Hardly an exhaustive list, more of a work in progress.
Eric F. Savage
Good stuff, updated weekly(ish)
Archive for the ‘reviews’ Category
Boston’s Best Steakhouses
Thursday, April 16th, 200952 Word Review: Watchmen
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Watchmen is an adaptation of a comic series that should have been longer into a movie that should have been shorter. Action was slick and acting was much better than expected, but the story preserved the uneven pacing of the source rather than remedying it. A noble and ambitious attempt with mediocre results.
Vista: Day 600
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008So, I had meant to do this sooner, but here’s the follow-up to my 1-day update after 18 months of using Vista.
- I haven’t downgraded to XP, nor felt any need to. On the flip side I’m still running XP at home, and haven’t felt the need to upgrade.
- It hasn’t crashed. Nope, not once.
- The one vista feature I’ve grown to use is the “Start Search” box, which is basically a slower/simpler version of Quicksilver, but provides most of the functionality you need (i.e. finding programs and files you don’t use all day).
Well, that’s about it.
Oh, the Macbook I gave to Phil when I got the PC? He used it for a while, but after too many problems with it, he eventually had to go and buy a replacement (his 4th Macbook in 2 years).
52 Word Review: Step Brothers
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Ferrell and Reilly redeem themselves for Talledega Nights in this one. Step Brothers starts OK, peaks in hilarity, then falters towards the end, but is the funniest comedy of the year so far. The most immature scene of the movie was also the first to have me in tears in a long time.
52 Word Review: Strange Wilderness
Friday, August 1st, 2008
This movie was so uniformly bad I couldn’t even finish watching it. It’s basically a really bad Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler. It has people in it who have otherwise been reliably funny, so it’s difficult to fathom the odds of that many funny people making an entirely unwatchable movie. Wow. Horrible.
Gordon Ramsay & The White Barn Inn
Friday, June 27th, 2008
I’ve lately been fortunate enough to eat at two amazing restaurants. The first was Gordon Ramsay at the London in New York City, the second was The White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, ME.
Ramsay’s was quite simply the finest meal and dining experience I’ve ever had. Reeny is a big fan of his show, and I’ve watched it here and there, so I had some confidence he knew what he was talking about and that he had very high standards (important since he is not actually the chef there). The food was astonishingly good, from the artichoke soup to the Black Cod to the Kobe short rib, everything was A+. The highlight was either the soup or the scallop, both were so good it’s impossible to pick. The service was perfect too, we never felt like we were waiting nor did we feel rushed. If you’re even in NYC, make sure you visit this place, assuming you can make reservations two months ahead…
The White Barn Inn, a recommendation of Dina, was also memorable. While not quite as good as Ramsay, it’s easily the best place I’ve been to in New England. I opted for the lamb, Reeny for the beef, and both dishes were great as well as the other courses. The atmosphere is cozy, the service was very good, highly recommended when you’re down east.
52 Word Review: Superbad
Friday, August 24th, 2007
Superbad, the newest Apatow -flavored flick, is yet another “high school is ending” teen comedy, but unlike too many of its predecessors, it’s hilarious. The humor actually masks the fact that it’s a well-written, well-paced story, so even if you’re too old to laugh at it, you’ll probably enjoy it.
52 Word Review: Eagle versus Shark
Monday, July 9th, 2007
I went to see Eagle vs. Shark because I think Jemaine Clement is one of those inherently funny people. If you agree, you will probably like it. Otherwise it’s an “offbeat” Napoleon-Dynamite-style romantic comedy from New Zealand. What it lacks in hobbits it makes up for in Awesome clothes and nunchucks.
52 Word Review: Transformers
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Transformers was the coolest, silliest movie I’ve seen in a long time. There’s obviously some nostalgia at work here, but it’s a solid, loud, typically-Michael Bay action movie. If you played with the toys as a kid like I did, rest assured, Optimus Prime is still as cool as you remember.
Vista: Day 1
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007So, after finally calling it quits in my battle against my MacBook Pro, I retreated to Microsoft. You basically can’t buy a Dell without Vista now, so I figured I’d give it a shot. There’s been a fair amount of hype by Microsoft in favor of it, and a tremendous amount of anti-hype against it by basically everyone else. After my first day, I’ll say that neither side has much to stand on.
The system is what I’d consider an average developer box these days. Grand total with tax was less than $1150.
- Dell E521
- Athlon Dual-core 5000+
- 2GB RAM
- 250GB hard drive (no raid)
- ATI X1300 video card
- 20″ Dell 4:3 LCD
- Windows Vista Home Premium
I hooked it up to my pre-existing 24″ LCD as primary monitor. I had bought a Radeon 9250 so that I could run the second monitor on DVI, but ATI doesn’t have Vista drivers for that, so I hooked it up to the VGA port until I return that card for a newer one.
Here’s what I installed:
- JDK6 – No problems
- Eclipse 3.3M4 – No problems
- Jetty 5 and 6 – No problems
- JettyLauncher (eclipse plugin) – Only works with JDK 5, not sure if this is a Vista thing, so…
- Subclipse (eclipse/subversion plugin) – No problems
- JDK5 – No problems
- MySQL 4 – No problems
- Firefox 2 – No problems
- Yahoo IM – Crashed once, but it does that on XP too often too.
- AIM 6 – Crashed once after I first started it, ran fine through several conversations later on.
- Windows Mail (pre-installed, I configured for POP and SMTP over SSL) – no problems.
So the big complaint by the hordes has been performance. For a mid-range machine, with full Aero enabled on two monitors at 1920×1200 and 1600×1200, I see no lag at all. Aero is actually decent. It’s only major flourish is the new “flip-3d” where the windows stack up like something you would see on a Mac, but its really kind of useless, and I prefer alt-tab. The live previews when you over over the task bar are actually kind of nice, though not very useful. The transparency is fancy, but not overdone, the fade/shrink when you minimize is quick and nicely done. I haven’t disabled any of it yet after 7 hours of use, which is about 6.9 hours longer than the ridiculous XP theme lasted.
Programs launch and run faster, though it does seem like installers go slower and hang for a while. It also comes with a ton of nice fonts, I’m curious if we’ll start seeing those show up in CSS files. I set most of my stuff up for familiar 8pt Lucida Console, I’ll have to go through and see if they’ve added any other nice monospace fonts.
Microsoft seems to have adopted the unix idea of security when it comes to “sudo”. Whenever you do anything that affects the OS, it prompts you to allow it to proceed. If you want to do something like edit your hosts file, you’ll need to run your editor as an administrator, which is as easy as a right click. It’s all a bit annoying, but probably just because I was tweaking it alot. We’ll see how it plays out after a period of normal usage. The worst part is that when the box comes up, the whole screen flickers and takes on a lightbox type effect. Seems to be overkill and poorly implemented.
Other than that, I hate to break it to the Microsoft PR squad and the throngs of haters, but it’s really just good old Windows. The paths are a bit different, things are called slightly different names, but from my perspective, it’s all trivial stuff. Unless I come across something tragic or wonderful, I see no reason for people to upgrade, or to resist upgrading.