I was pleasantly surprised with 28 Weeks Later. After learning that it wasn’t directed by Danny Boyle and after seeing the trailers I was considering not even seeing it in theaters, a drastic reaction given that I’ll go for pretty much any thing with zombies in it. Upon seeing that the trailer featured lots of soldiers, huge explosions, and kids as the main characters I made the assumption that they’d taken things in the direction of Resident Evil with stupid, brain-dead (heh) action, and added a heart warming family element to make it more accessible. This turned out to be entirely not the case, and I’m glad I ended up seeing it. It stays very close to the style of the first movie, right down to the godspeed you! black emperor inspired soundtrack. Of course, this also means tons of shaky cam and low frame rate flashes, which may or may not be your thing. I thought it still worked well though. While there was certainly plenty of action, it never felt like it was at the expense of the characters or the atmosphere though it did contain less quietly unsettling moments than the first. I guess it was somewhat like the shift in tone from Alien to Aliens, though not quiet as drastic. Having younger characters in the focus certainly didn’t soften the previous film’s vision of the zombie apocalypse either. A NY Times review called it “unflinching”, and I couldn’t think of a better word really. If anything did soften from the first film, it was the portrayal of the darker aspects of humanity. It’s no secret that zombie films (at least those that follow George Romero’s lead) almost always have a social commentary of some sort as the subtext, and more often than not the message is that man is the real monster. While it’s a recognizable trope of the genre, sometimes it can tend to be a little overstated and the more subtle presentation of 28 Weeks Later went over well with me. Unlike the first film, there aren’t any characters that are distinctly evil or despicable. True, the carnage and chaos are triggered and then exacerbated by human actions but it’s the result of believably flawed characters and people having to make impossible decisions, not out of malice or greed as might be more typical. There aren’t any characters, major or otherwise, that are impossible to sympathize with. It makes things a little more unpredictable since in most zombie films the unsympathetic characters are usually among the first to go, and quite messily at that. I may not be exactly hard to please when it comes to zombie films, but 28 Weeks Later definitely exceeded my expectations and then some.

• Performance tuning Subversion
  (tags: subversion performance svn)

The Decemberists – Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)

• Crossing borders: What’s the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails?
  (tags: ruby rails metaprogramming article)
• HotelChatter || Best WiFi Hotels 2007
  Not that I travel a lot, but its still good to know. Nothing worse than checking into a hotel and finding non existent or overpriced wifi.
  (tags: wifi travel hotel)

• Posko
  (tags: blogroll)

Jolayne’s graduation

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

Here’s my favorite member of the class of 2007 at the hooding ceremony for her Masters in Social Work. It took a lot of work in the past year, so now it’s time for a little well deserved celebration. Congratulations baby!

This post was sent in 3 lines of code in Ruby because Ruby is nice enough to include XMLRPC libaries as part of its standard library. That’s just awesome.

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2007-05-20 07:02:55 +0000

Ruby is so nice. It’s the only language I know that really makes me want to do object oriented stuff right.

One of these days I’m going to write something in Ruby.

• xmlrpc: Ruby Standard Library Documentation
  (tags: ruby xmlrpc xml-rpc documentation)
• Six Apart Developer Documentation – XML-RPC
  (tags: xmlrpc movabletype api documentation)

Jolayne at the geocache

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

For the past couple of years every so often Jolayne and I would talk about trying out geocaching, but we just never got around to it. This was primarily due to my indecisiveness about picking out a GPS device, pretty much a necessity for the activity (barring a superhuman sense of smell I suppose). I didn’t want to get a low end GPS to use just for geocaching since we’d probably want to get something more geared toward auto navigation at some point anyway. However, those always seemed just too expensive to justify if the main thing they’d be used for was geocaching. So, a couple weeks ago I came to my senses and realized that at this rate we’d finally go geocaching when we were senior citizens and I ordered a Garmin eTrex Legend. It had good reviews and seemed to be a good choice in the middle of the low-end devices with a few more features than the bare minimum without being much more expensive. Plus it came with a data cable which was great since one of the things I really wanted to be able to do was to pull the GPS track logs off of it (I’ll have to do another post about the cool stuff you can do with those).

Since the weather finally got more spring-like today we decided to go out and try to find our first cache, one that was in the Parkville Nature Sanctuary. It seemed like a good choice to start out with since it’s only a couple miles from our house and it’s got some nice, short, not too challenging trails. However, it probably would have been good to check the trail map against the location of the cache first to pick the right trail to start out on. I just kind of picked a trail that I thought would get us to where the GPS was telling us to go, only to realize when we got to the top of a hill that the trail wouldn’t connect to the part of the nature sanctuary that we needed to get to. Oops. After a minor off trail course correction down the side of a hill, across a small creek, and half way up another hill we made it to the waypoint for the cache. After a few minutes of searching, Jolayne discovered it hidden under a tree branch and we opened it up to check out the contents and sign the log book. Our trip back was a lot easier since we took the right trail that would have lead us almost right to the cache in the first place. We had a good time, and there are ton of other caches in the Kansas City area so I’m sure we’ll be out doing it again some time soon.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2007-04-16 03:12:16 +0000

Yay for geocaching! I’ve always wanted to try that.

On an unrelated note: My friend Shiv is a DJ for WOXY (they’re an internet radio station, you might have heard of them) but he mentioned today that Yo La Tengo is doing an impromptu Lounge Act for WOXY.

So check this link after 3pm tomorrow for a recording of a live YLT performance and interview:

http://woxy.lala.com/music/loungeacts/

Comment by Will on 2007-04-17 20:45:32 +0000

Thanks for the link, I’ll definitely be grabbing that once it’s up. Can never have too much Yo La Tengo.

Comment by Ash on 2007-04-26 08:04:08 +0000

Whoa! Will, you finally went geocaching. I’m impressed. I remember we talked about it when I first got to Kansas City, and I got all excited.

Hopefully sometime you’ll visit Chicago and we can go urban geocaching.

BTW, There’s a Garmin store on

Michigan avenue, its huge. You must check it out.

not sure how well this is going to work but what the hey i’ve got some time to kill. currently waiting for the show to start and since jolayne has enough common sense not to go out on a weeknight i’m all alone. so here i am, painfully typing away on a cell phone keypad. i was thinking of going for macworld style webcast updates, but man this sucks. forget this, i think i need a Palm.