Archive for April, 2007
The Braves Tie Up John Smoltz
The Atlanta Braves have reached an agreement on a contract extension with pitcher John Smoltz. This extends his contract through 2008 with options for 2009 and 2010 which surely means Smoltz will end his playing days with the Braves.
Stranger Than Fiction
Another belated review, this is becoming somewhat of a habit isn’t it? Regardless, another DVD review, this time of a movie that Robyn wanted to see from last year when she saw a trailer for it on TV.
Stranger Than Fiction is the story of Harold Crick (played by a very un-Will Ferrell Will Ferrell) who’s rather boring life of a tax auditor turns out to be the next novel of celebrated author Karen Eiffel (played by a fantastic Emma Thompson), complete with narrative voice over who “warns” him about his upcoming death. Thinking he’s going crazy, he ends up at the door of Professor Jules Hilbert (an equally fantastic Dustin Hoffman) who tells Harold he needs to find out if his life story will be a comedy or a tragedy, as that will determine the outcome…
This was a seriously good movie, an brilliant cast and a great story. There were so many nice little touches to it, like on screen graphics showing Harold’s obsessive counting during his day, the voice over semi breaking down the fourth wall as Harold interrupts it, one of the best visual puns in the history of cinema (you’ll know it when you see it), just a great, great movie. I’m not sure who was better, Will Ferrell playing a straight character, Emma Thompson’s author dealing with writers block or Dustin Hoffman’s bizarre professor who takes Harold’s situation quite literally.
Highly recommended, especially as it’s a rental now…
Next up: I have the choice of 300 or Casino Royale… Shame it looks like I’ve missed my chance to see Grindhouse, but there is always Spider-Man 3 to look forward to.
Thunder Dan
An awesome video of former Phoenix Suns player Dan Majerle draining some crazy shots from half court while wearing a suit before the Suns/Lakers game a few nights ago. Back in the day, Dan could the shoot lights out from anywhere!
Is Our Food Contaminated?
US health officials are now looking at whether humans may have consumed food containing a chemical linked to a recall of pet foods and livestock feed. FDA officials said they would inspect imports of six grain products used in foods ranging from bread to baby formula for traces of melamine, a chemical thought to have killed and sickened cats and dogs.
I Took It!
I took it! And if you’re in web design, so should you. The first A List Apart web design survey.
We Dig TV
We Dig TV. Play “classic” old skool UK game shows like Bullseye, Countdown and Blockbusters online.
Life Streamed
Yes, I bitch a lot about somethings, like last week I was complaining about Dreamhost disabling “allow_url_fopen” in PHP so I’d have use cURL instead to get a little tumblelog kind of site. Instead I cheated and used a basic WordPress install and Chris J Davis’ Lifestream plugin (of sorts) to create my own lifestream/tumblelog on the gregorsmith.com domain that was just sitting vacant since I got it in late December/early January. Quick and dirty, well dirty and not so quick, but it does the job.
Basically it does everything that my tumblr tumblelog does except archive information, it’s just the most recent information from the feeds, usually the last 15 to 20 entries. Currently it pulls in the main blog here, the links I post, uploaded Flickr images and my many twitter tweets. Completely automated, 100% meta and easy to expand, my kind of site.
Photosynth
Microsoft unveil a preview of Photosynth, a 3D way to view photos taken in the same location. This looks to be very, very cool… Get this working with Flickr and geotagging and you have a virtual 3D Earth.
Almost Free Cable
Sometimes I love our little TV, back in Atlanta it was able to get us the local HD channels from Comcast even though we didn’t have the cable box to decrypt the signal. Thanks to Robyn we also got the extended basic package for the basic basic price, always nice. We also got a few channels we shouldn’t have like Discovery Health and NBATV, nothing really special but a bonus none the less.
Now when we fired it up in our new home and set it up to find the Time Warner channels, all we got extra was the local FOX and CBS in HD, which meant Super Bowl and March Madness in HD, and Discovery HD Theater. Kinda sucky really… But a bonus still. Last night we were watching Mythbusters on TiVo when Robyn went off to check on the dinner that was cooking, I flicked through FOX and CBS HD when on screen was ESPN2 HD, nice… Next up was HDNet, now we’re onto something good.
Soon we were flicking through every channel we get to list what new ones we’ve scored on top of our extended basic package, the list was astounding. HBO, Showtime (in HD too), Starz, Encore, Fox Soccer Channel (score!), Science Channel, BBC America, Discovery Health (again), a whole bunch of movie channels and lots more I can’t even remember, almost a complete total package… We’ve scored big time. Now we need to remember the channel numbers, instead of being 114, 203, 732 or whatever, it’s like 77.1, 89.2 which really makes it hard to find what you want.
So now I can watch The Sopranos (no more Sunday night downloading), all the soccer I want, Penn & Teller’s Bullshit (Robyn likes that, we watched it last night), sweet. Another downside is we can’t TiVo it, can’t have everything…
Britain’s Best and Worst Places to Bring Up Children
Britain’s Best and Worst Places to Bring Up Children. Apparently, the best place to bring up children is in my brothers house, how bizarre!
No One Belongs Here More Than You
No one belongs here more than you. Miranda July does a real old skool website to promote her book of the same name, that being hand written with a dry erase marker on appliance surfaces. Very nice indeed.
Meanwhile, in North Mecklenburg…
A 16-year-old student took his own life Wednesday afternoon, just an hour after he approached classmates armed with a gun on campus at North Mecklenburg High School in Huntersville. The events put four schools temporarily on lockdown and had the area police and campus officers on high alert. Just after the lockdown ended, officers tracked the student to a gas station. When police approached the teenager, he made his weapon visible, but instead of putting it down, he turned it on himself.