I’ve released version 3.1 of the AJAX spell checker.  This releases fixes the bug where it didn’t work in IE and also adds a config option to place the spell checker controls below or above the text area.

Download it here!!

I just thought I’d share a poem I wrote a few weeks ago.  So here ya go.  Enjoy.

The End

Post-apocalyptic
motorcade of memory
sidles down the lane of compunction.
Raven torrents of smoke spew forth
from scorching earth.

The cavalry arrives
lost, lugubrious,
late.

I rewrote this a couple months ago and never got around to releasing it, but I just finished putting the spell checker site back up, so I figured now would be as good a time as any.  It’s the new version 3.0!!  I’ve completely rewritten the Javascript with Mootools 1. and a good portion of the PHP backend.  But it’s faster and more awesome now than ever before.

Go grab it here!

If anyone has been here recently – doubtful I’m sure – you might’ve noticed that I moved to WordPress (not the old comments yet though).  It’s a lot more awesome than anything I feel like taking the time to write, so here it is.  Hopefully it’ll help me focus more on writing rather than trying to maintain my own software, which is what I’m really looking for.  I’ve been using it for quite a while over at http://www.movie-recipes.com and have been very impressed.  You might need to resubscribe the RSS feed if you were one of the few people who were previously subscribed.

Also, we’re (Nathan Oliver) playing a show at the Soapbox in Wilmington tonight, and I came early just to bum around.  I went over to the Battleship U.S.S. North Carolina and here are a few pictures that I took.

[Show as slideshow]

We discovered that Google Maps has street views of Raleigh now. Apparently in their quest to allow you to “drive” literally anywhere without leaving your house. They drove through our apartment complex, unbeknownst to me, and took pictures of it all. I figure it’s a Monday since I work from home on Mondays and that’s my car you see below in the screen cap from Google Maps.

Check it out here

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.