Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
I just finished reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.
I remember the first time I had watched the movie. I never actually wanted to see it. Jonna had run across it by chance and told me that I HAD to watch it - that it was a movie right up my alley and that I would love it.
I remember not really believing that it was something I wanted to see but I watched it anyway. The movie blew me away. I thought it was brilliantly written and brilliantly acted. I was completely impressed.
I bought the DVD soon after that and have watched it numerous times since then - always saying to myself “I definitely have to read this book sometime”.
Well, Jake wound up buying the book for some reason and after he read it handed to me and said I just HAD to read the book. So finally, I read it.
The book is absolutely brilliant. More than that, overall the movie stuck pretty close to it, something I was very glad to see. The one thing that I hate the most is when you read a book to find that the movie makers completely trashed it. This one made it through the movie making processes pretty will intact.
If you liked the movie, you will absolutely love the book. The writing style is extremely disjointed - just like the movie. You actually feel like you are on a ride through one mans complete mental breakdown.
While the movie did a fairly good job of exposing you to the main characters inner dialog, there is nothing that compares to actually reading it for yourself.
I will say, its pretty difficult to read the book and not hear Ed Nortons voice as the narrator. Then again, he had the perfect voice for it.
If you liked the movie, you will absolutely love the book. On a scale from one to five - I give t a ten. Its that good.
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Tagged with: Books, pop-culture
links for 2006-11-29
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Lets you create your own South Park characters. Fun!
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Password Safe for MacIntosh. Unfortunately, this is for the PPC. Anyone know where I can find a version of Password Safe for Intel Macs?
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Tagged with: Bookmarks
Mac Software I’m Finding Useful
I thought I’d take some time to sit down and document the tools I’ve been using lately as I continue my acclamation into the MacIntosh world. These are tools that I’ve found really useful over the last six months or so.
- The Camino Browser - hands down the best browser I’ve found for the Mac so far. It’s my default browser.
- Ecto - Mac Native application for writing blog entries and posting them to your blog. Supports Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, and WordPress among others. Doug referred to MarsEdit as another alternative, but Ecto fits the bill for me perfectly. It includes spell checker, Amazon Web Services integration, templates, preview - really everything you would want in an offline authoring tool.
- Vienna Newsreader - Vienna is an open source RSS reader for the Macintosh. It is quite comparable to FeedDemon, which I used on Windows, but I like it a lot better. This tool has become one of the things I use daily in order to keep up with things
- Snap N Drag - Screen capture utility I mentioned in previous posts. I use this all the time as well. Excellent tool.
- BBEdit 8.5 - BBEdit is an HTML editor for the MacIntosh platform. Its the only thing I’ve found comparable to HomeSite for the Macintosh. I’m using a trial version of this application right now, but there is a good chance that when the 30 day trial ends, I’ll be buying a copy. It makes HTML authoring a hell of a lot easier than Emacs.
- UberCaster - This is podcasting software. I have a license for it, but I haven’t had the time to muck about with it. By far the easiest podcasting software I’ve seen so far for the Macintosh. The software is currently in beta.
Some additional software I’m looking at that looks useful, but I don’t have need for it yet:
- Xyle Scope - CSS exploration tool. I’ve messed around with this a bit and it looks really interesting. I haven’t found another tool like it so far. Allows you to explore CSS and how the styles are resolved on your page.
I’m still looking for good image editing software that doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars (like Photoshop) and doesn’t require X-Windows to be installed. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
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Tagged with: apple, Macintosh, software, tools
Home IT Check List Status - The Vacation Posts
I thought I’d give a small update on my Home IT duties that were pending at the time yesterdays post went up:
- Upgrading the Kids Memory - It winds up that the machine they have, an HP Pavilion 700 series, is maxed out at the current 512M. Bummer.
- Recovery Disks for Windows XP machine - I got all of my data centralized into one place on the Windows machine - ready to burn to DVD - when I realized that I don’t have a DVD writer on the laptop. Once I realized I’d have to burn 4-5 CD’s worth of stuff, I abandoned the idea of rebuilding the machine for the evening. Since the weather is so beautiful today (hey, at least its not snow), perhaps I’ll do it later in the day. I’m currently copying everything up to the Linux box, which can then be migrated to the Mac, and a DVD burned with all the data.
