Movies!

Apparently there’s a new internet meme going around that was started up by Avitable, where one has to take the EW list of the top 100 movies in the past 25 years and mark which movies you’ve seen (in bold) and which you liked (with an asterisk). Some movies I may have seen and didn’t mark and some movies I may have liked but didn’t mark, this isn’t because I’m an Elitist and think I should let on that I’ve seen some movies it’s because I’m a forgetist and I don’t remember if I’ve seen a movie sometimes or if I liked it. Here’s the list:

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)*
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03)*
3. Titanic (1997)
4. Blue Velvet (1986)
5. Toy Story (1995)*
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)*
9. Die Hard (1988)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
11. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)*
12. The Matrix (1999)*
13. GoodFellas (1990)
14. Crumb (1995)
15. Edward Scissorhands (1990)*
16. Boogie Nights (1997)
17. Jerry Maguire (1996)
18. Do the Right Thing (1989)
19. Casino Royale (2006)
20. The Lion King (1994)*
21. Schindler’s List (1993)
22. Rushmore (1998)
23. Memento (2001)
24. A Room With a View (1986)
25. Shrek (2001)*
26. Hoop Dreams (1994)
27. Aliens (1986)*
28. Wings of Desire (1988)
29. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
30. When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
31. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
32. Fight Club (1999)*
33. The Breakfast Club (1985)*
34. Fargo (1996)*
35. The Incredibles (2004)
36. Spider-Man 2 (2004)*
37. Pretty Woman (1990)
38. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
39. The Sixth Sense (1999)*
40. Speed (1994)*
41. Dazed and Confused (1993)*
42. Clueless (1995)*
43. Gladiator (2000)*
44. The Player (1992)
45. Rain Man (1988)
46. Children of Men (2006)
47. Men in Black (1997)*
48. Scarface (1983)
49. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
50. The Piano (1993)
51. There Will Be Blood (2007)*
52. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988)
53. The Truman Show (1998)*
54. Fatal Attraction (1987)*
55. Risky Business (1983)
56. The Lives of Others (2006)
57. There’s Something About Mary (1998)*
58. Ghostbusters (1984)*
59. L.A. Confidential (1997)
60. Scream (1996)
61. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
62. sex, lies and videotape (1989)
63. Big (1988)*
64. No Country For Old Men (2007)
65. Dirty Dancing (1987)
66. Natural Born Killers (1994)
67. Donnie Brasco (1997)
68. Witness (1985)
69. All About My Mother (1999)
70. Broadcast News (1987)
71. Unforgiven (1992)
72. Thelma & Louise (1991)
73. Office Space (1999)*
74. Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
75. Out of Africa (1985)
76. The Departed (2006)
77. Sid and Nancy (1986)*
78. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)*
79. Waiting for Guffman (1996)
80. Michael Clayton (2007)
81. Moonstruck (1987)
82. Lost in Translation (2003)
83. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)
84. Sideways (2004)
85. The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005)*
86. Y Tu Mamá También (2002)
87. Swingers (1996)
88. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)*
89. Breaking the Waves (1996)
90. Napoleon Dynamite (2004)*
91. Back to the Future (1985)*
92. Menace II Society (1993)
93. Ed Wood (1994)*
94. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
95. In the Mood for Love (2001)
96. Far From Heaven (2002)
97. Glory (1989)
98. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)*
99. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
100. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)

Wow… only 39/100 I’ve seen, but MOST of them I’ve liked.

Our House, in the Middle of our Street

Mrs Fireshaper and I finally finished the house and we have moved in. It took a few months (a lot longer than we had planned), and just a little bit more money than we had expected in the beginning, but now we are in our own house and have plenty of yard space for the dogs. Yes, you heard that correctly, dogs! We got a playmate for Amadeus and he loves him. He’s a puppy still, just under a year, and his name is Chico, he’s a mix and the mother’s owner wasn’t sure who the mother had puppies with so we really have no way of tellig what his breed is.

The house is a three-bedroom, one and a half bath, single story, and we live on family land, which used to be a dairy farm, so we have lots of yard space. We fenced in a backyard and painted and demolished and built back up, and all we have left is the blinds (which are becoming a lot more trouble than they are worth). I have an office now, I got an old desk from my dad that has lots of drawer space and I set up my two-monitor setup for my PC and have my Macbook beside it on its stand. Mrs Fireshaper and I have a large master bedroom, a lot larger than the room in the apartment, and she did an AWESOME job putting our master bathroom together, she’s such a great designer. The third bedroom, at the moment, houses most of our possessions, still boxed up, that we rummage through whenever we think of something we need.

So for the past couple of months I’ve been up to my ears in house-related stuff, I guess I didn’t get back to posting a bit more regularly like I had envisioned myself doing. But maybe now I can get on a more regular schedule.

