Crash Into Me

In the last two days I've watched two very different movies, Saw 2 and Crash. I watched the first Saw movie about a week and a half ago, and as far as horror movies go it was above average. Pretty much the same for Saw 2. I won't give any spoilers away, but it was painfully obvious that they were going to leave the movie open for a Saw 3. Horror movies are notorious at milking a franchise for as many sequels as they can, so long as they are profitable.

I watched Crash tonight, and I can't understand why the hype is so huge regarding this movie. Is it a good movie? Sure, but nothing mind-blowing. It deals with the inherent racism and racial fears and insecurities that different people in different races have. The acting was all pretty good, but the biggest suprise of all was seeing one Chris "Ludacris" Bridges not just act, but act well. Extremely well, to tell the truth. There's not much of a huge story in this movie, as it's obviously a character study. I liked it, but I don't know if I'll be watching it too many times in the future.

Earlier in the week, I finished watching all the episodes of X-Men Evolution. I had originally watched the first season a couple years back when it aired, and wrote it off as "the X-Men in high school. I'm sure MTV would be proud." And that still holds true for most of season one, but in mid-season two, things pick up. Familiar villians including the Sentinels and Apocalypse appear in seasons three and four, and that's where the show really hits its stride. In the later seasons, I even think it was on par than the original X-Men: The Animated Series (which I've also seen every episode of) which is without a doubt the #2 animated action show of all time (behind the obvious #1 of Batman: The Animated Series). This show, along with the Spider-Man that aired on MTV, was cancelled before its time - though I guess four seasons is plenty of time. I'm just greedy. I hate hitting the end of a series and wanting more. Firefly, X-Men, Batman, Sopranos, House...good TV is hard to find, and when you want more, it's hard to sate that hunger.

After I finished X-Men Evolution, I needed something else to kill my free time. I had a lot of tests this week, so I definitely needed a diversion from time to time to take my mind off of Organic Chemistry. I did something very uncharacteristic - I read a book. An eBook, to be honest - I've got thousands of those and don't mind reading a huge HTML file. The "book" of choice was Dan Brown's Digital Fortress - a book about the NSA and codebreaking. Not as good as the excellent Angels and Demons and the very good Da Vinci Code , but a good read none the less. I'll start up on the other book I have of his, Deception Point, sometime in the near future. I just got into another old TV series, the cartoon Gargoyles, and I'll watch all those first.

I saw this story on digg, and thought it was really cool. Apparently some rich internet guy moved into the boonies in New York state, and was very unimpressed with both the quality of service and customer support from the local telco. To combat that, he made the entire town a WiFi hotspot. Amazing stuff.

I finally got a new phone. Done are my days with the Kyocera SE44 "Slider", and now I'm using a Motorola V710, a fancy new flip-phone with bluetooth and a camera. I've never owned a top-of-the-line phone, so this is somewhat of a test experiment. I bought the phone used off of eBay for shy of $200 [Alltel sells it new for $249, and that's after the discount for a 2-year service agreement - something I didn't want because I was off-contract and very happily so] and the weirdest thing of all was that the previous owner LEFT ALL HIS PICTURES on the phone. Thankfully there wasn't anything disgusting, but it was still weird to look through these pictures of a guy's family and house and whatnot. He also left all his contacts programmed in, as well as his original phone number. Good for him I'm not some lunatic, but let that serve as a reminder to the rest of you: if you sell/give away a phone - delete your personal information!

Last weekend I decided that I needed to do something about the wireless connections in my room. I have three computers, one laptop and two old desktops [one AMD K6-2 running WinXP, the other a PIII-450 running Ubuntu Linux and serving up 500gb of files for the network] and the wireless speeds were frankly sucking. I also wanted to relocate one of my Xboxes upstairs to use as a media center (thanks Xbox Media Center, the greatest entertainment software ever written) but this causes a problem. The laptop's got a wireless PCMCIA card, so it's fine. The other two desktops had one wireless card, and the setup I had admittedly sucked: the WinXP dinosaur machine had the wireless card (since Ubuntu and my D-Link G620 card kinda disliked each other) and shared the network connection through a crossover cable via one ethernet card in the XP machine and one in the Linux box, and of course I set up a NAT bridge. This caused some terrible drops in service as the damned XP box would just crap out from time to time. So that's two computers in need of an internet connection, and the Xbox is wired-only. I had two options: either buy what they call a "Wireless Bridge" adaptor, which is essentially just something that one end plugs into a computer's wired ethernet jack and the other plugs into this device that acts like a WiFi antenna, essentially making your wired connection wireless. Cost for this option? Bridge adaptors run from 100 bucks upwards. That's too damned expensive for one piece of specialty hardware. I therefore went with the other option. I bought a second router for the house, a Linksys WRT54G, which I specifically bought because I could hack it to do what I needed it to do. End result? The Linksys router was configured with a custom firmware that makes the router act as essentially one big bridge adaptor with four available ports (I've got room for my Gamecube now! All I need to do is to actually buy the adaptor!) with DHCP built in, and though the setup caused some serious headaches, the end result was worth it. 4x the functionality at less than 1/2 the price. Hooray for technology.

I now need to clear out some space, so I'll be burning crap to DVD for the next 6-7 hours. Blu-ray or HD-DVD can't come soon enough. I am one of the ones who will always want more storage space. I'm an information junkie. For a new tech project, I think I'll try to make my Linux box a PPP server so I can use my old Dreamcast to play Quake 3 online, at least until the Xbox port is finished. I've looked at these old instructions, but I think they might be a bit dated. We'll see. I have to find my old modem first. Oh, and I'd kill for a Treamcast (portable Dreamcast).

Oh, and I'm working on a new piece - it's food and money related, and should be fun.

Technorati Tags: wrt54g, crash, saw 2, motorola v710, dan brown, wifi, dreamcast