theMediaman.com

A couple pieces of news to share:

Hwan’s coming into Livewire on Monday to interview for a freelance position on a web site. He’s already gotten rave reviews from me as a coder despite Livewire’s habit of hiring people for what they’ve learned rather than what they know. A similar situation happened when I was working at the Spectrum Internet Cafe. Several people hired there had restaurant experience (which is a dime-a-dozen in a University town like Waterloo) and were taught to do tech.

The only people that lasted at Spectrum (and SGCI) were the ones who knew tech and were taught how to run a restaurant. My analogy was that it’s easier to teach someone who knows tech to make a sandwich than the other way around. Same with Livewire. I’m trying to convince them that it’s easier to teach someone who knows how to write good, clean code how to write JSP than it is to get decent programming out of an ITI hack.

As a result of the “Approval Process From Hell” over the last two days at work, I haven’t gotten a whole lot of time off to go see my Japanese family members visiting in Barrie. Monday (the day after Wrestlemania) I’ve decided to use a Vacation day. Unfortunately that’s also the day that Hwan is being interviewed so I’ll miss out on that. Tonight I made the trip up for the evening and got some photos of my two nephews to show off…

…which brings me to my final bit of news. My hosting server that I run theMediaman.com from has just been upgraded to 300 MB of storage. This is more than enough for me to post all my photos that I have taken from my digital camera. Since it’s coming up on one year since I bought it in Japan, maybe I’ll launch the photos section on the one year anniversary of my coolest toy.

Stay tuned…

Saturday I made the trip to Pacific Mall with Syl and Carmina. Neither Syl nor I bought any Hong Kong VCDs or DVDs - although I was very tempted by a Shaolin Soccer DVD for only $17.99. My belief is that we were able to prove our restraint… so next time we go we can buy as many movies as we want with the firm knowledge that it’s not an addiction - just a love of HK films. If you haven’t seen Shaolin Soccer yet, I highly recommend it. Ask me and I’ll lend you my VCD copy.

Today, I had to buy birthday gifts for my neice, Erin and her cousin, Caitlin. Walking in to Walmart I knew of my weakness for movies. It was clear that a stroll through the video/DVD aisle would cost me $20-30 more than I had expected for this trip… and I was right.

On my way out of the store I absentmindedly wound up at the video displays. The only video that stood out was the John Candy/Eugine Levy “Armed and Dangerous”. Recently I’ve found myself attracted to the old 80’s comedies, and this is one I’ve been rolling around in my head for a while to rent. When I saw that it was only $4.88, then it was easy to justify the pocket-change to buy a movie I was expecting to rent in the near future for nearly the same price.

Unfortunatly for my Visa bill, the buying didn’t stop there. In anticipation of my brother’s vacation return to Canada starting tomorrow, I bought the “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back” 2-disc DVD. Expensive, but costing less than most other places, there are aparently a lot of cool extra features on the discs. If nothing else, it looks to make an entertaining evening.

Tomorrow night I’m meeting John, Seiko, nephew’s Dean and Robert, and Seiko’s parents at the Airport. I haven’t seen any of them since last year’s trip, and it will be the first time I have ever seen Robert. While I can’t get any time off work this week due to some very important and short-timeline projects, I plan to go up to Barrie to hang out with the folks as much as I can, as well as AMC’ing with John, Wrestlemania on the 17th, and introducing Simone to the extended family.

agnelson’s review of “We Were Solders”

I went and seen “We were soldiers” last night with Mel Gibson. I think I may

be “losing my edge” because I found it very disgusting. Just a movie full of

shooting and killing. I give it 0 stars, don’t go see it.

My response and review of “Hart’s War”

Mel Gibson has been doing entirely too many “yay! We’re Americans”

movies lately… especially for an Aussie. All these movies disguise

themselves as war movies to get the guys to come in, but it always seems to

me like it’s just a fucking drama with emotional growth of the characters.

The explosions are unnecessarily thrown in to maintain the interest of those

with phenomenally short attention spans.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Hart’s War yet, but if you haven’t then

go see that one. Not a lot of dumb explosions or stupid pride in being a

solder… just real honour along the lines of the good old war movies like

Dirty Dozen. Not the best movie I’ve seen, but a lot less flag-waving than

most of the recent war flicks

My birthday and The Week of M.E. (Mediaman Enthusiasm) has come and gone. I haven’t updated my website for a while since I dropped out of the habit a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to accomplish other goals recently - work on freelance sites, cleaning my apartment (a massive job) celebrating my birthday, going to the Gorillaz concert, consoling Simone during a very busy time at school and just general havok around the Internet including the destruction of SPAMmers and stealing a website domain from a cyber-squatter.

Mom & Dad got me a new Telus phone for my birthday (more about that and its features in an upcoming entry) and one of those nifty ROOTS scarfs that everyone is covetting.

The Gorillaz concert was really different. Since it was the first show in their North American tour (first and last tour, apparently) there were a few bugs in the system. We got to watch it from just back and to the left of the “broadcast booth” where they cue up all the video to play on the big screen. Sort of like watching “The Making Of…” at the same time as seeing the end result magic.

In my humble opinion, they could have easily taken it up a notch with just a little effort, and it would have made a difference. They were almost there already. However, the real only disappointment was the lack of an encore despite the rowdy fans. The Boston show got an encore three days later, so why not Toronto?

Since the advent of my birthday week, my DVD collection has doubled in size. My deal with the devil has warrented four movies - The Matrix, The Princess Bride, High Fidelity and The Mummy: Ultimate Edition. Despite the fact that I already own the first three on VHS, they are three of my favourite movies. I figured they would be in my collection eventually, so why not now?

Simone got me a really old Jackie Chan movie, “Half A Loaf of Kung Fu”. You can always spot the oldest Jackie Chan movies when his name is spelled “Jacky”, his hair is much bigger and his dubbed voice has a perfect British accent. If the disc had subtitles it would be great to watch it in the original language since the dubbed script is sometimes horrible. But Chan is Chan and the movie is pretty good.

On a spending spree at Future Shop, I picked up my other favourite movie of all time - 2010: The Year We Made Contact. This movie is what got me into Astronomy and my facination with space. It remains my favourite underrated film even though The Princess Bride is a close second.

While shopping, I also picked up John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” and watched it at Simone’s place on a Digital Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound system. The subwoofer effects channel makes you feel the gears shifting. This is the purest I’ve seen the film since it was in the cinemas… and possibly even better since Waterloo movie theatres didn’t always have 5.1 Surround Sound.

For Simone I picked up a nicely angst-ridden Nine Inch Nails live EP to get her through her busy week. Although I plan to copy it (F*** You, Hilary Rosen) I also picked up the Gorillaz G-Sides remixes and the new Chemical Brothers disc.