This past weekend, Glen, Maria, and I went to see War Of The Worlds. The movie itself was visually impressive, and there were some nice scenes. Overall, however, I found the scripting of the characters, and the unbelievability of some of the events that happened to them – even within the context of alien invaders – to detract from it. But, that aside, I would have found it a positive experience except for one thing.

We had to sit through 25 minutes worth of commercials and trailers. Literally. I’m somewhat used to trailers – although the number of those has started to increase to the point where it gets tiring. However, what I’m really not used to is the ever-increasing tide of television commercials now being played in theatres before the trailers themselves start.

Whoever decided to allow the first commercial in a theatre (I’m pretty sure it was Cineplex Odeon that started the trend) should have been shot; whoever decided to allow 10 commercials in a row should be shot along with all of their peers in the company where they work. Okay, maybe not literally. But I’d certainly like to give a good piece of my mind to the executives in charge of these theatres.

I just today read a piece about how movie sales are declining. Specifically, it talked about the poor sales of the movie Cinderella Man. (Incidentally, this is one of my favourite movies – I’ll certainly be pre-ordering it on DVD as soon as I have the chance.) One bit of thinking is that people prefer to stay at home and watch DVDs on their home theatre systems. Another line of reasoning is simply bad marketing or timing for the genre of movies coming out.

Personally, I say it’s the recent theatre experience that’s responsible. If I could go to the theatre and just see the movie I went to see, I’d go more often than I do at present. Because, currently, I don’t want to have to put up with the bullshit of watching TV commercials on the big screen. That’s just ludicrous. At home, I can fast forward, go to the bathroom, or get something to eat. But, in the theatre, where I’m actually paying to be entertained, I end up being tortured with mindless drivel that has nothing to do with the enjoyable couple of hours I’d been hoping to spend. In fact, it colours the whole experience in a distinctly bad light. Whatever fun I got out of watching War Of The Worlds, the one thing I immediately think of now, and remember more than anything else, is … “25 minutes of ads and trailers!”

The studios are going to have to get involved in this at some point, and the theatre chains are going to have to start paying attention to the fact that, just maybe, their glee at ever-increasing ad revenue is having a negative impact on their audience members and box office sales. The experience just isn’t fun any more. And fun is what going to the movies is supposed to be all about.

At the very least, there should be some kind of change whereby the theatres publish the start times of the movies themselves – not the start times of the first set of commercials. Still, I suppose that would just result in people coming later and missing the commercials (and trailers) – and they can’t have that. Maybe I should just start arriving at the theatre 20 minutes late every time. In fact, I think that’s what I’ll do. But I’ll make it only 10 minutes late just to be on the safe side. After all, I do like to see some trailers.

The new name for Mozilla has been officially announced as “SeaMonkey”, and the first release will be version 1.0. This is no big surprise, as that’s always been the codename for the project. However, there’s still a (somewhat vocal) minority that’s upset that this is the name that was actually decided upon. Personally, it’s what I’ve always referred to Mozilla as when filing bugs, so I’m used to it already. Also, I don’t really care what it’s called so long as things start being developed again, and with more energy than has been present recently since the Mozilla Foundation essentially dropped the suite in favour of Firefox.

Also, the beta of Coppermine 1.4.1 has just been released. This version brings a whole lot of new functionality to the existing photo gallery software (that our own Big Squiff uses. I’ll be downloading it and giving it a whirl shortly.

Right, that’s it for now. After some experimentation, I discovered that I couldn’t banish the left-hand column after all. It didn’t look right (to me) without anything on that side. I did, however, make it smaller so that it wasn’t as noticeable – and added the column effect to my journal entries. Likewise, the page “footer”, with my links, also stayed the same in the end.

It’s late now, and I’m starting to lose focus. I’d better stop while I’m ahead. Further tweaks will have to wait until later.

It’s time I gave this journal / home page a bit of a facelift.

