gottahavacuppamocha

Five hundred movies
Briefly reviewed in haiku
Bite-sized for film fans

I finally did it. The first 500 reviews have been put in a book and self-published as an e-book through Lulu. Review Haiku, Volume 1 contains reviews from 1941 to Zero Woman: Dangerous Game and all the Review Haiku posted from February 2007 to December 17, 2009.

You can get your copy of the e-book here.

Yes, it’s $6.99, but in addition to the five hundred Review Haiku, there are also thirty-eight pages where the films are indexed by director. This is pretty handy if you want to find out what other films that they’ve directed and I’ve reviewed on this site. The price is sort of a compromise. It’s affordable for most and it’s a PDF file that can be read on just about anything. The e-book can be read on multiple devices by buying just one copy. If you’ve got an e-book reader, or a similar device, you can read the bite-sized reviews just about anywhere. Waiting in line at the grocery store? Read. On the train? Read. In the bathroom? Read.

Now that Volume 1 is out, Volume 2 should be out when I have enough haiku for it. At the current rate, this will probably be late 2010 or early 2011. I’m looking into doing a dead-tree version, so people can buy them in bookstores, but 500+ pages is a lot of paper. That means the price would be pretty high, so I’ll have to think about it.

Looking for a beach
Two teen boys learn life lessons
From pretty teacher

Y tu mamá también at Rotten Tomatoes
Y tu mamá también at IMDB

Rating:  

According to my calculations, this is the 500th movie for which I created a Review Haiku. I may put them in a book at some point, but at the moment, there are still many more to come.

The storage unit is cleaned out, so instead of my apartment looking like a disaster area, it looks a bit like the world of WALL-E – a chaotic and cramped, slightly-organized mess. On the upside I’ll be saving money. The interesting thing is all of the stuff I forgot I had. I still have to get rid of a lot of it, but at least it’s a chance to figure out what’s needed, what’s useful, and what’s crap.

Interesting finds:

• A tent, which I think is a 3 person dome – sell
• Sorel boots – might come in handy in the winter – keep
• Sketching & drawing stuff – sell or throw away
• R/C boat – sell

There’s a lot of other stuff, too, but of the stuff I don’t want or need, I still have to sort out what can be sold vs. what should be tossed. It may take awhile.

In a storage facility a few blocks away from the apartment building where I live, I have rent a storage unit. Earlier this week, they sent me a letter which said the building is no longer going to be used as a storage facility and all renters need to remove their belongings by September 17th. This is good and bad.

I’m a bit of a packrat, so my apartment is a mess. I’ve been slowly trying to overcome this by cleaning the apartment and getting rid of things I’m not using and haven’t used in years. Still, it’s difficult. Now that I have to empty the storage unit, the apartment is going to become messier still, setting back my goal of cleaning the apartment. That’s bad.

On the upside, I’ll save money by not having the storage unit, and it’s forcing me to make decisions about what I want/need vs. what can be thrown away or sold.

This last paycheck, I ordered a Mr. Bento jar/box/thing and a rice cooker. At work, I normally get food from the Riley cafeteria or McDonalds, neither of which is very cheap. The least expensive thing I sometimes get is a grilled cheese and fries from the cafeteria, which costs around $3.00. A wrap from the cafeteria costs about $4.50. On a day-in/day-out basis, this gets to be sort of expensive, and the variety is sort of limited, which is why I wanted to try something different.

In Japan, a bento box is a bit like a lunch box or a box lunch in the US. Bento boxes can be bought in stores or from some restaurants as ready-made meals, like a box lunch in the US. However, you can also buy the empty boxes themselves, which are essentially lunch boxes with compartments. Mr. Bento is a model made by Zojirushi. It’s an insulated stainless steel container that holds four microwaveable bowls in a stack. In theory, the bowls on the bottom of the stack will stay hot, while the bowls at the top will be room temperature.

The main downside I can see is that the bowls don’t look that large, so I won’t be able to fit a sandwich in one. However, if I’m planning on eating a sandwich, then a bento box probably isn’t necessary. The main upside is having a variety of food for lunch, which means a sandwich isn’t necessary. When it arrives, I guess the thing will be to figure out what to make for lunch. The challenge for me personally will be to remember to prepare something ahead of time.

I also ordered a rice cooker. My only previous experience with one was a former roommate from Japan who brought one with him. I could never figure it out because all the buttons were in Japanese, but he ate a lot of rice and swore by it. Looking on Amazon on a lark, I found a) there was a variety to choose from, and b) many were reasonably priced. I sort of wondered about the quality, but the one I ordered is from a Japanese company (Zojirushi, as it happens), and had many good reviews from Amazon customers. Strangely, most of the people who gave it high marks said to ignore the instructions that come with it. While the principles of cooking rice are the same, American rice is usually longer grain compared with Japanese rice, so needs more water…or something like that. It may take some experimentation to get it right. It can also be used as a steamer, so that will be nice.

