July 31, 2001
Ended up getting an aim screenname last night: eightfaceX. There were some people who had switched over that I needed to talk to.
Woohoo! Just finished up writing the script for the movies page, looksee alphabetical and by rank. In other news, we finally have an update to conform from ben didier.
The kids I’m teaching this week are have been busy creating posters, so I decided to create a bookmarklet for imdb. I find that I do a lot of searches for movies and something like it will probably come in handy. If you want to use it, just click on the imdb link and drag it up to links bar in the program you’re using (or wherever you want to put it).
I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday messing around with php and xml. I’ve playing around with my list of movies, and trying to make it so you can sort the list by different criteria. Well at least by alphabetical order and by rank anyway. This tutorial on how to use php, blogger and xml came in handy for what I wanted to do. As well as some of the stuff at webmonkey. I should have some results relatively soon anyway.
July 29, 2001
Just finished up watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s a great movie. I remember watching it many times when I was a kid and loving it then. I saw L.A. Confidential the another night, for some reason I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it yet. I don’t really know what I was expecting going into it, but it sure ended up a lot better than I thought it would. The whole thing is very intricate, I really liked it.
At the moment, my neck and shoulders are kind of sore. I went camping last night and figure I probably didn’t have the most comfortable sleep of my life. It’s either that or a combination of bad sleep and playing football in the water this morning. All in all, it’s was a fun night, although we almost got kicked out of the park. We had a prick of a security guard (not even a park warden) who gave us two warnings before eight pm. The first was basically because we had one of tents off the campsite. He came back a second time with another securtiy guard and got mad at us because we were being too loud and had a fire going. There was a fireban, but we had permission from the wardens to use briquettes in the firepit to cook. As far as being too loud goes, there was a concert going close to us and we had to yell to talk to each other. Two of the people in the group have actually been working as wardens at park’s this summer, so we know that we shouldnt have had two warnings before eight.
July 27, 2001
In recent days, i’ve watched Me, Myself and Irene and Chasing Amy. Irene was a decent flick, albeit mainly a jim carrey vehicle. The humour is typical carrey stuff, which is getting fairly tame compared to some of the recent gross-out comedies. Chasing Amy was great; funny and emotional. I was laughing my ass off for a good chunk of it, it’s deffintely one of Kevin Smith’s stronger movies.
My vision is messed up right now. My eyes have managed to create distortions that resembles those static lines you used to get on a television signal pulled in by antenna. It’s messing with my head. It could be something to do with staring at a computer screen for an excessive amount of time today. If you sit to close to the television you going to go blind, sure mom.
Tonite, I ventured out to pick up a new contact lens (to replace a ripped one) and make an appointment to have my eyes checked. I also decided to get most of my hair cut off. The decision to take the clippers to my head late last year has had a lasting effect on my head. It has now decided that it likes the feeling of shorter hair (long hair being shorter than the length I used to keep it at). It’s summer time at any rate, so my head will be a little bit cooler. I also picked up a couple more movies to watch over the next week.
July 25, 2001
Cached pages at google are very useful. You can use them to circumvent firewalls and whatnot that your school or company may have set up. For instance, if you’re school decides to ban a list of free proxies, you can find a cached copy at google. They even have a cached version of eightface, which might be handy if I lost a bunch of data.
It’s funny, I said that i’d write more but what I meant, was that I’d actually write less. So it would seem anyway. Updates have become sporadic in the last week or two and I haven’t created anything new. It’s getting there, i’ll get back into the groove of things.
On another note, conform will be updated relatively soon. I had a new image to post, but the designer decided he didn’t like it and wanted to redo it. I don’t have a problem with that. In other news, adam is reworking his site. He hasn’t finished it yet, but I still like the new grunge stylings.
July 23, 2001
I went up to Kingston for some of the weekend, had to take care of some bills and a few other details. I might be back up there for a stretch of time near the start of august as well. I was told today that they’re going to be cancelling one of my computer camp weeks. It’s kind of shitty because that takes away a chunk of money from me. I have a couple jobs that I could go back to for that week, but I’ll probably only be making half as much.
