Alieniloquent

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I didn’t think I’d ever see it. The story didn’t seem like the kind I tend to enjoy. But, when a friend of mine offered to give me some free tickets I figured it was worth seeing for free, and it’s a good thing I did. This way I can tell you about how terrible the movie is, and hopefully save you some cash.

The budget for the film was $55 million. A fairly small budget by Hollywood standards, but in the same range as the last three films I saw: The Covenant ($20 million), Snakes on a Plane ($36 million), World Trade Center ($65 million). I liked all of those films, but I didn’t like this one, and I think it really comes down to how the budget was spent.

Two places the producers clearly did not spend their budget was on cinematography or editing. In no fewer than four scenes I saw the head of a boom mic bouncing along the top of the screen, and in one scene I saw the mic and its boom in their entirety. This isn’t like a car in Lord of the Rings. This is just shoddy movie-making.

Another place they clearly did not spend their money was writing. I’m sure that the book this movie was based on was a fine novel. I know there was a real story about Huey Long, whom this story is loosely about. Somehow, though, the writers for this film failed to caputre any real plot. None. None at all.

I think where they spent almost all their money was on casting. The movie had an amazing cast: Sir Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Kate Blanchett, Mark Ruffalo, Sean Penn, and James Gandolfini. Those are some big names, and I’m sure they all had nice fat paychecks for their performances. The performances were even decent, although Penn summoned memories of Snatch with his thick, unintelligible accent.

So, if you want to play spot-the-mic, or want to see if you can find the plot, go see this movie. But, if you want to enjoy the two hours you’ll spend watching it, go do something else.

So I’ve been thinking about starting some sort of periodic content: perhaps a regular themed article here or a podcast. I would like to take advantage of what readers I do have to see what people would like to hear me talk about.

Here are some topics that I’ve thought about doing:

• Things about programming they don’t teach you in college
• Agile methods
• Test-first design
• Refactoring
• Cocoa programming
• Ruby programming
• Lisp programming

There’s no particular order to those, as I find them all very interesting. It’s possible that I could end up doing a mishmash of all of them.

Please leave a comment with a topic you’d like to hear me talk about!

So I was looking up an actual dictionary definition of “alieniloquent” today. I had one at some time in the past, but it’s a hard word to find in dictionaries, and that’s why I picked it for my domain. I finally found this website, the Grandiloquent Dictionary, and it has my word in it.

alieniloquent

Speaking discursively or straying from one’s point.

So for those of you who were wondering, there you go.

Erica posted her creative goals, and I figured I’d do the same.

• I’m working on a Mac app that will interface with Google Calendar and iCal to help schedule free time. It’ll be ideal for students who want to plan their homework or freelance workers who need to break up their day. Erica’s going to be cutting her Cocoa teeth on this project with me, but I’m doing most of the backend work.
• There are a couple of Ruby on Rails projects I’d like to play with.
• I think it is high time I revisit OCFit and get more done there.
• I want to post more frequently and with some sort of theme. I think it’ll be largely programming focused.
• I would like to find more speaking engagements.

So those are a few things that I’m looking at doing aside from work and school this semester.

Well, it only took me one night. I’ll probably be tweaking for weeks now, but I got the main thrust of theming done.

I really have to compliment the Wordpress guys. Setting up a theme for their system can be as easy or as difficult as the particular designer wants. Their theme system is definitely the way to go for live blog redesigns, though: I could switch back to the other theme with a couple of mouse clicks. Very easy.

Let me know what you think of the design.

For those who actually read my site at my site, please pardon my mess.  I’m redesigning my site, and I have much less regard for how it looks than some, so I’m just going to piddle with it live.

On the up side, if you’re the kind that obsessively refreshes my blog, you can see how I design web pages.

So I’m in my web directory, doing some stuff, and I notice the twiddle backup files that Emacs leaves when I edit remotely. They bug me. So I did the following command to remove them.

Some of you probably think that’s just greek. But others are cringing just as I did when I saw it remove all of the files in my directory. Sooooo, the other parts of the site are broken until tonight when I can fix them.

I just got back to the office after giving a talk to the Omaha SPIN group. It was a report on the experiences we’ve had and the lessons we’ve learned at my current employer over a year and a half of using agile methods.

If you’d like to look at my slides, they’re here.

So I was browsing a company’s website today, and out of curiosity I clicked on their map to show where all their locations are. I was expecting to see lots of little dots representing their offices, but what I saw was so much more.

This company has gotten the scoop on all of the major news services. It has a map of the contiguous 51 states.

Here you can see a cutout of the Northwest area of the country. If you look closely you’ll see the new borders between East and West Idaho and East and West Montana. Rumor has it that Idaho has split over whether or not to put a potato on the back of their commemorative quarter, and nobody knows what’s up with Montana.

This other section shows the fifty-third, and newest state: Floridabama. Nobody’s quite sure why they formed. They don’t even have their own constitution. Almost all of the land has been sold to development companies to build retirement communities and casinos. That’s right: retirement casinos.

Note: I did not make these images. I have altered them to protect the innocent, but I really did find this while surfing.

Hey all. I have a story to tell you about Subversion and firewalls, but it will have to wait for tomorrow as I am dead tired.

But, I did want to share with you the fruits of my last thirty minutes or so. I have produced a new main page for www.alieniloquent.com. This is going to grow into place for me to put all sorts of things I want to share with the internet.

I moved my lisp talk materials under a new directory where I will be putting all of my presentation materials.

I also created a place to put code. In there I’ve put J3TestCase: a wrapper arount OCUnit . It makes it behave more like the xUnit frameworks I’m accustomed to, ObjcUnit in particular. Just drop the two files into your project where ever you want, and you can use the class to descend your test cases from.