I was invited to an advanced screening of Twilight’s sequel, New Moon.

I went.

I’ll admit it, and I’ll qualify it. Those of you who know me, and now those of you who do not, will be clear on one thing with me; If I’m going to truly build an argument toward or against a point, it is imperative to study, witness, or experience what you’re getting in to. Though, anyone could argue “why do you care to argue about Twilight?”, my response is simple; I’ve been building a case with the distortion of society through my blogs and coffee shop chatter for ages, now that there’s a tangible means to use as an example that people can relate to, and are paying attention to; it can now be used as a point of reference that people will get if they look at it.

First off, the sequel had better character development and story outlining than the first Twilight movie, and fans of the storyline will truly enjoy the experience more than the first, I’m sure. Yes – I saw the first one as well, see the above paragraph.

I can understand the appeal of this story, and though I thankfully can’t relate to the ideology or character traits of anyone in the film; it was well done, and decently executed none the less.

I urge Twilight fans, especially impressionable younger females to continue reading this next segment, regardless of how much you feel it takes away from the stories you love and cherish. (Yes, I hint at spoilers, but for true fans – you already know what happens.. You read the book(s))

The Problem with Bella

The female love interest in the movie has the wrong idea about relationship, and has little to no bearing on life, or independence. She is displayed as not only horribly weak, but completely codependent on “a lover”. She needs someone in her life to make her naturally incomplete and (blatantly referenced) empty “soul” be filled by a companion.

She continues through the New Moon like some completely hopeless and utterly helpless lost soul, depressed for months, acting like an obsessive compulsive internet and phone stalker, reaching out and even risking her life to get a glimpse of her lost “love”. I’m not talking a few minute of the movie, this painfully depressing, and utterly stunning performance goes on for nearly an hour (1/2) of the film.

Ultimately, with the “happy ending” this movie provides  shows that her helpless, extremely irresponsible, and frankly psychotic actions are rewarded, paid in full by Edward.

The Problem with Edward

The male love interest in the movie has an overbearing understanding that women are incapable of making their own decisions in life. He nurtures her codependence by enforcing his belief that he’s too dangerous for her, and needs to abandon his relationship to protect her. Yea, ok. He’s also some 98 years older than she is, which I won’t even get into.

The good news is, he’s barely in the film – he made his decision, and she gets to deal with it. Ultimately, he thinks something tragic happens to her, so he decides he can’t live without her. Romantic as it may sound, the shallowness of the way this is executed removes any instance of romance AT ALL, and replaces it with another factor of the movie:

The Glorification of Suicide

I’m not thinking about this too much. It is glorified. The characters in the film are built up to be so lost in one another that one of them feels the need to “no longer go on living” if the other person is ripped from their life. Mind you, one of them is already technically dead, but I’m not even going to get into that either.

If Edward were to go through with this selfish garbage he romanticizes so elegantly, he would be putting his family and everyone that truly cared about him in a place that most true suicide sufferers end up in – a place of despair and depression. This factor of the movie is grotesque, and awe strikingly  disgusting.

Why Do I Care?

Because the target market for these stories is tweens. Impressionable, pre-teenagers who already have a hard enough time figuring life out and their place in it as is. The appeal is understandable, and it’s completely sick that the author is being rewarded for exploiting this authored crack by such a mass appeal and following.

These messages are poison, and perpetuate the very fundamental flaws of society’s direction today.

Additionally

When your target market is raving, screaming, hormone enraged teenage girls – you might want to take it easy on the buff, shirtless, sexy crap. Yes, eye candy is COMPLETLEY acceptable in film. But when it’s so blatantly abused to the point of grotesque exploitation, on top of all the other messages this movie sends Twilight: New Moon promotes:

Weakness. Codependence. Objectified Sexual Tension. Suicide. Contrived Romanticism… oh and Parental abandonment... The whole damn thing is just twisted and sick.

Coming from me? That says A LOT.

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Wanted to put a mental note to myself (and anyone else that may need) for how to go about setting up multiple domains to register for a single Umbraco install.

The solution is pretty solid. Unlike the tutorials I found for Umbraco which used subdomains as language selectors (ex: http://jp.domainname.com and http://uk.domainname.com) ; you can actually use full root domains to house multiple projects from a single, centralized, CMS application install of Umbraco. The key? Domain Aliases.

