Monthly Archive for August, 2005

Review: The Dukes of Hazzard

Published on August 28, 2005 in Movies. Closed Tags: .

Dukes of Hazzard Movie Poster

3 out of 5 stars

We went to see this flick on Friday night with Matt and his wife, Chrissy. This is one funny movie. Now, make sure you understand me. This is NOT a good movie, but it is a fun movie to watch. I found myself laughing out loud many times during this film. They manage to take things that are southern and really just turn them around into something truly over the top and funny.

Let me cover the main characters:

1. Luke Duke – Johnny Knoxville was hilarious. Slightly more devious than Bo Duke, but definitely a fun Luke.
2. Bo Duke – Seann William Scott is essentially playing ‘Stifler’ in every movie he is in. That said, I haven’t seen him in anything where I didn’t think he was funny.
3. Daisy Duke – Thank goodness, Jessica Simpson is not in this movie very much. She was obviously inserted purely for the eye-candy. Not to say she isn’t good at being eye-candy, but …
4. Uncle Jessie – Willie Nelson did a great job here. He was definitely fun as Uncle Jessie and he had the worst jokes to tell.
5. Boss Hogg – Burt Reynolds doesn’t look like Boss Hogg at all (outside of the white suit), but I thought he did a fair job of convincing you that he was a money grubbing ass who thought of no one else, but in a purely idiotic manner.
6. Rosco P. Coltrane – M.C. Gainey was totally wrong for this roll. He wasn’t acting nearly bumbling enough to fill these shoes.

Other interesting characters were ‘Sheev’ who was played by the wonderful Kevin Heffernan (a.k.a Farva from Super Troopers). He was great, albeit a tad shameless. As far as eye-candy goes, they through in a whole sorority house of girls, but I did think Nikki Griffin as Katie Johnson was especially attractive.

Back to the humor, Uncle Jessie’s jokes were wonderful, for example (this is for you, Kirsten & Jeremy):

Uncle Jessie: What do you call a farmer with a sheep under each arm?
Luke Duke: What?
Uncle Jessie: A playboy.

There was also a lot of other fun scenes. They even essentially admitted Jessica Simpson’s role in the movie with the following quote:

Daisy Duke: You know what’s gonna happen. They’re gonna get caught and get thrown in jail. Then I’m gonna have to shake my ass at somebody to get them out.
Uncle Jesse: That’s why we love ya, honey.

So, all in all, a very fun movie to watch. I would suggest a matinee, but I didn’t regret my full price ticket at all.

It’s Alive

Published on August 24, 2005 in Software. Closed

Well, it looks like Google Talk is now live. There was a period of time earlier where I could connect and then not, but now that it is live, I am back in via Adium.

The actual app is Windows only, but the developer page has some interesting info:

What protocols are used for voice calls?

Google Talk supports a custom XMPP-based signaling protocol and peer-to-peer communication mechanism. We will fully document this protocol. In the near future, we plan to support SIP signaling.

This leads me to believe that voice chatting may be workable in the future via iChat or via one of the voice chat addons in progress for Adium. If this pans out Google could do quite well in this space.

One other addition from the developer page:

Do you plan to support the Google Talk client on other platforms?

We look forward to the Google Talk client supporting Linux and Mac OSX in the future.

Google Talk

Published on August 23, 2005 in Software. Closed

I found this interesting bit of info at smash’s world. This seems to give some credence to this story about the Google’s new communications tool that will be announced on Wednesday.

I’m curious to see what app they will release to take advantage of their use of Jabber…

Could be very cool…

Sin City DVD a real Sin

Published on August 21, 2005 in Movies. Closed Tags: , .

Sin City

I had wanted to pick up Sin City this past week as it has come out on DVD, but the release is rather disappointing. The video and audio quality are amazing from what I have heard, but the special features are pretty much non-existant. There is an eight minute featurette and some promos for other films. There isn’t even a trailer for this movie!!! Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine as I really like trailers and a DVD better damn well come with the trailer for the film at the very least. It doesn’t totally disqualify the DVD from purchase, but it definitely hurts the chances that I will open my wallet for it.

Adding insult to injury, there is a special edition already in the works for release likely later this year. Here is a quote from the review of this disc at my favorite DVD news site, The Digital Bits:

This disc’s weakness is its extras, or lack thereof. Other than an 8-minute featurette – one that gives you just the barest look at the film’s origins and makings – you get nothing of value at all. Nada. Zip. Don’t let Buena Vista’s marketing for this DVD fool you (“Collect all 4 limited edition covers!”). Anyone who buys more than a single copy of this disc is being taken for a ride. It shouldn’t surprise you that Rodriguez has indicated (in recent interviews) that a fully-loaded special edition is ALREADY on the way, so beware the double-dip.