Since boneless, skinless chicken breasts were on sale at the grocery store today, they will probably end up in most of my lunches this week. I need to figure out some good bento sized lunches :-)

A few months ago I began adding Apture links to the website. I had seen it on a few other sites and it was interesting that you could get a glimpse of a web page without having to open another tab or window. When I found out they linked to IMDB, I was sold on it (it’s also free).

After working with it awhile, some issues are apparent. Apture works very well with Wikipedia, @Twitter, and some other sites, but it doesn’t seem to work consistently well with IMDB. I can get Apture to work with Rotten Tomatoes, but I have to manually add the links, because they are not in Apture’s system yet. It’s sort of strange that a site that is in Apture’s system, doesn’t work well with it, yet a site that isn’t in the system, does.

However, IMDB is is more comprehensive in it’s listings than Rotten Tomatoes. I admit, there are some pretty obscure films on this site, and they sometimes test the comprehensiveness of websites. Right now, IMDB lists Urban Scenze, Vol. 2, but not Urban Scenze, Vol. 1, while Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t list either one. The All-American Girl is listed on IMDB, but not at Rotten Tomatoes. However, that one was rated X and I think Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t create pages for films with that rating. I may be wrong, of course.

Despite all that, I will keep adding Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB links to the Review Haiku, because they are probably are the best places to turn if you want further information on any given film. In the future, I may add different links, if the movies are difficult to find for rental or purchase.

I don’t know about this, but it seems strange/odd. Maybe it’s the economy or something.

At work, I ordered an HP LaserJet printer from a vendor a couple of weeks ago. Shipments from this vendor usually arrive in a few days, so yesterday I sent them an email asking where they expected to ship the printer. Two weeks is a long time for this vendor, so sending an inquiry seemed appropriate. Their reply was received a few hours later, saying there were supply problems and HP notified them it would be 6 – 8 weeks before the printer shipped. That’s a lifetime, so I’ll be shopping around at other vendors for something that isn’t HP. The annoyance factor is their website doesn’t mention if something is in stock or not. It just has the “Add to cart” button.

Last week, I ordered a replacement video card for my MacPro. A day or two later, the company sent me an email saying it would be a few extra days because they had it on backorder with the supplier. Yesterday, they sent me an email saying they were having a hard time finding a source for this card.

If each order was late separately, it wouldn’t seem so strange. This makes me wonder if there is a shortage of something going on. Shipping? Silicon? Simple coincidence?

It’s been quite awhile, so I updated the gallery to the latest version of ZenPhoto. It’s supposed to work well with WordPress via some plugins. At the moment, it’s only a few photos, but I’ve got a ton more photos to process and add. Plus, there will also be some 3d stuff, graphic design, and so on.

I recently got a flatbed scanner that also does film and slides, so the plan is to convert old photos, slides, and maybe negatives, into digital form. Even if they don’t end up being posted (to protect the innocent ô_o), it will be nice to get them scanned in.

Hopefully this will also give me incentive to come up with another theme to unify the look of WordPress and ZenPhoto. At the very least, the thumbnails can be pulled into WordPress like this. It’s a start.

WordPress 2.8 came out yesterday afternoon and I just finished the upgrade. For the past few versions, WordPress has become one of the most user-friendly pieces of software I’ve seen. It seems well thought out and well-constructed.

WordPress has a tool called Upgrade in the Admin panel, which allows people to easily upgrade or reinstall the WordPress code. No FTP needed, since it’s as simple as clicking a button. However, it’s not problem-free.

I have this blog for myself and a test blog I use for work. I logged into this blog and there was nothing new – there was no notice about the new version. Logging into the test blog, there were two banners mentioning the upgrade. Upgrading the test blog was virtually effortless, but I was puzzled by the lack of a notice on gottahavacuppamocha. The Upgrade tool said the blog was using 2.7.1 and that it was the latest version. On a hunch, I clicked on the Re-install button. WordPress 2.7.1 was reinstalled, but when it finished, there was a notice about the 2.8 version. I clicked on the button and let it upgrade. The upgrade went easy, but I had to trick WordPress to do so.

Still, WordPress is far more user-friendly than MediaWiki. MediaWiki is easier to setup, but WordPress is easier to maintain. WP isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.

Rating:  

A few things going on today. First, I added a plugin to WP that allows me to rate films. Review Haiku are nice, but they mainly sum up the film, rather than saying if a film is good or bad. Using the plugin, I can give the films a score, which I’m basing off the ratings I gave them at Netflix. Netflix ratings run like this:

• 5 stars – I loved this film!
• 4 stars – I really liked this film.
• 3 stars – I liked this film.
• 2 stars – I didn’t like this film.
• 1 star – I hated this film!

I don’t think Netflix allows zero stars, because their system will just look at it as being unscored.

I’ve got all the Review Haiku in a text file for easy reference (for myself), but the file only had the name of the film and the accompanying haiku. After adding the plugin, I went back to my Netflix rental history and grabbed the ratings I gave each film to put into the file. As it turns out, I missed a few haiku. There are three films I saw, but didn’t write haiku for. I’ll have to work them in at some point.

Also, I got linked to by The Film Cynics for the Review Haiku. Nice to know they’re appreciated :-)