December 17th, 2002

dinwiddy snurdle

Movie Round-Up

DVD1: Spider-Man: when I saw this in the cinema, I was somewhat under-whelmed - I suspect this was probably due it the ridiculous amount of hype the film attracted. Yes, the swingin' aroun' the city effects are overdone, but that's the films only real flaw. It's a crack action yarn which gets the clichés working for it, and doesn't take itself too seriously. Plus there's the kind of bittersweet ending that Hollywood should do more often. The quality of the DVD menus is possibly the best I've seen and there look to be stacks of cool extra features - sadly no original teaser trailer, but that's to be expected.

DVD2: Minority Report is classic Spielberg - sci-fi, action and a surprisingly good detective yarn. The vision of the future is intriguing without being implausible, and there's plenty of nifty cinematography.

Theatrical: TTT - out tomorrow (Wednesday), although for assorted reasons, I don't get to see it until Sunday (I wants it for my Birthday Present, my precious). I have every confidence that its brilliance will rise above any flaws (see a couple of posts in annamilton's journal re: Faramir). Must finish reading the book (just got to the end of book 3, now off to see how Frodo and Sam are getting on)

Trailer 1: X2 - I enjoyed the first X-Men film, and this sequel looks like it could be fun. Beware of the less-hairy Gandalf...

Trailer 2: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle - I have no worries about this film taking itself seriously, and with Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Lui, what's not to like? Plus this trailer has possibly the most ridiculous over-the-top stunt of all time - I love it.
  • Current Mood
    cheerful
msmouse

Go Go AOL!

According to
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According to <a href"http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28600.html">this story</a> on the Reg, also seen elsewhere, AOL have sued a bunch of spammers to the tune of $7m - and they say: <b>AOL is prepared to use all of the legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers who inundate the mailboxes of AOL members with unwanted and often offensive junk e-mail</b>. Cool! If we could get Micro$oft to do the same on behalf of Hotmail users, then the spammers might really have cause to back off - surely the only way to stop them is to hit 'em where it hurts: in the wallet.

Admittedly, <a href="http://www.spamassassin.org/">SpamAssassin</a> deals with most of my daily spam ration, but there are still some false negatives getting through, and I still have to scan my Spam box for the occasional false positive (including a recent <lj user="cert"> advisory which some moron had subitted to <a href="http://razor.sourceforge.net/">Razor</a>). Ah, I remember those happy golden days before the advent of spam...
  • Current Mood
    Die, evil spammers, die!
zorac

Fun with hard disks

Ah, the joys of data recovery! First we have a disk that's causing it's server to throw errors left, right and centre. After replacing it, we had to try and retrieve it's contents: ( Collapse )The second duffer came from an NT box, but the BIOS wouldn't even recognise it, so we had to give that up as a lost cause. About 5 seconds after binning it, I realised that I've always wanted to dissect a hard drive - as did everyone else in the office. I've taken apart plenty of dead floppies in my time, but this was much more fun. Blithely ignoring the "Warranty Void if removed" stickers (some of which could only be seen after disassembling half the drive), we broke it down to it's component parts. Highlights include the disks themselves - possibly the most perfect mirrors I've ever seen (until they acquired grubby pawmarks), the heads (but they're so tiny) and a pair of surprisingly powerful magnets (as in you can barely pry them apart). Much fun was had by all.
  • Current Mood
    inquisistive