Last night I had one of the more interesting experiences of my adult life, Melanie and I had dinner with a friend I met through Jinzora about a year and a half ago, Wim and his significant other Jacqueline. You see, the interesting thing here is they are from a small village in Holland and this is their first trip to the United States.

Wim found Jinzora about 18 months ago and started giving me great feedback. He’s been VERY helpful and is also the #3 poster on our forums (third only to Ben and I). He has almost 4 times as many posts as the next closet poster and has been hugely helpful to our user community and deserves a huge thanks. He really is a big part of the success that we’ve had with Jinzora. As a very small token of our appreciation last night I gave him the first (and only so far) Jinzora branded baseball cap! We also let some of the donations we’ve received from Jinzora pay for dinner for the four of us .

So we didn’t really know what to expect from Wim and Jacqueline (as I’m sure they didn’t know about us either). While we’ve communicated a good deal in email and our forums we didn’t really know each other, not really. Well that wasn’t an issue at all, we all got along great and didn’t stop talking for nearly 4 hours! Hell, we even ran two different couples off that sat at the table next to us!! We talked about everything from Cheesecake (they had never had it before and since we went to The Cheesecake Factory we insisted they try some – and they loved it) to differences in healthcare, driving, technology – pretty much the whole range. It really was a great evening, and is something I will never forget. They came here to visit a lot of our national parks, with the main goal to see Yellowstone. We help a bit by sending them a list of the parks that we’ve visited so they’d know what to see (and what to skip). They have almost 4 weeks here (damn Europeans with all their vacation time!) so they have plenty of time to see the west. They have no real agenda, and haven’t even made any hotel reservations, rather planning on finding something wherever they land. Sounds great to me!!!

We also talked a lot about how small technology is making the world, that we can easily use IM, Skype, and email to communicate free and virtually instantly anytime, anywhere. The only thing we need to think about is the time difference, it really is that simple. When I started Jinzora I had no idea I’d make friends like Wim, let alone actually get to meet one! What a small, small world we really do live in, and I for one thing it’s great!

Last night we saw Frank Miller’s Sin City. Apparently we saw a VERY different movie from all the critics and everyone else because we pretty much hated it.

So if we hated it why even give it a 5/10? Mainly Robert Rodriguez. The look of Sin City is amazing, you really have never seen anything like it. In that sense it reminded me a lot of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (another film that we didn’t really care for). Basically we thought the movie was awful, the acting terrible. Some of the dialog was great (just some) but most of it stunk too. The look of the film really is great, it really does feel like a comic book has come to life (much more so than other comic book movies which really are real life movies based on comics). This movie IS a comic book, and that is very cool.

Again I guess we just didn’t get it or saw a different version of the movie. If you know what we missed please let us know. Basically the plot (or plots) are all over the place. It’s similar to other large ensemble casts like Grand Canyon and Love Actually (although is obviously nothing like those). The thing that made those two films great (or at least really good) is that everything between all the apparently dis-separate groups of characters is that in the end they all tie together wonderfully and you see how they are all related. While they eventually do get tied together in Sin City it’s in a very hap-hazard way that isn’t fluid or believable at all. It just very matter-of-a-fact at the end, like “ok, I guess we’ll tie them together now”.

Ok, so the saving grace could have been the cast, right? Wrong. With a huge cast with the likes of Bruce Willis, Elijah Wood (a surprisingly dark role for him), Mickey Rourke, Brittany Murphy, Michael Madsen, Rutger Hauer, Josh Hartnett, Benicio Del Toro, Powers Boothe, and Jessica Alba you’d think there’d be something redeming with the film, right? Wrong. This once again proves that a lot of big stars does not make a great (or even decent) movie. So what about the plot? Well it’s one of the most brutal movies I’ve ever seen. No, it’s not Kill Bill bloody, but it’s pretty violent. That usually doesn’t bother me, like in Kill Bill where it adds to the film, but here it was just blood for the sake of blood.

Basically the plot is like watching 3 or 4 comics back to back. They are very disconnected and they are just slammed together with no smooth transitions between them. All of a sudden the entire movie shifts into something else and you have no idea why or where it’s going. “What happened to him?”, “What is this now?”, “Where did that go?” were frequent thoughts during the movie. Now I like thinking during a movie, but not a movie like this.

Ok, enough, you get it we hated it. Tell us what we missed. Tell us why we should have liked it. We don’t get what everyone else saw. My recommendation – avoid at ALL COSTS!

Well we finally released the next version of Jinzora, Jinzora 2.2. We’d be waiting for a bit to release it on Jinzora’s 2nd birthday which was yesterday…

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been hacking on Jinzora for 2 years now. It’s been a lot of fun along the way and I’ve certainly learned a lot. I’ve not only learned a lot of PHP/MySQL/HTML/coding in general but I’ve learned a ton about general project management – specifically from the development/product side.

There’s been one other unexpected side affect of all this. All the amazing people I’ve met all over the world. This I was not expecting. I’ve heard from people on every continent (expect Antarctica) and it over 80 different countries. Amazingly enough on friend I’ve made, Wim Hager from the Netherlands, is actually coming to Denver next week on vacation and we’re getting together for dinner! This is just amazing to me, that I’ll get to have dinner with someone from the Netherlands thanks to Jinzora. Amazing.

So back to Jinzora 2.2. There are several big things in this release, for all the details see the full Jinzora Changelog. Most notably there are a few critical security fixes – all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this release immediately.

