Wednesday, November 10, 2004

What we're watching [www]

A couple of nights ago, we rented La Dolce Vita. I'm sorry to say that I only made it 2 hours through the 3 hour "masterwork". Sure, Anita Ekberg has a very... um... enticing? screen presence, but she's not in much of the movie, is rather an airhead, and her segment is severely marred by the extremely creepy character "Frankie". Presumably, he was intended to look like a satyr with an extreme face lift; if not... . For the most part, however, the story felt very much like a version of Reality Bites for another generation -- amoral characters whining about life not turning out to be the paradise they expected. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Last night we rented the remake of The Stepford Wives. Overall, it was a mildly amusing way to waste 92 minutes. I haven't seen the original, so I really can't comment on which is better. The plot was pretty predictable and definitely lacking any suspense. The great cast – who doesn't like Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler and Christopher Walken? – almost makes up for the lack of script. Matthew, Nicole and newcomer Roger Bart are also all in the upcoming film adaptation of The Producers; hopefully that will be a much better film.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

It's Mozilla for me

I've finally done it. While I switched over to Firefox several months ago, I had been holding on to using Outlook as my e-mail client. My excuses were that it let me also check my Hotmail account and that I had carried it along with me through the last three changes to my ISP (TimeWarner, Adelphia, and now Verizon). After getting thwacked by a really annoying bit of spyware recently, I decided it might finally be prudent to remove the Admin rights from the account my DW and I use to logon. Urk. Outlook decided to be a chump and choke on that change. That was all the push I needed. I downloaded Thunderbird and restored Admin rights to my account long enough to import everything from Outlook. It's not perfect -- Outlook kept a bunch of my HTML messages seemed to come over as plain text for some reason -- but so far, I'm basically pleased with my decision. As for accessing Hotmail, I created a "Web Mail" folder on the Bookmark Toolbar and, with Firefox's wonderful "Open in Tabs" option, I can now check GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo in one swell foop.
Next up on the chopping block... the rest of Microsoft Office. Stay tuned!

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Election results

I... am... very disappointed! It's not that I had any illusions that Kerry was going to be a great President, but Bush? I mean, c'mon. He's such a... such a... smeg-head! Grrr.

Election results aside, this was an interesting one for me because, for the first time in my voting career, I relied solely on the internet for watching the returns. Matter of necessity, really, 'cause we're totally without any form of television service. I looked at the web sites for the three big "all news" stations: CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC. Surprisingly, MSNBC's was the worst by far -- practically unusable. Ironic given that one of its major backers is a software company. FoxNews's was the most usable, while, although more awkward than Fox's, CNN's site had the most useful information.

As a final little election tidbit, I was listening to Maine Public Radio on the way home from work this evening and caught an interesting quote from George Smith of the Sportsmen's Alliance of Maine. Of the opposition's recent TV ad campaign he said (at 13:15), "...if you put on, night after night, cattle being slaughtered, bacon would be banned. " Bacon? From a cow? This genius also wants a constitutional amendment preventing wildlife management issues from being allowed on the ballot. Awfully sporting of him, wouldn't you say?