Monthly Archives: February 2014

Ender’s Game (2013)

Have you ever heard a lot of hype about a movie that was based on a book that you haven’t read, and wondered what the fuss was about? Well Ender’s Game was one of those experiences for me. I knew the basic plot of the story, and even though I am an avid Sci-Fi fan, the concept held little interest for me. It seemed to be more of a Sci-Fi story for an eight or ten year old, since most the main characters and story heros are quite young.

It’s a story about a futuristic world where society has decided that video game playing children would make the best soldiers, if they could fight remotely, and be tricked into thinking it was simply a game.

Even though the movie is well made with excellent effects, it returned exactly what I expected, a completely predictable story with a juvenile plot. Perhaps the book is a great read, since many people that have read it tend to rave about it, but the movie is not a great watch overall.

4/10

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Goodbye TWIT TNT and Hello DTNS

My month long experiment to listen to the new Tech News Today podcast on the TWIT Network has ended. I can’t take it no more! The TNT feed is now deleted, and in hindsight I wish I had done it after 2 episodes as I intended. It’s been rather painful to endure the tedious dialog that now is TNT. It was a show I used to enjoy and look forward to listing to. I gave it a month to see if it would improve, and I have to say it didn’t even slightly. I found little to nothing of interest to take away from each episode, in fact it appeared to be little more than the current host’s personal opinion on two or three topics he cared to discuss that day, with the co-hosts either not bothering or struggling to add some input.

After Tom Merrit left TWIT TNT, I checked his personal web site a few times to see if I could glean where he would go next. I obviously hadn’t checked recently, as I just discovered yesterday that he has a new show called the Daily Tech News Show. And to my surprise it already has nearly a month worth of content. So I will attempt to listen to each show and catch up, as I did with TNT after Tom left CNet. To my delight it seems to have similar content to his TNT show, and with many of the old guests. While listening even to his first two shows of DNTS, I felt it had far higher quality of tech news, hosting skills, and content than any episodes of TNT since he was last there.

I use an app called BeyondPod on my Android phone to listen to my podcasts, and I was disappointed to see I was unable to search or find DTNS in the add feed search feature. So for anyone else that reads this and wants a quick link for the feed, I used:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyTechNewsShow

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