Winston's Humble Site

Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Grizzly Man: A Movie Review

Sunday, November 1st, 2009


This is one of my movie responses from my FSP, freshman year. I was rather amused by what I wrote for a class, that would be seen by my teacher… :

Behind a Jane Goodall-like facade, Grizzly Man felt more like a biography that should be titled “Treadwell: Fanatic or Freak.” Though I was honestly touched by his concern for animals (and the adorable foxes), Treadwell possessed a sort of adult arrogance combined with a childish enthusiasm that I found reminiscent of a mental disorder.

The film itself focused a lot more on Treadwell’s personal life than it should have advancing the cause of the grizzly bears.As I stated above, it felt more like a biography than a documentary.

Another thing that piqued my interest was T~’s* repeated use of the phrase “I’m… protecting these bears.” I was always left wondering “what did you actually do to protect them, aside from harass some fisherman?” In this way, the film turned into a sort of cynical joke for me.

Cinematographically (i think i butchered a few words…) , I felt the editors lingered a bit too long on a bunch of scenes. I mean, come on, you want us to stare at that autopsy guy staring back at the camera for a good ten seconds? Or watch T~’s girlfriend torn by sadness as the camera zooms out? Honestly… learn to edit. Oh and I think the film would have had a greater effect if the narrator didn’t have such an accent.

Overall, I don’t think Grizzly Man had as profound an effect on me as An Inconvenient Truth. Plus, I think T~ began to lose credibility after his “well, **** you, park service, you ****ing ****ers. **** you” rant.

And apparently it got an A- from critics on Yahoo! Movies?… wtf… overrated…

This guy was like the PG-13 version of Steve Irwin: Crocodile Hunter… on drugs.

*T~ = Treadwell… I got lazy typing it out.

Wordpress on the TCNJ Webspace

Monday, October 12th, 2009

This was going to happen at some point: me explaining how it is I got Wordpress running on my TCNJ personal page. So here’s how it went down, as concisely as I can make it.

Wordpress requires two basic components to run: PHPz and MySQL. PHP is a webpage development script that generates everything you see. MySQL is the database that stores what PHP regurgitates into your browser (like posts, name of your blog, etc). TCNJ has the capabilities to run PHP, but does not have a MySQL database solution. They’re supposedly working on it, but a) that’ll take time, b) it won’t be for the masses. Yes, I know that last point sucks.

The solution requires using a “Remote” MySQL database, hosted by someone that isn’t TCNJ. I got mine from http://www.freemysql.net/v2/, but anything that works is kosher. Once I made a database and had its URL, I could plug it into my Wordpress “wp-config.ini” file. I pasted the location of my database into the line: “define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);,” replacing ‘localhost’ with ‘[...].FREEMYSQL.NET’.

The remainder of the installation was about as typical as could be. If you have nothing to lose, and half an hour of free time, I highly suggest giving it a try. Having a content management system like Wordpress makes it A LOT easier to update your site with new posts. I don’t know why TCNJ is lacking in this regard… Maybe so the IMM kids are forced to code from scratch *shrug*