The Irish Thug

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.

Since we last talked, I’ve been keeping busy. I have been doing all of the things I enjoy. Started playing poker again (and had a winning day), watching movies, playing video games, programing and hanging out with friends. I’m halfway through with my vacation and I plan on doing more of the same in the next two weeks. Everything, except the last thing I mentioned, is going to be taking a hit because I will be going on a trip that involves 6 planes, 2 4-hour car rides, 1 4-hour layover, a bunch of amusement parks and two weddings. The day after all this ends is my first day of work and the rest of my life.

Like I said, I’ve been watching movies, but have seen more off the list than on.
For the on category we have:
Crumb
The Thing
Ben-Hur
Angles with Dirty Faces
Happiness
Badlands
North by Northwest
Harold and Maude

For the off category we have:
Sukiyaki Western Django
Dial M for Murder
To Catch a Thief
Dan in Real Life
Star Trek
The Killing
Mean Creek
Dear Zachary
Synecdoche, New York

Ok, I thought it was much less balanced, but I didn’t lie to you. A lot of these were hard to watch. Not that I didn’t enjoy them, more that they were extremely emotional or twisted, or both.

Crumb – It is about the underground comic artist Robert Crumb, but ends up being depiction of all the mental disabilities of him and his brothers.

Happiness – Despite the title, there is not a single happy person in this movie, very twisted and dark.

Harold and Maude – A really great movie about an unlikely relationship between a 19 year old boy and 79 year old woman. The hardest part of this was that the film opens with a fake suicide by Harold that I didn’t know were fake at the time. Once things were explained and I had a better feel for the movie, I enjoyed it.

Dan in Real Life – This movie stars Steve Carell and Dane Cook, it is not a comedy. You need to know this before you start or else you will not enjoy this film and you should.

Mean Creek – It’s Deliverance, except no banjo kid or squealing and everyone is younger then 18. What it lacks in original story it makes up for in performances and cinematography.

Dear Zachary – Wow, I still don’t even know what to say. A documentary about a woman who kills the father of her unborn child, flees to Canada, and how the legal system (mis)handles everything. Seriously hard to watch because just when you think you have gotten a handle on how messed up things are, something more comes. It is very well done and worth watching, just be ready.

On that note, we’ll turn back to me and talk about progress. I’m at 199 and chugging along. The first milestone of 250 will be just about in time for my birthday. I’ve also managed to bring the projected completion date into late 2015 instead of early 2016.

EDIT: I forgot about 8 1/2, which is on the list. So I guess I did lie, but it’s a lot of movies and hard to keep track of them all.

Classes ended a week ago. In that time I have watch an ungodly number of movies.

12 Monkeys
Beau Travail
A Scanner Darkly
RocknRolla
The Karate Kid
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Ultimate Avengers
The Exorcist
Layer Cake
The Maltese Falcon
Fahrenheit 451
This is England

Beau Travail, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Exorcist are the only movies from that group that helped me along my way towards 1001. Kind of surprised The Maltese Falcon wasn’t on the list, but then again, it wasn’t as good as Casablanca or Beat the Devil. Fahrenheit 451 was very good. Never read the book, but it is a very good story, so the movie worked well.

My favorite of the group is This is England. A 11 year old boy befriends a group of skinheads. Shaun had just lost his father in the Falklands War, and the gang fills this hole. Every part of the movie comes together well and you feel for the characters in it.

Beau Travail
My least favorite of the group, not saying it was very bad, just the least enjoyable for me. I can see why it is on the list because the cinematography and soundtrack were very well done. However, the entire story is very subtle and you get a feeling that nothing has happened when you are halfway through it. Much of this comes from the dullness of the soldiers’ post, but it was hard for me to get a feel on anyone beyond the 3 main characters.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Awesome. There is something about old-school horror movies that I really enjoy. These movies didn’t rely on huge budgets or lots of special effects to make you cringe. To me, having someone walk down a hallway, with eerie music, not knowing what is around the corner beats a person being tortured on camera any day. This is part of the reason I thought The Exorcist was not as good as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Exorcist used special effects, that were good at the time, but when you see them today, the same effect isn’t there.

