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Pan's Labyrinth

Talk about a cool, weird, tense and amazing movie.

Ok, let me explain a bit more, now that I've thrown out a few adjectives!

First off, this was a cool movie. It wasn't your typical fantasy flic, where there are stereotypical bad guys and monsters. This movie had great, and I mean great ideas for what you thought were set in stone characters. For example, we've got fairies. You know, the lil chicks with wings? Nope, fairies in this movie started off to be sweet ass looking preying mantis'. They looked SO creepy. Also, a faun - not half deer and man - looked like some weird stone tree thing with hooves and horns. Really cool!

Now let's move onto weird, There were some ODD things which were not over the top gross or startling but more just weird. The dude with eyes in his hands? Oh yeah, that's weird. Or the said fairies and fauns...yup, weird!

Tense only half describes the feeling of - oh what's next edge of seat - feeling. You know, when you're anticipating something so badly throughout the entire movie that you find yourself on the edge of your seat? Yes, this movie is one of those. You never feel the need to check your watch even though this is a two hour flic.

Lastly, talk about an amazing movie. The entire story idea, narration, sets, costume design and acting are top notch. This is the best foreign flic I have EVER seen. By the end you don't even realize you're reading sub titles.

Now that I've praised the movie so much, here is a brief synopsis:

The movie starts off with a young girl and her pregnant mother moving to the country side. You find out quickly that during this post WWII Spain, there is a civil war going on between the army and civilians. I'm not too sure how accurate this is to history, but wikipedia talks of a civil war during this time so that's good enough for me. The pregnant woman recently married a Captain who's fighting against country side insurgents...and is quite the brutal man. There is plenty of gore at the hands of this guy throughout the film, so whenever you see him you tend to go tense =D

On the way to the country home, the young girl comes across a fairy who then follows her to their destination. The story picks up from here where the fairies introduce the girl to the faun who then asks her to complete 3 tests to prove herself. All the while she is doing her quests, there is fighting between the Captain's men and the country side gorillas, which make for a very real and well tied story.

If you haven't already seen Pan's Labyrinth, I'd suggest to watch it in theaters. It's that good.

OK you're awesome, I don't care.

Maybe I'm just a bit more grumpy or tired than usual, but what is the deal with people always having to gloat about how freakin' awesome they are? I'm sick of it. I don't care how much you 'own', or how well you did on this or that, or that your virtual wang is larger than everybody else’s. I really just don't care. It's not like I don't sometimes have to brag about being super-awesome or whatever, but when an entire conversation consists about you you you and being the best...

Get over it, you're mediocre just like the rest of us.

7.5 hours on a bus!

There was a brief ski attempt this past Saturday. And by brief I mean 2 runs brief.

Lianne and I went up with her company to Mt Washington for the day, but upon arrival the weather was garbage. The mountain was all ice, the precipitation included RAIN, fog decided to grace us with its presence and the two main chair lifts closed. Blehck!

So, beer beer beer =) Stating it off at 11am (ohhh yeah), Lianne and I went up to the cafeteria and took a 2hr nap until the bus was supposed to leave. At least we got a refund...

Family Time

Incase you don't know, it's crazy busy family time now :-) My bro Pete flew in from Germany to visit and celebrate both my mom and dad's bday. Poppa Mueller turned the big 70, and is STILL rockin' it. There was food. A few beers and saki mixed in. Some family trivial pursuit and a general good time!

The Fine Art of Parking

Pop quiz. What does $320 buy you from UVic? The privilege of driving around Lot 1 for 25 minutes looking for a damn parking spot!

Today I rolled onto campus at a cool 11am, thinking I'd just snipe to the back row and get me a parking spot. Little did I realize that the back row was completely full. Not only that, but there were about 10 other hopeless frustrated souls looking to snipe a spot. My usual trick of waiting near the parking lot entrance and following a person to their car didn't work at all - there was nobody heading back to their cars. I then realized the err in my ways. Today was Tuesday, a day which UVic mainly offers hour long classes starting at 8:30. There would be no student following until about 11:30 when the stragglers made it outside of the ring. So instead of driving around for any longer, I pulled into a reserved spot, turned off my car and read a futureshop flyer and drank my timmy's coffee. The first wave of drivers proved fruitful, and I found a spot in about a minute.

Good thing they didn't oversell those parking passes, reduce the reserved parking lots, and chopped a good chunk of lot 1 into residence passes only. Because you know, the reason people live on res is because they have a car.

A new year =)

Well, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Appearently I've been a bit busy with life 'n such...which directly translates into busy with WoW and shopping! Christmas this year was awesome, the whole family (except Pete :-( ) were all over for Christmas eats and fun. Hat's off to Heidi and me mother for the amazing food; I think I gained 5lbs on chocolate alone! Post Christmas, I tagged along with Lianne's family down to Portland for TAX FREE SHOPPING AND EATS! Yeah, it was amazing. We both spent our limits (and some!) within the first day. I'm such a sucker for shoes (how metro of me I know).

