Carneval is over, and I missed it because of the flu. Kind of sad, the good news: in less then a year we are going to celebrate carneval again.

On other news, take a look at Palmanova, Italy. Very interesting concept of defending a town, isn't it amazing how you can make it out from space? The Earth Observatory is an extremely cool site, I added a gadget to my Live page which shows a new picture every day. More often then not something cool can be seen ...

The movie I'm talking about: Sin City. I heard lots of people raving about this movie in 2005, finally the 'recut and extended' DVD set became available, and after all that acclaim I decided to shell out my hard earned Euros. It didn't disappoint at all, the story is interesting and challenging to follow, the movie is visually stunning, and the DVD set is full of extras and information. It even contains the comic novels which are the basis of the movie, and flipping through the story it makes me appreciate much more the visual style and closeness of the movie to its graphical-novel origin.

Although no 'blood' is visible in the movie (blood is always 'white' - don't ask me why, but it makes sense if you look at the origin and the artistically direction of the movie), the story and the movie itself are not something for the faint of hard, I think it got an R rating, and this is well deserved. It might not be the best dating movie ...

As mentioned above, the DVD set is full of additional material, and even for the non-fan of the movie, there is plenty of interesting information to browse through. Although it was already late, I spent another hour quickly browsing through the material, I still have some open questions about the story (I think I missed a few bonus-details), and will definitely watch the movie again ...

My rating - highly recommended... 5 out of 5 stars

There is a movie trailer out there for the Mel Gibson flick 'Apocalypto', for details check the IMDB site, but someone at work mentioned that you should play close attention to the trailer around the 1:45 mark. It is really hard to spot - but here is it for your viewing pleasure...

At 1:46 you see this frame ...

A couple of frames later, you see this frame

The funny frame is in the middle, Mel Gibbson having a good time ...

nice marketing ...

As an owner of a XBox360 I added my gamertag to the title page ... Gamescore of 55 probably means I don't play enough ...

Gamespot run an article on "Video Cable Comparison" for the XBox360, here:
   http://www.gamespot.com/features/6139690/index.html

Nice article to give you and introduction to the different video modes, and the visual comparison done in the article with sample pictures is pretty nice.

"How you connect the Xbox 360 to your TV could mean the difference between brilliant visuals and mediocre picture quality. If you have an HDTV you're going to want to use component cables to hook up the Xbox 360. For normal televisions, your best bet will be S-Video. Should you have an older-model TV that doesn't have an S-Video input, composite video might be your only option. Lastly, if your TV has only an RF input and you bought an Xbox 360, you probably should have bought a new TV first."

Summary: I see more hme entertainment investment in my future.

For the last couple of month I was a happy user of FolderShare, a simple way to create a peer-to-peer network helping me to synchronize data between different machines (and also work places). The software worked just great for me, no problems with NAT, proxies, whatever. I finally decided to pay the modest fee of $49 for the extended version (better protocol, less limitations...). FolderShare has been acquired by Microsoft (something I take as a sign of quality for the FolderShare software), and I received mail from FolderShare stating that the service is now free of charge and I will be receiving a refund of my fees at a pro-rated basis.

All I can say 'Excellent', great service, I was not really expecting a refund. Thanks, keep improving the software, and I won't mind if it stays free ...