July 2008 Archives

I have been really looking forward to the Dark Knight coming out.  A couple of weeks before it was to be released I heard that several scenes were filmed with IMAX cameras and the director Christopher Nolan was speaking very highly of them.  I looked into seeing the film in IMAX and found that it wasn't showing anywhere in the entire state of Maryland.  The closest places were a museum in Harrisburg, the new Air and Space in Chantilly, VA and two places in Philadelphia.  I looked at getting tickets for the Harrisburg location but due to timing issues they were sold out.  Kelly found tickets for a 9 AM Sunday showing at the Franklin Institute and got tickets.

We got to FI about 8:30 AM, once inside we found out this showing was sold out as well.  The IMAX screen at the FI is an OMNIMAX style.  Kelly got seats in almost the exact center of the theater both horizontally and vertically.  The only initial problem is the projection booth sticks out into the seating area in the row we were in.  We were able to move over one seat and it was much better.  Dark Knight was shot in two ways, part with normal cameras and part with IMAX cameras.  I think the split is about 70% normal / 30% IMAX.  An IMAX screen is closer to and old style TV 4:3 square shape and less like movie / HDTV 1.85-2.35 rectangle shape.  During the normal shot scenes the screen is very much a letterbox shape with the lower an upper portion of the screen blank.  When the IMAX scenes come on it fills the entire gigantic screen.  The main scenes in IMAX were exterior shots and especially the Hong Kong roof top scenes.  Also the big car chase scene was in IMAX.  Those scenes were really amazing, if you have ever seen a traditional IMAX nature movie you will know what it looks like.  The normal scenes were not as good, they were a little distorted and just very wide.  The normal scenes weren't bad just not as good as the IMAX ones.  Also there were certain scenes that due to screen size and how busy the scene was it seemed like we missed stuff.

I really enjoyed the Dark Knight as a movie as well.  We watched Batman Begins on Friday night since Kelly hadn't seen it.  Going into this my expectations were high, and they were met and even exceeded.  There was good character development of new characters and further exploration of existing ones.  The action scenes were even better than BB and pretty impressive in scale.  The Joker character is just evil, like psychotic nothing to loose evil.  Also the gadgets are ratcheted up this time, but still not too over the top.

The movie is really dark, it feels the way you think a Batman movie should be.  He isn't a hero so much as the person trying to keep a city from total collapse.  The movie is also quite long, but it seemed to be worth it and pay off the patience in the end.  Also this movie is on the R side of PG-13 I think, not a kids movie in any way.

I highly recommend this movie, no matter if you aren't a super hero movie person.  If you enjoy a good action movie with a good storyline go and see this, you won't be sorry.

For the last few months Kelly had been dropping subtle hints about getting engaged.  Some choice quotes of these hints included statements like "Did you get my ring today?" "Where is the ring?" "Will you be giving me the ring now?"  I did actually follow through with acquiring a ring recently.  I ordered it from Whiteflash after a recommendation from Jerry (use one of us as references if you order from them.)  You can see the ring in the below pictures provided by Whiteflash.

I was actually going to wait until August 6th just to mess with Kelly.  That day was her going away party for her current job.  However another opportunity presented itself this weekend.  I will warn you this will seem a little odd.

I really wanted to see the Dark Knight in IMAX since it was filmed with IMAX cameras for certain scenes.  As I twittered there was no where in the state of Maryland that was showing it.  The original plan was to see it in Harrisburg on Saturday the 26th, then the 27th but it was sold out.  Kelly found that there were still tickets available at the Franklin Institute at 9 AM on the 27th and she bought tickets.  We later decided to spend the night in Philadelphia.  We booked a room at the Sofitel.  We had stayed at the Sofitel on the first weekend trip we took together.

On Sunday morning we ordered room service to provide for Kelly's oft requested breakfast in bed.  During that breakfast I presented her with the above ring.  You can see some more pictures of the ring in action here.  We then went to see Dark Knight.  More on Dark Knight later.  There aren't really any further details at this point.

This should show up at 4:55 PM.

Kelly got me a charging valet from Pottery Barn for Christmas.  For various reasons I was a little slow (ok a lot slow) in setting it up.  Today with some encouragement from Kelly I got it setup.  It is a neat cable hiding device.  Inside it has a power strip to plug in various devices.  Then a small cable pass through for the charging tip.  I ended up placing it on my TV rack in living room as it worked better there for power.  It looks nice as you can see in the below picture.  Even though it was intended to match that stand it does anyway.  I was even nice enough to let Kelly add her phone to the device to charge, can anyone guess which is hers?

I wanted to make a post in case anyone else comes across this problem. I had been using xcacls.vbs in a PowerShell script for most of the summer fine and then I started getting error stating that RPC server is unavailable. It took me a little while to realize that in the interim I upgraded the server that I was using xcacls.vbs against to Windows Server 2008. By default the Windows Firewall is turned on, and I recommend leaving it on. Anyway to resolve this issue go into the firewall config and enable the rule for Remote Administration (RPC).

Using my recently purchased Panasonic DMC-TZ5 I filmed two clips in 1280x720x30.  They aren't great quality since I was doing it handheld with moving subjects.  The biggest problem is the camera keeps trying to adjust focus.  I took the original clips which were motion JPEG and re-compressed with Apple Quicktime using H.264 at various bit rates.  Feel free to download and check them out and tell me what you think of them and how fast they downloaded.  The first is the dancing fountains in Las Vegas.  The second is an animation demonstration at Disney using strobe and spinning items.

This post is as much for me to remember things as anyone else. If you find this useful too all the better. I may update this at times. These are things I have installed on various machines and then forget where I can or did get them. All of the utils are free and I have installed them at some point successfully.

FLV Player
Free Download Manager
Exact Audio Copy
DVDFab
Wireshark
ImgBurn
Network Monitor
VNC
WinDirStat

Today I got Verizon FIOS installed, specifically FIOS Business 20/20 with static IPs.  This ends my eight year relationship with Speakeasy.  I can't too highly recommend Speakeasy but they just don't have anything to compete with FIOS since they are stuck in DSL land.  I have had many levels of service from them over the years.  I started with 144 kpbs IDSL, then I had 1.1 mbps SDSL and for the last few years I have had 6.0/768 ADSL (or something very similar).  Just to show the difference in speed a bit I ran some before and after tests using my desktop.  The problem with FIOS is right now it is too fast for many testing sites and breaks them to some degree.

This is what Speakeasy provisioned me for:

These are two of the more accepted speed test sites (one of them is from Speakeasy):

You can see I wasn't quite getting the full speed, however I will admit it fluctuates depending on many factors including time of day.

Now here are the same two speed test sites on my new service:

With this you can see I am getting my download speed for sure, I have seen the upload higher so it may be the server on the other end.

I will be switching over the www.hoyty.com server to the new service shortly so it should be much faster.  The switch has given me 3-4 times the download speed and up to 26 times the upload speed.  Should be fun.