Having now established my fanaticism I will go on to actually talk about the movie. Overall it was good. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t spectacular. There were lots of little disappointments, but there were some things I was really pleased with.

I thought the CG was amazing, but it was done by Industrial Light and Magic so I guess that should be a given. The animation of the bending was spectacular, absolutely everything I could have imagined possible. Perhaps if I had just put in some earplugs and watched the movie in silence it would have been a better experience. The creatures truly came alive in this film as well. Jasmin didn’t like their interpretation of Appa the air bison but I thought he was perfect. That pretty much wraps up everything that was great about this film.

Now I know a fanatic tends to be a bit more picky about film adaptions than the average movie-goer, but I don’t think the flaws in this movie are just things the fans are going to notice. The first and biggest downfall was the lack of character development. The TV series is almost a perfect balance of character, story, and action. The Airbender movie puts magic into the action sequences but forcefully shoves the story line into you with a pointy stick and has locked character development up in a closet somewhere. Aang should be a youthful and exuberant kid, but they’ve turned him into a quiet and sullen little emo boy. Saka and Katara should exude compassion and morality from their pores but instead you kind of wonder why they are even following the emo boy around. I want to tell you everything that is wrong with uncle Iro but it’s too painful. Let’s just say that my favorite character no longer exists – he is dead to me.

The story is driven so forcefully fast I’m sure that anyone not familiar with the series would leave the movie theater still wondering what bending actually is. Update: Uh, yeah, I guess I’m right about that. I get it, there was a lot to explain and a lot of story to move through, but there were also twenty minute chunks of movie that could easily have been left on the cutting room floor to make way for more character development. There were lines in this movie that sounded like a ten year old wrote them. To make things worse, the lines were delivered with the kind of emotion reserved for phone-book recitals or “grocery on line one, grocery on line one” calls from the checkout. It was truly cringe-inducing.

The 3D fad does nothing to make this movie better, but that can be said for just about any movie these days. I will be so glad when this trend dies.

Lastly I will mention what will surely be the most annoying feature of this film for fellow fans: pronunciation. For whatever reason (probably clinical dementia) the filmmakers decided to change the pronunciation of many of the lead character’s names:

• Iro: pronounced “eye-roh” in the series is now “ee-roh”.
• Sokka: pronounced “sa-ka” in the series is now “soak-ah”
• Aang: in the series the name rhymes with “twang”, in the movie it’s more like “ankh” without the “k”.

I’ll tell you what; if you want to make a movie based on a (popular)TV series, how about you DON’T MESS WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER?!!!!??

So yeah, I was kinda let down by this movie. Maybe the saddest thing was that I didn’t get my hopes up in the first place, knowing what movies are like these days. Always the optimist I am still going to look forward to the next movie. I mean, they can’t possibly screw Toph up that badly, can they?

Also, I make a wild guess at what my gift could be.

I got matched up to a lucky redditor who I’ll probably talk about in a later video, and some mysterious redditor got my name and mailing address. Last Friday a message from a user called “yourredditsanta” told me that my gift was in the mail, coming from upstate New York.

So far this whole thing has been a blast and I’m mega-excited about my gift, so I’m going to document the whole ordeal on video and share the fun!

Every time I’m out with my friend Peter and I mention Twitter he breaks out in a fit of giggles. Apparently when he was younger he used “twittering” as a euphemism for…well you can guess. It’s a good thing that term didn’t catch on, or this neat social networking tool would be unfortunately named.

Twitter at its core is a messaging tool. It lets you “tweet” a message of no more than 140 characters. You can tweet about what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. You can include a web link in your tweet as well, but that’s just the beginning.

Who reads your tweets? Well anyone who chooses to “follow” you can be alerted with your tweets. As well, you can follow other people and see what they are twittering about. You can reply to a tweet. Replies can been seen by anyone on Twitter. If you want to message someone privately there is a “direct message” option.

Alright, so you and all of these random people on Twitter are tweeting out short little tweets. Still don’t get what’s so cool yet? It’s all about how you use it, really. Here are some cool things I use Twitter for:

Celebrity Stalking
Twitter is catching on with celebrities minor and otherwise, as well as politicians and the media. Here are some interesting personalities to follow:

• Wil Wheaton; writer, actor, father, and blogger.
• Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
• Rick Sanchez is a CNN reporter that will hold polls and ask questions via Twitter and use some of the replies during his show. I don’t like CNN, but I like the adaption of new technology.

Click here for a much longer list of celebrity twits.

Group Think
Every Monday evening a bunch of journalists, bloggers, and PR people join in a group discussion called Journchat via Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have a built-in chatroom feature, so Journchat uses a special “tag” in each tweet to track the conversation. You just need to add a “#” infront of a word in your tweet to turn it into a tag, and there are programs and web-based tools that help you track tweets with that tag. Try searching for “#haiku” for a neat example of how tags work.

Updating Facebook
I like to post my thoughts and goings-on to Twitter, but I don’t want to neglect all my friends that aren’t using it. Thankfully there is a Facebook app that links into the Twitter system and updates my Facebook status with my most recent tweet.

Announcing Blog Updates
One of the great things about Twitter is that if there’s something you want it to do, someone has probably already written an application to do it. One such application I like is twitterfeed. It checks on my blog every few hours and if there’s a new post it will create a create a tweet to announce it. The double-whammy here is that since I linked my Facebook and my Twitter account, my new blog posts also get posted to Facebook.

