Is There Anybody Out There?

June 19, 2000

I've been monitoring the Hit counter and over half of them are from me proofreading the site for errors.  I must find better ways to advertise this place.  Oh well.  It's still a learning process.  In the meantime, I can continue to build my DVD Review database.  There's no lack of titles to choose from these days.

Speaking of DVDs, does anyone know the current DVD title count?  It wouldn't surprise me if just for Region 1 we'll be getting close to the 10,000 title mark by year's end.  This is truly impressive when you take into consideration that in the history of the Laserdisc format, the count topped off at about 15,000 titles.

New reviews are up, all of them old titles.  "Casino", "Ronin" and "The Blues Brothers".  It was time to dust off a few modern classics and remind you all just how well these excellent movies have turned out on DVD.  In a way, we are also celebrating Robert De Niro's presence in Montreal and the Grand Prix weekend at the same time.  Two of the three movies have De Niro or car chases in them.

What do you think of the Web site's backgrounds?  I wanted to create something out of the ordinary.  It started out as a textured image to create a "paper-like" look to the site.  I then started to create various colored versions of the textures and it resulted in something a bit out of the ordinary.  They add a nice touch to the site while at the same time keep the download time down to a minimum.

That's about it for now.  I'm still quite busy at work these days.  With the St-Jean Baptiste and Canada Day holidays coming up, the days off will give me a chance to catch up on some sleep and some "creative" writing.  Last year it was impossible to enjoy the holidays since I was moving into my new loft.  Good thing there were plenty of family members to help me out.

I just realized something!  It's been a year since I bought this loft!  Time passes so quickly!  And I still love this place!  Maybe I should post a few pictures...

Have a good week!

Busy at Work, Late to Bed

June 11, 2000

June 13, 2000.  Late breaking news.  The upcoming transit strike has been averted.  The tentative deal reached on Monday between the MUCTC and the Union has been approved by about 60%.  If you were wondering if you should cancel your Grand Prix weekend visit or not, rest assured.  You will be able to get to the track in a reasonable amount of time.

I've been very busy lately.  This is why the updates are few and far between.  There's also a lack of interesting new DVD releases to review.  Eventually things will get better in the coming weeks when a slew of new titles will be released just in time for the summer.  If you would like me to review a specific title and I happen to have it in my collection, please let me know.  I might be interested in writing about it especially if it's an overlooked gem.

I'm watching "The Simpson's" while writing this and they just played a dedication to the movie "Koyaanisqatsi"!  Oh to have that movie on DVD and in Dolby Digital 5.1!

The notebook is OK now.  I am now using a second hard disc to back up the main hard disc.  The Drive Image software works fine between two hard drives although it has a bit of trouble sizing extended partitions properly.  A couple of maneuvers with Partition Magic, one tweak with the Linux FDISK utility for the benefit of OS/2 and the job is done.  The previous disaster occurred when different partitions were being backed up to a separate file located in a partition that crossed the 1023 cylinder border.  That might have been the cause of the original disaster all along since the corruption of the backup file occurs right where the 1023rd cylinder boundary was located.

You may have noticed a couple of "tweaks" in my site.  The background image is used to give the site a "newspaper" look and feel.  In the Reviews, I added a "Final Word" entry in the Ratings table to fill up the empty space.  Now the table is complete and the standards are locked-in.  I might add the DVD cover art in the future but first I have to find a site that will give me the authorization to copy their JPEG images.  Plus I must ensure the files are not too big.  I still want my site to load as quickly as possible.

I now have a "For Sale" section.  It contains a list of the DVDs I want to dump because in my opinion they are not very good to begin with.  Some of the titles are so bad that I might even consider throwing in a barf bag as a gift.

That's about it for now.  I'll be busy this week working at my day job, creating the next installment of the "Home Theater Info" section and maybe another editorial if I'm pissed off about something specific.  In Montreal it's hard not to be pissed off about something especially with a transit strike planned for the Grand Prix weekend.  It wouldn't surprise me if Montreal loses the Grand Prix over this fiasco.  That means a lot of business lost over politics and stupidity.  Anyone planning to set up shop in the area please take note.

In passing, I would like to offer again my sympathies to my sister Chantal in B.C. who lost her dog Truffles this week.  Not only does she love and take great care of her dogs, they are very well trained and their behavior is exemplary.  She's the best master a dog could ever have.

Slowly Recovering from Disaster

June 2, 2000

Note: the review of "The World Is Not Enough" is now available along with a review of the anime feature "Perfect Blue".

Here is an update on what has been happening recently.

