Trying out the blogger app on my new nexus 7

Perhaps this will spur me on to blog more often we'll see...

Seriously, just don't look down the Hole

I took Tom to see a new 'teen horror' film today (well, he is nearly 12) called 'The Hole 3D'. As you can probably guess, it was free, and offered from my favourite internet site seefilmfirst - who have renamed themselves showfilmfirst.

I guess I should have realised what it was going to be like from the phrase 'teen horror'. I suspect anyone of my vintage (i.e. old) will be thinking of 'The Goonies' and there is a lot about this film that is Goonie-ish, but perhaps my old age leaves me thinking that surely no child would be stupid enough to investigate the scary thing they found.

Needless to say, I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have, although the 3D did add something to it. Tom on the other hand enjoyed being scared for the first time.

The Karate Kid

I've just returned from watching a preview of the new karate kid film. I was a big fan of the original films, and I didn't know what to expect from this - it's getting lots of hype because of the appearance of Will Smith's son Jaden Smith... hype is not always a good thing!

This film really does live up to the hype though, and Jaden Smith is brilliant. Also on top form is Jackie Chan, as young Jaden's reluctant trainer... not called Mr Miagi thankfully.

I'd say it is a remake of the original Karate Kid, but, not just a remake. The idea is the same, but the situation is different and... it's not Karate but Kung-Fu!

I kid you not, this is a great film, well worth seeing.

How do you train a dragon?

No - it's got nothing to do with drugs... I'm talking about the new movie 'How to train your Dragon' that I have just been to see, once again as a result of responding to a request from www.seefilmfirst.com.

I'm nearly 40 (just 2 weeks to go!), so I'll be honest, I got tickets to see this mainly for my own kids, thinking they will absolutely love it. I got home and presented them with my spoils (the hunter gatherer instinct is alive and well in me) only to be told that it clashed with a 'boot fair' of all things, and that they'd rather go to that.

Undaunted, I went on my own to see the film, sheepishly explaining that my family had 'bailed on me'. The nice lady at the Southampton Odeon responded with "Well that's their loss - it's great!" and handed me a pair of glasses. I started to point out to her that, while it was very generous of her to offer me eyewear, I already had my own, what with being horribly long-sighted, then I realised that these were RealD-3D glasses... Cool, my first 3D film.

And what do you know... the nice lady was right, this fim is stunning, and the 3D really adds a lot to the action, swooping flight sequences, incredible explosions, glorious landscapes - 'How to train your Dragon' has the lot. It's even got humour and a love story mixed in for good measure.

Take my advice, point your dragon in the direction of the nearest Cinema, and press 'GO'.

Kick Ass

I've just got back from a preview screening of the new action movie 'Kick Ass', organised by those nice folks at www.seefilmfirst.com & www.tellten.co.uk.

Surely, any film with 'Ass' in the title (as in backside, not donkey) was going to be good. It's got a scuba gear wearing hero, an 11 year old crime fighting girl in a purple wig, and Nicholas Cage as... well, as batman! what more could you want?

Oh? You want guns, explosions, blood, fire and swearing? OK - you can have all of those too.

So... Does it kick ass? F*ck yeah

500 days of Basterds

Well - that was fun! (no, it really was fun!) I had a ticket for a preview of a movie called 500 days of Summer; a rom-com, which, mainly because it features Zooey Deschanel, I was really looking forward to seeing.

Now, it's not uncommon for me to be rushing to get to these seefilmfirst showings, because they're always at 6:30 PM and my time-keeping is abysmal, but for once I was there in plenty of time, and what happens? It gets cancelled!

All was not lost however - in recompense, the Odeon gave everyone a free ticket for anything else, which, considering it was going to be free in the first place, was pretty amazing of them.

A couple of weeks ago I missed out on the chance to see a preview of Inglourious Basterds, the new Quentin Tarantino movie, and, what do you know - it was one of the options... SCORE!

I'm just back from seeing it and, let me tell you, if you're a fan of QT's previous work, you'll love this, it's brutal, it's comic and for the most part, the bad guys get what they deserve. If you have two and a half hours to kill - and I do mean kill - I heartily recommend it!

As for Miss Deschanel, maybe she'll reschedule, maybe she'll get lucky and I'll go and see her... we'll see (it doesn't do to come across too needy, does it?)

RubyWMQ

I've been playing with ruby (and rails) for about a day now, and I'm starting to really like it. It's even beginning to collide with work, found a really useful interface into MQ - which is the product I work on, RubyWMQ. It's incredibly easy to use - the following, for example, connects to a queue manager and puts a 'Hello world' message:

require 'rubygems'
require 'wmq/wmq'

WMQ::QueueManager.connect(:q_mgr_name=>'RUBYQM') do |qmgr|
qmgr.put(:q_name=>'QL', :data => 'Hello World')
result = 'CC ' + qmgr.comp_code.to_s + ' RC ' + qmgr.reason_code.to_s
puts result
end

It even prints out the compcode and reason aswell!