Month: June 2007

You can tell a sequel is about to come out when the earlier movies start showing up on TNT, TBS and the other cable channels. We watched (and enjoyed) Ocean’s Eleven for maybe the third (fourth?) time a few weeks ago. Then we went and saw Ocean’s Thirteen. I’d watch Eleven again…Thirteen…not so much. Metacritic’s 62 is on the high end.

It’s been a few weeks, but I still smile thinking of this movie. Raunchy funny and serious at the same time. I can’t believe some of these lines were said out loud, but here’s one of the safer ones:

I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.
(Pulled from IMDB)

Metacritic score of 85 for “universal acclaim”…I’m glad I’m in the universe.

Amusing side note: the official studio site was blocked by OpenDNS’s adult site blocking feature. Having seen the R-movie, I guess I’m not surprised, but it never occurred to me until I got the block page. Here at home, I just unblocked the “nudity” category, though, to view the site. You can check a site’s category for yourself with this domain checking tool. This new OpenDNS benefit we rolled out two weeks ago with St. Bernard has been very popular and very educational.

Question: “Do you feel older?”

Answer: “No, I feel bigger.”

Must be fun to wake up to that feeling on your birthday.

Family waffles for celebration at breakfast, and then a long day at the office for Dad. 🙁

I didn’t plan to, but here I am watching the sun rise over San Francisco. Very quiet and still, clear and warm for a San Francisco morning, so it’s already a bright orange over downtown, even at 5:23am. Sun isn’t visible yet, but it will be soon. I should really go for a run instead of typing. When the brain starts going (an hour ago), sleep became fruitless. I’ll pay for it later, but I do enjoy this solitude. Sometimes I’m even productive, but not so much this morning.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby finally bubbled up in Netflix. (OK, I pushed it to the top.)

I had seen the first 30 minutes already…and that was the best part of the movie, with laugh-out-loud funny scenes. So, I pop in the DVD on a Saturday night expecting to laugh, starting with the previously-viewed scenes. The repeat material was amusing, but not as funny the second time.

The bigger problem? The rest of the movie just sort of petered out…and it felt long. I never expected such a drop-off from a comedy.

After seeing Knocked Up earlier in the week, the bar was pretty high. More on that movie in the near future. Metacritic shows a 66 for Ricky Bobby. Hmmmm…

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles, doesn’t fit my usual genres. Yes, the novel falls in the category of historical fiction, which I do enjoy. But I rarely appreciate author-to-reader discourses. Fowles’ postmodern flourishes distract from a decent tale of love and class in Victorian England, with a dollop of Darwin.

I grabbed this one off the shelf at the library because it was on one of those “you should read these books before you die” lists being promoted that day. Whoops. I had to renew it twice to finish it, and I’m glad to put it behind me.

Another one from a few weeks ago, Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan is practically forgotten already. If you’re going to read Forsyth, it’s The Day of the Jackal or nothing. Slight exaggeration, perhaps, as there are other thrillers he’s penned worth your airplane ride… just not this one.

Almost a month has passed, but I don’t want to forget to mention Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond is unafraid to tackle the big topics. His blend of personal experience and lots of secondary research tells a persuasive story of how the environment underpins cultural success…and failure. This is the flip side of Gun, Germs, and Steel, where he explained why certain cultures “won” over others.

Collapse is more pessimistic. Still, he points out the “Red Queen” hasn’t run her race yet. There are warning signs in environments all over the world. Yet, there is also a rapid change in thinking and action on the environmental front going on in many parts of the world.

Whether progress can arrest (or even reverse) the damaging effects of the past decades and centuries is yet to be seen.

Metacritic gave this documentary a 61. I enjoyed Word Wars more than that. (IMDB link)

I’m not a Scrabble fanatic, but I’m a fan. This film following the competitive world of Scrabble through four players preparing for and competing in the National Championship isn’t a well-done as Word Play, or Spellbound, but if you liked either of those films, this is worth watching. It’s also not terribly long, which was part of the appeal last night.

Confirmation of the rumors started with typical Dick Costolo panache: “Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true.”

What a great team and a great product. I first met Dick via Spyonit at a conference at the W Hotel in San Francisco back in 1999 (?). When the “fantastic four” (Dick, Steve, Eric, and Matt) re-emerged from their post-Spyonit-acquisition-induced-purgatory with FeedBurner, I was interested. I’m ashamed all we worked out for CNET was the Mobile Feed Reader (now gone), but so it goes. First blog post for FeedBurner: February 23, 2004. I’m not sure when the FB team would start the clock, but that’s 1194 days from first blog post to acquisition announcement (or 3 years, 3 months, 9 days).

Google looks pretty smart here, whatever the price. Congrats to all of FeedBurner.