First of all the notebook is back up and running.  It's a good thing IBM's Recovery CD works properly and reloads the system in the default C drive while at the same time ignores all other partitions on the drive.  What took the longest time was downloading all the latest updates from the Internet.  If you need to perform this Recovery operation yourself, start by rebuilding a 2 GB FAT partition.  If you try to use a FAT32 partition, the recovery will fail.

My first editorial is now available along with the reviews of "Being John Malkovich" and very soon "The World Is Not Enough".  I finally found time to rebuild them all following my disaster.

Don't be surprised if you see some minor changes being implemented in the coming days.  I'll be experimenting with a few "decorations".

Disaster Strikes: Legit Software Behaves Like A Virus

May 27, 2000

The update will be delayed a week as I reinstall Windows 98 and all it's software on my notebook.  I suffered a fatal disaster when while trying to back up my partitions with Drive Image, the software reset the primary partitions to "Unformatted"!  Boot Manager, OS/2 and Windows 98 were wiped out!  Somehow the extended partition was unaffected by this reset including the backup files.

So I tried to restore the partitions with the backup.  OS/2 was up and running but Windows wouldn't reload!  Eeek!  After some prodding, I came to the conclusion that the backup files are corrupt.  So I pretty much lost all my accumulated work and mail.  I also lost the review to Being John Malkovich (weird and great story, great cast, lots of fun features, high value) which I had half-done.  I also lost a document I was preparing for the condo project where I live.

This is ridiculous!  A software package designed to avoid such disasters actually provoked it's own disaster!  This is why the Wonderful World of Backups is such a delicate issue.  You have to be ready to put a whole system on the line to prove that it works.  And if it doesn't work properly, you're screwed.  If my web site wasn't already on a separate system, I would have lost all that as well.  As for all the other work, it can all be recovered to a certain point.  And what was lost can be retyped -- given some time.  In the meantime, please E-mail me an empty message so I can pick up your addresses again.

And I thought the "I LOVE YOU" virus, which I didn't catch, was bad enough!

Updates and New Features

May 19, 2000

Note: the new reviews have been updated from their original versions posted the morning of the 19th.  The original versions weren't to my satisfaction so I uploaded new versions in the early evening.

Sorry for the delay.  I've been doing a few late-niters at my paying job.

First of all, I'm starting to build the Home Theater section in order to help you all adjust your TVs a little better. Chances are they aren't adjusted properly and probably look ugly as hell.  This section will help you improve what you see or at least try to help you.  First subject: the on-screen controls and what they REALLY do.

A new Review category has been started!  Trailervision reviews!  Reviews of movies that don't exist!  Trust me.  It's a bit weird.  Also included is a Five Best/Worst Featured DVDs which was requested by another web site.  Also included is the reviews for the existing movie "A Bridge Too Far" and the mini-series "From The Earth To The Moon" for those who didn't catch it when it first came out on DVD a couple of years ago.

So enjoy! I'll post more reviews next week once a decent batch of new DVDs finally come out. I'm still waiting for "Being John Malkovitch" which I forgot to reserve and was sold out within a few short hours! Bugger!

Initial Design A Success - Updates Forthcoming

May 10, 2000

Interesting results. Not only is the design very straightforward and easy to maintain, the load time is very short. The beginning of the page is already up on the screen and ready to read while the rest of the page is still loading. By doing this, I avoid the biggest annoyance I encounter on other web sites: having to wait for the whole page to be loaded before being able to read any of it. Some pages are so big that you end up waiting at least two minutes before anything shows up. I consider fifteen seconds to be too long.

All my existing reviews are posted. As new reviews and other items are added, will appear alongside the item and will remain there for about a week. The one exception will be the archives which will be updated as the main page is updated. For now, new DVD reviews will be on hold until I get a chance to start up the other sections. The other reason is the lack of titles to review. I'm hoping that a few Troma titles show up soon. There is always something interesting from one of the oldest independent movie studio in the USA.

New Website Introduced

May 7, 2000

Welcome to my website. What you will notice about the site is the lack of excessive clutter such as megabobs of images, fancy animation and various frames. One thing that has always annoyed me is the amount of time it takes for a page to load up using a dial-up modem. And even if the page load is quick, there is no guarantee the page will print properly. It is also a lot of work to create a standard format that will be replicated across the site.

So to keep it simple and straightforward, I am giving this site a plain-vanilla look. The major advantage of this approach is that this site should work with any browser on the market. The second advantage is you won't be waiting forever for the page to load up.

So enjoy the site even during it's construction and let me know what you think of the place.

Oh. I almost forgot. Milnoc is a word I invented off the top of my head. If the word truly exists in any language, please let me know. I may have used a very rude word by accident and never knew.