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This is my personal site, where I store my rants, pictures, and movie reviews. Have a look around, register and leave comments.
-James

Twilight

Posted by james on Jun 25, 12:00 AM

4

Man, what a weird movie this was. Such a huge buildup, but a pretty played-out topic with a huge splash of romance novel thrown in. I read the first two chapters of the book (out loud, no less) before watching the movie, so I had some idea of what to expect; not just with the plot, but also for the tone & style. The pacing was really off on this movie, with tons of time dedicated to awkward pauses and (supposedly) meaningful glances... and then a quick montage to skip past the "build the relationship" part. Absolutely no development there.

But the worst thing for this movie was the character direction, which pulled straight out of the book; tons of overacting, awkwardness, exageration, etc. I'm sure it hit home with the teenage girls that lived through this completely self-focused and overly dramatic time of their lives. A bit much for me.

So altogether, a throw-away film, which makes it completely surprising that it grossed so much. Even with all the fans of the book behind it, you would think even they would be turned off by the quality of the film. Despite my misgivings about the first film, I'm still curious about the second movie. I wouldn't go see it in the theater, but I might rent it for fun. I'm hoping it might be a bit better, due to a) less focus on the awkward get-to-know you stage of their relationship, and b) DIFFERENT director.

New photobooth site up

Posted by james on Jun 6, 12:00 AM

I put up a site for the rocketmonkeys photobooth software. It worked great at the last wedding, and it's just getting better. I had a few inquiries already, so things are looking good. Check it out here:

photobooth.rocketmonkeys.com

Tell your friends!

More gmail spam lately

Posted by james on Jun 2, 12:00 AM

I've noticed a rise in gmail spam in the last week or two, maybe 1 email a day. Has anyone else noticed this?

It's times like this that I realize just how good gmail's anti-spam is. I remember when I used to have to weed through dozens of email every day, and there seemed to be no reliable way to filter it. Now I never think about spam because it rarely makes it through gmail's filters. Thanks google.

Yay for stupid IE7 anchor bug!

Posted by james on Mar 24, 12:00 AM

So I'm testing a site out for cross-browser compatibility. It works great in Firefox 3, so now I'm testing in Internet Explorer 7, and I'm getting a strange bug. When the site goes to url#hash, IE7 jumps to the middle of the page, while Firefox does not. This is strange because normally for the #hash to jump anywhere, there must be a target somewhere on the page. The whole point of the #hash I'm using is that it doesn't exist on the page, so there shouldn't be any scrolling/jumping around.

Now, normally if you have this:
<a href="#some_hash">link</a>
<a name="some_hash">Target</a>
This means if you click on "link", the page will jump to "Target". If you have this:
<a href="#some_hash">link</a>
Clicking on that link will update the URL but will not move the page, since #some_hash doesn't exist on the page. According to the W3C, the target can also be any element with id="some_hash". Ok, good to know.

But of course, IE7 likes to do its own things just to screw with me.
<a href="#some_hash">link</a>
<input name="some_hash"/>
In this case, when the user clicks on "link", the page will jump to the input with the name of "some_hash", in violation of the w3c standard. This is incredibly annoying... yet another example of how screwed up the IE7 team is. How in the world did this get past testing? More incredibly, how in the world did this get in there in the first place? Do they just sit around in meetings and think up new ways to make IE7 "stand out from the crowd" (ie. introduce bugs)? It sure seems so sometimes.