I used some of my first week’s pay cheque to purchase a 40gb fujitsu harddive and a 64mb abit siluro geforce 2 mx400 graphics card. That’s a mouthful. The pricing was pretty good, I picked them up from canada computers. I got the card and the harddrive installed last night without any major problems. The only glitch i encountered was a problem with resizing NTFS partitions with the Windows 2000 service pack 2. They did something to the file tables that makes partition magic bring up an error code.
I saw A.I. in the theatre yesterday. I had been wanting to see it for awhile but couldn’t make it. I enjoyed the film, it had some amazing visuals. The movie itself is in the same vein as a most of the kubrick films, very pretentious and broken up into three distinct sections. The second part of the movie is very different from the first, a lot darker and more haunting. I probably have to see this again, the ending is kind of out there. A lot of people probably went to see this expecting a spielberg film and ended up dissapointed. It is in fact very much a kubrick film.
July 20, 2001
I decided to watch Das Boot at a rather late hour last night night. I forgot how long it was. It’s a great movie, probably the best submarine movie ever made. Wolfgang Peterson did an amazing job, making you feel like you’re part of the crew. You can understand the panic and confusion that they had to endure while depth charges were dropping around them. The distaste that was shown for the leader of their country was something that i wasn’t expecting, although looking back, it doesn’t surprise me. Just take a look at the current situation in the United States, even though he’s the most powerful man in the world, there is no trouble branding him as an idiot.
July 19, 2001
Watched a bunch of things later in the evening last night. I caught That’s My Bush (the new show by Trey Parker and Matt Stone) as well as a bizarre interactive show called Bonzai. That’s my Bush was made horrible intentionally, mockign other sitcoms with bad laugh tracks, catch phrases, stupid coincidences and annoying neighbours. Bonzai was a messed up British show in which you bet on different people doing stupid things. I thought it was hilarious.
I also watched Blade Runner last night. I have seen it before, but wasn’t really paying attention. I’m still going to have to watch it again because I started falling asleep part way through it. I found a pretty extensive faq, although it’s probably about eight years old. I found it to be informative anyway. I really liked the movie. I saw Best in Show a couple of nights ago but never wrote it down. It was one of the funnier movies that i’ve seen recently. You can’t help but laugh at all these people who have no lives beyond grooming their dogs. It’s amazing considering that a large portion of the dialogue was adlibbed.
July 17, 2001
Yesterday I was working on an internet scavenger hunt for the kids (it teaches them how to use search) and I came up with a question along the lines of what day of the week was January 7, 1576? Which isn’t the easiest thing to find on the internet. I stumbled accross more information on the Julian and Gregorian calendars, really just the tip of the iceberg as far as information about the calendar goes. There’s a lot of math and thought put into the various types of calendars out there. I also found a virtual model of stonehenge.
July 16, 2001
I ended up watching Proof of Life last night when I should have been in bed. The movie was a little on the long side and didn’t always do the best job explaining things. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but it takes awhile in the beginning to figure out what’s going on. Some parts of the movie you have to wonder if they would get away with in real life. In the end, you can’t help being dissapointed, any resolution to the conflict will make you feel sorry for someone and happy for someone else. There was a pretty good dynamic between Russel Crowe and Meg Ryan as well.
Nothing like a healthy dose of paranoia.
July 14, 2001
Just updated conform witha new image by adam.
Watched The Legend of Bagger Vance this afternoon. It’s ok, kind of sappy though. You start to wonder if Robert Redford can come up with something that isn’t. I doubt that i’ll ever watch this movie again. I started out watching Get Carter, but the cd crapped out on me about twenty minutes into it. Something about a cyclic redundency error, who knows.
July 12, 2001
I watched Thirteen Days yesterday. It’s an decent movie, although i wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t like an historical dramas. It’s a tad slow moving and the director does the best he can at putting suspense into a movie that everyone already knows the ending of. It was nice to see, I don’t really know much about the US and the whole Cuba situation. I thought the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missle Crisis were part of the same event. Something to read up on, that’s what the internet is here for.
I’m tired and should really go to bed. I don’t understand why I can’t just go to bed at relatively normal hours. Normal being probably before midnight. Actually, forget that, I know why I stay up late. It’s quiet, other people aren’t awake, there are no cars driving around, no dogs barking. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t be tired if we had some sort of liquid with caffine in it. I guess there’s some coffee around, but that takes effort to make. However, the coffee maker is probably loaded up and ready to go for the morning. I would still have to replace it afterwards.