- 80G hard drive swap - Taking the main server down takes DNS and external access to the internet - things needed for things like homework - so I didn’t complete this either
- Setting up the network printer upstairs - This also has to be done today, since the connection was eaten all day yesterday
All in all, yesterday was pretty productive. I was a tad disappointed that the Pavilion wouldn’t take any more memory, but overall I got a lot of things done that have been waiting for quite some time in the queue.
I also got an unexpected treat. Back in August I had thrown a link in my del.ici.ous links about Bryce, a 3D rendering program, being released for free for a limited time. I had downloaded it back then but had never done anything with it. I used to love this program back in the day and would spend hours playing with it. I’m not really the artistic type, as I tend to get extremely frustrated when I try to do anything even remotely resembling “art”, but I loved that program.
Last night I was able to expose Jake to it, which was pretty cool. He loved it and spent some time playing around with it starting with a base landscape that I threw together just to show him what it could do. I found it extremely cool to share something like this with him from back in the day that he was actually interested in seeing. For me, it was cool to play around with an old friend again and to share it with one of the kids and actually have them find it interesting. Those moments come few and far between as the kids get older.
I’ll end this with the final rendering of what Jake was working on last night, while I go check my file copies from the Windows box.
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Tagged with: 3d, bryce, vacation
links for 2006-11-28
Our First Day of Vacation
This is the first year since we’ve been married that Jonna and I are both in IT. This week marks the first available time that we’ve had to take vacation this year. Unfortunately, she had to work.
I figured I might as well catch up on some of my “Home IT” duties that I’ve been neglecting for a while, so after sleeping late and missing giving the kids a hard time for having to go to school while we sat around being lazy on vacation all day, I started taking care of the ol’ network here at the Labs.
Here’s the list of what I have done so far:
- Andy has been dependent on Jonna’s laptop to pull music on his Creative Zen Sleek MP3 player for a number of months. He had some troubles getting the software installed on the kids machine. This, of course, involved installing five bajillion XP patches and Media Player 10 before I could even get to the point of installing the drivers for the player. While I was at it, I figured I might as well install IE7 as well. I finally got both the MP3 player and Napster working. I know this because I verified it by loading a few Steve Vai songs on it for him. Lets see how long it takes him to notice.
- Performed a complete virus scan of the kids computer. Thankfully, its clean
- Running, I think for the first time, a defrag on the kids computer. Its run 3 hours so far and is only 1/3 done
- Began rsync backups of the Linux server to the Western Digital WDG1U2500 My Book 250 GB Hard Drive I bought over a month ago for just this purpose.
- Cleaned out my Google Mail inbox of all junk mail (as long as I could handle that tedium, anyway)
- Actually cleaned off my desk (well, the working area anyway). There’s still a lot of work to do here, but I can at least say I started. That’s got to be worth a few “husband points”
On the list for later:
- Buy another 512K for the kids machine, bringing them up to 1G. Just doing routine maintenance on their machine annoyed me. 512K just isn’t enough to run Windows anymore.
- Create recovery disks for the Gateway Windows XP machine and back up the data to DVD so that I can rebuild it and get the boot time down a tad from the 10 minutes it takes now. I want to start using it for things I don’t want to use the Mac for (like running The Gimp).
- Swap an 80G hard drive out of a machine just retired here at the Labs into the Linux server
- Set the kids machine up to print to the network printer (would have done this earlier, but the machine was unhooked so that Jonna could plug her two laptops into the network)
- Buy a tarp to cover the the furniture on the patio
Sure, it may not sound too relaxing, but its stuff that has needed to get done for a long time. I think the pay off will be not having all of this hanging over my head the rest of the week.
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- A really interesting article describing project dynamics around the Windows Vista Shutdown menu. I found this on Slashdot. Comments Off
The Beatles : LOVE
I picked up the new Beatles release Love this afternoon and am completely blown away. The 26 tracks on the album have been completely remixed. You’ve never heard The Beatles sound so good. If you are a Beatles fan, this album is a MUST LISTEN TO.
