My Wushu Blog

Watchmen

This movie was LONG. 3 hours, and most of the time it’s pacing was perfect. Except when it wasn’t. I had decided to start this movie at 11pm, so I finished it around 2am and I was pretty sleepy.

This movie has a lot going on, and I probably would have felt very lost if I had not read the graphic novel (okay, okay, “comic book”). Now, I read that almost 3 years ago (I flipped between that and a Reg Exp book during a very boring LANDesk training class), and from what I remember, the movie is nearly identical to the comic. When I first read there was going to be a Watchmen movie, I didn’t think it would pan out. I also wasn’t even interested in seeing it when it came to the big screen. I decided to buy the movie on a whim, and I’m pretty glad I did.

When I read the comic, I found Rorschach to be the most engaging and interesting character. He is a complete sociopath, hardly a “good guy”, but his unrelenting moral code that he does not budge from is great. He also has some of the best lines in the story. What is very cool about all the characters in the storyis that they are all heroes and villains at the same time. Maybe that is really what a vigilante is, and I think the story goes to great lengths to reinforce that idea, especially if those vigilantes are not kept in check. Hence the phrase “Who will watch the Watchmen?”

Rorschach is the primary detective in the story, he moves everything along. The other main characters, mostly the Night Owl and Lady Jupiter, I found a little boring. I was drifting a bit with their scenes, and I didn’t care for the romance angle.

There was also Dr. Manhattan, who aside from Rorschach, was the other well developed and entertaining character. His complete detachment from humanity proved an interesting contrast to everyone else’s struggle to stop the inevitable mutually assured destruction (remember, this story takes place in the 80’s, where the Cold War scare was rampant… I think, I mean, I’m not THAT old ).

The second disc had 3 bonus features, and I liked those a lot too. One covered real life vigilante’s, and provided multiple angles on how they are viewed in our society. The feature had members of the Guardian Angels, a combat trainer for the FBI, a history professor and a writer. All of them had their own rational for whether self-appointed hero’s were needed or even justified.

Another cool feature was an interview with a Physics Professor as the science consultant of the movie. Which was fantastic, and super nerdy. I thought it was great that even a movie based on a comic was trying to maintain a balance between the story and plausibility. I thought he did a good job.

So, to summarize, I really liked this movie. It was fun, sometimes a little too graphic (it has this hyper-stylized feel to the violence, and it didn’t feel necessary all the time), and it continued to make me think about the story over the week.

mike Movies based on a book, Blu Ray

David Gilmour

Let’s get this out of the way:

My favorite band is Pink Floyd, and Sir David Gilmour’s guitar work still gives me goose-bumps.

There will be little criticism of this concert, in fact, there will be only high praise. With once exception, there was a TERRIBLE audio delay on the concert disc. That really annoyed me, mostly since I pay very close attention to how he plays the guitar. The show itself was good, it wasn’t the typical Pink Floyd production (no large circular projections screen, crazy laser lights and flying pigs), it was very basic. It also had a really cool guest line-up, including David Bowie during Comfortably Numb. Funny, David Bowie talked about his parents taking him to a PF show when he was about 10… David Gilmour is freakin’ old! My only concern is that I’ll never get to see him in concert (I did at least catch Roger Waters in 99), other than that, his age has no other relevance.

This concert was to promote his solo album, On an Island, which was released on 2006. It’s a decent album, some songs are cheesy, and it always feels like each song is an excuse to belt out a super long guitar solo. Even when he plays the sax, he still treats it like a guitar. This is a contrast from the old Pink Floyd dynamic, where Roger Waters was completely focused on the message, while David seemed to be all about the tone of the music. This is why, in their stride, they worked very well together. Anyway, the first half of the concert was his latest solo album, the second half was a lot of classic PF songs, Echo’s being one of my favorites (I once copied a VHS version of their Pompeii concert, and learned how to play it by watching it over and over again).

The real gem of this Blu Ray concert is the second disc, with all the behind the scenes footage of the entire tour. It was incredible, and I have a new level of respect for the entire team that performed. Here was my favorite part:

a tuner attached to a wine glass

That is a tuner attached to the flute of a wine glass. Why is that cool?

They were at dinner, drinking wine, and they decided to play around with the wine glasses. Cool right? Then it cuts over to a sound check, and David is there with a handful of wine glasses, tuning them, and showing someone else how to play the beginning of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond Part I”, with the wine glasses tuned accordingly.

I think they all made the chords together

Thats the kind of awesomeness I always liked about the band. It gets better, because then in Venice, David stumbles across a street performer who uses wine glasses (and he’s really good, he’s playing Fur Elise with them). He then asks the guy if he would like to play a show with him the following night.. and the guy actually hesitates until Gilmour says “I’ll pay you of course…”

I really enjoyed this box set, from the concert to the bonus footage, and it has further fueled my enjoyment of playing the guitar. It also prompted me to search YouTube, and I came across this recording of “Theres No Way Out of Here”, from his first solo album in 1978:

I like it, even the cheesy chorus is cool with me. I bought that album and have really liked a few songs on it. Him and Roger need to get back together though because it still doesn’t beat “Dark Side of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals”, etc… Those are some really fascinating albums and I could post a full length post for each album.

mike Music a night to remember, Blu Ray, david gilmour

This title sounds like a horror movie title.

We ordered a large 8×12 shed, and oh goody, it arrived on possibly the hottest weekend this month. When Michele went to get lunch, she reported that her car said it was 105, but then cooled off to 101.

I really don’t think I have ever worked that long, and that hard in heat like this. I had my Step Dad (Jim… I mean, Mike) today, and my Father in Law (Curt) yesterday and today. I really don’t know how I would have gotten all of this done without their help, especially my Step Dad. He is a very skillful carpenter, and he even had to make up for some of the inaccuracies we made Saturday with the foundation.

So, here are the pictures of the last two days, and thankfully the camera didn’t melt.

I was very envious of Pico, thats what I wanted to do

Curt working on the floor, above our hand made foundation

Another shot of the floor

The almost finished floor from Saturday. This took almost all day

Caralyne wanted us to take a picture of a bird in a horse hair nest.

Day Two, Big Mike takes the lead and gets a whole wall up in an hour

Discussing how hot it is (and its hot too!)

Owen joined us outside

Zoey was constantly finding shade from the heat

The heat was starting to get to Caralyne, or the mescaline was kicking in...

The finished product

Side shot

This is how many water bottles we drank today.

Now, just because, here are a few pictures of my new guitar. I really like it, it plays great and sounds good too. It’s hard to play right now, my hands are cramped up from all the hammering and “work”.

My corner in the garage is getting packed with gear

Those tuners are really solid and well made, I like them

EMG active pickups, I've always wanted them.

mike General

FreeBSD 7.x has been using version 6 of ZFS, and originally only 8.0 was going to have the newly updated ZFS version: 13.

Last week the core team MFC’d (Merge From Current) the ZFS updates to 7.2, so I cvsup’d and re-build my server’s kernel and world ( with a simple “make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installworld && make installkernel ), rebooted, and now I have the latest ZFS version running:

[root@server ~]> zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 13.

The following versions are supported:

VER  DESCRIPTION
---  --------------------------------------------------------
 1   Initial ZFS version
 2   Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
 3   Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
 4   zpool history
 5   Compression using the gzip algorithm
 6   bootfs pool property
 7   Separate intent log devices
 8   Delegated administration
 9   refquota and refreservation properties
 10  Cache devices
 11  Improved scrub performance
 12  Snapshot properties
 13  snapused property
For more information on a particular version, including supported releases, see:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/N

Where 'N' is the version number.

mike Geekyness FreeBSD, ZFS