My wife and I were one of the first fans in line last night to catch the opening showing of Superman Returns. With her working in the “biz” we don’t usually get too excited about new movies but we had to make an exception for Superman.

Bryan Singer created a nostalgic action motion picture viewed through the clarity of the Hubble Telescope.

Okay, I so don’t write movie reviews for a living but Superman Returns has got to have been one of the most highly anticipated movies for me this decade as I was anxious to see what Singer would do.

I knew Singer had a history of making comic’s come to life in the modern age such as with the X2 series but in the back of my mind I was worried he may go Tim Burton on all of us and create a Batman type flick.

For all you real Superman fans I am pleased to report Singer does not offer any homage to Richard Pryor (Superman III) or Jon Cryer (Superman IV) but picks up where Superman III should have.

Superman Returns does offer tribute to all the favorite things we had come to love with the first two Christopher Reeve / Richard Donner episodes such as watching him fight crime in the streets of Metropolis and this time saving the destruction of an airplane carrying a space shuttle on its back.

The only negative I had about this movie was the lack of creativity for Lex Luthors master plan of destruction. This is nothing against Kevin Spacey, who played a great Lex Luthor but Singer stuck to Donner’s original version of Superman a bit much and it would have been nice to have seen an original story here.

Then again Singer had his hands full selling us on the idea Lois Lane had become a mother to “someone’s” baby!

All in all, I felt Singer pulled it off and I look forward to the “Untitled Superman Returns Sequel” due out sometime in 2009.

Trailers for Superman Returns

Other Reviews and Blogs

J. Crew has plans to execute the biggest retail Initial Public Offering of recent years sometime this week. They plan to raise nearly $280 million with the IPO and shares are predicted to be at $15 to $17.

Erick Schonfeld of the Business 2.0 Blog write that this will be a big IPO and a “classic Peter Lynch play (invest where you shop).”

More Info

J. Crew ready to try on biggest retail IPO in years
J. Crews tidy turnaround story

Nearly 2 billion people live in regions of the world where there is very little water. Norway native Torfinn Johnsen has launched a new startup company, Albedo Technology International, which has developed a cutting edge fertilizer that can “boost the soils ability to reflect the sun, thereby reducing surface temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions, and the need for water by as much as 80 percent”.

1. A biomembrane made of water and organic waste is sprayed onto farmland.

2. The layer of pigmented fertilizer increases the soil’s ability to reflect solar energy.

3. With less sun absorbed, the land’s temperature cools and its water content increases.

For the past 6 months or so I have been using Google personalized homepage to display all my RSS feeds. It has a great interface as it displays the top three newest entries of the 28 blogs I read on my Google homepage.

Since I go to Google a million times a day for search having all the blog posts on this page is super convenient. It allows me to keep up with everything without having to add an additional layer.

But lately I’ve been noticing there seems to be a long delay between the time someone posts to their blog and me receiving this new update via my Google personalized homepage. I guess part of my obsessive compulsiveness I would like to be the first to know breaking news.

Because of the convenience of having all my blog feeds showing up on the main Google search page I was content with it being a bit slow but for the past 24 hours all my feeds were down for long periods of time and when they did reappear it was in spurts and the data was all muddled.

I am just wondering what other readers people are using to keep up with their blogs and how convenient these readers are?

The chemical bomb has a name, Mubtakkar, and according to the author of “The One Percent Doctrine”, Ron Suskind, the delivery system is a “widely available combination of chemicals-sodium cyanide, which is used as rat poison and metal cleanser, and hydrogen, which is everywhere. The combination of the two creates hydrogen cyanide, a colorless, highly volatile liquid that is soluble and stable in water”

Suskind continues on to elaborate in an exclusive Time Magazine Book Excerpt titled “The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda’s Plot to Attack the Subways”

It’s a canister with two interior containers: sodium cyanide is in one; a hydrogen product, like hydrochloric acid, in the other; and a fuse breaks the seal between them. The fuse can be activated remotely as bombs are triggered by cell phones-breaking the seal, creating the gas which is then released.

The Mubtakkar is a chemical device similar to Zyklon B which was used by the Nazis in the gas chambers of their concentration camps yet it can be designed in a cylinder about the size of a paint can.

Last week Times deputy Washington bureau chief, Mark Thompson asked Suskind “What possibly be gained by describing the mubtakkar device to the public?” with Suskind responding

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack. So there are plenty of people in the government who feel that this [method] is something that the American people ought to know about. If they know what it looks like, they might be able to spot it if they see it.

