Last night we finally saw The Manchurian Candidate starring one of my favorite actors Denzel Washington and Liev Schrieber (from Kate & Leopold and Sphere). I thought it was a really great thriller.

Basically Schrieber comes back from the first gulf war as a hero and receives the congressional medal of honor. This launches his political career, primarily driven by his mother (played wonderfully by Meryl Streep – who I usually can’t stand). But when Washington meets up with a guy from his platoon that is having the same bizarre dreams that he’s having he realizes there is something more to what happened to them than meets the eye.

I don’t want to say more than that, as I don’t want to give the plot away, which with all it’s twists is great. While there are a few surprises and the suspense is great you really can figure it out pretty easily. We did watch the original some months back, but honestly I can’t remember a lot about it so it’s hard to compare. Either way I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

Recently I got a pair of the new Sony noise canceling ear bud headphones, the MDR-NC11′s. I’ve tried several different types of noise canceling headphones over the years, from the Bose QuietComfort series to the cheaper Philips ones (which work great but are terribly uncomfortable). The reason I tried these new Sony’s is because they are very light and portable since they are ear bud headphones (vs. the big bulky Bose ones). At $160 they aren’t cheap but boy are they worth it.

After getting them I tried them at the office and was very pleased with the sound quality. It was hard to gauge noise canceling, as it’s not that loud in my office already, my main goal was to see if they were comfortable enough. At first they aren’t, mainly because the stick way down in your ear to block they noise (they have great passive noise canceling due to this, they are also active but that’s really hard to tell unless your on a plane, more on that soon). So I gave it a day or so to see and I finally got used to them. The main downside of this type of headphone is not only are they a bit uncomfortable (again I got over that), you can hear every sound your mouth makes. Forget talking with them in, you’ll feel like your screaming your head off even if you’re whispering. Eating is impossible too, as you’ll sound like your chomping like crazy!

Those negatives aside these babies are awesome. They passive noise canceling (the fact that they simply block out sound do to blocking the ear canal) combined with the active electronics is really amazing. Recently my wife and I took a flight and right when we got on a young child (about 2-3 years old), the bane of air travel, started screaming his head off. He was on the other side of the plane, one row up. It was terrible. After we took off he stopped screaming (finally). I then put in the earbuds and turned on some music for the duration of the flight. It was nice and quite, and with the active noise canceling turned on my music was crystal clear and plenty loud (I had major volume issues with the cheaper Philips ones). As we landed I turned off the music but I left the active canceling on for landing (just to have quiet). I was very pleased with them and decided to keep them (I still had 3 days if I wanted to return them). The clincher was when we got off the flight and my wife said the kid in the rows near us was screaming the entire last hour of the flight. I heard nothing! Nothing! Sold! If these babies can silence a screaming kid they are worth their weight in gold to me!

Last nigh we watched Envy with Ben Stiller and Jack Black. While it had some funny parts it would be hard to recommend it…

We didn’t rent it, it just happened to be on the HD HBO channel and we were tired so we figured why not. Honestly I probably wouldn’t have even watched it if it hadn’t been in HD. Basically Ben Stillers best friend, Jack Black, is a dreamer who is always coming up with ideas for inventions. He finally hits it big with his invention of VaPooRize – a product that when sprayed on dog poo (or any poo for that matter) makes it disappear instantly. Stiller thinks he’s crazy and decides not to invest $2,000 in the idea, but when he sees that Black’s invention works he’s overwhelmed with envy when Black becomes ridiculously rich.

There are some funny parts in it, and Christopher Walken’s character is just great, it would still be hard to recommend it. If it’s on the HD channel, your tired, and have nothing better to do it might be worth watching, then again maybe not…

Yesterday we watched House of Flying Daggers and it was great. It wasn’t quite as good as Hero, and not nearly as good as one of my all-time favorite movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but it was very well done.

The martial arts are great, Ziyi Zhang (also from Crouching Tiger and Rush Hour 2) is a great actress and even better martial arts fighter. The best thing about House of Flying Daggers is the story, which is much richer that Hero (but not as powerful as Crouching Tiger). Liek Crouching Tiger it’s basically a love story, with some great plot twists (I won’t give those away for you!).

So if you’re in the mood for some great martial arts with some great acting and plot then you’ll like House of Flying Daggers. Like most great martial arts films it’s subtitled, but like most great subtitled films you forget about them quickly. Highly recommended.

So last night we watched Napoleon Dynamite. We turned it off. It wasn’t that it was really that bad, it just wasn’t any good, it was just totally boring. Now in fairness I was really tired but it was just so not good that it wasn’t worth spending an hour and a half watching it…

Basically it’s a story about a family of ultra-dorks. I’m mean t-total ultra-dorks. It stars Jon Heder (basically unknown before this but I’m guessing from this he has several movies in the works) as the lead ultra-dork named Napoleon Dynamite. I really can’t go much further than that as we didn’t watch much of it… It’s from writer/director Jared Hess (who’s only directed one other film) so I’m guessing this is just a new director who hasn’t yet figured it all out.

So I’m not sure I would recommend against this one, as I know a few people who’s opinion that I generally trust that loved it, but I can’t say I’d say it’s good. I also was really looking forward to it, so generally it’s a really bad sign when I turn something like that off…

Well I’m going through the first merger I’ve ever been directly associated with. As I pointed out in a previous post the project I founded, Jinzora, is merging with our biggest “competitor” Netjuke (competitor is the wrong word as we are all open source, but keeping with the M&A discussion I’ll use those kind of terms…)

Aside from what I assume are the normal merger issues (different personalities, different ideas, different ways of doing things) I think a merger in the open space world is a bit different. The reason I think this is that almost everyone working on an open source project is doing it because they are passionate about it. Since you’re not getting paid the enjoyment of coding the project is the main motivation. I’d guess that in the traditional world that in a merger the top guys are the ones passionate about it, but the lowly workers really don’t care nearly as much (someone correct me if I’m wrong here). In open source that’s just not the case.

So my biggest challenge with this new project is how to now manage a team of 5 when we were a team of 2. How do I manage 5 people who are all very passionate (and I assume very opinionated) about how this should work? Well I don’t have the answer yet, I’m definitely in uncharted territory for me, and I’m guess pretty new waters in general. On April fools Gallery and Coppermine (two big photo gallery projects) announced a merger. It was a hoax. This isn’t. What the hell do we do next?

Well, hopefully I can keep everyone on the same page, keep egos from getting bruised (including mine), and move forward building the most amazing open source app anywhere. Yeah it’s a lofty goal, but I think we did a great job with Jinzora 2.0 and that we’ll all do a great job with Product 3.0 (yeah, we don’t know what to call it yet, something I’m sure all M&A processes go through).