What would you do if God gave you all of God’s powers to use as you please? That is the premise of Bruce Almighty.
Irreverent but still respectful, the movie is funny and entertaining. Christianity is skewered so don’t be upset. The movie is all in good fun.
Due to sexual references and adult themes, I can not recommend this movie to the younger set and it may be a bit heavy for the PG13 rating it carries. Overall it is an enjoyable movie and Jim Carrey is at his finest as usual.
Morgan Freeman plays God extremely well and Jennifer Aniston supports the main role played by Jim Carrey very well also.
Religiosity is played up respectfully and I can’t see how most Christians would find this movie distasteful.
My Rating [ 3.5 out of 5]
Rated PG13 for language, sexual content and some crude humor.
Released 2003
Released to DVD 2003
Director Tom Shadyac (Wikipedia)
Main charactor actors
Well, its been a week from…somewhere. The air conditioner is finally fixed with a wireless system including a wireless thermostat. Cool.
No updates, no updates! Why? Been dab-nabbit busy and little to no access to my computer. I think its about time I get a laptop so I can update from somewhere other than my den (or at work on break).
I will be posting more soon. The following watched movies are awaiting review:
Flushed Away
The Island
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
I have a few political posts on my “to do” list and I want to review a few computer items I bought.
My daughter’s D-Link® router is giving out and she absolutely has to have Internet access for school work. She is studying toy design and has LOTS of homework. Being able to get access to school through the Internet from home keeps here at home, safe and sound, when it most counts — after hours.
I decided on the Linksys® WRT54GL. It uses Linux as its operating system (OS). Being familiar with Linux and the availability of third party Linux builds for it makes getting one exciting. My router is IPCop on an old Sempron™ system I had laying around.
My web hosting provider is upgrading the database used by this site. The site might be unavailable tomorrow, August 22, 2007, for short periods of time sometime during the day.
[Update 1] I saw nor had reported any issues to the web site. Good job Powweb!
I ran into an interesting issue with the Adobe Flash player in both Internet Explorer 7 (IE) and FireFox 2.0.5.
When I would navigate to YouTube.com to look at videos, an error popped up saying I did not have the latest Flash player with a link to install in IE. If I clicked the link, the install failed and the example Flash jobject would display a red X. FireFox popped up the yellow attention bar at the top. Installing the plugin from there did not correct the problem.
Adobe’s web site worked flawlessly but other sites with Flash either complained about needing the latest Flash player or the Flash objects on the page failed.
After investigating through Google searches, I was not any closer to fixing the issue than when I started. Even after uninstalling and reinstalling the Flash player, the issue continued. Frustrating!
I noticed that in Internet Explorer, a particular path listed the files in some of the pop up errors:
C:\Windows\System32\Macomed\Flash
Navigating to this location, I found two Flash utilities — one for Internet Explorer and one for Mozilla/Netscape browsers like FireFox.
Screen Shot
NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe is for FireFox and FlashUtil9d.exe is for Internet Explorer. I ran each and they indicated an update was available. I let them update and Flash player begain working in both browsers. The utilities indicated a reboot was necessary but it worked without the reboot for me.
I hope this helps others as it took me a couple of hours to figure this one out.
The Last Mimzy is a whimsical and fun movie, especially for children. The plot revolves around two siblings, Noah and Emma Wilder, who find a strange box floating in the water near their family’s vacation home.
Inside the box they find toys. The two children begin developing strange abilities after opening the box.
A stuffed bunny speaks to Emma and forms the basis of a lot of conflict in the movie between the parents, Emma, and later the US government.
Noah figures out that two of the “toys” react when near each other and end up combining into another toy. This causes a power surge the blacks out all of the city.
The Department of Homeland Security tracks down the source of the power outage to the family home and takes them all into custody.
The children manage to escape and return to their vacation home to retrieve one of the toys that fell and rolled under a bed. They need the toy because they had figured out that the stuffed bunny is actually a non-biological, living toy called a Mimzy sent from the future. They need to send it back to save humanity and ultimately succeed.
I need to mention a special feature of the widescreen version of the movie I watched. It includes a feature called Infinifilm.
You enable the feature when you start watching the movie. If you enable it, during the movie prompts will pop up allowing you to view extra content on the DVD. The extra content is also available as extra feature content through the DVD menus.
If you chose to watch the extra content, the movie will start up where it left off when you start the optional content. I found it useful after watching the movie once without it enabled to go back and watch it again with it enabled to see the behind the scenes content and commentary. It gives a new perspective to the movie and what it took to make it.
My rating [5 of 5]
Rated PG or some thematic elements, mild peril and language.
Released 2007
Released to DVD 2007
Director Robert Shaye (Wikipedia)
Main character Actors:
The Lady in the Water is an interesting movie. Based upon a fairy tale story that M. Night Shyamalan created to tell his children, it mixes a variety of visuals and story lines to weave a tale that could be quite frightening for little children which explains the PG13 rating.
The story starts off with a depressed apartment building superintendent who has a speech impediment. Someone has been swimming in the pool after hours against the rules. It turns out that the swimmer is a sea-nymph who is trying to get home.