Right. So like I said: Twitter is fun, all the cool kids are doing it, and so should you. Just try it. Sign up, post a tweet every day and find some interesting people to follow. You might just like it.

If you get my updates by email or in a feed reader you shouldn’t notice a thing, though I’d love it if you would take a look at the new site layout and leave a comment if you like it or hate it.

For my fellow bloggers I’m now going to tell you how I made this magical transformation work, with very little bloodshed or tears.

My site was running three separate installations of WordPress, each at a different version. Each blog was installed in a subdirectory of delicat.ca:
/journal/
/cookbook/
/workouts/
Though I liked keeping the content separate, it was getting bothersome to manage three intallations of WordPress with all the themes and plugins and comments. I wanted to manage everything from one interface, but still be able to keep data separate for site visitors and feed subscribers. I thought I would have to switch to a large CMS like Joomla or Drupal, but then a site I visit regularly (allfreelancewriting.com) updated in exactly the same way I was hoping to do, and kept it all in WordPress! With a bit of advice from that site owner, I started merging my three sites. Here were the steps I took:

Step One: Exporting posts and comments from the three existing blogs. I simply logged into the administration panel of each WordPress installation and used the “export” tool to export all the posts and comments.

Step Two: Installing WordPress 2.7 on the root of delicat.ca and importing from the three blogs. Again, WordPress has a handy “Import” tool that did most of the work for me, it even imported all the images from the posts! I then installed the theme and my favorite plugins. Some of the magic of the site is done by the theme. I’m lucky to have found such a great theme for free!

Step Three: Category editing. Where before I had subdirectories, now I needed a category structure to separate the areas of my site. During the import process all of the categories from the three sites were created. All I had to do was organize them under the main “Journal”, “Recipes”, or “Workouts” categories.

Step Four: Redirecting from the old subdirectories to the root with .htaccess. Anyone following an old bookmark or search result that pointed to the old blogs would eventually get a 404 error, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to make sure that any visitor hitting the subdirectory or anything beneath it would be redirected to the new blog. To do that, I added these lines to the .htaccess file at the root of my domain:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/journal/.*$ http://www.delicat.ca/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cookbook/.*$ http://www.delicat.ca/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/workouts/.*$ http://www.delicat.ca/

Step Five: Updating Feedburner feeds with category feeds. My biggest concern about combining my three blogs was that I’d like my RSS feeds to be kept separate. I figure some people like reading my blog, while others just like my recipes, and neither of those readers are interested in my workouts. Thankfully I had already employed Feedburner to serve up my RSS feeds some time ago. If you aren’t using Feedburner you’ll either have to do some magic redirecting or just tell your subscribers that they’ll have to change their feed settings when you move to a new site. To access a feed that is filtered based on category, all you have to do is add “/feed/” to the end of the category page. So to get a feed that only includes posts to my “Recipes” main category, the address is “http://www.delicat.ca/index.php/category/recipes/feed/”. I simply updated each of my feedburner feeds with the new addresses, and it worked like a charm!.

I still can’t believe how easy the move was. The longest process involved was tweaking the theme and graphics to give them my own kind of flair. If you’re reading this and considering a move of your own, feel free to comment with any questions you might have. I’m a vast, untapped resource of geeky WordPress knowledge now.

1. “crossfit diarrhea”: I’m sorry I couldn’t help you with that, best of luck!
2. “what other websites say”: I don’t care what the other websites say.
3. “the parent company on a all bran bar package”: I just liked this one because it was so long.
4. “the motherly types”: You really have the wrong place for that.
5. “lesbian crossfit”: Also the wrong place for that.
6. “ultramega bars”: As far as I know, these don’t really exist. Maybe I should trademark the name?
7. “bookapalooza”: I don’t remember ever being dumb enough to add “apalooza” to the end of a perfectly good word, but there it is.
8. “smelly snakes”: I’m saddened that this person is not interested in more fragrant snakes, how close-minded.
9. “little mom teen”: What strikes me here is not the choice of words as much as the arrangement. What could they have been looking for?
10. “heart irregularity and shellfish”: I really have no idea how this relates to anything I write. My heart is fine, and it beats fast and strong for shellfish, yum!

Thanks for tuning in readers, I hope you had fun. Now you know what kind of awesome keyword-targetted traffic I get here on the blog. I’m sure there are other bloggers out there scrambling to dominate me for keyword position in Google now. Please, take my traffic, I don’t need more freaks here!

I read through the spiffy graphic eBook introduction to the browser, and I’m really, really impressed by all the memory process stuff and user needs consideration. If I was just surfing the web I could absolutely use this right away, no question.

But I’m not just surfing. I’m by no means a plugin junkie, but right now I can’t live without these three things:

• FireFTP: a really sweet ftp plugin that lets me deal with my website files without having to install a whole other program or use a clunky web-based file manager.
• TwitKit: puts Twitter in my sidebar, so I don’t have to open a whole new tab and browse around to do my twittering. Again, this removes the need for a whole third-party application.
• Google Toolbar: I’m assuming that a browser designed by Google will have some kind of Google Toolbar functionality. I actually don’t use the toolbar much for searching, I still go and open google.ca for that, but I do like that it keeps my search history AND I use the PageRank bar when I’m doing my website/SEO stuff.

So, I might continue to play with Chrome, but I won’t be fully on-board until I can do almost everything in my life from one browser. I’m still tinkering with FireBug to see if I can negate my need for HomeSite and TopStyle – that would be sweet!