It’s late at night here in Sweden, and I’m sitting here thinking about my review of the Antec NSK-6580 computer-chassi.

One of my “internet-heroes” or whatever you might call it is Dan over at DansData. I think he’s hilarious in his writings, and he’s also heck of a lot smarter than I am. None the less, ever since I first discovered his site I’ve been a little envious of his job. He gets to review neat stuff, and he does it quite excellently. I tried to emulate his style of reviewing when writing my Antec-review, but I suppose he has more experience at this kind of thing.

I didn’t expect my review to get any kind of attention, but a lot of people are reading it. Either they find it through Google, or go through Antec’s website. Yeah, that’s kinda neat - Antec added a link to my review of their product. I’m still pinching myself about that one.

Anyhoo. I really liked doing the review. So if you have a product you need reviewed, let me know. I’ll be happy to do it. Just ship your product to me, and I’ll give it a fair go.

*For Free, meaning, you don’t need to pay me to review the product, but if I like it I get to keep it.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Action/Horror/Scifi from 2007 starring Milla Jovovich.

—

In the third installment of the Resident Evil-franchise we again get to familiarize ourselves with the heroine Alice (Jovovich). This time it’s really bad. The events of the previous film didn’t stop the T-virus from spreading, and it not only infected most of the human population of the world (turning them into dangerous zombies) it also killed the forests, nature, infected animals and generally wreaked havoc on our planet. The world as we know it is gone, replaced with a merciless desert eating away at what little natural resources are left. Alice maintains a day-to-day life until she gets reunited with other survivors of the Raccoon City-massacre in the previous film, and they decide to head for Alaska where supposedly there are more survivors. The remnants of the Umbrella Corporation have other plans in mind however…

—

I’m not really the target-audience for movies of this kind. I have a difficult time relating to the whole zombie-thing, and even though I enjoy most horrorfilms I have a somewhat strained relationship to this kind of movie. In general I feel that the zombie-genre is ridden with heavy clichés and that every attempt to modernize it simply confirms this theory.

I’ve never played a Resident Evil-game either, so I have no idea what all that is about, other than that most RE-fans seem as rabidly obsessed as the zombies in the games themselves.

(relax, I’m just joking)

So, while I had a somewhat fun time watching the first film, the second one soured me pretty bad on the whole concept. The first one had a good feel to it, and even though it was somewhat laughable at times it still provided decent entertainment. But the sequel was a far cry from being entertaining. It was almost painfully bad, and took itself way too seriously. Add to that, it was astoundingly silly in most every department, and as always riddled with clichés of the genre.

The groundwork didn’t look good for the third one. In fact, I considered not watching it at all. But it turned out I was in the mood for something braindead and filled with action, so I relented and gave it a go.

Surprise, surprise. It wasn’t as bad as I expected. Sure, it won’t win any awards for… well… pretty much anything, but it was pretty solid entertainment, and I didn’t yawn or check my watch a single time. Admittedly this also suffers from a lot of tired clichés, and Russell Mulcahy (yes, THE Russell Mulcahy, of Highlander-fame) falls pretty heavy for the temptation of using old by-the-book techniques to scare the viewer. The costumes are bordering on silly, and I always find it a bit amusing in movies of this kind how the hot chicks always have perfect makeup despite having spent years wandering the desert.

But for all it’s drawbacks this movie somehow works. A lot of people complained about a perceived lack of action, but I thought it was fine. I don’t really like movies who try to cover a thin plot or crappy acting by shoveling lots of action-sequences over the viewer, and I felt that this movie was somewhat balanced. Plus, the whole Zombies Meets Mad Max In The Desert-concept was interesting. I’ve always liked post-apocalyptic movies, and this fit the bill fine.

All in all, I’d say this is the best of the three movies so far. Which means it’s pretty mediocre, but hey - it wasn’t meant to be another Citizen Kane or something. Think of it as entertainment for teenage guys. And Milla has nice legs.

+ Desert
+ Milla Jovovich
+ Not too silly zombies
+ Guns, Guns, Guns
+ Lots of sand
+ Las Vegas buried in sand
+ Action
+ Weird ending
+ Slightly more character development than previous movies

- What’s with the ridiculous boss in the end of every movie?
- Tired dialogue
- Wooden acting
- Predictable plot
- Lots of genre-clichés, i.e. groups splitting up then getting killed off one at a time, monsters jumping out of closets, etc.

Has anyone seen a movie called “Interstate 60″ produced in 2002, featuring among other people Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd and James Marsden? If you haven’t, then I strongly recommend finding it and watching it. For some reason it never got a big marketing campaign behind it, but it’s a real gem of a film.