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.

Batman (1989)
For the sake of full disclosure, this is only the fourth Batman movie I’ve seen all the way through. The others being Batman (1966), Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight. This was very different than the other two images of Batman that I have seen. Keaton produced an interesting picture of Bruce Wayne. Quite and collective for the most part, even seeming out of place at his own party. But let’s be honest, Nicholson stole the show. Playing the Joker who was ridiculous in all accounts and using all of the silly puns. This movie is one of the most colorful Tim Burton movies with out blatantly going colorful like the Edward Scissorhands suburb scenes. I was also intrigued by how exaggerated Gotham was, yet Wayne Manor was a regular English looking castle. I enjoyed it a lot, but I choose The Dark Knight.

L.A. Confidential
Kevin Spacey. Russell Crowe. Guy Pearce. James Cromwell. Kim Basinger. Danny DeVito. Seriously, how do you got all of those people into one movie? Just a classic representation of film noir(neo-noir if you want to split hairs). Very well done on all accounts. You start in one place where you think you know everything, but then you are moving along with the characters as you learn more about them as they learn more about the plot.

Some time around September I decide I was going to watch all the movies on the 1001 movies you must see before you die list. On the initial pass, I had seen around 113 of the movies. It was mostly modern films, but I had seen a good spattering of classics. Since then, I’ve been putting in work and pushing through the list. I’m currently at 166 (yes that is a lot of movies, but last semester was very easy). I decided to start reviewing some of the movies on the list as I watch them. I’m not going to review all of them, but if I really enjoy one or feel like talking about it, I’ll put it up. So without further ado, I will start with a double-review in a special Mockumentary Edition.

This is Spinal Tap
Amazing. I don’t know how it took me this long to see this movie, I should have seen it years ago. This is Spinal Tap mockumentary that follows the fake metal band Spinal Tap around on their second US tour. Featuring the classic “This one goes to 11″ scene, this movie hits every joke right on the nose.

Man Bites Dog
Very Good. In this black comedy, the camera crew follows around a serial killer as he goes through his day. The entire thing is shot in black and white which gives it a much older feel. As you might have guessed, there are some fairly graphic scenes through out the movie. However, I found that the comedic presentation softened to blow that the audience would have felt if this had been a horror movie. That being said, rape scenes are always hard to watch. An American remake would probably do fairly well if one was made today. You might need to make some alterations to some of the random conversation between the crew and the main character. However, those are just minor changes of little consequence if you keep the same feel of the characters interactions. In general, I would be fine if they just did it again in English to help out the people who are too lazy to read subtitles.

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.

Lilly, I expect your revenge to be swift and vicious.

PRESENTS!!! I LOVE GETTING THINGS!!!!

Hands down best present is the complete Twilight Zone series on DVD. A total of 28 discs featuring 156 episodes that would take just over 3 1/2 days to watch without interruption.

In addition I got the following DVDs:
Futurama Season 3 (completing my set)
Bender’s Big Score
SNL Season 1
Simpsons Movie

The surprise out of the group was SNL Season 1. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a full SNL skit that was made before 1985. But it should be really fun to watch all the old classic comedians perform.

And since watching DVDs isn’t enough, I go some games for my Nintendo DS. Most notably Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Plays like a visually spruced up version of the first Zelda games. The touch-screen stylus interface works very well for clicking on items and moving around the map.

The strangest gift was two books featuring pictures of my hometown. At first glance this seems like a generic gift that would get flipped through once or twice before it is placed on a shelf. What makes it interesting is the fact that two other members of my family received the same books.

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A few years ago I noticed that my cousins had very limited access to good music. Since they live in a town that is somewhere between rural and suburban, they are essentially limited to what MTV decides to show. Based on this I decided to give them CDs as Christmas presents to “help” them on their way to good music.

This Christmas it became extremely apparent that one of my cousins has terrible taste in movies. The two movies he received this year were Deck the Halls and 1408. I unfortunately saw 1408 in theaters and watched Deck the Halls Christmas afternoon.

I’ve got a lot of work to do.