Hero Inc.

Last night instead of going out to enjoy my Friday night, I stayed at home to “veg” out in front of the TV. An old movie caught my eye that I remember watching as a kid and started thinking about great soccer moments in the movies. I love soccer, but being an American, it is rare a true, good soccer movie is made. Usually we only get flicks that push soccer even further back in the American eye. If it isn’t part of the American big three (football [NFL], baseball, or basketball), it will not receive its cinematic justice.

Therefore, I have decided to create the five best cinematic displays of soccer that I have seen.

5. Any part with Larry’s (The Keeper) visions, The Big Green – Ah yes, the quintessential Disney formula for the mid-90’s:
   

   Misfit kids + A Sport + 1 Known Actor (Steve Guttenberg) + Humor = Release This Movie

   The Big Green may not have been as good as Mighty Ducks, but I loved the scenes where Larry was imagining the other teams attacking him as their mascots, most notably the Knights. It just goes to show you what magic goggles can do when worn properly on the soccer field. Maybe the goat was a bit much though.

4. Allies vs. Nazis, Victory – This movie could have been great. Mix great athletes with a good actor, Michael Caine, and you could possibly have a great soccer film. What’s that you say? To help it get exposure in the states you need to beef it up by adding Sylvester Stallone? Are you kidding me? Victory is great, but Stallone just kills it. It’s either his constant jabs against the game or his non-believable role as the team’s goalie. Otherwise, this movie is great. I mean, where else are you going to get Pele overcoming an injury to help his team out? Or classic 70s/80s soccer moments? Why Stallone? Why?
3. Team Shaolin vs. Team Evil, Shaolin Soccer – Mix cool fighting techniques with soccer and, of course, I’m sold. The basic plot is that five monks come together to relieve the great feeling Shaolin brought to them and maybe even have a great soccer match at the same time. Each character’s special Shaolin technique somehow magically matches to a great soccer skill. The graphics are pretty cool too.
2. Dirty Yellows vs. True Blues, Bedknobs and Broomsticks – Sure it may be a musical with that guy from Herbie and Marry Poppins (David Tomlinson) as well as the Murder She Wrote Lady (Angela Lansbury), but the soccer scene is great. Early mixture of live action and cartoon is just funny when the human has to be the ref with no control. Animals playing soccer offers the great lines:
   

   Charlie: That’s a foul referee.
   Carrie: They’re animals, Charlie.
   Charlie: That may be, but it’s no excuse for dirty football.

   The match also has probably two of the best keepers/goalies you will see in a film featuring soccer.
   

1. Cons vs. Guards, Mean Machine – I know what you are already thinking. This is just a rip off of The Longest Yard. Well, when the original Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds was released in the UK, it was given the name Mean Machine instead. I’m thankful someone took the time to provide soccer/movie fans with a good movie by modifying the original concept. Mean Machine follows the same formular as The Longest Yard:
   

   Pro Player – Everything Thanks to Broken Laws + Humor + Ability to Redeem Himself = Great Soccer Movie

   Vinnie Jones works well in his role as a drunken pro who threw everything away and now finds himself in prison. The game…..errr…..match has everything: Great Commentators, a Keeper/Goalie going on walkabouts, skills, violence, and a great team concept.
   

kAlarm to me is the app I was searching for months to find when I was using Windows. I always wanted an “alarm clock” application that could launch my windows media player. However, when I did search, I only found applications that didn’t truly work or required money I was not willing to spend. kAlarm does everything I want and maybe some more that I don’t even know about.

kAlarm can be found as part of the kdepim package, which will provide your KDE environment with many other mini applications design around personal information management (PIM). Since I use Thunderbird, most of the other PIM applications are not for me, but kAlarm is it hook, line and sinker. kAlarm is super easy to setup and repeat just like a normal alarm. It can be set to launch a note, script, file, command, or even email. I did write a simple Amarok script to launch my favorite “alarm clock” playlist, but now I just have it run the amarok command to begin playing. Either way works the same. I’ll probably try to write a new Amarok script to increase the volume as it plays over a period of time. This way I can keep the music soft when I fall asleep and increase the volume as the alarm clock goes off.

I did accidentally remove this application for a week or more and waking up in the morning was just not the same and not as easy to do.

Roughly 5 days and 23 hours until the NFL season begins. Ok, it may not truly begin but the preseason games do for the Atlanta Falcons. This weekend, the Falcons spent time in scrimmages that were open to the public in hopes of reaching more fans and giving us all a taste of what is to come in the coming season. I attended the Allstate All-Access Roam The Dome event on Saturday where I took pictures and notes on what this year’s team is doing.