There might be some minor spoilers down below, in case

Either way, there’s this excellent supporting character that shows up at one point in the film, name of Bob Cody. Played brilliantly by Chris Cooper, this character will almost always stay in my mind. He’s excellent, being a man who “says what he does and does what he says”. Essentially he’s a free-roaming cynic, and one of his pastimes is listening to the radio and loudly debunking what’s said on the same.

Example:

Woman on radio: The choice is clear. The Arion 620, the American-made car for the American driver.
Bob Cody: That’s a lie. The Arion engines are made in Japan.
Man on radio: Kill Signal, the movie everyone’s talking about, from Weber Films.
Bob Cody: [laughs] That’s another lie. We’re not talking about it.
Another man on radio: We’re the U.S. post office, and we care.
Bob Cody: Oh! That’s the biggest whopper of all.

Often I hear a Bob Cody inside of me. This is especially true whenever I see a commercial, and it’s unusual that I can contain my sarcasm about commercials and their claims. My friends and family know this well.

And all this yapping brings me to the point of this entry. There’s a company in Sweden called Viasat. The history behind the company is somewhat convoluted, essentially consisting of several different companies in various genres of business merging together over a period of some fifteen years. These days Viasat is one of the largest suppliers of satellite-television, but also maintains holdings in several of the major swedish TV-channels, as well as being the producer of the TV1000-network, one of the major premium movie-networks in Sweden. Essentially TV1000 is a swedish counterpart to HBO, but without the original productions. They broadcast movies and have no commercials, instead you subscribe to the service.

Viasat-channels are also broadcast via cable, in my case through Comhem which is probably the largest cable-TV supplier in Sweden. Me and Ann-Sofie pay for TV1000 since it’s a good way to keep track of movies, as well as being a good source for bored movie-watching in the middle of the night.

Whatever.

Viasat launched a service called Viasat On Demand a few months ago. I really haven’t checked it out until a few hours ago when I went to their homepage. Essentially it’s a video-on-demand service, you can rent movies over the internet and watch them. Nothing new here, it’s all been done before. The reason for my curiosity was that since me and Ann-Sofie already subscribe to TV1000 I was wondering if we could get a free account at this webservice. It had been implied through the commercials, so I got to wondering.

Those thoughts came to an abrupt halt when I saw the technical requirements. Translated from Swedish they are:

* PC with Windows XP or better.
* Internet Explorer 6 or better.
* Flash Player 8 or better.
* Windows Media Player 10 or better.
* A minimum of 1mbit/s broadband connection. 2mbit/s recommended.
* An updated WMP with individualization for DRM-encryption.
* The clock on your computer may not deviate more than 15 minutes from the clock on our servers.
* You must allow cookies.

This means if you’re running anything except 100% Microsoft-products or Microsoft OS’s you’re shit out of luck. It’s absolutely pathetic in my opinion. Why not just put a slogan on the front page saying “Screw you if you’re not a braindead lemming”?

The irony is even more obvious considering that Viasat On Demands slogan translates to “Entertainment On Your Conditions”. When I read this I heard Bob Cody inside of me shouting:

“Liars! That’s not entertainment on my conditions!”

Well, I’ve officially decided to move the last two remaining Seagate-drives from my server to my workstation. This sucks, but I’m going to have to be pragmatic about this - they were (for whatever reasons) causing the machine to be unstable, and an unstable server is simply unacceptable.

Supposedly there are a lot of people out there who are perfectly happy with Seagate-drives, but my patience is at an end. I wrote about this back in June (in Swedish) and even though I started to become very disenchanted with Seagate then I felt that maybe things would be sorted out in the future. Thus, I left them unplugged in the server, awaiting a chassi-change.

That chassi-change happened a month ago, yet the problems persist. The only conclusion I can draw is that Seagate-drives are somehow flawed when it comes to being in my server. My workstation currently runs all Seagate-drives, and some of the problems persist, but the difference is that my workstation is not mission-critical. I’m fine with rebooting it every few days. The server however, I cannot accept. I also cannot accept the lockups, DMA-errors and general weirdness that follows in the wake of the Seagate-drives. I cannot accept that whenever the Seagate-drives are attached the server will lockup if the load-average goes above 0.50 since under that load the Seagate-drives for whatever reason decide to squeeze their brains out through the IDE-channel. Unplug them and the machine will run happily under whatever load-average it gets.

I don’t know the causes for the problems, but I do know that a lot of people are experiencing similar problems. The symptom is always the same. The constant culprit is Seagate-drives. I no longer have the time or patience trying to find out why my drives are acting funky, and instead moving them to a less vital computer. After a lot of troubleshooting the problems persist, and while it would be easy for someone else to write off my server as temperamental and fussy about drives that is not the case - virtually every other brand of drives work fine in it, even the old Maxtor 80 gigabyte-drives that I always assumed would fail within the first year. I shrugged at it, since they’d been a free gift, but they’ve been ticking along steadily for more than four years now. This is unlike the Seagate-drives, who have all been causes for more or less intense degrees of grief.

