Month: June 2008

Secret project part 1: Hosting

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My newest top secret projectI’m working on a new little side project which I should be able to announce next week at some point. My plan is to create a Web 2.0 Digg style site and do it in under 20 hours from start to finish. This whole venture will be detailed here on RadicalHive, but I won’t let anyone know WHAT the project is until I’m done it. It is vaguely related to All New Comics, but different enough that it’s going to live on its own enviornment.

I have the technology down, this site will be using PHP and mySQL, and I want it to be able to handle large traffic loads with relatively little downtime. I have already selected a content management solution for it, and I’ve started creating the basic template for HOW the site will look (complete with ads and such).  – UPDATED July 1st @ 9:24pm! Continue Reading

Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk

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Edward Norton is The Incredible HulkChar and I went out to see the Incredible Hulk on Monday night, and while it’s definitely a better overall movie than the first film version of the Hulk was, this was still a fairly weak comic book adaptation.

Hulk is a pretty easy concept to get right, and the whole “man on the run” part of the story was done perfectly. What didn’t work as much was the Jeckyl and Hyde aspects of the story. Continue Reading

Belly Off Plan Part One: The ugly truth

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About a month ago I got on a scale and made a horrible discovery, I am now nearly fifty pounds heavier than I was when I got married. This is the latest in a series of increasingly horrifying discoveries. My knees hurt a little, my hands ache a lot, my back is often sore, I get winded when I go up a few flights of stairs, and the mere thought of having to run anywhere gives me cold shivers.

I joined a gym about two weeks ago, but I haven’t been motivated to go yet. I usually figure out a workout plan, get it all down on paper, and then start working out. It worked really well in the very beginning (around the wedding time back in 2001), but my follow up attempts at it have failed. Since 2001 I’ve belonged to four different gyms, and the best results I ever saw was when I first started at Good Life, and when I started going to the Premiere gym on Kennedy doing my little home-made workout that I researched. Continue Reading

Movie Review: Southland Tales

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Southland Tales the movie posterDonnie Darko is one of my top ten favourite films of all time. Director Richard Kelly managed to tell a story that had several layers, plenty of intrigue, and just enough science to make the fiction believable. His director’s cut was a little ham fisted, with unnecessary exposition and extra bloat that makes it weaker than the original, but the flick stands up as a great ride. Donnie Darko also stands out as one of the first movies that had a web site which really built upon the movie and created a backstory which made the movie better, which may have just been a product of the particular moment in time that gave us the Blair Witch Project, and Center of the Earth (which had one of the most amazing Flash applications I’ve ever seen).

Unfortunately Kelly’s sophomore effort, Southland Tales, doesn’t fare nearly as well as his debut. Continue Reading

Canadian Copyright Law…protect our corporate citizens!

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Copyright for CanadiansCanadian MPP Jim Prentice is about to introduce a new copyright protection law into the House of Commons. This law is said to be more restrictive than the US DMCA law which has allowed the recording industry to sue itself into obscurity, and has let the MPAA put blinders on and decide that they should lecture their customers rather than innovate.

I am personally offended every time I go into a movie theatre, pay good money for tickets and popcorn, and then get told not to steal movies. Umm, you’re kinda preaching to the choir idjuts.

Rather than innovate, the recording industry and TV/film industries would like to legislate our behavior. Continue Reading

Holy Bat-History Batman!

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The original BatmobileAnybody who knows me knows two things about me. 1: I’m not a big car guy, and 2: I love comics. So what happens when the love of one overcomes the apathy of the other? I become a car guy for a day!

On Saturday my dad and I went to the Fleetwood Country Cruise in at the Plunkett Estate just West of London. Continue Reading

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal SkullGeorge Lucas once again proves how lucky he was with the first three Star Wars movies, and Steven Spielberg proves how bi-polar he is with their latest collaboration Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

George Lucas was the man who once upon a time brought us American Graffiti. Steven Spielberg is the same man who brought us Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. These are two guys who between them know how to tell a story. They know how to create relationships, they know how to craft a good story, they know how to harness the spirit of the Saturday matinée adventure film, and most importantly, they know how to get across the idea of peril.

So why does the latest installment of Indiana Jones have none of these?

Continue Reading