Usually when working with IIS, you can actually have .NET applications process URL requests (headers) that are passed to it. http://domainone.com and http://domaintwo.com. Setting this up is pretty easy, through the Web Site properties window in IIS. But on a shared host, it was a bit odd… The questions we walked through in our minds (as it made sense from a noob point-of-view)

1.       What’s the first step?

a.       Register the Domain name

b.      Point the domain name at your web hosts name servers

2.       Do I have to setup hosting for this domain name?

a.       No.

3.       How about a DNS A-Record or any of that mumbo jumbo?

a.       No.

As you can in most Shared Hosting control panels

1.       Select your domain

2.       Select Domain Alias

3.       Input your domain name (the one from 1a above)

4.       Open your Umbraco CMS panel

5.       Right click the desired ROOT/Parent folder you’d like to assign your domain name to

6.       Input it

7.       Right click that same folder again

8.       Publish

Done.

Granted this is for Umbraco v4, and I have no idea how to do it for Umbraco v3, but I think it’s the same mojo.

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This week has been interesting, more so than most, in that I’ve been presented with a number of situations that got me thinking about how people go about doing things in business. My observations, as usual, have drawn up a list of conclusions that I typically just file away under “past judgments” in my head, but today – I’ll share these ones, as I feel people can benefit from them in general:

1.       Passionate Influencers: These people are inspiring most of the time and always like to provide you with their findings; regardless of their excitement about their finding influencing their opinions or not. I like these peeps, they’re awesome and show a true energy for their interests. If you’re interested in learning from them, just make sure you take in to account that they  absolutely love what they’re talking about. This will provide faulty subjective criticism on things; but chances are they still have plenty of knowledge to provide objective criticism as well.

2.       Purely Smart Folk: These are the people that you can count on to do one of two things, help you, or help make you feel stupid; depending on how you go about your interactions with these folks, you’ll benefit from having their attention, and hopefully, you’re awesome enough to give some knowledge back in trade for their insights, regardless of their abrasive nature or not. Point being, I know a lot more cynics who are intelligent and short tempered than not, especially people who have been exposed to the world of Support… They just lose faith in “general population”; and that just goes with the territory. To provide a metaphor, the BlackBerry support team at EDS thought BlackBerry’s were the worst pieces of sh*t on the planet; and that’s bound to happen if all you see are the problems they pose for you every day.

3.       Pushy Bastards: Here’s one for the books; and it’s something I’ve been witness to a LOT this past year, and I think it has more to do with desperation in economic downturns leads to blatant disregard for self-pride and integrity in trade for hopeful dollars. Typically, these folks have good intentions, in that they’re not generally one-sided, but they come off so abrasive with their desires, and presumptuous with what “the world” owes them, that the world rejects them as a sniveling has-been that people shouldn’t deal with “for good reason”; even if the reason doesn’t exist or it’s unknown.

4.       Victims of Circumstance: Ever meet that guy or gal that stuff just happens to? Whether it’s good stuff or bad, the funny thing about Circumstance is; 90% of it is self-perpetuated, the other 10% is merely “it” working. I’m not accounting for random car accidents or being part of a company-wide layoff, you can file those under “Sh*t Happens”. I’m talking about the guys that just wake up one day and decide to do something, productive or counter-productive, and thus it goes the way they set out for it to. It’s pretty awesome to see the power of the human will, and the people in #2 and #3 should consider this in order to become #1.

That’s my fortune cookie for the day. No matter how ugly it gets, don’t lose faith in humanity; you don’t need to swallow your pride to push your value on others, and at the end of the day, you can take charge of your life and make it whatever you’d like… because chances are, everyone is in the first category, if they let go of the crap that drags them down the list.

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As the story goes, I’ve been rather hating voicemail since about the time I got that “feature” from my mobile provider in 1996. I have Caller ID, I know I received a call, in fact, my phone displays that I “missed” calls in a special list, all on its own. Furthermore, if I reject a call, my phone will let me know that I did so in yet, another list. So, at the end of the day, leaving me a voicemail is redundant and a waste of time and airtime.

It’s reminiscent of the days of taped playback answering machines which I couldn’t stand, even when I was a kid – but that’s because everyone screened their calls through them pre-Caller ID, and there was always those moments: “Hey, Mike, this is Enrique…. My mom took me off restriction and I was wondering if you wanted to go play outside… <Hello?> … Oh, hey Mike’s mom … <Mikey’s on restriction still>…Oh, ok. Can you tell him I called?” – You get the idea. Hated that crap.

