King  Gary 

Please note, there are NO SPOILERS in this review.

I watched “Superman Returns” today.

Just some of my thoughts on the movie:

• The special effects are blended in very well. There were effects that made the film seem more hazy, and dream-like, a la “Batman Begins“.
• The movie did indeed seem that it was stretched out a bit too long, as many reviews have pointed out. It’s about 2 1/2 hours long, and it shows when you’re watching it.
• I’m sure many people expected it to be an action flick, but it turned out to be more of a character analysis of Superman, and Clark Kent.
• I felt that the final scenes took away from the impact of the film, up to that point. I’m not going to ruin it for you and tell you what happens, though.
• Kevin Spacey, who played Lex Luthor, acted as too much of a goof to be the right villain of the movie.
• Spacey either should have acted more sinister, or someone else who fit the role better should have played Luthor.
• Adding in bits and pieces of previous Superman movies, specifically audio, and I believe, some video, of Marlon Brando, gave the movie a nicer touch of “authenticity” as it was able to somehow connect and tie in this movie with previous ones, in a way that improved the movie’s experience, in my opinion.
• I have not yet seen any other Superman movie yet (I know, I should!), so I can’t compare with any of them.
• Brandon Routh does look like a good fit for the Superman role.

Final verdict: Recommended, but keep in mind that it’s NOT entirely an action movie.

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I returned home from maybe the last violin performance that I’ll do, at least for a little while. I’m not too sure how and if I’ll continue with it; I’ll probably at least join Waterloo’s school orchestra, which I’m sure they have.

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I love my Mac. I love the software it runs. But I just ran into a problem that appears to be blatantly obvious, and yet, it happens.I was trying to fix the networking problem between my Windows and my Mac; the problem was that, sometimes, I couldn’t modify files on Windows from my Mac over the network, and sometimes I could. Someone recommended, from an online forum, that I run Keychain First Aid, and so I did. I used the Repair option to repair my keychains. What it did completely baffles me. It deleted my login keychain (or so I thought), which contains all of my passwords that I save on my computer, for applications (such as for my instant messaging client). So, whenever I restarted my computer, each program would always ask me to type in the password once again, and again, and again - on every startup. After poking around a bit, I found that the keychain still existed in ~/Library/Keychains, where I suppose all of the user-created keychains exist. I imported the keychain into Keychain Access, and all is well again.

Just to test the problem, I once again ran Keychain First Aid, and sure enough, the same thing occurred. The program removed all references to my login keychain, so I had to re-import it. Again, I don’t know WHY it does this, but it did. For some reason now, though, after playing around a bit, I have TWO System keychains (I should only have one; they both appear to be duplicates of each other, and I can’t delete either of them) and after running the Repair option again, my login keychain doesn’t disappear.

If someone could explain what is going on, then that’d be nice.

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Google Checkout, which some have thought would be called GBuy, is finally here. I’ve also attached a video explaining a bit more about it in this post, below.

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Yesterday’s/this morning’s ACI BBQ/party was a blast! 42 out of the total 60 people who were invited showed up, so that was good. There was also lots of food served, so much so that I’m sure that a lot of excess remained. There was also a plethora of activities to do, including foosball, and a large group of guys also played football in the park nearby. The weather was pretty good, too.

I also played Risk at the end of the party, while others watched the movie Dragon Squad, which from what I understand, was a really bad movie, so much so that it became funny.

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I just woke up at 4:30 pm today, because I’m so tired from yesterday’s ACI BBQ/party. I had a great time, and went to sleep at about 5:30 am after I got home.

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I went bowling again today with my family (this was planned before the other bowling event that I went to a few days ago), and also with another family. I went to a different place this time so I could try out something different. This was the second time this past week that I’ve gone bowling; I think before that, the last time I bowled was about a year ago.

The game I played on Thursday was 3 full games and 9 frames in the 4th game, played in 2 1/2 hours. Today, I played 4 games and 2 frames in the 5th game in two hours. Goes to show how slow we were in the first game and how efficient we were in the second.

I also got 3 strikes in a row (called a turkey), and so I’m pretty happy about that.

After observing some of my friends, family, and other people playing, I think I can conclude that it’s pretty useless to run up to the line, then throw the ball, without using the momentum that you gained from running to the line in the first place. Also, for me, I bowl MUCH better without distractions than I do with. I was listening to my iPod while bowling the second time at certain times, and those were the times when I was ‘in the zone’ and got my strikes - so there MUST be a relation!

The inconsistency in my bowling scores is because my arm gets tired after bowling too often, because I usually use a 14-pound ball, and this resulted in me using a 10-pounder afterwards because my arm needed a vacation.

After reviewing my scores, I can conclude that, if you’re going to bowl with me, we’ll have to play up to game 3 before we count the scores, because I always seem to do the best in game 3 every time I bowl.

Anyways, I’m off to the ACI BBQ/party. I’ll make another post when I return, and if I’m not feeling too tired.

The scores are:

Totals (not including game 5):
Gene: 447
Kenneth: 264
Gary: 456
Susan: 355

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I just saw ‘Alien‘ for the first time. Fun stuff, but I guess knowing a lot of the famous scenes in it ruined it a bit. But still, it’s interesting to see how well the special effects for this horror/action movie is, when it was made back in 1979 (about same time as Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back.) I have the DVDs for the entire quadrilogy (a word coined by the Alien series; the proper term is actually ‘tetralogy’), and so I’ll probably watch at least Aliens, since I heard it was good, but the last two weren’t nearly as good.

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Here are some places where you can find out what books I’m reading, movies and TV shows I’m watching, music I listen to, and photos I’ve taken.

• my books
• movies and TV shows
• my music
• my photos

All of these are also listed in the sidebar to the right of this blog.

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I’ve been tweaking King Gary’s layout for the last few days bit by bit, and it’s looking better every time, even though a lot of it may not be obviously noticeable. I use Firefox on Mac OS X, so I also don’t have Internet Explorer on it. Today, I visited my website in IE, and guess what? It looked horrific. So, I had to fiddle around with it for a few hours before finally resulting to a workaround just for IE (aw, isn’t it special?) and so it looks closely to how it’s supposed to look, as it does in Firefox.

Anyways, what’s the lesson of the day today, boys and girls? DON’T use Internet Explorer. It eats babies.

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