New The Film Critic Feature (and it's blog related)

If you're reading this via rss, go to my actual blog. Okay, now look to the left. See that new box? It shows the last 5 movies I've watched, pretty neat huh?

If you want to add this to your blog, you need to do 4 things. First you need to use The Film Critic to review movies, which you should be doing anyway if you read this blog :) Second, you need to use The Film Critic to track watched movies. This is easily done by adding Enter Watched Date and likewise via the website, email me for help. Third, you need to ask me what your UserId is. You probably can figure it out yourself if you know ASP (Rob, I'm looking at you) but just let me know and I'll figure it out for you if you want. Finally, add the following code to your blog's template:

<iframe src="http://www.misdb.com/movies/Last5.asp?UserId=XXX" style="width:200px;height:350px;"></iframe>

replacing the XXX in the above line with your UserID. For example, mine would be


<iframe src="http://www.misdb.com/movies/Last5.asp?UserId=1" style="width:200px;height:350px;"></iframe>

and look like this:



Lacey's would be

<iframe src="http://www.misdb.com/movies/Last5.asp?UserId=19" style="width:200px;height:350px;"></iframe>

and look like this:




Neat, huh?

Making progress

So I'm making progress on my collection. As you know if you read this, I have a bit of an addiction to collecting DVDs. Yeah, it's sad, I know, but I still have this problem.

My main problem isn't how many I own (~950 right now) but the real problem is that I have ~7% of them unwatched. At least I did. This past weekend Lace and I really knocked out a bunch of our unwatched movies, which was pretty nice.

Currently I'm down to 61 unwatched movies and TV shows on DVD. It sounds like a lot, but since I was around 70 for the past few months, I'm making progress.

I did manage to watch the oldest movie in my unwatched pile. I owned it for just under 5 years before I watched it :) The Unberable Lightness of Being was the title, and it wasn't bad, but it is 3 hours long and we just weren't in the mood to watch it until this past weekend. We also watched 4 Rocky movies, Days of Thunder and Ed Wood. A pretty fun weekend movie watching wise.

So now the oldest movie in my collection I bought on 1/27/01. Actually, there are two, Nixon and Born on the 4th of July, both Oliver Stone movies. I like Stone as a director, but I tend to need to be in a particular mood to watch his movies, and I just haven't or had other things I wanted to watch during that time.

You can check out the ever changing list of my unwatched movies, if you're curious at http://dvd.christophersmith.us/dvd After the pages loads, you'll have to wait for it, it takes a while because it's running of my workstation and a gig of ram isn't enough for everything I do, filter on Tags and the AA_NotWatched tag to see the movies I own that aren't watched. Not that you really care.

Being Nostalgic again

You know what's weird? I just went through my history and I've had this blog for well over a year. And, even wierder, is that for about 2 weeks in August of last year, I was a daily updated blog. Betcha don't remember that, do you?

Anyway, I read something today that I just loved. I've read it before as I've read the short story many many times but, I read it online today, which allows me to be lazy and copy and paste, but I thought all of you (if anyone still reads this) should read it to.

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped ,or turned back, for their private benefit.

Robert A. Heinlien - Life Line