I just wanted to put up a little update on our Movie-Recipes.com site, and whore out our RSS feed to whoever might see this. We've been going pretty strong and are posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday right now. We are entertaining the possibility of putting up a new recipe every weekday, but it's still up for debate at the moment.  We've added our first poll up there too, so make sure you vote on that.  We'll be posting a new poll about once a week, so make sure you keep visiting!

If you still haven't subscribed to our RSS feed over there make sure you subscribe right ta-now!

Subscribe here!

I realized, after thinking about it, that it would be pointless to review and summarize movies. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. So rather than reinventing something, my friend Jason and I invented something new. That's what I'm going to dub "pulling a Ben Franklin".

We've started a site called Movie Recipes. You can check it out for yourself, but the basic idea is that you don't care about what we think about a movie, you just want to know if you're gonna like it. So what we do is take a movie and break it down into it's "ingredient" movies. That is, we make a recipe for a movie using other movies we've seen as ingredients.  Clever huh?

The way we figure it, it's more useful for finding a movie you'll like than some random guy on IMDB posting that they love or hate a movie for whatever reason. And if you don't like our recipe, post your own or a modification of ours. It's so simple!

We'll be posting new recipes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so subscribe to our RSS feed and maybe you can find a new movie to like.

Check it out at http://www.movie-recipes.com

Well, I finally saw my 1000th movie yesterday. I'm now a member of the elusive "One-Grand Club," as it's called. It's akin to the 5-Timers Club of Saturday Night Live. You may be saying to yourself, "that's great and all, but don't you get anything?!" I'm glad you asked. Upon admission to the club, you receive a red velvet robe lined with the skin of baby seals. Very posh, indeed. To mark this milestone, I'm revising my rating system to be four times as granular! I found recently that I'd like to give half-ratings to some movies, so I'm now rating movies from 1 to 10 with the ability to give half a point! I'm also going to start reviewing the movies I see — starting now.  Exciting I know…now on with the reviews.

Movie 999: 30 Days of Night - 6.5 / 10

In order to see my 1000th movie I had to first see my 999th movie, as one might natually deduce. For my said movie, I went to see 30 Days of Night, a vampire movie starring Josh Hartnett and Melissa George based on the graphic novel of the same name. This vampire movie takes place in modern day Alaska in the northern most town in the US. Every winter, the town doesn't see the sun for 30 days, hence the title.

A group of vampires (brood?, coven?, clan?, murder?, coalition?) comes to town to feast on the living. Chaos ensues.

Not being well-versed in vampire lore, I have a rather inexperienced palette as far as quality and accuracy are concerned. Keeping that in mind, here are my impressions of 30 Days of Night.

The music was great. The composer did an excellent job of conveying the mood and keeping it creepy and intense.

As far as fictional stories with fictional creatures go, this one was pretty plausible. Ignoring the part about vampires not being real, I could totally see this happening. The vampires weren't cheesy or over-the-top, so it worked really well.

Crazy vampire language. I don't know what language vampires traditionally speak, but these spoke Vampire'ese I assume…or maybe it was Romanian, who knows. Whatever it was that they spoke was 1) subtitled, and 2) unintelligble by me. This added to the "plausiblity" factor for me. It would be naive to assume all vampires spoke English.

I read somewhere that this movie was "more relentless than The Descent." While I don't necessarily think that's true, it is pretty gory. Don't take your 9 year old to see it like the guy in front of me.

In the end, I enjoyed it, but it could have been paced a little faster to keep it more intense.

I give 30 Days of Night 6.5 blood-curdling vampire screams out of 10.

Movie 1000: The Brothers Solomon – 4 / 10

This movie was not awesome by a long show, but good for a few laughs nonetheless. It stars Will Forte, Will Arnett, and Kristen Wiig, of SNL fame, so it plays like an SNL movie (i.e. A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, etc.). The Brothers Solomon is about two brothers who have zero experience with women and want to have a baby to save the life of their ailing father.

The premise is pretty dumb (Think 40 Year Old Virgin meets Dumb and Dumber meets Knocked Up, only 33% as novel), but that's to be expected when Will Forte is put in charge of writing the screenplay. It feels like one of his typical SNL sketches that lasts for about an hour and a half. So it moves a little slowly at times and uses a few gimicks one too many times.

Worth a few laughs for sure, but I wouldn't pay too much to see it. Maybe give it a whirl if it's on HBO or something.