Last but not least, rocking out a LANage lan. We spent 4 days (that's right four!) at Brian's place playing ET, Quake3, Warcraft3 and most importantly, Armegatron - which is simply the best written quick 'n dirty LAN game ever. If you've never seen the movie Tron (shame on you!), watch this 80's classic first, then download it. Simple buttons and fun to play.

And finally here I am back in the lab working on Brimpy. I thought I was done, but appearently not. My mission is to get the sonars working reliable in an RTOS...for anybody who cares I'll keep you updated :-P

Btw, WoW auction house is sooo addicting.

An electronic boat anchor

So my hopes of capitalistic grandeur from selling a PS3 have withered into the pipe dream it really was. Basically, I made 30 freakin' dollars once all the shipping/eBay/PayPal fees were subtracted. Woopdi freakin do. I guess people are coming around and realizing that the Wii is way better than anything Sony has to offer. The PS3 has basically turned into an expensive boat anchor. Here, let me make a list of recent reasons why I now hate Sony (more):

CD Rootkits
PSP viral ad. scandal
PS3
Bluray
Sony Ericsson phones
Betamax


Ok, I'm done here.

An update on addictions

I think it may be time to sleep. The last few nights have been spent rockin' out p4x (level 42) riddles and WoW (level 9). Between those two narcotics and Nintendo gaming (go Donkey Konga!), I have very little time to get anything else done. Eeek! I need to get my butt to school and finish this dang blimp project.

3am bedtimes are killing me.

The ultimate in time wasting

So last night, just before I was about to go to bed, Lianne sends me this link. A harmless little link. Rather short in length, a foreign extension. Sure, I'll click this link.

What was so exciting about this link that would make me want to talk about it here you may ask? IT'S THE MOST ADDICTING GAME ON THE PLANET.

Go ahead, CLICK!

This series of riddles is fantastic, and is easily more addicting than WoW. I've wasted nearly 7hrs of my life, and see no end to it. Level 27 as of this writing....argh!

PS3 FTW!

Yup, I am holding one right now! (Well, it's on the floor...if I was holding it that'd be pretty creepy!)

So, time to wait a little bit longer for Christmas to near, then eBay time. Come on PS3, get me through college :-)

Adventures with SATA

Should Windows be renamed to Windoesn't? Let us begin.

Last weekend I went over to Vancouver to meet up with fellow supra nuts, shoot the shit, and buy some computer parts. I thought it would be a good idea to finally get a new hard drive. I mean, I've got a pretty nice 10k RPM scsi drive, but it's loud. Lately, I'm all about quiet so that sleepy time is not interrupted by my computer. I was ready for the quiet setup, but was missing the HD, 92mm fan, and video card fan. If you've never heard a SCSI drive before picture this - two walnuts being ground together. It's loud! Secondly, I needed an intake fan to blow cool air over the drive to keep it cool. The fan I had was an older Coolermaster fan which is well, awful. And last but certainly the MOST annoying loud is the fan on the video card. This thing was on its way out so I figured hey, let's buy a replacement.

So I get back from Vancouver with a new 320GB Seagate SATA drive, a 92mm Antec fan, and a new 18x DVD burner. I'm stoked - I love goodies :-)

Being an experienced computer nerd, and having dealt with SATA many many times before I knew full well that Windows is the suck. You'd think that by SP2, the ISO's would at least contain SATA drivers for some of the more common chipsets. Negative. So I booted up the Win98 box, downloaded the drivers from the ASUS website and threw it on a diskette. Ripped out that diskette drive, put it in my machine and booted up the XP setup. I get as far as "Loading driver SIL3802" or whatever when the install complains about missing a .sys file. Well I says, wtf is up with that? I take the disk drive out of the system, back into Win98 box and download a different version. Inside this zip, there are no .sys files...wtf? I go to the Silicon Image website and grab their newest version...ok .sys on their tarball. Throw it on the diskette, repeat the process and load the driver. I get to the point during the install where you select your target drives...NOTHING THERE! Oh, I'ma feisty now.

Finally I discovered that my Win98 box is fracked. It wasn't untaring all the files correctly and neglected to even mention anything of the sort. After booting a Gentoo install disk, I use links to download from the asus website, untar, mount the diskette and copy the files. Back into the XP setup and all is well.

Sorta...

