Year: 2001

Not much to say right now. The Holidays are taking their toll on my work schedule, but I have managed to catch a couple of movies. Look for little blurbs on Lord of the Rings (kick ass) and Vanilla Sky up here soon. In addition, we are going to see the Royal Tennenbaums tomorrow night, so that should be a blast.

Saturday begins our four day weekend in North Bay, where the Toronto Gang will be spending the New Year.

Until then.

It just gets better! ActiveSync Pass Through Connection with PocketPC 2002

Not only can I now use my Pocket PC wirelessly in any room in my house at blistering 1 meg speeds. Not only does my web connection not require any third party programs/apps to connect to the internet now since I have a wireless hub, but now I have figured out how to use my Pocket PC in the cradle at work to surf the internet. Why is this a good thing? The wireless hub doesn’t want to work here at work, so I’ve been looking for another solution to see stuff I’m doing on the web from work. With PocketPC 2002, it’s easy as pie!

I managed to get the aircard working on my iPAQ yesterday, and it was so easy. I just went to the Samsung website, grabbed the software, and installed it…in less than five minutes from the time I started the search, I was online and surfing on my Pocket PC.

Now if I could just find a good cgi based message board for HeadsDown, all would be good.

I’m writing this from my PC, but I started it on my Pocket PC.

For the next several months, I have unlimited use of a Wireless Samsung MagicLAN-RG, a Compaq iPAQ with a Wireless Samsung card. This means I can access my network from anywhere in my apartment. I’ve already surfed PocketPCThoughts, TSNMAX, and ComicCon. I’m going to create a new webpage on HeadsDown which will be a Pocket PC Portal to take me to all my favourite websites. Very very cool.

I’ll be doing a lot more development for the iPAQ now that I’ve got this bad boy, and it will allow me to check the work that I’m doing for the iPAQ on TSNMAX. I also want to get the aircard working on my personal iPAQ because it has Pocket PC 2002 on it, and I want to see what the internet looks like on IE 6 for the PPC.

That’s really all I’ve got to say about any of that.

Album Du Jour: Bare Naked Ladies Greatest Hits Volume 1

DVD of the week: SSX Tricky! How cool, this PS2 game also had tons of “behind the scenes” stuff on the making of the game.

Movie of the week: Vanilla Sky, Kate and Leopold. We won free tickets to Kate and Leopold, pretty good for a chick flick. Vanilla Sky on the other hand was just weird. It was very dark, had a great soundtrack, and had a totally bizzare ending. While I thought it was a good movie, it wasn’t great, and wasn’t one of Cameron Crowe’s better films. I’d put it just above Singles, but below Say Anything.

Game of the week: SSX Tricky. I rented it from Jumbo, and stayed up until 3 am two nights in a row to play it.

Website of the week: Spider-Man Movie website. The new trailer is out…and damn is it good!

Comic of the Week: Weak, weak week for comics this week (that’s a lot of weeks). I’ll have to give the nod to X-Force, which once again was totally quirky, and really fun. Sadly, it was the weakest issue of the series thus far. Next week will be better with New X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, and Ultimate X-Men all out on the same week. The X-comics have never been better reads than they are right now.

Well, certain people who shall remain nameless (but who were the best man at my wedding) say that this site isn’t dark enough. They want a full on descent into madness.

Well tough beans! This is my random ramblin’s. It’s whatever’s buggin’ me, whatever’s on my mind, whatever I’m doin’.

I will tell you this though…I’m making plans baby. Big plans. Huge plans. Ground shaking, earth shattering, life altering directional plans. My new year’s resolution this year will be to do something that’s all mine. My days of making other people money are at an end. It’s time that I stood up and put my money where my mouth is. If I’m as talented as I think I am, and as valuable a commodity as I keep marketing myself as, then it’s time to stand up and do something with it. I’m writing down my tricks and tips for making streaming media viable for everyone from the one-man start up to the uuber network, and I’m going to put them together into a book. That’s stage one. Stage two is taking that info out into the real world and turning it into a buisness. Not just streaming though, web design, application development, Flash development, video, ASP…everything I know.

I posted a small little teaser to HeadsDown a year ago, it said “Change is coming”.

It’s time I live up to that teaser.

Album Du Jour: I picked up the Barenaked Ladies Greatest Hits volume 1. I’ve never bought a BNL album before, so this was a pretty good idea. They are one of those bands who’s songs I’ve always liked on the radio, but who’s albums I’ve never picked up.

