Archive for June, 2005

This movie was a great surprise. Starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, this movie shows how sometimes, in the end, no matter how good a person can become, their past can haunt them, or vice versa.

Nicole Kidman was smart and believable as The Interpreter, with an upbringing in southern Africa she is able to speak a tribal dialect that only a few others on the earth can speak as well as English. While returning back to the UN building to get some of her things, she overhears an assassination plot spoken in this language and fears for her life. She has people all around watching and tracking her, most of them wanting her dead.

Sean Penn does a good job as usual, always with emotion right at the surface. Penn is an FBI agent that wants to help, but tries not to get too close, as he investigates the accusations she is making. As he digs deeper into Kidman, he finds a painful and sorted past that includes half of her family killed in the war in Africa and photos of her at rebellion rallies to overthrow the country.

Everyone should see this. You never know how it will turn out, whether she is really evil and hiding it, or if the FBI will find the killer among so many people that happen to be in one city, all at once. Kidman and Penn do excellent jobs, without too much foul language or too much gory violence.

I saw Batman! It’s a novel, and it’s geeky. But it’s good. Awesome Awesome Awesome movie.

We went to our first Indianapolis Indians game tonight, unfortunately, we forgot our cameras. But it was a surprisingly good time. A beautiful night, a really nice looking park, and there were about 6 home runs by these little AAA ballplayers. Sarah really liked it, especially since it was our first ball game together.

We have the Winningham wedding this weekend, so we’ll talk to you after that.

Sections Updated: Movies A-B

We had some photos to take after work today, so it was a bit of a long night. Sarah made breakfast for dinner, so that made it all worth it. She has been having a ton of allergy problems lately, and hopefully when she is shopping tonight she gets some different medicine.

I did the back lawn tonight, and have been chillin. Been a little stressed with work. Tomorrow is Batman and I can’t wait.

Jeeze, I am becoming a real freak about these. But like everything I am sure it will wear off, and last night may have been the high point as I downloaded about 20 new extensions from a list of about 300. There isn’t anywhere else to go from here I would guess.

miniT - Tab Organizer

Since I wrote about this in May, this has been bugging me. Here is the browser that I am attached at the hip to, and anytime I say, “Gee, I wish Firefox did this…” I go out and look for an extension that does exactly that. But there wasn’t an updated version of mimiT that worked with Firefox 1.0.4, or at least I thought.

Version 0.5 is now out, and has been out for a little while I think. You have to watch the extensions pages at Mozilla, sometimes you can come across the outdated versions and the only difference is the version number of the extension. Normally Mozilla keeps these updated for you once you install them, but that is the trick, installing them even if they aren’t compatible.

So, enough rambling. This extension lets me drag my browser windows! Finally. Easy to use, and helps manage my information when researching. I love it. Notice the screenshot below. It gives you a nice little purple arrow to show you where you are going to drop your tab in your new arrangement. Supposedly this should be in Firefox version 1.1, and you can test it out on the developer release entitled Deer Park.

Rating : 10 of 10

Like I said, works perfect, I love it. I hope it continues to work in future version of Firefox, or they do incorporate it into the main release.

Mowed the front lawn tonight, and did a lot of browsing / researching online, mostly about new extensions for Firefox, if I didn’t have anything better to do.

Sounds like the weekend is settled. I am going to go with Sarah to Patrick Winningham’s wedding, and we are going to go see Batman on friday night instead. Batman being the more exciting of the two.

Real quick I did a little writeup on two extensions I came across yesterday.

Sections Updated: Browsers

Oh Boy, where to start. I think it is Jason Schwartzmann. Maybe it is Dustin Hoffman, he has been in a ton of weird roles lately, or maybe it is Naomi Watts, who is in a bunch of oft kilter movies herself. But this movie is philosophical and weird, and will make you laugh if you step back and think about what you just saw. From Lilly Tomlin and Hoffmann running around with their spy equipment looking through garbage cans, or Mark Wahlburg and Jason riding bikes around in a fireman’s suit and suit respectively. About finding deeper meaning to things in life, Schwartzmann hires an agency to help investigate a coincidence he has had, running into a Nigerian man on three separate occasions. The movie kind of takes off into strangeville from there with commentary on capitalism, beauty, and development.

If you like movies Schwartzmann has been in, you will like this. Otherwise, stay away from this unless you are drunk and feel like thinking way too hard about things. This isn’t one of those enjoyable weird movies. Like his breakout role in Rushmore from 98, you wonder why there was any acclaim for this movie, I just was a sucker for a cool graphical marketing campaign.