For my 1000th movie, it wasn't stellar. But try as I did to find a Schindler's List or an Apollo 13, I just couldn't come up with anything. So I just picked the first goofy comedy I saw that I hadn't seen yet. Oh well, here's to 1000 more!

I give The Brothers Solomon 4 out of 10 on three. One, two, three! 4 out of 10!

I believe I posted approximately 12 times in 2007 (not counting the road trip posts of course, as that practically doubles the post count). I thought for my first post back in quite a while, I would just update whoever may read this on a few of the goings on since I last mentioned pictures of my trip to San Francisco were up…in October.

October 19th, 2007 – Amy and I got engaged (to be married)! The shindig goes down on October 18, 2008, so we'll see you there if you're one of the few to receive an invitation.

November 22nd, 2007 – The United States celebrates the 389th annual Thanksgiving. Thanks! Check out the pictures from our Christmas Tree picking expedition.

December 24th, 2007 – I finally beat the Slayer – Raining Blood on hard in Guitar Hero III. Only Lou on hard and the last two sets of expert left!

December 25th, 2007 – Jesus Hallowed Christ held his Guinness World Record breaking 2007th birthday.

(Side note: Right now, on this page, I see ads for the following: Space Propulsion, Piano Stool, Blood In The Stool, Irregular Stool, and Yeast Bread. If anyone can explain how those are in any way connected and why they might show up on my website, I'd appreciate hearing that.)

December 31st, 2007 – I came up with a few New Year's resolutions. 1) Write more. 2) Read more. 3) Lose a little weight. 4) Exercise more (see number 3).

January 6th, 2008 – I saw my 997th movie. That's only three more to go to get to 1000 if I'm doing the math correctly. I'm debating on what to try and make my 1000th movie. It seems like a milestone of some kind, albeit arbitrary. If you've got any suggestions for what that movie should be, let me know and I'll consider it. Although, chances are quite good that it will be some film wholly undeserving of the "One Grand" moniker. We'll see.

I put up the photos I took while I was in San Francisco again this year for the Zend PHP Conference.  You can check em out here.  It's mainly the pictures I took at Alcatraz and some other random parts of the city.  There are a couple of totally awesome signs that I took pictures of though.

While Kip was scanning old violent art, he came across the page in his 8th grade year book that I signed.  I really don’t know why I decided to sign his year book this way, but I did…in ink.  So I thought I’d share it since it’s pretty hilarious (at least I think so).

Some observations:

• We thought it was funny that Charles Manson’s kids also smoke cigars.
• I said “You’re coller than Charles Manson.”  Typo aside, I think that’s a fairly decent compliment.
• I don’t know the accuracy of the Charles Manson quote, “I’m gonna kill you.”  He may or may not have ever said that.
• I think the Home Simpson stuff came from an episode of The Simpsons (maybe a Treehouse of Horror?) where someone (Homer?) went crazy and was like “There’s Homer Simpson, there’s Homer Simpson.”  Maybe someone else can clarify exactly what that was about, because I don’t really remember.
• The Swastika on Charles Manson’s head is a left-facing Swastika (also referred to as a sauwastika) found in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and the bottom one (as well as Kip’s “Nazi Star”) are of the right-facing decorative Hindu form rather than the Swastikas that the Nazi’s used.

There you have it.  A small view into my crazy messed up brain.

Apparently one of two things has happened: Either Stephen King has read my previous post, or I'm some kind of prolific visionary on par with Stephen King's thought processes. Just to stroke my ego, I'll think both, heh.

"What the crap are you talking?" you say. Well, I'll show you.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20044270_20044274_20050689,00.html

That one little part near the beginning of his review he talks about the exact same thing I did. To be certain, Mr. King's version is better structured and more articulate, but the ideas are the same nonetheless.

I'll just hang on to this for later so at some time in the future I can ask Stephen to "do me a solid," as the kids say.

Me: 1, Stephen King: 40 billion (cause that's how many books he's written…in the last year)

I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yesterday and I think that it was an appropriate ending to the series. But that's not what I want to comment on. The NY Times decided to keep children's books off of it's bestseller list, opting to keep a separate children's books list for such things. Obviuosly this won't have too detrimental an impact on Harry Potter sales, but I'm questioning whether or not Harry Potter should be considered children's literature at all. I was at the midnight release party and I'd venture to say that the average age was probably close to 19. Maybe that was partly due to the fact that it was midnight and close to 1:45 in the AM before we left; I don't claim to be a parenting expert. But there were a decent number of younger kids there.

