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December 21, 2001. I'll be performing a clean install of Windows XP Professional. If you don't hear from me, it's because I threw the computer out the window out of frustration. December 22, 2001. The installation was successful. The only item that was lost was my links which I forgot to back up. It's not a serious loss since the directory was already pretty messy. It was overdue for a purge. December 23, 2001. At first look, Windows XP appears much more reliable and stable than either Windows NT or Windows 98. Hardware and software problems that have plagued my Windows 98 installation have pretty much disappeared under this new operating system. Even the processing speed seems to have been improved a bit. Support for Windows NT applications seems to be present; even a few of my company's applications seem to be working normally. There are still a few bugs and security issues to resolve, but those will be corrected with time via the Windows Update. Microsoft doesn't have much of a choice; they'll be sued by just about every small company in the world if they don't deliver the goods and correct their mistakes. My computer is a 500 MHz IBM ThinkPad 600X with an 11.5 GB HD and 448 MB of memory. The installation partition was initially 3.77 GB in size and was increased to over 5.5 GB to make room for all the extra files. This larger partition does cross the 1024 cylinder boundary, but it doesn't seem to affect the machine, HD or files in any way. As long as a reasonable part of the partition is below the 1024 cylinder boundary, the operating system will boot without a hitch. Just make sure your computer's BIOS has been upgraded recently just to avoid any trouble. As for your IBM 600X devices, they're pretty much all supported with only the modem requiring a minor driver update from Microsoft. I also installed Microsoft Office XP. Overall the installation and Web site update went very well. But one element I discovered is that if you're comfortable with your Outlook Express and don't see the need to obtain any new features, don't bother installing it. I found it so overly bloated for my needs that I simply removed it. Also, it doesn't come with a newsgroup reader. Instead, it uses Outlook Express! When Outlook is installed, Outlook Express is left as-is including your original messages. So when you remove Outlook, you can immediately go back to using Outlook Express as if nothing happened. If you didn't understand any of this, leave the upgrade job to a professional. December 17, 2001. Canadian Content = Useless Filler? I've come to a realization. Ever since I got that satellite dish for the condo building, I've been watching way too much TV. Of course, excessive TV is not all that I've noticed. I've also notice what's being passed off as Canadian content these days. For those of you who aren't aware of this, the government of Canada has made it a requirement that all Canadian channels present a certain amount of Canadian content in their programming in order to avoid a glut of foreign i.e. "American" shows from swamping the airwaves. Unfortunately, the policy isn't working all that well. As I see it, the shows I would consider as being truly Canadian is "Air Farce", "This Hour Has 22 Minutes", "Red Green", "DaVinci's Inquest", and ironically enough, "Made In Canada". All the other shows labelled as being Canadian are basically syndicated shows destined mainly for the American market, international co-productions, "Americanized" TV series based in Toronto, and infomercials disguised as computer information shows. One new channel's idea of Canadian content is to replay the movie "Porky's" often enough to meet their quota, a movie made in Canada but where the story is set in the United States. That ain't Canadian content! That's just a tactic designed to pass off a bunch of filler shows as Canadian content in order to satisfy government requirements. The bottom line is that very few of these shows are actually watched by the Canadian public. Ironically enough, the only shows that can be considered truly Canadian actually come from the French Canadian networks! The French networks successfully produce reasonable quality TV shows that are widely watched by the French speaking public to the point that the ratings for the average French Canadian show easily surpass the ratings for the average English Canadian show. Quite a few shows do have a bit of an "Americanized" flavour to them, but the most successful shows are the ones that possess a heavy Quebec cultural flavour. TV shows such as "La Petite Vie" and "Un Gars et Une Fille" have been hugely successful, highly praised, and have attracted more viewers in Quebec alone than the most popular English Canadian show has managed to attract in the rest of Canada! One fifth the population, double the ratings. A ten-fold per-capita difference. Enough to give advertisers wet dreams for weeks. There's something seriously wrong with a government policy that -- while it started out with the best intentions -- ended up encouraging the production of third-rate English language shows that will be forgotten one month after they've been mercifully cancelled. And forget about abolishing the policies altogether. That would just encourage the broadcasters to dump all Canadian based productions and present American shows twenty-four hours a day. Is there any solution to this dilemma? I honestly believe most Canadians will watch Canadian made TV shows if they're good enough to watch. Unfortunately, production studios in Canada are simply not making TV shows and movies the Canadian audience will enjoy. To make matters worse, other questionable Government policies such as substituting American broadcasts on cable and satellite with the broadcasts from Canadian based broadcasters are actually encouraging a lot of Canadians to go "grey" or "underground" and purchase American satellite equipment so that they can pick up the American speciality channels and get their fix of American shows without the presence of any Canadian filler whatsoever. Canadian culture in television. Does it truly exist? If it does, it's doing an excellent job of hiding from itself. New review! The review of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" will be slightly delayed. The Canadian DVD Users Group, a site that posts a few of my reviews, made a special request for a Christmas title. So I present to you: "It's a Wonderful Life". Enjoy! And Merry Christmas! |
