Vanessa becomes an alterserver at St. Joseph’s Parish

Check out: [[Vanessa Becomes an Alterserver]]

##Proud Day

[[mike*and*vanessa]]

Today was a very special day in the Carney family: Vanessa became an alter server for St. Joseph’s Parish. She decided that she wanted to do this a while ago, and about a month ago started training.

Writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley brings a unique perspective to his role as the author of The Official Lord of the Rings Movie Guide, and two further volumes on the production of the saga which will follow as the remaining films are released.

I understand why people will carp and complain, it’s inevitable, but what I felt very strongly on the set in New Zealand was that the one thing that Peter and his cast and crew have captured is the real spirit of the book. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ve lost or sacrificed the central theme of the quest, and not just the quest but the significance of the quest: the cost to Frodo, the cost to everybody who’s involved in it. To have captured and held that is one hell of an achievement to my mind. They could just have gone for the adventure, for sweeping vistas of marching armies, and those are going to be there in the film, but I believe Peter Jackson has really captured the core of the story, its heart and emotions.

God I hope that’s true!!!

And here’s an interview with Elijah Wood:

http://www.wow.ie/cinema/index.cfm?fuseaction=getInterview&id=1863

Our last best hope for good television

[[b5_lurk]]
Unlike most television series, Babylon 5 is a single story, completely planned out from day one with a beginning, middle, and end. Each episode is enjoyable on its own, but is also a piece of a larger whole, a chapter in a five-year-long novel for television.

The setting of the show is affected by events in each episode — the status quo isn’t neatly restored at the end of the hour. Characters die, are reassigned, or are forever changed by
their actions and those of the people around them. Because of that, it’s impossible to come up with a single introduction to the series and characters that applies to all the episodes.

Not a bad movie, but missing the magic

Review: [[Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone]]

Also, here’s another review of the Shore score for Fellowship:

http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/lord_rings01.html

Whatever magic was lacking in **Harry Potter** can be heard here, and Shore does it in a more effective way; his themes don’t parade with attitude, and his action music is deeply woven into a choral fabric that provides all the necessary magic that the Tolkien world demands and deserves.

When you make a movie about magic, you can’t forget the magic.

##It’s all about the feel

[[harrypotterposter]]
When I sat down in the theatre to watch this movie, I had high hopes and high expectations. I’ve read all 4 Harry Potter books and have loved them all. My 10 year old daughter devoured them. We both wanted so much from the movie. We were both disappointed.

I left the theatre with an empty spot in my gut similar to when I left the theatre after watching [[Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace]]. All the right elements were there (the characters and the settings were just like the book, at least on the surface), but there was a sense of magic missing, a sense of awe, a sense of **WOW** that the books had.

##Score

What happened John? I’ve been a huge fan of your scores since you burst on the scene in 1975 with “Jaws”. You’re arguably the greatest composer of film scores in history. Were you asleep with this one? Several times during the movie, the music literally jarred me to the point where I was pulled out of the reality of the movie. I’d find myself listening to the score thinking “That doesn’t really seem to match” and realize that I was thinking it instead of watching the movie.

It’s time to lineup in Randolph!

Well, [[TheOneRing.net]] has done it. They’ve set up a place where interested people can sign up to have a party while waiting in line for advanced ticket sales for Fellowship of the Ring.

There’s already 15 people signed up at the Randolph theatre (where I’m planning on attending the opening show). Maybe I should sign up???

He covers a wide range of topics surrounding the movie.

After years of speculation, it’s finally here. It’s safe to say that director Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the most anticipated film series this side of that galaxy far, far away.

Over the long haul, will Fellowship of the Ring beat out Harry Potter at the box office?

On its opening weekend, [[Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone]] raked in a cool $90.2 million. But in some countries, tickets for “Fellowship of the Ring” are already on sale and selling faster than for Harry Potter.

I found a lot that I liked in Dave Winer’s manila project, but I didn’t have much control over the development of it.

##History

[[Frontier]] began as a scripting environment on the Macintosh platform. In fact, it preceded [[Apple]]’s own Applescript by several years.

After several years of languishing in the scripting market, and with some very frustrating interation with Apple, Dave Winer decided to stop development on Frontier and release it for free.

People started playing with it, and found that it’s object oriented database and scripting language could be used to good effect for holding and building websites (this is back around 1993 for those that are interested). So, development started up again, but the product remained free.

I started playing with [[Frontier]] back when version 4.2.3 came about (it’s now at version 7.1). It took me a while to grok it, but once I did, I fell in love. I was able to do things with my website that most of my friends could only dream of. And it had nothing to do with the look of the site. It had to do with how quickly I could add content and have things linked together in a reasonable way.

I ported the site to Frontier 5.0, and then something completely understandable but a little disappointing happened: Frontier went commercial. Or, I should say, it returned to being a commercial product.

##A Hobby

My website is basically a hobby. I update it often, modify the layout, etc. just because I have fun doing so. I couldn’t justify the cost of Frontier for something that’s not much more than a toy for me. I decided to stick with Frontier 5.0 (which is still free by the way), and hope that eventually there would be another free release of Frontier with some bugs fixed and some new features.

Enter [[Radio]].

Radio is essentially the same scripting/database/outlining environment that I was used to with one very important enhancement: It talked to the manila site engine (which runs inside a Frontier web server). And, it’s free!

So, I ported my website into Radio. I loved it.It was the same, only more.

##Manila

Also about this time, I started working as the Director of I.T. and my company, and decided to buy a copy of Frontier to explore the possibilities of Manila as a content management system for my work. It worked well, but it was a bit slow. And, unfortunately, it didn’t really take off.

But, it did get my brain working.

##MacOSX

Then, a miracle happened. Apple release [[MacOSX]], and the world changed forever. My Macintosh now runs UNIX natively! The entire open source world opened up to me. I immediately started playing with [[MySQL]] and [[PHP]] and after some aborted attempts to use some other (in my opinion) inferior to Manila content management systems, I decided to write a CMS that did all the things that I liked most about Manila, with some things that I wish it would do.