Where have you gone, Eagle-Eye Cherry?: A tribute to terrible late '90s hits
The Onion AV club has put together a collection of awful radio-pop from the late 90s. And I know every single one of them like the back of my hand. Someday this will make me really cool, like when they release the "AWESOME LATE 90s" pack for rockband. Also, someone with a serious music collection please muxtape this.
Additionally, they totally forgot my favorite late 90s band, Eve 6!
I was catching up with my Mum over skype at the weekend and we ended up chatting about a holiday we had in Oxford way back when. I should clarify a couple of things. Firstly, I use the term 'catching up' loosely as we talk on the phone a few times a week (snatched calls from conference rooms), and exchange emails through out the day. When you couple that with twitter and blogging we pretty much have small talk covered, and there are times I feel that some people are hardwired into my brain. Secondly, the trigger for this tramp down memory lane was my paternal granny (Grannie Butterfly) mailing my Mum a thank you letter that her mother (my maternal granny - Granny Moth) had sent Grannie Butterfly in the late 80s.
So back in the mists of time before iPods or cell phones Mum, Granny Moth, my brother and myself headed down to Oxford to house sit for my paternal grandparents for a week or two, and take care of their cat Emmet. My brother and I didn't have pets growing up instead we ended up looking after our friend's cats, hamsters and tortoises when they went on vacation. This arrangement proved to priceless as we got a few weeks a year to play pet owner but without any of the responsibility, and the pets always stayed at their owners home so we didn't even have to make way for them in our home. I digress, I remember that the summer of the year I can't remember was hot and it was this climatic condition that led to our merry band having to spend an afternoon sitting on the roof of my grandparents extension.
When we got to Oxford we quickly discovered that the place was hooching with fleas. I believe that the piping hot temps had a part to play in the craziness of the flea situation that was engulfing the nation. The cat was immediately banished to the garden, and my Mum dispatched to the chemist to buy every bottle of flea powder she could get her paws on. Every inch of carpet was covered in a thick dusting of flea powder, and the house looked like Narnia had been seeping out of the wardrobe and infecting reality. Whilst the powder was doing its thing we were evacuated onto the roof of the ground floor extension with mugs of tea, sandwiches and reading material. I wish we had photos of us picnicking on the roof, and chilling out till the fumes subsided. Once the powder was vacuumed up all was well but that didn't stop my Granny Moth's inner shaman coming to the surface, and she got my brother and I to sleep with cloves of garlic in our beds.
Once the flea situation was squared away we had a lovely stay in Oxford even though it was not as rich in jumble sales as Peebles was.
Tomorrow is July, and at some point in the next thirty-one days I will get my exam results. Cut to me banging my head on a table, and screaming "The end if nigh, the end is NIGH - aarrggghhh". Over the last month I have managed to block out all the second guessing that went on after I sat them but now the doubts are starting to creep back. Was my hand writing legible, did my sentences make sense and will I manage to score at least a 2:1 in Homer and Greek History. I am less worried about my grade for Roman literature given that it wont count to my overall degree. I felt pretty good about Homer and Greek History, I mean I put enough work in but was I confident or deluded? I am shooting for a first but I would be happy with 2:1 grades given that I am holding down a full-time job, plus if I was able to get a 2:1 for Greek art last year when I blanked out over an essay on Archaic staues then I should have be able to pull it off this year. But, who knows until I rip open the envelope.
I've been using the iPhone SDK since its original release way back in March. Many frustrating moment in the beginning but the recent beta 7 and beta 8 release proved to be ready for prime time. Apple has added many helper classes or helper methods to classes to make it far easier to work with the UI components, which is by far the most frustrating things I encountered. I am still having problem wrapping my head around the idea of Interface Builder but since the apps that I am building do not involve very complex UI, I just hand coded all the UI instead.
- Fix the build time being 1 hours off (probably day time saving bug)
- Better status icons
- Create application icon (currently it uses icon from CCMenu)
- Finish coding the 'Force Build' functionality
- Add startup screen bitmap (so it won't be just a black screen)
- Add auto detect of CruiseControl server (Java, .Net, or Ruby)
To put it bluntly this film sucks, and just scraps a C. I thought we were off to a movie that would be all car chases, assassins and shit being blown up instead we got a Frankenstein's monster mash up of Office Space, The Matrix and The Da Vinci Code. The majority of the action sequences were just too CGI; they left me shrugging my shoulders and muttering "Meh" to myself. If Bourne and re-vamped Bond has taught us anything it is that we want realism, and to hold back with the CGI (The Matrix breaks that rule but it had the plot and bullet time slow-mo effect was properly worked into the story).
