Something Fishy

Here it is at last, this week's Tastes Like Chicken by Josh Alves.

Gives new meaning to going through the drive thru...

The Last Stand

Alright, limited blogging will ensue.

Going to see X-Men: The Last Stand tonight. I'll post after the film with thoughts, but this film has some major potential. MSNBC has a nice little interactive that gives you some information about the different characters not only in this movie but the previous two.

New to this film are Juggernaut, Kitty Pryde (Shadowcat) and my all time favorite, Colossus.

I also have to note that instead of going to our local theater, which is getting ridiculously expensive, we are going to drive about 10 minutes up I95 to Spotlight Cinemas, where you can catch a first run film very reasonably and also get snacks without taking a second mortgage on the homestead.

Update: The movie was awesome! No spoilers here. I'll leave it up to you to see the movie. The effects were amazing. The only real problem I had with the movie was with what the writers did to a couple of characters.

Ratner, in my opinion, did a great job considering he had to follow in Bryan Singers footsteps, which is a hard act to follow. The movie looked great even though it was a little choppy.

This reviewer thought that Ratner killed the film and that being a mutant in the movie can be a metaphor for homosexuality. What movie did this guy watch, Brokeback Mountain? John Hartl, get a life.

I can't wait to see it again. Fabulous! Worth the full price of admission!

You know the drill...

Yeah, yeah, I know. You've heard this before. No posting in a while.

Well, life have been incredibly busy the last couple of weeks with work and personal stuff. Also, I've picked up a case of DeQuervain's Syndrome as a result of too much typing and well, too much Xbox. Therefore, I'm doing as little typing as possible with plenty of icing, stretching and rest. Therefore no blogging. You can see where this is going.

Off to a wedding rehearsal and dinner tonight. Wedding tomorrow with the reception to follow at the Penobscot Valley Country Club. Should be a good time, especially when we start getting rowdy...

Just reading through the Chronicles of Narnia, which I almost ashamed to say I have never done before. And what I have been missing out on. More to come on this later. All I can say is that if you are a fantasy fan, and never read them, you should. Good stuff!

Irons Sharpens Iron Update

Sorry this update is late in the coming, but like most weeks, this one has been busy.

As you will see in this post, I was heading to Portsmouth, New Hampshire this past weekend to attend the Iron Sharpens Iron conference being held at Bethany Church (amazing facility by the way!).

So I can keep this post relavitely short and focus on the positive, I am going to give you the highlights of the conference for me.

The first was the morning session speaker, Ted Roberts. This guy is an ex-marine fighter pilot and is as real as it gets. If Ted was leading the charge on the very gates of Hell himself, I'd be right there with him.

The other real hightlight for me was Paul Coughlin and the Good Guy Rebellion. In his book, No More Christian Nice Guy, he really strikes at the heart of the matter that being "nice" isn't always a good thing, often leading to fear and passivity, and that being "good" is another thing altogether, and what we should be striving to be.

Men weren't created to by fearful and passive, but are slowly being emasculated by pop culture and believe it or not, the church. Jesus wasn't always "nice", but he is "good". Read the Gospel of Mark to see this in action.

Of course, that doesn't give us men the excuse to be jerks, but his book is really a great guide for living to our true Godly potential.

I have to say it was a great weekend overall and look forward to attending next year.

Make Like a Tree...

Josh Alves latest!!! And in color no less. Weekly readers only got black and white.

Ah, the power of the Web...

Macs are now susceptible to viruses?

There have been Mac viruses for years, but apparently Mac users are just more creative and don’t have time to mess around with self-propagating viruses that cripple your computer.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), details what the virus really is and as usual, the Main-Stream-Media is late to the party:

Several people have emailed us to point out that CNN is featuring an AP story about the 'first Mac virus' on their front page. It looks like CNN is a little late to the party, since the Mac web already reported about this way back in February. Damien wrote that, 'The bottom line is that this really seems to be a proof-of-concept trojan more than an actual "in the wild, self-propagating" virus. So yeah, it's certainly very interesting, but I'm not about to start watching for the sky to fall.'

The virus detailed in the CNN story is (though they never call it by name) Oompa-Loompa, as coined by Andrew Welch. You get this trojan (it isn't really a virus) by downloading a file that promises to give you a sneak peek at Leopard. You must then decompress the file, and then click on the resulting decompressed file. At that point an application runs that does a variety of things that Andrew details much better than I can.

I wonder what took the AP so long to sensationalize this little 'virus'?

I’ve been a mac user for at least a decade, and have never had a virus. Go figure…

How Opal Mehta got pulled from the shelves…

Copy or coincidence? Now, while I certainly don’t condone plagiarism (who would?), I wonder if this really is a case of prolific plagiarism or just a young impressionable kid emulating other authors that she enjoys.

I wonder, if you took all the books published in the world and compared them by genre, how many would truly have “similar” wording and phrases. I mean, c’mon, there is no new thing under sun.

Is she guilty? I don’t really know, and don’t much care really. If people want to read it, let them read it. Don’t pull it off the shelves. Don’t kill her deal. Let the readers decide. That could be death enough for her writing by itself.

Give her a chance to pen the second book. It might be all original work, even though I kind of doubt it.