The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Dark Knight

I saw “The Dark Knight last night. In a word—

Wow!

From the opening bank heist (which is … just … oh my God) to the final scene (which I can't reveal because it's a spoiler) is just …

Wow!

Character wise, this is perhaps the truest portrayal of the Batman characters in a movie I've ever seen. Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker is as stunning as it is disturbing (and really, it's scarier not knowing his background). Gary Oldman's James Gordon is lifted right out of the comics. And the tragedy of Harvy Dent clearly comes through.

The only gripes I have with this film, oddly enough, are with The Batman himself. It's not that I have a problem with Christian Bale's portrayal per se, it's just that I didn't like his “let me attempt to disguise my voice so no one recognizes me but make it plainly obvious that I'm trying to disguise my voice” Batman voice. I don't think it worked. My other gripe is that The Batman is a world-class detective (even studying criminology in college) but you would never know that in this film (and the only reason I'm griping this much about an otherwise excellent film is that The Batman is my favorite superhero, and this film is about as letter perfect as a superhero film can get).

(You want a better review? Okay, here are some that are worth reading).

That's finally done!

So I'm back installing the router. I told Smirk to tell the customer it would take two hours, even though I was expecting it to take at most half an hour.

Good thing too—because just as I was finishing up, 45 minutes after starting (due to some driver issues on my laptop, I could only use the serial port (to configure the main router) or the ethernet port (to test the network) but both at the same time—sigh) the customer asks if the wireless portion still works.

Excuse me?

You see, they were using a consumer grade wireless access point (with four ethernet ports) to handle their office, and much to my surprise, they were actually using the wireless portion for a few devices. I wasn't aware of this.

It turns out neither was Smirk.

So I spent the next hour reconfiguring the wireless router (which I had to completely reset because the administrative password had long since been lost) to work on their network. Fortunately, the customer had saved some critical information (WEP keys) that made the process just a tad less painful for both of us.

Total time: two hours.

Fancy that.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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