No more of that now.

The days of Seagate-drives in my computers is once again numbered - and this time I’m not going to question my own judgment. Instead, the two drives will be moved into my workstation, and in time all Seagate-drives will be phased out of my life. Whether that phasing will come from them failing and getting junked or from me buying newer drives is really something that doesn’t concern me.

I recently turned 30 years old. Supposedly it’s a milestone, but I feel just as silly as ever. In most cases, as far as I’m concerned age is yet another bogus measure of a human beings worth.

Anyhoo, one of my oldest friends, Magnus Lindholm (the same bloke who recently welcomed his first child) recently gave me the nerdiest gift ever. I was in shock for several minutes after being presented with it. I had planned to keep it a secret for a few weeks longer but I just can’t control myself any longer.

Without further ado:

“What the heck is that?” you might ask. Well, he’d found one of my old motherboards complete with shipping-label and slapped it inside a frame as a kind of monument or reward of some kind. The motherboard in question is my first 32-bit computer, an AM386SX-40 that I bought to upgrade my then-computer which consisted of an ancient 286. I can’t remember how long ago this was. We’re not quite sure that the shipping label is the right one, but it’s neat none the less. This thing dates from the early nineties, probably around 1992 or so.

How he got possession of this piece of computer history is rather convoluted. Apparently I gave it to a mutual friend at some point in time, which in turn passed it into his mothers computer for a cheap upgrade, and served there for several years until it transferred somewhere else and then somewhere else and somehow ended up in Magnus’ hands where it lay dormant for several years until he discovered it in an old box of stuff not too long ago. He then framed it with the supposed shipping-label and provided a helluva laugh for me.

This motherboard provided a lot of fun for me and my nerdy friends. Among other milestones, this was the motherboard that allowed us to try Doom for the first time.

I got a little creative and whipped up this simple wallpaper based on a macro-zoom of the (surprisingly dusty) F4 graciously given to me by my father. In a neat technical loop the camera I used to take the picture is his much-newer Nikon D40x.

It’s always a bit tricky making wallpapers of very detailed photos, since they have a tendency to becoming very “busy” and distracting. A good wallpaper should in my opinion be pretty but not too heavy on the details. This one seems to work.

On a sidenote, I’m becoming really fascinated by the sheer sturdiness of the F4. It’s an almost 20-year old camera, yet it works as well as the day it was new. Apart from some minor scarring it’s difficult to tell that this camera has seen a lot of action, being dragged through all kinds of weather from heat to cold. Also, it’s lightning-fast when snapping off a shot - provided that it’s all setup beforehand, since the interface requires virtually both hands to operate.

You can download the wallpaper from my gallery. Enjoy.

Not too long ago me and Ann-Sofie went up north to experience the Winter Market in Jokkmokk. We stayed at my parents place (who live about 10 km outside of Jokkmokk) and had a fairly good time. Of course, we weren’t the only guests there and I had a brief chat with an old friend of my father. I mentioned that I wrote a blog, and he seemed somewhat confused and essentially asked me why I did that. I answered something flippant to the effect of “I like to push my opinions on strangers” but in the days since I answered that question I’ve come to realize there’s a better answer to the same question.

The answer is simple and somewhat brutal:

I suck at verbal communication.

I never feel that I manage to convey my opinion or emotion correctly when talking. Admittedly, I find it difficult to do even when writing, but writing is a more honest way of communication for me. I have an easier time to line up my thoughts and it’s easier for me to communicate my opinion and thoughts about whatever subject might be at hand.

When talking, I hide this behind a self-assured attitude of forging ahead. Essentially I turn into George W. Bush and accidentally talk myself into situations that I don’t like, simply because I feel a need to hide this insecurity behind lots and lots of words.

Writing is more natural for me, and thus my blog has become my mouthpiece of choice for communicating things that I find difficult to talk about; it can be too emotional, or simply too complicated for me to sum up in spoken words. Written communication is easier for me, especially when it comes to painful subjects. I find it very difficult to talk about my emotions because usually I start crying. I cry when writing as well, but my ability to write isn’t impeded in the same way as my ability to talk.

A typical example of this is pretty much anytime I talk on the telephone. I really don’t like telephone-conversations except for a few exceptions. Occasionally I manage to loosen up enough to have a conversation, but in most cases I become very stiff and nervous. Earlier today I called a certain someone to wish a happy valentines day, to tell her I love her, and of course I clammed up and lost any kind of flow in the conversation. After a while I got so locked that I ended the conversation with the excuse that I needed to eat! How dumb is that? Well, on a scale from 1-10 I’d say it’s a solid 8.

