Terminator Salvation review

If watching movies is like eating food, then watching Terminator Salvation is like going to a buffet. I did not plan to see this in the theater, but I gave in to peer pressure. This also sums up how I usually end up at buffets.

The two good dishes in Terminator Salvation are action and special effects. You know you've had it better elsewhere, but while you're here you might as well enjoy the steaming trays of it that are brought in to refill the ones that were just finished. Along with the decent action/special effects the writer/director decide to fry and/or add too much soy sauce to the rest of the dishes resulting in cliched, formula-laden dishes of love, good vs. evil, coming of age, redemption, horror, and references to the earlier movies.

You walk out knowing you've eaten too much ok tasting food and that all the unfinished food will be thrown out at the end of the night rather than going to any of the starving people in the world. You realize you could have spent the same amount of money on a moderately sized, tasty, yet finishable meal at a decent restaurant. You still manage to enjoy the one or two good dishes that were there, but regret piling on everything else that happened to look good but didn't taste nearly as good as they looked.

Another infrequent update

I ended my fulltime gig with Supernova Inc at the end of July of last year. They moved back to New Jersey and I figured it was time I moved on after 5 years with them and 2 years with their sister company M2 Communications.

I still did freelance for them from home until end of September when I started doing contract work for Paperless Post. I signed on for a fulltime position as their Lead Flash Developer in October and have been working with them since. Paperless Post is a startup that I believe will have a big impact in the world of online stationary. The company is still in stealth mode so I can't reveal too much, but I've been putting in a great deal of time on the project and I'm pretty happy with the way things are going so far.

I'm hoping I might have some free time again after launch. Prior to quitting Supernova and the crazy hours that I've been putting in from July to now I was working on building a game engine. It's been on hold for half a year but hasn't been forgotten.

EEE PC running LAMP

I finally got LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python/PHP) all running on the little laptop.
I'm able to SSH in using Putty from my Windows XP desktop machine and open up application windows using Xming so I don't have to get confused with 2 mice and 2 keyboards right next to each other.

Tomorrow will be the moment of truth when I try to get this tutorial on creating a web chat running on it.

update

I got an EEE PC recently. It's what I've been looking for for a while now; a very portable and affordable computer with a keyboard. PDAs are too small to do any actual work on, regular laptops are too large and heavy to carry around and the ultraportable laptops have all been too expensive. It's nice because I can carry it on the subway and watch movies and read webpages. It's small and light enough that it's not too bad to hold it while standing up if I'm unable to get a seat.

This morning I was even able to get the Flex SDK running on it. The computer comes with Linux rather than Windows which is part of the reason it's pretty cheap, but it also ended up being kind of a pain to get Flex working. So I'm pretty happy now that I can do some development while I'm on the train.

getting things done

If I never finish anything I mention in this blog, at least I will have a documentation of things I wanted to accomplish, but never finished. =P

I haven't worked on a Tetris clone since I last mentioned it. I haven't scanned any of my sketches in since I last mentioned it. What I have been working on is exploring how to work with different binary file formats in Flash in Actionscript 2 with the mdm Zinc Flash wrapper. I've been looking at exporting PDFs, TIFFs, and BMP files for a project at work. Since it's for work it's not a matter of if it will be done, but when it will be done. The BMP file format is looking pretty promising.

In the process of creating an exporter it's helpful to be able to look at example files and look at what you're exporting to see if you're doing something wrong or not. I tried to find a decent hex editor for working with BMP files. What would be ideal is something that would allow me to view the hex in a way the file format is structured. Unfortunately almost everything I've found either only shows the hex in one continuous chunk or does something like what I'm looking for, but is plagued by an overcomplicated and inelegant interface.

Since there's nothing out there that does what I'm looking for the way that I want it to, I'm thinking that might be a good next project to tackle. It would be a binary file viewer that allows you to break it up into meaningful segments for viewing in a fairly easy manner. I also found out that Adobe just released the beta for their Abobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for running rich internet applications on the desktop. So I could kill a whole bunch of birds with one stone by building a hex viewer using the Flex Builder 3 beta that would run in AIR.

Sketches

I haven't forgotten about the Tetris clone I'm supposed to be working on. I have a problem of trying to do too many things at once.

Since I posted about working on that game, I've finished two books, The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders. Both books were excellent in their own way.

I'm currently in the process of scanning my sketchbooks in chronological order for posting on this site so that I actually have some content here rather than only providing links to social sites that I'm a part of. There are at least 10 sketchbooks worth of half finished work that I'll be putting up in the next month or so. I'm done scanning my first one and will upload after I clean up the scans and figure how I want my work displayed.

The most disturbing use of my name

I found this site called, (NSFW) String-Emil via Presstube. It's some German guy, I'm guessing who's name is Emil. The site contains pictures of him in various locales, many of them outdoors wearing string bikini briefs with horrible MIDI music playing in the background. I can't really tell what it's about since it's all in German. He even has a fan club forum which I also can't understand since it too is all in German.