Mittwoch, März 28, 2007


Stephi and I watched "Children of Men" last night, and I'm still mulling over it and thinking it through, which almost always is the deciding factor of whether or not I like a movie or not, actually: If a movie makes me think, regardless of what its message is, I like it.

Children of Men made me think, but it also drew me into its world and stole my breath, especially with its three LONG action shots which are each single takes. It's hard to describe what it feels like to watch a single car chase scene where the camera not once cuts to a different perspective, but the whole scene is a 4 minute long, fluid, intense piece. But the shot that was most incredible was the 9 minute long - yes, 9 minute long - take of Clive Owen making his way through a war zone, into a building where bombs and shells are exploding everywhere, up some stairs with refugees everywhere, then back out through the war zone and into a building. The whole thing is intense and you just don't get a second's rest, because the camera never gives you that rest: It's a single continuous shot. At first I thought this had to be multiple shots and they simply used CGI to stitch them together, but then I read this article. They actually prepared and practiced the choreography and explosions for that 10 minute scene for 12 of their 14 allotted shooting days at that spot, then would try to shoot the whole thing in one take - any time anything went wrong, they had to reset everything and it took 5 hours, and then they'd try again. And they actually made it on their last try! Just amazing stuff...now I'm just really disappointed and confused at why in the world Pan's Labyrinth (an excellent movie itself BTW) got the cinematography Oscar over Children of Men. What in the world? Children of Men is in a league of its own when it comes to cinematography, it should have been a no-brainer.

I found that war zone scene on YouTube by the way...

NOTE #1: PLEASE don't watch this if you haven't seen the movie and think you may yet. The whole movie is set up in a way that it builds up to this incredible 10-minute climax. To watch this scene by itself pretty much ruins the effect. I link this only for those who've already seen the movie or think they won't anyways.

NOTE #2: This scene is quite intense and violent (like the rest of the movie), so don't watch this if you're not comfortable with intense scenes.

OK, here it is.

The symbolism behind Children of Men is also very interesting, here's an excerpt from the excellent Wikipedia article on the movie:
According to Cuarón, the title of P.D. James' book (The Children of Men) is a Catholic allegory derived from a passage of scripture in the Bible.[33] (Psalm 90(89):3 of the KJV: "Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men."[34]) James refers to her story as a "Christian fable"[20] while Cuarón describes it as "almost like a look at Christianity": "I didn't want to shy away from the spiritual archetypes," Cuarón told Filmmaker Magazine. "But I wasn't interested in dealing with Dogma."[6] The audience swims through an ocean of Christian symbolism, where British terrorists named "Fishes" protect the rights of fugees.[35] Opening on Christmas Day in the United States, critics compared the characters of Theo and Kee with Joseph and Mary, calling the film a "modern-day [36]Nativity story".[37] To highlight these spiritual themes, Cuarón commissioned a 15-minute piece by British composer John Tavener, an Orthodox Christian whose work resonates with the themes of "motherhood, birth, rebirth, and redemption in the eyes of God." Calling his score a "musical and spiritual reaction to Alfonso's film", snippets of Tavener's "Fragments of a Prayer" contain lyrics in Latin, German and Sanskrit sung by a mezzo-soprano. Words like "mata" (mother), "pahi mam" (protect me), "avatara" (saviour), and "alleluia" appear throughout the film.
Now, on the one hand, the movie is incredibly depressing and dark - the world basically has no future whatsoever since everyone is infertile. But this is not a "Sin City" where hope is not to be found anywhere whatsoever, rather the movie centers on the hope of humanity in the miraculously pregnant girl Kee who is protected by the main character Theo (whose name means God). And to be honest, this resonates with me a lot.

So, all in all, I give this movie a 14. For those who don't know my rating system (it's been quite a while since I've rated a movie), that means I think it's worth 14 Euros to see this movie.

Dienstag, März 27, 2007

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott


Found this on Ariel's blog.

Freitag, März 23, 2007

Geek Glory

Woohoo! I just got some geek glory by being mentioned on the Lifehacker blog! I helped fix 2 little bugs in a script they had, so they updated the script and...get this...mentioned my alias!



Bring on the geek glory, baby. Although it's nothing in comparison to Mike's gushing being quoted on the Scrybe main page (look for mrcaron). Because of this, he's unfortunately way much cooler than me, in a geek sense of course. But hey, being mentioned on Lifehacker is a definite step toward catching up with him.



