I forgot to write a "Movies This Week" last week, so I'm writing for the last two weeks. This fortnight I watched Deja Vu (3.5/5), Ghost Rider (1.5/5), The Last Kiss (2.5/5), Evan Almighty (4/5), and Flags of Our Fathers (4/5). Here are my impressions.
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Movies This Week (6/29)

One of the best features of Ruby on Rails is the ability to interact with database tables as objects using ActiveRecord. Sometimes documentation can be a bit spotty, but after searching for a little bit it's not hard to find the mapping from Rails Migration types to MySQL data types. I did find it more difficult to find out what happens if I already have an existing MySQL table. What Ruby class gets created with what MySQL column type? I didn't find it on the web, so I put together this list…
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MySQL and Ruby on Rails datatypes

This week I watched Hot Fuzz (4.5/5), Slither (2.5/5), An Unreasonable Man (3.5/5), and Match Point (2/5). Here are my impressions.
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Movies This Week (6/15)

I spent the last couple weeks playing Jade Empire: Special Edition. Often, I find that once I get to a certain pointwhile playing a game, I just can't go any further. It's not that I don't want to finish or that I'm bored of the game, it's just that I lose motivation.This happened to me for Neverwinter Nights 2, I got past Act II, but I can't bring myself to load up the game to keep going to finish Act III. I don't know why, I'm just tired of it. Jade Empire was well designed in that the later chapters move quickly so you feel like you're rapidly making progress.

I enjoyed the environment that Jade Empire presented, although some of the characters are a bit weird and Drunken Master style actually relies on the martial artist imbibing alcohol. I wrote up a full review on Fanpop that you might like to read if you're interested in Jade Empire.

This week I found myself going through a lot of movies having watched Date Movie (0.5/5) , Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (4/5), The Sweet Hereafter (3.5/5), Firewall (2.5/5), Jarhead (4.5/5), Apocalypto (3/5), and Art School Confidential (3/5). Here are my thoughts…
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Movies This Week (6/8)

With the help of Papa's friend Jason, we rolled out a little flash widget that can be embedded in just about any blog, journal, profile, or webpage to help spread the word about picks (a highly visual and fun version of polls). Here's what it looks like:

So, I've been watching (of and on) A Lyon in the Kitchen, a new cooking show on Discovery Health. I began watching because I received some promo material a few months ago and watched a few of the show clips and wrote up a brief article on Cooking For Engineers. His shows are nothing special when it comes to cooking shows, except for the fact that he spends about 45 seconds at the begining of each show visiting a source for one of his ingredients - a mushroom farm, cheese market, beet farm, etc. I had a real problem watching the Grilled Halibut and Provincial Bread Salsa episode. He starts off visiting an olive oil producer and the on screen tip tells us to eat olive oil because it contains "monosaturated" fat. Okay, it's just a typo, and it's probably someone else's fault they he's got "monosaturated" instead of "monounsaturated" on the screen. Then he come back to the kitchen to demonstrate how to make what he called a "Provincial" Bread Salsa. I'm thinking, what does he mean by "provincial"? Does he mean from a local or rural dish? Or does he mean provençal (which is of course spelled differently and pronounced differently - [PRO-von-sawl])? He then explains that the dish is an homage to the Provence-style of Italy. So, he does mean provençal. My next problem is that Provence is French! Maybe that's why his show is on Discovery Health… and that would also explain why no one caught these fairly big mistakes that occurred in the first five minutes of this show. For all the faults of Food Network, I think someone would have pointed out that this wasn't quite right.

I think I can stop recording his show on my DVR.

This week I watched Casino Royale (4.5/5), Tristan and Isolde (2.5/5), and Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End (Pirates 3) (2/5). Here's what I thought…
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Movies This Week (6/1)

Through random clicking, I found JayIsGames and on JayIsGames I found a fun little game called Hoshi Saga. The objective of Hoshi Saga is always the same: display a five pointed star on the screen. How you go about it is very different for each of the 35 levels. 25 levels are available for play with 10 levels that are revealed, one at a time, whenever you complete a row or column of these simple yet satisfying puzzles. It's best not to say too much about the puzzles, but I will provide the hint that you should try everything - clicking, dragging, swirling your mouse, etc. Sometimes there will be visual clues, sometimes not. But all of them are pretty much solvable.