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November 25, 2001 I'm this close to I just have one major irritant to get off my chest this week. I surf the Internet quite frequently. I especially like to visit many of the private forums that exist out there. These forums have the advantage of being closely regulated which helps reduce the number of crank postings which are rampant on the unregulated newsgroups. Unfortunately, even these private forums suffer from a plague for which there's no immediate cure. I'm talking about bad English. For starters, there are the spelling mistakes. Now I can understand when rarely used words are misspelled from time to time, but now the mistakes are spreading to words that are used each and every day. The spelling mistake in the header is one mistake I find more often than any other. Have people forgotten the difference between "loose" and "lose"? "Loose" means "not tight", "lose" means "not found". How difficult is that? There are many more examples of these type of spelling mistakes in the private forums, and they're getting worse. In some cases, the meaning of a sentence is completely changed and the message it tries to communicate is completely lost. Then there's the bad grammar. Now I'm not someone who would normally complain too loudly about this problem since my own writings do suffer from this problem from time to time. Words such as "with", "from", "in", "at", "it's" and "its" are sometimes used inappropriately in my own Web site from time to time. But when you take into consideration my poor vocabulary and my slight inability to distinguish the difference between adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and so on, it's a small miracle that what I write makes any sense whatsoever. But in the private forums, there are messages that are so riddled with grammatical errors that I can't make heads or tails of what the person is trying to say. If such a person was up for a job interview where communications skills were essential, I'd be reluctant to hire them. Combine these two elements together and you have a real mess on your hands. And the native language of these posters is already English! Is this situation caused by a learning disability or is it the result of a poor education? The third problem however is something I do blame entirely on the various education system. It wasn't until I took evening college courses that I finally learned how to properly gather my thoughts on paper. For years, various teachers have tried to teach me all about the individual elements of the French language (I'm "officially" a francophone), but none of them have taught me how to use these elements together in an actual document. They teach you everything you need to know about a specific tree but they don't teach you how this one tree can be part of a huge forest. Introduction, development, conclusion; these are the three basic elements of any document and they're essential in just about everything we write. So why aren't we taught how to properly exploit these elements until we're already out of high school? This kind of information would have been very useful to me before getting into high school! The way I see it, in this age of instant worldwide communications, we are actually losing our ability to communicate with each other. And this is not a new or recent problem. Even before the Internet became as popular as it is now, signs of trouble could be spotted on the private bulletin board services that were rampant in the early nineties. With today's means of communications available at our fingertips, I was hoping most Internet surfers would be a bit more careful when writing down their thoughts. Unfortunately that's not what I'm reading these days. A review is ready! I finally finished the "One Night at McCool's" review. Next up will be the widescreen edition of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", a movie that severely traumatized me when I was only six years old. I didn't even want to touch a blueberry for years after seeing what happened to the gum chewing girl! Have a good week! |
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November 12, 2001. Remembrance Day Frustrations Yesterday, we were remembering the work, the courage and the sacrifices made by our fighting men and women of the two great world wars and many other conflicts around the world. This year's Remembrance Day is even more significant since it follows day per day the events of two months ago when a terrorist group hijacked a handful of passenger planes and rammed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, killing thousands of people in the process. Today, the United States is currently involved in a full scale attack against Afghanistan just to get at one single man. What they're showing the world is that they simply don't remember their history, or more specifically the Soviet Union's previous experience with the mountainous country. The United States is dropping bombs left and right, but accomplishing very little in terms of progress. In the meantime, the ramifications of the WTC attack are widespread. Already many airlines have declared bankruptcy including a few airlines in the States, Swissair from Switzerland, and even Canada 3000, a Canadian based carrier that went belly-up just last week and left many people stranded far away from home. Even the accidental crash of an American Airlines Airbus in the neighbourhood of Queens this morning got everyone so nervous that the stock markets started to drop like a stone in water. Only an official announcement that the crash did seem accidental allowed the stock market to climb back up to reasonable levels. You also have samples of the anthrax virus being mailed to various high profile addresses creating as much havoc as possible in many offices, but with a lot fewer deaths than what is normally encountered on the nation's