Category: Reviews

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Shark Tale

Went to see Shark Tale over at the American Theater last night for my wife’s Friday night outing with her classmates and friends.

I really enjoyed the movie. The jokes were corny but funny, and there were the usual name variations for selected commercial entities (Kelpy Kreme, Coral Cola, etc). One of my favourite was Robert DeNiro as the godfather shark. The animators did a really good job of capturing DeNiro’s look and expressions. And as fish go, Angelina Jolie was pretty hot.

I think the best characters were the rasta jellyfish. For me, they definitely stole the show, and I loved every scene they were in. The octopus henchman was pretty funny too, but the jellyfish were the best.

Definitely one I’ll be adding to my collection when it comes out on DVD.

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Stargate: Atlantis

I liked it. I think it’s going to be a cool spin-off with bad guys that make the Goa’uld look like playground bullies. The new digital Stargates in Atlantis are pretty spiffy looking. The only problem I had with it was that the new team had absolutely no trouble communicating with they aliens they found in a whole other galaxy millions of light years away. I’m still looking forward to the upcoming shows though. Hopefully the Stargate writers don’t fall into the same trap that the Star Trek writers seem to keep falling into and recycling plots.

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Shrek2. Go see it.

Saw Shrek2 tonight during a brief outing with the wife between study sessions. Funny funny movie. I thought it was just as funny as the first movie. Like most animated movies, there are jokes the kids will laugh at, and plenty of jokes for the adults to laugh at too. Definitely worth seeing and adding to the DVD/video collection.

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Kickass server admin tool

The other day while setting up Samba on our RH 9 box, I found out about this very cool sysadmin tool called Webmin. This thing is absolutely amazing. An entirely Perl/web-based application for helping with server sys admin. The primary purpose appears to be to provide a nice usable GUI for configuring and setting up the vast array of server software you will find on a typical server. It’s all module based, so there is a module to help you deal with Apache config, setting up Samba and Samba shares, NTP, Sendmail, Procmail and more. All kinds of good stuff. No more wading through config files and trying to remember where the config file for whatever daemon is located.

Of course, you still need to know what you’re doing, and not every single configuration option for every daemon or config file is available. This is no substitute for sys admin knowledge. It just places all the config stuff in one easy to access location and provides an easy to use interface. Very sweet indeed. And best of all, it’s open source!

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The concert

The concert over the weekend was ok. Loud, very loud. My ears are still ringing. I’m not really a big fan of rap and hip-hop music, but my wife is, and she listens to it so that means I listen to it too.
We actually ended up with some reasonably decent seats. Halfway up the first tier behind the left corner of the rink, with the stage at about the far blue line. The people on stage were still pretty small, but visible through the crowd.
The concert opened with someone named Tamia who sang pretty well. Next up was Missy Elliot who had a pretty active show, although I couldn’t understand a word she was singing/rapping about. Then came Alicia Keys, who I thought was by far the best part of the show. My wife thought so too. Sang well, played some great piano and really played to the crowd. Last up was Beyonce. Made a good entrance, but I thought the performance was lacking. My wife thought she did too much dancing and running about the stage, and not enough singing. And a lot of the time I thought her background instruments and singers drowned out her singing. The rest of the audience seemed excited enough about her though. A surprise appearance by Jay-Z really sent the audience through the roof. I think the crowd got more worked up when he popped up on stage than they did about Beyonce.
And that was the concert. 100+ dB of ear numbing noise, shrieks and drums and probably about 120dB when Jay-Z came out.