G.I. Joe: Retaliation - Or: Plot Holes a-Plenty

This is going to be a quick one. I went to go see this out of boredom and boy is it an odd flick. The action is good, the 3-D is used mostly for depth (which is a good thing) with only a couple of "pop-out" moments. The acting is probably fine if you're just going in to this movie for the boom booms and the hoorah's.


Basically it's Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, Bruce Willis, and from way the hell out of nowhere The RZA. None of the story line really makes sense. If I remember anything from the previous G.I. Joe movie (and I don't) there was a lot of emphasis placed on how Cobra Commander was a bad dude and his Cobra symbol was on terrorist flags and things. Why then does when (spoilers?) Cobra Commander come back does the entire world give one giant shrug when the Cobra symbols start popping up on the White House? 

The plot is like Swiss cheese, but if what you're looking for is to see Adrianne Palicki in short shorts, then this is the movie for you! There is however one action sequence on the side of a mountain that looked incredibly stupid in the trailer. In the movie however, it the action sequence is well shot, but incredibly stupid.

2.5/5 for me, high marks for action sequences. The Director Jon M. Chu, does an OK job with the script that he was given. Fun fact, his previous movie was Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. That should tell you most of what you need to know.

Olympus Has Fallen - My Interest Has Risen!

Morgan Freeman. Even when he isn't playing the president, he ends up playing the president. That man is magical. Olympus Has Fallen is about the White House getting terrorized in spectacular fashion and Aaron Eckhart's President Asher getting taken hostage. It's up to our man on the inside Gerard Butler to rescue him and the First Child (not to be confused with the Golden Child), Connor.

Olympus Has Fallen - Trailer

It's a pretty good movie. There's lots of explosions. The action is gritty and it certainly deserves an "R" for violence. The story is "plausible" in that, it isn't out of the realm of imagination that the White House could be attacked by terrorists, however the way it gets infiltrated is a smidge over the top. The plot revolves around a group of North Koreans breaking in to the White House and taking the President hostage, and threaten to execute him unless the United States has pulls out of the DMZ and recalls the 7th Fleet, which is positioned in the South China Sea to support the South Koreans should shit hit the fan.

As fun and captivating as the story line is, lets take a moment to talk about the importance of not having a stingy special effects budget.When you have the National Monument falling to pieces, maybe have a little bit more pixels shaded eh? Or perhaps when you show the White House getting hit by a helicopter, a few more details would be good?

I took this screenshot from the trailer above.

                            

It makes me sad that often, fairly decent movies can "take me out of the action" by having some fairly wonky visual effects. I'm hoping that as visual effects get even more prevalent in films that studios will take an extra week or two and put some more detail in to the movies. Especially now that we're in a HD universe. 

Special Effects aside the movie's fun! I give it a 4/5, but make sure if you go it's with folks that don't mind a little violence. The movie's got plenty of it! It's a fine flick, but they really didn't leave themselves a lot of wiggle room for a sequel...which might be the best part!

South by Southwest - First Impressions

I flew in to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive and just like CES, it was cupcake time! The night I arrived at South By Southwest, or “South by” as it was referred to by more than one person in Austin,  I went to a house party, and boy was it full of bearded people. When I heard stories of hipsters and beardos (it’s a word) living in Austin in numbers that rival San Francisco, I was skeptical, but yea, there's tons. One of the most interesting encounters I had was a conversation that went a little something like this: “Are you here for South by?” “Yea, I flew in this afternoon” “Oh cool! Where are you from?” “San Francisco.” “Don't move here...”. OK, I won't! But I can see why people flock to Austin (a chamber of commerce member told me it has grown by almost 1 million folks in the last ten years or so), especially from San Francisco and the bay. It's clean, the weather is nice, the people are friendly-ish, and there's tons to do. Plus it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to live there. So yes, Austin is nice. I liked it.

I think SXSW is something that is best experienced. You can read or hear about it, but until you're actually there none of it really makes sense. I heard there was going to be lots of music, lots of parties, lots of lounges, and lots of people. All that is true but the way it all comes together is actually pretty spectacular. The bars and clubs around downtown Austin get skinned from the outside and are branded with company logos throughout. The streets get blocked off and stages are set up. Bands come out and “festival babes” fill the streets giving out fliers, chapstick, and trinkets, trying to get folks to tweet and mention their companies.

The tweeting thing is kind of interesting. I was approached by a very pretty lady, and asked to tweet about something, in exchange for a set of Logitech 500VM headphones. That struck me as odd, usually you have folks tweet in order to be eligible to win something or other, but to give out something that costs $60 for one tweet seemed a bit like overkill. Granted I was probably “lucky” and not everyone got a set of headphones, their cost was quite surprising. Also, it's a good thing that I'm not a member of the press so I could accept them! The amount of swag that you could get on the streets was staggering. It made me wonder if companies put aside $5 Million for “SXSW Swag” in order to burn through their left over budgets. The answer is, probably.

One of the things I found most strange was the exhibit hall itself. It felt almost like an afterthought. Granted, the focus of SXSW wasn't on start-ups and tech when it first started, but it seems to be headed in that direction now, and the exhibit hall left something to be desired. Maybe I was a bit spoiled by CES, but it seemed a bit cramped. The nice thing though, there weren't many iDevice and phone cases! Those seemed to dominate both CES and MacWorld, the last two large tech events that I attended.