Voicemail? Hate that shit too. Chances are if it’s not a message saying “Hey, man, it’s ____, call me back” (duh); then it’s going to be a list of ramblings that I won’t pay attention to because after I heard who it is that left the message… I’m gonna call that person back and have to explain what this means: “Yea, got your message, what did it say?”. Frustrating.

“But, Enrique, you could just listen to your voicemails…”. No, actually, I can’t. If you can’t get me on the phone; I have 7 email accounts, the ability to receive text messages, 5 IM accounts, I’m on over 200 social networking sites, hell – you can even Google me (nrek). If you have a phone, you can get online, and thus, you can get a hold of me by any means other than rugged, tired, dumpy, presumptuous Voicemail.

Don’t leave a message after the beep.

Tip: If you have AT&T, call into your voicemail and Press 4 – 1 – 1 to disable your outcall notifications today. End this “standard” means of communicating (barking) messages. It needs to die.

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Gonna keep this short.

If somehow you’ve been dead online for the past few days, Google started to invite people to use Google Wave (http://wave.google.com); I didn’t ask for an invite, but they invited me. To my surprise, the only thing I could think of when I looked at this… thing, was “What’s it giving me?”… the next thought was, “Why is everyone wanting me to invite them to this thing?”.

It’s a mess of information, a collaborative messaging and sharing system, and the interface allows you to see typos on the fly when creating a “Wave” that others are associated with. Yippy. Perhaps the eager developer in me was expecting “The Jesus” of applications since everyone’s been buzzing about Google Wave for months. Now that I have it, I don’t really think it’s the next greatest internet thing evar!!!11 – more like, a step in a direction that might get somewhere later. It’s either that, or I’m just too old school with emailing and actually not being allergic to clicking my mouse to see video & things that my friends send to me. Dunno.

Overall, I’m not utterly floored. I would, however, like to see some of the UI features in Wave be ported to Gmail. I have 7 invites left. Entice me to send you one, and I’ll think about it, only to share the pain of trying to understand WTF  you’re looking at with me, I reckon.

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In a word? Fine.

Just like everyone else that uses a computer, it’s a tool to get things done. What’s that mean? Well, as long as I can do what I do, how I know how to do it, and quickly, then there isn’t a need to pony up and fanboy a company at will, just to have an integrated solution.

Kettle, black

With the seamless integration I already enjoy between my Windows Servers (I have 2), Windows Workstations (I have 3), and my Nokia cell, which runs all sorts of stuff (you can read about in my fanboy press-like blog posts raging about how awesome my experience is with these devices in general at enrique-gutierrez.com someplace) – there’s no need to Apple-fy my network or computer experience, and personally, I think it’s more controllable, more contained, and that makes it “better”.

Music

Amazon Music is the only way to buy music, in my opinion. It’s fast, it’s priced well, and it’s simple. For me, iTunes is just this weirdly automated, and completely “dumb” piece of software that tries to be too smart. I use computers to serve my needs, and I don’t want them serving my needs to me. I’ve seen what iTunes does to some people at times, and it’s awful. Granted it works great for others, and I’m sure people LOVE the seamless experience it provides for their iPod, iPhone and AppleTV products… I thankfully don’t own a single one, and believe those that don’t use iTunes should continue to do so, and make a point about it – to ensure “other” services are continually available for us.

Television/Movies

I’ve been streaming media to my television for 5 years now from a dedicated media server appliance called a LinkTheater from Buffalo. It’s a robust device that displays Photos, Music and Videos, sometimes streaming (but “eh” I have no need for that typically). When you mix it with Nokia PC Suite and Home Media Server, you truly do get an integrated experience that you can micromanage if needed, and alter any way you choose. Love it. AppleTV? I heard it’s neat, I’m sure it is. But I’m also sure it’s too controlled, and too automated for my tastes.

Computing

Simply put, my experience is superior within the configuration I’ve created, hands down. I have a network though, and home-based networks with VPN, web-services, and media-services will trump most computing experiences in general. But because most people aren’t nerd enough  to want to pull this kind of thing off, it probably sounds like a bit “much”. I do believe that everyone should run a server in their house, and I do believe that everyone should have at least one media host/server system set up to some form of home theater system, but that’s just me I think.

Overall, I never complain. I patch my systems, use them and abuse them at will, and rarely run into issues, never issues I can’t fix. Again, most people that use computers never worked as a Network Engineer or a Systems Administrator either, but I think most people should at least have the knowledge to “change a tire, if they’re going to drive a car”, in my opinion.