The excerpt provides some excellent information in the inner workings of al-Qaeda and Washington. My only concern after having read it I will never be able look at those paint cans sitting in my garage the same way again.

The MySpace topic I posted before got me thinking about the Internet and I started to think of this funny video by Comedy Central’s David Chappelle.

According to the Register a 14-year old girl was “sexually assaulted by someone she met through [MySpace]” and the mother of the girl is now suing them for $30,000,000.

The lawyer for the family is quoted as saying “MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online [and] we feel that one per cent of that is the bare minimum, that they should compensate the girl for their failure to protect her online when they knew sexual predators were on that site”.

Over the last decade we saw people suing McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants on the account that fast food was making their children obese. Now we can be sure to see over the next few years more reports similar to this MySpace case.

I am not a parent (yet) so I am sure my opinion could change but my first thought when hearing a case like this is, whom does the responsibility lie with?

I believe first and foremost the primary responsibility lies with the parents of the children but considering computers and internet access are readily available almost everywhere parents can not be expected to handle this all on their own.

MySpace is a global social network and has become a breeding ground for sexual predators and in order to offer a “family safe” community they would need to implement more stringent verification processes to prevent children from accessing the site. Until that time they must share in part of the responsibility.

Though speaking from experience as a one time child who figured out a way to hack into anything that said “no children allowed” I know there are limits to how childproof one can make things.

The real issue with this is a societal one and that most parents do not really have a thorough understanding of the Internet. I see so many kids sitting on their parents computers freely surfing around with no localized auditing or child safe prevention equipment protecting them.

As the resident Internet guru for most of my friends and families I would ask them if they would allow their children to freely run around downtown Los Angeles by themselves or Disneyland, a professional football game, a public beach, or a large outdoor flee market without them first telling them exactly where they were going.

As great parents they would not, but why do they let them do this on the Internet?

I would then inform them of all the things they could do to protect their children and control their surfing experience but after 20 seconds of talking I would see their eyes start to glaze over and give me a daunting look.

To get them to surf the Internet without the help of AOL was a triumphant task let alone asking them to install and manage some sort of firewall.

We are witnessing a major transition with our society and how the internet is becoming intertwined with our lives. My parents never spoke to me about “safe surfing” and what is and is not appropriate to share because back when I was a kid the Internet did not exist.

In the course of just 15 years the Internet has embed itself into almost everything we do and young parents must become aware very quickly as to the ramifications of their children carelessly surfing the internet.

Thing I am sure I would tell my children.

1. Never talk to strangers.
2. Don’t give out personal information on the internet.
3. Wear a rubber!

For a while now I’ve been wanting to share videos in my Blog but every time I went to copy the Embed code from YouTube my entire Blog displayed craziness.

Today I wanted to embed another video and finally took a few minutes to figure out what to do.

There are dozens of posts around the web with all these ideas on how to make it work and I found a real simple solution.

In SiteAdmin go to Users and turn off “Use the visual rich editor when writing” then go back to your post and past the Embed code provided by YouTube.

That should do it.

Update: March 24, 2007

I am now using version 2.1.2. Putting the videos is as easy as clicking on the Code tab while writing the post and pasting the YouTube or Google embed code. Although there are times when this is not 100%. Try clicking on the Users tab, find your user name and click on Edit. There is a “Your Profile Tab” and a box that say’s “Use the visual editor when writing”. Check this, and click “Update Profile”. This will allow you to turn off the Editor when typing writing posts. Only problem is you have to format your text in HTML, which becomes a pain. Like I mentioned, embed code in the code tab seems to work most of the time.

Update: September 01, 2007

If you followed everything on this page and your still having issues, I think I found a bug with certain browsers and WordPress Admin. I wrote a post about it here: Certain Things In Wordpress Admin Not Working? It Could Be Your Browser!

I just took part in the first SEO No Limit Texas Holdem Poker Tournament hosted by Quadszilla and it was very exciting for the few minutes I lasted.

There was a small group of us and the game took off fast. As reported on Quadszilla’s blog Dan from kloakit took the lead early and ended up winning the game against Jason Bailey.

It was my first time playing on Pacific Poker and I did not like the interface at all. I found it clunky and it took me a few minutes to figure out how to chat with the other players. I guess the developers thought most people don’t like chatting so they did not build a standard default chat module into the poker room.

In order to chat you had to first find the chat icon then click on it to execute a separate chat interface that floated over the other players. Lame!

Since we were all using handles for our names I was not sure whom I was competing against, but I believe it was Jason who took me out of the game early with a stunning full house, with kings over aces against my three of a kind, kings.

Congrats to Dan for winning and I look forward to playing again.