highways on a daily basis. Throw in an already weakened economy and increased paranoia, and you have the makings of a real catastrophe. As disturbing as this may seem, I feel the terrorists are starting to win the war. With minimal resources, they managed to disrupt the operations of an extremely advanced civilization just by hitting a few key targets. And now the big civilization is spending millions of dollars trying to get at a single person -- and progressing way too slowly. On the leadership angle, the situation ain't much better. The terrorists have a very powerful and influential leader assisted by strong and extremely loyal henchmen. On our side, we have George W. Bush, a man who won the presidential election through what could be called a technicality. Add to this his statements which sound like the cliché "if you're not with us, you're against us", and you have the makings of a highly shaky alliance. There's so much that sinks about this whole affair. Is our whole society built on a house of cards that can be blown over by the slightest breeze? For the soldiers of past wars, this makes their sacrifices seem like a big waste of time. Entertainment industry events On a more positive note, two competitors locked horns with simultaneous releases on the same day. On a Friday a couple of weeks ago, the movie "Monsters Inc." was released in theaters, and the DVD "Shrek" was released in video stores. Surprisingly, everyone including the consumers are the winners here. "Monsters Inc." achieved record sales for a movie released on a non-holiday weekend, and "Shrek" achieved record first week's sales of a DVD title, surpassing even the DVD release of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" released only a couple of weeks prior. And what do you know! Both movies happen to be highly entertaining, probably the only decent movie release up to now this year. On another angle, the final Star Trek movie to be released on DVD, "Star Trek - The Motion Picture", is very well repackaged. Director Robert Wise finally had the chance to fix up a few things that bothered him about his rushed-into-production theatrical release. And unlike George Lucas who loves to add a bunch of crap in his special editions, Robert Wise's requested edits were mostly appropriate, limited to improving a few scenes, removing elements that were dumbing-down the storyline, and replacing a few sound cues. Overall, a very appealing and totally appropriate director's edition. Montreal has a new mayor His name is Gérald Tremblay, and he replaces the previous mayor Pierre Bourque. And I'm not seeing things getting any better here any time soon. It almost took a whole year for the city to simply replace a tree a contractor knocked down outside our building last winter while clearing the snow from the streets! So with this whole merger scam going on right now, I don't expect the quality of life in the Montreal area to get any better. And for the towns losing their charters at the end of the year, their quality of life is about to take a nosedive. Big time! Satellite service update Bell ExpressVu's promotional period is over, and I'll now be paying full rate for the service. And I have no problems with that whatsoever. Aside from a few brief incidents of "rain fade" lasting no longer than five minutes each, the quality of the service has been impeccable. Even though the picture resolution of the various channels varies a bit depending on the compression ratio of the digital signal, the overall stability of the picture on all channels is dead on. The sound levels are still a mess, but I just have to remember to keep my finger on the volume control whenever I switch channels. The only real disappointment has to be The Movie Channel. For a movie channel, very few of their features are presented in their original aspect ratio. Now that the mini-series "Band of Brothers" is over, there's no real reason for me to keep the service. So as of today, The Movie Network is no longer part of my subscription package. The e-mail I sent them over a week ago asking them to give me a reason not to cancel the service has yet to be answered. So I won't be wasting any more time with them. November 14, 2001. My subscription changes won't come into effect until December 8. I found out I'm still at the tail end of the promotional period. Still, I won't be watching The Movie Network, MoviePix or the superstations very much if at all. This disappointment has got me thinking about obtaining a Class 2 licence for a widescreen movie channel, offering features presented in their original aspect ratio, broadcast simultaneously in HDTV and SDTV and full Dolby Digital 5.1 surround whenever possible. Essentially, I'll be offering a service that's not available on any other speciality channel offered here in Canada. And I'm more than willing to broadcast Canadian features on prime time. All this should be just enough to give me a fighting chance at obtaining a licence. Afterwards, I can work at building the broadcast center which will consist mainly of HDTV equipment and one box that will downconvert the HDTV signal for broadcast on standard TV sets. This way, I'll have all the latest broadcast equipment and avoid any duplication of service. But that's just another one of my life's ambitions. For now, I'll simply enjoy the existing and new channels offered on ExpressVu and just stick with DVDs for my movies. So have a good week and don't watch too much TV! |
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October 21, 2001. The review of "Star Wars I - The Phantom Menace" has been completed. Please click here to read it. But let me warn you in advance that this is probably the longest and most negative review I've ever written for a single movie. If you notice that some elements of the review seem to have been copied from my original "Phantom Edit" review, it's no accident. Much of the content of that original review was still accurate or needed just a bit of tweaking to bring it up to date with the latest DVD release. My next planned review will be the DVD "One Night at McCool's". October 17, 2001. I'll make this quick. I'm tired and I still have too much work to do at the office.
