Yup, I finally went and saw this wretched bit of crap that Lucas put out. It was less horrifically bad than I had anticipated but still failed to be a good movie. The dialog was cheesy and the acting wooden. In particular “Annie” aka Darth Vader blew chunks, though he did get slightly better once he was in the Vader suit. To be fair though, the special effects were kind of nice; nothing particularlly innovative (just lots of CG). Still the massive battle scenes were cool. The individual battles of Jedi vs. Sith were just as cheesy as the dialog with tons of flips and swirls that almost looked impressive but were actually a massively dumb way to fight. Overall, I’ll give E3:RotS 1 star out of 5 (vs. -24 for E1:tPM).
Tag: Code
As my long time readers might recall, I watched a show called Firefly a while back and greatly enjoyed it. This week, thanks to one of my co-workers, I had an opporunity to drive 5 & 1/2 hours to plant my butt in a packed movie theater at 10 o’clock with a broken air conditioner. That is to say, I was able to attend a special preview showing of the Firefly movie, Serenity. Though the movie hasn’t quite been completed yet; it was fanatastic!
It started off with a short speech by Joss Whedon. He basically thanks the fans for their support and asked them to continue that support by asking them to help promote the movie. Then the movie was off and running. It appears to pick up at least a couple of years after the t.v. show ended1. Not all of the crew is still flying on Serenity though most are. The Alliance is still after River and they seem more desperate than ever to get her back. Desperate to the point where they’ve sent an unamed agent after her. During this agent’s introduction, we get treated to see a holographic recording of Simon rescuing River from the facility where they were experimenting on her; as well as finding out one of the reasons the Alliance wants her back so badly.2 Overall, I thought the story worked very well for fans of Firefly but I’m not sure how well it will play with people who never watched the tv show. The movie doesn’t have any big-name actors and it hasn’t been getting much in the way of promotion from the studio. I hope it does well at the box office (mostly in hopes of the tv show being revived).
Closing thougts about the preview:3
- The preview didn’t have much in the way of music. This really bothered some people and it is one of the things that they’re still working on.
- There weren’t any credits; again this is something they’re working on.
- Supposedly there were some placeholders for special effects that aren’t complete yet, but I didn’t catch them.
1 Supposedly there is a comic book coming out in July (?) that covers what happens between the show & the movie.
2 I bet you’d like it if I told you why, wouldn’t you?. Too bad, this preview-review is going to be spoiler free. :p
3 Sorry, but 11 hours of driving in 2 days plus watching the movie at 10 o’clock, staring straight up at the screen from the front row, doesn’t exactly leave me pumped up for writing an indepth review. Maybe I’ll have something more to say after the official opening on 30 Sept 2005.
Ever since I upgraded CoffeeBear to the newer version of WordPress and my fancy new theme; I noticed that mozcc wasn’t displaying any Creative Commons info for my site. I’d thought it a bit odd but figured I’d broken the extension somehow and have been a bit too distracted to really look into it until this evening.
First, I made sure I had the current version of mozcc installed and that I’d freshly restarted Firefox so I knew I had the lastest version running. When that didn’t work, I checked the source code of my pages and realized that I’d completely forgotten to add in the license info when I did the upgrade. Whoops! I’ve since rectified the problem and now you can see that this site is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. The missing license info has been added in by using the WP-CC Plugin developed by Firas. So many kudos to him for this nifty plugin!
While having wireless Internet access is very sweet, I don’t currently have working sound on my laptop (it was also somewhat problematic with SuSE too). I’ve been googing for anwers and not had a lot of luck. I did find that I need to have acpi=off when I boot up or Ubuntu won’t be able to detect the soundcard. Other than that, all I’ve found so far is that I’ll probably have to manually specify all the settings for the soundcard, as detailed in this HOWTO. If this is something that you think you can help me with than you can read some details of my laptop after the jump.
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One of the many lovely gifts that Ariesna and I received for our wedding was a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router.1 Since a wireless router is useless without something to connect to it; I went out and picked up a Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Notebook Adapter. Since I was still kind of dazed from the whole wedding/honey-night experience; I didn’t stop to check whether the router had SpeedBooster and if I could get the card online for much cheaper than I could in the store.2 I had cash in my pocket and techno-lust burning in my heart. I bought the card, took it home and immediately started mucking about with my laptop to try to get it to work. In a previous fit of whimsey, I had wiped M$ Windows from my laptop and replaced it with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Since APT is such a wonderful thing, I used it to keep SuSE updated; rather I used it to update SuSE on the laptop whenever I booted it up to use it. So the first thing I tried doing in my quest to get wireless networking running on my laptop was to run APT and grab all the latest stuff for SuSE 9.0.
For the first time ever, APT let me down and in doing so it let me down badly. Something in my xserver configuration (or maybe the startup scripts) got hosed. I fiddled with it for a couple of days, but had no luck in correcting the problem. I could work around it, but not fix it. Once I got to that point, I tried to load some missing software I needed to get the wireless card to work, but the software was not listed in the APT repositories I was using. This is especially problematic as the CD-ROM in this laptop tends to be very flakey, so I couldn’t hope to go back to my original CDs and load it from there. In the meantime, I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (Hoary 5.04). I did this planning on borrowing the modular CD-ROM drive of a co-worker with the same ancient Dell laptop to replace SuSE on my laptop (if all else failed). Tonight, I was home alone and annoyed that I still didn’t have my wireless network up & running. So I ran over to Best Buy, picked up a spindle of CD-Rs, burned Ubuntu to disc and tried installing it.
Much to my utter amazement and total surprise, my laptop decided that it liked this burned CD and allowed me to install Ubuntu without error. It took several hours to do it, but eventually I was looking at an incredibly ugly Ubuntu desktop. This struck me as odd, but then I realized it was displaying at 800×600 when my laptop’s native resolution is 1024×768. So a bit of googling later and a quick run of: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and I was looking at the very pretty version of Ubuntu’s desktop. About an hour later, after following these directions in the NdisWrapper wiki, and I have wireless networking running on my laptop. Now I just need to look into a 2nd battery for the laptop so I can have be a bit further away from the wall socket than my power cord lets me go. Still, it’s so very nice not having to sit in my lousy desk chair to do some work on the computer. It’ll be even nicer when I can put the funds together to build a MythTV box for the living room to watch all my anime with. 🙂
Updated 2005-05-27, 19:55 GMT-06:00: I noticed a typo in the dpkg-reconfigure command above, so I’ve edited this post to correct it.
1 Yes, I do realize that considering this a lovely gift puts me completely and forever in the “geek” category,
2 The answers to those questions were: No and Yes.