So I went to watch THe Constant Gardener today with CDMCC and Elizabeth. Movie depicted Africa and its story really beautifully. The movie was pretty good, but moved a bit slow and there really was no suspense overall, though it was supposed to be a “thriller”. Maybe the book did a better job. You could’ve pretty much guessed the entire movie within the 1st 30 minutes. The trailer basically tells you everything you need to know. SPOILERS! The movie begins with murder of the main character’s wife and the rest of the story is the husband trying to figure out what his wife did and why she was killed.

There was a major plot hole that we were arguing over after the movie. You may want to skip the following block if you don’t want to be spoiled. I found some reviewers of the book on Amazon.com and emailed them the following message:

BEGIN SPOILERS

I noticed you read the Constant Gardener after seeing your review. I recently saw the movie, but there seems to be a major plot hole which I’m hoping you can help me answer.

How exactly were the pharmaceutical companies planning to make money? From the movie, it sounded like the companies did not want to spend more time and millions more dollars in research because they were expecting an outbreak of TB soon and research might take another 3 years which will cause them to lose their leading edge because other pharmaceutical companies were already developing TB medicine. So in order to cover the side effects, they were hiding bodies who died using their medicine. But if they were planning to introduce the medicine into European countries or even America, if people die from the side effects of using the medicine, you can be sure they’d be sue big time. Also, how were they planning to bypass the FDA and get the drug approved.

My friend argues that what they meant by research was that they didn’t want to start from scratch, but continue testing it on humans and refining it until its ready for mass distribution to the people who could pay for the pills.

Since you’ve read the book, I was wondering what your opinion on this is. Thanks!

END SPOILERS

So I watched Stealth today. movie was okay. nothing much happened, though I sorta had a completely different idea of how the movie was going to be. From the trailer, I thought the AI plane was going to attack America and that was why they had to put it down at all cost. There was way too much going on for the movie to do much 2hrs. The trailer basically gave away most of the movie. SPOILERS! A short summary would be an AI fighter jet is introduced to the navy, hoping to learn and one day replace the top pilots. However, a lightning strikes the airplane and instead of frying it, it rewires the plane and now it and feel and think on its own. The AI plane starts to disobey orders and selects a specific target to attack. Their goal is to get the stop the plane hopefully get it back in one piece.

While watching the movie, they had this implosion missile/bomb weaponry. I took a guess implosion was the opposite of explosion and instead of blowing outwards, it would suck stuff in. But that sounded like science fiction and was wondering if they were pulling my leg. To verify the definition, I looked it up on wikipedia. Implosion is a reverse explosion that concentrates matter and energy. Buildings are colloquially described to implode when demolished through explosives, causing them to collapse on themselves. Implosion is the inward collapse, the opposite of explosion. I also googled it, but it only seems implosion is used during the process to create an explosion, never really to cause something to collapse among itself.

So my LCD didn’t come today, so I’m sad. Hopefully, it’ll come tomorrow since that’s the “new” expected delivery date. So my Fable isn’t on steroids yet, but it’s still just as fun. I’m still trying to figure out how to put the 2 speakers behind me. Was thinking of putting a small table there or something.

Random crap:

Mark Newport has 2 galleries up which I found interesting: Lyons Wier Gallery and Greg Kucera Gallery (from /.). They’re hosting comic book character costumes and woven comic book covers. The costumes weren’t that interesting and looked quite odd, but I thought the woven comic book covers were pretty neat.

Think of it like this. Microsoft has, for two decades now, shown itself as the bright younge upstart. But the truth is they are coming to maturity now. They aren’t “cool” anymore. iPods are “cool”. Facebook is “cool”. Google is “cool”. Microsoft is like the youngest uncle at the family renions, too young to know that he’s too old to be hanging out with the kids anymore.
– quote from /.

Parishioners see the light — eventually – artile wasn’t that interesting, but I like the last quote: “When I was a young monk. I climbed up a ladder to have a look at something and two girls whistled and said what good legs I have. I haven’t climbed up a ladder since,” he told Wednesday’s Daily Mail.

VirtualWiFi (from /.) – VirtualWiFi is a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. It abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card. This new functionality introduced by VirtualWiFi enables many new applications, which were not possible earlier using a single WLAN card. Basically if you have 10 wireless networks around you, you can log on to every one of those networks simultaneously. Someone did comment that this page doesn’t look like Microsoft at all. It seems it was a project done by a cornell student, most likely funded by Microsoft.

From pya!:

Ｊｒ. – Spiderman Jr. – wearing costumes do give you powers!
ぽけっとまねー・・・ – Pocket Money – the guy bootlegging (is that the correct term) Pokemon/Pikachu t-shirts must’ve been daydreaming.
立可尿 – Pee Standing Up – a device allowing woman to pee standing up.

So Tekman invited me to watch Serenity tonight. As you may have noticed, I’ve been dying to watch it. If you haven’t watched, GO SEE IT. I thought you needed to watch the series first to understand it, but all the info you need for understanding the story is incorporated into the movie. Watch the trailer here. I also posted the 9 minute high quality intro to Serenity a few days ago, so you might wanna check that out too. Though I do have to say, watching the movie will revewal a lot about the series. If you’re planning to watch the series at all, you might want to watch the series before watching the movie. The TV series is short, only 13ish episodes.

Many people have heard this series is a western in space and others say it’s very similar to Cowboy Bebop if you’re into anime. Personally, it was neither of those that attracted me. It was the values that the characters held that made the series so attractive. You may argue that these values are common in western series, but I’d have to argue the values the characters hold can be in any series and I’ve defintely see such values in many different genres of anime series. I’d have to say, if you’re an anime fan, you might want to check out the following 2 series: Trigun and Rurouni Kenshin.

SPOILERS!!! I was quite disappointed, actually that’s an understatement, more like extremely disappointed with what Captain Malcom Reynolds did to the guy during his escape from the 1st heist. Zoe did bring up a good point regarding the payload. I guess he did redeem himself somewhat later on, but my respect for him is wavering.

Welp, I won’t say much more than that so to not spoil it for you. If you haven’t seen it yet, GO WATCH IT!!!