I’m going to banish the left-hand column, with my autobiography, which always stays the same. I’m, personally, tired of always seeing the same thing every time I visit. I’m going to create a link to it at the bottom of the page or something (I’m not quite sure how it will work) and free up the remaining space for journal entries.

In doing this, I’ll be implementing columns – something that only the latest nightly builds of Mozilla and Firefox can view. People with other (versions of) browsers won’t see them.

It’s also possible that I’ll get rid of the links at the bottom and move them to the left or right. (They’d take up less space than the autobiographical text.) I’m not sure about that though.

Watch this space…

At least not in some ways. I’d meant to post this a few weeks ago, after having seen Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith, but never got around to it.

In the Lord Of The Rings series, he played Saruman, one of the cooler villains. After making him a memorable character, Peter Jackson edited out his final scene in Return Of The King in the theatrical release since the movie would have been too long if it had been left in. This, despite the fact that many people thought he deserved to have his death scene put into the film. I personally think that Jackson could have trimmed some other things (such as the interminable series of “false endings” at the end of the movie) instead, and left in the character’s scene. I haven’t yet watched the extended DVD version of the final episode of the trilogy, but will be looking forward to Saruman’s proper exit specifically.

Then, we have the second and third installments of the new Star Wars prequel trilogy. Here he plays Count Dooku. In Attack Of The Clones, he comes across as another well done villain and there are a couple of memorable light saber battles, one where he cuts off a young Anakin’s hand, another where he fights Yoda and lives to escape.

But, in the opening of Revenge Of The Sith, he is summarily dismissed when Anakin confronts him again and, after a short battle, Dooku’s almost casually defeated. (This time around, Anakin cuts off Dooku’s hands; Lucas seems to have some kind of a fetish for this kind of result, because it happens more than you’d think would be “normal” – especially in the final movie.) The only explanation for how such a strong opponent (one who earlier defeated Anakin and fought Yoda to a stalemate) can be so quickly and easily beaten this time around, is Anakin telling him that he (Anakin) has simply become stronger than the last time they met.

So, let’s build up a villain as a worthy oppnonent – and then either exclude them completely in the end, or turn them into a relative weakling, undermining the story that went before. With Star Wars, I’m not suprised. George Lucas’s prequels were far from good. The last of the 3 was the best (and enjoyable enough at a certain level), but that’s not saying all that much. They did, however, fit right in line with his recent “revival” revisionism to go back and edit his films to remove references to any seriousness (E.T. gets the police officers guns digitally changed to walkie talkies, and the original Star Wars now has Han Solo only shooting Greedo second in self defence after, stunningly, Greedo misses him from only 2 feet away), and turning them into the kind of mind-numbing 3-year old targetted fare that ended up giving us Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. (Does he, perhaps, have some sensitive grandchildren to whom he’s now trying to tailor and/or reimage his movies?) With Lord Of The Rings, however, it was quite shocking to have Lee’s character so easily mistreated.

Okay, so it turns out that you can’t get dual layer DVD-RAMs. Only double sided – which means that they have to be manually flipped. We ended up losing a lot of our shows that we’d set up to record while we were away in B.C. because they ran out of room on one side.

I took them back to Staples and got my money refunded. I’m not very impressed by this.

I’d also asked one of the guys as Fairview HiFi to source me some that were legitimately dual layer, that didn’t need to be flipped. He took down my name and phone number – and then never bothered to call me. This was 3 weeks ago now. I consider that to be a huge black mark against them. You just don’t do something like that to a customer (ignore them) if you want to keep on good terms. It’s likely I’ll not shop there again – which is unfortunate for them since I’ve done a lot of business with them since moving to Burlington many years ago.

Last Tuesday, a friend of Michelle’s took our old washer and dryer. On Friday night, we took the rest of our appliances out of the kitchen and moved them downstairs to the condo’s recycling / loading room, so that they could be easily taken away on Saturday morning. The dishwasher was the most painful experience. The sales woman who told us that it shouldn’t be a problem for us to uninstall / reinstall that piece clearly had a different idea of the word “problem” than most people.

