Monthly Archives: November 2014

Predestination (2014)

Based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, this is a complicated time travel drama, that includes the trials and tribulations of a young androgynous girl, that is forced into a sex change by medical practitioners of a past era.

This is a very well made and acted movie.  It’s also as far from a main stream time travel story line as I’ve ever seen.  This movie is neither exciting nor fun.  But it does holds your attention like driving by an accident.  The emotions and pain the characters feel will suck you into watching simply to see what happens.

The story is complex and strangely riveting, but I found the open ended conclusion disappointing.

7/10

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Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

I expected this movie to be lame and overall disappointing.  I was totally wrong!  This was one of the most entertaining movies I’ve appreciated in some time.

If you could take a box and drop in the following movies:
• Buck Rogers
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Raider of the Lost Ark
• Battlestar Galactica
• Star Wars
• The Rocketeer

You would get Guardians of the Galaxy.  And not just the basic plot concepts, but total rip offs of the plot, scenes, etc.  I say this as a good thing.  I don’t think the developers of this movie were shy about steeling from these other movies, they took the best and popular parts of these other shows, and merged them into a modern combined version.

If you are a SciFi or action movie fan, this is a must see.

10/10

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Switched Blogging Software

As my handful of followers may (or may not) have noticed, my blog has not been updated much lately.  A combination of life getting in the way of doing this (and other equally important things), and my favourite blogging app no longer working.

Up until today, I’ve used BlogDesk.  A quick, simple and easy to use blogging tool.  I was very impressed to find such a great basic free app.image  
But recently it stopped working for me with WordPress.com.  Giving me this error:

“XML Parsing Error: Invalid procedure call or argument”

I contacted the author, after a couple days he asked me to send him an error log, which I did.  After a week of not hearing back, I have given up hope for BlogDesk.  I assume it’s a new incompatibility issue with changes to WordPress or WordPress.com, but I don’t know for sure, and I’m tired of wasting time trying to figure it out.  So I went on a quest to find an alternative to BlogDesk.

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After wasted hours searching for reviews and trying other free blogging tools, I settled for Windows Live Writer.  I say settle cause I was avoiding having to use a Microsoft product, as all MS products are bloated, have dependencies on one or many other MS products to work, and are typically HUGE installs.  Plus Live Writer is somewhat more complicated to use and learn, and I loved the basic concepts of BlogDesk. 

But here I am using Windows Live Writer, and it works.  No errors, short learning curve, and did I mention it works?  I’ll have no better luck getting support from MS for a free tool than I would from a small company, or a one man developer, but I can likely depend on Microsoft keeping it updated when things change…till they abandon it of course. 

But one thing tech history has shown us, is that Microsoft does not easily abandon products, free or paid.  Unlike Google who abandons products all the time without notice, when someone thinks it isn’t making money directly.  But that’s a whole other rant. 🙂

If BlogDesk has stopped working for you too, give Windows Live Writer a chance.

2014-01-07 EDIT: Six weeks after contacting the author of BlogDesk and complaining that it still didn’t work with WordPress, he replied with this:

I‘m sorry I don’t have a solution for you, but apparently there are
other users with the same problem. If you google for “wordpress” and
“server accepts POST requests only” you will find a lot of pages
talking about this. Please keep me informed if you find a solution,
thanks!