Kick-Ass (The Movie)

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If you were thinking about going to see The Losers, please do what I should have done and ago see Kick-Ass instead.  This is another comic book adaptation but it is done much better and the story is much more original.  It is about super heroes that don’t really have powers, ala The Watchmen but still take the world into their own hands.   This could have been the beginning of the world of the Watchmen.

Yes, she can.

Yes, she can.

I am going to keep this short, because I think you should just go watch the movie.  It has the most dangerous 11 year-old girl that you will see on the big screen.  It is a little gory, and the pacing is a little slow to start with but it takes off and the cinematography and action scenes are pretty killer.  Nicholas Cage has a great showing, as do many other actors in this movie that you probably haven’t seen before.

Grade: A

It’s worth seeing in the theater.

–Nat

The Losers (2010)

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Movies based on comic books, especially Marvell comics (Spider-Man!) are the types of movies that I really want to see in the theater.   The Losers is based on a comic book, I guess, not that I had ever heard of it.  It’s about a covert hit team that gets double crossed way down in Bolivia and then has to make some compromises in order to get back to the states so they can get answers, revenge, and their old lives back.

The movie has some great action scenes and some nifty cinematography that invokes the scene by scene transitions you would find in a comic book, I’ll give it that, and comic book based movies could make good use of this technique to great effect in the future.  The issue I take with it is that it takes a comic book and puts into our world, so when you are watching some of the scenes the suspension of disbelief is broken as you think “no way would that have worked.”  Movies like Spider Man or the Watchmen change the world enough so that you can take little details and shelve them and that makes them digestible as a whole.  Without having read the comic, I think what happened was the PG-13 rating and the decision to try and keep the setting light, which didn’t jive while at all with what was going on, they just made the good guys too “good.”  How am I supposed to feel sorry for these guys when they cause huge collateral damage to people in the way of their objectives?

I really enjoyed the character “Jensen” who has also played Johnny Storm (the guy who can start on fire) in the Fantastic 4 and Captain America in the upcoming Avengers movie.  The character is a ripped, geeky commando who wears the best t-shirts (lol @ the zombie t-shirts) but can talk to women without making a fool out of himself.  Compared to the utterly cliched Colonel and Bad-Girl roles that are present, it was at least refreshing to have a new type of role and reminded me a lot of Battlefield Bad Company 2 – which is a good thing.  As a side note, how can you be both Johny Storm and Captain America?  It seems like at some point that could become an issue, didn’t the Fantastic 4 at least encounter the Avengers?

Anyway, the movie has been panned as a forgettable action flick, which I suppose it is.

Grade: C+

It’s worth a rental or Netflix queue addition if you do like action movies.

–Nat

Six Feet Under, fin.

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This show might be heavily steeped in sexuality and drug use but it was a fantastic show.  The emotional roller coaster was so strong and the characters portrayed so well that it is easy to see why it garnered so much praise.

But one thing I have to say about it, after watching so much TV lately, is that this a show that ended gracefully when it got to where it need to be and *paid off* in the finale in a huge way.  Its five seasons and probably about sixty five hours of your life (which is sadly about 13 days of TV watching for the typical American) but I can think of very few other ways to invest your time in front of the TV that might be more thought provoking or moving.

If you have a list of TV shows to watch, this should be on it.  You can get into it now knowing that it won’t leave you hanging on some random ending due to its being canceled.   More TV shows should go out like this.

Finally, everyone should have a pre-need on file at a funeral home somewhere.  Seeing how much strife it can cause the deceased family to have make all those decisions when emotions are running so high, it is only fair to those you love.

–Nat

Motivational Posters, Star Trek Style

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Jeff L. sent me the link to this site and I found it to be quite hilarious.  Its full of demotivational posters based on classic Star Trek.

The Awesomeness is self explanatory.

The Awesomeness is self explanatory.

Since there are many more, four pages of them, head on over to this great website and browse through them.  I think the hardcore Trekkies will get even more kicks out of it than I did.

–Nat

SR-71 Blackbird Pilot tells his story

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The SR-71 Blackbird was always my favorite growing up… I had “Top Gun” book that detailed all sorts of planes, and I read it over and over, memorizing sizes, speeds, payloads.  Even now I remember that a F2-Phantom is faster than an F-16.

Anyway, it’s worth a read, so check it out.

The article mentions how important the plane was to the Cold War effort and how it out flew more than 4,000 launched missiles in its service lifetime.  The plane was only grounded because it was too expensive.  I also suspect that our spy satellites have reduced its usefulness.  Having spent a few minutes reading about the A-10 today, which came to be in the 70’s and will be in service until at least 2028 because we really can’t make something any more effective for any reasonable amount of money, I am in awe of what NASA and the Defense Industry was able to achieve in the 50’s and 60’s.  It feels like to me that must be the height of American aerospace engineering.  Certainly the F-22 and F-35 will be remarkable, but they are so expensive and so late; if you spend enough money something in the end will be made.

