Something New in the Hard Rock Category

If you’re looking to check out something in the new Hard Rock category, check out Sevendust. They just released a “Best Of” disc. One of the beauties of XM Radio is discovering new bands. I’ve probably found 10 new artists that I never heard of (which you’d never hear on terrestrial radio), not to mention the comedy acts! My favorites so far are Face to Face and Enemy. Very catchy choruses with very heavy guitars....

Interesting Stats...

So I decided to take a peek at the stats they my webhost keeps about my domain. Lots of interesting things I never new (all numbers are rounded down to a nice even number). Between January 2005 and January 2006, my domain (everything under mcstudios.net) had 51,000 visits During that year, I served 12.5 GB of data (about a GB a month) During the month of November (the month of most traffic) I had 190 visits per day....

On a Date with Java

To start, I really like Java as a programming language. Because of its “library,” it is very is to be productive quickly, without having to reinvent the wheel each time. When you combine that with an IDE like Eclipse and a graphics library like SWT, Java is amazingly powerful. Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me bitch for a bit. If anything I say is wrong, please let me know as it will relieve much toil....

Battlestar Galactica

For some reason, I’m late on the uptake on new SciFi series. There was a lot of buzz that surrounded this around the same time I was investigating Firefly. I decided to try Firefly first and was duly rewarded (Serenity arriving in theaters was the reason for that). The problem is that Joss Whedon’s project was already canceled by the time I had discovered it. 13 episodes is all you get....

Serenity Sales Rank on Amazon

Check this out. For a box office bust (unfortunately) Serenity is holding its own! For reference, here is Firefly’s Amazon ranking history since it arrived on DVD. Its neat as you can see its sales ranking improve as Serenity approached and the impact Serenity had on the series. Bottom line, TV shows don’t do this. Canceled shows do not reappear on the silver screen. They don’t beat out everything else (sales wise) out there two years after being canceled....

Jon Stewart to host Oscars

CNN.com - Jon Stewart set to host Oscars - Jan 5, 2006 Oh this is going to be good! As long as the network lets him have fun, there should be loads of fun for the rest of us. At least it will be an Oscars worth watching. Speaking of Oscars… We saw King Kong earlier this week, and I was debating with myself should Jackson be eligible for an Oscar?...

Harry Potter

Quick and dirty: If you’ve seen the other 3 films, this one is much better. I give Mike Newel a lot of credit. There is a lot of material to cover and he did it very well (I’ll touch on that later). Great start to what looks like an excellent few weeks of movies. The Goblet of Fire is my favorite of the series thus far. It really the evolution of the series from children’s novels to young adult....

Touch up

I touched up the site’s CSS. The background is now fixed, having discovered that finally fixed the bug that causes the CPU to go to 100% when scrolling against a fixed attachment background. I need to update my CD & DVD collections… the DVD collection won’t be hard, but I’m in the process of moving my CD collection to a different storage format. Problem is that it requires me to redo it from scratch....

Firefox Extensions

In case you were curious, I thought I’d give a run down of the Firefox extensions that I use. Its extension system is quite impressive, keeping bloat away from the main executable, while at the same time letting users have full control over customizations. With IE being so incredibly stagnant, Firefox has stepped in and filled the void. It has also given developers hope that you can code to standards! Though unfortunately, you inevitably have to include some hacks to get IE to work (but that is the reverse of what it was even a year ago)....

Things that make you go... huh?

I have now determined I know nothing of the way Hollywood marketing works. Take the following… Do you remember Big Momma’s House? Before you click the link… guess how much it made gross US… (I’ll give you a hint… its budget was approximately $30 million and it made $25 million on its opening weekend)… They are now making a sequel! WTF! How the hell does that work? Maybe that’s just the economics of having a big star....