neongreen.com

I finally added a contact form here. I decided to use a WordPress plugin by Dagon Design for reasons that I can’t remember right now. I wanted to use Ryan Duff’s contact form, but his site has been down for months. Not sure what’s going on with that.

If there’s a better contact form for WordPress that I should be using, let me know. If you just want to say hi, try it out.

In other news, my sleep schedule is totally jacked. Last night I stayed up until after 4am working on my new photography website that I hope to launch this weekend. I ended up sleeping until 1pm.

Now that I’m self employed, I’m finding that I do my best work after dark. When the sun is out I’m way too ADD, so I use that time to email, network, run errands, ride my bike, etc. I don’t know what I’ll do if I have a morning meeting, but I think it’s best if I get back to a somewhat normal schedule.

I was totally going to post about how eating grapes while drinking wine makes me think about eating meat while drinking blood, but I have something much more exciting to report:

Blog Of The Day over at City Pages, beotches!

Cracked magazine put up a list of The 20 Worst Cover Songs in Pop Music History. An interesting list, but I don’t think everything on the list is really that bad.

Even though I’ll occasionally admit to liking Celine Dion, her version of “You Shook Me All Night Long” is embarrassing, but the most shocking song on the list is Duran Duran covering “911 Is A Joke” (found on page 4 with audio!).

Today, after months of anticipation, I finally saw 300.

I was severely disappointed.

It’s an adaptation of a graphic novel, so I didn’t expect much depth, but there was virtually no character development and was like watching a sequence of cut scenes from a really good video game.

I was so bored after the first hour that I almost left. I’m glad I stayed to see the ending, because one of the final shots is as beautiful as any I’ve seen in a film, but overall, I found myself regretting the time and money I lost seeing this movie.

I did appreciate the production quality of the film, with the exception of the heavy metal battle music and Xerxes’ voice, which sounded cheesy and overly processed. Other than that, the set design, costuming, cinematography, and audio was all very good.

I’ve cooled down since I left the theater, but my immediate review to a friend was this:

Total garbage bullsh*t. Visually great, acted marginally well, but thought it was as throw-away as any episode of Too Close For Comfort.

Rating: 5.5/10

Now that it’s getting nice out, I’m excited to get back out on my bike. I didn’t ride it much last year, but am determined to get out on it a lot this spring and summer.

I’ve been looking for new mountain bike tires that are better on paved roads and paths than my regular knobby tires and I think I finally found them.

What I like about the Specialized Armadillo tire is that it has a smooth center tread section for a faster ride on pavement and side knobs for extra traction when turning. Plus, the “Armadillo” armored casing seems like a good idea to resist punctures from broken glass, etc.

Is it too early to get in line for free coffee?

How sweet is it that NBC offers full episodes of several of its shows online…for FREE?! This is great news for me now that I’m obsessed with 30 Rock.

There’s a small catch. The episodes can only be viewed in 20%-30% chunks at a time, with a commercial thrown in at the start of each clip. I thought it would be annoying, but it’s really not a bad way to watch shows.

Now if HBO would follow NBC’s lead, I could cancel cable all together.

Wow! I was really surprised to see that RottenTomatoes.com has the new Jim Carey movie, The Number 23, coming in with only 9% positive reviews. Or am I? I’m not sure.

“Gimmicky numerology plus Jim Carrey minus narrative coherence equals The Number 23.” – Justin Chang, Variety

I definitely wasn’t planning on running out to see this film, but the trailer didn’t look that bad.