Welp, I succumed

I finally moved over to feedburner so I can track how many rss subscribers out there there are. My guess is... 2.

Here hoping for "not sucking"

I think it is a sad commentary on movies nowdays when my first thought on a movie is "Gee I hope it doesn't suck " but alas that is where we are today in Hollywoods "sequel mania."

Now not all sequels are bad, heck I think X2 was the best of the 3 so far (it built on the great foundation of characters 1 laid down, which is the key to any franchise movie series, build up your cast of characters early) and I think we can ALL agree that Last Crusade (the 3rd) is the best Indy film to date.

Batman has always had a nice series going, although when Batman & Robin hit that was brutal and I pretty much considered the series dead. But then Christopher Nolan (yes that Christopher Nolan, of Memento fame) decided to direct Batman Begins. I would argue that not only is Batman Begins the best Batman movie hands down, but possibly the best "comic book" movie of all time.

So in that light I don't know how to feel about this:

On one hand Christopher Nolan is back directing (although I don't know if he wrote this one like he did Begins) and Heath Ledger as a "young Joker" seems about as perfect casting as you can get (outside of Jack who was perfect but is too old now). But on the other hand this seems like a "we made tons of money with this formula so lets try it again" movie studio play, and those almost ALWAYS end up badly. I guess we will see.

Also, does anyone find it humerous that this is a sequel to a prequel... think about that one.

Why does Google rock SO HARD

Seriously, outside of perhaps Mr. Jobs and his fruity company there may not be a large mega company I love as much as the goog.

I am not typically a super fanboi of mega companies, and even in Google and Apple's case I don't think I am a fan of the "company" so much as the products they kick out. Apple has had more than it's share of face plants over the year, but even a lot of those were just "before their time" (Newton anyone?). Similarily Google hasn't had a perfect success record, but honestly MOST of their products are EXACTLY what I am looking for.

I have been using Google's search probably longer than most, I started out using webcrawler way back when I first started on my internets journey. I then had a BRIEF affair with excite before I finally settled on Google as my search engine of choice around the year 2000.

So for 7+ years I have been googling and loving it. Not only that but I know Google Reader has been many an individuals gateway into the wonderful bliss that is rss. This here blog is hosted on Blogger that is, yes, owned (bought) by Google. My main email account is a Gmail account. My personalized home page is Google/ig, my router was paid by funds made through AdSense and while working on my latest project I have been using document collaboration with Brian Dickman using Google Documents. And the scary part, not a SINGLE one of these products do I use over another product because "it's google"... instead I use all of these because they are either 1) the only offering or 2) the best offering at the time I started using them. Google seriously owns my online soul!

So as I was sitting here, listening to my iPod, thinking about how I have been doing a better job of updating my blog lately, an idea struck me. I need to have iTunes update my blog in real time with what I am listening to, that should be a simple enough script. And then I thought "I can't be the first person to do this, heck there are probably 100's of these scripts out there" so I Googled it real quick. First hit was: itunesblogger hosted on none other than Google's own code repository. Now code.google.com is hardly a new idea, Sourceforge has been around a LOT longer. But you know what my main complaint about Sourceforge is, they have 100's of thousands (millions?) of awesome programming projects, and absolutely NO WAY to find ANY OF THEM. Unless you are linked to Sourceforge by a developers web page or you google across just the right keywords contained in the project page... you would never find anything.

So take Sourceforge, add great "searchability" to it, and presto: you end up with a code repository on google that will hopefully be what I dream of it being.

Learning Languages

So through highschool I attempted to learn Spanish. I took Spanish for 2 years, and I think I can't even count past 10 in Spanish now. I can identify the primary colors (but don't ask me what torquise in Spanish would be) and I could ask where the bathroom is.

In summary, my Spanish SUCKS.

When Shalisa and I left for France I listened to these "learn French in 30 days" audio programs, I even did it pretty religiously every day like I was supposed to. I can't count past THREE in French.

In summary, my French is WORSE.

When we traveled to Germany and Italy Shalisa decided to try and learn German (knowing my previous experience with French I didn't even bother) and I decided to be the official Italian speaker for the trip. I did okay with Italian (or at least, I could stumble through it) mainly because Italian and Spanish are both Latin derivitives and so lots of words are the same/similar. My Italian is horrendous, but better than my French.

In summary, my Italian is PUTRID.

Get the drift here, past English I can't seem to make anything stick. YET, there is a strange caveat to all this. In my recent programming foray with Brian Dickman [side note: he really needs a blog so I can link it here] he has decided to use Python as our programming language. My experience in Python is all of about... 30 seconds 5 months ago. Yet by the end of last night while I was no Python master coder, I can stumble my way through it well enough to figure it out. Give me another week or 2 and I will be owning Python like master hacker.

Pascal, Basic, qBasic, C, C++, VB, VB.NET, C#, Java, and myriads of others. All of them I can "get around in" if I needed to program something, and could EASILY read any of them. So why is it my brain can pick up a new programming language faster than most people can finish a paperback novel, yet when it comes to learning a new SPOKEN language, my brain is a complete and utter disaster.

Puzzling indeed (and somewhat frustrating for someone who highly enjoys visiting other foreign speaking countries... Imagine if it only took me a week or 2 to master a spoken language, that would be AWESOME).

7 states and 95% of the world to go...

While clicking around, I found this. I have always looked for a good way to track all of the places I have been, this seems pretty darn good!

So I have 7 states, and 95% of the countries in the world to go... I better stop going to Disney World!

ETA: Bad Ryan, BAD. Forgot to link: The map tool can be found here at TravBuddy.com