Spider-Man

Grade: A

Movie Time: 8:00pm on Thursday, May 16, 2002

Location: AMC Forum 30

Viewed with: David and Jennifer Stampor

There have been a multitude of superhero movies; some are good, some are bad. With a majority of them, the story differs in varying degrees from the original comic. Often this can ruin part of the enjoyment of seeing a favorite hero on the screen. I can happily state that this was not the case with Spider-Man. Although some things have changed, I consider them to be improvements on the original and really aren't essential details of the story.

This was a good superhero action movie. The special effects were decent, even though there were a couple of scenes that did not look quite right (i.e. the inital rooftop scenes.) The story flowed and kept up with the times (i.e. Spider-Man's origin) while still remaining true to the original comic's tale.

Another positive was the darker, more mature theme of the movie, "with great power comes great responsibility." Instead of ruining the movie by making it showy and stupid for kids (like a few certain movies involving a caped crusader,) it focused on the dilemas that a person with such powers would likely face. Additionally, everything doesn't fall into place like one would expect of a sappy movie.

My Review: Grade A :Go see it in the theatre; definately worth the time.

I've added some additional smileys that can now be used on the site. All available smileys are listed below:

: - D == :-D
: ) == :)
: ( == :(
; ) == ;)
8 - ) == 8-)
: ' ( == :'(
> : o == >:o
= - O == =-O
: - P == :-P
: - \ == :-\

Also, you can still use <NEW> to display if you desire.

Any requests for additional icons will be considered.

I also added a new links section to the website containing a handfull of links, most of which I visit daily.

PS -- April Fools sucks when it comes to finding reliable news updates on the web. >:o

Well, not a lot has been going on with the site. I'll need to investigate the issue with the counter. Not sure what caused it to reset, but I am guessing it had something to do with multiple users accessing the page at the same time. A good site for information about PHP is PHP Help.com. The forums are constantly monitored and the advice is elaborate.

What a pain in the ass it was this weekend trying to get the laptop to be able to access the internet via the desktop. What I decided to do instead of simply buying a cablemodem/dsl router-hub was to install a second NIC into my desktop and buy a back-to-back (or crossover) cable to connect the laptop to the second card. Well, I couldn't get it to work. I know a couple of people who might have some suggestions regarding this, so I still might be able to get it to work. Although, it might be more convenient to have the ability to add addtional computers to the network with little difficulty. I wonder if I am missing a step, or if Win98 (desktop) and Win XP (laptop) have problems communicating?

I was surprised that a couple of people signed the guestbook this weekend. One of them I knew, the other I didn't recognize. I'll have to investigate where she found my site listed. I suspect somewhere at Blogger.com.

How sad. The US lost the Gold. But, if I had to pick a country other than the US to win, it would have been Canada; they are a neat bunch of folks. :)

	Added happy little New icon and ability to be replace text with image by using <NEW>. It is case sensitive.
	Updated the choose style page. Now you can decide which page, either The Daily Monkey, or the Silly Monkeys, you would like to be the default.

I should have a lot of time to update the site this weekend. I really don't have a lot of other things planned.

Ryan and I had a good time with D2 tonight. If anyone else has D2X and would like to join us in a game, email us; we'd be thrilled to have another along.

Kendra and I watched Scary Movie 2 tonight. It was one of the worst movies we have seen in a long time. We were both really disappointed, since we like the original.

And, that was about the most exciting part of the evening. At least Ryan got ice cream and beer.
:(

Ouchy! I way over-did the workout on Monday! My arms are so sore that I can barely bend them! I guess I should be a little more careful when first starting working out again. :(

On a happier note, I have updated the counter so that the error where it would not display the number of hits the first time to the page has been fixed. Additionally, the value is incremented if the page is viewed by someone else while you are at the page; before it would remain the number that you first saw for the entire duration of your time on the web, regardless of how many would come and go. :-D

Worked out two days in a row! It is almost a personal best! :-D

I have updated the counter so that it will only update once per session. If you want to see it increment now, you will need to close down your browser and restart it. Great. Good job. Was it worth it? :-D

For the first time in a long while, I actually worked out today. It is amazing how quickly I felt the effects as I was working out. I am certain I will be sore tomorrow, but it is all good. :)

As you can probably tell, I have added a counter to the site. In its current state, it is pretty simplistic; every time you refresh the page will count as a hit. All I had to do was fiddle with permissions for the counter file to get it to work, since I had already written the script several days ago. I'll spend some time and adapt the script to handle multiple counters and also disallow refreshes as counting toward the totals.

