A friend of mine just pointed me to this article about a possible Hitchhiker movie. I’m not quite sure what I think of this. I think if they didn’t keep true to Adams’ feel they’d have a lot of pissed off fans.

Kingdom Hearts came out yesterday and it’s quite amazing so far. I’ve only played for a few hours but I’m already very impressed with the production values on it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s the latest game from Squaresoft for the PS2. This time they teamed up with Disney to make a game that combines the worlds of Squaresoft with the worlds of Disney. They included so many Disney characters in the game, and most of them are voiced by the original actors (For instance, you have Chris Sarandon voicing Jack Skellington).

I’ll give more updates on what I think of the game as I get deeper into it.

I’ve seen this one coming for a long time. And I don’t blame it on Instant Messenger type things. All the rave mailing lists I’ve been on have had people typing in this way for at least 8 years. Bleh.

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers. As more teenagers socialize online, teachers are finding that Internet English is popping up with increasing frequency in school work. By Jennifer 8. Lee. [New York Times: Technology]

Video rental places like Blockbuster have long been known to (rumored to?) sanitize some of the movies they carry. But as technology gets better, companies are able to ‘clean up’ movies in more subtle ways. I personally find this disturbing. It’s bad enough that networks have to cut things for time and content (how come they don’t make those versions available). Oh, and the next step, digitally inserted product placements.

Hollywood Balks at High-Tech Sanitizers. Movie studios and filmmakers have decided it is time to get a handle on companies that offer sanitized versions of Hollywood hits to sensitive or politically conservative consumers. By Rick Lyman. [New York Times: Movies]

Oscar Wilde. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” [Quotes of the Day]

Following in the tradition of the Hello Kitty USB Hub, we have Hubzilla. This time it’s firewire. I want one.

And remember:

Charismac claims no responsibility for broken personal or business related property should Hubzilla go on a rampage. As always, a clean and fed Hubzilla results in a happy Hubzilla.

Paolo posted about iCal the other day. iCal is the calendaring software that Apple just announced last week. On first glance I was fairly underwhelmed with what I saw it iCal. But as I looked at it more and explored what Apple was doing with it I started to see where it could be a very useful application (It is still very much a 1.0 product and needs a bit of work though).

The biggest thing iCal lets you do is publish your calendars. It is set up so that once you have a calendar of events in your life, all you have to do is tell it to publish and it will show up on a web page. Here’s one that I did for a club calendar. The cool thing is that it is that you can subscribe to calendars that are posted on the net. These each show up as a different category in your own calendar. iCal will even go and check to see if these are updated periodicly.

Upon further researching. I found that Apple used a standard file format for sharing their calendar informaion. Mozilla Calendar is another app that seems to support this. Searching around I found more information on the formats for calendars and contact information. Even MS seems to support these formats.

Now Apple just needs to clean up iCal a little bit more and things will be even better.

Oh dear

TV Commercial Degrades Ducks. “Please contact AFLAC Incorporated (a supplemental medical insurance company) and urge them to stop running TV commercials that represent ducks in dangerous, unnatural, and degrading situations.” — United Poultry Concerns

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Because we all know bad ducks feel when people make fun of them. Are these people against Daffy Duck too?

Sir William Bragg. “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.” [Quotes of the Day]

Last night I finally go to see Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. I’d gotten tickets for an advance screening from Tokyo Kid a week or so ago and had been looking forward to it. I was also happy to have the company of my friend Emily who was able to come along on late notice.

Having seen the movie before, I just really wanted to see it on a big screen. Secondarily I wanted to see how the dub of it was. I have to say that John Lassiter did a wonderful job with this movie. I’ll be happy if he can handle every Miyazaki movie they bring out over here from this point on. Daveigh Chase did a wonderful job voicing Sen, folks may recognize her voice as Lilo from Lilo and Stitch (she’s also going to be in the US version of The Ring (aka Ringu).

If you live in one of the cities it is opening in this weekend I can’t urge you enough to go see this movie. A short list of the cities where it is opening includes: LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Washington D.C., Austin, Philadelphia, and Denver. There are other cities, and it is due to open in more cities in the coming weeks. For a list of theatres, one can visit nausicaa.net.