One odd thing about the album though. For some reason, I was unable to rip it into iTunes to pull it into my iPod. The disc just wasn’t able to be read properly. I wound up finally pulling out the old Gateway Windows machine and ripping the disc to MP3’s at the highest quality, moving them onto our network server, pulling them down to the Mac, and importing them into iTunes that way.
I don’t recall ever seeing this happen before - where a disc cannot be read by the Mac at all but is fully rippable through Windows Media Player (I tried iTunes on Windows as well to no avail). I looked around, and couldn’t find any reference to anyone else having problems with iTunes. Weird.
Anyway, the album is phenomenal and I highly recommend it. While I was at it, I picked up The Beatles 1 as well. Its amazing how completely timeless the music they produced is.
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Tagged with: beatles, classics, Music
New NetFlix User
We finally broke down a few weeks ago and got a Netflix account, after finally getting fed up with local video stores. I know - we’re a little behind the times in certain areas.
I have to say, I’m enjoying the experience.
On the average we rent about 2-3 movies every other week. That comes down to around $16-$24 for 4-6 movies a month. Inevitably, we will wind up with late fees, due to either not having time to watch everything within the allotted time frame, or just plain forgetting that the movie is around.
We joined the “three at a time” plan at the beginning of the month, which runs us $17.99 a month. Since October 30, we’ve had 11 movies delivered right to the house (between all 5 of us). Without Netflix this would have run us $44 for the month of November - not counting late fees. We paid $17.99. A 59% savings for the month.
Normally, I’m not the person worried about saving money in the house. Its one of those things that I’ve never really cared about, as bad as that might seem. My thing has always been convenience. So lets talk about the convenience that I’ve received by using NetFlix over the conventional “go to the rental store and find a movie to watch” experience.
Here’s how the normal experience would go:
- Family decides they are excruciatingly bored and we should rent movies
- Family gets into car, goes to movie rental place
- One or more of family “knows” there was a movie they wanted to see, but for the life of them cannot remember what it was
- Family goes through the “new release” section because they are positive that there will be something there that they haven’t seen there that might look interesting
- Family cannot find anything that looks remotely interesting
- Ron or Jonna remember some movie that they saw when they were kids that they would love to see again and expose the kids to the fine art of older movie making (lets use Scanners as an example)
- Family goes to the “regular and older” movie sections, finds “Horror”, finds ‘S’, and Scanners is not there
- Someone goes to the counter to find out whether they actually have the movie at the store
- Clerk says they definitely have it, and walks us back to the Horror / S section and proceeds to look for the movie in the exact place we didn’t find it
- Clerk cannot find it either, shrugs their shoulders, and says it must be in another section and goes back to checking out customers
- Family goes through debate as to what everyone wants to see. One picks something, the others don’t want to see it. This goes on for a bit
- Family walks out with no movie - or some movie that no one really wants to see
- Family member who remembered there was “a movie” they wanted to see still can’t remember
In all, a good 30 minutes (at least) has passed and we walk out unsatisfied.
Now, since the first of the month, every time someone thinks of a movie they want to see, we go to the NetFlix site and adds it to the queue. Our sudden remembrance is recorded and queued to be delivered to the house. No clerks to deal with, no long lines, no late fees.
Here’s a great example. A few weekends ago, some we were watching the 100 Scariest Movie Moments on Bravo. Jonna and I are horror movie buffs, so there were quite a few gems that we knew we definitely wanted to see. I sat with the laptop and added the movies to the queue as we decided we wanted to see them. We got two pretty amusing films: Slither and Rest Stop - two movies we would not have found otherwise.
A few other movies we rented that we would not have agreed to rent otherwise:
- The Aviator - excellent movie on the life of Howard Hughes
- Blood Simple - An amusing little thriller that I added to the queue when someone mentioned it in casual conversation. I really liked this movie, though it could have moved a little faster
- Roger & Me - This was the only Michael Moore movie I had not seen. I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would have.
