I don’t know what it is but I’ve been really bored with the movies I’ve been watching lately. Even independent movies, which have become my favorite movies over the past couple years, haven’t kept my interest. Too much crap is coming out of Hollywood. I’ll give you some examples(warning, may be minor spoilers).
Southland Tales: The only thing I can say about this movie is WTF? I shouldn’t be surprised at how weird and dumb this movie was. It was by the same guy that did Donnie Darko which has to be one of the most overrated pieces of crap to come out over the past several years. Even all the celebrities (Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Rock, Sean William Scott, Kevin Smith) couldn’t save this movie.
Sweeney Todd: Pure crap. The play is much better. Depp was ok, Helena Bonham Carter was terrible. Boring movie.
No Country for Old Men: Another movie that was overrated. Yes, the acting was good, but the story I thought was stupid. Why did they have to kill Woody Harrelson so quick? Why introduce the character at all if five minutes later he’d be dead? Made no sense. I don’t see how people liked this as much as they did.
The Mist: This movie I was actually made me mad at myself for watching it. I thought, Steven King and the director of The Shawshank Redemption (also written by King), it should be halfway decent for a horror movie. No. Though it was funny to see the religious nut convert everyone and how stupid people get during a panic, the ending spoiled the entire movie. Complete crap. There’s been movies where the ending has totally saved an otherwise crappy movie (The Others), but this is a case where the ending made me so mad and was so terrible I can’t believe the studios even let it be shown in theaters that way.
I have watched a couple good movies recently. Dan in Real Life I thought was excellent. Steve Carrell did a great job and it was one of those movies that engulfed you and made you feel what was going on while watching it. The Darjeeling Limited was surprisingly awesome. The performances were great and the soundtrack was even better. It was much better than Wes Anderson’s previous film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. For the most part though, everything has been pretty bad, and with the looks of what Hollywood is doing (remakes of TV shows, cartoons, and movies (a remake of Short Circuit… really?)) it doesn’t look to get any better any time soon.
Feedburner Broken API
For a few weeks Feedburner’s API has been broke. If I try to pull the statistics of the title and URL of my posts it comes back “NO TITLE.” The statistics package I use, mint, has a Feedburner pepper and it has been showing NO TITLE for quite a while. Apparently this has been reported but has yet to be fixed. Come on Google, fix your stuff. If you’re going to provide an API, make sure it works. I want to see which posts people are viewing and clicking in my feeds. NO TITLE doesn’t help me very much.
Domain Switching
I’m considering moving my blog over to pieceofshep.com. This was where my blog was originally set up long ago (maybe four years ago). The domain fits better with my blog’s title obviously. The only thing I’m worried about is what’s going to happen to all the search engine referrals. I can use an .htaccess rewrite to forward the URLs from mikeschepker.com to pieceofshep.com and that should work ok. I just need to figure out what rules I need to 301 mikeschepker.com/blog/wp-permalink-structure to pieceofshep.com/wp-permalink-structure. I have some good searches on my site and would not like to lose that incoming traffic. This may take some research. If anyone has suggestions, let me know.
Wanted: More Real Estate
I love my MacBook. I love it more than my previous Compaq laptop. It’s so much lighter, thinner, and well, OSX is much better than Windows. The reason I went with a MacBook and not a MacBook Pro was because I didn’t want a laptop that was as large as my old one. I wanted it lightweight and compact. The problem I see now, and it’s not so much a problem as a minor annoyance, is that I miss the larger screen. My old laptop had a 17 inch widescreen. My desktop has a 21 inch widescreen, and the MacBook has a 13 inch. The only time I really need it is when I’m working on website stuff. I like to have multiple windows open, along with IRC and instant messenger, and be able to move stuff around. More screen space equals more productivity for me. With a 13 inch screen Firefox or Smultron or Transmit take up the entire screen. Oh well, I still prefer working on my MacBook to my Windows Vista machine 99% of the time and I have no regrets in buying this over the MacBook Pro. I really can’t wait for my next desktop. I do believe that will be a Mac too.
A Disappearing Community
One of the things that has bugged me over the past year or so with WordPress is that the community seems to be disappearing. Some of the developers have left to create other software and some have just left. It seems the passionate group of volunteers that helped support WordPress have moved on as well. The WordPress IRC channel was once a place I enjoyed hanging out in and helping whenever I could. Now, I never speak in there. I hardly look at what’s being said in there at all. Some of the volunteers that helped out in the forums have even been asked to leave by Matt and company. Matt seems to be doing a great job at driving a wedge in the community. His way, or leave. Or as he once put it, you don’t like it, fork it.
Themes.wordpress.net is pretty much a graveyard. I used to go there several times a week to check out all the nice new designs that people were making. Even if I wasn’t ever going to download the themes it was nice to see what was being produced. Now the only place that publishes new WordPress themes on a regular basis seems Weblogtoolscollection.com, and that has even seemed to slow down a bit. I don’t know if that’s because passionate theme developers aren’t producing themes anymore or what. Now your choice is to use Google and hope you don’t find a site that puts malicious links and/or code into the theme you download.
The latest thing that Wank pointed out is that the Plugins page on the Codex no longer exists. It was a fairly complete list of plugins for WordPress. It’s no longer there. So if Matt chooses to tell you your plugin isn’t good enough for the official repository, there’s no place to notify users that your plugin exists. That page on the Codex was a great page. Also absent from Extend is the link for themes. It was there before 2.5 came out. So, Matt takes away the theme repository, has the plugins page deleted, drives away developers and volunteers and this is supposed to be a community? Yeah, right.
Movie Boredom
I don’t know what it is but I’ve been really bored with the movies I’ve been watching lately. Even independent movies, which have become my favorite movies over the past couple years, haven’t kept my interest. Too much crap is coming out of Hollywood. I’ll give you some examples(warning, may be minor spoilers).
Southland Tales: The only thing I can say about this movie is WTF? I shouldn’t be surprised at how weird and dumb this movie was. It was by the same guy that did Donnie Darko which has to be one of the most overrated pieces of crap to come out over the past several years. Even all the celebrities (Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Rock, Sean William Scott, Kevin Smith) couldn’t save this movie.
Sweeney Todd: Pure crap. The play is much better. Depp was ok, Helena Bonham Carter was terrible. Boring movie.
No Country for Old Men: Another movie that was overrated. Yes, the acting was good, but the story I thought was stupid. Why did they have to kill Woody Harrelson so quick? Why introduce the character at all if five minutes later he’d be dead? Made no sense. I don’t see how people liked this as much as they did.
The Mist: This movie I was actually made me mad at myself for watching it. I thought, Steven King and the director of The Shawshank Redemption (also written by King), it should be halfway decent for a horror movie. No. Though it was funny to see the religious nut convert everyone and how stupid people get during a panic, the ending spoiled the entire movie. Complete crap. There’s been movies where the ending has totally saved an otherwise crappy movie (The Others), but this is a case where the ending made me so mad and was so terrible I can’t believe the studios even let it be shown in theaters that way.
I have watched a couple good movies recently. Dan in Real Life I thought was excellent. Steve Carrell did a great job and it was one of those movies that engulfed you and made you feel what was going on while watching it. The Darjeeling Limited was surprisingly awesome. The performances were great and the soundtrack was even better. It was much better than Wes Anderson’s previous film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. For the most part though, everything has been pretty bad, and with the looks of what Hollywood is doing (remakes of TV shows, cartoons, and movies (a remake of Short Circuit… really?)) it doesn’t look to get any better any time soon.