First off, let me say that the Dome looked amazing. I can now easily tell what team plays in this venue and what team will be playing their in December for a conference championship. The outside looked great and the inside change of seats was even better. It almost made me begin looking to the season even more.

As for the scrimmage, the team was divided into two teams: white and red. The 1st team defense was on the red team as well as the 1st team offense. Here are a few points of interest I gathered from the day.

• The name of the day seemed to be D.J. Shockley. Sure I might be a little biased, but he seemed to be cool and calm out on the field and easily moved the ball down the field against the 1st team defense. Out of all the QB’s, D.J. shined the best and truly made it seem like there could be a real fight between the QBs before the season begins. All of Shockley’s throws were on target and the incomplete throws were more an issue with the WRs not pulling in an easy to moderate catch more than a throwing issue.
• As for the other QB’s, no one really shined. Matt Ryan’s first pass of the day was a horrible low thrown ball that was easily tipped at the line of scrimmage. He also threw an INT when his team was inside the 20 that was returned to the 5 by Blue Adams. It looked at times that Ryan was focusing on Roddy White too much instead of looking at the entire field. He could have been looking to relieve the magic of the night before where White and Ryan connected on a 65 yard TD pass.
• The running backs looked great. The tandem of Norwood and Turner will be great. I really like the idea of two “starter” backs since you can use one to wear down a defense and then turn up the energy again in the second half with your second back. It worked well two years ago when Norwood was picking up between 6 to 8 yards a carry because of the tired second half defenses he was facing thanks to Dunn’s help. Jason Snelling looked good as well and a few good “power” runs (even though that’s difficult in a two hand touch scrimmage). For those also wondering, Thomas Brown did not look that great. I’m not sure if it was the plays he was given to show his skills but he was probably the least effective out of all the RBs. I’m hoping he is looked at more for his return abilities since the team seems to be looking for Adam Jennings on offense instead of returns.
• With the return of Grady Jackson, the Falcons are switching to a 3-4 defense instead of their previous 4-3 (4 defensive linemen and 3 linebackers). However, I don’t see this defense being run on every play because Grady doesn’t have the stamina to work every play and I’m not sure if the other DTs are big enough to fill the hole that Grady fills. It did look nice to see that LBing core….
• Linebackers. It seems that the once UGA notable Tony Taylor could have a chance at starting linebacker this season. He was on the 1st team defense and was playing MLB with Keith Brooking and Michael Boley playing on the opposite sides. John Abraham was the other defensive lineman who was dropping back to play LB when the 3-4 was run.
• The race to fill the D. Hall spot looks to be a good one. Both Blue Adams and Brent Grimes looked decent in the scrimmage but we will have plenty of time to see their capabilities during the preseason games. I cannot offer my thoughts on Chevis Jackson’s scrimmage play because I did not see him (forgot to look). I’d like to see Grimes become great because he is coming from a Division II school just like his current mentor, Secondary coach and Hall of Famer Emmitt Thomas.
• Before scrimmage started, the defense was announced and stepped out of the tunnel individually. Each player performed a “dance” that was quite entertaining. One player (I forgot which), even gave the crowd a taste of the “Dirty Bird” again. Brent Grimes was the only player with no dance. His name was called and he played it straight and ran straight to the rest of his teammates. I will say that I don’t think I’d like to see Keith Brooking dance ever again unless it is due to a game winning INT returned for a TD.

Overall, I don’t think we, the Falcons, are as bad as everyone expects us to be, but I don’t think we should look for anything other than trying to compete in our own division. Let’s build the team for the year and look to the future for further improvement.  I’d say the first goal would be to get past the stigma of the Falcons not being able to produce back to back winning seasons.

Well, scratch another life moment off the list. I have now become, in some sense of the word, an internet celebrity. Sure this is going to go to my head for a moment, but I think it is cool nonetheless.

Basically what happened was an old comment by me was brought to attention again and the internet blew it up. While in college, I became enthralled by a site called Digg. Digg was designed as a social news site that allowed users to share and submit news stories in different categories. Users would then “digg” the stories which would move the stories to the front page and allow others to read and “digg” them as well. It allowed users to decide what was news instead of the sites that just reported on it. I didn’t really submit many stories back in the day, but I did do a lot of digging. One particular story was about the release of Firefox 2. Digg users have been known to post repeated stories or stories ahead of their actual time in an attempt to became “famous” for submitting the story. The Firefox 2 story was one such story. Under a comment for the story, the creator of Digg, Kevin Rose, made a comment that FF2 would be live in about 30 seconds. I responded with a comment that posting “future” stories was not why digg was created. Well, the fanboys did not like this one. I was instantly slammed for my comments for assaulting Kevin Rose and my comment quickly went to the triple digit negatives.