That's it for now! The review of "The Wicker Man" is finally posted, and the next DVD review will be "Star Wars, Episode I - The Phantom Menace" which will be similar to my review of "The Phantom Edit" which I wrote last summer, with one major difference. Watch out for your subwoofers! This movie is overloaded with deep bass! Have a good one! |
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October 1st, 2001. Still very busy! Okay, I'm a bit late. I've yet to write the review for "The Wicker Man", and I still want to post an update. The office has been keeping me very busy to the point where I've had very little time for myself. And that time was spent either resting up for the next day's workload or catching up on some writing for the office. The workload is not a bad thing. We've already completed the basic OS/2-Windows NT conversion of our software package. We're now searching for left-over bugs and incorporating new features for the benefit of a client. We still have a few components left to convert, but they can be completed after the beta version of our software has been installed at our client site. This new version of our software package is a dramatic improvement over the previous version. It's implementation is as dramatic as when we converted the package from it's original text-based version to the GUI version ten years ago. And there's no better feeling than to implement something that you and many others have worked so hard to develop. So I don't mind the extra workload that much so close to the finish line. Enterprise The new Star Trek television series has just started, and the reviews by both the public and *choke* professional reviewers are very much the same. Everyone likes the look of the series, the actors that compose the ship's crew, the political and social angle of the twenty-second century, and the design of the new ship. The one element everyone seems to hate the most is the opening theme song. One person even asked who's the "crack baby" that composed that monstrosity. My own opinion about the series is pretty much the same. What I especially like is the new ship with it's levers and buttons all over the place. Along with the cramped quarters, the new Enterprise resembles what a first-generation faster-than-light starship would look like. The one thing that bugged me the most in the previous series was the amount of space available in the various ships. As bizarre as this may seem, space in "space" is normally at a premium. You just have to see how much space is available in the various space vessels we've created up to now to understand this. The new (old?) Enterprise still has some reasonably big rooms, but it also has some reasonably cramped ones as well, making the inside of the ship appear more realistic. Some people have complained the new series, considering the time frame, should have looked something like the original series from the late-sixties. That would have been a big mistake. Many of these Star Trek "geeks" can't seem to accept that the original series was created on a shoestring budget and with limited special-effects technology which severely limited how much creativity could have been applied to the series. They'll just have to accept the fact the new series is not based on reality, but is a television show created by a team of writers, actors, producers and special-effects teams. They'll just have to adapt. Just like they'll have to get used to the fact the series is being presented in the widescreen format. With the increasing support for HDTV, it would be foolish not to create the series with that in mind. Enterprise may be the first North-American television series entirely created and presented in the widescreen format with no pan & scan version available. All I hope is that the actors that compose the crew understand that they're pretty much committed to a seven year acting job that might make them unsuitable for new acting roles in the future. The series is not kind to either new or existing acting careers, imposing the most unkind form of typecasting ever seen. Municipal elections for a new municipality Montreal and the island's suburbs are about to merge, and the first elections of the new municipality scheduled for November 4th promise to be a chaotic mess with the implementation of a new voting system. Regardless of who gets elected, the new mayor will have to deal with a bunch of municipalities that have become part of a forced marriage. Montreal is a badly managed city composed of ineffective civil servants, bloated unions and amputated municipal services. The suburbs however have enjoyed the benefits of small and highly efficient municipal governments where if you call City Hall with a problem or a complaint, the issue will most likely be handled within a week if not the next day. In Montreal, you're lucky if the problem or complaint is handled at all. Even when the city does something about it, it can easily take months to implement the solution. If your problem is seasonal, the solution will most likely be implemented only the following year. The suburbs better get used to this pathetic city management. pretty soon, they'll be seeing something they've never seen before, but that Montrealers endure year-round without fail: pot-holes! Enjoy the forced marriage! The honeymoon will be a bad one! As Jack Nicholson's character Joker said in the movie "Batman", "This town needs an enema!" WTC follow-up I won't dwell too long on this. We've had enough of all that's been going on since September 11th and we need to get on with our lives. Canada-US relations were slightly strained when Bush failed to include Canada among the countries he thanked during his congressional address. It left many Canadians a bit irritated at the snub. