The Irish Thug

That is all.

Just watched the Battlestar Galactic mini series that leads into the first season. I was immediately happy with my decision to watch a four season show that I knew very little about, with the exception of nobody every saying something bad about it.

Stylistically it reminds me a lot of Firefly. Though, Firefly is more aggressive with the flares and un-steady-cam. They also both do a lot of space flying that utilizes zooming in on ships after they come on to screen. Other than that the shows are completely different as Battlestar stays very close to the space scifi feel and Firefly is all about the comedy and melding of genres and cultures.

• Off
• Hey, can you turn on the air.
• Dude, I said turn on the air, I’m hot.
• About time, but can you turn it down a little.
• Can’t … move … too … much … wind. OOONNNN!!

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. – Flannery O’Connor

Been kind of slacking on my movie list. I’ve slipped to a movie every 3.13, I was at about 3 even in May. But I still am making progress and am at 216. Most recently I watched All the President’s Men and Cool Hand Luke. Both were good, the latter being very much so. I’ve got Rosemary’s Baby and A Night at the Opera here from Netflix, so hopefully I get through both this weekend.

Tonight I watched Primer a second time, I still don’t know how everything pieces together quite yet. However, some one has documented it. Don’t read through it if you haven’t seen it, but you can look to confirm it’s confusing-ness. It’s very well done and the actors are the people actually making the movie too.

In other news, work is going well. The thing I’m working on is very likely about to become much larger and will keep me very busy. While working I’m making some good progress on my For Review folder of music. However most of the progress has been bands I’ve decided not to keep around. One of the non-ill-fated bands is Ozomatli. Think Flobots, but take the string instruments and replace them with Latin influences. I also have a place to live for the next year, so that’s good

But he didn’t say goodbye. In a way, it almost works because he gave me so much that he will always be with be. With the exception of my parents, Evan is the one person who had the most influence on who I am as a person. From my interest in poker, to my love for movies, to development of my sense of humor, he effected me greatly. However, the one area that is most easily quantifiable is music. Growing up, I didn’t really listen to much music. While I had started liking some bands before I met him, Evan turned me on to so many more.

Bands That I Would Not be Listening to Now If It Wasn’t For Evan
Nine Inch Nails (My favorite band who we saw together live)
The Beatles (Arguably the best band ever)
Radiohead (His favorite band)
A Perfect Circle
Beck
Bjork
Fiona Apple
Flobots
My Bloody Valentine
Outkast
Pavement
The Pixies
Smashing Pumpkins
The Strokes
Tool

Honorable mention to Spoon. I only had their two most recent albums and didn’t know they had more and he only had their first two and hadn’t heard the new songs.

Those 16 bands make up exactly 25% of the albums I listen to and the percentage is slightly higher if you do it by number of songs. Take that and the fact that I listen to at least 40 hours of music a week to understand how frequently I am given a reminder.

Evan, you will always be with me despite the fact that you are not here.

Duck Soup
This movie had everything. Singing, dancing, comedy, romance, and even a gun fight. The Marx Brothers are a great team and mesh together well. Since they each have their own niche, they can go back and forth and keep everything fresh. A good example of where the collection is better than the sum of the parts.

Vertigo
Hitchcock never fails to disappoint. Vertigo was similar to A Beautiful Mind, in that, I was really getting into the story that surrounded the first half and was thrown when it shifted. Zooming in and pulling out is such an awesome effect. After going to look up how he actually did it, I realized that it was something I had discovered earlier and like. However seeing it again in Vertigo done with so much speed gave it much more of an effect.

Dawn of the Dead
Zombies are awesome. While they aren’t fast, there are lots of them and they are determined to eat you. Watching this made me sad of the current state of zombie movies. Today everyone is too focused on getting that shot where the guy’s head explodes looking just right. But when you watch this and Night of the Living Dead, you see more than just zombies. You see people being forced to interact with people they did not previously know and get what kind of person they are. Dawn of the Dead has a complete break from zombies for about 20 minutes where the 4 main characters just live their lives in the mall they have fortified themselves in. This is what we need to get back to.

Philadelphia
This movie was good. Tom and Denzel both have good performances throughout the movie. However, it didn’t grab as much as the other movies. It had all the pieces that make up a “good” movie. The homophobic lawyer, who already doesn’t like the client, takes the case because it’s right and shows the big time businessmen that they did wrong. It seem very formulaic to me and didn’t pull me into the court room like you do when you watch To Kill a Mockingbird.

Side Note: I did the math and since my start on the list in September, I am watching 1 movie from the list every 2.85 days. If I continue at this rate, I will be finished by the end of August 2015.

About three weeks ago I released PlaceMint v1.0. It has what I view as a full set of features and works very well.

Now my work has been recognized and added to the Softpedia listing. PlaceMint has been tested and deemed good and safe for use.

It’s been quite here for quite some time. I can answer all questions of what I’ve been doing since I last came by with one word. Programing.

From January to June I was working at Citrix working on Provisioning Server. If you are too lazy to watch the demo, it’s a system that will let you boot an OS streamed from a server. This lets you have a bunch computers all boot off one hard drive image on a server with out needing a physical hard drive in the computer. Not really a product used by consumer, but it is really cool.

I also did a bunch of work for the lacrosse website. That’s now running pretty stable and won’t need much work to keep running. And since I’ve played my last season with the team, I’ve handed control of the everyday work off to others on the team.

From there we go to my latest creation. PlaceMint is a tool that will allow you to arrange windows into defined slots based on window title. Slot are configurable by the user to ensure the windows are position to each users specific needs. Allows for drag and drop swapping of windows between slots. It has turned out really well and I’m glad that I spent the time writing it. It forced me to learn a lot about programing in C# and utilizing the Windows API, which are two things that are good to be able to get your head around.

Now I’m keeping busy by fixing/adding things mentioned by people that are beta testing PlaceMint. I’m also starting to do the planing steps for my Capstone project. This is the major project that I have to do before I can graduate, where we make something and then show other people and try to convince them that our idea is better than everyone else.