Cloverfield Outing

Friday, my office went on an outing to see "Cloverfield". We had rented out the "Lux" seating at the Randolph Cinema, which was a strange, if fun, experience. I presume tickets to the Lux section cost a lot more. Huge, very well padded seats, tons of leg room, and little pushbuttons which summon wait staff to serve drinks and food, off a pretty decent menu. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance in watching such a violent and destructive movie while in such frankly decadent surroundings.

Lots of previews. "Jumper" looks interesting. People who can teleport use their powers to do cool stuff until they are hunted down by the evil(?) conspiracy led by Samuel Jackson. I like it when superpowers lead (at least partially) to fun instead of angst. Speaking of superpowers, there was a lengthy preview of "Iron Man". Looks like they're going with a fairly straight rendition of the origin story, only updated to Iraq. When the armor makes its first appearance (at least in the preview), it was accompanied by the appropriate Black Sabbath music, which made me laugh out loud. There was a teaser trailer for the new "Star Trek", but it didn't show anything of consequence.

"Cloverfield" itself was ok. It has a lot more craftsmanship than I would have thought, though most of it is extremely subtle. Mildly recommended to those who are interested in experimental story-telling structure, or are fans of disaster stories. More details and spoilers below the cut.

( Read more... )

Cloverfield Outing

Friday, my office went on an outing to see "Cloverfield". We had rented out the "Lux" seating at the Randolph Cinema, which was a strange, if fun, experience. I presume tickets to the Lux section cost a lot more. Huge, very well padded seats, tons of leg room, and little pushbuttons which summon wait staff to serve drinks and food, off a pretty decent menu. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance in watching such a violent and destructive movie while in such frankly decadent surroundings.

Lots of previews. "Jumper" looks interesting. People who can teleport use their powers to do cool stuff until they are hunted down by the evil(?) conspiracy led by Samuel Jackson. I like it when superpowers lead (at least partially) to fun instead of angst. Speaking of superpowers, there was a lengthy preview of "Iron Man". Looks like they're going with a fairly straight rendition of the origin story, only updated to Iraq. When the armor makes its first appearance (at least in the preview), it was accompanied by the appropriate Black Sabbath music, which made me laugh out loud. There was a teaser trailer for the new "Star Trek", but it didn't show anything of consequence.

"Cloverfield" itself was ok. It has a lot more craftsmanship than I would have thought, though most of it is extremely subtle. Mildly recommended to those who are interested in experimental story-telling structure, or are fans of disaster stories. More details and spoilers below the cut.

( Read more... )

GO BACK!

Currently in hour 3 of attempting to eradicate GoBack from my computer, so that it will deign to boot again. Taking a break to post from frustration. This program was allegedly supposed to *prevent* exactly the sort of problems it is now causing. So far the process has been full of catch-22, and not letting me uninstall until I've already uninstalled and so forth. Gahhh!

This on top of spending 3 hours this morning wrestling the household wireless setup into submission. At least that effort proved successful. This is not how I planned to spend my Saturday...

Edit: fixed, finally, just short of 1 A.M. I recommend to folks out there that if they have this "utility" installed, that they make some time to remove it before it explodes. There are some fairly straightforward fixes, but neither worked for me. After a lot of googling, I found the following, which eventually solved things:
http://www.itreviews.co.uk/discuss/1154/7

Message #63
From: Josh
posted: 24.09.2006 19:28

Well, I think we all agree, symatec is absolute sh*t any way you look at it. Sh*t progs and Sh*t support. I repair pc's for a living and I always uninstall norton antivirus and install avast. Finds malware everytime that norton didn't and they have a free version. I now wish extreme bitch slaps to the people that designed goback. LoL ;)
Anyway, wanted to share my fix for goback nightmares. Sometimes the boot cd provided by symantec works to take goback out of mbr, BUT if goback.bin is corrupted that won't work. Same with the gb_prog.exe /u fix or the ctrl. alt. g fix. Then when your really about to freak because you think of all the data your gonna loose and all the time to reinstall windows and all the apps. and get everything configured just the way you like it. AAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Try to slave the drive into another pc but you can't access the drive because windows does not recognize the partition. Install goback on the pc hoping it will then recognice the drive, but oh, you "fixed the mbr and goback is not gonna have that. So your left with a drive that is completely inaccessable by any recovery prog.
WELL HERE IS THE FINAL FIX!!!! Google ptedit.exe and download. (free) create bootable floppy and copy ptedit onto disk. Boot to floppy and run ptedit. CHANGE DISK IDENTIFIER TO 07 . Goback changes disk identifier to 44 (raw). 07 (ntfs) will allow the disk to become accessable when slaved if you can't boot it. My pc booted right up after hours of trying everything else.
Hope this helps someone.
Remember boys and girls, symantec is over priced crap.
Rollback rx seems to be a great replacement for goback.

GO BACK!

Currently in hour 3 of attempting to eradicate GoBack from my computer, so that it will deign to boot again. Taking a break to post from frustration. This program was allegedly supposed to *prevent* exactly the sort of problems it is now causing. So far the process has been full of catch-22, and not letting me uninstall until I've already uninstalled and so forth. Gahhh!

This on top of spending 3 hours this morning wrestling the household wireless setup into submission. At least that effort proved successful. This is not how I planned to spend my Saturday...

Edit: fixed, finally, just short of 1 A.M. I recommend to folks out there that if they have this "utility" installed, that they make some time to remove it before it explodes. There are some fairly straightforward fixes, but neither worked for me. After a lot of googling, I found the following, which eventually solved things:
http://www.itreviews.co.uk/discuss/1154/7

Message #63
From: Josh
posted: 24.09.2006 19:28

Well, I think we all agree, symatec is absolute sh*t any way you look at it. Sh*t progs and Sh*t support. I repair pc's for a living and I always uninstall norton antivirus and install avast. Finds malware everytime that norton didn't and they have a free version. I now wish extreme bitch slaps to the people that designed goback. LoL ;)
Anyway, wanted to share my fix for goback nightmares. Sometimes the boot cd provided by symantec works to take goback out of mbr, BUT if goback.bin is corrupted that won't work. Same with the gb_prog.exe /u fix or the ctrl. alt. g fix. Then when your really about to freak because you think of all the data your gonna loose and all the time to reinstall windows and all the apps. and get everything configured just the way you like it. AAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Try to slave the drive into another pc but you can't access the drive because windows does not recognize the partition. Install goback on the pc hoping it will then recognice the drive, but oh, you "fixed the mbr and goback is not gonna have that. So your left with a drive that is completely inaccessable by any recovery prog.
WELL HERE IS THE FINAL FIX!!!! Google ptedit.exe and download. (free) create bootable floppy and copy ptedit onto disk. Boot to floppy and run ptedit. CHANGE DISK IDENTIFIER TO 07 . Goback changes disk identifier to 44 (raw). 07 (ntfs) will allow the disk to become accessable when slaved if you can't boot it. My pc booted right up after hours of trying everything else.
Hope this helps someone.
Remember boys and girls, symantec is over priced crap.
Rollback rx seems to be a great replacement for goback.