In ancient times, the water people helped man but man forgot them. The water people have been sending nymphs out to try and contact man again. Narfs, wolf-like creatures, hunt them down and kill them even though it is against the rules.
The superintendent, played by Paul Giamatti, brings together a group of the apartment dwellers to help the sea-nymph, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, go home all the while uncovering the dark past that befell his family.
There are plot holes in the story line such that certain pieces of the story are disjointed. Other than the weak points of the storyline and the herky-jerky flow in parts of the movie, I did thoroughly enjoy it. I just wish that mister Shyamalan had spent a bit more time in cleaning up the script either before or during shooting.
Well, we finally made up our mind on repairing the air conditioner. Since the cost to rip the wall open is such a large expenditure, we will be putting in a wireless system. The installation will not be scheduled until after the summer when we can afford it.
When my daughter was in an accident a few weeks ago, I began researching accident rates and causes — not in depth but enough to satisfy my curiosity. As you age, accident rates go up significantly. Eye sight is not was good and reflexes are off.
The gentleman that rear ended my daughter’s Honda Civic is almost 80 years old. He made a mistake and it might have been the frailties of age that contributed to the accident.
Now, I don’t specifically blame him. Accidents happen. Luckily this accident was at ~35 miles per hour and not on the freeway.
This brings me to my point. As a libertarian, regulation and law are abhorrent in general terms. Government is a necessary evil that has to be reigned in, maintained at a proper size (and our current governments at both the national, state, and local levels are far too large). However, public safety is extremely important. I believe anyone should be able to operate a non-commercial vehicle on their own property with no restrictions from the state.
In a libertarian society, the person whom caused the accident would pay recompense to the one receiving the damage either through direct payment or insurance. This is as it should be. Getting a license would be a privilege and an honor. Licensing and certification would be used to insure that one is ready to drive without harming anyone else’s property (which includes one’s life).
The governmental system in use today is far too restrictive and in some ways abusive as are most large government organizations. Licensing is a public safety issue and so regulation is required.
The current system does not go far enough in the area of testing and certification however. Personally, we should be requiring a new test — both driving and written — on particular schedules based on the likelihood of accidents based on statistics. In California, for example, renewal of your driver license is done through the mail or online. It seems the government is more interested in the fees than safety in this instance.
Driving on public property is a privilege and not a right due to public safety concerns. How to go about changing the system is a complex subject. I am just not sure of how the system should be constructed and administered except it shouldn’t be via a government agency.
Or does your Vista system suddenly freeze or reboot with no rhyme or reason?
If so, you need these two hotfixes:
KB938194 An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista
KB938979 An update is available that improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista
They certainly did the trick for me! But, I know there are quite a few more fixes needed. At least these cleared up the weirdness with video and freezes/reboots that I was experiencing. And restart from hibernate is much, much faster.
I have been using Cloudmark Desktop for several years and have been quite satisfied with it. Cloudmark Desktop is an anti-spam add-in for Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook. It adds a tool bar and automatic processing of incoming email messages.
Messages marked as spam are moved to a user configurable folder. Overall, its is fairly accurate in processing spam but you still need to look in that folder periodically, like any anti-spam software, to verify any false positives. The tool bar includes a block and an unblock button to mark or unmark messages as appropriate.
Unblocked messages are sent back to your default inbox. After you unblock a sender twice, it will ask if you want to always unblock that sender. This is called whitelisting and is quite nicely implemented. If you block a message, it remembers and sends information to their service to build the spam database.
By default, all new messages, even SPAM, are left in the unread state. You can change this through the options.
Installation is fairly easy. Be sure Outlook or Outlook Express is not running when you start the installation process. Once finished, you can start your email program. Cloudmark Desktop will ask you to login because this requires an internet connection to work. A failure dialog box will display if your internet connection is not working. You won’t be able to get your email, turn off the internet connection, and then have it filter spam due to the way it is designed.
The add-in works with what they call collaborative security. Each email message is compared to caught spam in the collaborative security network that Cloudmark Desktop forms. As new spam is caught, the database grows across all the users of the service and more spam is caught in an efficient manner. I do not know what pariticular information they collect and this might be a privacy concern for some people. This information is maintained on Cloudmark servers.
The service rates you based on the qualify of blocks you perform. The fewer non-spam messages you block, the better the rating. The rating is listed in the tool bar. The methods they use to determine if blocks are valid or not is not known nor listed (that I could find) on their web site.
The service is paid for annually and costs $39.95US a year with automatic renewal as an option.
After using it for such a long time, comparatively, I can say it is quite effective — more effective than anything else I have tried except SpamBayes.
Cloudmark also provides services for businesses and a number of ISPs use them.
System Requirements
Operating System:
Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP / Vista 32-bit
Email Software:
Microsoft Outlook 2000 / XP / 2003 / 2007 or
Microsoft Outlook Express 5 / 6
Email Supported:
Cloudmark Desktop works with any type of email account supported by Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express:
IMAP
POP3
SSL POP3
Microsoft Exchange (Microsoft Outlook only)
Gmail using SSL POP3
MSN/Hotmail using HTTP, or Hotmail Plus using POP3 or HTTP
What would you do if God gave you all of God’s powers to use as you please? That is the premise of Bruce Almighty.
from Amazon.com