DVD of the week: Made. John Favreu and Vince Vaughn reprise (sort of) their roles from Swingers. Not as clever as Swingers, but it wasn’t bad.

Movie of the week: Watch this space for a review of Oceans’ 11

Game of the week: SSX Tricky demo for the PS2

Website of the week: Mojo Radio. Talk radio for guys. I listen to this all day at work. Don’t ask me why…it’s what I do.

Comic of the Week: Dark Knight Strikes Again. 15 years in the making. Did it live up to the hype? Nope, not really, but it’s got potential. 80 pages, thirteen bucks. That’s a lotta coin, but it was a pretty good read. A close second was The Authority, which was on a four month hiatus, and will end in three more issues. This is the one comic that I’m gonna really miss.

I’ve become quite addicted to Morpheus. It all started innocently enough. I wanted to see what was out there, and everyone told me that Morpheus was way better than Bearshare. With Bearshare, you had to download a new version practically every time you connected. Not so with Morpheus. It’s way faster too since you’re downloading snippets of files from various people, and the program then stiches them together. I’ve downloaded a ton of TV lately, and some cool video clips. Now I know that these things are supposed to be used to get MP3’s and porn…but I’d really rather check out the new episode of Justice League, or that really cool Batman Beyond that I missed. What can I say? I’m old and married. I’m all porned out!

Which brings me back to my topic, Why was it all better when we were kids? No, not porn sicko…I’m talking about cartoons. I downloaded and watched the new Justice League cartoon, and a couple of last season’s Batman Beyond’s which had the JLU in them. Both were really impressive, and made me nostalgic for the days of the SuperFriends. So as I was looking for this weeks episode of JL, I happened across a couple of old episodes of JLA, they said they were ancient, but I think they were from the mid 80’s, when Perez was writing the book, and Batman had his own cartoon (because Bats isn’t in the title credits). They sucked. The animation was bad, aided only by strobe flashes which just gave me a headache. The voices were horrible (I swear Casey Kasem must have been on every single bad cartoon in the 80’s, and could probably die on the fat royalty cheques he’s getting from Comedy, Cartoon, and Sci Fi networks in the States right now).

After watching this drek, I had to find some quality Warner Brothers stuff to clean my palate (sort of like sucking on pickled ginger after sushi). Now this is great stuff…and my kids will probably never get to see it. Y’see ole Bugs and pals weren’t exactly what the kids these days call “Pollitically correct”, mind you this was almost 50 years ago…but DAMN some of this stuff is nasty. Funny, but nasty. It’s funny though, I remember seeing these cartoons as a kid…I think I turned out pretty well. So why can’t some of them get shown today? Tweety never did anything wrong…just used a little dynamite. Oh, like that’s a bad thing? Listen, if my kid is gonna be eaten by some cat, he damn well BETTER be using dynamite on him. That’s not overly violent. That’s just common sense. That stupid Coyote got everything he ever deserved. Those cartoons showed us two things. 1: Acme makes really cool stuff. and 2: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That’s right, so far cartoons have taught us basic Darwinism (survival of the fittest), and Newton’s third law of physics! And that’s just using two cartoons. Speedy taught us that if you were diligent and a hard worker…your friends would use you. Sure the cartoons were rife with stereotypes, but when they’re done as parables, shouldn’t that make them okay? I mean were the Speedy Gonzoles cartoons really telling us that all Mexicans were lazy? Or were they telling us that the Mexicans we were seeing in this instance were lazy. Speedy wasn’t lazy was he? Hopped up on speed and lord knows what else maybe, but lazy? No way!

Just take a look at what the two or three generations of kids who grew up on unadulterated Warner Brothers cartoons grew up to do, and then take a look at what this latest generation has accomplished…and tell them to pull their damn pants up while you’re at it.

Ironically, it’s the two or three generations before this one who has decided it would be better for them if the old cartoons weren’t seen anymore.

Go get them on Morpheus or Bearshare, before they take them away from us the same way they took Napster away.

Album Du Jour: Buffy the Musical (the songs are stuck in my head!!!)

DVD of the week: The Matrix Revisited

Movie of the week: This was a movie free week for me…sad isn’t it?

Game of the week: Metal Gear Solid 2 is the reason it’s a movie free week this week.

Website of the week: I’ve been using Morpheus a lot lately, so it gets the nod for this week.

Comic of the Week: Powers started a new storyline this week, and as usual it was about as solid as a comic gets. This one had just the right amount of intrigue and enough mystery to really make you want to know what happens next. The Powers stuff reads so well as a TPB, but it really is best as a monthly comic…you always want the next issue to come out now!