Matt's Homepage

I caught one of the 3 sold out shows this weekend. Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Adaptation

I’ve seen other kids that attempt to remake movies – but this went above and beyond. It was almost shot for shot the same movie sans the fight scene with the nazi at the plane and a few other modifications. But they actually went to a navy yard and filmed the scenes on a U-boat, the fighting/fire scenes in the Mariann’s bar in Afghanistan too. They even had the chase scene where Indy falls down the front of the military truck hauling the ark, slides underneath the truck and then pulls himself back up after being dragged behind it. They did the front crawl down, and then the dragging/pulling himself back up scene. Couldn’t believe how dangerous that was and they did it as kids.

They started at 12 years old, and finished about the time they were 17 – so you can actually see them age as the movie goes on. The guys who made it were there talking afterwards and had some fun stories to tell. Needless to say, during the filming, there were several trips to the hospital involved. Awesome stuff.

Not available on DVD unfortunately due to copyright, but keep your eye out to see if they do a showing in your town.

If you want to subscribe to my blog for RSS, click:

HERE for RSS 2.0 support

HERE for older RSS 0.9 support

HERE for Atom feeds

My dad is recovering today and everything looks ok for the time being.  Still need to wait more to see what will need to happen next – but no immediate dangers.  So as distraction, I thought I’d throw up some links:

How to cook the last 1st class meal that was served on the Titanic.  None other than a 10-course meal.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s album – Gurrumul.  Aboriginal from Australia with an amazing voice – definitely worth a listen as it’s so unique.

Mr. Lee’s adventures.  A guy sticks a little camera around his cat’s neck and turns him loose each day.  See where he went.  Other owners do the same.

My mom drove him in this morning.  He’s doing ok, but had to have some emergency work done.  Please keep my dad in your prayers if you would for a speedy recovery.

I already modded my car. I haven’t even had it a total of 8 hours, and I already ripped the dash apart. I put in an auxmod – which adds a line-in capability for the stock stereo. Can’t believe aux in lines aren’t standard on everything, but they stubbornly refuse to be in more than 50% of cars. I forgive my 2004, and since this thing works so well, I won’t complain.

Now to get back to listening to Moby Dick (books on mp3 – freely downloadable from the Portland Library!) every morning on my way to work. Over halfway finished with the book so far…

Update: it’s here. I’ll be driving over at lunch to pick it up.

I figured the car shipping would get stuck at way stations for days on end on its way out, but that hasn’t been the case at all. It’s moving right along and makes a great diversion while code is compiling to check up on the next spot. I’m hoping it will make it out well before the Apr 25th eta. Here’s the progress so far:

Fort Wayne, IN 0 mi <start>
Indianapolis, IN 127 mi
Arbury hills, IL 307 mi
Frankfort, IL 310 mi
Council bluffs, IA midnight 12th 758 mi
Brady, NE 09:00am 13th 1020 mi
Lodgepole, NE 10:00am, 13th 1146 mi
Kimball, NE 12:07pm, 13th 1206 mi
Cheyenne, WY 12:57pm, 13th 1275 mi
University, WY 03:04pm apr 13th
Buford, WY 02:21pm, 13th 1302 mi
Evanston, WY 10:00am apr 14th (all day) 1632 mi
Salt Lake City, UT 09:00am apr 15th 1713 mi
wilson, UT 10:15am apr 15th 1752 mi
Malta, ID 12:00pm apr 15th 1869 mi
Eden, ID 01:00pm apr 15th 1928 mi
Ontario, OR 04:00pm apr 15th
La Grande, OR 0:5pm apr 15th
Hood River, OR 07:00am Apr 16th
Troutdale, OR 08:00am Apr 16th <done>

8:30am – call from shipper that it arrived
12:00am – picked up car from shipper – arrived in almost perfect shape
01:30pm – DEQ testing = passed
02:30pm – plates and title taken care of, after driving past 3 state troopers that didn’t pull me over for no plates
03:00pm – bought new bolts and front mount for plates
03:30pm – back at work

How’s that for efficient!

I just found that the DAS auto shipper site actually has live updating of the car traversal.  I simply hit refresh and it went from Brady, NE to Lodgepole, NE.  How’s that for cool!  Poor guy is driving across Nebraska right now…

Interesting updates on the car progress. I checked around 5pm and it was in Frankfort, Illinois; and now it’s in Council Bluffs, Iowa. 756 of 2400 miles done. Google maps says thats 12 hours worth of driving. Whew. Glad I’m not doing it. Instead, this afternoon I had a beer with several friends on a patio in shorts, 60’s, sunny and warm.  Beautiful day today…

Mark Twain:
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”

Plato:
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
“This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.”
“The measure of a man is what he does with power”

Sub-pixel rendering on LCD displays:

• http://www.grc.com/ct/ctwhat.htm

VI color scheme tester/downloader – test out and download from a whole library of color schemes that some nerds hacked on for months…

• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/

Slyfex – auxMod. This little gadget plugs into the head unit inside your Mazda radio and turns the ‘media’ button into what it should have been – not XM satelite, but an aux-in line input. It’s all internal and you pick where you’d like the cable routed. Mine’ll be going to the center console box.

• http://www.sylfex.com/products/AuxMod/