Sameer Barkawi, friend and film-student (oh, and actor), has written his thoughts on the movie after seeing it opening night. He compares the movie to 1994′s Forrest Gump, in a rather bad way. I loved Forrest Gump, btw. Oddly, he didn’t enjoy Brad Pitt’s performance even though he’s been nominated for a few awards because of it.

I would still like to see the film, but I trust Sameer’s judgement – and so I may wait until the DVD is released and I get to see it for free.

Source: Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

If you have a moment, go give it a read.

Source: Hey Mr. Genius DJ!

“Would I recommend this film? I think so. It’s not a strong recommendation, though. Consider it an appetizer for the wonderful bounty that rests in months to come this summer.”

I think my recommendation to see Iron Man would be a little stronger than Sameer’s, only because there isn’t enough to complain about Iron Man to recommend not seeing it.  In other words, I’d leave it up to you whether or not you wanted to see Iron Man.  It isn’t a must-see, in my opinion, but if you see it you probably won’t be disappointed.

“Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is excellent. I laughed out loud way more than I thought I would. I think if you put Downey in any movie as a quick-witted, pompous billionaire, you’d be entertained to some degree.”

Robert Downey, Jr. is great in Iron Man.  In fact, I don’t recall seeing a performance by RD, Jr. that I haven’t liked.  There are moments when the smell of cheese was a bit thick in the air, but – this is a Marvel Comic movie.

To sum up my thoughts on Iron Man: After watching it I didn’t immediately want to rush out and buy the DVD.  I will probably watch it again, simply to be sure I didn’t miss any of the dazzling special effects, but I’m in no rush.  I am, however, looking forward to the next installment (which I am sure there will be one) because we won’t have to worry about the Iron Man setup.

Source: Movie Review: Iron Man.

From the “An oldie but a goodie” department.

In March of 2005 I saved myself $30 by not buying an iPod dock and building my own out of the box that the iPod came in. I remember this getting on tons of sites and spreading pretty quickly.

“I thought it was a fun project, and it didn’t take me that long to complete.”

Looking back, I should do more of these types of things. I have always enjoyed fiddling with art, paper products, tools, and anything else to build my own fun things. Perhaps I should get back into doing something like this once per month and feature it here on my site.

Source: iPod box dock on The uber geeks.

For those of you that do not know, I used to run a small blog with a few friends where we tried our hat at writing about geeky topics. We called it TheUberGeeks.net, or TUG.n, and we’ve recently begun working on its resurrection. We’ve got some big plans (as big as they can get giving it our night and weekend attention for the next few months) and I hope that anyone that used to subscribe will find their way back to TUG.n.

We’ve got two new articles up there and we’ll have at least a few more before this week is out. The two most recent articles were written by me:

• An iPhone FAQ – covering the top questions I receive from people that see me with an iPhone.
• Porting Mac applications to Windows – An interview with Cris Pearson of plasq – where I conduct a short interview with the CEO of a small software development company about the challenges of porting software with a small team.

I’m looking forward to seeing Chris’ Song of the Week return in style as well as Josue’s coverage of several TV series. In the next month or so we’ll have several pretty neat announcements there, so keep your ear to the ground. Actually, just subscribe to the TUG.n feed, and that will keep you up-to-date.

We’re back baby!

First, I grabbed a modified version of Cutline and made my own little tweaks (which I’m not quite finished with yet). Obviously I changed the way the headers work and brought back my featured headings in order to highlight certain posts randomly. I’ll be adding many more banners over time, since there are ton of posts that should be highlighted. I’ll be doing a little more of this by creating a “random note” area in my right-most sidebar soon.

I also edited the way that the sidebars work. I wanted a 3-column layout to allow me to pull in my flickr photos, some posts from Viddler, ChanceCube, and The uber geeks, as well as a place that I will soon be putting various other collections. However, I wanted to have only 2-columns on my single entry pages because I like having the width for things like photos. Also, some of the pages (like the new diet page), have 3-columns, while some only have 2-columns.

On the frontpage you will notice the latest posts from the other sites that I write on (mentioned above). This section is powered by BDP RSS Aggregator. Obviously I could have built this type of functionality myself but after seeing how well thought out this WordPress plugin was – it made the decision to use it very easy. BDP RSS Aggregator does far more than what I am using it for, and if you are looking to syndicate some feeds on your WordPress powered site, I highly recommend you looking into it.

My most recent Flickr photos, on the frontpage, is powered by FlickrRSS. Since BDP RSS Aggregator has so many options, I could have technically used it and ended up with the same result, but I chose to use something that was specifically built for grabbing my photos from Flickr. Obviously Flickr’s API could have been used for such a task, but all I really wanted was a cached list of my 4 most-recent photos, and using the API would seem like a little overkill. FlickrRSS does an excellent job, is easy to configure, and has just the right number of options. Another plugin that I highly recommend.