Although it may seem trivial, the counter is the first step in creating many wonderous marvels here. :-D It makes use of reading and writing to a file, and knowing how to do that opens a world of possibilities. For instance, I have noticed that Blogger is becoming busier; I had a hard time actually logging onto the site to post this because of the heavy traffic. Thus, it may be possible to replace Blogger with my own Blog script. I'll probably start by replacing the html-gear I have with my own guestbook script and poll script, although you can feel free to continue to create and post any polls you want from html-gear.

I love PHP. :-D

Kendra and I had a good time tonight. We went to dinner with Court and Dave at Camp Ticondaroga. Good food and very large portions. After dinner, we all hung out at Border's for awhile.

The neat part is that I am going to be the baby's godfather! :-D Hopefully that little bugger will come out soon.

I didn't even think about the website last night; too busy watching the Olympic's opening ceremony and then playing Diablo II with Ryan.

I probably won't do much tonight, either. Kendra and I are going to dinner with Courtenay and Dave. That is, of course, unless she decides to give birth instead. If that happens, I imagine it would become a very interesting evening.
:-D

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist was hilarious! The previews made it look like it could go either way, but rest of the theater and I were dying. I highly recommend it. The way they did stuff made me think of the old Woody Allen movie, "What's up, Tigerlily?"

Not enough time to work on any new stuff tonight. I should have time this weekend to fool around with my site.

Red Wings rock. :-D

Tonight I added the Shakespearean Insult generater and added it to automatically display when the page is reloaded. Give it a try.

I know that this has been done before and if you do a search of the web you can find a bunch of such insulting scripts. However, back in the day when I had the "Domain of the Andyman" hosted at umich, I had received the Shakespeare insult email and immediately decided it would be a good perl script. So, although it really isn't original, I was one of the original implementors of such a script, so it is kinda original. Hmm... At any rate, it was very easy to write in PHP. In fact, some of the built in functions of PHP make me wonder if it was designed with the thought of creating such a script.

Some other things I have been working on is a third template option. This one displays my two blogs side by side in the old school format. I have some addtional tinkering I need to do, but I should get that up tomorrow.

I also have been fooling around with writing a counter script. The way it should work isn't too complicated, and it was very easy to write. The difficulty I am facing is that the script does not have the necessary rights to create or edit a file. There might be something I'm missing, but I need to investigate further.

If anyone has any suggestions for neato things they would like to see here, please post at the Damn Dirty Apes (aka Silly Monkeys). I will be sure to promptly ridicule your suggestion and make you feel dumb. :-D

Kendra and I went to see "Mamma Mia," the play with the music of ABBA. It was a lot of fun and very interesting; they did a good job of working the songs into the play in a meaningful way. I give it my approval. :) Only down side was that the seats in the Masonic Temple are the most uncomfortable I have ever encountered.

I have made some corrections to my scripts so that they work better. I also cleaned up the scripts and set the groundwork for addtional features. Unless you are really observant, you will not notice any of these changes. You'll just have to trust me when I say that they're there. :-D

Since I love my honey, and she preferred the original name of The Damn, Dirty Apes, I have created an option under Choose Style that will allow you to select the name you prefer for the Silly Monkey/Damn Dirty Apes blog.

I love you, Kendra. :-D

In doing so, I needed to make a couple of additional changes that will make it easier to adapt additional features onto the site. Most of these changes will not be visible to the user, since the change really just breaks the visible webpage up into several smaller components which are then easy to rearrange without a lot of duplicated effort.

