Rocket Surgery

Wow.

I don’t like comic books.  I don’t usually like comic book movies.  I liked the original Superman: The Movie from the seventies, and I thought the recent Spiderman movie was just obnoxious.

But The Dark Knight was great.  Heath Ledger had been making great buzz as The Joker, and all the talk about Oscar-worthiness got me interested in seeing it, and I was not disappointed.  At all.  In fact, I was pretty damn impressed.

I like dark movies, and this one was pretty dark - particularly for a comic book movie.  This is NOT the Adam West/Cesar Romero Batman and Joker from the TV series, or even the Michael Keaton/Jack Nicholson Batman and Joker from Tim Burton’s go at it.  This one doesn’t attempt to be fun, it goes for serious - and paradoxically, therein lies the fun.  The Joker doesn’t make over the top corny, campy jokes - any humor that comes from the Joker comes from his being sarcastic.  He’s more disturbing (and disturbed) than funny.  He’s a genuinely threatening villain.

And our hero is forced to examine his own ethics when confronted by the Joker’s complete lack of them.  How far can you go and what means can you use to defeat evil without becoming evil yourself?  Pertinent question for our times (viz., waterboarding).

The rest of the cast is great too.  Aaron Eckhart’s character did not develop as I expected at all - I love being surprised by movies - and I even liked Maggie Gyllenhaal who I normally don’t really care for.  Each actor was fully vested in their characters, and this was a true ensemble piece.

Four stars.

What a dumb movie. Not that dumb is always bad, of course.

But in an action movie, you want to have suspense…you need to perceive that the protagonist is somehow threatened during the action sequences.  When a 67 year old man is blown up by a nuclear weapon and is thrown for (presumably) miles on the inside of a lead-lined refrigerator, then gets out and walks away without a single broken bone or even a bloody nose or lip, he’s basically invincible at that point and some chick with a sword is no threat.  When it happens at the beginning of the movie, how can you possibly care what happens to this guy?

And then when Mutt goes swinging through the vines like Tarzan…my eyes were rolling.

It was amazing to me that Spielberg was involved.  They definitely jumped the shark with this one. 1 and a half stars.

I’ve done something simple, yet cool and useful in our Ant builds to make them work a little nicer with Hudson.  I’ve modified things so our Jars/Wars get stamped with version control information from Hudson.  To do this, I take advantage of the fact that when Hudson starts an Ant build, it puts certain key values in the environment variables, so I grab them and stuff them into the manifests for the jars.

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Well, this may turn a number of you off and make you think I’m some sort of Luddite or something, but I have come to a considered opinion:  I don’t really like Hibernate.

Before you consider me an ignorant fool, here are some of my reasons for you to consider (and I may add to this list over time): Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking of trying out another MMORPG, so when a friend told me she played Vanguard Saga of Heroes, I decided to try it out.

Don’t.

It’s terrible.  It’s buggy–seriously buggy.  Weird graphical artifacts all over the screen buggy.  Sound stuck in loops like a broken record buggy.  Miserable frame rate, and the graphics aren’t that great — heck, the new graphics in Runescape are nearly as good.

I never should have played World of Warcraft.  Once you get tired of that, there’s nowhere to go!!!