BTW, more on Scrybe coming soon in a separate post...

Mittwoch, März 21, 2007


Just wanted to share this Greasemonkey script I found for all you Google addicts out there: Here is a great Greasemonkey script which (collapsably) embeds Google Reader into your GMail. Totally awesome. All you need is Firefox, Greasemonkey installed, then you install the script, and you're done.





Powered by ScribeFire.

Montag, März 19, 2007

Some of you may already know this game: Line Rider. If not, check it out, although I must warn you of extreme addiction potential.

Then, take a look at this and mourn the days and weeks somebody must have spent doing this:

Translation the easy way

Nice.


9AM The Global War on Terror Hits Another Snag

Tech #1: There. Translations are done. All nine languages.
Tech #2: That was fast. I didn't even know you spoke Arabic much less any of the others.
Tech #1: It's easy -- just highlight the text and change the font.
Tech #2: What?!
Tech #1: Yeah. We should hear back from the Army in a day or so. I went ahead and sent the new files off.
Tech #2: [Huge sigh.]
 powered by clipmarks

Donnerstag, März 15, 2007

Discovered this yesterday (even though it's been around for quite some time) and think it's pretty cool: Twitter is basically a mini-blog you set up where your posts can't be longer than 140 letters and are supposed to be answering the question "What are you doing?"



You then hook up with friends and can see what they're doing pretty much in real-time, depending on what you want (too many friends and it might be information overload - you can just scale back then). For example, I learned today that Mikey is trying to learn Spanish on his way to work. Nice.



The idea is simple enough that I could easily see it becoming the Next Big Thing™.



Anyhow, sign up and then add me as your friend so we can keep each other updated on what's going on. :)



See the "badge" at the top of my sidebar to see what I've been doing all day, for example.

Mittwoch, März 14, 2007

For a couple weeks now I've been using Lifehacker's Trusted Trio method to keep my GMail inbox clear, and it's worked great - one more reason why Lifehacker has become one of my favorite blogs to date! The idea is quite simple:



For every single email you get, you as soon as possible get out of your inbox and place it into one of three "bins" (which can be folders in Outhouse Outlook, or, even better, labels in GMail): Action (stuff I need to read and/or reply to!), Hold (stuff I need to be able to keep on the back burner and keep an eye on, like emails I'm waiting on a reply for), or Archive (pretty much everything else that isn't spam or "funny" jokes forwarded by co-workers, you can just delete those). Since placing an email into one of those three options doesn't take a lot of time at all (meaning you usually don't have to even read the whole email to be able to categorize it) - poof! Your inbox is cleared very quickly, also you have a nice handy email "to do list" lying in your Action bin for you to "get done".



Check it out, this is what an empty inbox looks like - beautiful, isn't it?



Donnerstag, März 08, 2007

Some smart guy somewhere figured out Google can sometimes have a higher resolution of satellite images than what you can access on the Google Maps tool. If you manipulate the URL a little, sometimes you can zoom even further in.

For example, get ready for your jaw to drop. Hwhoah.

Now just think what the military can see if they want, I bet they could count my nostril hairs if I looked up like the guy near that well. Of course, I do have a pretty big nose.

Mittwoch, März 07, 2007

NETBible

I just discovered the "NET Bible", a Bible translation specifically developed in order to be a freely quotable, online or downloadable Bible.

I just read their Daily Reading today, which was Judges 1-4, and was pretty impressed by the translation. It seems to have been designed to be first precise, then readable, but with great commentaries any time any translation is disputed in any way.

They have tons of other cool stuff, like really awesome word studies, also you can download the whole thing for free.

Check it out:

NETBible

Montag, März 05, 2007

Well, wonderful - using the Clipmarks apparently got me marked as a spam blog which means I can't post posts until Almighty Google Man checks to make sure I'm not a spam blog. I think the reason is that their wonderful and good-looking AI (you listening, AI?) detected that the clip was copy-pasted automatically from a different page.

Anyhow, what I was GOING to post was a link to this pretty cool physics flash game where you keep removing sticks from a tower built of sticks. The tower responds in real-time. Anyways, check it out (whenever this post gets posted):

Stick Remover

*sigh*

Gotta love it when you're at the receiving end of a false-positive anything.