Then we come to this evening, opening day for the Hunger Games movie. My wife and I were planning on going out after dinner to do some household shopping and wondering what we’d do afterward. I pulled up the theater’s movie listing, noticed that the Hunger Games was out ³ and the next showing was only 40 minutes away. Seeing as we still had some free movie passes lying around ⁴, we decided to see if we could get in to see it.

We went straight to the theater and the parking lot was looking full. We parked, started walking up to the entrance and noticed what looked like a crowd waiting in line for tickets. We started to mentally prepare ourselves for leaving the theater and finding something else to do with our evening. But as we got closer we released it was just a group of kids hanging out by the doors and there wasn’t really a line at all. We got right in.

My wife decided to get us some water and had me go ahead into the theater to get seats. While there were a fair number of people in the theater already ⁵, it definitely wasn’t packed. My wife came in a few minutes later; we watched the adverts and inane trivia crud the theater always shows and then the movie started.

We watched it all the way through ⁶; and frankly, we’re really glad we were there using our free passes instead of shelling out full ticket price. While I’ve not reread the books yet ⁷, I do remember enough of them to recognize that the story from the first book was heavily squished to fit into the movie’s 142 minutes. It didn’t feel like anything essential was left out; but everything prior to the arena is glossed over to the point that I doubt it made much sense to people who’ve not read the books.

And in the arena scenes are were we come to my biggest problem with the movie; the cinematography. Over the past few years, Hollywood’s gotten on something of a kick of relying heavily on hand-held/shaky camera work, small DoF and motion blur. Presumably their usage is intended to help the audience better engage with the film, either by focusing the audience’s attention on specific parts of the film or by making the audience really feel like they’re there in the film. In any case, if these effects are used well; they can have a profound impact on the film. Unfortunately the Hunger Games does not use them well and the end result is eyestrain, headaches and a lot of time spent looking away from the movie screen.

Overall, I’d say 2/5 stars. I would’ve given it 3, but the shaky camera work and motion blur really bothered me.

The Hunger Games © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Sometimes it really surprises me how much my enjoyment of a book is linked to my current headspace. For example, I read The Magicians a year or so ago and I recall really liking it. But this time around, I hated it. Well in truth the book was ok; what really I hated the main character. This read around he just totally rubbed me the wrong way. ¹ Then there was Blood and Honey. I don’t know for sure that it’s something that would normally be to my taste; but when I read it, I was in something of an angry mood ² Or we could look at the Dresden Files which over all has been a great source of entertainment of late; unfortunately too a great source, as it’s been keeping me waaaaay too late into the morning as I read each volume. ³

Other Notes

• I hadn’t realized how much a pair of worn out shoes were affecting my general feeling of well being. At least, I hadn’t until I finally bought some new ones. Good lord, I totally should have bought new shoes sooner.
• Speaking of things I should have done sooner, I went in to the doctor’s office today and got some antibiotics for the sinus infection that’s been wiping the floor with my system.
• I’ve been working on the new theme for this site, and I’ve got a rough prototype worked out for the home page. But I just don’t like it much. It’s not god awful, but it’s also not good enough. So I’ll probably be ditching the current redesign I was thinking about and try another approach.

Books, Headspaces & Other Notes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

So I looked up the manufacturer’s website which to all intents & purposes is a fancy coming soon page. They did include an email address inside an image on the site ¹, so I sent them a note asking about my problem with the left ear-piece. I got no response, not even a simple automated note saying they got my message. Annoying. Very annoying.

Then I tried Mobile Line to see if they could help me, but their site wants you to register to do almost anything there and seems to be geared towards getting you signed up as a peddler of their crap. After a bit of poking around, I found an email address on the site and thought I’d writing them ². Sure the email address was for their sales department, but I figured at the very least I’d get a response saying they would forward the request off to their support department. But I figured wrong.

Now over a month later, neither the manufacturer or Mobile Line has bothered to respond to my emails and now to add insult to injury the right ear-piece started flaking out (while the left now only rarely & randomly works). So I’m forced to change my rating on this headset from “yeah, cool!” to “junky crap” and recommend that nobody ever buy them.

Do Not Buy! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I’ve been a fan and owner of Nintendo’s Wii console for some time. When I heard a while back that Netflix was going to start allowing people to stream movies to the Wii; I got very excited. I signed up for the service the first chance I got and waited eagerly for the disc to arrive. Eventually it hit my mailbox and I’ve been enjoying it ever since.

