BrainFuel

I saw Narnia on opening night and really enjoyed it. I had kept my expectations low because I certainly didn’t think it would be possible to have a beaver that talks and doesn’t look cheesy. Not to mention some dozens of other talking animals. Yet, somehow they pulled it off — the beavers were very realistic.

Whoever wrote the screenplay deserves an award. The dialog was very, very good. I have seen so many movies where the dialog felt unnatural. I think films with young actors fall into the trap of poor dialog combined with poor acting far too often. This movie does not. In fact, I was impressed with the actors who played the 4 Pevensie children. They really knew their characters and the dialog fit perfectly.

To give you an example about the dialog. I think the reaction on meeting Mr. Beaver was very good, and the reaction upon meeting Mr. Tumnus was excellent. It made for a film that works realistically even with talking animals.

This film could have been an hour longer. It was very fast paced. I found things moving almost too quickly. Winter moves to summer fast: One minute they’re on frozen ice and the next they’re on a plain with green grass and sunshine. Perhaps in the book that happens as well, its been years since I read it.

I thought the wolves were very realistic and I thought it was impressive how the White Witch creates disappointing moments for her captors. That was very dynamic.

If you’ve seen the 1988 television version you’ll see a lot of similarities. For the television movie they eventually made The Silver Chair and Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (IMdb). Both were quite good for their time and I hope they remake those as well.

Overall I give it 4 Beaver Units out of five using our highly scientific Beaver Extra Awesome Veritable Expert Rating (BEAVER) system. Here they are in no particular order:

Off site information:

• Review: ”Narnia” finally gets to the big screen
• IMDb entry for this movie
• Mr. Tumnus’ house – how they made it
• The cast

Last December I ordered a 1 GB memory chip for my laptop and it worked great until about a month ago when suddenly my computer would not boot up with it installed. Something had gone wrong. Faced with the possibility of having to buy another one, I emailed the folks at 4 All Memory and asked them if I could get a replacement. The coolest thing was that they replaced it for free (all I had to do was mail my old chip back).

So if you need to order memory for your computers I’d recommend 4 All Memory. They have a lifetime warranty and they apparently mean it. From their web site: Lifetime is defined as the lifetime of the product on the market. Outdated technology is not covered by lifetime warranty if the item is no longer available on the common market as a new product.

I’ve seen all of the Wallace and Gromit films and having just seen Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit I must say it takes top honors for best execution. The film is simply outstanding in its quality and definately a step in the right direction for Ardman films.

I’m having a difficult time deciding whether I like this movie best or The Wrong Trowsers. In The Wrong Trowsers a very cool penguin takes centerstage in an elaborate plot to rob a museum. While that film employs more subtle cues and less spoken word it still has a very, very good story. In this new film there are way more characters than ever before in an Ardman film and so it is just that much more action packed.

The plot is simple: Wallace and Gromit live in a small English town where the annual Giant Vegetable Competition is held. Rabbits have infested the town and Wallace’s company Anti-Pesto is considered the best company to manage the pests in a humane way.

Back at the home Wallace and Gromit keep all of the rabbits in the basement and feed them presumably until after the competition is over.

I won’t go into details but the next bit is where the film really shines. A giant rabbit starts terrorizing the gardens and eating the huge vegetables. There are some wonderful chase scenes and good character development at this point. There is even one scene where the giant rabbit climbs a building ala King Kong.

One more interesting note: throughout the film I was expecting to see a nod to Jimmy Stewarts film Harvey in which a giant invisible rabbit is also the central character. I didn’t see it. Checking the Wikipedia however reveals this (now obvious) tidbit: A large carrot sign advertises “Harvey’s” vegetable shop, a play on the film Harvey.

Overall I give it 4.5 Rabbits. Go see this one folks. Here are the rabbits (with a couple of their friends) and some vegetables:

External Links:

• The article about this film on the Wikipedia.
• IMDb entry.
• More reviews on Google.

I’ve been listening to audio books in my car a lot lately. I’ve been able to enjoy several lately (much better than talk radio since you learn something). I just finished David McCullough’s book called The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.

Now the first thing to notice is the 44 year timespan it took to create the canal (really a long canal with locks and a lake in the middle). That timespan includes a lot of failures that built up to success in the end. Failure by both the French (yes, the French were involved which I didn’t know) and the Americans.

Some other interesting tidbits:

• Approximately 12,000 ships pass through the canal each year.
• Nicaragua was almost chosen as an alternate route.
• At the height of construction, there were 40,000 workers working on it.
• Yellow Fever was a big problem during the construction and Malaria as well. Yellow Fever was literally eradicated when the Americans removed all standing water.
• For much of the construction period the plan was to build a canal at sea level. Which would have meant building a much deeper canal. Even up until the Americans started construction this was the original plan and Congress even got in on the decision.
• A railway was built and served to transport supplies and excess material back and forth across the canal line.
• Most of the electric motors and generators were built by our very own General Electric and most of the steel materials for the locks were made in the USA.
• The day the canal opened in 1914 was the same day World War I erupted and the event was hardly reported.
• Apparently, the amount of cement was so vast that the workers were instructed to “shake the bag” when it was empty at a reported savings of over $50,000 (and in 1914 that was a lot of dough).

Overall it was a fantastic book. I previously had only a cursory knowledge of the Panama Canal yet never knew the history or the great struggle to build it. Fascinating book and I would recommend it. I’ve also had the privilege of listening to some other books by this author and hope to write up a review soon. He’s a very good author and gives you details that add to the story.