Apple

Apple takes the tire changing need away from the driver, and provides them with mechanics and service departments for their finely tuned machine. These are great mechanisms, and I love that they do it, for others. It will never be for me, and I’m glad it won’t. This whole mentality probably comes from my car-fixing background, or the whole “how’s this work” take it apart” mentality. Anyhow, like I said in the beginning, as long as you use computers, as long as you can get things done, and as long as it takes little to no effort to do so, you’re doing it right, regardless of how it is done.

This is just another post in light of the hype surrounding the marketing engine that is Apple with their special releases and that turtleneck guy people flock to because … I have no idea why, but hey! He makes what most people do easy. Gotta love a guy that can do that, no?

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There was a time in Disney’s past when they were about the magic of mouse and man. Walt Disney created a mystical place of both myth and legend in California, their movies, both live action and cartoon, pushed the boundaries of what anyone had ever seen before, and they provided dreams and imagination to both kids and adults.

Today? That magic is still at Disney, but that magic isn’t the primary engine driving the Disney machine. They’re a strategic brand monster that positions, plans, and corals it’s interested market base into a world carefully designed in hopes to maintain a presence of Magic, while squeezing dollars in trade for dreams.

The greatest example I can think of for this is the insertion of Downtown Disney and California Adventure into the Anaheim theme park, Disneyland. Both of these additions are neither improvement, nor magical. In fact, they’re simply “maximizing of real estate” and of course, profit. Anyone that’s ever been to California Adventure knows it feels more like a “newish” Knott’s than an actual Disney park. As for Downtown Disney, the only thing Disney about it is the control of their branded janitors, and the soundtrack they pipe through the overhead speakers. It’s a friggin’ strip-mall, people.

So, in comes Marvel. A $4,000,000,000.00 deal. This could be good or bad. Disney’s long been using Miramax films to run their “non-Disney” ventures through, and some are good and some are not-so good. That’s fine. They also have ABC, which does a fine job at entertaining with it’s shows. What scares me the most about this, is seeing Mickey one day holding hands in front of the castle in front of Fantasyland with Iron Man. I love Iron Man, even the movie was pretty damn awesome, and I can’t wait for that whole franchise to open up on the big-screen... But yea, that would suck.

I just hope for the sake of Marvel and Disney alike that they keep these interests separate. Hell, a Marvel theme park wouldn’t be all that bad, and perhaps that’s the intent, something to compete with the suffering Six Flags franchise, perhaps. With more intense rides than “Space Mountain”, for example. I don’t know. I liked Marvel as it was, and the direction they were going as it were. I just hope Disney doesn’t rape Marvel the same way they’re raping Walt.

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Well, Saturday was it. A hell of a day, great turn out, lots of fun… booze, betting, networking, and friends. From organizing the web design meetups, to helping organize this massive event, I gotta say – holy crap stressful! But overall well worth the effort. When Jennifer van Grove came to Phelan and I about this event, I didn’t really know how we were going to pull it off, what the draw was going to be, how it was going to be received… hell, there were more unknowns that I could shake a stick at.

Now? I see, the reception of the event from the community was fantastic, we achieved our goal of providing a kick ass time to people we know and people we don’t. It was great, and damn it, I think there’s time for more of this kind of thing on my plate. In fact, I hope more opportunities come where I’m able to piece together events like this again and give good-times to all those seeking one.

What I would like to see in the future is more LA and Orange County people make the perilous journey south to mingle with some really great, and influential business people of San Diego. Bridging the gap between the three counties would definitely be a nice stake to hold in the California tech-scene, in my eyes. I think with everyone SoCal on the same ship, we’d be able to give NorCal a run for their money, and have a hell of a lot more fun (in better weather) doing it. That’s just me though…

So there you have it. A great event. I don’t have any photos or video from it, sorry – I was busy running around the event for the first half of it, putting people and things into places. The other half… Well, it was a well deserved break from the organizers’ seat, and into a relaxed, chillin state of haze driven by tequila. On that note, ‘til next time, kids.

Photos from the event available at http://events.declan.net

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Posted via web from Enrique’s posterous | Comment »

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Saw this in downtown. Pretty awesome.
- uploaded by ShoZu

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Imagine that, the day after the MJ debacle and I get YouTube fails on videos at random without a whale… so here’s a fail mashup errr mashdown for that matter

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