- I finally saw Scanners again. What a great movie - as cheesy as it is.
Here’s the bottom line for me and the base value that I’m getting out of our membership so far. I don’t have to remember these things any more. I have a place where I can just queue things up as we think of them and when they come its a pleasant surprise. We don’t have to wander around the video store anymore and waste time trying to find something that is “there but miscategorized”, and I don’t have to be on a schedule to watch the movies I’ve rented. If I dawdle, I just don’t get the next thing in the queue.
Finally, Netflix has gotten me one step closer to that dream state that I’ve been thriving for - the ability to do all of the things we normally do without ever having to leave the house.
Now - if only PeaPod served our area and my employer would institute a virtual office policy …
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Tagged with: Digital Life, movies
links for 2006-11-24
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Using Xylescope is like surfing with an x-ray vision. You will immediately see beneath the surface of the web pages you are visiting. Experiment by changing CSS values in author style sheets - no matter if they are on the internet or on your own computer.
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Tagged with: Bookmarks
Quotiki: A Social Site for Quote Man
As I was upgrading our Subversion software to 1.4.2 yesterday once everyone had left for the holidays (I’m really trying to keep up on this), I started browsing through LifeHacker, a site that Jason Calacanis has mentioned quite a few times on the Gillmor Gang and on his personal blog.
While browsing the site, I came across an article on Quotiki, a social quotes site.
Now anyone who knows me knows I love to collect quotes, so this site has me absolutely fascinated. Its a Digg like site where readers submit quotes and vote on them. For each quote, you can tag them, and it automatically provides “further reading” recommendations for the originator of the quote via Amazon.com.
The really fascinating thing to me is thinking about how the simplest idea, like making a web site for quotes, can keep my attention for so long. Rather than a web site completely built around the idea of making money, this site peaks my interest as a quote freak and gives me the opportunity to buy related materials from Amazon if I choose to do so. Rather than feeling that the money is being ripped from my wallet, I can buy something if I choose to if it is relevant to me at the time. Chances are, with someone like me who is fascinated by other peoples viewpoints and small glimpses of brilliance, the time will come where they will probably get one or more sales out of me just because I’m there doing something I enjoy.
The real question to wrestle with this is how you apply the concept in a corporate environment, making your customers feel that they are getting value out of you without making them feel like you are just after their piece of your total “revenue dollars”.
This is what I’ll probably spend the rest of Thanksgiving break thinking about. I’m that pathetic.
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Tagged with: Digital Life, quotes, social-networks, web-sites
links for 2006-11-23
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CSSTidy is an opensource CSS parser and optimiser. It is available as executeable file (available for Windows, Linux and OSX) which can be controlled per command line and as PHP script (both with almost the same functionality).
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“Eighty per cent of the applications typically use only 30 per cent of the features found in commercial databases,” Yuhanna told vnunet.com. “The open source databases deliver those features today.”
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Should developers “stick to the two week plan” rather than switch contexts to solve critical issues? I have to say, I agree with Joel on this one.
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Excellent article on one of the most annoying attributes of the Java programming language - lack of stand alone functions and over emphasis of “things” - whether they are appropriate or not.
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“My brother had the best line I’ve ever heard in this area: 62% of all statistics are made up. I’m fairly confident he stole it, but I have passed the plagiarism baton. Yes, it’s all made up. No, you can’t bet on any number you see, from anyone, even me.”
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Color Picker in Javascript. Works well, and is FREE. You can use it in your own projects.
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Windows and Mac only: E-mail files as large as 1GB with Pando, a free P2P app that overcomes the 10MB file-size barrier inherent to most mail servers.
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A Digg for quotes. Pretty cool.(tags: quotes socialcomputing)
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Found this site on LifeHacker. It even has a podcast. Totally cool.(tags: podcasts)
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Tagged with: Bookmarks
links for 2006-11-22
links for 2006-11-21
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mod_auth_mysql was written in order to allow users to use the blazing quick speed of MySQL in order to store authentication information for their apache web servers
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Tagged with: Bookmarks
Paul Stanley: Live To Win
Its been 9 years since anything good has come from the KISS camp that wasn’t a rehash of the days before they took their make up off. The last KISS release of original material was Psycho Circus back in 1998, which wasn’t necessarily their best effort.
