Year: 2006

I’m doing it! I’m doing yet! Yes, I’m finally doing it!

I have decided to separate my movie reviews from my personal blog.  Rarely any of you are interested in my reviews, and those of you who are can read them now at Filmocular.com. I won’t post anymore movie reviews here – be warned.

Filmocular.com won’t have anything much except for movie reviews.  Maybe, occasionally a link to an interesting interview or trailer will popup, but I don’t think that that will happen very often.

Since Filmocular.com is very specialized website, I thought it would be a good idea to try and make some money out of it.  Google Adsense program was among the first things that I’ve installed, but by far not the only.  For every movie I will also provide links to online shops – Amazon for DVD shopping and Movie Poster for posters.  (These might change in the future.)  I have signed up for affiliate/associate programs with all those shops and hopefully will be getting few cents here and there.  So, if you’re going to buy anything from any of those shops, I’d appreciate a lot if you could do it through Filmocular.com.

I still haven’t finished with configuration of the website and a lot is still missing.  ‘About’ page will be up shortly.  Also, there will be a lot of listings/searches by film genres, years, and people in the crew and cast.  These all is coming very soon.  (I am pushing this announcement out earlier, so that search engines and aggregators could catch-up in time.)

Content-wise, from now on I will be posting all my movie reviews straigt to Filmocular.com.  I will be also copying movie reviews that I have written for this site.  That should give me a nice starting point of above zero content value.

You’re welcome to visit, bookmark, promote, and critique the site, as usual.  All help and feedback is much appreciated.

Maxim and I were on our way to the park today, as usual. We were passing by the Starbucks joint, when I got a little bit freaked out by a group silence.

Starbucks was full of school kids. They were all enjoying their cappuchinos and espressos, talking as loud as kids do. There was this constant buzz in their and about 100 meters around. But, suddenly, when Maxim and I were approaching the cafe, ALL of those kids looked at us and shut up.
Now, I’m not your average where-is-my-panic-button guy. I try to keep my alert levels up at all times, and so I am not easily caught off guard. But this was definitely the moment.

I used my side sight to carefully look around. Nothing suspecious. Then I checked the shadows and reflections around me to see if they would give me any hint of danger. Nope. Everything is clear. I then looked around and slowed down almost to a stop.

Got it!

The kids weren’t actually looking at me. Their focus was on behind of me, where was this policeman, who just arrived, and who stopped a small bike with a couple of teenagers who were driving without helmets.

Oh, let’s what it is! Kids, bikes, helmets, and the policeman! Now I could relax.

It seemed that most of the kids in the Starbucks arrived there on a bike. Obviously, most of them didn’t have either helmets or proper documents. And that got them all very worried when they so the police work.

Whooh. Nothing to see here. Catch your breath. Move along.

Once again I have to thank my brother, who supplies me with hardware, fast and cheap.  This time he got me D-Link DWL-G520 wireless card (PCI).  I plugged it into my home server (appologies for a few short downtimes), downloaded and installed madwifi drivers from ATrpms, and go immediately connected with my notebook.  Everything works extremely well.

Now I have to think about securing the wireless network.  Previously, I was thinking to ignore the issue due to the lack of competent neighbors, but when I scanned looked around and found as many as 4 wireless networks within my reach, I reconsidered.

The question now is which option to choose?  WEP, WPA-PSK, VPN?  I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, and I have somewhat contradicting requirements – I want to easily provide network connectivity to my guests, but I don’t want every passer-by to use my connection.  Hopefully, I’ll figure this all out before someone else will mess things up.  (Hint for bad guys: please, stay away for some time).