above pic.

Dany

It’s just the right time, with the Beijing Olympics starting tomorrow and the Presidential campaign in full swing… yeah, that’s why I’m posting this video of Obama Girl vs McCain Girl from Barely Political (subscribe here)… riiiiight (also because it made me laugh).

Oh and just because I can, here’s Paris Hilton’s frighteningly rational energy plan as she throws her hat in the ring for President from FunnyorDie:

Dany

It has been a long time since John F. Kennedy put forth the idea that we would go to the Moon in the span of a decade, but we accomplished that goal. Today we may need our politicians to make some sort of similar inspirational proclamations.

I realized that from the Ford Model T through today, cars average 20-30 miles per gallon (thank you Ford and the US National Highway Traffic Safety for that little fact) and after almost 100 years, that is just NOT acceptable.

I would love to hear one of our candidates proclaim an initiative that within ten years, we would mandate that all car companies that wanted to sell their cars in the USA would have to maintain an average fuel efficiency of at least 100 miles per gallon (or the equivalent using alternative energy vehicles) across their entire fleet (cars and trucks combined). I know there will always be some people that need larger cars that are less fuel efficient, others just love their Hummers and then there are truckers who haul massive loads across the country, but if we can balance that out with other, extremely fuel efficient vehicles, this would do a lot to help our current problems dealing with energy costs/foreign oil/national security.

I implore either Senator Obama or Senator McCain to adopt this plan and fight for this idea… check that, I’d rather see BOTH candidates addopt this plan and vigorously fight to make it a reality. I also hope that any/all of the potential 3rd party candidates adopt this initiative as well.

If you agree, let the candidates hear that it by digging this story and sending this article to your campaign of choice. Tell McCain about this story. Tell Obama about this story. Tell the third party candidates about this story.

Dany

I think I might be more surprised about this article than anyone else, especially since I pretty much have no interest in non movie soundtrack related music, but I’ve actually got to spotlight a music video I heard today on Popsiren (subscribe here). The band is the Black Kids and the song that hooked me is called I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend. The visuals in this video just really caught my eye and I found myself enjoying what I was hearing as well. I don’t know what got into me.

Let me know what you think

Dany

I think most of you remember the hillarious JibJabers from their amazingly funny hit from the 2004 election season: This Land! Well, they’re back for this year’s presidential election with Time for Some Campaignin’… JibJab never really went away, they’ve actually been making videos since 1999 way back in the dial-up days and before the dot-com bubble burst.

Thanks to Net@Nite (subscribe here)for interviewing those funny JibJab founders. Hopefully soon, those crafty JibJab guys will set up their videos as a podcast to make them even easier for people to watch and keep up to date on their latest funny videos.

Enjoy

Dany

As an added treat, here’s the This Land! video below, just in case you forgot what I was talking about.

The Dark Knight is probably the longest (over two and a half hours), most violent, shocking, enthralling, fun and disturbing superhero movie I have probably ever seen. I had a wonderful time, but I was let down when I couldn’t get in to see the IMAX screening of the film, but I couldn’t wait any longer to see this film. I will definitely be going back next week to try and see it in IMAX and then buy the dvd.

A lot of people are talking about Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker and part of the reason that it has been so hard to get tickets for this film is because he died before the film was released, but I must say, he TAKES OVER in a way that only Jack Nicholson would be proud of.

I really can’t review this film, but it does show what a superhero movie could be and that our current efforts in CGI are so realistic that it is almost impossible to tell that we are being fooled by an effect. I am not going to give anything away, except to say that I don’t believe any young children should see this film, it is both too long and also the most violent and disturbing PG-13 ever, but even though I’m intimately familiar with the Batman comics, I believe in Harvey Dent and it was inspiring to see that Gotham did as well.

Thanks to The Telegram for the above pic.

Dany

*8-29-2008 Update* - I finally got in to see The Dark Knight in IMAX and it was totally worth the wait, but the only oddity I noticed this time around was that Gotham’s Mayor (Nestor Carbonell) wore eyeliner, I later found out through the great imdb, that this was to give the role a more Frank Miller comic feel.

I went along to see Mamma Mia today. I didn’t know what to expect from it since I had never seen the theatrical production and the only exposure I had to it was seeing the theater posters and the movie trailer itself. After watching Meryl’s last two movies (Lions for Lambs and Rendition) I was really hoping to see a GOOD movie from Meryl Streep and maybe even a film where she looks like she’s having some fun, especially since I don’t think the scripts of those last two movies gave her a whole lot to work with.

I can’t say that I liked this movie, but then again this really wasn’t a movie geared toward me, I must say though, the grown ups in the film (Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski) seem to be having all the fun in this film. Everyone else… including the young couple that is supposed to be getting married (Amanda Seyfried and Dominic Cooper) just seem undeveloped and uninteresting.

Whenever the grownups were on screen, the story felt somewhat interesting and amusing, but once they were off camera, the story sagged with their absence. The script tried to show parallels between mother (Streep) and daughter (Seyfried), both had their two best friends come to meet them for the wedding, both groups had similar reactions to seeing each other for the first time and then later in the film they paralleled the scenes between both groups of friends after the bachelorette party, but there was no comparison, Streep and Baranksi far out shadow the younger generation in this film.