On Saturday morning everything was delivered. The new dishwasher required a different piece of plumbing (a flex tube rather than a copper pipe for the incoming water) so we went to Home Depot to get that. Also to pick up some longer dryer vent tubing.

After some more fighting with (again) the dishwasher, installing the new one this time, everything was connected and working. At least the new dishwasher is extremely quiet (at least half as noticeable as a microwave – when it’s noticeable at all) and easy to use, so I’m sure it will make up for its troublesome start. We just need to somehow permanently attach it to our cabinetry so that it doesn’t move back and forth at all when the door is open / closed.

We’ve got the oven balanced, and the fridge finally readjusted from the insane angle that the guy who’d delivered everything had set it to. (He’d claimed it needed to be that way so that the doors would close. They closed all right, but they slammed as they did. Things are now much better looking, the fridge no longer “lurks”, and the doors now close gently on their own.)

The washer / dryer assembly, despite the professional balancing of the installers, still vibrates a bit more than we think it should – although certainly not enough to be really noticeable or cause any concern. We’re going to have to purchase a level (we don’t have one) and see if we can do some tweaking there.

The last thing, household-wise, is to install some new grills on our BBQ that we’d ordered earlier and just picked up from the post office yesterday.

Just this past weekend, Michelle and I bought a new set of major appliances for our house – all five. After several unsuccessful meetings with uninformed / unhelpful sales people at Sears, we finally ended up going to the excellent Goemans Appliances in Stoney Creek. The woman who helped us was awesome, and the showroom floor is really quite excellent – a large selection and all very well displayed.

We ended up getting LG models of Washer, Dryer, Dishwasher, and Fridge. We would have kept with LG for our stove too but they don’t make them yet, so, instead, we went with GE.

Everything will be delivered the Saturday after next. We also have “buyers” lined up to take our old appliances. Since we would have paid to have them removed anyway, we saved a bit of money by having friends pick them up for free.

Only the washer and dryer are being installed for us (it seems that getting them balanced is a little tricky). We’ll be installing the other appliances ourselves, which we’ve been told shouldn’t be all that difficult.

A little while ago, Michelle and I noticed that the VCR we had in our living room wasn’t recording properly. Anything we recorded on in would end up having a distorted band at the top of the picture when we played it back. We started to record our shows on the VCR in our bedroom. This worked, but it was less than totally ideal.

Since we’ll be going to Vancouver for a week next weekend to visit Skip, we needed to have both VCRs in working order so that we wouldn’t miss any of our regular shows. We didn’t want to have to watch half of those shows on the distorted playback of the living room VCR.

Perhaps the simplest solution would have been to just try a head cleaner on the machine. We decided that we’d go pick one up, but I first had us stop by Fairview HiFi to check on the current state of DVD recorders / PVRs.

Needless to say, we never made it to the video store to get that head cleaner. Instead, we came out of Fairview HiFi with last year’s Toshiba D-R2 DVD recorder for $350.

(Ironically, we discovered, upon getting home, that we already had a head cleaner and had just forgotten about it…)

We brought it home and replaced our existing VCR and NAD DVD player with this unit. It’s silver and doesn’t match the rest of the equipment in the wall unit, and it’s a bit bulky so doesn’t quite fit as well as we might like but, that aside, it’s a really awesome unit and I can highly recommend a DVD recorder to anyone. The difference in functionality and ease of use is actually quite noticable. It makes me wonder why I didn’t get rid of my VCR some time ago. (Oh, right. I remember now. I didn’t have a job for a long time and then, when I did, it didn’t pay enough…)

Of course, after doing all of this, I soon realized that anything we taped in the bedroom could not be played back anywhere but in the bedroom. Similarly, whatever was recorded in the living room could only be watched in the living room.