But SXSW isn't about tech (not really) it's about music! And there was lots of it. One of the most interesting bands that I saw was called rdgldgrn (red gold green, but without the vowels). Rdgldgrn is a DC band that mixes rock and rap, I dug it. I also met Theolodge which is a neat name,  not sure if it’s a play on “theology”, but he’s a Florida rapper, and he’s quite good. Check out his song with Imogen Heap “First Train Home”. Pretty much ever genre was well represented and you couldn't walk around downtown Austin without hearing bass coming from somewhere.

SXSW was a blast, and I can’t wait to go back there. I liked the vibe, I liked the city, I liked the food, and I liked the people. I always had a soft spot in my heart for Texans (I lived in Dallas for 3 months), and Austin is filled with interesting folks. I’ll be looking forward to my next Austin trip, and hope to see you there at the next South By…just make sure to get your hotels books a year in advance.

*EDIT/UPDATE* -> I realized that I said to book your hotels a year in advance but I didn't say why, here's the financial breakdown of why you should plan way ahead:

My plane ticket from San Francisco to Austin on the days that I wanted to be at SXSW would have cost $1300 round trip, whereas a few days prior it would have been $350. I decided to fly in to Dallas instead for a more reasonable $400 and then rented a car to drive down to Austin from Dallas (I recommend flying in to San Antonio or Houston if you need to, they are closer to Austin). Renting a car in Dallas and then returning it in Austin after 5 days (the duration of my trip) would have cost $1600 (returning a car to a different location costs more money). I decided to rent a car in Dallas, drive it to the Austin Airport, return it, and get another one for the remaining 4 days. This worked out to $250 for the car from Dallas to Austin (essentially a 4 hour rental), and another $240 for the 4 days that I had the car in Austin. So it was less expensive for 4 days of renting than just the one-way trip. In conclusion, plan ahead! But if you don't make sure to play around with different transportation options so you don't get screwed!

And here are the pictures:

The cupcakes I was to deliver

Torchy's Tacos. If you go here, get the street corn.

Random guy in a bed...mostly naked...

rdgldgrn performing

Matthew Lesko!

Me and the fire fox.

Matthew Inman of Oatmeal fame. I met him at the Indiegogo party!

If you look closely above the building, you'll see hundreds of bats.

Find my name?

I like that # still means "pound" in some instances!

Wine in a cup! As seen on Shark Tank.

The "after".

Those hubcaps are not OK.

I liked the solar charging stations all over Austin.

The Hannibal food truck.

Path's cute posters.

This is a "Long Island Iced Coffee". It's as good as you imagine.

Homeless in Austin. Even they are tech savvy.

Texas.

Playing Around with the Microsoft Surface Pro

We bought a Microsoft Surface Pro for the office and I got to use it in a real world test. The Pro is actually pretty fun to use, I'm currently using the stylus to write this post and it's pretty fun to write cursive again. I was just thinking about not being able to and not needing to write manually anymore. With the Pro I can use the stylus (quite a nice one by the way, with multiple secondary buttons) to write manually, which I am getting quite the kick out of.

Pro's design is pretty interesting, and I'm not sure it's in a good way. There is a bit of a ridge surrounding the device, which makes sense as there is a kickstand at the bottom of the device that clicks out, but there is nothing at the top, which makes it a bit odd that the ridge is present. It makes it a bit hard to quickly orient the device if you take it out of a bag or pick it up without looking. Apart from that the design is pretty nice and I was able to quickly figure out the buttons and get comfortable with the layout.

The camera front and back cameras are OK, but nothing to write home about. The screen is 1080p and looks pretty good in most lighting situations that I used the Pro in. One of the most interesting additions to the Pro are the "covers" that you an attach to it. When I first received the Pro we got a Touch cover to go with it. The Pro does not ship with a cover included and so we decided the Touch cover was the way to go. That cover is flat, and has almost no tactile feedback to key presses. This led me to make a lot of spelling mistakes, the majority of which came from missing letters, as I could not register whether or not the key was actually pressed. I type fairly quickly, so I'd go over my work and notice a lot of misspellings.

We then got a Type cover which has raised keys, not unlike those you would find on a laptop. The keyboard surface is a bit smaller than a standard keyboard, but it took less than 5 minutes to get used to it and start typing with very few mistakes. One thing to note is the track pad, it feels OK and has a few multi-touch gestures that help scrolling. It's smaller than you find on laptops, especially multi-touch ones, but it's usable and helps navigating the UI in desktop mode, if you don't want to poke the screen. Another downside is the speaker system. It’s not powerful, and my Nexus 7 feels louder.

The current iteration is fairly compelling, but may not be the best thing since sliced bread, as they have a few things they need to work on. Mainly the weight. A lot of Macbook Air and iPad users noted that this was a bit heavy for them, but on paper, with a type cover it is only 0.5lbs heavier than an 11" Macbook Air, the fact that it was noticeable to some folks was a bit worrying though. The less powerful (read: useful) Surface RT is lighter, but the Pro is the best bang for your buck. 

It even plays games fairly well. The normal assortment of mobile games is available, and it played Jetpack Joyride like a champ. I decided to test a bit further though and installed Steam on it to see if we could get a few "big kid" games rocking and rolling on it. The Pro played Portal at 1920 x 1080 without an issue. Very impressive.

Overall the Pro is a good start and I can't wait to see what version 2 and 3 are like. Others (like Dell and HP) have started using Windows 8 on form factors similar to this and on Ultrabooks, so there will be lots of other offerings in this space in the near future. I like where this trend is going.