White’s of Henry Lane

My local cinema has a great deal. If you have a lifetime membership to Hostelling International, you get the $4.25 senior’s/children’s ticket price. That means it costs roughly 1/3rd the price of a ticket at somewhere like the Paramount Festival Square to catch a film. Michelle and I have been seeing more films as a result. While none really blew us away, we’d caught some watchable flicks like Serenity and Elizabethtown.

On Friday, I thought Michelle was going to go to yoga, so I decided to catch DOOM. The Hallowe’en spirit, its cheaper to catch it now than on DVD, I need to get out of the house more; all that.

I’m not going to review this movie. In general, I don’t review movies; I’m not great at it. And far snarkier people than I have had at it already. Suffice it to say I’ve only seen one movie worse than this one: Austin Powers in Goldmember. (How that got a higher Tomatometer reading, i couldn’t tell you. Maybe it got better after I left about 2/3rds of the way through.) I went in with really low expectations, and they didn’t even manage that.

It is so terribly underdeveloped. It has the generic skeleton of a scifi horror, but they forgot to flesh out the parts between guys with guns running from one location of Olduvai to another. Basically the movie works like this: guy sees something, tries to kill it, it gets away from him. He calls everyone, they run over there. The Rock tells them to stay in a location. Someone walks away for a dumb reason, and is killed. Rinse, repeat. They took out the Hell stuff, the Burtrugeur-esque character is called Dr. Carmack, haw-haw, and they bit the Resident Evil T-Virus thing to create the Zombies. They open with a hackneyed character development scene in the barracks that plays like a cheesey version of the opening of Predator with the special ops guys in the helicopter. They do the lockdown in medlab like in Aliens. And, yes, there’s a couple of minutes of terrible First Person Shooter perspective crap that features the most killable pinky ever.

With movie tickets generally going for $12, and the DOOM 3 and RoE games going used for about $20, there is absolutely no reason to go see this movie. If you really want an hours worth of DOOM entertainment, you’d have a better experience with the shareware levels of the original DOOM played with Doomsday.

(As an aside, I caught The Rock on The Daily Show last week. He flat-out lied about what was in the movie. That really bugged me. He knew that he was being gawked at by a bunch of gamers, and said what they wanted to hear. Not fair, Mr Johnson. You’ve come so far into the mainstream, and people are starting to respect you. I loathe the WWE, but have enjoyed you in a number of flicks, particularly Be Cool. Don’t pull this; you’ll squander the credibility you’ve worked so hard to get.)

My work machine was in desperate need of a wipe a few weeks ago. It has had scads of transient freelancers on it, and it started out as a Flash developer’s box, and has never in all this time been brought back to the metal. So in preparation for the reinstall, I jotted down a list of the apps I had and needed. Since it was little bother to annotate, I thought I’d post this to my site; maybe you’ll find a hidden gem that will make you more productive. Continue reading…

I’ve posted some of the images I use as wallpaper on my various machines to flickr. They are scaled to 1280×1024, since that’s the native resolution of my LCD panels. If you like them, please leave a comment!

First, a set from my anniversary trip to Montréal:

Next, a couple from Versailles:

Then some nice textures from around France:

Most everything I post to flickr is licensed under Creative Commons as Attribution-Noncommercial. Share and enjoy!

A while back I came across the Gameboy Advance Movie Player on the Lik Sang site. At the time, it really seemed like just a toy. After all, I already had a Dell Axim on which I played movies, and really, the screen just seemed too tiny. The sound quality was supposed to be only mediochre. I wrote it off.

At some point this summer, I found myself with a lot of CF cards kicking around, and I thought: why not? There were a couple of other items I wanted to buy, and USD$25 is well within my discretionary spending budget. So I bought it, and it’s been kicking around with the odd episode of Family Guy or Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the card I leave in it. I showed it off at work a bit, and used it for commuting.

To tell the truth, I pretty much forgot about it, until my wife and I were getting ready to take a five hour train trip to Montréal. Michelle usually sleeps on trains and planes, so I wanted to have some entertainment. I had a book on the go, but knew it wouldn’t take me long to finish. I didn’t want to take another book, since I had every intention of travelling light. So I went to Craphound, and grabbed a bunch of Cory Doctrow’s short stories from his latest book (which seems to be trapped and eternally checked out at the Toronto Public Library), and some recent scifi from the Gutenberg Project, and dumped them into a folder on my 512M CF card. I also converted the Pimsleur French lessons I’m doing into GBA audio, and grabbed a homebrew Lumines clone called Luminesweeper.

Well, the Pimsleur lessons were a bust. For some reason, the audio came out worse than anything I’ve ever dumped to GBA Audio. Possibly since the original encoding was pretty low-bitrate.

Everything else was a phenomenal win. I have the most up-to-date ROM for the Movie Player which adds bookmarks. This is now my favourite ebook reader, and I take it with me everywhere. The screen on the GBA SP is very readable, and the d-pad is actually very natural for scrolling. I like the positioning even better than the scroll wheel on the Axim. Luminsweeper is every bit as addictive as the original is purported to be, and there are a number of other homebrew games that work with the Movie Player. Best of all, since the ebook reader is really just a text scroller (like | less for the GB), there’s little limit to what you can place on there. You could even turn your GB into a read-only PDA like some folks do with their iPods. Minus, of course, the calendar …

Long and short, if you’ve got a GBA SP and some moderate-capacity CF cards lying around, this device will give them a whole new lease on life.