–Nat

Pictures with Green in them

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A coworker was stopping by to talk about some storage matters and noticed my PC background – he mentioned it looked awfully cold and wintry.  So last night I set about trying to find something green to use.  The willow tree in our backyard had some greenness to it, so here are a couple pictures of it.

Picture 1

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 2

The nice weather really let me play around with my camera settings – I goofed with exposure time, f-stop and ISO speeds.  Taking pictures of stuff up close proved to be challenging with the auto focus, so I had to tweak what part of the frame I wanted it to grab.  After spending about five minutes trying to figure out how to manually focus the lens I gave up.  Ideally, I wanted the picture to not be too bright but for the green to pop out a bit.  Picture 2 ended up being closer to what I wanted, color wise, but I preferred the layout of Picture 1.  Paint.net came to the rescue (I’ve never really messed with picture alteration before) I simply dialed down the brightness and ticked up the contrast and came out with this.

Picture 1, modified

Picture 1, modified

In with the green, out with the snow!  🙂

–Nat

NATLAN 2010, a success!

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Sean brought a functional network in a box, Dave cooked up some tasty supper, friends old & new brought their boxes and I brought the dedicated servers and fun was had by all!

Check out the Event & Schedule page to see what gaming goodness went down and what people won.

Then look at some pictures we took; more should be posted shortly.

What’s next?  A “Ten Man LAN” in the upcoming months to rock out some Left 4 Dead 2?

Stay tuned 🙂

–Nat

Setting up the Internet CS:S Server

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This was very helpful information:

Call this entry CSS1

it should be like so

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS1
Incoming ports: 27020 – 27039
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 27020 – 27039
Port type: Check TCP

Press submit

Now we need to create another, this time call it CSS2:

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS2
Incoming ports: 1200 – 1200
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 1200 – 1200
Port type: Check UDP

Press submit

Now we must make a final one, we will call it CSS3:

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS3
Incoming ports: 27000 – 27015
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 27000 – 27015
Port type: Check UDP

Courtesy of FPSBanana, a site that seems to live on in Google’s cache.

Server config generator is here…

The server is up, by the way 🙂

–Nat

An adventure in storage expansion

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In this great age of rapidly expanding storage, I’ve decided to stop throwing things away in a digital sense.  We are talking storage that is under $0.07 per gigabyte.  This means that each 3.5 megabyte picture I retain costs $0.00002.  Someday the real issue will be keeping track of these things, but that is a separate discussion.

First up, the fun part of this post.

Before

Before, 1.59TB of available space

After

After, 2.96 TB of available space

One 1.5TB just doubled the storage capacity of my Windows Home Server.   When I put the 750 GB and 1TB drive in there, those were the $100 drives of the time.  The 1.5TB drive cost $102 shipped.

Now, here is the complicated part.  They (the hard drive industry as a whole) are changing how the data is laid out on hard drives that is not very compatible with Windows XP and Server 2003 (which is what WHS is based on.)  There are a number of technological issues at stake here that a number of sources like Ars Technica have covered this in depth so I will spare you that.  Basically, you get bad performance with the new drives on old operating systems – and WHS is effected.

What do you need to do?  Well, you basically have two options.  On most drives, there will be jumpers on there like there were on hard drives for a long time that limited their capacity to 2GB for 16 bit file systems that will fake out the operating system.  The caveat?  You can only have one partition per drive.  If you read the above article, you’ll know that this is intended for big drives, so you’ll be committed to something like a 2TB C: drive if you go that route, which is pretty ugly.

The second option is to use software to “realign” the partition after it has been created which allows for whatever layout you want.  The caveat here?  You could lose your data and any time you redo a partition you are going to be using this software.

Being the idiot I am, I didn’t use the jumper to fake out the operating system and I promptly put data on the drive by adding into the WHS storage pool (which you have to do to get the partition created that you can later realign.)  I tried to go back in and save myself with the bootable software, but this dropped the 1.5TB drive out of the pool and corrupted all my PC backups.  Then I shut it all down and did the jumper thing, which also made WHS freak out until I told it I really wanted to drop the drive out of the pool permanently and added it back in again.

Moral of the story – I wasted about three hours of my life and lost about 300GB of PC backups because I didn’t take time to set the jumper first.  If you are buying a hard drive for WHS or XP in the next few months, you are going to need to be aware of this issue.  Trust me, the jumper is easier and apparently neccessary with WHS as covered in the forums over at www.wegotserved.com.

–Nat