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Do I agree with David Denby's Batman: The Dark Knight review *? Yes. Also, two and a half hours? *When I use the term review , I refer to the part of his writing in which he actually expresses an opinion or looks at the film with a critical eye. Invariably, this is about 10% of what he writes; the other 90% is just him recounting the plot.

These videos of a talk Brian and I gave to some developers about the AdWords API are apparently causing quite a stir in the Internets (ed: this is not true) . If you like Jeff'y but also like debugging SOAP calls, well, why settle for one or the other ?

Facebook laid the ontological smackdown on me yesterday. I was trying out one of Facebook's new features, importing RSS feeds into your Facebook activities feed, and apparently I tripped something on their end that got me flagged as a suspicious user. (I'm reposting my email to their tech support folks with more details below.) I'm like Richard Scoble , though cuter, and I didn't do anything stupid like try to scrape contact info. I'm not too confident in getting a timely response from the normal support channels, but fortunately I know a few folks within the company and hopefully things will get sorted soon. One of the amusing things about getting my account suspended was that it generated not one but twenty identical emails from Facebook, sent within a short period of time, each reading "Your account has been disabled for persistent misuse of the site. Please contact disabled@facebook.com for more information." So Facebook apparently has some issues wi...

Some random thoughts after playing Mario Kart for a while: Timed battle mode is no good. Some of my fondest SNES Mario Kart memories are of using the feather to jump behind a barricade and forcing my battle mode opponent to follow me in for the kill. Girls like Mario Kart. Playing video games with your significant other is a lot more fun, and doesn't leave you with that nasty I-just-played-WoW-for-four-hours-while-my-wife-watched-Law-and-Order feeling. The question mark blocks are called either "presents" or "fake presents", depending on whether they'll blow you up or not. The shells are obviously "ducks". You need to power slide. Auto mode is for wimps. It's been 16 years and Nintendo still hasn't realized that red and green shells are indistinguishable to a sizable minority of the male population.

My dining schedule being a little thrown off when Sheryl is out of town (she's currently in the air, landing at Newark airpot at hopefully 2:00am-ish), I didn't eat supper tonight until 10:00pm. And I didn't shop for supper, so I had to make do with what was in the pantry. This worked out surprisingly/surpassingly well; a tin of good sardines and some thin pasta were the key ingredients. If I had actually been planning this ahead of time I might have gotten some flat leaf parsley, but I don't feel badly about omitting it. The food was ready in under 15 minutes and was a fishier (not to mention cheaper) pasta with clam sauce. 1 tin of good sardines, packed in oil, but drained 1 or 2 or several serving of dried thin pasta (don't use shapes or tubes for this) olive oil 1 clove of minced garlic (I used a garlic press) black and crushed red pepper Cook the pasta in well-salted to a bit before al dente and drain. Add a liberal amount of olive oil to the pan, along with ...

I didn't think I'd be able to give up on the Sidekick , but then I got an iPhone . I didn't think I'd be able to give on World of Warcraft , but then I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl . (Okay, I'll still be playing Warcraft.) Also, I love my wife.

I had a feeling it would be David Denby that got me blogging again. I had originally planned to post something a few months ago, when I read his New Yorker piece on Hollywood stars of old, that consisted entirely of the extracted lists of names and descriptions. Think "Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, ..." and "dazzling, solemn, momentous, ..." or something along those lines. Believe me, it might not be interesting now, and I can't find it on the New Yorker 's website anymore, but the entire article was a series of series. Anyhow, it's Denby's review of Vantage Point that has riled me up most recently. Sheryl got it into her head after seeing the preview a few times that this was a movie we wanted to see. I really don't know what the appeal was--I'm going to embarrass her by saying that she feel asleep when we rented Rashomon , so it's not like that kind of of thing fascinates her. But we saw Vantage Point and it was trul...