The International

I recently rented The International, starring Clive Owen. Owen portrays an Interpol agent trying to take down an international banking institution suspected of dealing in weapons.

The International is an action movie and over all I enjoyed it. I've only seen Clive Owen in a few things, but what I have seen of his work I've admired. Actually, the first time I saw Owen was in a video game for the PC -- a spin-off of the Wing Commander series called Privateer or the like.

The action scenes were enjoyable -- important for an action movie -- and as I indicated above Owen did well in his role.

One puzzling thing in the movie, though, had to do with a dead bird. I don't think it will really spoil anything, so I'll just say I got the implication that the bad guys killed the bird but I don't understand why they did so. It sort of revealed their presence to an already paranoid Owen. If it was accidental, then what caused the avian's demise? Odd.

In the blue-ray version they included a deleted scene with Owen's daughter -- the daughter character was completely absent in the final version of the movie. It makes me wonder whether the actress still gets paid (probably), whether it's appropriate for her to include The International on her curriculum vitae (probably), or whether she was listed in the credits? I forgot to check the latter by the time the credits rolled around. Oh, well.

Anywhoo, The International deserves 3.5 out of 5 stars (I originally was going to give The International 3 stars, but as I enjoyed it more than The Hurt Locker I bumped it up to 3.5).

The Hurt Locker

I rented The Hurt Locker recently, and I thought it was a good, but not great, movie.

The Hurt Locker was a character study more than anything else. The movie felt very static with no real plot and no character development.

Many scenes were interesting, but others I found pointedly unbelievable; the latter surely a detriment for a supposedly realistic portrayal of soldiers in Iraq. I thought it absurd that a 3-man bomb squad would be left with no support in the midst of hostile territory on a regular basis.

Who knows, maybe it really does happen that way and I'm ignorant of some tactical or strategic benefit to doing so. Regardless, until I learn otherwise I'm attributing it to artistic license.

I give The Hurt Locker 3 out of 5 stars.

Bicycle + Trailer + Me = Ouch

On the walk home, today, I was hit by a bicycle trailer -- one of those chariot thingies pulled by a bicycle that sit a baby or toddler inside. Luckily no one was seriously injured, though the toddler was definitely crying up a storm.

I'm not sure what the cyclist was thinking. First, he was riding on the sidewalk, coming towards me. Second, he was traveling at a fairly good clip despite heading up hill. Third, that sidewalk is narrow. There's barely enough room for two pedestrians to pass, let alone a bicycle pulling a trailer. On one side there's a low retaining wall, the other is busy traffic where merely sticking an elbow out over the road brings fear of getting hit by a car mirror.

Anywhoo, I stopped, the cyclist didn't. He inched too close to his right and the chariot's wheel bounced off the retaining wall, the impact tipping the entire chariot on its opposite side where it promptly slammed in to my shins.

I couldn't help but think, as the cyclist quickly righted himself and sped away, that if the cyclist is going to ride like that then his helpless passenger deserves to wear a helmet, too.

My Credit Card Cancelled

Earlier today I was surprised to receive an automated telephone call informing me my credit card had been cancelled due to potential fraud.

When I later phoned customer service I was informed that one of the stores I shopped at had been hacked; as a precaution my credit card was cancelled even though there didn't appear to be any fraudulent charges.

My only worry right now is that some of my bills are paid via automatic charges to my now cancelled credit card. I hope I receive my new card before any of those bills come due.

I also wish they would tell me which store had been hacked. I asked, but apparently that information is considered confidential. Go figure. I guess they're worried that if customers were told then vendors would be less likely to report problems such as this for fear of losing business.

Today's incident felt slightly surreal through out because just this morning I read an article on cbc.ca regarding the vast majority of retailers failing to wipe debit card, credit card, and PIN numbers from their point-of-sale terminals, as they are supposed to do.

Thieves skim customer data from debit terminals

Merchants not vigilant about wiping point-of-sale machines clean

"[...] Thieves are accessing personal financial information using the old-fashioned smash-and-grab method, but what they're grabbing are point-of-sale terminals, not merchandise.

