CBS reports that the 13th season of Survivor will split the tribes into race; White, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American. “I think it fits in perfectly with what Survivor does — it is a social experiment. And this is adding another layer to that experiment, which is taking the show to a completely different level.”
Monthly Archive for August, 2006Page 2 of 3
After waiting the entire summer without a good serial drama to watch, Prison Break returns for its second season tonight. The break-out hit of last year is back and will kick off the Fall season early with the MLB playoffs looming this coming October on FOX.
As we follow the adventures of Michael Scofield and Lincoln Burrows after their escape from Fox River Penitentiary, watch this space for the start of my weekly recaps. I’ll usually put them up on the Tuesday or Wednesday following the airing of the episode so those who download the episodes (either because you’ve got work to do or don’t have a TV) can get a chance to see it before I post screencaps and commentary.
This morning I sat down at the table for a nutritious bowl of cereal and brought in the Sunday Newspaper (another funny Foxtrot comic by the way). I took a look at the ads and to my surprise, we actually got CompUSA and Best Buy ads this week even though we rarely get them.
Anyway, as I flipped through the CompUSA ad I came upon the Samsung SyncMaster 205bw monitor for $269 after rebate. I’ve been researching monitors for a few months now, but never heard of this model. Most on sale are in the $300-$350 range and the current Dell model is at $367. After doing additional research, I discovered that it was HDCP compliant, had an 8-bit panel, and was height adjustable and the base could swivel. Wow! Everything that I’d been looking for in a monitor that a number of the ones on sale lacked. Here’s a shot I took with my camera of “The Beast™ Monitor Edition” next to my (now puny sized) laptop. 
So this morning I woke up at 7 AM and decided to do some reading and by 7:30 I felt like doing an upgrade to the newly released K2 0.9 theme. I had been using their subversion repository for quite some time and this is their first relatively major release in the last few months. There are a lot more features now, and it is easier to mess around with the code than before. At the same time, I finally created my own special style CSS file so that every time they have a new release, I just have to activate my style now and only do minimal editing to the source files.
K2 0.9 also features exciting new plugins including fully supported “Edit Comments” and “Quoter” plugins as well as fully implemented “Sidebar Modules”. Both the edit comments and quoter plugins will probably be the most helpful ones, while the sidebar modules help a lot on my end so everything in the sidebar can be controlled through a GUI rather than having to mess around with all the php code directly. I’m still working on finding a good WYSIWYG text editor for comments that looks nice.
There are still a few bugs that I had to fix on my own, but as of now, all the improvements are completely integrated (probably some other bugs floating around as K2 moves toward 1.0). As I learn a bit more about CSS I’ll probably be able to customize the blog a lot more.
Nothing more to say so here’s a video of Ok Go - Here It Goes Again on Treadmills
Five weeks after it premiered in theatres, I finally got a chance to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. This is most definately the hit of the summer, and for me it is the best movie I’ve seen this year (considering the only other movie I’ve seen is X-Men 3). I went to see it at the Regal Germantown Stadium 14 theatre in Germantown, MD while visiting my brother with my parents for the weekend. We caught the 4:15 show with our free Blingo tickets that arrived in the mail recently. I was pretty surprised that five weeks into it’s summer run that the theatre was almost as filled as when I saw X-Men during its second week in theatres with roughly one-third of the seats taken. The previews consisted of Night at the Museum, Talladega Nights, Lady in the Water, Invincible, Accepted, and a teaser for Transformers. None really garnered any considerable crowd reaction, but the only one that interested me was the Transformers teaser even if it really didn’t show anything (as expected). I’d be interested in seeing it in an updated CGI feature movie since I really liked the 80’s cartoon as a little kid. As usual, I smuggled in a can of soda, particularly an Aruba Jam Sprite Remix this time and a pack of green apple Mentos.
If you haven’t seen Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest yet, one word describes it, “action”. Pretty much, the entire movie is one action scene connected to another with small pauses to progress the storyline. Even the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie didn’t have close to as much action as this one, but was equally fun and humorous. From Johnny Depp’s flamboyant performace as Captain Jack Sparrow to Orlando “Legolas” Bloom’s quick-witted comments as Will Turner to Keira Knightly’s bantering as Elizabeth Swann, this movie is exactly the Hollywood blockbuster hit I’ve been looking for since the most recent Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings movies. Even better was that length of the movie at 150 minutes was definately long enough to fill out the storyline while leaving me really satisfied. One of the gripes I had with X-Men 3 was that it was much too short giving me the feeling the director could easily have added more content. Nothing in Pirates really left me wanting more except for a few small things (not nearly enough for me to detract from enjoying the film).
Other than a few quirks, this movie rates as one of my favorites. The family-style humor, the amazing backgrounds, complementary soundtrack, and the non-stop action make this one special. Everything I liked about the first movie is brought back and taken up a notch. And although some might think it was a little overdone, the CGI was used very effectively to great success.
Lastly, it’s been confirmed for a while that Pirates of the Caribbean 3 will be coming next year in May 2007 a la Matrix Revolutions-style (Most of the taping was done at the same time as this movie). It has been speculated that the title will be called “At World’s End” following the quote at the conclusion of this movie. Chow Yun Fat will be playing a role as well so look out for him in a possible major character. The question is whether there will be a Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Anyway, I’ll be at the theatres to see the next one for sure.
Things to look for (in very vague, broad terms) if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
- Depp bouncing on a stick
- Impromptu fruit kabob
- “Gareth” the genius
- Cantonese hermit crab guy
- Indy sandbag replacement technique
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