For my recent comments I’m using a highly modified version of the recent comments plugin. I’ve added support for Gravatars and a few other options that it didn’t have out of the box. Once I clean up the code I hacked to get it done I may submit the changes, but since it is reliant on someone using the Gravatar WordPress Plugin (site currently under repair as of today) too, I may not. If you want this, just give me a shout.

For my archives I’m using Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin. I like my archives simple, and this plugin allows me to have just that. I see now that its been updated recently, so I may have to get me a fresh copy.

For my keyword tagging I can’t do without the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin – which in my mind is the best keyword tagging plugin for WordPress. It allows me to use MarsEdit to write my posts and put my keywords inline – which has increased the accuracy and ease of searching quite a bit too. There are many benefits to using this plugin.

I’m using Shaun Inman’s Widon’t plugin to help clean up the straggling words on my post titles. This layout doesn’t succumb to these problems as much as the last one did, but this plugin is handy nonetheless. Plugins that work completely behind the scenes and yet make such big differences in your site should really be applauded.

My feed is being delivered through Feedburner via the Feedburner WordPress plugin by my friend Steve Smith. It is all transparent to you on your end, but to me it adds a nice little layer that allows me to pull some nice stats on how many people and who are subscribed to my site’s feed. If you are using Feedburner and WordPress, this plugin is a must have.

Obviously I’m using ChanceCube‘s Slugger plugin to help me never to see WordPress’ administrative area as well as HappyPals to take advantage of my XFN relationships in my links. I also have Mike Stickel‘s Simple Countdown plugin installed and activated, but you’ll have to wait till the weekend to see why. These three plugins have become indispensable for me in how I publish, Slugger the greatest of these. I could never stand using WordPress’ admin (or any administrative area that I’ve seen) to write my blog posts. I’m happy I don’t have to anymore.

I think I covered pretty much everything. Poke around, if you see anything outta whack just let me know. Other slight tweaks will have to wait till the weekend as I have a fairly busy week this week.

Oh! For those of you on the diet that have recently been contacted by me (which most of you have, and if you have not then it probably means you’ve been fairly active in the dieting area over the last few months) – I’ll be updating everyone today or tomorrow but suffice to say that Tuesday begins another 20-week (minimum) run of updates. More soon.

[tags]cdevroe.com, redesign, shaun inman, wordpress, plugins, chancecube, mike stickel, slugger, happypals, simple countdown, ultimate tag warrior, justin blanton, smart archives, flickrrss, gravatar, recent comments, bdp rss aggregator, viddler, theubergeeks, cutline, theme, steve smith, feedburner, flickr, api[/tags]
[slug]cdevroe-v0207[/slug]

My other issue is of where some of my posts belong. As most of you know I write for TUG.n and have since starting it with Chris “back in the day”. I love writing geeky stuff but as I start to get better at writing ( I am improving a little, aren’t I ), I find myself wanting to post much more thought-out posts rather than the normal quickly written posts you’ve seen on TUG.n over the last several years.

That being said, who has the time? Though I think there is a balance, and blogging should not be turned into a form of journalism where every single detail is gone over with a fine-tooth comb (at least not for me personally), I am finding it difficult to strike a balance that I am happy with. So, the TUG.n airwaves go silent.

Perhaps this same issue plagues Mike, and Josue too. Not only are we finding it hard to produce good content on a regular basis (that we’re happy with), but I think we’re also trying to find out where each post belongs. Personal blog, TUG.n, company blog, etc.

It is something that will probably continue to challenge me for quite sometime and I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to fully solve the issue. But I have some ideas up my sleeve that will hopefully be able to pull some of this stuff together and that will help that decision become less important (in theory).

Whoever said blogging was easy never really blogged much or only has one blog.

[tags]blogs, itunes, theubergeeks, madeincr, josue salazar, mike stickel, screenflicker, chris fehnel, writing, personal[/tags]
[slug]itunes-belonging[/slug]

[tags]josue salazar, colin devroe, chris fehnel, mike stickel, tug, theubergeeks, interview[/tags]
[slug]tug-interview[/slug]

Lesson learned.

Update: The site is back up, thanks to John K. and helping me get some caching setup.

[tags]tug, digg, theubergeeks[/tags]

Mike and I have been chatting online since he started leaving comments on The uber geeks back in the summer of 2005. Since then we’ve chatted and eventually worked on a few projects together.

A photo of us taking a photo of us

On Monday Mike arrived in his Honda Accord, after driving almost 4 straight days, from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. So he’s now officially a friend, coworker, and neighbor. Welcome Mike.

[tags]mike stickel, theubergeeks, screenflicker, honda, mike rundle, chris fehnel, photos[/tags]