But I digress. The books started out being more for children than not, but the story matured greatly with each successive book. The case in point is what I'm going to label the profanity quotient. I assume that lots of parents are going to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to their child. For a so-called children's book, I encounted quite a few damn's, bastard's, bitch's, and effing's. I don't know about you, but I can't recall any children's novel I've ever read that contained the line, "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" So my question is, do the more parents skip over these lines or leave it as the author intended and vehemently shout the line in their best Molly Weasley impersonation?

I'd like to think the latter.

My roommate and I are big fans of indirect lighting, especially in our living
room area. Glare is our arch-nemesis, so we work to keep it at bay as much as
possible. In our quest to seek the perfect lighting atmosphere, we came upon the
idea to use dimmers to create various scenes depending upon what you may be
doing. After we received all our requisite parts, we got our automated
web-enabled lighting system up and running in no time. I thought I’d write up a
little tutorial for those of you who, like us, are enthralled at using way too
much technology to do something simple. Suck it Ockham! The simplest solution
may be the best, but it certainly might not be the most awesome and flashy.

Before you can set all this up you’re gonna need a few
things. Basically the only part you’ll really need that you probably don’t have
around somewhere are the dimmers and controller. We picked up four INSTEON LampLinc Dimmers ($34.99 each) and one INSTEON PowerLinc USB
Controller ($69.99). We also are using a Cisco IP Phone to control the web
interface, but you can use anything from your Wii to your cell phone. Anything
that runs a web browser will work.

You’ll also need a couple pieces of software to control the dimmers. We are
using InCmdLine. It’s just a command line utility that executes the
Insteon commands. You’ll also need the Smarthome Device Manager to talk to the actual devices.

The only other thing you’ll need is a web server and a scripting language
(either PHP or ASP — we’re Abyss and PHP but I’ll
let you decide what to use and set those up yourself).

The first step is to plug in your dimmers and your lights (incandescents
only!!) where you want them and your USB controller to your computer.

NOTE: We had some crazy-go-nuts issues when using a computer power
supply that wasn’t very great. Our PLC (PowerLinc Controller) would only work
if we had enough flourescent lights on to cancel the interference created by the
not-awesome power supply. It took forever to figure out. So make sure you’ve
got the PLC plugged into a PC with a good quality PSU and not your 225 watt Wal-Mart PSU.

All these dimmers have what are essentially MAC addresses on them, you’re
going to want to make sure you’ve got those written down.

Basically what we’re going to do is just use the web server to shell out to
run the InCmdLine exe with the options we want to set the lights for our scene.
An easy way to accomplish this is to just use .bat files that basically equate
to macros to set up your scene.

So you’d have something like this to set up a movie scene:

:: —– Begin movie.bat —–

InCmdLine.exe 0A.8D.D7 d50, 0A.82.E2 d25, 0A.8F.BB on

:: —– End movie.bat —–

This just tells the first dimmer to dim to 50%, the second one to dim to 25%,
and the last one to be 100% on. So make your bat files and stick them in the
same directory as your web scripts for the lights.

So, I’d recommend putting InCmdLine.exe in your Windows directory or
something (something in %PATH%) so you can execute it from anywhere. You also
need to make sure that the SmarthomeDeviceManager is running before any of these
things will work.

So, now that you’ve got the hard part done, we just need a simple script that
will let you run your scene batch files from a web browser.

Here’s some really simple php that’ll give you the basic idea with this batch
file model. I have two files, an index.html file that is going to serve as a
barebones interface and then a setMode.php file that will do the work.

The index.html file will just have links to setMode.php?mode=movie where mode
is the filename of your batch file minus the .bat part. We’ll do it this way
for simplicity’s sake.

Here’s the php:

<?php
$mode = trim($_GET['mode']);
exec($mode .
‘.bat’);
header(‘Location: index.php’);
?>

That’s it! I went more complicated with an XML config file and stuff, but
this gets the point across. Just point your web browser at your page and see if
your lights change. Now you can come up with some crazy awesome way to control
your lights. We personally opted for a Cisco IP phone on an end table. Maybe
you could do what we did, or an internet device, or even voice recognition.

Good luck!

Delicious Library is my new favorite application for OS X.  It helps you organize your library of books, movies, games, and cd's.  If you know me, you know I love to keep my media cataloged and organized.  This app kills at doing that.  It let's you just scan in a bar code on your book or movie with your iSight and it automatically goes and looks up all the information on Amazon.com for you.  If you like to keep tabs on your media and who borrows it, this is the best thing evar.  It's only for OS X, so if you've only got Windows, buy a Mac.