Ok, so I now have a fresh install of XP on my SATA drive, but I'd like to get all my data off of my SCSI drive. Apparently neither Windoesn't nor Grub has ANY idea wtf to do about this situation. As soon as both drives are plugged in, I cannot boot from either drive. I tried running the XP recovery console, fixing the MBR...no dice. Every possible combination of BIOS settings...nope. Evnentually I just plugged the damn thing into my Linux server and copied over the network.

What a pain in the ass. And on top of it all, my new DVD burner doesn't even fit inside my Antec P150 case. The pretty little CD-ROM covers are just a bit too small for the CD try to go through...grawrrr!

PS3 Experience

Well I attempted to get a Playstation 3 at launch, but no dice. This all started a few weeks ago when after doing some research I realized the absolute potential that these units had. The potential to sell like CRAZY on eBay. I really could care less about console gaming, and am definately not willing to spend hundreds of dollars to sit in front of a TV. Ok so maybe I do enjoy the occaisonal game, but not enough to warrent buying a system for myself.

Then here comes the PS3. Can you believe that these systems sell for $660? Holy moly! I'm fairly certain that kids these days cannot even come close to earning that kind of money mowing lawns or delivering papers. So who is the target demographic? ME! That's right, the Nintendo generation has matured into consumer whores, and we LOVE our stuff. I love to buy stuff too, but these days it hasn't been techy. I know people want these things, I know there is a huge supply shortage, and I know rich people will pay ludacrous amounts of money for 'em. Here in starts my adventure.

After calling around many stores on the Wednesday before launch, I got a good idea of how many each store had recieved. Brian also did some recon work, and talked to a delivery guy...So we knew where they were going. Thursday morning I went to Futureshop in Langford to get a rundown from their manager. I couldn't find 'em, so I talked to the nearest cashier. She wasn't entirely all that useful but mentioned that they were definately getting less than 20. I figure, 10-15 would be a good number, considering Futureshop nationwide was allocated 1500 units. After some quick counting and poking around the FS website, there were 121 locations ;-) So my 10-15 estimate was bang on.

On my way out of the store I see 6 kids already outside waiting in the PS3 line. Appearently those nuts were there all night already. Gross.

I then boogied down to London Drugs and talked to the techs there. They hadn't got their shipment in yet, but figured they would get 4. The London Drugs on Quadra got that #, so this seemed accurate. Now what to do? Well I did as my heart said and drove to UVic to work on assignments ;-)

Later that night I discovered that Futureshop was posting an exact # of units. My drive down there right at closing proved they only had 10 units. Ok crap'en cakes - there are 12 people already staked out for the night! Well I decided there is no sense staying over night there. I went down to London Drugs, they got 5. Oh MAN there were already 8 people outside. Didn't look like all of them were staying over night, but 5 of them sure did. So poop, I guess my only chance of getting one would be to try costco. Appearently in the states they each got a few, so why not. I drove to costco to find NOBODY there! Wow, things were looking up...but if there was nobody there by 11pm, why would there be anybody there at 6am?

So alarm goes off at 6 am and I get my ass down to FS for opening at 8. I stand inline as "guy # 11". I was hoping so bad that somebody's credit card didn't go through. Unfortunately I was in a lineup of nerds with excellent credit.

London drugs opened at 9, so I attempted the same thing. Nope...Although 1 guy offered to sell me his "voucher" for a couple hundred bucks. I could've done that, but then again my capitalist ebay plan would have 200 bucks on the line. Nah, I drive a 500 dollar beater for a reason.

Last stop, Costco. I get there and some dude in a truck had pulled right in front of the main doors. So I'm guy # 2! WOOT, heck yeah I'm going to get one! So i sit there from about 8:40 ish to just before 10...Then some costco employee comes out

"What are you guys doing?"
"We WANTS PLAYSTATIONS!!"
"We don't have any"

Dammit.

So I go home, tail between my legs and crawl back in bed.

Maybe I should try and get a Wii...

Borat

This movie made my sides hurt. I think what I liked most about this movie was its no holds barred attitude. Straight up humor, the whole time. Some of the shit that Borat pulls are absolutely priceless...bringing back a bag of shit to an "up class" dinner party table? Naked wrestling for nearly 10 straight minutes? Pulling a marriage sack over Pamela Anderson's head...oh emmm efff geee is all I have to say. If you havn't seen this movie yet, you need to. =)

New fuel pump on the way

Well, if all goes well, a new fuel pump for White Rice is on the way. So what does this mean to the average joe? Nothing really, it's just a pump that will be able to handle bigger injectors. And what does THAT mean, well if you don't know then you're not a car person :-)

ooo, phallic

finger in my cereal?

Yeah, exactly. wtf?! I was half asleep this morning, munchin' down on my morning cereal when I just about slammed back a latex finger. Ok, so it wasn't a human finger - just the glove but still! G-ROSS.

I guess that's what I get for eating no-name brand cherios.

latex finger