Fast forward to the present, apparently someone decided to bring my comment back to the masses by posting a screenshot of my comment and the outlash I received for it. Quickly the story was “dugg” by many users and my once triple digit negative comment became triple digit positive and Kevin Rose’s comment was pushed to the negatives (only for a short period of time, of course).

Right now the story about my comment is the 16th highest rated story of the past 7 days. The ultimate goal would be to hear the story discussed on the Digg weekly podcast, Diggnation, but I seriously don’t see that happening. At least I have another life goal crossed off the list.

Here’s the original story and here’s the new story that is receiving all of the attention. I am “buddylee415”.

Life Goal List

• Be a hero
• Appear in a video game
• Become an internet celebrity
• Have an Aston Martin
• …More to come…

While searching for the possibility of a Time Crisis game coming to the Wii (no such luck), I ran across a familiar name I had seen on the internet before. I suddenly found myself watching more videos of work performed by Johnny Lee.

If you have not heard of Johnny Lee, then you are not visiting the right sites or hanging out with the right Nintendo Wii users. Johnny Lee is a Ph D graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of Human-Computer Interaction Institute and has found many cool uses for the Nintendo wii remote at a relatively low cost.

His other work surrounding kinetic typography and foldable displays are amazing as well. I’m looking forward to each new youtube video he posts surrounding his work. It is very interesting to see at the new ways we will be able to use technology and the ability to use this technology currently for a reasonable price.

For those who have been around my site for sometime, you’ve known about my previous work creating my own CMS (Content Management System). I tried WordPress about 3 years ago and did not like it initially due to my limited knowledge of PHP and ability to change/modify functionality that it offered. However, I soon learned how much time I needed to truly build the CMS that would accomplish all of the tasks that I needed and I soon moved back to a happier WordPress time.

Well, after several months of WordPress usage, one minor detail has continued to grow on my nerves. WordPress can be setup to notify the author of the post of any comments that are made concerning the post. I had built this functionality into my own CMS but I stopped comments from being emailed if I made them. I mean, why would I want to read my own post comments? I only want to read those that others have left.

Since I had built this functionality before I knew it was possible. I just needed to take the time to find where I needed to make the change within WordPress. One night earlier this week, I finally took the time to find the file I needed to change and so far my change has worked. For those interested, here is what you need to do.

1. Find the “comment.php” file in your WordPress files. It is listed under the “wp-includes” folder.
2. Inside of this file you will need to find the “wp_new_comment” function. This is the function that inserts comments into the WordPress database. It also utilizes the PHP mail function to send mails to the author’s email address to notify of any new comments.
3. Within the function, you will find the following IF statement that needs to be altered:

   if(get_option('comments_notify') && $commentdata['comment_approved'] &&
     $post->post_author != $commentdata['user_ID'])
        wp_notify_postauthor($comment_ID, $commentdata['comment_type']);

   This statement is saying to notify the post author if certain conditions are met. This function is great but we need to alter it so that for a particular case we do not notify the author.

4. I modified my statement to be based on the email address since that is unique to an individual. Here is the changeI needed to make:

   if(get_option('comments_notify') && $commentdata['comment_approved'] &&
     $post->post_author != $commentdata['user_ID'] &&
     $commentdata['comment_author_email'] != 'username@myemail.com')
        wp_notify_postauthor($comment_ID, $commentdata['comment_type']);

   I basically added the extra condition that if everything else is right for emailing the author about the post that the system should make sure the commenter’s email address does not equal a certain value. For those that might try it on my site, the email address above is not the one I used on the code change for Hero Inc. I just wanted to provide an example here.

That’s it. That’s all that needed to change for the emails to stop when I posted comments on my own posts. When I made this coding change, I also modified a few other sections of my site that were bugging me as well. Namely the comments section was changed from the design perspective. I have hated for a long time how the comments were displayed using an ordered list of numbers.

Let me know if you do or do not like the latest comment design changes. Man, it was nice to code for “fun” again.

Today I bid farewell to A Penguin and Me. I’m not departing Linux from my home PC. I’m just parting ways with my separate website. I was finding that I was having less time to post specifically about Linux on A Penguin and Me. My original intent was to have others post along side of me, but alas, that did not happen either. Therefore, with my friend’s (Will) passing advice, I decided to hang up A Penguin and Me.

I still plan to post about my adventures with Linux, but all of the posts will appear on this website and not A Penguin and Me. All traffic directed to that site will be forwarded to the Linux category page of Hero Inc. I’ve already moved over all posts from APAM. It was fun while it lasted. Mainly fun because I really liked that WordPress theme.

