6 Nov 2005 esteve   » (Journeyer)

/me disguises as Roger Ebert

Clint Eastwood meets Han Solo

I saw Serenity last week and man, it is a-w-e-s-o-m-e. Plenty of laughs, good action and a compelling story. I've never watched Firefly (it hasn't arrived to Spain yet and I fear it will never do...), so I knew little about the story.

I was very surprised, since you won't need to know every minor piece of Firefly to understand Serenity. The ending is quite well thought:

<spoiler>

the idea that aggressiveness is a fundamental part of human nature is a very disturbing point, because it is true (at least, in part). What defines us as humans is that we can channelize it to good purposes (such as trying to defy our own limits)

</spoiler>

I'm quite reluctant to watch what most people call sci-fi (Matrix, Starwars, etc.) so I wasn't really convinced if I would enjoy Serenity, but I was wrong. I love slow paced sci-fi movies. I don't believe that sci-fi is all about laser shooting starships, but about the social impact of believable technology (I'm one of those who prefer Gattaca over Matrix).

Good idea, bad implementation

Corpse bride by Tim Burton gave me mixed feelings. The story behind it is quite funny, but the screenplay is irregular. Sometimes it was boring and sometimes funny.

/me takes off Roger Ebert disguise

Talks

I finally gave my presentation on Rails & AJAX in Hackmeeting 05. The speech that served as a basis for my (bad) jokes can be downloaded from here It is a Theora/Vorbis encoded video.

There's something funny about this, I wrote the application for the presentation in a couple of hours and, by the way, learnt about some minor aspects of Rails that I wasn't aware. "Every work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch" by ESR is completely true :) You can mail me if you want the source code (it has some AJAX tidbits, such as a live search).

fxn asked me if I was willing to give that speech at his class at UB, and I have accepted. It's somewhat frightening, since the public will be composed of ex-classmates :P

Plus, there's some guy at UC3M LUG (Felipe Talavera) who will give a talk based on my work about the same topic. It's nice when people find your work useful and want to reuse it :)

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