Liquidninja

Eight Unexpected Best (Rental) Movies

For curiosity’s sake I recently reviewed my full history on Netflix.

I’ve always been a big fan of Netflix and have been a member for a good while, placing my first rental, The Sting, on 3/28/2003. I haven’t watched a ton of movies or series (271 total discs in 6 years) but I am proud to admit that Netflix provides me and my wife with, by far, the bulk of our sit-and-watch-and-zone-out-as-necessary entertainment (the only other regular sources being The Office on Hulu, Seahawks games on TV and the rare theater movie).

As I scanned my history only 8 movies (not including Anime or mini/TV series) jumped out as tried and true 5 star-ers, the “loved it” rating. (There were a few that I had once rated as fives but I decided to bump them down to fours — I guess it’s like periodically rebalancing your portfolio.)

Please note that this list isn’t my complete favorite movie list, just some favorites that I discovered thanks to my Netflix subscription.

appaloosa

Appaloosa

An excellent buddy movie — a great cast with a cool plot. Ed Harris directs himself and Viggo (at his best) as two bad-ass guns for hire. All the characters are interesting and complex, even the female lead played by Renee Zellweger. My wife generally does not enjoy violent films but this one she liked; the violence is not for violence’s sake. I absolutely loved the ending.

michaelclayton

Michael Clayton

This is a gripping story with great acting by Cloony — he still plays himself but he does it very well. I really enjoyed the direction by Tony Gilroy and the supporting cast is amazing. I watched this twice when I got it.

elizabeth

Elizabeth

I’ve always been a big fan of dramatized historical movies, especially ones about the british monarchy. This one is about the ultimate transformation of a queen and I found it fascinating. Geoffrey Rush plays an amazing Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s dubious advisor.

thegoodshepherd

The Good Shepherd

This film surprised me as I am really not a Matt Damon or Angelina Jolie fan. But do love a great spy story and this one has it all, telling the story of the birth of the CIA.

brick

Brick

Director Rian Johnson’s debut blew me away. It’s a fast paced, super stylized sleuth picture. I’m generally not a mystery fan but the atypical and dark high-school setting drew me in quickly. Another twice-watcher for me.

layercake

Layer Cake

Daniel Craig, pre-007, stars in this very cool british gangster movie. I enjoyed this more than Lock-Stock and Snatch.

oldboy

Oldboy

My favorite Korean flick, the third, and by far the best, in a pseudo-trilogy by director Chan-wook Park. Start with Oldboy, and don’t bother with the other two unless you’re truly interested afterward. This one does happen to be ultra-violent at times so take heed. This film has Matrix-like elements.

laconfidential

L.A. Confidential

Okay, this one’s kinda cheating since I had seen it before I netflixed it. But I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching it again. Amazing work by an amazing cast.

Liquidninja Redux (or How I Designed my own WordPress Theme)

The homepage to liquidninja.com has barely changed since I put it up about 8 years ago (I’m not so good at remembering dates so I looked it up via the handy internet archive). Well the site now sports a brand new look and this post will go over a few of the details on how I did it.

This first screencap is how my homepage looked for so many years (in internet time it’s like 50!). I’ve always been quite fond of this minimal (albeit pretty useless) page.

liquidninja-pre-blog — Fig 1. My ancient homepage

After installing WordPress onto the homepage earlier this month it looked like screenshot number two. Notice that I tinkered to get my latest tweet onto it via a handy wordpress plugin. This was an idea I borrowed from Howard Lindzon, one of the funniest, and thus the only stock market writer I consistently read.

(Update: The twitter plugin for wordpress was having problems due to API limits and page caching so I changed the theme to use twitter’s standard javascript option.)

Fig 2. wordpress default on liquidninja.com

Although I think the default theme in WordPress, called Kubrick, is nice it’s definitely not my personal style. So I spent some of my spare time over the past couple weeks designing my own theme which is now live on the site (screencap 3).

Ahh… much better. I call this theme FrostNinja.

So how did I put this theme together? Since I didn’t want to spend too much time on this project I didn’t bother digging into the wordpress codex. Instead I started by taking Kubrick and copying the theme directory (called default) to use as a template for my new theme. Then I went through all the files to get a sense of their purpose (wordpress uses PHP so some basic programmer’s understanding of it helped with this part). Then I tweaked or culled as necessary.

At work, I get to use fancy Adobe products to generate image assets but since this is a personal project I decided to go the free route. All graphics for the theme were created using two free, open source software packages. This decision was made to both save cash and to learn how capable the free alternatives are these days.

The twitter bubble and the rounded rectangles for the header and footer were all drawn using InkScape. (Think Illustrator but free.) InkScape is a vector graphics program and I was very impressed with its capabilities and user interface. It has nice spline editing, a powerful (although not super easy to use) gradient editor and overall very nice set of tools. I look forward to playing with this app again.

The site logo, background (which is my remix of factoryjoe’s filigree) and other images were done with the GIMP. (The poor/smart man’s Photoshop). It’s been a while since I fired up the GIMP and it seems to have come quite a way. I toyed with it on both OS X and Vista and my only complaint was how it deals with multiple tool windows; I was really hoping that the OS X version would at least have a single menu bar. But the software is extremely capable so I can’t complain too much.

To test it all the right way I would probably recommend installing WordPress and mysql locally. But I wanted another shortcut so I hacked together some canned HTML versions of key pages of my site using the new theme. After completing the design, I then used FTP to get the template directory up and then ironed out a few last glitches using the preview theme feature in WP (rather than pushing live too early).

Et voila!

Bush plays WoW. Go Obama!

As a former World of Warcraft dabbler I found this amusing and thought I would squeeze it in the last few hours before a new era begins.

(Source unknown, drop a comment if you know)

A New Blog Resolution

I don’t feel too strongly about the concept of new year’s resolutions. People should be willing and able to resolve changes at any time of the year. But here I am starting a blog and it happens to be January of the year 2009.

The idea to begin writing a blog came about from a couple factors. One, I find myself often spending much of my spare time tapping the j-key, aka surfing, in Google Reader. (Thanks to Scobleizer for that video a few years ago on how to use GR effectively — that moved me off of Sage and I haven’t looked back.) So if I read lots of blogs, shouldn’t I write one too, for karmic reasons?

The other reason was that I recently moved my website, liquidninja.com, from one hosting company (your-site.com: cheap, good reliability) to another (dreamhost, so far so good). And the new one actually lets you run arbitrary web software! So I finally went and tried some free web software packages including WordPress.org which has published these words you’re reading.

I’ve basically taken a hiatus from the public web’s eye since 2002 when I stopped working on metapad, my freeware notepad replacement project. Since then I’ve been happily living in Seattle and working at Amazon.com designing and building some very cool website software. But I don’t really intend to talk much about Amazon here…

So, what do I intend to write about on this blog? New technology, software, and design. I might do some re-blogging and link to cool or funny stuff floating around the cyberspace. I also plan to write about media and entertainment like movies, books and the occasional video game. And of course blogging.

Next up? The impending re-design of this very blog.

First post

From my iphone even! A real post is coming soon.