I watched my all-time favorite movie for the first time in a couple years last night.

Fight Club is one of those movies from that magic year of 1999 when US cinema peaked, IMHO. American Pie, American Beauty, Dogma, The Matrix, The Mummy, Notting Hill, October Sky, Office Space, The Sixth Sense, and Star Wars: Episode 1 were all released in 1999. As a colleague once put it, "1999 was the year were almost every week during the summer you were blown away by a new movie.". And from the list above, every movie but Star Wars was not a sequel. Now you can argue that Episode 1 wasn't a great movie, but the hubbub surrounding it's release went on for literally months.

So I was in the mood to watch a movie last night that I hadn't seen in a while, and quickly thought of Fight Club.

Back in 1999, I wasn't even sure I was going to even see the movie. I even let a work colleague spoil the end of the movie for me because I wasn't sure I'd go see it. Brad Pitt to me was too much of the pretty boy at the time even though I thought he was great in the movie Se7en. In hindsight, I do regret knowing the twist at the end, but in all honesty I don't think it spoiled the ride, that's how well crafted the movie was.

When I did finally go see it in the theater, I remember walking out of the movie at the end in a stupor. So much to digest, so much to contemplate. The movie talked to me in a way that no other movie has or has since. And no it wasn't the nihilism, or absurdity, or even the obvious shock factor that hooked me. It was the not so underlying message about why do we do the things that society tells us to do. The idea that when we chase the dream of owning things, things end up (to quote the movie) "owning you". And that happiness is somehow a given if you have everything in life. I think my parents generation (very early baby boomer) aren't as afflicted by the current world's ADD behavior because life back then wasn't just simpler. It was because they valued and cherished simpler things longer.

A friend of mine just recently pointed me to a YouTube link of a comedian who told a story of recently taking a flight on a plane. The plane had Wi-Fi as most airlines are starting to carry. A technology that has really only been common for less than a year. So on this flight the Wi-Fi was down and the person sitting next to the comedian starts to get irate and launches into a "This Stinks" tirade. The comedian of course makes light of the fact that they are flying 7 miles up and on-the-Internet. Something that no one would have ever considered 10 years ago. It was just a great example of the current times in which we live that points back to really the core message of the movie.

Don't get me wrong. I realize Fight Club is not a movie for everyone. I would never let any of my children see the movie until they were 17. Bob, and his extra sized parts... The bloody fights and violence... Everything out of Marla Singer's mouth... and even the social terrorism is not kosher to all in today's post-9/11 world. However, the reason for absurdity isn't just for the sake of comedy. All the way back to Shakespeare, writers and playwrights have used absurdity to stick a magnifying glass up to things that we usually take for granted and rarely question. Audiences are smart enough to realize this even if it is on a subconscious level. That's why TV like The Daily Show and outlets like The Onion make us laugh as well as make us think. They point something out to us that we typically don't think twice about.

I'd like to think that I was irrevocably changed by seeing the movie. Yes, there have been times that I have been sad or depressed since seeing the movie. And sometimes over very minor things. But I feel like it is because of Fight Club that I really see the world through a different lens. When a 2 hour movie can do that to you, you know you have found something great.

I am not really sure why I call these posts reviews. I don't go all Ebert and say a lot about the movie. Just little tidbits.

Today's feature was Run Fatboy Run. I picked it up on the way out of the video store as one of the few comedies out there that aren't marketed to a teenager. I had seen Shaun of the Dead when it came out on DVD and was rather amused. (Hard to believe it was 5 years ago).

We actually watched the movie during the afternoon which is rather rare for us. Our typical movie watching time is between 7pm and 9pm, since it will end just before my wife’s bed time.

There was a lot of cliche and overdone stuff, but it was still enjoyable to watch. Both Simon Pegg and Hank Azaria were convincing. I am still not sure about Thandie Newton. My favorite role I have seen her in was ER. I was kind of shocked to see at the end that David Schwimmer of Friends fame was the Director.

It was nice to see another movie where London is used as a character. Any time I see a movie set in Europe, I guess I always think about where it is in relation to Prague. I really feel like Prague is like my home away from home. With my wife still owning the flat there, I guess that has something to do with it.

Movie Rating: 3 stars out of 5 (Enjoyable, but don't plan on a repeat viewing)

We watched Changeling tonight. It was a pretty good film. I give it 4 out of 5 stars. Angelina Jolie was pretty convincing in the role of the mother who lost her son. Great acting. Also a nice supporting role out of Amy Ryan. I didn't really like her too much in Gone Baby Gone (that was probably the point), but ever since she has been in The Office, I changed my tune.

