December 11th 2007
Four and a half stars!
Astronaut Farmer was one of the best movies I have seen this year. I rented this movie without knowing much about it, based entirely on Billy Bob Thornton as the lead character. Thornton is always entertaining, and his characters entirely vivid.
This was somewhat of a departure from the typical Billy Bob Thornton lead character, typified by such roles as the "Bad Santa" and his rendition of Morris Buttermaker in "The Bad News Bears". Thornton plays something approaching a serious character in Astronaut Farmer, even though most of the town thinks he is insane.
The movie was truly inspiring. Charles Farmer is a .. farmer. Forced to leave NASA to care for his family after his father’s untimely death, he never gave up his dream of exploring outer space. And despite the struggles of living, pours everything he has into building his own rocket, and even involves his wife and children in his plans for the launch.
The odds are against him. More than a half a million dollars in debt (a legacy inherited from his father), and facing imminent foreclosure, Farmer becomes desperate. Soon the FBI is hounding him, the FAA is trying to shut him down, and even one of his old buddies from astronaut training (Bruce Willis) is sent to betray him.
I was thoroughly caught up in the drama of this flick, despite it’s seemingly trite and formulaic story line. Thornton is thoroughly convincing, and we root for him even when he has given up on himself. The directing is first rate, and the dialog is convincing, more than making up for what could have been a mediocre story. Even Bruce Dern steps out of his usual bag, portraying the mellow old grandfather – instead of the on-the-edge trippy dude where he is traditionally cast.
I highly recommend this movie. Truly inspiring. It might be a little too cerebral for the younger kids. Not a date movie, but the girls will enjoy it, especially if they are Thornton fans.
March 6th 2007
Kewl. I’ve installed FCKEditor for my WordPress blog. I got it as a plugin from Dean Lee. It’s not modified from the standard FCKEditor distribution, it’s just wrapped up as a plugin, which is very cool.
Thanks, Dean!
February 27th 2007
Ok, I’ve embarked on creating a WordPress weblog. WordPress is pretty cool. It’s not everything I’m looking for – but it looks like it will work. I actually tried this once before several months ago, and got so frustrated trying to make WordPress work like I wanted it to that I gave up and removed it, in favor of Plone. And that was pretty cool. But Plone is a *lot* of layers of stuff. It’s built on top of Zope, which is fine, but trying to integrate other things, and figure out how everything works is a major task. Zope has its own database system, and reams and reams of little object modules. It also uses its own web server, which was a little tricky to get working along side Apache. Plone is a *great* full-featured CMS tool, but a little more than I need for the simple stuff I want to do on this site. Anyway, I’ve settled on doing what I can with WordPress, since I at least understand all the parts (Apache, PHP, MySQL, CSS, etc.). I even experimented with some themes. I now have a slightly customized version of the Earth 1.0 theme from (apparently) 2yi.net. I’m sure I’ll be making more changes, but this looks like a good starting point. Updating it to use my colors and logo was pretty simple. I’m mostly satisfied with the look so far. I don’t like this editor too much. I wonder if I can install FCKEditor in WordPress instead. It’s got a lot more features. The only bad thing about the FCKEditor is that it traps right-clicks (surely there is a way to change that), so you can’t use the Firefox 2 spellcheck tool. FCKEditor has a client-side spell-checker, but I don’t really need that, and I’m not interested in setting it up.
February 26th 2007
I have started using wordpress on the site, now. This will make it a little easier for me to get things posted, since I don’t have to worry about hand-coding pages and manually managing my files.
Now I just need to automate those database backups.