Review: Superbad

A common theme among movies aimed at teens these days is to release R rated clips from the movie months ahead of time via YouTube. With any luck the videos go viral and everybody and their brother has seen the clips a dozen times before the movie is even released. Unfortunately, as often happens, the hype build-up is greater than the movie can possibly hope to be. This was never more clear for me than with the movie Knocked Up. I LOVED the videos that were being passed around before the movie came out. Then, I went and saw it at th theater and I can hardly remember laughing during the entire movie.

When I first saw the R rated trailer for Superbad on Youtube, I laughed my head off. I could not wait for the movie to come out. I tempered my enthusiasm hoping that I would not have a repead of my experience with Knocked Up. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. I saw the movie the first week it was out in theaters and I loved it. Seth Rogan as Officer Michaels and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fogell (McLovin) absolutely made this movie for me.

The characters in the movie are all likable. You find yourself rooting for the three unpopular guys (Evan, Seth and Fogell) who have their chance to hang with the in-crowd and hopefully get laid so long as they can use their new fake ID to obtain alcohol for the party. Of course everything that can go wrong does go wrong. When they finally make it to the party with alchohol in hand, they are the hit of the party. The girl Evan likes has way to much to drink, takes him upstairs to a bedroom and is throwing herself at Evan. Evan, being a really nice guy, won’t take advantage of her in her drunken state and narrowly avoids getting thrown up on when she pukes on the bed. The chick that Seth likes won’t make out with him because he’s drunk, and Fogell gets cock-blocked by 2 cops who burst in the bedroom seconds after he starts going at it with a little hottie.

There are plenty of funny scenes in the movie and the DVD has a decent gag-reel, line-o-rama and some other extras that make it worth picking up.

A very funny movie that I’m sure I’ll watch a dozen or so times.

Click Here to buy Superbad from Amazon.com

Review: Fuji Finepix Z5fd 6.3MB Digital Camera

Recently I dropped and broke my digital camera so it was time to head to the store to pick up a new one. My requirements were pretty simple. I was looking for a pocket sized camera with a decent sized viewing screen and at least 5.0 MP. After checking out several cameras, I decided on the Fuji Finepix Z5fd 6.3 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom.

finepix

Like I said, my requirements weren’t very difficult to meet. So when I got the camera home and started using it, I was pleasantly surprised by all the extras that came along with it. The 6.3 megapixels capture enough detail that you can print photo-quality pictures up to 14 x 19 inches in size. The 8 x 10 prints I’ve made from shots taken with this camera are amazing.

The viewing screen on the back is a 2.5 inch scratch resistant LCD. This was an absolute must! The big screen makes it easy to use all the menu options, and when viewing the shots you’ve already taken it’s easy to see which shots you want to save and which you want to delete. I’ve been carrying the camera in my pocket most every day and there are still no scratches at all on my screen.

The Finepix Z5 also shoots video. When you are out with your friends and somebody is about to do something really stupid, it’s nice to have a video camera so quickly available. I have a 1 GB Xd memory card in my camera and can shoot about 15 minutes of video at 640 x 480 resolution. Once I get home it’s a piece of cake to grab the videos from the computer and upload them to YouTube.

The sliding lens cover makes for a super quick on/off switch. If you are putting the camera in your pocket, you will want to be careful not to slid the lens cover open.

The camera performs better than expected in low light situations. Here’s a photo I took at an awards show.

The camera can also be set to several different modes depending on what you are shooting. The “Natural Light” setting takes two photos in rapid succession, one with flash and one without. Then, both images are displayed on the screen. This is great for shorts where you aren’t positive if the flash is going to be needed. I also like the “Continuous” mode. When using this setting, the camera will keep taking photos one after the other for as long as the shutter is held down. For capturing natural looking shots, this mode is fantastic.

The camera comes in three different colors. I bought the silver one for myself. My wife liked my camera so much she had be buy her the wine red model. It looks pink if you ask me. There is also a chocolate colored version as well.

Overall I’m thrilled with the Fuji Finepix Z5 camera. It far exceeded my expectations and would happily recommend the camera to anyone looking for a compact digital camera.

You can purchase the Finepix Z5 from Amazon.com. Or, if you would like to see all the technical specs for the camera, you can find them at fujifilmusa.com.

One month with Akismet

Last month while attending BlogWorld I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, at the WordPress Meet-Up. One of the topics we spoke about was Akismet, the spam blocking plugin. I had used Akismet a few years back, but had run in to some issues with it. At that time I found Spam Karma and started using it exclusively. A few drinks, a little dinner and some great conversations later, I headed home to give Akismet another shot.

