i guess this blog is kinda just for sharing whatever i think is something cool or interesting - and it don't get much cooler that this. them crooked vultures are basically a hard rock supergroup consisting of josh homme (from queens of the stonage), john paul jones (from led zeppelin) and dave grohl (from foo fighters/nirvana).
i'm a pretty massive foo fighters fan anyway and dave grohl on drums is pretty fuckawesome anytime. queens of the stoneage rock and led zeppelin... well i'll be honest i don't actually know much of their stuff yet but i'm giving it some more listens :)
so far most of the stuff the band have done has been really secretive. unlike most bands these days nothing has leaked online yet. they've done a few secret gigs so far (so there are a few bad quality videos on youtube) but bar that all we have are these videos.
they've also done this pretty cryptic google earth link that they post on their facebook/twitter pages every now and then. it zooms into where ever they are playing next before any venues have been accounced.
i'm pretty freaking excited to hear whatever these guys do and rumor has it they are supposed to be playing reading festival 2009 (which i also happen to be attending).
been a while since blogging, should hopefully pick up the pace again soon! so another film from a few of the ones i wanna see has now been seen.
going in i knew it was a pretty long film at 2hrs 45mins which is fine if the movie's good but i still would have liked a couple of trailers, but ho-hum nevermind. and if i'm gunna spend 2hrs 45mins watching someones film quentin's are generally a safe bet. i'd say i'm a big enough fan to watch whatever he makes. it's pretty unanimous that reservoir dogs and pulp fiction are great films and among the favourites among most of my friends and myself. jackie brown... meh it was ok i guess and got a little better towards the end. death proof i did kinda like mostly from the last 30mins. i quite liked kill bill though but i haven't seen it for a while but probably would have been better edited down to one really good film instead of two alright ones. but watching inglorious basterds it did feel kinda like kill bill in a few ways (probably just quentin's style of the 00s). the titles, chapters and i'm sure some of the music was actually from the kill bill soundtrack.
first of all the film feels like it's being really falsely advertised. watching the trailers and tv ad's it's not just a group of guys killing nazis. infact you really don't see alot of the basterds at work (which is kind of a shame 'cause i'd like to see that movie too). the problem is the people who see the trailer and want to see it will get something they weren't expecting and the people put off by the trailer may actually like the film.
the acting was all pretty great. brad pitt and the rest of the basterds were all pretty awesome. mike myers had a cool cameo. but the stand out was probably the rob bryden lookalike christoph waltz as lt. hans landa - the jew hunter. every scene with him was pretty awesome. he's kinda scary and funny but kinda likeable at the same time (for a jew killing nazi anyway, which can't be easy to pull off).
most of the scenes in the film did seem to follow the same pattern of building tension for as long as possible and build to a true taranino style stand off. obviously it's still pretty violent. its pretty gory in places and there's alot more humor than i thought there would be (which is always welcome). for some reason the film kind of reminded me of 'there will be blood' - although i'm not quite sure why yet. could be just from all the extended dialog scenes.
this week i made the update from windows vista to windows 7 on the work laptop and overall it does seem pretty good. who'd have thought windows vista could have been improved upon! i should note that i did the update option as opposed to a complete reformat, 'cause i'm lazy like that. the update process took about 4-5 hours but overall there seems to be a pretty good speed increase in booting up and shutting down (which kinda is expected as vista is pretty much the slowest operating system there is).
i've been using it now for a few days and it does seem a definite improvement (again not difficult coming from vista). since buying a macbook (for home) i'm pretty converted to mac os x and given the choice i'd much rather be running that, but from what i've seen it looked pretty complicated to get it installed on most normal pc's and i'm just not that bored enough to get into it that much. so for the time being windows 7 will have todo.
so being a mac user i do like the new windows 7 taskbar 'cause microsoft being microsoft has attempted to copy the mac os x dock. the new windows taskbar takes up much less space and just looks alot nicer. one feature that seems to have been left out is stacks (a mac os x feature) that allows folders placed in the dock to be opened so you can access more from one icon on your dock. there seem to be a few apps out there to get around this and the one i'm trying out is called standalonestack2 (catchy name i know). it's compatible with windows xp, vista and 7 so may be something you wanna check out anyway. for more info and to see it in action check this out.
another cool thing i noticed about the new taskbar is when your copying files it shows the progress bar in the background of the icon. so you can see when your files are done copying without having to minimise everything else.
another slightly changed feature is the "gadgets". basically they are little things you can add to your desktop to get in the way (like a clock, calendar, local weather, news headlines, etc). in windows vista these were limited to the left or right side of your screen but now you can just throw these anywhere on your desktop. it's a useful feature to have if you actually use them but still doesn't compare to the infinitely better mac os x dashboard.
another "big" feature added to windows 7 is the resizing of windows. if you want to compare two websites side-by-side you can just drag the window to the far left or right of the screen and it'll resize it to fit half the screen. once your done you just drag them back and they return to their previous size. kinda cool i guess.
given the few days i've been using windows 7 these seem to be the most noticeable and stand out features - so far anyway. i'm sure/hope there's more under the hood but it definitely seems a worthy update from vista (but then so was windows xp...). it really should be a free upgrade from vista but any way microsoft can make more money they will, and if they can confuse people with all their stupid different versions at the same time all the better. seriously, is anyone gunna make sense of this:
but i guess for the time being this is a free and worthy update from vista so i'd recommend doing it (especially if your already on vista, but maybe if your on xp too and fancy a change). obviously backup your shit first - just incase.
now here's a quick video on microsoft's innovation in windows vista :)