Going to see Hostage tonight, will post that later.

I got a great deal on my bike, when I got it two months ago. I got a speedometer with it, and Justin took the liberty all by himself to hook it up the weekend they were down. Today I gave it a little tweak and it started working. They should call it a guiltometer.

The whole ride home my goal was to average around 20 MPH, even up the hills. I never did dip below 15, and spent most of the time right around 19. Man, I was frickin tired though, so fat, so fat. I will be using that more I am sure on my rides in, especially in the morning hot off a big bowl of sugar cereal.

Emily called tonight. We sent her some jelly bellies from our trip out West. Particulary enjoyable conversation because now that she is working in Chicago, babysitting and such, she is a little less, “Happy bunnies and horsies playing with lemonade,” and a touch more cynical. I think I actually heard her say “suck”.

Sarah continues to be busy, splitting her days at Wheeler Mission and at the school. Yesterday she was talking about riding to Wheeler, ride to work just like me, but we shall see, that is around 9 miles one way. what comes of that.

Sections Updated: Movies H-J

Wow! This was one heck of a movie. Hostage, as you would get from the previews, has a dual meaning. Bruce Willis is a retired negotiator whose family is taken hostage so that he may negotiate the proper setting in a hostage situation with a family to help out your corrupt bad men.

Three boys on what seems like a joyride end up at a mountain side home of a rich man, and two of them decide to steal his car. But as it always happens, this escalated very quickly into something much more. Soon they were in the house, taking a family hostage, and then a cop checking on the house is killed and an alarming situation is taking place.

Bruce Willis, haunted by his past, haunted by the people he believes he has let die, is a sheriff in a small town. He gladly turns over jurisdiction on the hostage situation to state authorities. But then some corrupt men who need information out of the house take his family hostage and he is forced to take hold of the situation, and make sure that the area is secure until more evil men can arrive.

This movie is extremely violent. On the edge of your seat, nervous, I was never sure what was going to happen. One of the boys inside turns out to have some sociopath ic qualities and quickly becomes more than anyone can handle. Bloodthirsty and beyond creepy, Ben Foster really steps it up to make this character unbelievable, after his first couple of movie roles where he played wimpy characters.

Bruce Willis gives such an emotional performance, as does the whole cast, the whole thing seems a little to believable. An awesome movie, that is hardly a warm and fuzzy but more of a jaw dropper, if you can take the violence, this is a really sweet movie with an original story.

Since I began learning about the intricate but rewarding in’s and out’s of CSS, I have been researching sites that have use it. I notice that there are many sites that use “ID” selectors to define a class for block level div element. I have wondered why that is, why they don’t use a “class” instead, but haven’t been able to say why one way would be more or less better than the other.

For example, you may have your main container, which is commonly called the “wrapper” defined either of these two ways;

<div class=”wrap”></div>

<div id=”wrap”></div>

But now I do have a good reason. I have recently figured out a good technique for testing a fully CSS layout. I will digress and admit that Dreamweaver does a decent job of rendering the complex CSS in the design view of the program. But it still is not very accurate, and when it comes down to it, you have to be able to analyze the problems on a website with only your knowledge at hand. Where, coming from a design background, this was much easier to see in Dreamweaver using a table layout.

I have found myself defining to styles in my style sheets, and although they are only used for testing and the real CSS loyalists say that keeping them in the stylesheet defeats the whole purpose of being concise, I leave them anyway for future use. This is usually what I define;

.border{

border:1px solid #000;

}

.background{

background-color:#000;

}

Basically these set classes for a solid 1 pixel black border, and a solid background color of black. That way, I am able to easily apply these styles as a double class to an existing class to help me test and visually see what is going on and where I need to fix my problem. Most of the time it is related to floats and clear issues. This is what the example with the wrapper would look like with my border class;

<div class=”wrap border”></div>

But, when you use an “ID” you cannot define a double class. I actually knew this, but had never really paid close attention until I tried to add a second class and everything messed up and I couldn’t figure out why. This is the big no no;

<div id=”wrap border”></div>

Now, granted, I learned this the middle of last month, and I have since found out about the “Web Developer” extension for Firefox, which I wrote about in my browser section. This allows you to draw borders around all block elements. But this doesn’t solve the same testing issue in IE, or Opera.

So, for that reason, I would recommend using “Classes”. If for nothing else, to make your life easier when testing out your beautiful CSS website.