In 2004 Gene Simmons released Asshole his first solo album since 1978, which is hardly something I would recommend you to buy. However, being one of those goofy KISS fans that have to buy anything new from the band, I just had to buy it for some reason, a decision I regretted soon after making the purchase.
This year, Paul Stanley has released his first solo album since 1978, called Live to Win.
This album is one I’ve actually enjoyed listening to. Its quite obvious when listening to this album where most of the song writing skills within KISS actually reside. I found the songs to be strong and catchy. Its been a while since I’ve bought an album that I’ve been able to listen to all the way through and then start over again.
Some of you might have heard the title track of the album without even knowing it, as it appears in the South Park World of Warcraft episode during the scene where the kids are practicing for hours on end killing boars to up their strength in order to confront the character in the game that is killing everyone within the game.
I felt the rest of the songs were pretty strong on the album as well. This is a good effort by Stanley, and its nice to hear his voice on something new for a change, rather than rehashes of KISS’s 1970’s catalog.
I have thought for a while that it is about time that KISS let go of the make up and old catalog performances that strike one as something to just fill their coffers and get out and do something new. Stanley has made a really good effort in putting some new material out there and this is one KISS fan who actually appreciates the effort and has enjoyed listening to something fresh and new from the KISS front man.
Its pretty obvious. If the band were to break up and stop putting out “Best Of” CD’s, Paul would be the one that still has a career when the dust settles.
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Off The Rails - The Review
I just finished reading Off The Rails by Rudy Sarzo this last week. Overall, I would say I liked it.
I’ve been a fan of Randy Rhoads since first hearing the Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of Madman albums in 1983 or so. He was a unique player for his time and these two albums are of the sort that they sound just as fresh today as they did when they were released.
As a Rhoads fan, I’ve always picked up any and all information I could get on him. Every guitar magazine he’s been in, I probably have or have had it. Each article or magazine never really gave you enough, as a fan, as to what Randy was like.
Off The Rails was written using Sarzo’s daily diaries that he had kept during the Blizzard of Ozz and Diary tours between 1981 and 1982 (at the request of his accountant) and gives you an interesting glimpse of what was going on in the band at the time. While this book is probably the most detailed about Rhoads as a person, the book for me seemed to focus more on how screwed up Ozzy and Sharon were during this time, which is actually the stuff I wound up getting more interested in as the book went on.
After reading this book, you will be amazed that Osbourne has gotten to where he did, and that he actually produced the music he did over the years. Rumors have always abounded about his alcoholism and wild antics, but Sarzo gives you a very detailed glimpse into the amount of abuse Ozzy exposed himself and everyone around him to during the early days of his solo career.
Most interesting to me was the circumstances around the planned live album that became Speak of the Devil and Randy’s resistance to doing the album. Given where the band was at the time, with two albums of solo material, its easy to understand that Randy did not want to do a live album of Sabbath material, but the most telling is how Ozzy reacted and treated Randy when he refused to do the album initially.
Over the last twenty some years, we’ve heard a lot of positive things about the relationship between Ozzy and Randy. This book, if nothing else, gives you a glimpse of the “real life” circumstances on the tour and paints a much less rosy picture of the time that the band spent on the road.
That is not to say at all that Off The Rails is negative. Sarzo manages to detail all of the goings on during this time without giving the reader the feeling of reading a “tell-all” book meant to smear the participants for the sake of making money. Rudy does a great job of reporting what happened in a very balanced way that manages to get the reader to close the book and walk away thinking.
Bottom line, the book is excellent. Sarzo does a good job of reporting the daily goings on in the tour, giving you a glimpse into the life of guitar hero, and doing it in such a way that it does not feel exploitative in the least. I would definitely recommend this book to those who are Rhoads fans, or even those who just want a third party addition to the biographies already out there on Ozzy and his crew.
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Tagged with: Books, ozzy, reviews, rhoads, sarzo
