Julien's First Cinema Experience

Last night was a momentus occasion - Julien had his first excursion to a movie theatre. In fact, this one was a drive-in movie theatre! The two films playing were 'The Dark Knight', which is the latest of the Batman series a la Bale and the main feature of the evening, and 'Journey To the Centre of the Earth', which is a poor rendition of a film based on the classic Jules Verne novel of the same name.

For those of you who I may not know in person, my son, Julien, was named after Jules Verne because as a young boy, he was always my favourite author. I remember reading 'Mysterious Island', 'A Journey to the Centre of the Earth', '10 000 Leagues Under the Sea', 'From the Earth to the Moon', and many others before even being presented with the idea of reading for academic purposes in the fourth or fifth grade. Only a few summers ago, I was surprised to find that 'Michael Strogoff' was not the boring novel that I judged it to be as a young boy (based on its cover art alone), but I think now it's actually one of Verne's best novels.

Back to the point at hand, Jules Verne is the so-called namesake of my son Julien, and I thought that it would be a fantastic opportunity to concretize his first film experience with a film based on one of the more famous novels of his namesake.

Jules (mine) actually paid attention to the film for a good 15 minutes before Erin gave him his pre-bedtime snack and laid him down to sleep in the back seat. Unfortunately, the 15 minutes that Julien saw of the film could not have been worse than any other 15 minutes of the film - it was atrocious!! Brenden Frasier, being the only actor of any fame, set a very poor precedent. I would say that the best actor in the entire film was the young nordic girl, whose name escapes me right now.

In any event, it was a 3D movie - which I find incomprehensibly cool - but the drive-in operators didn't give away 3D glasses (arg!), so now I'll most likely buy the film at some point, just so that one day Julien (well... and me too) can buy a pair of 3D glasses and reminisce. I would at least hope that Jules is inspired one day to read some of the classics that I enjoyed when I was a boy.

The latest Batman film, on the other hand, was awesome!

During the evening, the thought occurred to me that drive-in movie theatres are a relic from the past. I wonder if they will even exist any longer when Julien is my age. Even when my father was my age, they were still a relic of the past, having been around since the 50's, when everything began revolving around the automobile. It will make for a fun story to tell him in 10 years.

Anyway, I should get back to work ;-)

Sidereel Firefox Search Plugin

Following the really easy template at Digital Alchemy, I've written a small Firefox search plugin for Sidereel, a probably not so legal site where you can watch lots of cool movies and TV shows for free. Download the plugin (really just an xml file) by right-clicking here and selecting 'Save Target As...' or 'Save Link As...' and save it in your searchplugins folder.

The searchplugins folder can be found on Linux systems simply with

find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name 'searchplugins'
For example, running the above command on my Linux system gives:

/home/[username]/.mozilla/firefox/[userprofile]/searchplugins

For Mac users, it's probably something like

/Users/[username]/.mozilla/firefox/[userprofile]/searchplugins

I'm guessing that on windows its something like

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\[userprofile]\searchplugins

Note (at least for linux): the searchplugins folder is not created automatically. You must either create it manually, or download an existing search plugin (e.g. Wikipedia).

You will need to restart Firefox for the plugin to be detected.