Our House

Soon Mrs Fireshaper and I will be moving out of the apartment and into a house. YAY! We are moving more out of the city so we will be further from a lot of the stores we like to shop at but we will also be away from the noise and constant lights. We are actually moving not far from my parents.

The house needs a lot of work though, we are going to rip out all the carpet, tear out a wall, and then re-do everything. The paint job the last tenant decided on is horrible and we are going to have to get a professional painter come in and put down some commercial grade white paint before we can do anything else. It’s not going to be easy, definitely not going to be easy.

The dog will get more room though. Hehe.

Email me back to my inbox

Ack! Again I spend way too much time not blogging and doing other things, I can explain this time though, really! Um… I’ve been busy doing stuff. Yeah, that’s it stuff. I need to get back into the habit of blogging every other day (when did I do that???).

So I signed up at Viddler.com after listening to Leo Laporte (along with the lovely Amber Mac) do an interview with the founder. It’s a real interesting twist on commenting on videos, letting you set your comment to a certain spot in the video stream. I thought I was safe from spammers in a startup as I haven’t had spam from any other startup web company yet, but apparently there are a few people out there who can’t help themselves. I got a message from “Rita”, well that’s what she calls herself, saying that she thinks we can “click” and she said “email me back to my inbox so that i can send you my picture for you to know who i am through my email address ” (sic). I don’t know where this can go, I usually don’t “click” with people who don’t have a firm grasp of the English language, which is why “she” will be getting an email from a throwaway address, hooray for Gmail!

I’m still really enjoying my new phone, it’s just so cool! I’m glad I finally decided to get a PDA phone, there’s just so much that I wish I had a long time ago in theis phone.

I used Bold!

I’d like to call the period from my last post to now a hiatus, it wasn’t really that though, it was more of me forgetting to post anything and when I did think about it I rarely had anything to say. I still have little to say but I’ll try anyway, for you *points from his side of the screen*.

MacApper.com - I recently became a contributor for MacApper.com and have written a few reviews already, as well as setting up two giveaways (which are still active until the end of this week) — Galder and HoudahGEO. If you are a Mac-whore, like me, then you should definitely check out MacApper.com for great reviews of Mac apps.

HTC Touch - Mrs Fireshaper still had an Ohio phone number, after almost 5 months of being down here in Georgia, so we decided to go to Alltel, have her put on my account and get her a new number. While we were there we had the chance to browse the phones and the rep let me know that he could give me an early upgrade if I was interested in a new phone, so Mrs Fireshaper picked out an HTC Mogul (PPC6800) and I grabbed an HTC Touch for myself. I really like the Touch, it’s not an iPhone (that’s for sure) but it is a solid phone with great features (sans Wi-Fi), not to mention it isn’t locked as to what I can load on it. If I want MP3 ringtones I got them, if I want to watch videos that’s okay too!

Podcasts - I finally fell into the podcast stream that everyone else was seeming to enjoy without me. MacApper did a post on the contributors’ favorite podcasts and I felt left out since I was one of the few who didn’t listen to them, so I grabbed my towel and began subscribing to podcasts without abandon! Here’s what’s on my iPod now:

• 1UP Yours
• Ask a Ninja
• Diggnation
• MacBreak Tech
• MacBreak Weekly
• Net @ Nite

If you have any other suggestions, let me know. I’m always open for them!

You’ll also notice I did some changing of the sidebar to your right. There’s a MeeboMe widget I added and a link to my shared news stories on Google Reader.

I don’t care how good your book is, I want a summary!

Mrs Fireshaper and I got Borders gift cards for Christmas (one of the few GCs that I actually ask for due to the fact that Amazon.com accepts Borders gift cards for anything on their site) so last night we to get supper out and run to the bookstore for a minute or two. I had been eying a book on ASP.NET and saw that Amazon had it for $20-something new and wondered how much more it was at the Borders brick-and-mortar store, so Amadeus was put in his crate and off we went.

The reason for writing this post wouldn’t become evident until later into my story unless I cut to it now so I will. What is the deal with publishers (or authors or whoever is responsible) not putting a summary of books on the back cover anymore? I couldn’t tell you how many books I picked up that looked interesting from the cover or title and when I turned it over (or looked at the jacket sleeve if it was a hardcover) there was just “praise” for the book or a bio about the author. How am I supposed to know what the book is about if I can’t read a summary of it? Are we supposed to blindly buy books now, or do publishers, or whoever, think we are such informed consumers now that we know exactly what a book is about before we go to the store?

I don’t know about you but I tend to go to the bookstore, not because I know which book I want to get, but because I want to SHOP for a book, which usually means picking up the book, reading a summary of it, and then deciding whether I want to purchase it or not. But when there’s no summary of the book how can I know if I want to read it or not?

A message from who?

