Hand Coding

I went to see Star Wars Episode II on IMAX with some high school friends yesterday. I wish I could say that it was even better on The Big Screen, but it actually wasn’t.

For starters, several scenes were cut from the film, though most of them weren’t crucial to the film as a whole (such as the Anakin & Amidala meadow scene). As best as I Can recall, about four or five scenes were cut.

More than that, the super-large size of the screen made it hard to follow some of the action. Because of their size, many of the intricate lightsaber battles just resembled flashes of blue and red light. Battle scenes such as those were really more appropriate for the Medium Screen.

I will say that the level of detail was astounding. At that size and resolution, I could clearly see the makeup on Natalie Portman’s face (and Hayden Christensen’s face as well). The detail did make the film more enjoyable (though, unfortunately, not enjoyable enough to offset the not-made-for-IMAX sizing problems).

The detail also gave me new appreciation for the CG work on Yoda. Most of the time, the CG modeling held up well (though some CG lighting problems became evident during full-screen close-ups).

In all, I had a good time. However, it was more of a novelty than anything else. If you’re really in the mood for watching Episode II again, you're probably best off just buying the DVD.

If you’re running a recent build of Mozilla and it’s been frequently crashing for you, you’re probably running into bug 179822 — “Flash4 / Flash5 crash Mozilla in recent trunk builds” (I ran into this on my parents’ machine).

The solution, of course, is to just download the latest Flash version (6). Either that, or don't run Flash at all ;).

I’ll be in the Dallas and Pittsburgh airports over the next few days, so I was curious if either of those airports had 802.11b access. I had a hard time finding information on this, but I eventually crafted the the right search terms to come up with these sites:

• 80211HotSpots.com appears to be the mother-lode. It has search-by-city and has all kinds of information. (Quick links: Dallas, Pittsburgh).
• Wifi Maps is a site with maps generated largely from wardriving. There, you can enter a zip code, and you’ll get a list of hits found. (from this site I've learned that there's apparently an 802.11b hotspot in North Park)

TiVo has a suggestions system where, if you have extra free space on the drive, it records shows that it thinks you might like (based on previous shows you’ve recorded). This, however, creeps some people out:

Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described “straightest guy on earth,” he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other “guy stuff.”

“The problem was, I overcompensated,” he says. “It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich.” […]

(Link from ObscureStore)

Back in October, I lamented the non-functionality of the Export to PDF option in OpenOffice.org (it would just crash every time I tried that option).

However, I’ve discovered that there’s a new Developer Release (643C) and I’ve confirmed that Export to PDF now works! Woohoo!

At the Slashdot Meetup on Thursday, Jon mentioned that he had an interest in linguistics. I offered that I could e-mail him about some of the linguistic mailing lists that I’m on. In case other people may be interested, I thought I’d to post them here.

• Buzzwhack features a buzzword-a-day mailing list. Recent examples include “managerial courage” and “yogurt cities”.
• Word Spy has a mailing list for coined-words of the day. Recent entries include “corporate anorexia” and “dirty-white-collar”.
• AWAD is one of those A Word A Day mailing list. But this isn’t just any mailing list. AWAD is received by more than 525,000 people in 206 countries daily. It was one of the first word-a-day mailing lists, and still one of the best.
• The American Dialect Society is probably most famous for their Words of The Year awards. For example, the 2001 winner for “Most Euphemistic” word was “daisy cutter - Bomb used by US Air Force”. But, they have a mailing list as well. Unlike the others listed here, this one isn’t an annoucement-only list, but a regular discussion list. They talk about dialects in America, and language in general. Topics range from discussion of The Onion’s satirical piece on two Big Beef Burritos Supreme to the subtleties of the hypothetical subjunctive. It may sound esoteric, but you might just like it; you can always unsubscribe later.
• This last one, World Wide Words is an announce-only mailing list sent out once a week. Its tagline is “Investigating International English from a British Viewpoint”. Quite often the newletter includes a question-and-answer section where they answer a reader’s question, usually something along the lines of “My grandmother uses obscure saying X all the time. How did that phrase originate?” And, granted, many of the sayings may be chiefly British, but I enjoy many of them nonetheless — part of the fun, to me, is trying to imagine saying a phrase such as “cream crackered” with a straight face ;).

As always, I welcome your feedback. If my descriptions interested you enough to subscribe to any of these newsletters, leave a comment :).

Apparently, you can hit shift-enter in Mozilla’s URL bar to save the URL (I didn’t know that). Though its usefulness may not be obvious, this could be handy for saving XPIs to disk (they often insist on installing themselves if entered normally in the URL bar).

(Due credit to Bonsai Watch for making note of the bug-fix.)

From MetaFilter is this video from the Kollaboration dance show.

[This] video clip offers nearly 2 minutes of some of the most amazing and intriguing dance you’ve likely seen in awhile. It’s a clip from Kollaboration, a Korean-American talent show sponsored by prokreation. The show’s aim is to break down Asian stereotypes. […]

That was some seriously impressive dancing.

I’ve recently discovered Spinsanity, a political-commentary website with the tagline “Countering rhetoric with reason”. It’s fairly interesting, and covers subjects from Rush Limbaugh to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.

The distortions begin with the film’s title. Lyons reports that, contrary to the title of the film, the two boys who committed the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., did not bowl the morning before the shooting. Although early news reports did state that they had attended a bowling class in the morning, police told Lyons it's simply not true. […]

The DFWBlogs Cocktail Event for November was held this month at Cosmo’s. I had a great time, and it was just what I needed after a hectic day at work.

Cosmo’s has a jukebox that didn’t drown out our conversation, though the sheer number of people later in the evening tended to do so. Their interior lighting was a bit quirky, but lovable. It was full of those goofy colored lamps that see you see at places like Eurway.

According to the GuideLive review, Cosmo’s speciality is its little personal pizzas. And, actually, that seemed to be the only thing on the menu (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

The pizzas came in 7” and 12” sizes, and I knew that a 7-inch would be plenty for me. They had various topping-combos, including Greek (feta cheese, olives, and so on) and Sun Dried Tomato (sun dried tomatoes, garlic, and other toppings).

The menu also had an option for a make-your-own pizza at $4.95 + 50 cents per topping. Considering that the combo-pizzas were all $7.95, that’d allow me to choose up to four toppings while still costing less or equal to the regular combo price.

So, I chose Italian sausage, pepperoni, and sun-dried tomato. The pizza arrived shortly and, though it was appropriately hot, its other features could have used some improvement. Sure, the sausage was tender and crumbly (just how I like it) and the sun-dried tomatoes had a pleasant sweetness, but I didn’t detect the pepperoni (perhaps they forgot that).

The dough was full of good flour-and-yeast flavor and had a browned-crispiness from a good oven. The make-or-break factor in any pizza, I feel, is the sauce. And, in this case, the pizza didn’t fare so well. After a few bites, I realized that I couldn’t taste the sauce. Thinking that maybe the other ingredients were simply overpowering the sauce, I even took a quick peek under the cheese: I couldn’t see any sauce in there.

Consider an entree made from freshly baked dough with a generous helping of hot mozzarella chesse, and what do you have? That’s right, I had apparently unknowingly ordered an open-faced mozzarella-based grilled cheese sandwich ;). As grilled-cheese sandwiches go, it was pretty tasty — especially with the Italian sausage and sun-dried tomatoes sprinked on top. But, it didn’t make much of a pizza.

Kidding aside, the food was still a pleasant change-of-pace from my normal dinners at home , and I look forward to the next Cocktail Event.