July 10, 2001
The fbi has released documents on all sorts of different people. I haven’t really been able to look at the files because they require a pdf reader. I don’t have on installed here at work and haven’t gotten around to downloading one yet.
Just updated conform. The current series is moving along at a decent speed, faster than a lot of the other ones.
Microsoft should really give software away to schools for free, rather than punish them for having pirated software. If students are taught to use Microsoft products from an early age, they would be less likely to switch over to another product (it would involve relearning things, people are lazy). You have to give some to get some. This is going to drive schools even closer to free open-source products. It’s not that I’m pro-Microsoft, anti open-source, but as a student without much background in economics, it just seems like a really stupid business model.
July 9, 2001
I rented Almost Famous last night. I really enjoyed it. The movie flowed well and didn’t seem overly long, even though it lasted two hours. It is a peek into the lives of a rock band, their roadies and and a rock journalist on tour. I’d recommend watching it, especially if you enjoy listening to music. That’s all you need to know.
July 8, 2001
To tell you the truth, this song disturbs the hell out of me.
I ended up seeing Cats & Dogs tonite. We wanted to see A.I. but the theatre for it was packed. The movie is defintely aimed at kids, with childish humour and a lot of sappy moments. Honestly, they didn’t show enough of the cats, the story mainly focused around the cats. The dogs had sappy moments for the most parts and the cats had the funny bits. The ninja cats and the russian cat are the best parts of the movie. They also showed some trailers to animated movies that are coming out later this year. I think Monsters Inc. and Osmosis Jones have potential.
Came accross ze tonite. There’s some cool shit going on there.
July 7, 2001
I’m playing with some ideas in my head and on the computer. The site really needs an overhaul, it’s kind of boring. I don’t update much, other than the main page. I’ll try and change that. I really became lazy as far as the website goes in the last year.
The dsl lines got hooked up yesterday with a couple glitches. Apparently the phones started ringing and the alarm started going off, I was at work, so I missed it. I went down and picked up the modem this afternoon. It’s working, i’m happy. I’m running it right now on my computer, i have to do some work on the family computer before I hook it up there. The system needs a total overhaul, reformat, reinstallation and all that. That will be one of the weekend projects. That and maybe putting up a new layout.
I watched Wonder Boys a coupld of nights ago. I liked it, somewhat dark humour, you probably have to be in the right mood to watch it. Either that or have a twisted sense of humour. My dad came in and watched the first half of it, I don’t think he was too impressed. There’s lots of subtle humour in it as well. I watched Virgin Suicides tonite. I wasn’t all that impressed by it. I found it on the boring side, i think it was trying too hard to be an intellectual movie. Obviously with a topic like suicide, it’s not going to be a light movie, but it still went a little overboard.
July 5, 2001
Came accross trackstar.nu tonite through the referer report at conform. The site looks pretty damn good.
Today was a long day at work. The kids had no desire to learn anything or listen to what we had to say. They’d ask us questions and then not pay attention to the answer. They would proceed to ask the same question again a couple minutes later. Then there was little people coming up to ask a question, mumbling something and trailing off. It’s quite hard to discern what they’re trying to tell you. They drove me nuts, but I made it through the day without flipping out on someone. It wouldn’t be a good idea if I did. I remember it happening last year too, they’re good for the first three days, the last two are a challenge. I think they must have some sort of maximum amount of information that they can cram into their heads over a short period of time. Either that or they can only sit in front of a computer for so many days in a row.
July 3, 2001
I haven’t spent a whole lot of time online the last few days. Between working a couple jobs, some of it being teaching computers, as well as the holiday weekend, I haven’t really had that much desire to go online at home. I’m back in brockville for a couple months, i dragged my computer back too. I convinced my parents to get dsl this week, so hopefully I won’t have to deal with the dial-up for much longer.
The camp I’m teaching right now only has dial-up, the one i’m teaching at for the next five weeks will be high speed. I talked to some people today and they said that the place i’m teaching at right now should have highspeed up and running by the time i get back there for my seventh and eighth weeks. It’s prety much the same situation as last year right now. It makes it kind of hard to teach the kids how to use the internet.