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Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg-athon

Feb 27 2007

Just thought I would take some time out to share my love for their work:

Spaced

Shaun of the Dead

and now…

Hot Fuzz

and here’s another oldie with Simon Pegg that many may have forgotten about:

Big Train

Midnight Euphonies 2

Feb 27 2007
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My second mix tape for you all. I’ve gone for the dark haunting lullaby-noise theme that celebrates both the fear and wonder of the night. I let loose some of the scarier tracks in this, so be warned.

Overpriced Cinema tickets and an ugly IMDB

Feb 22 2007

I love it when Blogger takes six hours to publish a post that I make via email. It fills me to the brim with joyous green radioactive goo, none of that half assed polonium business though. I apologise for my posting frequency in January – my residential campus Internet provider banned me for 28 days due to "suspicious use" which probably constituted using a wireless router to connect my Wii and a weekend uploading blitz that saw me backup 10GB of digital photos to some web space I have.

With no connection to the outside world I found time to complete all sorts of life changing things, from my previous posts it is evident I worked on my foobar designs; I also completed a number of assignments and project work. Life without the Internet wasn't hard, more inconvenient.  Scrubs got me through (until I reached the rather unfunny downfall that is season 3… but that's another story).

Anyway, I was going to make this post about something. Yes – the price of cinema tickets these days. I wanted to see Hot Fuzz on Saturday in the Odeon but we thought better of it – no way did we feel that a discounted £6 student ticket was worth it, considering within 12 months the film could be purchased for that amount or less. I hate to think what the full price was. A shining example of the perfect cinema is the local Warwick Arts Centre cinema – £2.50 for a ticket and every sixth film is free. What's more it shows quality art house films, classic cinema and has comfortable homely seats. Even sitting in the very front row for the entirety of Babel I did not feel uncomfortable (the soundtrack for which is immense). So instead we decided to watch Woody Allen's Match Point, a brilliant (and very different to the standard Allen) thriller starring my favourite Scarlett Johansson.

My next point is the internet movie database, more commonly referred to as IMDB. What on earth have they done with their design? It is categorically the messiest and worst redesign since the all-music guide abomination. Huge over sized middle buttons, with an indistinct sidebar and non-fitting page highlight. Did they not realise that Web2.0 was/is a fad? – IMDB was the last staple & successful "web 1.0" site. Now section header images look small and out of place; the cast list is oddly inward shifted; the text is too small; it's not instantly clear what the information you are looking at relates to; nothing matches up; ratings are in a less important page zone and when I vote I need to count the stars. Give the main body some colour – make sections more distinctive, shade cells in tabled information, make the sidebar bigger, put the rating back in the middle of the page… it is that important. Yikes, I am very glad that the former IMDB layout is still online here.

In other news, I bought Okami for PS2 – a very original and interesting video game.

Foobar Code Release Pack Version 0.2

Feb 20 2007

Many have asked for this, rather than rush out the first release I spent a while refining the code and commenting the various sections. Hopefully everything will be relatively understandable. All image sources are defined in variables at the top of the code, as are font sizes, colours and alignment variables. Please look at the readme.txt file which contains links and information about the required components, fonts and images. The code is in the new standard .pui format which should be placed in your “ C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\foobar2000\PanelsUI” folder and loaded through Foobar2000’s PanelsUI preferences dialogue.

The code has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license which allows derivative works. Please do not remove the link back to this website or the copyright information.

Download Version 0.2

I am now openly accepting feature requests and answering questions.
NOTE: For Single Column Playlist, Row Height: 17, Group Rows: 5
My Windows Visual Style is Inverso Reborn Balanced and a discussion and link can be found here. A good resource for downloading artist images is http://artists.trivialbeing.org

Components Required

Fonts

  • Bebas
  • Calibri – Comes with Windows Vista and cannot be redistributed (but you may find a site that has it)
  • BigNoodleTitling

A brief history of my January viewings

Feb 19 2007

Match Point – a very different Woody Allen film. So very very tense, the perfect thriller?

3-Iron – A quiet and alluring love story, astounding work by Kim Ki-duk.

Oldboy – Another Korean film. I’ve been meaning to watch this for 6 months now. Having seen this I must now seek out the rest of Chan-wook Park’s vengeance trilogy.

Lady in the Water – An interesting fairy tale but nothing to match Pan’s Labyrinth. I also spent the whole movie trying to work out the twist.

Le Ballon Rouge – a short and sweet french film.

Ong Bak – A fun filled action packed romp (or just another OTT kung fu flick, though at least better than most – but they did make sure to show all the good bits twice… every big jump was shown from ten different angles).

Wait Until Dark – Another top thriller, although Hepburn’s portrayal of a blind house wife isn’t entirely convincing. This trailer is horrific.

Renaissance – The supermodel of movies – beauty without brains.

Miami Vice – Terrible.

Adrift – Terrible.

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