Category Archives: General

General

A mini-review of John Carter

First of all, it should have been called A Princess of Mars (the title of the book it’s based on). It’s a romantic adventure movie, that’s a perfect title. But is it good? Yeah, it’s pretty good leaning to just OK. It’s really too bad it flopped so ridiculously hard. It could have started a really cool trilogy of movies. I think the big problem is the flabby screenplay. Considering the people involved — Andrew Stanton and Michael Chabon — this is really surprising. It’s flabbiness was made even more apparent by me finally watching the super-lean and packed-tight Adventures of Tintin later that night. If only Edgar Wright could work on every screenplay.

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I’ve Given Up on QWERTY

If you hadn’t noticed a Colemak-sized bomb dropped on my blog and slowed down my rate of posting. That’s OK though. Today was a turning point in my alternative keyboard adventure. I realized that I’ve given up on QWERTY. I fired up the Windows OS in a virtual machine and started typing gibberish into the IE9 address bar because, of course I hadn’t switched the keyboard layout there and I was instinctively typing using the Colemak layout. It was annoying as hell. So now I have Colemak installed there too. I’m done with QWERTY. I may only be typing 40wpm now and won’t suddenly get over 100 just because I switched layouts but once you realize how silly the QWERTY layout is you just have to do something about it. It took me a year to do that something but I did it. It feels good!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go feel bad about how long it took me to type this post. :)

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Good Copywriting

Good copywriting makes you want to eat your shampoo. It takes an ordinary ingredient list and makes a Narnia; a fantasy world that anyone can get to if only they have the right, otherwise ordinary but for whatever secret magic they’re imbued with, material stuff. In other words it makes you want to eat your soap.

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Colemak Progress

My attempt at learning to type using the Colemak layout is still in progress and going well. I briefly considered switching last night but I think I’m going to keep building up my typing skill in it for a few more days at least. It might be next Monday at the latest that I go cold turkey.

Here are my latest stats from Master Key. My practicing was briefly interrupted by a trip to NYC but I’m now at a comfortable 30 words per minute. It took a while to get there from 25 though. Check out the log. :)

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Twelve Angry Men

I finally watched Twelve Angry Men tonight while I was ironing some shirts. Yes I iron shirts on a Saturday night. I have kids. And I almost burnt a few because of the movie. It’s captivating. It’s going on the list of movies to watch with my kids when they’re teenagers.

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Phantom Menace 3D trailer robs Star Wars of its last shred of dignity

In this ridiculous trailer, a narrator desperately tries to Honey Badger his way into making this movie kid-friendly. Can’t wait until the kids get a load of Qui-Gon Jinn’s hilarious Trade Federation banter! Watch this trailer, and weep for future generations.

So nasty. Via io9. Oh, the aforementioned Honey Badger.

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