Wes (James McAvoy) is a loser, works a dead end office job and is bullied by his boss (Office Space). His home life isn't much better as his girlfriend is shagging his best mate. Then one day whilst picking up his anxiety meds at the drugstore he runs into Fox (Angelina Jolie) who tells him his father was a class-A assassin and that a rogue assassin is after him. He is offered the chance to fulfill his potential and learn how to bend bullets round corners (The Matrix). All he has to do is join this fraternity of weavers... yes weavers. You see this secret group of assassins are also loom lovers - they could put women of antiquity to shame with their weaving skills. But, it gets better because they are given their orders through a magic loom... Sloan (Morgan Freeman) is the master at reading the cloth that comes off the loom, and it communicates through binary. At this point The Da Vinci Code became a whole lot more plausible because we are talking about binary messages in thread work that get translated into targets (you could say it is a loom with a view!). I will buy into many distortions of reality but they lost me at a loom... perhaps if they had hooked it up to a computer, had a geek analyzing it CSI style and then throw in some some ancient clothes that spelled out the names of some bad people that needed to be offed then it wouldn't have left such a bad taste in my mouth. (I guess unbleached cotton has that effect on most people.) If there had been more of a story and/or character development then the loom thing would have irked me less but there wasn't so I sat through the film getting grumpy.
So, Wes continues on with his training which pretty much involves being beaten up, and then dunked into a wax bath (magic healing properties). Finally he is able to out ObiWan his trainers and he is given his first assignment. Now, I know if you broke down one of the Bourne assassins getting an order it doesn't amount to more than a text message with a photo attachment, but at least there were shots of people sitting in offices looking at data and making an informed decision not just Sloan with a magnifying glass pouring over his cloth. Then cutting off squares, and stapling them to sheets of paper to make it look more official. He might as well have been a mafia don gaily naming names because seriously the whole loom-cloth-order-system is totally open to abuse. Do you care what happens next? Well it turns out that the rogue assassin is actually a good guy, Sloan has been corrupting the cloth by making up names to be killed for profit, and Wes ends up cleaning house. Total shocker, eh!
McAvoy is a fine actor but was miscast in this role, he is too scrawny and indy to be in action films. Jolie was way too thin, and appeared to be dialing in her performance. This was not the sexy, energetic Jolie of Gone in 60 Seconds or Tomb Raider. Bless the costume department as they did their best to dress her in "sexy" baggy clothes and was it a coincidence that her hair was always over her shoulders to hide her collar bone?
Do not waste $12 on going to see this film at the cinema I would rent Shoot 'em Up instead.
What's your favorite type of donut?
Submitted by tomatshonino.
Krispy Kreme glazed raspberry filled.
I really don't understand why Krispy Kreme is the beta max of the donut world (in the US at least). They taste so much better than Dunkin' Donuts (sorry Rachel Ray). It's probably a good thing that I no longer have access to those delicous raspberry filled donuts coated in sticky, sweet glaze otherwise adult onset diabetes would be lurking in my future.
What's making you smile today?
I am not sure which made me crack a bigger grin - the prospect of getting more than six hours sleep tonight or the fact that five boxes of guitars arrived safely at the office today. Both are linked to not only surviving Calgary but having a really successful onsite activation. Our tent rocked, we got people registering for our newsletter AND we got guitars signed - hallelujah! Plus, our tent had great sight lines of the main stage so we didn't feel totally out of the action. We could see The Flaming Lips lead singer rolling about in a hamster wheel and teletubbies dancing on stage.
I was fairly pensive leading up to the Festival. Would it be chaos? Would I be coming back to NYC with no signed guitars and have to hang my head in shame. As it turned out everything went to plan, and I had amazing volunteers giving their all (and bring us food parcels to keep us going before the buffet kicked in at 5pm) and making it a wonderful weekend.
Although almost every day at Six Apart is Take Your Dog to Work Day, Friday was extra special because it was the official Take Your Dog to Work Day! Plus, as lovers of blogs and animals, we think it's great that active blogger and Human Society's President and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, thinks having dogs around the office is a good reminder of "who we're working for."
We realize some people have it ruff and aren't lucky enough to be able to bring their dog to work, but hopefully these pictures taken at Six Apart last Friday will get your tails wagging... And let me tell you, it's harder than it looks to get all the doggies and their fetching owners in one picture.
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