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The Inheritance Books November 30, 2006 9:02 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Book / Magazine, Of Interest, Publishing, Reviews, TV / Movies , 2comments

Christopher Paolini began writing Eragon when he graduated from high school at the age of 15. Eragon and the second book in the Inheritance series, Eldest, captivated me. I shunned responsibility to absorb chapter after chapter. Book 3 is scheduled to release Summer 2007. That will be a long wait! And I will have to fight Tommy for first read. Eragon the movie is airing its trailer now and will be in theaters on December 15, 2006.

Eragon is an epic story of a farm boy’s travels in a land with dragons, elves, dwarves, and humans ruled by an all powerful overlord complete with allegiances, underground resistances, ancient broken promises, and magic. The book is riveting with unexpected plot twists that wrench at your sympathies. I must balance that statement by pointing out at times I felt the story was somewhat formulaic as attempted to guess its direction; however, it never failed to disappoint. I give it a high recommendation and suggest reading the book before seeing the movie.

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Google Maps vs Yahoo Maps and Geotagging August 29, 2006 8:26 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of Interest, Reviews, Technology , 1 comment so far

I love Google Maps! I used to use Mapblast and still contend its line directions are the best way to present driving directions. Are Google Maps accurate? Using Sergey Chernyshev’s tool to compare Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, I am surprised to find that although Google Maps has more detail in Europe, Yahoo maps appears to be more accurate in the US (at least in the areas I checked).

I found Sergey Chernyshev’s site while reading Thomas Hawk’s review of Flickr’s new geotagging option. Thomas Hawk is the Chief Evangelist for the photo sharing site Zooomr which makes his review of Flickr so much better. Zooomr was reviewed by C|Net 7 days ago. Geotagging is the practice of associating GPS coordinates with a picture, blog, post, or other information. GeoURL is a service mapping URLs to specific locations on the planet.

Geotagging is unhealthy for the paranoid because placing coordinates on a photo, or blog entry, publishes publically (in most cases) your exact location at an exact time. Some people may decry this a privacy issue (remember, you voluntarily put the information in the public’s eye) or declare it dangerous as "the bad people" could derive patterns in your life and track you down. It may be wise to not geotag your house or neighborhood but in reality does it really matter if people know that on Tuesday at 3:03pm you were standing by a cool statue? Personally, I wish my camera automatically put the coordinates with the EXIF information on the pictures and that the photo services would automatically grab that info. Some cameras do this already.

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ARrrr! Thar Be A Good Pirates Movie Matey! July 22, 2006 10:27 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Of Interest, Reviews, TV / Movies , 2comments

Saw Pirates 2 last night. Thoroughly enjoyed it! Despite the 2 movie sized medium cokes I drank begging me to leave at the roll of the credits, I entertained the training X-Men and Cars have put into my children’s heads. Pirates has the most astoundingly long credits I have ever seen! There must have been 3000 names! At one point it was 4, 5 or 6 columns of solid names on the screen. Looked like a joke.

Even people that stayed through half the credits started giving up. But I was pleased we stayed, for indeed, Noah was correct. He said, "Cars was made by Disney and this is made by Disney, so there’s something at the end."

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Cars worth the watch! June 12, 2006 8:48 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Of Interest, Reviews, TV / Movies , 1 comment so far

Saw Cars (offical site) over the weekend and was very impressed! The storyline has been done before and some of the actors are comically (at least to me) typecast playing the same characters from their other movies but it is great story, unbelievable animation, and a good time. The brothers from Car Talk make a cameo which I found very entertaining since I periodically catch Car Talk on NPR (my favorite NPR show remains Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me).

I found the opening sequence so unbelieveably realistic, for a moment, I questioned whether or not they filmed a real car to start. This movie used 2300 CPU years which means your home computer would have had to be running since 300 b.c. to make this movie; granted, your home computer would have taken much longwe since it probably doesn’t have enough processing power to begin with. Pixar overstressed NFS and had to replace it with SAN.

…the NFS, Brandeau confirmed that it was woefully inadequate for the demands of the new movie. "A gigabyte of memory on our file server heads was nowhere near good enough," he said, adding that Pixar needed something in the region of 32 Gbytes.

… Brandeau and his team found salvation in a SAN. … Pixar eventually opted to replace the NFS with a SAN based on an EMC CX700 box, linked to Dell Linux servers running parallel file system software from startup Ibrix.
[Source]

For those that haven’t followed, eons ago The Muppet Movie ran jokes during their credits. In X-Men:The Last Stand, the credits started running and the bulk of the theatre left. Those in the know remained seated for a bonus scene after the credits. (I am not issuing spoilers at this time but will advise staying to the very end). Cars (IMBD) did something similar running some footage during credits then it went to just credits and most people left. Cars also has a bonus scene at the very end.

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