Month: November 2004

Spartan

Vladimir, Olga and I watched “Spartan” on DVD.

It was one really stupid and boring movie with nothing good to it what-so-ever. Actually it was so bad, that it was good. We ended up laughing a lot and having some good time. That would be out of the question if we would have made a mistake of watching it in the cinema.

Acting and dialogs were particularly bad. I know it was supposed to be based around US army and marines who are not usually pictured as very vocabulareous (what a word! I should be a word designer, don’t you think?), but it ended up having not much of wording except for “Where is The Girld?” phrase. The word “girl” was used about a thousand times in this film.

And soundtrack sucked.

And R is not really appropriate. There was not that much violence in it. Ok, one guy was punched in the face and another had his hand broken. “Rocky” had more violence than that.

An overall rating of 3 out of 10 is really a favor to this movie. Skip this one.

Christmas tree is up and running

I have setup the Christmas tree today. It took me about two hours and I got pretty tired.

There was no instruction in the package, but none was needed. There were three parts of a tree in the box, a metal base, and three screwes. The base needed to be expanded from 2 dimensions into 3 dimensions by rotating one part of it; than screwed with 3 screwes (no screwdriver needed). Parts of the tree were easy to distinguish and stack one upon another.

Making the tree hairy was the time and effort consuming process. Each part of the tree had 2-3 rows of branches. They needed to be bent away from the central core of the tree. Each branch than had three levels of subbranches. Each such subbranch level had 4 small branches. 4 branches x 3 levels per branch x 3 levels per tree part x 3 tree parts = 108 thingies to bend. I could have missed a couple, but noone would notice because the tree got really fluffy and everything.

After the tree was assembled I proceeded with decorating it. I had two packs of yellow reflective balls (about 10 each), one bigger blue ball (the one from Baci candies if you know), three yellow tin foil strips (whatever they call them in English), and that is about it. Nope. Forgot something. I also had a pack of medical cotton wool, a doll of Santa and few Linux penguins. Cotton wool was wrapped around the tree base to hide the metal and imitate snow. Santa was installed on top of that “snow”. And the penguins were set around Santa.

It turned out to be pretty nice. The only thing missing now is a stripe of Christmas lights. We will buy some for the next year I guess.

Oh, and sorry for no pictures. It was pretty late and dark when I setup the tree. I will produce some picture tomorrow with better lighting. Promise.

Free RSS feed builder

Via The RSS Weblog I’ve found out that IceRocket now provides an interesting service – Free RSS feed builder. It is pretty easy to use they say – just create an account, login, fill in some fileds in the form and that’s it. They will create a feed for your site and now the only thing you’ll have to do is to link to it. This sounds like a pretty good option for those people who use content management systems without RSS support, or, even worse, for those who don’t even use CMS for their websites.

Mambo italiano

I just watched an excellent movie on DVD – “Mambo italiano“. This is a great comedy/drama abou immigrants, traditions, family, human relationships, and homosexuality.

This film in many ways is very similar to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding“. It just covers slightly different problems from a slightly different perspective. Both picture “traditional” immigrants excellently, and both have lots of cultural humor. I think that there is even a direct link from “Mambo italiano”, when in the end journalist interviews Angelo Barberini and asks what motivated him to write the story, Angelo replies “The Greek community”. Than, of course, he corrects himself after a pause saying that “it is safe to assume that my family motivated me”.

The film is thought-provoking and entertaining. It deserves a 7 out of 10 in my book.