This morning when I left I noticed that my Wii was pulsing blue at me, it does this every so often and usually means that Nintendo has sent me a message to tell me about some new channel they are giving away/selling and that I need to check it out. I read today that the Wiis would soon be getting the capability to download complete Nintendo DS games and thought maybe that’s what the blinking light was for but when I turned on my Wii to see what was going on it turned out to be totally different. You see, I bought Super Mario Galaxy a while back and have been loving the game. It’s a wonderful next step in the Super Mario line of games and I’m thoroughly enjoying myself with it. Up until now, as I said before, the only messages I had received on the Wii were my daily status reports and the news messages from Nintendo, so imagine my surprise when I get a message from Toad! Yes, that’s right, Toad, the little guy who always tells Mario that the Princess is in a different castle, the one with the ’shroom on his head. Now they are sending messages from the game to me via the characters in the game? Wow…  

The demise of analog television

Consumerist.com announced that the website for the government’s mass eradication of analog television is up and you can now apply for your coupon for 1 (or 2) free digital TV converter boxes. The coupons are not going to be out until late February/early March but better to go ahead and apply now than wait until it’s too late. There are no retailers available yet, but keep an eye open for one near you. Cable/Satellite users need not apply.

The gift that keeps on giving

I’m sure many of you received that wonderful gift this year, the one that everyone loves to hate and hates to love, yes, I’m talking about gift cards! I don’t think I’ve typed here about how I feel about gift cards (I hate them! Unless I specifically asked for a gift card to a store, give me cash!) so I won’t expect you to understand how I loathe them. So when Mrs Fireshaper got an unwanted gift card in a White Elephant game at my grandparent’s house on Christmas I thought that it would be great if there were a site that let you sell, trade, and buy gift cards with others. So, being the entrepreneur that I am, I Googled the idea and up came a wonderful site - CardAvenue. Mrs Fireshaper put her gift card up and looked for someone wanting her GC and who had something she wanted and the trade went through in a matter of minutes. She should be getting her GC in the mail today or so.

TuneTagger 1.0.2b2 Review

I was looking through my iTunes playlists the other day and noticed that a lot of my songs were missing information like Album, Album Year, and Album Art, so I set about looking for a solution to that. I had envisioned an app that would take each song’s Title and Artist and look on Amazon.com or something for all the information and all I would have to do it click an “Accept” button but the only things I could find were apps that found the Album Art. I knew there had to be an app out there, maybe it was just no one else had reviewed it or something, so I went to the place where I knew the new stuff showed up — VersionTracker.

The first things that popped up under the iPod/iTunes directory were of no use to me so I went through a couple of pages until an app named TuneTagger caught my eye. It claimed it could do everything I wanted and even get the songs’ lyrics. So I downloaded it and gave it a try.

First Impressions
The first thing I noticed was that the app doesn’t run like a normal app, when you install it an icon is added to the menu bar and that where all the menus are for the app, it is never the foremost app but when its panels are open they are always in the foreground above everything else. Of course, if you are planning on working on your library’s info all your attention will be on the library, right? Your attention would never on any other app that could be running and need your attention, right?

First Use
The app ran fine once I figured out how to work it, but it was a little complicated at first. Basically there are only two TuneTagger panels you need open if you are doing what I was, the review panel and the controller panel. To use the review panel you have to have a song playing for it to look for all the information and to change the songs you need to use the controller panel, this makes changing songs very quick so looking for the information is a breeze. The app doesn’t always find information for all the songs but it gets the majority so looking for the rest manually aren’t a problem.

A kink in the chain of progress
Of course, as soon as I got into a nice flow of looking for all the info and approving it then going on to the next song, I hit a snag. The app locked up and shut itself down so I restarted it and everything was going smooth again until the app locked up again. This time it wouldn’t shut down and I couldn’t access the menu icon to quit it or even Force Quit the app, it didn’t show up in the Force Quite dialog under the Apple menu and since it wasn’t ever the foremost app not even holding the shift button while in the Apple menu would show “Force Quit TuneTagger”. I had to go to the Activity Monitor and quit the application from there eventually.

Overall Impression
I wish I could say this is a wonderful beta app, I really do, but all I can say is it has really great potential. The app works… until it locks up and you have to quit it with the Application Monitor… and when it works it works well. There are a few bugs to be worked out but that is the nature of beta apps, hopefully the developer will continue to work on it and not let his vision die. Overall I wold have to give this app a 7/10, when it works it works, no doubt about that, and the only thing I could find that it lacked was a way to force quit that app when/if it locks up. I’m not really sure why developer kept it from running like an actual app with menus instead of just an icon, I like the minimalist quality but for a beta app it should have some way to force quit.

So if you are looking for an app to fill in your songs’ info and grab Album Art and Lyrics then TuneTagger is an app you should definitely check out, just beware that there will be times that you will have to quit the app with the Activity Monitor or a log-out-and-log-back-in.

TuneTagger 1.0.2b2 is Donationware — you can use it as many times as you want without paying for it and what you download is the full product, you don’t have to donate to get anything you don’t already have, except maybe a warm feeling for helping out a starving programmer