Unfortunately that’s par for the course when it comes to telephone-conversations with me. There are exceptions to this rule, I’ve managed to have hours-long conversations about everything and nothing, but in most cases I clam up and become inwardly panicked about not knowing what to say. When I talk to my parents on the phone I mumble and sound very absent, and only when making an effort can I sound even slightly interested in anything they say - even though I listen carefully to everything they say and wish that I could somehow be more that just some mumbling fool pretending to be their eldest son.

I grew up rather shy. I preferred the company of books (and later computers) rather than people, and even though I over time learned to relax a little and actually talk to strangers I still need periods of isolation. One of my friends a few years back complained that whenever he talked to a pretty girl he would lock up and start saying weird things that scared them off, and how he was somewhat jealous of my ability to talk to pretty much anyone. This ability is basically a fraud to help make it easier for myself - I learned in my teens how to fake it, and this made it easier for me to lighten up and talk to people, rather than becoming really self-conscious like I used to. In fact, for many years I was great at approaching strangers and striking up a conversation.

Now, I’m losing this ability, and I prefer to communicate through writing instead. That’s why I blog. Not because I have some delusions of grandeur about becoming some rich asshole, or pushing my opinions on people, or whatever other things about blogging might exist.

No, I do it because this is the best way for me to communicate who I am with both friends, family and complete strangers.

Seraphim Falls

Western/Drama starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson

—

At the end of the Civil War, a colonel hunts down a man with whom he has a grudge…

—

I borrowed that plot outline from IMDB. It pretty much sums up this movie, even if it’s not completely accurate. This movie starts out with a very slow pace, and nothing changes through it. I suppose that there’s some deeper meaning to it, but mostly this was just a drawn out, tiresome and somewhat boring affair with some pretty scenery-shots.

Most of the plot focuses on revenge, a common theme in westerns. Unfortunately the slow pace of the movie combined with the boring and in my opinion somewhat generic stock-western characters kills off any intrigue. My guess is that the writer/director wanted to create a mystery and slowly unfold the reason for the manhunt through flashbacks over the course of the movie, but this just makes it very boring in the beginning and when the conflict finally is revealed you’ve pretty much figured it out already. There’s no real suspense anywhere.

Minor characters show up out of nowhere and make absolutely no impact on anyone or anything. In fact, most of the supporting characters are more interesting than the main two characters, and when they disappear without a trace it just makes the whole thing more tedious.

But, there are some beautiful shots of scenery, and the music is probably a good cure for insomnia. Other than those two high points there really isn’t much to recommend this movie for. Bland and uninteresting characters, slow pace, borderline cliché-story doesn’t really work for a period-piece such as this. I really wonder what Brosnan and Neeson saw in this project.

Go grab Unforgiven and pop it in the DVD-player instead. Much better movie dealing with similar motifs.

For the umpteenth time I’m trying to make some money off of my blog again. Everything I’ve tried before has been less than spectacular, the only thing that really brought in any money at all was Adsense and that brought me US$12 - which Google refuses to pay me, since it’s below their level for payout.

This time I’m going with Text-Link-Ads. I’ve been recommended them before, but back then I blogged in Swedish and only reached a limited audience. No ads were sold. But I’ll try it again, and this time maybe someone can please buy adspace? If you have a product that needs reviewing I can do that as well.

UPDATE: Anyone interested in purchasing a link can do so here. Perhaps some statistics is of interest?

Unique visitors per month: ~55000
Unique visitors per day: ~1700
Pageloads per month: ~58000
Pageloads per day: ~5000

Another neat thing I brought back from my parents place was this 2-CD holder containing…. *drumroll*

Red Hat Linux 3.0.3!!

I was digging through the closet containing all my youthful foils and tribulations, and among the booty was this thing.

Pretty neat. I greatly over-estimated how easily that closet would be cleaned out, and after accepting failure I could only take a small smattering of things with me. This was one of those few items.

(Sorry mom and dad! I’m coming back up to do the job proper during spring. I thought there would be exclusively crap there, but I was wrong.)

Red Hat 3.0.3 from March 1996 (running kernel 1.2.something!) was the first real exposure to Linux for me. A few years previously me and my friends toyed around with Slackware, but THIS was the real thing. This was a lot easier to install, and a lot easier to get going. A minor recompilation of the kernel and everything worked! Really easy to install, all you needed to do was rawrite three floppies and follow some easy installation prompts. Even X worked without too much fiddling!

I’m going to try to get this thing running in VirtualBox just to get nostalgic, but for some reason the virtual harddrive is mounted read-only during installation. Weird. I’m going to have to investigate this.