Christopher Mackay's Blog

Delicious Monster’s Delicious Library is amazing. Worth every penny. You’ll also need an iSight, a Mac and OS X. And a bunch of stuff (books, DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, games). And high-speed access to Amazon.com won’t hurt, either.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

– John McCrae, 1915

Firefox 1.0 has been released. This is among the best open-source applications; it’s being widely adopted, it’s useful (to end-users and developers), and it’s just as nice on my PowerBook as it is on my HP Pavillion.

Download Firefox

For someone who loves movies, I don’t go out to see one very often. Yes, it’s gotten nearly as expensive for a couple to go out to a movie as it is to purchase the DVD (even if you’re not dragging children behind you or hiring a baby-sitter), but the real reason has more to do with how unbelievably rude audiences have become. But that’s another post…

The last film I saw in the theatre was, I think, Finding Nemo. Sunday afternoon I took in Pixar’s latest oeuvre, The Incredibles. Great show.

It goes without saying that the (evil?) geniuses at Pixar have once again raised the bar, technically, in 3D animation. The virtual sets were simply stunning, to the point where it looked like there were cartoon characters running around in the real world, albeit one designed by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. Hats off to the designers and the lighting and shader teams.

As usual, it is the story that makes a Pixar movie stand out. Other films, such as Dreck, um, sorry — Shrek — and Antz have featured impressive technical wizardry with stories that left me somewhere between bored witless or feeling like I’m being mocked by the filmmakers. But The Incredibles is a bit of a departure for Pixar. Like their previous work, this one is aimed squarely at the adults in the audience as well as the kids, but the kids are assumed to be a bit older this time.

One of the smartest things in the film is a scene where the super-hero Mom (aren’t all moms super-heroes?) warns her children that the most important thing they posess is their identities, and that they must protect their identities at all times. A very wise lesson to be teaching children these days.

The only negative thing I can say about The Incredibles is that when Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas, he must have inherited a gene; the one that wisely casts Samuel L. Jackson in a movie, but then gives him no screen-time (see Star Wars Episodes I & II).

• The Incredibles web site
• The Incredibles trailers

Congratulations to Eldon Hay of Sackville, New Brunswick, who has been named a Member of the Order of Canada. His dedicated service to making the world a better place stands as an admirable model for others.