Despite having to see the movie with some of the rudest people in the audience I have ever seen(*), I had a blast. This movie was a thrill ride, and the stunts were just spectacular. What impressed me the most was the avalanche sequence, with ths subwoofers booming, it felt like almost being there. Sure, there may be plotholes and logical inconsistencies, but I don’t really care, because this movie is about entertainment, and it did entertain me. A lot. The last half hour had me hanging on the edge of my seat, being totally immersed in the action on screen. The last movie to do this was Matrix, which also had me just sitting there, letting the adrenaline rush through me and enjoying the fireworks. So, the overall rating is, see it, if you haven’t already.

And they showed the trailer for The Two Towers, which looks very promising.

(*) Maybe it’s just me, but talking loudly during the film is just plain rude. Even more rude is popping the bottle of your softdrink so it flies through half the cinema. And why does everybody think it’s OK to just dump the popcorn onto the floor and walk all over it? Yes, they do clean the cinema, but that does not mean you have to make a mess out of the place. I was especially annoyed as the guy next to me got the rest of a big bucket of popcorn dumped all over him at the end of the movie. Luckily, my jacket was not in the “danger zone”.

Woke up with a sore throat. I can feel the cold slowly taking over my body, and of course, this happens in the week where I have 2 things I am looking forward to. On Thursday, Birgit and me will go and see “XXX”, that’s going to be an entertaining evening, judging from all the reviews I’ve read about “XXX”. And on Saturday, we’ll spend most of the day in Essen, at the Essen Game Fair, which is the biggest european gaming event. But it’s not just a con, they’ve got all kinds of games, for the whole family. The best thing about it is, that a lot of US companies will be there, selling their games for really great prices. I’m hoping that Z-Man games, makers of Shadowfist will be there with some of the older expansions. Or even better, with the new basic set “10.000 Bullets”. But there’s also good news. I finally found the “Thunder Road” version of “Rain King” by the Counting Crows. It’s not the one from 2000 in Cologne, but it’s still a great cover.

I still can’t believe it. They made a cover version of Iggy Pop’s “Candy”, one of my favourite pieces. This would not be so bad, if the cover wasn’t

• abominably bad

• and done by a band called “Killer Barbies”, together with Bela B. of “Die Ärzte” fame

So instead of Kate Pierson, we hear some chick that can’t even speak proper english, for crying out loud! Well, the only thing I can do to get that out of my head is to put the original “Candy” on repeat for a while, to get the yucky feeling out of my ears…

Today, I finally managed something, that I’ve been working on for quite some time: frying a piece of chicken the right way without having to cut it open and throw it back in the frying pan a couple of times. Drumroll, please. :-)

OK, I found a solution for the CSS problem, I have to position the containing block element, and suddenly, everything gets positioned as planned. Weird…

This is starting to drive me nuts. According to CSS2, when I use position:absolute:

The box’s position (and possibly size) is specified with the ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘top’, and ‘bottom’ properties. These properties specify offsets with respect to the box’s containing block.

But that’s not happening with Mozilla. The box is positioned with respect to the whole document, not the surrounding DIV-tag.

Aaaaaaaah!

I came across Burningbird: The Parable of the Languages by way of slashdot this morning, and I was damn lucky that I had already finished my coffee.

I went to see Minority Report with Birgit yesterday. To avoid spoilers, I won’t post it on the front page.

Wow. That was my first thought about this movie. First, it looked amazing. The cars, the abundance of advertisements, and, most of all, the technology. When Cruise is working on the huge screen, shuffling around images, it looks like a conjurer working his magic. Second, the plot. I was really into it, suspending my disbelief for the 145 minutes this film was running. The world absorbed me, because it was futuristic, but still a lot like the present, so you could easily relate to it. The shock effects all worked, there were a few times that I almost jumped out of my seat, and I wasn’t the only one. But the movie also has some very humorous scenes, for example there’s one scene where Cruise is desperately running after a pair of eyeballs he just dropped.

I think, this movie is definitely an Oscar candidate, it was very entertaining, and I would even go so far and say it was thought provoking, with the theme of fate and predetermination.

When I checked my web stats this morning, there were 10 hits on my site for “Redhat 8.0 Review” and 2 hits for “Redhat 8.0” coming from Google. Then I wanted to check, what ranking I had. Turns out, for “Redhat 8.0 Review”, I am number 2 (and 3). I have no clue how that could have happened, there are no external links to my site, that I know of. But it’s nice to be at the top for once. :-)

Somehow, weblogs.com is unable to resolve my hostname (slackerbit.ch), so my blog doesn’t show up on their recently updated list. Not that I am expecting huge amounts of visitors via weblogs.com, but I use it to check out interesting-sounding blogs (for example, I just had to check out a site called iwilldare, and lo and behold, it was a Mats fan), and maybe someone would find this bunch of text interesting.