I sure wasn’t one of the first to see Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith but I did see it the movie this afternoon, and I must say it lives up to all the hype and then some. It sure helps if you’re a Star Wars fan (like I am) and perhaps you could go as far as to say it’s a prerequisite. If you don’t know much of the backstory you will miss out on most of the plot-details in Sith. As far as story goes, as a stand-alone movie it’s not worth much. The big treat here is of course that it takes Episode 1 and 2 and patches in with the original Episode 4, and the big feature is the transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. In this respect Sith delivers and more. For real Star Wars fanatics there’s probably things they can complain about but to me it explains all that needs to be explained and bridges the gap between 1/2 and 4/5/6 in a very satisfactory way. There are some minor things that don’t make much sense perhaps. Padme (Natalie Portman) is pregnant and expecting Luke and Leia but it’s not until she’s about to give birth that she discovers that she’s having twins. All throughout the movie she talks about “the baby” in singular. If they have such advanced weapons and technology why can’t they tell that a woman is having twins? Perhaps she hasn’t been to a doctor but she’s clearly showing that she’s pregnant and she is a Queen turned Senator so clearly she would be closely monitored medically, I would think. There’s some little things like that, that might be annoying to some.
The star of the show is of course the appearance and style of the movie which is in no uncertain terms stunning. A better looking scifi movie is hard to find and Lucas and his team have become masters at blending real-life shots with digitally created environments. For most viewers of this movie it’s hard to impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is computer-generated. Of course you know that a lot of things are computer-generated but that’s because you know it’s impossible to do in real-life rather than them looking “fake.”
So what is not so good about Sith? Star Wars has never been known for great acting and Sith is not an exception. Most actors perform adequately but I’m not sure why Hayden Christensen was hired for this role in the first place. He’s okay but certainly doesn’t shine in terms of acting-performance. Portman is somewhat better but the supposedly intimate scenes between her and Christensen never really become interesting and intense. That might be Lucas’ fault too however. He’s never been very comfortable directing intimate scenes, I guess, and it still shows. He’s much better at action scenes, especially those of a grand scale.
So all-in-all this is a great movie. I would certainly recommend you having seen all other Star Wars movies before getting into Sith - you will get so much more out of the experience. As gratifying as it is to come to the conclusion of the six episodes, it is as sad that it is now over. My guess, however, is that Lucas is not done yet. He’s said that he will redo all episodes in 3D in a few years’ time but I think there will be more to the Star Wars saga, perhaps Episodes 7-9, who knows?
You know that if you buy a computer from Apple, for example, you shouldn’t buy the extra RAM from the same place because the markup is just so much higher than what you can find elsewhere, right? Well I’ve been getting som SD flash cards for my iPaq (see this earlier posting). If you buy the iPaq from HP’s site they will try to sell you SD cards for the following prices:
- 256Mb for $54.99
- 512Mb for $84.99
Dell (and I’m sure this is not the cheapest you can find) sell Kingston’s 512Mb SD card for $42.39 (minus $13 MIR) and the 256Mb for $21.59 (plus a $5 MIR).
I don’t often write about music here, at least not about my own taste in music, but now I have to. Do you know that obnoxious just-named-chief-resident-Morris on NBC’s ER? Well, he is quite a musical performer apart from being an actor. His name is Scott Grimes and he has released an album entitles “Livin’ on the run”. He’s probably best known for most of us from “Party of five” and “Band of brothers.”
It was the catchy “Sunset Boulevard” that caught my ear while listening to a local radio station (Cool 104.9). I had no idea who it was and could never catch the DJ saying what the tune was called or who the artist was. All I knew was “Sunset Boulevard”. Anyway, I emailed the station and one of the DJs responded quickly (thanks Craig Russ!) and told me who it was.
This is a very good all-around album. It has the range of songs from up-tempo to ballads. My favorite is still “Sunset Boulevard” but I’ve also fallen for “You come around”. There’s also the wonderfully low-key “I saw you”. Scott won’t win any awards for being a ground-breaker in terms of music. He doesn’t necessarily do anything new with his music but he does what he does very, very well. In some ways he’s a simple singer-songwriter but don’t mistake him for just another actor turned musician. It seems to me Scott has a bright future in either profession, although I must confess that I would prefer it if he focused on music 
A List Apart has a pretty good guide to designing web pages for small devices like PDAs.
If you’re a WordPress user, Alex King provides a plugin that automatically formats your site to suit small screens. I put it to work on my site and you can see the mobile version if you like.
I settled on an iPaq RX3715 for a PDA. Well, “settle” is probably the wrong word to use since I tried the 3715 out at a local store and I really, really liked it (but I ordered it online to get a better price). One big point in HP’s favor compared to Dell, for example, is that HP stuff is sold almost everywhere. I can walk in to the local Office Depot and there’s a ton of HP items. The RX3715 is small, light, has a great screen, and if I get some 6-8 hours of batterylife out of it (like many tests and opinions say online), that’d be really great. Now I need a good case for it (I really like Krusell’s Multidapt cases), probably an extra battery (there’s a 3200mAh battery available that should give me over 12 hours of running time), a car charger, and some memory cards (got two 512Mb cards to start with). Then there’s software… Years ago I was a Pocket PC user, well actually, it was before it was Pocket PC, when it was still Windows CE. The most recent one was a Philips Nino 312. It was a real multimedia powerhouse for its day but badly underpowered. Anyway, I was up to speed on Pocket PC software back then, but I am totally out of sync now.
Compelling reading for all PDA-fans.
ZDNet:
1. Users who insist on giving you their diagnosis of a problem rather than a neutral description of the symptoms.
2. Users who hover around asking questions while you’re troubleshooting — and worse, making suggestions.
3. Users who deny having done anything that may have caused the problem.
4. Being treated like a user by tech support from another company.
5. Purchasing departments that change purchase requests.
6. Internal junk mail.
7. Users who think part of my job is to spend my lunch break telling them how to fix their home computers.
8. Users who complain about not being able to use a new application, when they “didn’t have time” to attend training or read the documentation you painstakingly prepared.
9. Being summoned to a user’s office to resolve an urgent computer problem, only to be kept waiting.
10. The positioning of the IT department in the organisation.
I can certainly relate to many of these…
Since I’ve been contemplating getting a Pocket PC PDA I’ve been looking at ways to watch movies with one during long flights for example. Today I found DVD to Pocket PC and tried it on a DVD movie. The movie is around 90 minutes long and with the setting in the software to fit the quality so that the movie fits on a 256Mb memory card it is actually pretty okay. I say it’s “okay” with the intended use in mind - watching the movie on the PDA using earphones.
Today I looked at the HP iPaq RX3715 PDA and I must say I’m pretty impressed. It looks cool, has most everything I want (like wifi and Bluetooth) and according to some tests online it runs an amazing seven hours or so on one charge. It also has a 1.2 megapixel camera built-in which won’t get you any real high-quality shots but it should be okay for a little everyday shooting for a moblog or similar. A slight problem is that the pricetag of around $450 seems a bit high.
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