Geek On The Mountain

I saw Team America: World Police over the weekend. It’s the latest movie by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park creators) and the whole thing is done with puppets. Team America is out to save the world from terrorists. When the actor on their team gets killed, they have to recruit a new one. The actor plays a vital role on the team….umm, acting. They eventually have to go up against North Korea’s Kim Jong Il who is planning on making everyone equal by making all countries 3rd world countries.

The puppets looked great. They had pretty realistic looking faces capable of showing some amount of expression and the mouths were controlled by a computer in order to sync their movement with the actual audio. At the same time, no attempt was made to hide the fact that they were puppets. Instead, they played off the fact to create more humor. There are clearly strings all over the place, and they frequently end up walking or even fighting rather strangely as a result of this approach. Some of the weird, Matrix style fighting becomes easier when everyone is already on strings… They also play off the puppet’s small size at a couple of points including later on in the movie when two of the heroes have some “puma”s unleashed on them. The pumas are just plain domestic black cats, yet they’re nearly as tall as the puppets. There was an exceptional amount of action and explosions and such considering there were puppets involved. There’s even an explicit puppet sex scene…it was released in theaters with an R rating, but my DVD wasn’t rated…

Another upside to the whole movie are the songs, which are almost entirely written just for the movie and just short little things with weird lyrics. My favorite is the song called “America, Fuck Yeah!”…. It pretty much goes like that actually. You’d have to hear it to fully appreciate it, but I laughed every time it came on.

On the down side, it really wasn’t that funny. It was OK. There were funny parts for sure. It’s done in their standard style. Anyone who’s at least seen South Park will recognize it. A lot of it just didn’t hit me as great though. It all depends on your sense of humor I guess. I felt it could have been funnier.

Unless you absolutely love South Parks style of humor or your a huge fan of puppets, it’s probably not worth checking it out.

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So the weekend is soon to be over. It hasn’t been too bad really. I did indeed get my Andromeda disc on Saturday like I’d hoped, and it even had 3 episodes on it (a lot of the discs only have 2). I watched that and kind of did a whole lot of nothing I suppose beyond what I’ve already posted about.

On the up side, Milenka ended up having today off. We went out for a while, shopped around, and got something to eat. The town is totally dead actually, which was great. Most of the college students are gone of course and I can only imagine that a lot of other people were just gone elsewhere still this afternoon. Normally traffic would be terrible and stores would be packed on a “weekend” day like today, but everything was nice and empty.

We got some weird things actually… We picked up some groceries, but that’s rather boring, so here’s what else we found.

Pigs…..we got pigs, as in more than one….

This is like one of those garden statues. Usually they come in the shapes of gnomes of bunnies but this is a pig with wings. He’s cute really.

Another cute pig…..it’s a waterproof kids toy thing. It even has a rattle in it. But it was on clearance, so why not?

This is my favorite. It’s a dish type thing I suppose. It’s actually one larger dish with three smaller dishes (one shown here) on it. They also had bowls and normal plates, which makes me think that maybe this is some sort of dish that actually has a use in Japan that doesn’t in the US. I just like it because it looks so cool. It’s like it’s made out of green glass on the inside that was then shattered into little pieces. The outside, which is hard to see, is this dull charcoal grey color. I saw this stuff and I just loved the way it looked so much that I had to get it, which is odd for me (particularly with something like dishes….) I’ll end up putting it on my desk and probably put appropriately colored candles in each of the small dishes.

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I mentioned the other day that I missed the preview entry feature that MT has. It became even more apparent to me that it would be nice to have such a feature when I began to play with future-posting. If I wanted to “preview” my entry (look for far too frequent syntax/logic errors, that is), I had to actually post it, load the site, and then come back and edit the entry, adjusting the timestamp to reflect the time it should actually post at. This was kind of a pain.

At the same time, I manged to fall in love with the Live Comment Preview plugin that shows visitors what their comment will look like once posted, in real time. I put two and two together and decided it would be great to be able to have a live preview for entries.

So I modified the source of the plugin so that it would work with post editing instead. If you want to try it out, just download (use this link instead for the latest version) and then upload (be sure to remove the txt extension it has now) to /wp-content/plugins and activate it. (I didn’t even change the attributes for credits and such that you see in the plugin manager except for the name) Then all you need to do is add the line < ?php live_entry_preview(); ?> to /wp-admin/edit-form-advanced in the place that you’d like it to show up. (try right above the line that says < ?php _e('Advanced'); ?>).

And BTW, you must be using the advanced form for this to work. (This can be set under the options page) As it is right now, it is only setup to use the advanced editor and not the normal one.

Mind you, the code is pretty rough, as far as my modifications go. It works fine, but I’d clean it up before I’d do a whole lot with it.
(Read the article)

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Awesome. I just found a script that will allow you to redirect all your MT posts to WP. It’s just some PHP code that you stick into an MT template. The template can get the post ID’s and therefore generate a path to the MT archive locations. Then it uses the function that WP uses to generate it’s paths (which is configurable, but I’m using the more or less “normal” setup) for archives using the entry date and title to create a redirect that you can then put into your .htaccess. Very cool!

I probably really don’t need this as I probably don’t have that much in the way of people linking to me, but now I don’t have to bother with going through and changing all of my links to myself… As soon as my site backup finishes (just in case, you know), I can delete all of MT. What fun

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Forecastfox is better than ever with the lastest version. Sort of at least. There’s been three significant changes as far as I can tell. Two are good and one is either not good or it doesn’t matter.

First of all, the icons are bigger and prettier. They’re much easier to see than the old ones. It looks good.

Secondly, they’ve added a radar function. This shows up as a circle that shows a little radar screen as a mouse-over. This is a cool feature, though I must admit that the picture they show is zoomed out too far. I can see as far to the west as the Dakotas and well into the Atalantic on the other side. I can also see well into Canada to the North and down to Tenessee to the south. My beloved glove of a state is just a tiny spot in the middle…. it’s hard to see where the rain is. On the other hand, clicking on it will bring you to the full sized map on a web page.

The final change is that the data now comes from accuweather.com as opposed to weather.com. Accuweather hasn’t been forthcoming in releasing their forecast data in the past so I haven’t been a big fan of theirs. Plus, I think their site layout sucks, although come to look at it they’ve done some major work since the last time I was there, so it’s not so bad. I still prefer weather.com though. Oh well.

If you care about the weather at all, get this extension! It’s very very customizable and can be put in any toolbar. I have mine set to show in my menubar to the right of the actual menu items and the left of the “access” icon in the corner. Where there was once wasted space I can now see the current conditions and the forecast for the next week! It’s great.

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