Also saw “Flight” during the weekend. And there we go with those expectations again! When I hear the name Robert Zemeckis I’m thinking “epic”, “grandiose”, “visually awesome”, “visual f/x you never even see” and “deep”. Like “Back to the Future”, those were pretty damn epic, the score was grandiose, the visual f/x in especially the second one are just awesome! And then you have “Forrest Gump” and “Contact”, both of which had more special f/x than anyone could count, both epic and grandiose in scale. So “new Robert Zemeckis movie” = “I have to see it!”.
Had anyone else done this movie I would probably have thought it was good movie. But with the expectations I had, and insisting we see it in our home theater, well then it was pretty much a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, the story is good, the acting is top notch. But it wasn’t epic or grandiose, or visually awesome (granted, crashing a plane is always visually awesome but that was only 5 minutes of the movie!), maybe there were a gazillion visual f/x I never saw (I missed most of them in “Contact” which is the highest praise you can give to the visual f/x guys!) .. and it was kinda “we’ve seen this before” kinda thing with two broken characters with demons find each other, it’s all been done before. I expected more. But still don’t consider it a waste of time though.
Saw “Brave” this weekend. The wife had decided we needed a little family “just sit back, relax and enjoy a movie and popcorn”-session. And since our son has a thing for Pixar movies it was time for their latest creation “Brave”. I didn’t expect much, the normal Pixar stuff really. But I was pleasantly surprised! If we disregard the story which was mediocre (chick flic?), I absolutely enjoyed that movie and would recommend it to anyone! I’ve dabbled in 3D rendering myself about a decade ago so I kinda have a feel for the work that goes into animating stuff like this and on that level this has to be one of Pixars finest work ever! They managed to capture and render that awesome atmosphere and environment so beautifully, and I joked to the wife that “the animators must’ve loved hearing the amount of hair on the lead character!” because hair and water are some of the worst stuff to try to animate. And they didn’t tackle that problem much in Toy Story or Cars but they did now and did it fantastically! Then there was the music which really put the cream on this semla!
As a matter of fact I’m gonna try to watch this movie in English some day to take that Scottish feeling one step further, cause swedish dubbing just doesn’t do it justice!!
I fixed my little fuckup with help from Google. I tried restore files but MySQL didn’t like that, but fortunately Google had indexed these pages and I could use their cache to re-write the few posts that were lost. So thanks Google!!
I’ve redone the image gallery again. I couldn’t find a gallery system for wordpress that worked “the way I wanted it to” so instead I went back to Imagevue and created seperate galleries for every year, in seperate folders. What that means for you is that it’s easier to navigate, however you can’t navigate from one year to the next without going back here. Quite simply because the navigation thing in Imagevue didn’t look good when having over 10 categories and subcategories and sub-sub-categories, it just wasn’t practical!
Hope you like it, and as usual, the password is the short Swedish name of my current employer.
So I fucked up again … I rearranged things on my server and lost the SQL database for this site. So I went back to the NP.com which is dated early December, that’ll do until I have time to restore the missing month (which with my updating frequence can’t be much!)
I really do hate expectations and now they’ve cost me about $1500! I wish I could just eliminate them completely. You know when you go into a movie expecting one thing and getting another. I think I’ve learnt to not have expectations in that regard, I’ve been disappointed so many times (“Star Wars The Phantom Menace” anyone?) that I just don’t have them. When I went to see “Prometheus” I made damn sure not to expect an “Alien”-movie and in hindsight most of the people that are giving it bad reviews went in with that expectation!
Now how did that cost me $1500? During my hiring process here at Thomas Cook my boss told me about their bonus system. And at the same time I was pursued by a big company that wanted to hire me and give me a higher salary and when I discreetly hinted at that she again told me about the bonus system and said “over a full year we’ll be able to match them salary wise” and it was one of the reasons I started working here. That and the fact that my boss and the colleague I met seemed like the most professional IT people I’d ever met! And during all of last year I kept hearing about that bonus as a carrot for us to achieve our professional goals here. Even as late as last Wednesday I was promised this bonus is coming with this months paycheck. But I knew I wasn’t going to get the full bonus since I had “only” worked here for 8 out of the 12 months of the year, but that should still give me $1500 after tax.
