Sometimes I wonder how I end up with such an odd assortment of movies in my Netflix queue. Case in point: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.

Check this, a (black and white with orchestral accompaniment) silent movie, adapted from a ballet adapted from the Bram Stoker novel.

The filmaker uses all sorts of visual hoo-ha to play with the eyes: out of focus bits, tinting, odd wipes, boosted contrast, etc. At first it felt a tad gimmicky, but after a bit I found myself completely absorbed.

Give it a try. At the very least it will be unlike anything else you see this year.

A site loaded with palindromes

If you hate (as I do) mandatory user registration for sites that don’t need your information, check out BugMeNot.com

Oh, and if you’re involved with a site that enforces user registration, you must of course first register with BugMeNot. The registration form is pretty typical

Tracy says that she enjoyed Catwoman. It seems she’s pretty much alone there.

One reviewer (Gregory Weinkauf of the Dallas Observer) wrote:

“Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty.”

He’s apparently not much of a cat person.

I turn 40 on Monday. If it’s really no big deal, why have I been wandering around saying things to myself like, “This is the last time I’ll grocery shop in my thirties?”

That sound you hear is one helluva midlife crisis bearing right down on me.

For the life of me, I cannot say “Fa shizzle.” It always comes out “Fa swizzle” or “Facism” or some other forced, damn-you’re-such-a-retard variant.

Steve takes the funniest photo ever

Once in a while it would be nice to have a digital camera handy. I still have my old casio exilim, but I hate using it. Since I sold the Digital Rebel to Steve and bought all sorts of film gear, I was left without anything digital. What I wanted was something small enough to take everywhere, but not so small that it’s hard to handle. I wanted a simple point and shoot but with manual options, just in case. After much research, I settled on the Canon A80.

After about 6 hours with the camera, here’s what I like…

• Solid construction. They actually used metal to make this thing, and it’s heavy enough to feel like it won’t fall apart if I squeeze it too hard.

• Reasonable shutter lag. I can live with the lag, especially if prefocussing.

• Controls are nicely arranged. I don’t expect to accidently push the wrong button too often.

• The lens is pretty fast - f2.8 at the wide end.

• The rotatable LCD has already come in handy

What I don’t like so far…

• The LCD is way too small. This won’t always be a problem, since I usually use the optical viewfinder anyway.

• Highest ISO is 400, although I’ve heard that it’s actually more like 800.

• Lotsa noise at higher ISO settings. The Rebel blows this outta the water

• After a few test shots, it’s showing a tendency to blow out highlights easily, and there is evidence of “purple fringing” - see below.

Shot of Zim against bright sun

Fringin’

Another great one from The Onion

But the final straw, Supreme Court justices said, came last week, when none of the 500,000 random citizens polled were aware of the existence of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

“I mean, come on,” Justice William Rehnquist said. “The threat of global thermonuclear war? It’s just ridiculous. There was no way we could trust such a populace to keep running things after that.”

Then later….

Thus far, reaction to the ruling has been largely indifferent.

“The people ruled unfit to govern? Yeah, I think I might’ve heard something about that,” said Covington, KY, sales representative Neil Chester. “I think I saw it on the news or something, when I was flipping past trying to find that show about the lady sheriff.”

So far, Flickr rocks. It’s still officially in beta, and things change/improve almost daily. The site is a great combination of easy to use and geek-friendly. The developers are focused on all the right things. There seems to be a core set of ideals that touch on things like standards-compliance, ease of use, extensibility, accessibility and other goodies.

They’ve just teamed up with FeedBurner to offer feed splicing, which is a way to patch together your Flickr photos with your weblog RSS feed. See the Flickr blog entry.

I’d never heard of FeedBurner. They basically take your feed and tweak it in all sorts of configurable ways. As an example, over on your right is a FeedBurner icon which links my “burned” feed. It automatically chooses the format (RSS/Atom, etc) based on the parser and can do all kinds of wonderful things I’ve yet to discover.

They are both pre-release products that will be well worth watching.