The legacy of Steven Seagal

Published on August 14, 2005 in Movies. Closed Tags: .

After I did some poking around on Steven Seagal’s IMDB page, I had to post this…

This guy has SIX movies tagged as 2005. Three are already out and three more are in post-production. Check out these titles:

  • Black Dawn
  • Mercenary
  • The Untitled Onion Movie
  • Today You Die
  • Submerged
  • Into the Sun

Probably a large collection of garbage there, but we will have to wait to see.

I am curious about the ‘The Untitled Onion Movie‘. It is supposed to be a humorous look at world events by The Onion. I don’t recognize most of the actors in the movie, but Mr. Seagal is there and his character’s only name is “Cock Puncher”. I feel I must see this ;)

Kung Fu Hustle

Published on August 13, 2005 in Movies. Closed Tags: , .

H and I are about to head out and go watch Kung Fu Hustle at a friend’s house. Friends, pizza, beer, and a flick, what more can you ask for? :)

I should be back later with a review…

[UPDATE:]

This is honestly a difficult movie to review. We were having too much fun to really pay attention to the entire plot. The night started off with my request to play Sean’s copy of Katamari Damacy. This was my first time playing and wow is it addicting. The best thing about this game is the fact that it can act as a conversation starter. It is rife with so much sexual innuendo. Now, this doesn’t seem to be intentional, but you’re basically rolling a ‘ball’ around and the following keep happening:

  • You’re told to get your ball bigger
  • Your ball picks up crabs
  • You are told that it goes down smoothly

Yes, I know this is all low-brow gutter humor, but … Also all of this occurs while being surrounded by happy graphics that look like someone was high when designing the game.

So, we started out in a festive spirit and then the alcohol came out :)

Now, on to Kung-Fu Hustle. The movie has some surprisingly good CG effects and the cast is fun. There didn’t seem to be a huge plot (from what I could tell), but it was almost entirely composed of slapstick humor combined with cool action. I liked the movie a lot and would definitely recommend renting it to others. Maybe I will see it again and give it some additional attention to better describe it…

Not wanting to go home, we moved on to Submerged, which is a horrible movie, but it does star Steven Seagal. We had the most fun making up dialog for this movie and ripping it apart scene by scene.

Ctrl+Alt+Del – “Bathing Suit Area”

Published on August 8, 2005 in Gaming. Closed Tags: .

Okay, this is disturbing, but it might explain a lot ;)

For those who don’t know who don’t know any of the back story from that comic, check out this site about Jack Thompson, a Miami Attorney, who is a censor and a critic of media that he feels is in some way wrong. It seems that he is following a long line of people who attack what they don’t understand or don’t agree with under the guise of “protecting the children”.

Here is a VG Cats comic satirizing Mr. Thompson and here is an e-mail thread between the artist behind VG Cats, Scott Ramsoomair, and Mr. Thompson.

I would love to be able to say to just ignore this kind of thing, but I see it as a slippery slope and who knows what next will be dangerous to the yutes of America.

H.264 encoded video

Published on August 8, 2005 in A/V Gear and Software. Closed

Since I got Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Quicktime 7 Pro, I have been experiencing the fun of encoding my DV captures into H.264 video files. This is incredibly processor intensive but I simply love the results. On my iMac G4 1GHz, it takes ~13 hours to encode a 20 minute clip (20 minutes is the example as most 30 minute TV programs contain 20 minutes of actual content). On my PowerBook G4 1.67GHz, the time drops to 8 hours for the same clip. I have a script that basically batch encodes these one at a time as needed.

I capture a variety of things including commercials that I find interesting. I thought I would put some of these clips up for others to see. I honestly don’t know if others get enjoyment out of video that is interesting even if it is a commercial…maybe I am just odd ;) One such example is a commercial for the Motorola RAZR V3. That clip should load in your browser if you have Quicktime 7 on your Mac or the Quicktime 7 Public Preview on Windows. I have read that VLC can handle these clips in Linux, but I haven’t tested it.

Pain in the back

Published on August 7, 2005 in Personal. Closed

So, this weekend has kind of sucked. Heather was out of town and my back has been hurting. Unfortunately, I decided to try mowing the lawn and my back has been killing me ever since. Every so often my back will cause me problems and when that happens it is very easy to push it too far and make the problems worse.

Make Fire From Water : Gizmodo

Published on August 5, 2005 in Miscellanea. Closed

Make Fire From Water : Gizmodo

This is just terribly cool. No, it isn’t revolutionary, but I think this is a nice step in the right direction towards bringing this cool technology into the hands of consumers…