Joseph Brower

.. that really sucked.  I took my family to see the new transformers movie.  I didn’t have high expectations for it, since I had heard that it was essentially a hollow movie built to get a bit more money from the success of the first film (which I liked.)  I didn’t expect it to be that bad.  If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t. If you plan on seeing it anyway, my rant will contain spoilers, (what little can be spoiled) so you may want to stop reading if you are worried about me somehow spoiling the movie.

The movie starts out with the autobots hunting the decepticons.  That’s all nice fine and dandy, and even set up the film fairly well.  The special effects were amazing.  We get introduced to two new characters, autobot twins.  They seem to be there for comedic releif (which we didn’t need) and throughout the entire movie they used foul language and offered “comedic relief.”  Honestly, I didn’t find them beating up on eachother, insulting eachother and other characters, or generally not helping, to be of comedic relief.  I just found it annoying.  Also, the movie became incredibly predictable.  There is a decepticon that is after the main character, and you know about 2 seconds after seeing her what is going on.  Also, Sam’s parents become idiots somehow and their “comedy” is spread throughout the film.  It isn’t even mature comedy that makes you think, it’s just stupid humor that I would expect a 13 year old to think is hilarious.  I could go on and on.  The only “good” thing about the film is the special effects, except that half the time you can’t tell who is fighting who, who’s winning, what’s happening, but there is a lot of it, so it must be “good.”  I feel like the production team for the movie took Dumb and Dumber, Transformers 1, and National Treasure (Sam is following clues at one point to find the Matrix which can power up a device to eat the sun, that ends up being destroyed, but the robots that hid the matrix (which is the key to using it) didn’t even think about destroying it.  Isn’t that kind of a major hole?  I thought that the transformers were wise.  Anyways, maybe it was a bit too much Dumb and Dumber for my taste.  That’s my opinion.  I won’t be throwing any more money towards the movie beyond the 10 bucks I spent to go see it last night.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to enable mod rewrite in ubuntu when using apache.  Hopefully this will help everyone figure that out.  Go to a terminal and type

sudo a2enmod rewrite

and that will take care of it.

I love playing the occasional game and really like the sci-fi, action, flight sim, type game.  I found an excellent open source game that fills those categories and looks awesome.  It is freespace scp.  Google search it, you won’t be disappointed.  It’s a long time to download it, but it really shines through on it’s visual effects and plot.  It’s nice seeing commercial apps get opened up and then customized to work better with more platforms and with newer hardware.  I’ll probably review this one in a bit, but it is very good.

I have an ATI 3250 in my machine (running Ubuntu 9.04) and apparently ATI has some driver issues.  I can’t seem to run a video fullscreen without it running very slowly if compiz is enabled.  I also can’t use wine for anything requiring 3d accelleration.  I think I may just end up getting an nvidia card.  I really miss my compiz.   I’ll probably give them until 9.10 is released to see what happens though.  Has anyone else had good luck with ATI and linux, specifically for wine and for compiz?

We were planning on going through some more PHP development and helping people along with their projects that they had decided to start.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do either.  I had forgotten my keys so I had to backtrack, which made us late and one of my participants had locked his keys in his van.  We spent a significant amount of time getting his van open, but then his alarm went off.  This cut the functionality of his starter, so we spent the next while figuring out how to disable his alarm. (It ended up having to do with a fuse under the hood.)  Once we pulled that fuse, he could start his van, but he couldn’t close his windows.  Apparently that fuse has something to do with the windows.  We eventually got it all worked out so that he could at least get home without his windows down.  He’ll most likely have to take it somewhere where they specialize in that sort of thing.

On another note, I’ll be having family visit for a few days soon, so I’ll be off-lineish during their stay.  After that, I plan on posting 2 or 3 times a week again.  I’ve also been working on a site that will really blow your mind if you are looking at buying/selling a house.  More on that later.