So for the very first time, I actually clicked on one of those text ads. It was on Facebook, and it was for a movie I hadn’t heard of called The Ten. I still have no idea how this got by me. It’s essentially from the The State/Stella, and stars Paul Rudd, Jessica Alba, Liev Schrieber, Rob Corddry, Gretchen Mol, Famke Janssen, and Oliver Platt. That’s a lot of people I like and/or lust after (I’m talkin’ to you, Paul Rudd). And I loved Wet Hot American Summer, which these guys also did. Anyway, it’s been in and out of theaters so add it to your Netflix queue. It’ll be released on DVD on 1/15/08.
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)
Almost Famous was the first and last movie I saw in the theater alone. I’m one of those people who believe movies are a social experience. You grab dinner, see the movie, and then talk about it over coffee1. I’m pretty sure I’m in the majority. When Almost Famous was released, of course I wanted to see it with friends. But either everyone had seen it, or nobody wanted to see it. Normally I’d just wait for it to be released on DVD, but something told me I had to see this movie in the theater. So after meeting friends for dinner at the Santa Monica Promenade2 and failing to convince them to join me, I bought a ticket and went in alone.
It was practically a religious experience.
Seeing Cameron Crowe’s journey into the world of rock and roll at the age of 16 seemed like a wakeup call. A big “what the hell am I doing with my life” kinda thing3. The film immediately became one of my all time favorites.
And the music. Just fantastic. Complementing each scene so that hearing them again allows us to invoke Crowe’s memories as our own.
Of course, I bought the soundtrack right away. But even at 17 songs it only covers about a third of the music in the film. At one time I had ambitious plans to collect all the albums the songs had appeared on, allowing me to experience it the same way Crowe did. Luckily, procrastination sometimes saves you work. Eventually I discovered Rhapsody, which saved me from tracking down all those albums on half.com. And the good volunteers at the IMDB painstakingly entered the music credits4. All I had to do was find the tracks on Rhapsody and play them.
Unfortunately, Rhapsody doesn’t have the best search capabilities. But eventually I was able to find all the songs or determine if they weren’t available. When faced with duplicate tracks, I chose the one that appeared on the original album if it was available. This saves you the trouble of having to track it down, if you’re a purist like me.
In addition, I have listed below all the songs that were missing from Rhapsody. The great tragedy for this soundtrack is that Rhapsody doesn’t really have any Zeppelin5 . Considering that the fictional band Stillwater is a composite representing Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, and The Eagles, it is a real loss. Or a great excuse to buy a bunch of Zeppelin albums.
I hope this inspires others to do the same, as there are many movies with great music, and only one of me. However, this won’t be my last – stay tuned!
Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)
Continue reading Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)
- No coffee after a movie makes me sad. [↩]
- Back when it was cool, not just some clone of The Grove [↩]
- Unfortunately, my powers of procrastination and laziness are still as strong as ever, but at least I know I’m capable of being motivated for short bursts. [↩]
- As I count 48 songs, I’m not sure if it’s missing any since I heard there’s over 50 in the film. However, it does look to be very thorough. [↩]
- They must’ve really took “get the Led out” to heart. [↩]
Crack Team 2.5
The server migration is complete and I’ve added lots of cool stuff. While this isn’t as drastic a change as when I switched from Movable Type to WordPress, it’s the biggest change since then. Here’s what’s new:
WordPress 2.3.1
I was way behind, but now we’re on the cutting edge. The upgrade includes tagging and auto-save, among other things. It also has a better visual editor.
Tarski 2.01
The latest version of this theme, which includes a new header image that nicely demonstrates The Crack Team’s plans for world domination. Most other changes are invisible to users. Mainly it’s compliant with WP 2.3 and supports tags. Of note to bloggers is an option to reverse your page title, so the post title comes before your site name. That’s good for search engine optimization.
Subscribe To Comments
When you comment on a post, you can request to be notified by email of any follow-up comments.
Social Bookmarking
When you view a single post, you’ll now see a row of icons to bookmark that page to del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, etc. Let me know if one you use is missing.
