Posts from — June 2008

Ok, so it’s not for kids.  I think there are political, social and moral messages hidden in here somewhere (the not so subtle quote at the end of the movie is a reminder).   And I am not sure that this film portrays America in a great light overall.

But damn was this movie entertaining.   I thought Tom Hanks played his role perfectly, but Philip Seymour Hoffman stole the show.   The scene in which he is arguing with his boss and breaks his window (again) had me laughing out loud.  Later in the film, he again steals the scene from Hanks as he’s ushered in and out of the congressman’s office and ultimately confesses to planting a listening device on the bottle of scotch he brought with him.

The casting overall was excellent – from the girl’s in Wilson’s office, to the other members of congress, to the foreign dignataries – just enough of a real feel while still providing comic sensibility. 

I rarely see movies that I think I probably won’t like and then I do – but this is one of them.  I don’t know why, but this movie never really seemed to interest me.  Perhaps it was the subject matter.  However, after seeing it I can say it will be on my “watch again” list.

4 out of 5 stars.  Check it out.

All of our stuff just got delivered yesterday.  One whole semi-truck full!  This is like my fifth full move, and I hope it is my last.  We got all the boxes inside, but just barely.  Now starts the laborious task of unpacking.

Ever notice that no matter how well you supervise your move, the packers always seem to put that one box you’re looking for somewhere out of sight?

For example, I found ten boxes of wine last night, but not the box with the kitchen gadgets.  No wine without an opener huh?

D’oh!  I hate moving.

Man, I hate spam.  I have an email address that I’ve had for more than ten years, and I would say that 99% of all the email I receive is spam (maybe more).  Of course, I have some programs for filtering out spam, and I have tried them all – white lists, black lists, bayesian, you name it. 

None of them work to my satisfaction.

So, I was dabbling with some of the settings on my gmail account the other day and was musing – “Wouldn’t it be great if google offered their spam filtering technology as an add-on to Thunderbird or even Outlook?”  Realizing the latter would likely never happen, it came to me – google lets me use gmail to check other accounts, and allows POP/IMAP access, so in fact you can use it to filter email, just not the way I thought.

So, I setup google to check my main email account, then setup Thunderbird to check google.  WHAM-O!  I’m in.  What’s even cooler is I can use gmail when I am on the road to check my email account, and not worry about syncing email between my home client and some other account, etc.  I love it!

 Things got a bit squirrely trying to get the authentication setup (you’ve switched over to having google check your account, then they send a verficiation email, and you have to respond to it – but where?  in google?  in your old client?).  Anyway, after getting through that I haven’t received ONE SPAM in days.  Amazing.  And since gmail can check up to five accounts, I have been able to centralize all of my accounts now into one account, it’s super cool.

 Thanks google, you rock!

So I am using VMWare again – this time to test multiple platforms from my new Vista laptop (I don’t have a lot of love for Vista, at least not yet, but my company needs to test on all kinds of platforms).

 VMWare to the rescue!  I’m running multiple OS’s on one laptop and cutting my costs and testing time in half.

 Love it!