The thing I hadn’t really thought about was how it would change what I watch. While usually I don’t have connection problems with the service; it does happen from time to time, so I watch more TV shows than movies. Also if I have a couple of hours with nothing better planed or if the weather doesn’t cooperate with what plans I do have, I can quickly choose to watch most anything from my queue. And usually what I choose to watch is one of those movies.

You know what I mean. They’re that class of movie that looked interesting enough that you were kinda/sorta wanting to see it, but not interesting enough that you’d actually be willing to part with cold, hard cash to watch it at the theater. Tonight’s case in point, Echelon Conspiracy. Our main character of the film receives a mysterious cellphone that saves his life and starts to make him rich via well timed text messages. Only the casino he’s at notices and gets upset, worse the FBI gets involved (enough though said casino is in Prague, well outside their jurisdiction). Hijinks ensue, most of which appear to be either outright stolen from other movies or at the very least heavily inspired by them¹.

Was this a good movie? Good lord, no. Was it an entertaining way to kill a warm summer night? Heck yeah. Does it make me wonder if the instant gratification of streaming movies via Wii+Netflix is ruining my already questionable test in good cinema? Hmm.…

¹ My best example of this is the ending, so I’ve changed the text color here to hide it, to avoid spoilers. If you want to see the example select all text on this page. The ending was very much playing off of War Games.

Wii + Netflix = Bad Movie Marathon Madness © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mind you, the name isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Before the bar was a minor feature of the restaurant, now the restaurant feels to be a minor feature of the bar.  Pre-flood the walls were adorned with prints of Alphonse Mucha’s artwork and photos from the Czech Republic. Now the walls abound with flat screen TVs displaying various sports channels. The menu has also changed adding newer, cheaper options. And while some old favourites remain (Chicken Paprika, Czech Goulash, etc..), some things are quite noticeably missing.

The first thing that caught my eye as missing from the menu was the dessert section. Yes, that’s right while Al is back, the Blue Toad does not currently offer his famous strudel. When we noticed this glaring omission from the menu, my wife asked our waitress about it and was told that they don’t offer desserts.

We were crushed. After waiting over a year and a half for our next slice of Al’s strudel, to find out they weren’t offering it any more was heartbreaking. But refusing to give up on it entirely, we caught Al as he was walking past our table and asked him about it. Al reassured us that he plans to bring back the strudel; he just didn’t want to burden his cooks any more than he already had with it being opening night.

Quite a bit later¹ after we’d ordered and received our food; we realized there were a couple more changes to the menu than we’d noticed. One was all the Czech dinner options now come with a cup of soup instead of apple sauce. The night we were there, the soup was chilli and a rather tasty chilli at that. The other change we’d not noticed was they apparently don’t do potato dumplings any more and only have bread dumplings.

But these aren’t tiny, dried up bread dumplings. These dumplings were moist and roughly the size of a hockey puck. And they tasted quite good dipped into my Czech Goulash, though they were much better with the brown gravy served over them on my wife’s plate of Chicken Paprika.

The portions that we received were smaller than I remember them being on prior visits, but on the positive side they were still filling and the cost was down considerably². And that lower price point for the meal will help to draw me back to Al’s in the future, even though the enlarged bar means it won’t be our “special” place anymore.

¹ As near as I could tell, all of the wait staff was new. Add in that this was opening night and things moved slowly & chaotically.
² Prior dinners with two entrees, 2 iced teas and 2 desserts usually came around $35–40 range. This visit with two entrees, 2 iced teas & 1 craft-brew beer was only $26.

Al’s Back! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Bag of Holding

My employer for my day job provides me with a 17″ screen laptop and has provided a backpack style bag to haul it around in. Unfortunately my first bag shredded itself over the course of a year. The replacement bag I got was holding up better… until our cat had an unfortunate accident near it. Cleaning the bag took care of that. Or rather I thought cleaning it took care of it until the first time I got caught in a bit of rain and I was “treated” to a familiar order returning.

After that I worked harder to keep my work bag dry and put up with the occasional whiffiness. Then the other day, I noticed some money I’d forgotten about in my PayPal account and around the same time I heard ThinkGeek had their Bag of Holding in stock. It was the right size, looked sturdy and was within my budget. So I ordered it and have been using it as my daily bag for a little over a month now. Which brings us to the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

• My work laptop fits snuggly in the padded pocket.
• The heavy canvas construction stands up well to brief exposures of heavy rain.
• The bag has really great, front snaps. Rather than being just tacked directly to the outside of the main body of the bag, the snaps are on little strips of the same nylon webbing that makes up the shoulder strap. This is gives you a little more wiggle room to fasten the flap shut after packing stuff into the interior pockets.
• The bag is big enough that I’ll wager I can carry my work laptop and my large 3 ring binder for gaming.