Now I feel much better about myself. Wouldn’t you?

22

Note: My ultimate goal was to see this movie in IMAX due to Christopher Nolan filming parts of the movie with an IMAX camera. These images were to be more visually stunning when compared to the normal movies that are translated to the IMAX screen. However, the “great” people at the Mall of GA Regal IMAX did not seem to plan well for the numerous screenings that were scheduled for the IMAX and how this might affect the IMAX blub that could overheat and break. The AJC has a good short story about it. I still got to see it on a regular screen but I will update this post later when I finally get to see the movie as it was intended.

In the simplest of terms, The Dark Knight is perfect. I have seen many movies in my lifetime and I’ve seen many that have been hyped by the media and myself prior to seeing them. All of the hyped movies have never ever lived up to the hype until the Dark Knight. I really don’t want to write this review for the simple fact that I could write “perfect” and walk away knowing that I got it right. I’ll still take some time to point out a few non-spoilerish items.

First, the reviews you have heard do not lie about Heath Ledger. I tried and tried and tried during this movie to find Heath but was only able to find him for all of 2 seconds in a scene where the Joker was wearing no makeup. Other than that I only saw the Joker, a sadistic, chaos happy murderer/thief. Heath’s performance was great for a superhero movie and even better for a general movie. He was lost in the role and brought to life one of the most eccentric characters I have seen since Hannibal Lector or Bill The Butcher (Gangs of New York). He will make you laugh at things you know are not funny and you should not be laughing if you were told the same thing if you were outside of the theatre. As for Oscar nods, I feel he deserves one. Should he win? Well, that is the best performance I have seen all year. I will most certainly make the time this year to look at all nominees and then judge again. I don’t want him to win just because he died early. He should receive it only if he deserves it.

The plot/dialog is even better than I imagined. All of the characters were perfectly captured and given adequate time to be furthered in the story. The film may clock in little over 2 hours and 30 minutes but you would never know it since you are sucked into the story. The action makes you jump and cheer while the characters can make you love/hate the world we have without heroes.

When the film ended, I knew there was nothing after the credits, but I didn’t want to move from my seat. I wanted them to start it over so I could watch it again and again. Heck, I’d go right now if someone offered it to me. I believe when everything is said and done, The Dark Knight will be the number 2 all time box office movie (you just can’t beat the teen sensation of Titantic).

I will state that this movie is NOT for younger viewers. I felt disturbed at times and I know kids would be far worse. Batman Begins might have been ok for kids, but The Dark Knight is just too….well….dark.

On my normal rating skill, The Dark Knight would receive the following rating.

[Rating: 5/5]

However, every now and then you see a movie that breaks the rating system and you must design a new one specifically for the movie. Therefore, The Dark Knight would/should receive the following.

[Rating:20/20]

Hellboy II has one fatal flaw that will make it a box office bust and I must start out my review by stating what it is.  Pure and simple, it is the fact that The Dark Knight opens on Friday, July 18th giving Hellboy only one week before the real dark hero walks away with more money than Bruce wayne ever thought he would see.

Hellboy II raises the bar many times over the previous movie.  I remember going to see the first Hellboy with low expectations and enjoyed every minute of it.  It incorporated a great mix of humor and action.  When I went to see Hellboy II, I had a little bit higher expectations but I was worried Hollywood would try to sellout and not give the second movie the justice it deserves.  Man was I wrong.  Hellboy II is probably on the same level with Iron Man and will measured against TDK at the end of this week.  Hellboy II keeps the humor and action but ups the ante as well as throwing in new characters, better effects, and a love story.

This movie is led by two great artists, Ron Perlman and Guillermo del Toro.  Perlman gets even better as Hellboy as the character struggles to fit in with the human world once the secret is out that a devil boy does exist.  He even tries to shrug off those that see his skills as inadequate while also imparting great relationship advice to a few of his friends.  Guillermo’s eye for the dark and creative is simply amazing.  The creatures he creates are spectacular look at while also allowing the characters to seem human.

The two best scenes of this movie are the Hellboy/Dr. Phil style moment with Abe and few brews as well as the fight between Red and his new boss.  You might find yourself falling on the floor laughing and as well you should.  However, please forgive the “new” direction for Jeffrey Tambor’s character.  They do make him look more like a bumbling idiot than he was in the first film.  Oh well, it works for him in some ways.

As a side note, it never hurts to see a movie with a friend who brings a cell phone jammer along for the ride.  It doesn’t stop the chomping on food and talking but it does limit the most annoying part of seeing movies today, cell phone chatter.

[Rating: 4.5/5]