Archives for May, 2005
Lost: Season Finale
Posted on May 25th, 2005 @ 11:03 PM EST
I just finished watching the season finale of Lost and I must say that I was extremely disappointed. I thought since it was a two hour episode, a lot more answers were going to be revealed, but instead they just piled more questions on us. It could have easily been made into an hour long episode since most of it was just useless dialogue.
When I first started watching it in the beginning of the season I wondered how long could a show like this really go on since it was just about a plane crash on a deserted island. At the rate they are going, it could go on for several seasons. All throughout tonight’s episode, I kept thinking they weren’t going to blow the hatch until the last minute and the camera would just zoom inside and not really reveal much - sure enough that’s exactly what happened. We are now left hanging with three major cliffhangers for the next few months:
- Walt being taken from the others.
- The tunnel in the hatch that had a broken ladder.
- The mysterious thing that keeps appearing.
I think Walt has special powers because he told Locke not to open the hatch (as though he knew something bad would happen) then he told his Dad they had to get off the island like there was going to be trouble, he wished the birds outside the window would die when he was doing his homework and they all the sudden died, and also because the polar bear that was on the island came from the one in his comic book shortly after the book was thrown into the fire. It seems like the men who took him are somehow aware that he is special. I believe that the tunnel in the hatch leads down to a scientific lab and the thing on the island is something that was created by the scientists.
Overall, I really enjoyed the first season. Lost is without a doubt one of my favorite shows of all-time. I just really wish they would have clued us in on a lot more than they did to keep a lot of these questions from being unanswered until next Fall. Sure they opened the hatch but instead of answering the question of what was inside of it, they created a new one by showing a deep hole. They also revealed who the others finally were, but I think there’s more than just those three guys. I can’t wait until next season!
Link to this entry • Posted in Television •
Photographs Now Flickerized
Posted on May 23rd, 2005 @ 10:38 AM EST
All of the photos that are displayed in the Photographs section are now entirely served from my Flickr account. I worked on a PHP script over the weekend that fetches my photos through Flickr’s wonderful API and displays them directly on my site. An RSS 2.0 feed is now available so if you use a news aggregator you can subscribe to the feed to be notified when new photos are posted. I’ve also added a link to view a slide show of each album so you don’t have to do so much clicking to see all of the photos.
I previously used Movable Type to create the albums which was tedious and time consuming whenever I had to add new photos since I had to add a new entry for each photo. Now all I have to do is just import my photos into iPhoto, assign them to a set, select the ones I’d like to upload, then export them to Flickr using FlickrExport.
The great thing about Flickr is that it is very easy to manage photos. They also give unlimited storage space (with Pro Accounts) so it’s a great way to store backups of high-resolution original images. After uploading 552 of my photos the past two days, I’ve already reached 63% of my bandwidth allotment (1.26 GBs) for the month. That’s a lot of pics!
Link to this entry • Posted in Blogging • Comments (2)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
Posted on May 19th, 2005 @ 6:14 AM EST
My wife and I just returned home from seeing Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith one and a half times. Since it was the most anticipated film of the year, we purchased our tickets in advance for the show at 12:01 AM It was a good thing we did because the theater managed to sell out of tickets even though the movie was being shown on six different screens. About halfway through the movie, it kept cutting off and the lights kept coming on. The manager informed us that the projector could not be fixed and said we would have to return at 3:00 AM if we wanted to see the rest of the movie. He ended up compensating everyone with three tickets per person for the trouble. I estimated that they had given out over $15,000 in tickets since there were two rooms affected by the problem. The free passes will certainly come in handy since there are several other movies that I would like to see that are coming out in the next two months.
I won’t reveal any plot points so don’t worry about reading any spoilers. Going into the theater, my expectations weren’t that high since the last two prequels weren’t all that great. George Lucas has finally come through by delivering a film that fans have long been awaiting. I think out of all the Star Wars films that this one was the best laid out story. The opening battle sequence was jaw-dropping, the lightsaber duel between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi was excellent, and all the visual effects throughout the movie were stunning.
Whether or not you liked the last two movies, this one is definately worth seeing. It is full of action and is a great film from beginning to end.
Update (May 20th, 2005)
Star Wars Day 1: A Record $50 Million
The final chapter of the “Star Wars” movie saga grossed a record $50 million from its first 24 hours in North American theaters, the highest box office tally for a single day, according to studio estimates issued Friday.
Update (May 22nd, 2005)
‘Star Wars’ Reigns Over Box Office
“Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” sold an estimated $108.5 million worth of tickets for the Friday-to-Sunday period, taking its total to $158.5 million since it opened after midnight on Thursday.
Its four-day haul sets a new record, surpassing the $134.3 million tally of 2003’s “The Matrix Reloaded.” Its Thursday tally of $50 million also set a one-day record, beating the $44.8 million sum for “Shrek 2” last year.
Link to this entry • Posted in Movies • Comments (1)
Panama City Beach
Posted on May 16th, 2005 @ 11:52 AM EST
;)
Last week my wife and I visited my in-laws who live in Birmingham, Alabama. We drove down to Panama City Beach, FL for a few days and stayed at the Summerhouse which was right on the beach. We couldn’t have asked for better weather - it was nice and sunny and the temperatures were in the low-80s.
;)
We spent most of our time hanging out at the beach and pool. One day, we drove up to Seaside, a small beach town comprised of Victorian-style, pastel-colored cottages with white picket fences. This town was the set in the movie, The Truman Show, which starred Jim Carrey. I couldn’t believe how high the houses were on the market for, especially since many of them are second homes. The lowest-price that I saw was around $1,700,000 and the highest was around $6,300,000. I snapped a few photos while we were walking around and they can be viewed in the photographs section.