My biggest complaint about this film though, is that nobody seems to care about the Dominic Cooper’s character, not even the woman who is supposed to be marrying him! No matter what happens, he seems to love her unconditionally (not that that’s a bad thing, mind you), but in the one scene where there’s tension between him and his fiancee (where the whole fight is her fault, by the way) he gets mad and walks away, but instead of Seyfried running after him or at least making sure to mend fences, she just walks away assuming that he’ll get over the whole thing and because he is such a shallowly written character, she was right and there were no consequences. Then at the very end of the film, something similar happens to her on a boat in the shadows, but I don’t want to give away the end of the movie.

It was fun watching Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgård having a lot of fun and make fools of themselves throughout the film especially throughout the credit cookies, but I must say, Streep and Baranski were definitely having the most fun of anyone.

I would never recommend this film to any of my guy friends and I don’t know if I’d recommend it to my female friends either, but I did see a lot of women who left that enjoyed the film and if you are a big musical fan or just a big ABBA or Meryl Streep junkie, you might like it.

Thanks to The Theatre Addict for the above pic.

Dany

Now, I don’t know how long this 3 part miniseries from Joss Whedon will remain online, but if you haven’t seen it, try and catch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog here.

Dr. Horrible is a 3 part miniseries starring Neil Patrick Harris (yes, Doogie Howser), Felicia Day (from The Guild [subscribe here]) and Joss Whedon regular, Nathon Fillion.

I don’t usually like musicals, but a Joss Whedon musical is different, just watch the Buffy musical, Once More with Feeling, to see what I mean,

For now at least, this miniseries is free via Hulu.com, but you can keep it by buying it off of iTunes by purchasing each individual episode for $1.99 or get the season pass for $4.99 and it will eventually be released on DVD, which I will buy in a heartbeat.

Thanks to Stuff.co.nz for the above pic.

Hope you all get to enjoy it

Dany

*8/2/2008 Update* As of right now, the entire 3 acts of Dr. Horrible have been combined into one 42 minute movie and are available to watch via the Official site and Hulu.

*8/9/2008 Update* Or watch it here:

*9/1/2008 Update* Thanks to Nathan Fillion for sharing Dr. Horrible’s iPhone remote van controls from Act I.

This first clip is fitting since we celebrated America’s independence earlier this month, from Break.com, America Rules England Sucks.

The second clip is a behind the scenes look at a Family Guy taping. It is very strange watching Seth McFarland switching from one voice to another having a conversation with himself, but the whole thing is hilarious.

Enjoy these two clips I found from watching episodes of The Digg Reel (subscribe here).

Dany

After reviewing Pixar’s most recent success in Wall-E, it’s only fitting that I present the very first Pixar short titled: The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. It’s hard to believe that Pixar’s origins go all the way back to 1984, since they burst onto the scene over a decade later with Toy Story. What’s also interesting is that along with presenting the short film, The Experience Project also chronicles the early history of Pixar.

Thanks to The Digg Reel (subscribe here) for highlighting this early work.

Enjoy

Dany

After finding out what Homer Simpson and Mario Mario would look like if they weren’t cartoons by Pixeloo, I knew I’d have to see what was the next projects were.

I really enjoyed Pixeloo’s rendition of Jessica Rabbit:

and Stewie Griffin:

Also, here is the ~10 minute video going through the Jessica Rabbit untooning process.

Enjoy

Dany

I download a LOT of podcasts daily (I currnently have 10 solid days of audio waiting for me to listen to and growing) and keep only a small percentage of them. I have so many, that the only way I can manage them and keeping sane is using the EXTREMELY useful iTunes smart playlist feature.

The only problem with this system was that I could not delete the smart playlist items I had already listened to directly from the smart playlist menu, I would still have to sift through iTunes‘ Podcast section and individually delete all the old podcasts…

I’ve FINALLY found a solution, all you need to do to fix this is to select all the smart playlist items that you want to delete and while holding the SHIFT button, hit DELETE. This brings up the regular iTunes deltetion dialog box and presto! Problem solved. This also works from any iTunes playlist, smart or otherwise by the way.

Now, I use Windows, so I don’t know if this fix works for Mac users, but if you run a Mac and have this problems, try this fix and let me know in the comments below.

Thanks to PhilMug.com for the above pic.

Dany

**UPDATE** AlisterComputeron commented that on a Mac, all you need to do is Option+Delete to get the same result.

I’m usually the “tech guy” for our office, but lately I’ve had to try and get help from some much more seasoned tech people both at Dell and Microsoft, but up to now, my tech problems at work are still troubling me, even though I’ve had very helpful techs working on my case.

Now though, my friend Dan sent me this clip from Break.com and I thought it was so fitting considering what I’ve recently been going through. This is hilarious, especially once the IT guy wants to get himself a screen shot.

Dany

After watching this clip from Best of Youtube (subscribe here) of a guy texting while cruising down the highway on his motorcycle, I almost fell off my couch. Even though this guy could manage to lean back, text AND drive his bike at the same time without crashing into a wall or another car, I could barely manage sitting on my couch… truly sad, I know.

I think I know at least one person *cough* Tara *cough* who might just get a kick out of this video… or maybe hate me for sending this out. Either way this video is crazy.

Dany

I know I’ve talked about Dan Carlin before, but after listening to his most recent episode

Ever since Tim Russert’s passing, I’ve noticed there aren’t that many interesting, exciting and original voices speaking out about politicals. The people that come to my mind that I enjoy listening to are Chris Matthews, Rachael Maddow, Tavis Smiley, Penn Jillette, John McLaughlin, John C. Dvorak (who is a technology writer, but who loves stirring it up interesting with interesting political views) and…. Dan Carlin.

Check out DanCarlin.com to get all his most recent updates. Thanks to MeFeedia for the above pic.

Dany