Here’s a link to Amazon with more info. You might also find the article on the Wikipedia to be of interest.

This book gets four Gophers (it’s the Chris Tingom rating system for October). Here they are:

Why four gophers intead of five? Well, in my opinion the book spent too much time focusing on what happened with the French (first half of the book) rather than the Americans (the last half of the book). The American part could have been longer and added more details. But that’s just my opinion. Overall it was an excellent read!!

Just last week I picked up the audio version of 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers. It was at the library and looked interesting.

It’s fabulous and tells the story from the perspective of those inside the towers. The minutes before they were hit, and the 102 minutes following. Every detail is exposed including the thoughts of survivors, their discussions in the tower, the decisions they made, and the radio messages.

I learned a thing or two:

• Explains some stuff about how radio communications between fire and police were barely effective due to the use of dated radios and a vice between departments
• Interesting information about the size of the damage inside the towers as well as structural information I didn’t know like how the fire coating was made and the length of steel beams
• How each tower had more than 100 elevators (and get this 80 elevator maintenance crewmembers!)

I can’t recommend it enough. Especially the audio version.

Related: Amazon link and a NY Times article written by the author (might require login). Apparently the authors work for the New York Times. Here’s an interesting engineering perspective about what caused the towers to fall. At the bottom of that page is a link to a pdf that is pretty cool, too. Another fabulous article. There are a lot of theories about what caused the WTC collapse and I’m not really saying this is how it happened just that the book was really interesting.

I’ve just installed Screenshot Pilot, a free Windows app that makes taking screenshots a lot easier. It is really easy to use and you can send emails with screenshots attached right from within the program. Very cool.

You can take multiple screenshots all at once and it can crop them down to any zoom you want (full screen, current application, etc.).

I normally don’t go out of my way to recommend ISPs to people but there is a local company here in Phoenix that has provided fabulous service to me for going on about 8 years.

That company is FastQ Communications. From a service standpoint when my DSL ever goes down I can call them up and talk to one of their support staff and get an almost insant idea of what is going on. Often when I’ve called they already know what the problem is. Usually a router has gone down or a third party bandwidth provider is having problems. It’s always fixed quickly.

If you call their support staff and you talk to Doug you’ll be talking to the right guy. More than anyone I’ve talked to he’s able to diagnose technical problems and resolve problems really FAST.

So there is my personal recommendation. I know many of my clients and friends have selected FastQ over the years based on my feedback.

I recently read this book called Getting Things Done. I picked it up because it was apparently quite popular. Whenever something is quite popular the best advice is to avoid it entirely. I got sucked in this time, I guess.

Business books and efficiency books bore me entirely most of the time. I used to like them. Not any more. Usually they are written by business failures who can write. Books about submarine missions or biographies are far more interesting.

Back to the point: Getting Things Done is a personal organizational technique. Hmm, technique is too small of a word. Better is system or plan for keeping things in your life organized.

So my current conclusion is that the book says a lot of important things and rather than just suggesting you should get more organized it actually has things you can do and if you do them it helps keep things organized. The trouble is you have to keep it up and simply starting takes a lot of time. The author says most people need 2 or 3 days just to get everything out of your head and into organized to do systems. That sounds scary but you can begin to implement some of the things the author writes about immediately. Simple little processes that combined are supposed to really help keep you organized.

So I have finished the book. I need to re-read it because I feel like I missed something. It hasn’t transformed my life like everybody says. Something though that I have discovered is that even if I haven’t implemented every technique discussed in the book it inspired me to rethink everything about the way I organize projects. Causing me to look for solutions.

One thing I’ve done is create project jackets for every single project I have going.

(I also created project jackets for almost all of my older closed web site projects from the past 5 years or so but don’t tell anybody. I’ve actually already used the first 100 envelopes! Insane.)

Project jackets look like this:

So if you’re like me you probably just read this and said “project jackets are stupid!”

“I would agree with you entirely” is what I would have said two weeks ago.

Let me tell you something: if you don’t have a system for where to put project related papers then this is a possible solution. I hadn’t notice before, but I didn’t have a good system for organizing project related documents. They’d be in folders, or thrown into my file cabinet, or even just stacked on empty desks. I guess I never notice. Odd how that is, but I’m guessing most people could learn from this rule:

Chris’ Rule: If you have a lot of papers sitting around, think about what categories that stuff might fit into and create envelope jackets for that stuff so you can get it out of sight and out of mind (except when you need it).

Having a new project jacket is wonderful. Now I can carry project stuff with me everywhere and I look organized (clients like that for some reason) and I also feel more organized. I can also just grab a folder and know I have everything related to that project. It makes it easy to look up old notes and papers.

I’ve seen people use project jackets before. Other agencies use them and so do the folks at Kinko’s. I never imagined that I would like them as well.

My project jackets are simply 12″ x 15.5″ catalog envelopes I picked up at OfficeMax and I created a “jacket” template I print and write on. I write the project name, client name, the date the project was opened, finished, and is due. Other information I might add: invoice and check numbers and team members. I also create a project number. Each project follows a consecutive number.

A project is anything that involves more than a few hours or if you will be doing it on a separate day. The project numbers are handy because at the end of the year you can see how many projects you did.

At the very least, you can tell your friends you did X number of projects and they’ll be impressed you even know.

“Wow Chris, that’s really impressive!” they’ll say.

Then I might say: “This concludes our project jacket seminar.

Insert big groan from the audience here.

“There are some books in the back and I’ll be around to greet folks and please clean up your seats as you exit. Thanks so much and remember: Do your part to help prevent forest fires.”