Looking back on the ole Fozzolog, it seems to me that I often get around to posting some information only when something momentus has occured. Well, this time, I don't think that's the case. A lot of stuff has happened, but nothing momentus.

Score... score, kind of

On Thursday, Iodynamics presented a proposal to one of our clients to completely overhaul their website and received a big fat thumbs up from the company owner and others. That's cool. This will keep us busy for the next 10 weeks or so.

This company's current site was developed using PHP and MySQL by a guy over two years ago. Incidentally, I've had to work with this guy's code when we were both working on another project for a client in Salt Lake City - so I knew what kind of a programmer he is. I'm sure he's a nice guy - and I've only heard nice things about this guy as a person - but, gawd, his code is terrible to look at. It seems like he could not indent to save his life, for example. I hate it when source code isn't indented.

In any case, we're replacing that nasty MySQL and PHP stuff with a new site developed using Perl (Apache and mod_perl) and PostgreSQL - my favorite. :)

Also this last week, another client informed he would probably be turning over most of his development tasks to Iodynamics because they were either letting people go or people were resigning. So... that's good news, for us anyway.

Ice Age

I took Maya to see Ice Age today. We went to my parents' to visit for the day and while Christine and my mom went dress shopping, Maya and I went to the movies.

Ice Age is a fun show. The humor is witty and caters well to both children and adults alike. Being a computer graphics nut, I tried to pay attention to characteristics of the graphic rendering. There were parts that blew me away - moments where Sid the Sloth or Manfred the Mammoth looked more like furry stop-motion puppets like those you'd see in the endlessly repeated 70s-era Christmas TV specials like Rudolph The Red Noised Reindeer or Frosty The Snowman. Other things left me wanting more. Some of the water splash effects looked like something rendered by a home game console. The ice and fire also suffered (I thought) from this look as well.

The story was a classic story of man vs man and man vs himself - except, in this case, it's Manfred and Sid vs Diego and Diego vs himself. Underneath this, there was a lot of character development - more than you'd normally expect to see in a kid show. All of the main characters were interesting - which is more than I can say about the other recently-released computer animated feature, Monsters, Inc.. (Only Sully and Boo in Monsters, Inc. succeeded in winning my compassion and interest.) But, don't get me wrong, I would still put Monsters, Inc. higher on my list than Ice Age. I'm not sure why.

All in all, a fairly good show and not a waste of money to see in a theater - especially at a matinee or discount price.

Upcoming movie excitement

While at the theater to see Ice Age, I saw a trailer for the upcoming Scooby-Doo film coming out in June starring the voluptuous Sarah-Michelle Geller as Daphne (*pant pant*), Hackers and SLC Punk star Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, and a computer generated Scooby-Doo. It looks like it will be a fun show!

I also saw the newest trailer for Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones which has me stoked and hopeful there is truth in the rumors that Episode II will make up for the shortcomings of Episode I.

Should I do SEAL training?

A couple days ago, there was a story posted on Slashdot about the journals of this guy in New York City who signed up for a Navy SEAL PT course held for two weeks in Central Park. Partly out of boredom, I checked out the journal Peter kept during his first training course (he's done two to date) and was blown away. It sounds amazing.