Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Saw the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest today. This movie starts where the last one left. Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan are about to be married, and Commodore Norrington is out chasing Captain Jack Sparrow, and like all middle movie of trilogies ends on a cliffhanger. Firsts the comparisons. The first movie was like the Disney ride on celluloid. This is was more of the same. The characters were the same with the same attitudes and the same running after something of value, the race, the sword fights, the same cartoonish make-ups and special effects. While the first one was extremely enjoyable, this one seemed to be over complicated and more tiresome. Think of it as a great song on your iPod. You eagerly download because you liked it so much, and put it in your playlists so that it repeats over and over again. Then you reach a point where even though you still like the song you cant bear to hear it anymore. It was the same thing with this movie as well. I kind of felt that constant barrage of excitement was a little too much.

The other thing that was a little off-putting was the complexity of the story. I counted like four plotlines in the story. Other reviewers have put the plotlines to five. The story tried to tie in to the backstory of the movie. For example (Spoiler Alert here) How Jack Sparrow got the Black Pearl, what’s with the compass that does’nt work, Bootstrap Turner, etc, what happened to Commodore Norrington, etc. The other thing that I did’nt like was the villain. Captain Davy Jones was nowhere as cool as Captain Barbossa, and his reappearance at the very end of the movie was a bit of a relief at the end. For me it was a good way to set the stage for the 3^rd movie (which was reportedly filmed the same time as the 2^nd movie). How Captain Barbossa returned to life after being dispatched in the 1^st is not explained. I guess that’s part of the cliffhanger. I guess the other important bad guy or the bad entity here is the East India Company. Not much is explained about that. Initially Will Turner is sent to retrieve a compass, and then that’s suddenly changed to getting Davy Jone’s live heart. That was a little confusing for me. The most obvious explanation was that whoever got control of the heart would have leverage over Davy Jones, and that meant control of the seas. But the compass always pointed in the direction of what the user really wanted. We know that it was’nt the treasure that East India company wanted it was something else. Perhap’s the 3^rd will tell us more.

Smoking & Working out

The Seattle Times: Health: Do benefits of getting buff make it OK to take a puff?. Brought to you you via here

I can relate to this. I used to be one of those people who smoked and worked out, and I really got a high from that first cigarette. I finally kicked my habit about 10 months ago, after having been a smoker for ten years. Best decision I ever made

Rocketboom: Losing the Boom

Rocketboom, the most popular video blog covering internet news, has let go its charismatic star anchorwoman Amanda Congdon. She has posted her own video giving information on what happened on her own “Unboomed” website. I’m hoping she gets going with her own thing; her writing, performances, and personality were the best part of the show.

read more | digg story

Rocketboom’s collapse became news yesterday when Digg reported that Amanda Congdon, Rocketboom’s host has been fired. Then Robert Scoble picked it and posted alternative hosts for rocketboom.

Its funny that how the end of something can bring something new. I’ve just started reviewing these vlogs. I really enjoyed Rocketboom both for its content and its “presentation” and subconciously I’m still comparing them to Rocketboom, even though I know I should focus on being more objective. For more info go to

• Rocketboom (view the archives to see why the site was so popular especially among liberal types)
• Amanda Congdon’s blog
• Scoble’s post about rocketboom. Note the links about alternatives for Amanda Congdon
• 1st Digg story
• 2nd Digg Story

Linux Moves Towards Unified APIs…

“The Portland Project has released a beta version of its programming interfaces for the Gnome and KDE Linux environments. This is designed to boost development of desktop Linux applications by creating common application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers to use.”

read more (Warning!! Page top heavy. REally slows down Firefox) | digg story

This is an important development. If the OSS community manages to standardize the API, the playing field for programming mind-share would be levelled quite a bit. For more Info go here.

Digg|OS X vs. Vista – a GUI development and concept analysis

Great article on interface design concepts and developement process on both operating systems. Different company philosophies for different results on user interfaces.
read more | digg story

An interesting article in the design process of Windows Vista and Mac OS X. One of the comments had a link to a video superimposing a presentation about Windows Vista’s upcoming features with all the features that Mac OS X has right now.

The Weather today….

A lot of barbeque’s are going to be ruined today…. I just hope it does’nt spoil the fireworks tonight. This is how the weather looks from my living room at 11:18.

Update:

I guess, I’m going to eat my words. BBQ’s wont be ruined. Its going to be sunny after all. Fireworks will still happen. Here’s the udpated view from my apartment. Note how the clouds have moved in the Doppler map

This is what it looks like from my apartment at 14:18.

Updated Update:

It suddenly started raining. The poor lifegaurd at the pool had spread out all the deck chairs for people, Now she’s waiting in her car for the rain to stop, so that she can stack up the chairs again. This is what it looks like from my apartment a little before 5:38 pm.

at at 5:40 pm it finally stopped raining.

Slashdot | Tools to Automate Checking of Software Design

I came across this article on Slashdot | Tools To Automate Checking of Software Design. Its about using a formal checking language called Alloy. One of things that our software engineering group is trying to do at my company is requirements tracking for CMMI Level 2 certification. This might be of interest to them. To find out more about Alloy look at this article in Scientific American, by one of of the developers. Here’s a gif about other possible tools.

Currently Listening to…

“How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” by U2.

I finally downloaded this album this afternoon. Initially I was pretty excited about it, but now that I’ve been listening to this album, I’m beginning to have some mixed feelings. Some songs are awesome. Not quite at par with Joshua Tree, but geetting close. Some have a hint of that disaster of an album, Pop. Anyway here’s my run-down

	My Rating	Comments
Vertigo	***	Great First time song, got tired of it after repetedly listerning to it
Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own	****
Love and Peace or Else	*	Kind of like Vertigo, but just did’nt enjoy it as much.
City of Blinding Lights	***
All Because of You	***	Vertigo style song, enjoyable. Might be good track to listen to on the job.
A Man and a Moon	**	A Sappy Song. I dont know I might enjoy it a little more in another mood.
Crumbs from your Table.	****	Nice socially concious song. Something along the lines of if good will send his angels
One Step Closer	****	Nice slow song, I think I’m going to be listening to this one a lot
Original of the Species	****	Another slow song, kind of inspiring
Yahweh	*****	Awesome song to wrap up the album

New in Gmail: Delete All Spam

Gmail is rolling out a new link called “Delete all spam messages now” so you don’t have to repeatedly select all messages and delete them. Another new feature: “Empty trash”.

When Google first came out with GMail they touted their large email storage, as a reason why a typical user will never have to delete email. Today on their blog , they announced a new feature to easily delete spam and trash, by easily selecting all their emails. I guess, people do really need “delete” their email.

read more | digg story