Month: January 2005

Tricks with Zippo lighters

If you ever had a Zippo lighter you must know of at least one tricky way of lighting it up. It’s just the nature of the thing. Well, if you didn’t learn your trick, or if you were the best in your area and noone could show you anything knew with the Zippo thing, check out this website. It has a huge number of movie clips with all sorts of tricks. There are so many of them, that they even needed some sort of categorization, which there is.

Even though I don’t smoke any more, I am thinking of getting back to my mad Zippo skills. This site can provide for like a year of training.

Seabiscuit

Watched “Seabiscuit” on DVD. This is a pretty good family movie. It covers all the usual subjects about family, believe, giving second chances, friends, understand and all these. It also has a good coverage of horses and horse racing. I don’t know how accurate the subject is covered, but it does provide a good insight into horse racing.

As a film, it has a good story and a nice mix of joy and sadness as any drama should have. Most of the acting was OK, which was expected from the OK actors such as Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, and Tobey Maguire. It was William H. Macy who did an outstanding job although playing a really background character – radio commentator. The movie is worth watching for many reasons, and he is truly one of them.

I’ll rate this film as 7 out of 10, hoping for some more films like with a slightly more original story.

Intercollege.info

There is now an unofficial website about Intercollege – Intercollege.info. It just has been started recently, but it seems promising. As far as I understood it is maintained by some of the Intercollege’s students. They provide several forums to talk about what really bothers them. They can even open up new forums as long as at least 10 people need it.

Too bad I am almost finished with the college by now, but still maybe I’ll use the resource to share my bit of information, although it may be slightly old and outdated…

The Man Who Cried

Watched “The Man Who Cried” on DVD. It is amazing how little this movie missed to be on my favourite list. It has to stay with the average ones now. Pity.

Good things about this movie are: story, pace, casting, acting, photography, and music. I liked how one small girl from the first part of the movie was used to bring in three more main characters. That was an interesting move. I liked the acting of all four main actors – Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, and Johnny Depp. All of them did really good jobs, but they weren’t pushed to the limit or anywhere closed. I’ve seen all four of them doing much better.

What I think this movie needs is more dramatism and depth. It almost touched me. But when it almost happend the closing credits started rolling. First half of the movie with the little girl had a lot more sadness and sympathy to it.

I’ll rate it as 6 out of 10. Good, but could have been so much better!

Major cleanup

After two hours of major cleanup I have disposed of about 100 kilograms of paper, floppies, CD-ROMs, and other useless junk. I have thrown away 99.9% of all my college notes and course outlines, motherboard manuals, soundcard drivers, MS-DOS user guides and what not. All these activies have freed up a lot of cupboard and wardrobe space, so we won’t have to buy any.

In the process of doing it I have seen things which changed my mood from joyful to sad and back again through angry. I have found a bunch of Internet.Cy magazines from 1996 with Cyprus URLs and mIRC documentation spanning pages. I have found few printouts of Eric Raymond’s essays from the time that was before I learnt who ESR actually is.

Nostalgy and freshness are two strongest feelings I experience right now. Third one is tiredness.