Save vs. Geek

So tonight, I went out with some people (new friends) to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Having heard mixed reviews, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be any good. I have my opinion, but you’ll have to wait for that.

First, what it has, that someone who watches Bond would expect.

Insane chases, improbable, and exciting
Beautiful women
Villans just unrealistic enough to feel no empathy for
Improbable plots to hold it all together

Things that are missing:
Cheesy double entendres
Crazy gadgets
Q
Cheesy henchmen

So, now that you have a cheat sheet, and can probably make up your mind yourself, here’s what I thought.

I enjoyed it. It could have been called Casino Royale II, and if you haven’t seen that, don’t see Quantum until you’ve seen Casino. Like it’s predecessor, this movie throws out all of the previous incarnations of Bond. It’s gritty, it’s ugly at times. Daniel Craig does cold pretty well. To me, this incarnation is closest to the original Fleming, where Roger Moore is a parody of 007. While Bond in this film leaves a trail of dead bodies, living up to the ‘License to Kill’ MI-6 is certainly uncomfortable with Bond’s use of said license, which is a nice touch, and makes the series more believable.

In all, this isn’t the greatest movie ever, and isn’t as strong as Casino Royale. In short, if you loved Casino, you’ll enjoy this. If you didn’t like the direction that Casino took, yoi’l get more of the same. It’d be best as a double feature in my opinion. This concludes Dan’s movie review.

That is all.

Posted with LifeCast

dan movies

Years ago, before the internets, I was still a computer geek. I’d spend my time using my 1200 baud modem to connect to local Bulliten Board Systems. BBS’s had email, forums sometimes (rarely) chat, file downloads, and what were called ‘door’ games. Now, the internet is much better than the old BBS’s in a lot of ways, being able to email anyone, anywhere, it being easy enough that everyone seems to have some sort of presence, and the advances delivered by bandwidth (video would be unheard of, it took 20 minutes to download an image)

But there’s one thing that was lost.

The local community. Since a BBS was typically run by a person who’s close enough to be a local telephone call, the users naturally all lived in the same area. This enabled a lot of cool things. Just about everyone lived near everyone, there were meetups in the real world, discussions about local events came naturally.

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Craigslist have begun to pick up on some of these uses, but not ideally, because the categories are by town/school. Brightkite does things a bit better, but has it’s own problems, such as a tiny user base.

I live in New Milford, CT, just south of the middle of nowhere. According to Facebook, my ‘network’ is either New Haven, Bridgeport, or Poughkeepsie. Craig says I should be in northwest CT, new haven or fairfield county (one town over)

The thing is, my ‘network’ should really be something like, 50 miles from where I am.

I can’t blame facebook, the model was build around campuses.

Local news outlets don’t understand how to build communities, and maybe it’s wrong to expect them to.

With the onset of location aware cellphones, and software, these models need to change. We need the tools to find people near us, not just for dating, not just for events or resturaunt reviews, but for anything. One network, or a thousand federated networks.

More to follow

dan local, nostalga, social