So, just this weekend, we went back to Fairview HiFi where I bought another unit for the bedroom. Against Michelle’s “apparent” protests, because she’s since admitted that she really did want me to do this. Now we’re completely free to watch movies in the bedroom too. The unit also works much better (physically) than did the VCR we had there, with the TV being more balanced sitting on top of it.

One other thing that we ran into was the recording media. Computers use DVD+RW or DVD-RW as their recordable (and rewritable) media. They are two different standards, just like beta and VHS. The first time I bought a rewritable DVD disc (and, no, I still haven’t managed to record that episode of Nip/Tuck to it, despite many frustrating hours in the attempt) I asked what the best format would be. I was told that the one best for both data and video was DVD+RW, so that’s what I bought.

Well, with stereo based DVD recorders things are different. Rather than DVD+RW or DVD-RW, the media of choice is DVD-RAM (there’s no such thing as “DVD+RAM” so this is just a regular hyphenation rather than one of two different standards). This allows for bits of data to be written to the disc at any particular point but still accessed sequentially as a whole. So you just keep recording shows onto whatever may already be there, and then erasing them in whatever sequence you want. The data for any given shows can be spread out over multiple “spots” on the disc without a problem. They also support, so they claim, upwards of 100,000 re-writes before needing replacement.

This is all well and good, but the D-R2s I bought only support DVD-RW. In fact, there are almost no DVD recorders that support DVD+RW. I think that all do DVD-RAM (although I could be wrong about that) and most do DVD-RW. Which means that the DVD+RW disc that I’d bought was incompatible with the D-R2s. (I’m pretty sure that my NAD CD player could have played it but I never got around to being able to record a DVD that I could even play on my PC to actually test that portability.) In any case, I picked up a 5-pack of DVD-RWs from Staples for $13. With any luck I’ll actually use them.

Additionally, the DVD RAMs that came with the D-R2s were single sided. 4.7G of data, or 6 hours of TV on extended play. The units also support dual layer DVD RAMs – 9.4G of data, or 12 hours of TV on extended play. Fairview HiFi didn’t sell those, although they pointed me to Staples right across the street (where I picked up the DVD-RWs). They didn’t have them either, but were happy to place a special order for me. They should arrive within the next 10 days. If we’re really lucky, we’ll see them before we go on our trip. If not, I may need to get slightly creative with our TV recording and/or buy an extra single layer disc so I can swap things out the night we get back to get Coronation Street recorded the following morning.

I finally got around to buying a better heatsink for my computer – a Thermaltake SonicTower. It’s meant to be fanless, although there is an optional fan that you can install onto it as well.

I picked this up at good old Canada Computers and, for some reason, didn’t get the optional fan. In looking for a simple 12cm fan here in Burlington, I was met with either ignorance and people who wanted to sell me a whole different CPU cooler, or the fact that they weren’t sold at the stores I checked. As I said, I should have just picked one up at Canada Computers.

I decided to just install it without the fan. It was a little tricky, but not altogether difficult, to install the sink onto the motherboard (which I had to remove from the computer case). The problem came when it was time to reconnect all the cables and power it back on again. It wouldn’t turn on properly. At one point, the motherboard got power, but nothing would actually happen.

It was only the next day, when I checked the manual online from work, that I discovered the reason. One of the power connections had not been hooked up – and it wasn’t for a lack of my looking for it. What was happening, after I knew exactly where it was located, was that it was hiding directly underneath one of the heat sink “towers”, so I hadn’t been able to seen it when scanning the motherboard.

Once I knew where it was, I had another tricky moment. I had to unscrew the power supply and push it back into the case so that I had a bit of room in which to actually attach the 12V lead to the motherboard. I almost thought I might have to remove the sink altogether but, luckily, that wasn’t the case.

My CPU is now running about 10-15 degrees centrigrade cooler than it had been before, and there is no fan so it’s quieter too. I had to change my BIOS so that it would boot past the fact that there was no fan (normally, a serious problem) but everything is working now. I’ll probably still hook up a fan the next time I get to Canada Computers, but there’s no rush.

Now, if only I could make my server more quiet…