Link to this entry • Posted in Travel •
Thoughts on Tiger
Posted on May 4th, 2005 @ 11:25 PM EST
I finally got around to upgrading both of my Macs to Tiger. The PowerBook was updated on Friday and the iMac was done yesterday afternoon. It only took about 30 minutes to install and everything went nice and smooth.
Spotlight
Although, it’s really nice to be able to instantly search files wherever they may be on your computer (separate partitions, external hard drives, etc.), it is not as fast as I thought it would be after all of the marketing hype that I read about it. Spotlight includes a feature called Smart Folders, which contain files grouped together based on search criteria instead of physical location. If you wanted to keep track of all Photoshop PSD files, you can simply create a Smart Folder that will search for this type of file and they will instantly appear after clicking the folder.
Automator
Automator is great for repetitive tasks such as moving specific types of files around, renaming files/folders, scaling images, etc. Rather than having to do this manually like in the past, this will definitely help save me a lot of time in the future.
Dashboard
Dashboard is pretty cool and has some nice animation and effects. One thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn’t have an option to turn each widget on/off so it is permanently displayed on the desktop. Currently, you have to click the Dashboard icon to make them all appear then they all disappear when another application is selected. You can hold down F12 and drag a widget out onto the desktop, but you have to do this each time you click on the main Dashboard icon which is a pain and you can only select one widget. Here’s a list of my favorites:
- Weather - Displays your local weather conditions and forecast for the next six days.
- Unit Converter - Converts units such as currency, temperature, time, weight, length, etc.
- Package Tracker - Track packages that are sent via FedEx or UPS.
- Hula Girl - Adds some good fun to your desktop.
- Translation - Translates 13 different languages.
- Dictionary/Thesauras - Looks up word definitions and synonyms.
Preview
Preview now offers enhanced PDF abilities, screenshot options, and saves screen captures as PNG files instead of PDFs. It also offers support for RAW camera images which is great for viewing photos that are taken from my Canon Digital Rebel XT.
Safari RSS
Safari is definitely a lot faster than it was in Panther. One of the biggest new features in it is support for RSS. This is one feature that I don’t particularly find useful since I use NetNewsWire as my news reader.
I like that it finally has an option to import/export bookmarks under the File menu. In previous versions of Safari, a separate application had to be installed in order to copy or backup your bookmarkes, unless you went into the Library folder and copied the files. I also like the option to be able to save a page as a Web Archive which will save the entire page, complete with images and links in case you would like to save it for offline viewing or save an older version of a webpage.
Default Icons
Cage Fighter Icons
The first thing I noticed after launching Mail for the first time was the tiny, hideous buttons for the mail controls. Luckily, someone created a tiny application called Cage Fighter that will remove the ugly backgrounds and just display the plain icons. One big improvement from the search functions that were in previous versions is Spotlight and also the ability to create Smart Mailboxes.
Overall Thoughts
Many of the new features that are included will help speed up the amount of time that it takes to get things done which is certainly a big plus in my book. There are also hundreds of small improvements everywhere you look that really make a noticeable difference from Panther.
Link to this entry • Posted in Apple •
Hit-O-Rama
Posted on May 3rd, 2005 @ 8:56 PM EST
;)
According to Urchin, my site has received approximately 176,010 hits, 3,180 unique visitors, and has transferred 2.02 GBs of bandwidth since Sunday. This is a significant increase in traffic compared to my usual stats. A large number of the referrals are coming from CSS Vault and Pajatti.net as well as CSS Reboot.
Just before I launched the redesign, I installed ShortStat. While Urchin is excellent for viewing highly detailed statistical information, I really like how I can just click a button and instantly see my current stats all on one screen with ShortStat. The guys over at the The Big Noob are working on a Dashboard widget for it that will make it even easier to view the stats with a nice clean GUI. It is supposed to be released sometime this week and I am really looking forward to using it.
Link to this entry • Posted in News • Comments (1)
Rebooted Baby!
Posted on May 1st, 2005 @ 12:35 PM EST
After a hectic week of juggling between projects and working on this site, the redesign of XHTMLed is complete! Now I can finally get some sleep! All of the pages should validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0. The site has been thoroughly tested in Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, Firefox, Mozilla, IE 6, IE 5.5, Netscape, and Opera and everything looks good in all browsers except for the following:
- Borders in the Photographs section are not vertically lining up in Safari.
- The hyperlinks in the footer of the page do not work in IE due to a bug in IE’s implementation of style filters. Unfortunately, there isn’t a fix for this that I know of unless I use a GIF instead of a PNG image. The PNG image has a much smoother gradient compared to a GIF when it is used over top of a background that isn’t a solid color. So if you are still using IE here’s yet another reason to switch to Firefox.
If you notice any problems besides the ones listed above I’d appreciate it if you would post a comment or drop me an email and let me know.
Since I just decided to redesign the site two weeks ago, I didn’t have much time to work on the site. I started last Sunday and am pretty happy with the end result after scrambling to put something together to meet today’s deadline. I didn’t have a chance to add a bunch of new features so it is basically just a facelift, although I did add a Links page and made it so the last five links that have been added will appear in the sidebar on every page. There is also an RSS feed for it that you can subscribe to in your news reader as well. I also got rid of the atom feed for the main entries and have permanently redirected it to the RSS 2.0 feed.
If you like my design please head over to CSS Reboot and also May 1st Reboot (my site is on page 15) and give me a good rating. :)
Here’s a screenie of XHTMLed v1 in case you’re new to the site and would like to see what it previously looked like:
;)
Link to this entry • Posted in Web Design • Comments (3)
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