Dave Kellam

What kind of dork sits in a computer lab on a friday night, trying to code a 2D maze in OpenGL? That’s right.

Thisis a cool optical illusion. If look at the s without focusing on the surrounding image, you can tell they’re the same.

I ended up watching Withnail & I, one that Bruce Robinson did before How to Get Ahead in Advertising. That one was good, but Withnail is better. The dialogue is amazing; the scene where they get arrested for drunk driving is genius. I couldn’t stop laughing.

So immeadiately following the movie, I jump on the IMDb and seek it out for blogging. I was checking out the Withnail & I entry and notice the “we also recommend” at the bottom for Bulletproof. Yeah, that one with Adam Sandler in it. Which in turn recommends Lethal Weapon, which recommends Lethal Weapon 4. That brings us back to Lethal Weapon, an infinite loop. I found it amusing.

Update: Andrew and I guessed that his might not be such a random occurence. He recommended that I try A Knight’s Tale, which sure enough leads to an infinite loop. Try it. And then Snatch, that does it too. And then Straw Dogs. Yup those were all Andrew’s choices. Andrew the film buff.

Update #2: Refusing to give up, Andrew tries his last hope: Blade Runner. Sure enough that hunt ended quickly in a loop with Aliens and Alien3.

I watched How To Get Ahead in Advertising tonight. Until a minute ago, I didn’t know that it was made in 1989. From the rhetoric spewed forth, it could easily have been written by the new generation of film makers that have been inundated with brands and anti-branding (the likes of Adbusters and No Logo). Beyond that aspect of the movie being a little bit tired these days, it was brilliant. Well not brilliant, but pretty damn funny. Some of the lines and moments in it were gold, pure gold.

New video’s from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory illustrate the activity surrounding the pulsar in the Crab nebula.

Disney wants to remake Snow White as a martial arts movie. It’s not that I can’t see the story being interpretted like that, it’s more the image of the dopey cartoon dwarves running around kickboxing. They’re thinking live action, so it’s out of the question. Still funny though.

I don’t understand why this weblog on computational complexity crops up now. I could have used it for my software specifications course last semester. I think that I have an algorithms course next semester that we’ll be doing a lot of complexity in; I guess it’ll be a good link to hold onto.

I didn’t want to find out that Superdrives can heat up and implode using new higher speed media. A fix would probably be nice.

I watched Dark City last night. It’s interesting because I believe that I saw it before the Matrix but don’t remember drawing any parallels between them after watching both. My guess is that the latter is more of cultural phenomenon rather than a cult one. The commentary track by Roger Ebert interests me and might warrant renting the dvd at some point. If you’re watching it for the first time I’d advise skipping the first chapter or so, to around the point that the a character wakes up in a bathtub. It’s a much better movie without the intro narration (something the studio forced Proyaz to put in).

I watched The Bourne Identity this afternoon. I heard some good things about it, so I figured it’d be worth checking out. If you ever enjoyed reading spy novels or if you enjoy spy movies, it’s right up your alley. Suffice it to say, that I grew up reading Follet, Ludlum and the like. I enjoyed the movie but can see how people might find it cliched and so forth. It’s a good spy flick, ranking up there with The Day of the Jackal

I have a graphics course this semester, basically OpenGl/C programming. I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of experience with C. Throw in the fact that I haven’t compiled a C program on a mac yet. At some point I installed the mac developer software but never really started playing with it. I’ve been experimenting a little bit, trying to get things to compile, et al. There’s are really good tutorials at NeHe, they’re worth checking out if you’re interested. It’s aimed at Windows coders, but there’s example code for most platforms. There’s even beginners code for project builder. It’s a learning experience.

On an unrelated note, I was having trouble getting Stuffit to expand some large .rar files. You can find some command line software here, it worked for me just fine.