I downloaded and installed the latest copy of Akismet on 2 blogs; geeeek.com and austinsink.com. While this blog has been around for several years, austinsink.com is relatively new and I was curious how it would handle the two. Would I seed any differences between a blog that receives a TON of spam and a blog that receives hardly any.

geeeek.com results
Total Comments: 10,724
Real Comments: 33 (0.30 %)
Spam Comments: 10,691 (99.7 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

austinsink.com results
Total Comments: 73
Real Comments: 14 (23.72 %)
Spam Comments: 59 (76.28 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

Overall I have to say I’m really pleased with Akismet. In the 2 months leading up to the switch, Spam Karma had been doing a great job of keeping the spam out of my blog and had zero false positives, but I was receiving a hefty amount of spam pingbacks that were all going uncaught.

I did have a bit of “user error” the first few days I was running Akismet. In the Options -> Discussion settings on WordPress, I had left the following box checked:

WordPress Settings

This setting was being overruled by Spam Karma. When I switched to Akismet, all comments needed to be approved prior to showing up on the blog. I was under the impression that all my comments were being held up as spam and I was counting these as false positives. I unchecked the box and the comments were flowing freely to the blog without my intervention. All is right in the world again, yeah.

So for now, I’m going to stick with Akismet. It seems to be doing the job fantastically.

Tubemogul.com; continual time saver

So many tools that you run across on the Internet claim to save you time. When you try them out you find that they save you time initially, but as you use them more and more they have other aspects that end up costing you time. You can get blinded by the initial time savings. When I first heard about tubemogul.com, the first thing I was told was that it’s a huge time saver. When this is the lead-in, I’ve become jaded and immediately look for the catch.

If you are unfamiliar, tubemogul.com is a free service that lets you upload a video to their site and then from their control panel you can have your video posted to several popular video sites, like: youtube, google, yahoo, revver, metacafe, myspace and several others.

Sounds great, right? So far, so good. The upload process is simple. You title, tag and categorize your video one time through a very simple interface. You select the video sites you want to post to, enter your username/password for each site and click the post button. Your video gets pushed out to several sites at once.

With most services, this is where the time savings would stop. Not with tubemogul. Here’s the part that really sold me on the service. Starting the day after you upload your video, tubemogul starts collecting stats for your videos across all the sites where you’ve published your video. You don’t need to log in to each of your video site accounts to see how many viewers you have had. You can check them all from one centralized location.

If you use video as part of your marketing or advertising and you aren’t using tubemogul, you are crazy. Did you miss the part where I said the service is free?

Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.

Running the 2007 Las Vegas half-Marathon

Back at the end of April, I wrote about being Blissfully Ignorant about the run I was supposed to do the following morning. It was to be my wife’s and my first training run with the Las Vegas RoadRunners. As I remember it, that first run was a whopping 20 minute run. It wouldn’t be very long before we were routinely running 6, 7 or 8 miles on a given Sunday.

Fast forward 6 months.

Bright and early yesterday morning, we left the house and drove over to Mandalay Bay. Thanks to me not listening to my wife, we ended up parking way too far away and ended up walking 15 minutes to the convention center. After a brief stay inside the nice and warm conference room provided to the members of the RoadRunners, we headed outside to take our place behind the elite runners and the running Elvi (of which there were more than 150) on the start line for the Las Vegas Marathon. The sun wasn’t up yet, it was quite cold and there were some 15,000 runners behind us waiting to start running.

On our way out to the starting line I was contemplating the nerves I had about running in my first half-marathon. I then thought about the small group of elite runners who probably had a hard time sleeping last night with anticipation for today’s race. While my race was against myself and nobody else, these elite runners are trying to finish first out of 15,000. That has to be a bit nerve-wracking.

Unfortunately, I injured myself about 6 weeks ago. My training was basically put on hold and in the weeks leading up to Marathon day, I had run remarkably little. I knew this was going to be problematic, but I was determined to go out and finish this race. Even if that meant walking the entire course. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what it meant. My average pace time and my overall finish were nothing to brag about. Though, I’m still quite proud to have completed my first half-marathon.

A guy from my office recently completed a triathlon and went on to run the full marathon today. When I was talking to him about the injury he told me to remember that, even though this is the race that I have been training for, that doesn’t mean it’s the only race available. Compounding the injury by over-exerting myself for this ONE race makes no sense. There will be plenty of other races to be run. I took that to heart and really tried to maintain a comfortable pace that would allow me to finish without causing too much pain. The thing is, 13.1 miles, no matter how quickly or slowly you walk it, it’s going to cause some pain.

After the race we ate a bunch of the goodies that they were handing out at the finish line. We then went home and ate some more. Took a nice warm bath, took a short nap, iced my leg, napped some more and then got up and ate again. And, as if that wasn’t enough activity for 1 day, we headed back to Mandalay Bay last night for the Social Distortion concert at the House of Blues. General Admission tickets means you stand up the entire show. After the beating we put our legs through earlier in the day, this made for a very uncomfortable time. We stuck it out as long as we could, but eventually had to head home early.

I had an amazing time yesterday. I know for sure I’ll be back again next year. Hopefully by then I will have run a few more half-marathons. Next year I would like to finish in less than 2 hours and 30 minutes. We’ll see how that goes.

Here are a few photos I took: