Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Sky Captain & The Forgotten

    No spoilers.

    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

    It was ok. I dug the whole 50’s, bluish feel, the soft tones, the grandiose, yet dark feel of the filming. I liked how air superiority was a truly expounded concept in this flic.

    However, I thought a lot of character development was not very well executed. I found it hard to really attach myself to any of the characters, aside from a minor one they encountered in Tibet. They jsut didn’t have much too them, and although they weren’t shallow, there just weren’t enough quirks. The personification of the plane was another example towards the personification side of things; the plane could of been taken soo much further. Remember the Batmobile in Batman? It had character, it had style, it WAS a personfied part of Batman. I think the plane was almost there… but the relationship between pilot and craft was on the extreme of indifferent. The flip-side would be like Han Solo and the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars… now THERE was a relationship.

    Worth $8? Wait for the DVD unless you have a student/company discount.

    The Forgotten

    Fuggin’ awesome. Basically, a mother’s lost her son in an airplane crash, and is trying to emotionally deal with the loss, which is obviously hard on her. She’s in therapy, in a nice house in the city. However, certain “forgetful”ness things start to happen. It starts with a cup she thought she had just placed on a table… to forgetting the location of objects, to pictures not looking the same as before. Things go deep from there…

    It’s one of those flics that has the calm intensity of Pitch Black, the ability to rouse a theatre out of their seats more than once (only saw that ever happen in Signs and the original Scream), and make you feel pretty small and insignifant, yet hopeful at the same time. Great date flic… better than Sky Captain. It is Sci-fi, but doesn’t have that as the overall tone, blatant enough to sell itself as it, so non-sci-fi’ers may still find this one approachable.

  • No pay no play, the 6 attempts rule

    My site & email were down all day yesterday and today. Turns out my credit card expiration was different than said card on file, thus my hosting company suspended my account after 6 attempts. Geez, 6 attempts! Imagine how much love could be expoused amongst couples in the world if people took that approach to rejection.

    “So, hey baby… uh… your hot, can I uh… like, …buy you a drink or something?”

    “No.”

    “So, yeah… what if I pay for it?”

    “No.”

    “How about 2 drinks?”

    “No.”

    “What if I get on my knees, beg, and buy you drinks till the club closes?”

    “No.”

    “Alright, playing hard to get, eh? What if I go find the hunkiest, most metro-sexual, yet hetero guy here, and talk about how you think he’s hot, thus increasing your chances of scoring a potential interest?”

    “Uh… no.”

    “I’ll give you a hundred bucks?”

    “Tempting, but… no.”

    “Bummer… well, I’ll just stand guard here, and ensure any bloke who attempts to even gaze at the glorious countenance that is your presence, will pass the test of appreciation, realizing that you have the eyes that can see right through me, a smell that makes me float and forget what time it is, a …”

    “I’ll take a Rum & Coke… just shut up!”

    I’m not saying those sayings work, merely that a loving connection with potential could be established is people didn’t fear rejection, and instead made more than one attempt… even 6. Thanks for expanding my self-reflection MediaTemple Credit Card Transaction dude!

  • XML and Text Viewer Panel

    I’m a Flash Developer, and I parse XML all the time. Your a Flash Developer, and you potentially parse XML all the time.

    I’m not sure how you handle schema’s, but typically I’m making up the XML format as I go, and since the structure isn’t memorized, I’ll typically either open it up on Dreamweaver or Notepad, start coding my parser in Flash, and toggle back and forth when I need to refresh my memory on what the XML I’m parsing looks like.

    For smaller chunks, I can just paste an example in my code, and refer to it that way.

    …both ways suck. So, I created this panel that allows you to load text into it. I then can load my XML file into it, dock the panel, and refer to it while I’m coding. You can load any text file, but typically one would use it for XML files.

    I hope this helps your productivity, too!

    JXL XML and Text Viewer Panel – MXP | ZIP

  • Firefox Parasite

    Another confession this week: I like Firefox.

    Before you go, “Aw man, no one gives a hoot… your so late to the party, brah!” or “I don’t care about browsers, dork”, here me out.

    This whole “blah blah site doesn’t support Firefox” etc. I find frankly annoying, whiny, and curious why I should give a frigin’ care. I use IE; it works, comes pre-installed, and most everything I do works in IE. The security flaws are only exploited, in my experience, on less savory websites where one shouldn’t frequent anyway (unless you know what your doing).

    I was tasked at work to research XUL and it’s capabilities. So, I’m really digging using Mozilla’s rendering engine for XUL. It’s pretty neat that it’s nearly identical to HTML and forms development, but they have their own framework + rendering engine + installation system devoted to just this process. I never could get my Chrome install to work, the lack of proper GUI’s for this 2 year-old (it’s older, but most good forum posts start in 2002 that I saw) technology is pathetic, and it was extremely diffucult to debug (I found out later about the developer install/debug version).

    So, I’m testing things in Firefox because it appears to be more progressive in it’s use of extensions. Therefore, I’d have a plethora of examples to take apart and examine. I consider myself a window management meister. In Windows, one must master this skill to remain sane and remotely productive. I’ve found the positives in that skillset to help justify the constant clicking and moving. I then started using tabs in Firefox to switch between XULPlanet.com, Macromedia’s LiveDoc’s on their implementation, and my sample app running locally because I had other IE windows open. On dual monitors with lots of RAM, I’ll load those suckers up with windows.

    Next thing I know, I’m using other tabs for normal websites like Full As A Goog, and others to browse in my spare time. As of yesterday, I started my day opening Firefox instead of IE to visit the Goog. I then started doing it at home.

    Now, my blatant disregard for web standards probably ticks off the w3c-nazi’s, and assure’s you I’m missing the whole point. My confusion, however, stems on how the heck did a “browser” grow on me? I’m not all into web browsing as an experience. To me, it’s a frikin’ tool, end of story. And yet… here I am writing a blog entry about how frustrated I am; I feel violated, befuddled, abashed, “How could this happen?”

    Anyway, if you have time, give Firefox a week, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s just a stupid browser, you think initially. Who cares. Mozilla sux, why would this be any different, right? Bloody hell, I just realized I’m blogging in it, too.

    Damn browser. I’ll tell you, though, if IE got tabbed browsing, I’d probably go back to IE… but the CSS button and the RSS buttons are cool too. Weird man. I never thought I’d care.