I have been working on my site a lot lately. It is just a lot of fun. Kendra has been saying that if I put forth the kind of effort I have been on developing this site into everything I do, I would be a dynamo of efficiency. I guess it all depends on how you look at it. I really enjoy playing around with stuff here, so it doesn't feel like work at all. I guess if I could "find the fun" in stuff, like Mary Poppins said, stuff I have to do wouldn't be so bad. Hmmm....

At any rate, the latest item developed for the site is my implementation of smileys. Right now, you can use :), :-D, and :( by typing in : ), : - D and : ( respectively. (Without the spaces.) I wrote a nifty little script that searches for those items and replaces it with images. Try it out; it is nifty. :-D

It's been quiet around here lately so I have been playing around with the layout. PHP is a really powerful scripting option for the web. I have enabled cookies and now you now have an option as to which style you would like applied to this site. Currently, there are only two, but if you see a setup elsewhere on the web you like, I could easily add a third option.

I have discovered a fun online game called Sanctum. It is a "collectable card game" in the tradition of Magic: the Gathering, but done entirely online. Free to play, and a free deck of 60 cards is enough to check it out. No limit on amount of play, so feel free to take a look. You can find me under my handle, "A-Feeble-Mind".

Happy Hosting

I now am hosting stampor.com at logjamming.com. Thus, I have a greater limit than the 10 meg that I had at my mediaone default account. And, for $5 a month, I figured it wouldn't break the bank.

It should have been an easy task, but it took forever to get everything looking properly at the new site. Hurts my head. At least all is well, for now.

This site is now the default page. To get to the Silly Monkeys, use the link on the left.

The Return of the Monkey

Well, it has been a long time, but I am back at it. Although it is likely that I will be the only one to visit this site frequently, I am planning on actually making it true to its name. Namely, I am going to add monkeys here. Errr...or update it daily. I can't rememeber what I thought initially.

Adventures in Cyberspace, old school style

The other day, I found a link at one of my favorite sites to another site that has a bunch of interesting links. Fark.com had a link to a site that has a game based on the light cycles from the movie Tron.Long story short: this game rocks! It is true to the movie and is fun to play.

I remember desperately wanting to play the light cycle game from the movie as a child. It was too bad that it didn't really exist as it did in the movie. Now, with the addons, it is really like you are part of the movie. Without the addons, the game is pretty easy against the computer. I'd be interested in joining up with some of my buddies and playing this together online. Check it out for yourself.

Damn Silly

Kendra has suggested that she is tired of the "new" title of the Silly Monkeys. Let's have a poll....


If you choose "Other" post your suggestion after voting on the voting page.

Deals at Sams

Kendra and I went to Sams the other day. They have great deals, but a lot of their items are stuff that you would not normally get, as flavors are limited. For example, we got a good deal on some popcorn, but we're not sure we really want to eat it....

Things to come

Neato things will be happening soon. I must resist speaking of it now; I don't want to ruin the surprise.

Popourri for $100, Alex

Today's edition of the Daily Monkey contains a bit of this, and a bit of that. Hopefully there is a little bit of something for everyone. If not, someone is taking too much and should learn how to share.

More Monkeys Continuing in the tradition of monkeys, I have found an interesting site that reviews and discusses the original Planet of the Apes movies. StompTokyo.com is an amusing little movie review site that uses the ingenius lavalamp method of rating movies.

The Most Dangerous Desktop

I have created a repeating background for your computer desktop that is both painful and fun at the same time. Download it now and display it proudly on your computer at home and at work. If commented on by a co-worker, reply in an amazed fasion and inquire why they don't read the Daily Monkey.

Same House, New Roof

Because of the hail damage done last year, our insurance company agreed to replace our roof. We are pleased, since we never cared much for the old roof. The new roof looks much better. Now all we need to do is paint the front door and shutters. Then, we should have a super-funky looking house.