I guess the one part of the evening that took me by surprise was Blockbuster. We had not rented at Blockbuster in a while. The whole new choose to rent by-the-day ($2/movie, $1 for additional days) or rent by-the-week ($5) was a little strange to digest. I guess that is Blockbusters way of getting more customers away from Netflix. So we got the Changeling for $2. We usually watch movies within the first day so I can't see us ever renting by-the-week. So I guess the questions are "Will people really rent movies by-the-week?" and "How come movie rentals have been $4+ for 2 day rentals for the last couple of years?"

I got back after lunch and pretty much jumped right to the Engadget liveblog to read about the upcoming iPhone software.

I have to say that the 3 biggest features I am looking forward to is the Push Notification, Spotlight, and MMS. I can see how cut and paste will be useful and how Apple seemed to elegantly implement it. I just probably need to play with it to see how much I will use it. Cutting a URL from Safari and pasting it into an email or a SMS is probably where I would see using it the most.

The only downside of course is since I have a first gen iPhone, I can't do the MMS. Undoubtedly the 3.0 phones will come out before July, but I can't see upgrading unless there is a feature I can't live with out. I have already lived without the GPS and the 3G for almost a year and they both were big reasons to upgrade.

The Shuttle kept on being delayed this week. I had it in my head that it was supposed to go at 8:49 pm for some reason.

When I got done with the yard work, I hurried into the shower and thought that when I got out I should double check the time for the launch. About 5 minutes later, my wife ran in and told me that she can see the Shuttle, so I hopped out, threw on a towel and ran to the back door. Sure enough, I could see a pinprick of light to the north east (which was the Shuttle) and a beautiful exhaust with different colors. My wife said I just missed the solid rocket boosters falling back to earth.

I ran inside, grabbed the camera, and tried to take some shots.

Today I finished the novella Debt of Bones by Terry Goodkind.

It was an interesting prelude story to the Sword of Truth. I guess it was either written well or I wasn't putting 2 and 2 together that the ending of the book would be about the boundaries. It was interesting to see Zedd written during the time when he was the First Wizard.

Next up is Book 4, Temple of the Winds.

I love my current job. The work is challenging and dynamic. It also gives me the opportunity to work at home, have irregular hours when necessary, convert commuting time into personal time, and a whole host of other benefits that I often under-appreciate.

The one downside that crops up every once in a while is my company is on the west coast of the US and I am on the east coast. Usually it is not a problem because I like sleeping in and don't mind adjusting my day. But on days like today when the company meeting is scheduled for 6-7p ET, man it can really be a challenge. Especially when you started your day earlier than normal.

I hope to post more videos in the coming months, but to do that I had to nail down what it took to get the videos in a friendly format as well as post them to the blog. Since I will undoubtedly forget, here are the steps to add embedded Flash video to a webpage:

1. You will only have to do this step once. Download the SWFObject javascript (swfobject.js) and player.swf from here and uploaded it to the /swfplayer/ folder on the webserver .


2. Next you need to take a preview image of the movie (mov, .avi, .mp4). The preview image is the image that appears on your webpage before the user starts the video. So you will want to scroll through the movie and pick that one image in the movie that really "sums up" your movie.


3. To take the preview image, open the movie in QuickTime (window mode, not full screen mode), fast forward through the movie, and take a screenshot. (On the Mac, use Cmd-Shift-4). Save the screenshot to a .jpg with the same name as the movie. Also for the sake of consistency, if the movie is mymovie.mov, name the screenshot mymovie.jpg.


4. Before closing QuickTime, show the movie inspector (Cmd-I). For the window you'll want to save off the Normal Size of the movie. (For this example we will use a Normal Size of 360x240)


5. Convert the movie to a Flash Video (.flv) file. I converted the movie using Visual Hub on the Mac (make sure to set the Raw FLV option). Again, for consistency, make sure to name the converted movie mymovie.flv to match the screenshot and the source movie.


6. Upload both the movie mymovie.flv and the preview image mymovie.jpg to the webserver. Preferrably the same folder location.


7. Make a new blog post and then cut and paste the following into the editor:



 
Get the Flash Player



8. To clone this for other movies all you will need to do is two things. First, change all of the mymovie references in the HTML code to whatever you named the movie and preview (including mymoviecontainer). Second, change the 3rd and 4th parameter to the SWFObject() call to the Normal Size of the movie. In this example, it was 360 and 240


9. Publish the post and hopefully that is it. I did have some formatting issues with Wordpress where it was munging the code after publishing, so if that is the case just try and minimize the amount of HTML code that is on each line.

Many thanks to these websites for helping me figure out the steps:

• deconcept
• squareCircleZ

Hi Folks,

I am not exactly sure what kind of stuff I am going to put on here, but hopefully I will have enough to say. I am used to the 140 chars of Twitter so this might be a difficult.