Tag: coffee

If you’re not a regular WP user, then you might not have noticed there’s a large amount of anger and frustration happening in their support forums lately. Basically, some people in the community have spent a great deal of time and effort helping out WP users with layout problems that others ended up with due to quirks in the default layout and in some1 of the designs that were posted over at Alex King’s WordPress Style Competition. But that wasn’t the direct cause of the current mess in the forums; no the blame for that seems to rest with Michael’s announcement that a variation of his Kubrick style would be included with the next release of WordPress. This was the spark to an apparent holy war between WP’s community support leaders2 and WP’s developers, with a bunch of fanboys on the sidelines escalating things.

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As you’ve probably noticed already; I’ve finally switched over to the new look that I’ve been working on for CoffeeBear.net. It’s not 100% finished but it’s close enough that I wanted to go ahead and make the switch. My thanks go out to Root for his Trident interface/template on which this new look is based. Sure, my implementation isn’t fancy but it’s a nice change from the old look and is more mine than any other look that I’ve used.

Also, I’ve finally opened my Gallery for your viewing pleasure. Currently, the only thing in there are a selection of photos that I took during my Japan trip. I’ll be adding more to it later.

Enjoy!

Update: Err, I’ve noticed that the new look is busted up on my Portal page and on some of my posts. I’m working to correct that now.

Update 2: Oh and a word of caution, my gallery pages are massively picture heavy. I’ll see about sorting them out a bit later into smaller folders, but for now if you try viewing those pages over dial-up… You’ll be sitting there a while waiting for the thumbnails to load.

Update 3: I forgot to mention, my gallery is currently being powered by Paul Griffin’s Simple PHP Gallery

This afternoon Ariesna and I went out to see The Bourne Supremacy. As I expected it was mostly a fast paced action movie with just a hint of drama tossed in to spice things up. Was it good? Well… it would have been better if they didn’t use such jerky camera work for the action sequences, particularly the car chases. I have a fairly strong stomach for such things but even I was starting to feel a touch of motion sickness by the end of the movie. Poor Ariesna was downing some Dramamine to try calming her stomach and fight off the severe motion sickness that she was feeling. Still if you can get past the motion sickness issue; there are some other disappointments in store for you:

  • Matt Daemon isn’t playing the role of Jason Bourne as well as he did back in The Bourne Identity.
  • Figuring out the real bad guy in this film takes no effort and that ruins the suspensefulness of the film.
  • The portion of the movie where Bourne goes to Russia, feels tacked on like it really belongs in another movie1.
  • The way Bourne dealt with the Russian assassin didn’t make any sense.

So am I saying that I hated the movie? No, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was a fun film that allowed me to have some mindless entertainment for an hour & 48 minutes. Given I woke up exhausted and was in a sleepy haze all day that was probably for the best. I give the movie 3 and a half out of 5 cups of coffee. It’s worth seeing if you can catch it at a matinee or at a cheap-seats movie theater.

1 Though I have to admit, I did admire Bourne’s character for locating the girl and apologizing to her for what he’d done in the past.

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
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Today we had to get up and check out of the hotel by 6:00 AM (or 5:45 AM if you had phone charges to pay for like I did). Then we ran to catch the early morning train and made some exchanges to get over to Takarazuka, where we visited the Osamu Tezuka Museum. The walk to the museum from the train station would not have been so bad; if we weren’t carrying our luggage for the next 3 days with us1. The museum wasn’t as big as say the Ghibli museum had been but it was packed with stuff about Tezuka and his work. Also in the basement level, they ran an hour long “animation course”2. The course ran off a set of computer built into little desks with built-in lightboxes. You were supposed to follow along with what they were saying via your computer, but we didn’t speak enough Japanese and none of us read any Japanese, so that part was hard. Fortunately, some of the museum employees spoke enough English that we were able to participate and make our own little 2 frame animation. Mine was of my CoffeeBear character waving and it received the Astro Boy Seal of Approval3 *grin* Oh and one of the other nice things about the museum was that they allowed you to take pictures inside. So, I’ll see about posting some of those later.
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