Some More Short Ones

I have always been a fan of chocolate and I'm diggin' a new chocolate experience. I prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate so dark chocolate miniatures have always been a staple of my diet. But in the last year or so there has been a new trend in chocolate: super-dark varieties. You could always get super-dark varieties in specialty chocolate shops but I have never been to a specialty shop let alone bought chocolate from one. I've been to their websites but the expense always kept me away. Super-darks were never in local markets. Now they are. A few different companies have some 60% cocoa chocolates (the start of the super-darks) on the supermarket shelves now. The flavors vary by brand but they are all good. I even found chocolate chips made of the same chocolate but you get twice the amount for your money. If you are not attached to the bar form then go for the chips. My mom just gave me a bar of 72% cocoa and that is the darkest I've gone so far. I can't wait to try the 90%. Dig it.

I watched a couple of movies this week; the first being "Open Water" from 2003. I can't decide if I think it's good or not. It's a low budget movie about two people who get left behind in the open ocean after a scuba dive. Will anyone notice the mistake? Will any rescuers find them in time? Do they live? Do they die? What about all those sharks? Are they a strong enough couple to not be broken by this experience? These are all the questions the movie explores while the man and woman bob in the water. They have scuba gear that enables them to float so at least the don't have to tread water indefinitely. That leaves time for conversation. A flare gun would have ended the movie quickly though. I don't know anything about scuba diving but I'm going to start carrying a flare gun with me at all times thanks to movies like this. I'm not sure if I like this movie of not but, to its credit, it made me think about what I would do in that situation. I like movies that give me something to think about afterwards. But to its debit most of the movie was two people bobbing in the water and their conversation wasn't very interesting. My Diner With Andre it isn't. Strangely it is also classified as a horror film. It's not. It's more of a disaster film than a horror film. It has more in common with The Towering Inferno than The Exorcist. Just a small scale disaster film. Go watch it and you decide.

But whatever you do don't try to watch Boogeyman from 2005. I didn't make it through this one as it played on cable this Saturday morning. It is the story of a guy who was traumatized as a kid by the Boogeyman adultnapping his father. Now the guy is all grown up and afraid of closets. Closets! This movie's idea of a scare is to have the lead character stare at a closet door while "scary" music plays and he slowly moves towards the handle to open the door revealing... wait for it... nothing! There is never anything in the closet! Once he stepped into a closet and they shook the camera and jump cut some edits while the scary music played. Then our hero got a scratch from a coat hanger! Tough stuff there. I had to turn the movie off it was so dull. According to most reviewers at IMDB I missed nothing. Stay away.

I was messing with some video stuff on my computer today. I do that every once in a while not because I am a film maker but because I occasionally like to archive things. I like to shoot video every now and then but I hate to edit it. So it is only very occasionally I break out the video software. The last time was the highlights from the Giants Broncos game from October of last year. Why that game? Who knows? I just like to keep my video archive skills form getting too rusty. So now I want the highlights from the Giants Eagles game from last weekend. I had to dust off my skills and deal with some problems. I have a video capture box from Formac but the software is out of date and doesn't quite work right. I downloaded the new software but it wouldn't work because I needed an "eprom update". "What the hell is that?" you ask. Well so did I. The Formac website was no help and is a piece of crap. Luckily I found my answer on a computer video forum on a completely different site. Unluckily I found out that I would have to send my box back to Formac so they could put a whole new chip in it. All for $70 plus shipping to England! Yeah right. The forum also had some alternate shareware software I could use. Yay shareware! Boo Formac! And if you need video compression software for the Mac -FFMpegX- rocks! It makes big video small and is shareware. Dig it!

Ouch...the Giant's game gave me a headache!