Monthly Archives: May 2009

Taking it on the road

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I’ve been on a mini-vacation this week (3 days) which is nowhere near enough, but better than nothing. Mostly I’ve been doing maintenance on a few websites, playing with the dog a lot, a few minor domestic chores and generally doing sweet f*** all. It’s great. I could get used to it.

Today is day 2 and I decided to take it on the road. Chris and I bought a laptop about 2 months ago (on credit card, 3 months no interest, already paid off thank you very much) and it’s never left the house.

That’s not quite true. I took it to Metrotown on Good Friday to meet Chris but we didn’t go anywhere to sit that I could pull it out and use it, so it stayed in the bag. I consider that “not going out”.

Today, I finished most of my self-imposed chores at home and took the dog on a good hike. The sun was out the whole time, some puppy friends were out and he had a good time. Then I decided to head downtown. I had to drop some checks off for the orthodontist and since it was nice, I decided to relax outside the house for a while.

I considered where I could go, and settled on the close and familiar Starbucks inside Chapters downtown.  Not very exotic or interesting, but I knew my Chapters card would get me some free wi-fi and I could have a little coffee. Having never done it on this laptop before (only on my iPod), I assumed it would be easy. WRONG.

According to the Bell WiFi Hotspot site, their connection/setup isn’t compatible with FireFox, my browser of choice. So I fired up IE. It worked “better” but the connection screen kept refreshing and never gave me the “You have 2 hours” message. In fact, it even yelled at me once saying I had tried to connect too many times before the connection was ready and I should “Stop it. Now!” – yes, it actually said exactly that.

I finally opened a new tab to my home page and it worked. I guess the connection was established but the Java applet they use wasn’t compatible with this 64-bit version of Vista. 20 minutes wasted.

So here I am, sitting in the middle of Starbucks, surrounded by a lot of people (it was empty when I arrived) and writing this blog post. Fun. I’ve been tweeting, checking email and generally trying to look busy, productive and somewhat less pretentious than most people I usually see, but guess what!

Starbucks, enjoying my mystery beverage.

Starbucks, enjoying my mystery beverage.

Using your laptop while sitting in Starbucks with a giant coffee cup (full of mystery fluid, or empty) looks pretentious. No matter what.

Stop me? Not bloody likely! I love being able to do this. The freedom is pretty cool. I should activate my webcam and take a picture. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

There you go! Now I have to leave. Not only do I want to get home before Chris, but 2 women just sat down RIGHT NEXT TO ME. They pulled 2 empty chair and just sat down. No table, no nothing. It makes me uncomfortable.

Aw crap. It’s raining. Thank god for the Sears viaduct to the Skytrain. Minimal wetness.

Thanks for reading…

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released in theatres yesterday, May 1, as the first of 2009′s (supposed) summer blockbusters. Now, the movie suffered from a lot of bad press lately due to it’s “accidental” release onto the internet a month or so ago. That was supposedly an unfinished print and everyone from studio execs to Hugh “Wolvie” Jackman himself all but begged people to go see the movie regardless of what they heard.

So, being good sheep, we followed the crowds and spent $25 bucks on the movie today at ScotiaBank Center in Vancouver. We went to the first matinee screening and had no trouble buying tickets right at the start time. We got upstairs to cinema 8 and encountered a few people heading back. “Not a good sign” says I expecting a jam packed theatre with nothing but a couple of seats right at the very front, leaving us with stiff necks to remember the movie by. Not so, we good good seats, although it was a packed house.

The presentation was not so good. I’m not talking about the movie yet, just the theatre experience. Cinema 8 at this theatre was the site of the ill-fated Indiana Jones and the Crystal Stupidity Skull viewing. At that time, they were running the film in “tandem” meaning that they were sharing a single print of the film between two theatres and had it threaded through a complex system of delicately balanced levers, pulleys, gopher driven wheels and assorted other Rube Goldberg-like devices. I’ve done it once in my career and it’s a nightmare, so of course it broke. Luckily the other side of cinema 8 was Fast and Furious so no worries this time.

X-MO:W started badly. During the coming attractions, I noticed the projector bulb was out of alignment and there was a set of shadowy lines down the left side of the screen about 1/3 of the way in. I also noticed there was no surround sound. Fine, says I, it’s just the trailers. No such luck.

So we watched the first epic movie of the summer with “stereo” sound. Nice, but come on. For all the violence, sound effects, explosions and stuff they threw into this movie I wanted this to be an EXPERIENCE not just noisy. It kinda ruined the whole experience for me. I know, overly sensitive, but tell me you wouldn’t feel cheated!?

Oh yeah, the movie. Chris put it quite well on Facebook. It was mediocre. If it had been crappy we could have had more fun.

They did a fairly decent job setting the stage of Wolverine’s origin and angst, his relationship with Creed and Stryker, how he got his Adamantium bones etc, which we had seen briefly in the first X-Men movies. And they introduced a bunch of throw-away type characters, some of which I know and some I don’t.

Will.I.Am played an odd guy named JohnWraith who was a teleporter. Chris tells me that’s not the way it should be. Kevin Durand (Keamy from Lost!) played Fred something a.k.a. Blob, who’s super power was being super fat and not dying, far as I could tell. Dominic Monaghan (Charlie from Lost!) played some guy with electric powers. Taylor Kitsch (from some TV show I don’t watch) played Gambit, who I always thought was kind neat in the comics, but didn’t really care about in the movie. And finally, and most importantly, Ryan Reynolds played Wade Wilson a.k.a. Deadpool. I’d read Deadpool in a few of Chris’s comics from time to time and since I didn’t know his backstory had no clue about him, but he was a smart-mouthed sword-fighter and pretty cool.

Ryan was wasted. He got really one great scene near the beginning and then disappeared. Bah.

Oh yeah, Wolverine. Right.

He was cranky. Killed a bunch of people, attacked others, built and held grudges, loved and lost. Triumped over the bad guys, that sort of thing.

The thing I hate most about this type of movie… It’s a prequel right? So that means something comes later that we’ve already seen. Will Wolverine die? Nope, he’s in 3 more movies. Will Scott Summers die? Nope, 3 more movies. Stryker? Nope. Some of the nameless faces and mid-range super muties we met? Probably. If you live until the end of the movie, you stand a chance to get your own spin-off.

X-Men Origins: Gambit, coming May 2011. No doubt.

Stay until the end of the credits! There are 3 to 6 different endings out there depending on who you talk to. Ours ended with (select the line below to read the MAJOR SPOILER):

Weapon 11′s arm, grabbing his decapitated head, and the head saying “Shhh!”

Put the ending you saw in the comments for me, but I won’t approve it until the movie’s been out for a few weeks so I don’t spoil anything for anyone.