The Bad

• The padded pocket for the laptop isn’t an interior pocket under the main flap of the bag. I would have prefered it to be under the flap, so that it would feel better protected.

The Ugly

• Some of the stitching is coming loose from the seams in a couple of spots. It’s not much (a couple of millimeters of thread) but it is worrisome that it’s happening so soon.

Overall, I give the bag 4.5 stars out of 5 and would rate it as recommend buy.

Review: Bag of Holding © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Appearance: No change. This yogurt still looks like something very, very nasty rather than food.
• Scent: N/A. I made no comment on the scent of the yogurt in my previous review but today’s cup had a pleasant coffee fragrance.
• Texture: Improved. This cup of yogurt mixed up properly and when eaten was smooth, not chalky.
• Flavor: Improved but still unpleasant. Today’s cup tasted more like a bad, drip coffee combined with sour cream. Sadly, that actually is an improvement.

Overall today’s cup was significantly better than the previous cup I tried, but still not good enough to get me to eat it again.

Dannon Coffee Yogurt, Take 2 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Note: This review is based upon an uncorrected proof which I received via a giveway on GoodReads.

I don’t, as a rule, read True Crime; I do enjoy a good mystery. So when I saw this book being offered in a giveaway over at GoodReads.com; I felt I just had to enter.  Then when I was home sick the other day, the book arrived in the mail. Given I hadn’t yet noticed I’d won a copy it was a very pleasant surprise.

I moved the book to the top of my to-read list and once I started on it was glad I had done so. It’s strange; there’s no quick paced action,  no tense drama yet I couldn’t put it down. Maybe it was the author’s fasincation with Gilkey (the theif)  & Sanders (the “bibliodick”) or maybe it was the author’s own fascination with this private world of rare book dealers. It certainly wasn’t the characters that drew me in. Gilkey was given the most “pagetime” but he wasn’t very interesting. Simply an unrepentant crook (all protestations to the contrary) who choose credit card fraud as his easy method of living the good life, which happens to involve owning rare books. Sanders was slightly better but seemed too angry/bitter for much of the book.

While I’m still not sure why I enjoyed this book, it’s safe to say it was an good read.

Review: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One pair of sunglasses that were particularly nice had a blue tint to the lenses. It cut out all the glare and made dull, grey days seem more pleasant (grey skies would look blue). Since I’d gone back to wearing to glasses, I’d given up having sunglasses as prescription lenses cost too much for me to buy a 2nd pair. I tried glasses with clip-on shades but the clip-on broke and later pairs of glasses I chose didn’t come with them.

Then this year back in February I decided to try ordering a pair of prescription sunglasses online. I’d read several reviews of Zenni Optical and it sounded promising. So I poked around their site and ended up ordering a pair of titanium frames with mid-index, polycarbonate lenses and a 80% blue tint. Total cost $58.85. Compared to $251 for just a new pair of lenses from the local optometrist.

So if price is your only criteria, then Zenni Optical wins. However price isn’t my only consideration, for one thing it took over a month to get my glasses from them. Over a month with no communication from them on the status of my order until I wrote them. Then when I did write them, it took them several days to reply. Additionally it’s hard to correctly judge how the glasses will fit from just a picture and the measurements. I suppose if I’d paid more attention to the measurements given, I might have had less trouble but that’s how the cookie crumbles¹. Also the images they have of how the various custom tints do a poor job of showing how things will look through them. It would be better I think to have a reference picture of something with know colors (e.g. banana, stop sign, etc…) and then various shots of the same item though lenses with the various custom tints. Something like that would have given me a better idea of the very, very bright a blue my 80% tint would turn out to be².

Still they do a good job against bright sunlight and against snow-glare, which I had been somewhat concerned about. “Fortunately” we had several inches of snow fall around my house last night and so my new glasses got a good workout vs snow-glare.

Overall I’ve been pleased with my purchase but Zenni Optical’s customer service could use a bit of work.

¹ The glasses don’t fit badly but the arms of the frame are a bit shorter than I’d like.
² I’ve been told my new sunglasses look like “hippy-shades”.

Zenni Optical © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

And things just went downhill from there.  True there were moments in the film which were enjoyable, but they were the exceptions not the rule.  I highly recommend staying away from this wretched, steaming pile of poo.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.