Sunday, February 24, 2008

jPod Awesomeness

I've really been enjoying the first few episodes of jPod, and am actually glad that they've strayed from the book somewhat, plot-wise. The new developments are something to keep someone who's read the book on their toes.

Just wanted to mention that I just adored the fact that Alan Thicke's character, Jim Jarlewski, uses...



Yes, the cool people know by looking at the power indicator, but for the n00bs,,



YES! An old-school Apple II. That kicks more ass than anyone can imagine. I loved those stickers that came with my first computer, the Apple IIGS. I stuck them on the disk drive and on the side of the monitor, I loved the reverse-rainbow Apple logo.

Round about 2000 or so Apple decided to erase any memory of the rainbow logo in favour of the single-colour blue or grey logo. Tidbit: the last publicly-viewable rainbow Apple logo was on the site of http://www.next.com/, apple's "Enterprise" website. Basically the tiny parked page they put up after Apple acquired Next technologies and Steve Jobs, essentially the bedrock of Mac OS X.

Apple II was where it was at for hackable hardware. I peeked and poked my way to some pretty bizarre shit back in my BASIC days. A BASIC call that let you alter any address in memory and stick in whatever value you wanted was God-like power.

That was a beautiful time.

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By al - 1:12 a.m. | (0) comments | Post a Comment

Thursday, February 07, 2008

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Remember the video for One by Metallica? With the scenes in the old hospital of a soldier with no limbs who couldn't speak or move? And in the end he figured out how to communicate in morse code, but just kept repeating the phrase "kill me" over and over?

Well, now there's a version based on someone's real life experience, and it's so much more deep and positive and even affirming. Of course, if I had gorgeous French women hanging on my every wink I'd probably feel like hanging on for a few more days myself.



(Link to trailer)


The movie showed the process of coming to accept your own situation and appreciate the true value of an intact mind in a way that inspires by extreme, uncontradictable example.

I enjoyed very much that the whole film was in French, I haven't used French in too long a time, but it didn't take me very long to get back into the rhythm and become able to just sit back and listen and take it in and not worry about actively trying to catch each word.

I was having a pretty bad day before putting the movie on, was quite unhappy about some things that really shouldn't have bothered me as much as they did. But the experience of thinking in a whole different language made all those thoughts just completely slip away, a complete switch of my frame of reference just by changing language and taking away the words I was bombarding my psyche with all afternoon and evening. That combined with the truly hope-inducing story and the beautiful cinematography and music was enough to give my mind a real vacation from negative thoughts for a while.

It's still playing for a few more nights at City Cinema, if you are in Charlottetown definitely try and go see it.

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By al - 1:47 a.m. | (0) comments | Post a Comment

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