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Sun, 31 Jul 2005

[16:59] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ***** (5/5)
Date: 8/1/05 at 12:59PM

My first experience of English cinema going was great! The whole allocated seating thing is interesting - there's no point stripping down for less wind resistance on the run down to the cinema because you have a seat allocated, however, there is simply NO room in these cinemas (Odeon - fanatical about film, not so fanatical about seating space). I like to sit there and drain every last drop of goodliness out of a movie - I'm the guy sitting there at the end reading the license number from the Humane Society license as it wanders past at the very end of the credits - this proved a little difficult and I was nearly trampled by an angry mob who wanted to leave the SECOND the movie proper fnished while I sat there reading the credits. Anyway, on to the movie:

I am yet to see Johnny Depp do anything bad (no, I've never seen 21 Jump St) so I always look forward to his movies and this one was great. I have never seen the "original" Charlie and the Chocolate factory movie although I've read the book and, like all Roald Dahl books, enjoyed it immensley. Roald mostly wrote for children but his writing style (for those who don't know) is really quite dark. The beautiful thing about his writing is that he never coddled children - he wrote for them but never spoke down to them or hid the facts. If someone died, they died, if something bad happened - it happened. Sort of like what the Lemony Snicket books are like these days.

Am I rambling, well a little bit but I think it's important to to point out because this movie brought a similar level of disquiet in the screenplay - it did get a smidgey bit saccharine here and there but to be honest, so did the book.

To sum it up - this movie was brilliant. The screenplay was perfect, the sets (digital and otherwise, perfectly brought to life the quirky and slightly impossible world that Roald created and the acting was superb from everyone. The music for the Oompa Loompa songs was very nicely done and if you can catch all the lyrics, quite cleverly put together. I literally had an ear-to-ear grin when those songs were playing but the Verucca Salt one was my favourite.

I have never before had the urge to clap for a movie but as the credits rolled on this one I finally understood why people might feel the need to do so (although I will never understand why ANYONE clapped The Phantom Menace - they did, I was there).

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Thu, 28 Jul 2005

[16:49] Stopping USB Devices in Windows
Date: 7/29/05 at 12:49PM

I store my To Do list and various other sundries on my USB key and invariably when I try to remove it in the evenings I get the annoying "The device 'Generic Volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later." message. Why they don't include a list of PIDs or process names or SOMETHING in that message to indicate what you could do to expedite the arrival of 'later' is beyond me.

The best way to find the locking processes that I've worked out so far is to grab Process Explorer from the Sysinternals Freeware site and, using the Find Handle (Ctrl+F) functionality search for Harddisk. Windows mounts USB drives as \Device\Harddiskx where x is a number between 0 and however many drives you've got in your machine (minus 1 if you want to be pedantic :). I currently have two drives in my machine, \Disk\Hardisk0 which is the internal drive and \Device\Hardisk1 which is the USB drive. You can determine your drive numbers by opening the Computer Management management console - located under Control Panel > Administrative tools - and clicking on the Storage\Disk Management option.

After doing the search you will be given a table of process names, pids and handles that should lead you to the locking process pretty quickly. The one I just did returned this:


As you can see explorer.exe and pdksh.exe are using Hardisk1 at the moment.

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Mon, 25 Jul 2005

[09:43] The Water Method Man - Rating *** (3/5)
Date: 7/25/05 at 5:43PM

This one was sitting on the shelf of my flat when I moved in and that was all the motivation I had to pick it up. I actually started reading it last weekend but then I got Harry Potter and read that instead so this weekend I finished it off (it's great not having TV or internet access :)

A bloke by the name of John Irving wrote this, he is also the man behind the book The World According to Garp which I have not read but I've seen the cover for a movie based on it - that is possibly useless information.

Anyway, I really enjoyed The Water Method Man - it could be the whole vouyeristc nature of the book or it could be that I really wanted to know what happened to the Fred "Bogus" Trumper, the poor bastard who is the stories anti-hero. The boko traipses gaily through his life for a few years from the start of his thesis to "now", revolving around urinary tract problems, his relationship problems with family and his eclectic collection of friends, the pitfalls or Old Low Norse and manages to hide some rather insightful little gems in amongst the humour and pathos.

There was nothing ground-breaking here, no epic stories set against dramatic backdrops - just the story of a man whose faults many will find familiar I suspect. I'll be keeping an eye out for more books by Mr Irving.


Wikipedias take on The Water Method Man

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Wed, 20 Jul 2005

[16:46] Bombings MkII
Date: 7/21/05 at 12:46PM

We've all just been told that there have been another three incidents - I can't find anything online yet....

UPDATES: