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Shrek 2 Review

I’ve always loved cartoons. Of course, no one calls them that anymore. It’s animation, now. Alas, I digress. Once computers got into the animating business, though, I wanted to see them more for the how the film looked rather than silly things like plot or, well, I guess that’s all there is in animation. I wanted to be dazzled by the effects. The first Shrek movie dazzled me. They set out to make every frame photo-real and they did it. I was entertained by the first film for its humour, as well.

After seeing Shrek 2 tonight, I can say the filmmakers out did themselves and set the bar for future computer animated films. The look of this film is absolutely stunning. If the Crocodile Hunter watched it, he’d exclaim: “She’s gorgeous!” A lot of shots were probably thrown in to show off what they could achieve: reflecting water, torrential downpour, slo-mo shots of hair waving in a breeze, …

It’s funny too. I’d say funnier than the first; the reason: Antonio Banderas, as Puss ‘n’ Boots.

His scenes easily stole the show. You can read other reviews to see what it’s about. Or go see the movie!

 

Good

  • The look of the film
  • Antonio Banderas
  • The gingerbread man

 

Bad

  • It was on the short side, but that’s understandable since it takes so long to create all that with computers

 

Recommended if…

You like computer animation, you enjoyed the first film, you melt at the sight of Antonio Banderas

Rating:

I will buy this on DVD.

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Outlook 2003 is great, but…

There is one feature Outlook 2003 doesn’t have that it should have: I get a lot of spam, on the order of 100 messages a day. That may not be much, but it is really annoying. Outlook 2003 is pretty good at filtering the junk. So far no false positives, which is good, but that means it tends to let some junk through. Usually, I’m pretty vigilant with my email checking, but even then the spam is sometimes too much.

The feature I’d like to see is ContextMenu item to select multiple messages as junk at time. Currently, I have to click each email. Annoying! Plus, it shouldn’t be that hard to do (famous last words in software), since the functionality for one message is there.

Any other features outlook 2003 should have? Tell Microsoft.

Or leave a comment

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This is really paying off

For all zero of my local readers, I’m mentioned in the Times Colonist today, with my team members, about our Imagine Cup Canada win. Even better than that, we should be in the next issue of an even smaller paper – The Saanich News. They’ll have pictures, so every one gets to see my big, fat face. This is all due to the wonderful PR people at UVic. A big thanks for all your help. I hear MS Canada isn’t finished with their niceness (yes that’s a word). They’re also contacting the local media outlets so there may be more to come. Aren’t you lucky!

We also got letters from the Chair of the Comp Sci Dept at UVic, Jon Muzio, and the President of the University of Victoria, David Turpin. Thank you for the letters and your support.

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really long error messages can finally be read without the mouse

I was playing around with internal interfaces today, trying to get them to work with just the access modifier internal. The compiler didn’t like that very much. Did you ever get this error message:

‘ClassLibrary1.FooClass’ does not implement interface member ‘ClassLibrary1.IFoo.Bar()’. ‘ClassLibrary1.FooClass.Bar()’ is either static, not public, or has the wrong return type

or how about this one:

“The type or namespace name ‘Data’ does not exist in the namespace ‘System’ (are you missing an assembly reference?)”

I get that one all the time! Anyway every time I’d build, I’d get a message in the Task List (we all know that), but in the Task List uses some crazy ListView that doesn’t behave like any other ListView ever. So to view the description like the above, one would have to expand the column by dragging <gasp!> then scroll twice the screen width to read the whole comment.

When I got home I went to my Whidbey preview and I am happy to report that the VS team fixed that. Excellent. Now here’s a good long-winded post with no  point.

 

BTW, I figured out my problem from this post here. I had heard of Explicit Interface implementation before (I swear!) but never saw why anyone would use it.