Well this Monday she called me for a spontaneous meeting to give me the bad news. I had only worked 5 months of the fiscal year and I needed to have worked 6 to be eligible for the bonus, something even she didn’t know about until she checked with HR. So instead of $1500 in cash that I had counted on that was just 4 days away I get $0. I do get something on the side but nothing in real hard cash.
I can’t say that she lied to me during the recruitment process because she didn’t know about this, but it’s very damn hard not to feel disappointed over it. And more than that, I feel like they stole $1500 from me! Because I’ve been promised that bonus 5 seperate times last year and twice this year and when it was only 4 days away it just vanishes!! If they had at any point last year said I wouldn’t get it I think I’d been fine with that, but now it got to the point where I had actually counted on getting it, and it was all going to go to pay our vacation this summer. Even besides that there are so many holes that money would fill that I feel robbed of that money. Kinda like Clark Griswald! But this was after Christmas though…
Anyway, what can I do about it? I’m professional enough to suck it up and keep on trying to do the best job I can! I can’t say I’m less motivated to do a good job than before. But I can’t say I’m happy that Microsofts analysis of our Sharepoint enviroment that I’ve set up said “it’s the most healthy Sharepoint environment we’ve seen” and I get nothing for it except a “good job”.
This time I can’t blame anything else than I’ve simply forgotten to write something here in a while. Last week my son was really ill so that took up pretty much most of my thought processor when I wasn’t working. But I really should be updating more often, I know. I’ve looked into getting my tweets posted here automatically but so far no go.
Anyway, I’ve dumped instagram now because their user agreement doesn’t agree with me so that’s out of here which is really sad. Other than that it’s pretty much same stuff going on here as usual – me playing computer games, us watching movies, our son complains that we don’t spend enough time with him. But all in all it’s going pretty well actually.
Read the other day that movie box offices in Hollywood broke the 10.7 billion dollar mark for 2012 which is a new record. Also broke the record of amount of movie premieres (655) for one year. And that’s while claiming illegal file sharing are killing them.
And I’m pretty sure when I say this – the problem is lack of options! In Sweden HBO Nordic just started up, but only after first opening up to people who have the “right” ISP and bought the “right” TV – that kinda thing would never happen with a file sharing site, now would it? And the fact that HBO Nordics list of movies and TV shows are seriously lacking anything I’m interested in. Ok they had Back to the Future, but what about new movies? And the new TV shows they were supposed to have? We also have Netflix who has a pretty good lineup so I’m still paying monthly for that.
But one suggestion I’d like to make to Hollywood is to think a little outside the box. When I watched a movie the other day called “Giant Mechanical Man” (great movie by the way!) I though it was one of the best movies I’ve seen for quite some time. And there is no way I would have seen it had it not been for the way I got it. But I felt bad afterwards because it was so good I wanted to pay for it. The thing is there is no way for me to pay for it. And that’s when it hit me.
How about starting a donation site to a movie for people like me, that see the movie and feels it was so good I really do wanna pay for! I think that most people would think that a donation of say 5-6 would be ok for a movie they thought was worthwile watching! This would hugely increase the revenue for these small movies that never make it to the theaters in sweden and that “only” made $5 million in the box office in the states. I’m damn sure that would double if we had the oportunity to pay for it online somehow. Because right now my best way to pay for it is to actually pay CDON $5 for renting it online. And I’ll do that only because it’s the only way I know how to give money back for it. Unfortunately there is no way the writer/producer is going to see that revenue!
Speaking of which – I wonder what the creative force behind that movie would think. Is he or she or them ok with as many people as possible watching the movie regardless of how we obtain it, or are they pissed that I saw it and liked it and gave it a good review at IMDB and want to give my money to them for it, if only there was a way??