So today I’m beginning the bragging toys section of my blog. Ok, so in all seriousness what I’m planning is a “Toys” section of my blog so others can see what I’m playing with. When I thought about what I do/know different/better than others its all the toys I’m lucky enough to play with. What better toy to start off with than a Plasma display.

So about 6 months ago I made the jump to Plasma. If you don’t know I’m a HUGE home theatre buff (yes I’m very lucky that my wife LOVES our home theatre too and let’s me spend all this money!). We just love movies but haven’t been out to the movies in about 3 years thanks to our home theatre. People often think I’m crazy that I don’t go to movies and wait for them to come to DVD (no, I haven’t seen Episode III yet). Then they come over and watch a movie, or a short demo from something (the pod race scene in Episode I is awesome). Then they get it. It only takes about 10 seconds and they get it. Then they realize I have many things a movie theatre doesn’t: pause button, bathroom, beer, reclining leather sofas, stadium seating, my dogs, pause button (I mentioned that one, right?). They also realize that the picture and sound are far better than pretty much any main stream movie theatre.

Ok, so enough ranting about my home theatre is better. Did I also mention that I’m a snob about it? The ONLY true home theatre is front projection. Period. No big screen, no plasma, sorry, that just doesn’t cut it. Ok, but this post is on my plasma which is really in my bedroom. It is NOT for home theatre. We got it for a few reasons, but the biggest was that it’s 3 inches thick. It is amazing the amount of space it gives back to the room.

On to the picture. I’m sure if you’re reading this you’ve seen High Definition programming on a plasma somewhere. It’s amazing. You know that. What you might be wondering is about Plasma vs. LCD, HD vs. ED, connectors, formats, etc. There is a TON to know before getting one. DO NOT go to Costco and just buy one, you will probably regret it. Learn about them, read, study, and if you can’t do that ask someone who knows (feel free to ask me). Soon I’ll write some posts about connectors, formats, LCD vs. Plasma, HD vs. ED, etc to help you out some. As I said I really just wanted to start my Toys section off right.

One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with a lot of new, cool technology. A few months ago Brad wanted to try out the new generation of Tablet PC’s so we got the Compaq TC4200 which I didn’t like at all and predicted that Brad would hate. Well he didn’t, but he didn’t really love it either. But once IBM announced the X41 Tablet he wanted one as quickly as possible.

If you don’t know I’m a HUGE fan of IBM laptops. I have a IBM T40 that I’ve had for a while and I love it. It is by far the best laptop I have ever used in my 10 year career. So when IBM announced the X41 Tablet (and Brad said he wanted one) I was looking forward to playing with it. It did not disappoint.

So rather than do a big long review (there are plenty out there) I’ll just give you a quick good and bad on it.

Good

• Super bright screen
• That great IBM keyboard
• Very thin/light
• Excellent tracking of the pen
• Powerful: 1.5 GHz, 1 GB Ram, 60 GB HD, a/b/g wireless, bluetooth
• Strong screen pivot hinge

Bad

• No ctrl-alt-del button in tablet mode (not that I can find)
• Small keyboard (I’m NOT a fan of ultra-portables but this is a good one as far as they go)
• No Volume keys in tablet mode (they are hidden)
• A bit heavy in tablet mode

Again this is just a quick and dirty review. If you’re new to Tablet PC’s do some research before taking the plunge. Personally I would never go for one, mainly due to the screen resolution (my T40 is 1400×1050 – as low as I’m willing to go on a laptop – the X41 is only 1024×768). If you need a ultra-portable laptop that could double as a tablet then this is probably the one for you. It blows the Compaq 4200 away and if you listen to the reviews blows ALL Tablet PC’s away (at least the laptop convertables). While I still think that Tablet PC’s fill a very specific niche and aren’t really useful for everyone this one is a great cross-over product.

So Melanie and I are on flying back from Portland as I write this. We’ve been thinking a lot lately about where our next home would be and we’ve kicked around Portland quite a bit. Melanie had been to Portland before but not I.

I distinctly remember riding to the rental car pavilion on my first trip to Denver. Seeing the Rockies for the first time is an amazing thing, something I’d guess that most people don’t soon forget. I won’t. I was amazed by them and knew right away that Denver was going to be home. While there wasn’t any one thing in Portland that was that amazing right off the bat (Mt. Hood is amazing when you can see it – I had no idea it would *feel* so huge) I knew Portland would be our new home. We recently went to Bosie, Idaho to give it a try and conversely I knew pretty much right away it wasn’t going to be our new home…

Why Portland? Well if you’ve been there you know, it’s beautiful. I had no idea it was going to be so green and forested, at times I thought I was in Hawaii! Ok, maybe it’s not that lush but it’s pretty close. You’ve got mountains (granted they aren’t the Rockies but they are really beautiful), you’ve got the city and culture, and you’ve got the best part, the coast. Since I’m from the South (the Atlanta, GA area) I’m used to the beach being within driving distance. I’m used to the pretty sandy beaches of the east coast where you actually get in the water. I’ve never seen northern beaches (not on either coast) and never really understood what makes them so great. I understand now. They are just geourgous. You really have to be there to appreciate it. Needless to say I can wait to spend countless hours walking, lying, relaxing, and most importantly playing with Sierra and Ellie (our dogs) on them!

While we’re not sure when yet (it’s 99% that’s its only a matter of when) we can’t wait to move there. So if you know something about Portland that we need to know please let us know, we’d really appreciate it.