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to ease tensions the best he could the following day. When Chrétien visited Bush the following week, Chrétien downplayed the issue and Bush accused Canadian politicians of "playing politics". Has politics become so cynical that it's now impossible for a politician to offer a simple apology for an honest mistake? All that this experience has taught me is that our leaders are a pair of incompetent boobs who care more about keeping their jobs than they are about doing their jobs. And this is the same pair that will lead us into a war against terrorism? It'll probably turn out just like the war against drugs and biker gangs: totally ineffective! They just don't get it! What about "The Wicker Man" review? I'll try to write it this week. In the meantime, resume your normal lives until further notice. |
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September 16, 2001. What a shitty week! There's no better way to describe it. Last Tuesday morning, four commercial passenger jets in the United States were hijacked by terrorists almost simultaneously. Two of the jets were deliberately smashed into both 110 floor towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and one jet was smashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The Pentagon survived the collision although there was extensive damage to the West side of the building. Both World Trade Center towers, weakened by the raging fire inside, collapsed to the ground and took a few surrounding buildings along with them. The fourth jet crashed to the ground before reaching it's target, possibly when the passengers tried to overtake the terrorists after finding out on a cell phone what happened in NYC. All the passengers and terrorists on all aircraft were killed on impact. Almost two hundred people were killed at the Pentagon, and over five thousand people are dead or still unaccounted for in New York City including over two hundred rescue workers who were caught by surprise when the first building to be hit, the North Tower, collapsed unexpectedly. Included among the dead are Chief of Department Peter J. Ganci Jr., First Deputy Commissioner William M. Feehan and Rev. Mychal F. Judge. They and their fallen comrades are being honoured for doing their jobs no matter how high the risks. I was trying to understand what makes this attack any different from the attacks occurring between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the Middle-East, and the Christians and Protestants in Northern Ireland. And then I realized the difference. This attack involved Muslim extremists fighting against the rest of the world. That's what the World Trade Center was all about: various cultures from around the world doing business together while at the same time respecting each other's cultural diversity. At least that's what I believe. So when a group of terrorists decided to target these two particular buildings, from my point of view they're telling us that they can't accept a world where diverse cultures including their own faith can live and work together in peace and harmony. So they try to destroy that world. Their approach won't work. Especially with Americans. This is the same country that was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. At that time, much of the American naval fleet was destroyed from within the confines of Pearl Harbor. Yet the USA through their high level of patriotism and arrogance have successfully fought back the attack and eventually won the war against the Japanese. The attack last week is not that much different except that the Americans are not dealing with a single country this time around. Instead, they have to deal with a bunch of smaller groups of terrorists with no fixed nationality. This won't change the USA's stubbornness to punish with extreme prejudice the bastards responsible for this highly destructive and cowardly attack. Canada must support the United States in this endeavour to the fullest. We already helped them last week by granting their airlines landing privileges in Canada after they've closed all their airports. Even the closing of the borders was executed with full cooperation between the two nations for the sole purpose of preventing other terrorists from escaping either country. It's important for Canada to back up the United States in their endeavour to eliminate the groups responsible for this cowardly act of terrorism before these same terrorists decide to target our own nation. This does go against Canada's historical tradition of promoting peace around the world, but peace negotiations only work with people who want to end the fighting. Peace negotiations don't work with people who want to continue the fighting. I just can't see any other option. Either fight this terrorist disease right now, or allow it to spread throughout the rest of the world. A new review is coming soon! I finally bought a new DVD! Believe it or not, it actually took me over a month to find a title I wanted to buy. And not a moment too soon. After this week, it's nice to watch something that took my mind off Tuesday's World Trade Center attack. At least I tried to take my mind off last week's events. The movie is "The Wicker Man". And if you know anything about it, you know there's a heavy religious angle to the storyline. Luckily, the religious angle is more local than international. And this budget movie is quite an accomplishment. I'll be writing the review this week. Keep checking the upper-right corner from time to time where I'll announce when it's ready. |