Footnotes
On longer posts I love to use footnotes, so this is great for me. You just wrap the footnote in double parentheses. For example1. Just make sure there’s a space before the opening parentheses.
Contact Form
I added a simple contact form; you can see it at the end of my profile page. It uses both CAPTCHA and Askimet to prevent spam. I know CAPTCHA isn’t foolproof, but as far as I can tell Askimet is. It’s saved me from over 5,000 spam comments since I switched to WP. If any author wants, I’ll set up a form for them.
In addition to the software upgrades and plugins, Inmotion keeps separate server logs for each domain and subdomain I host, and separates out webmail. This means AWStats will report more accurately. Granted, I’m sure I won’t want to see them since they’re artificially inflated right now. But that which can be measured can be improved.
Hopefully all this is useful and not just a novelty. If you have any suggestions, just leave a comment. Thanks.
- Here’s a footnote [↩]
Free Rice
If you’re looking for a good way to kill some time, check out FreeRice. It tests and improves your vocabulary while donating rice to starving people. So you improve your vocabulary, raise your karma, and procrastinate all at the same time!
Server Maintenance
Well, it’s more like server removal. I’m switching from a self-hosted server to one at Inmotion Hosting. It was fun while it lasted. Ok, so it wasn’t really fun, because I hate system administration. And that’s why I’m switching it out. Some things get worse when they’re out of my hands, but other things like regular backups, security and bug fix patches, etc. get way better.
They’ll be handling mail as well, and as a result I will be getting rid of my CrackTeam.org email address. I technically have 6 email addresses and by far the Crack Team one gets the most spam. Not that I see any of it – I have excellent spam filtering. It’s 97% accurate and has protected me from over 69,000 spam messages to date. I don’t know that Inmotion will be nearly as accurate though, since they use SpamAssassin, and I use the BayesSpam plugin for SquirrelMail. Anyway, I was worried about getting rid of it until I realized that almost none of my friends use that email; it’s mainly used to register for web sites. I can use my Yahoo account for that, since their spam filtering is excellent as well. If you were using my Crack Team email, please switch to one of my 3 main personal email addresses.
Anyhoo, the point is that the site will be going down, perhaps tonight, so don’t be surprised. Hopefully the whole thing won’t take long, and we’ll be running on WordPress 2.3.1. There should be some nice new features.
Seinfeld vs. Larry King
Some are calling Seinfeld arrogant for this, but I find it pretty hilarious. Of course, I am arrogant, and I have nowhere near the success he has.
I miss 800.com
As I get older, some recent world history starts seeming like ancient history.This is not a good thing.I date myself when I recall programming with punch cards, real-to-goodness pieces of paper with little holes in them. I date myself when I say that I miss the sound of my old LPs playing on a phonograph. And I am dating myself when I long for those brave pioneers of the early Internet Commerce Experiment (ICE): 800.comI still remember when the world of electronic commerce offered untold riches to anyone who was willing to dream up a new enterprise and pay outrageous sums to web developers to make it a WWW reality. There were offers galore from all sorts of outfits; I naturally gravitated to those offering cheap and discounted DVDs. Don’t forget that we early DVD adopters had to pay upwards of 20.00 for each of our shiny movie discs (my most expensive DVD purchase was 21.99; I paid that for the “Lost in Space” movie DVD which included –wonder of wonders– two commentaries and tons of supplementary material. Wow. I recently saw that very same disc in the discount bin at Fry’s Electronics for 4.99. Wow. )
So I spent my early surfing days looking for discounted and free DVDs. I found 800.com to be a good place for price and selection. Their first sale was 3 DVDs for 1.00 and I quickly took them up on their offer. Yet there was a better draw on their site: they had a film blog and weekly writing contests for free DVDs. I could tell that they loved film and I envied their adventure into online commerce. What could go wrong with selling the films you admired and rewarding good writing from your customers??
Alas, 800.com is no more. They were victims of the Disastrous Internet Bubble Burst (DIBB) and went the way of the dodo, along with Pets.com eToys.com and other worthy endeavours. But I was lucky/talented/geeky enough to win a couple of their contests.� Here are some of my entries, see if you can guess which ones won prizes.