CBC-TV's Marketplace has learned that many retailers are not helping the situation because they leave valuable information on the terminals where customers swipe their debit and credit cards when paying for purchases instead of wiping the data each night as they're supposed to.

It's the equivalent of leaving the store vault open and full of cash, except the cash is credit and debit card data, said RCMP Det. John Koppes of Abbotsford, B.C., who is the Mounties' computer crime specialist. [...]" --Read more at cbc.ca

This is Just Wrong

Hep C sufferers endangering health to get treatment

B.C., Ont. won't cover antiviral drugs without liver damage, so patients binge drink

Health-care workers who treat hepatitis C are raising the alarm about patients who are binge drinking and taking dangerous herbal concoctions to try to inflame their own livers in a desperate bid to get provincial governments to pay for their medication.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/03/02/bc-hepcbinging.html#ixzz0h9zosnHT

Firefox versus Chrome

Mozilla Firefox has been my browser of choice for many years, now. Unfortunately, consistent and frequent hanging issues in the past couple years have made me wish for another alternative to Internet Explorer.

I recently tested Google Chrome and liked it, but a couple issues make me reluctant (at least for now) to completely switch over.

First, Firefox offers better control over cookies. In comparison, Chrome's cookie controls are too all or none in nature. Second and more importantly, I've grown accustomed to the Firefox add-on NoScript. It's amazing how well it cleans up webpages of all the stuff I have no interest in seeing -- or if I do, then it's quick and simple to remedy. Chrome, as far as I can determine, doesn't have an extension of similar utility not because no one has produced one but because Chrome's design and/or infrastructure doesn't make such an extension possible.

Oh well. Back to my hanging Firefox, rebooting, hanging Firefox, rebooting... ad nauseum.

Formatting a Large HDD to FAT32

When I used to format HDDs or USB drives I never really thought about the different options available, like NTFS, FAT or FAT32. As long as it worked, right? And they all did.

Though there have been times when a USB drive wasn't recognized for no discernible reason, I attributed these instances to cheap USB drives. It wasn't until recently when my PS3 wouldn't recognize a USB drive that I gained enough motivation to investigate.

Turns out the PS3 will only recognize FAT32-formatted disks. It also turns out that FAT32 is format that's pretty much universally recognized by various O/S.

Unfortunately, while Windows Vista will recognize HDDs of any size formatted as FAT32, Vista itself will not -- by design -- format anything larger than 32GB as FAT32. Eh?

I think that deserves another, emphatic eh?! Especially as HDDs these days are much, much, much larger than 32GB, and I don't really want to partition a 1-2TB HDD 30-60 times.

FAT32 does have limitations, however, which is at least in part why Microsoft prefers formatting HDDs via NTFS. FAT32 is only useful for up to 2TB, I gather, and individual files can't be larger than 4GB.

I hope there are other technical issues that contributed to Microsoft's decision to not allow formatting anything larger than 32GB in FAT32, though frankly I can't be bothered to find out if there are.

All I wanted to do was format a 500GB external HDD via FAT32.

The first potential solution I found was appealing and simple. In Vista, open the DOS/command window as an adminstrator, format /FS:FAT32 x: Although this appeared to work at first ultimately an error message came up stating the drive was too big.

The second and successful solution I discovered was utilizing a little FAT32 format routine (free!) from Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd.. A simple matter of putting the exe file on my computer and running it (fat32format x:) from the command/DOS window allowed me to format my 500GB as FAT32 in a single partition.

Anywhoo, apparently I can now hook up my FAT32-formatted external 500GB HDD to my PS3 via USB for increased storage space, or do a complete backup of my PS3 should I so desire.

Oh yeah, I'm sure everyone is already aware of this but, in the interest of preventing a nasty surprise, I feel compelled to unnecessarily remind anyone reading this post that formatting a disk will wipe the HDD clean of any data or files. Backup as appropriate.