The Grax Domain

31 May 2007 One Word Blog Day 2007 part 1

Delayed???

24 May 2007 I'm no schizo. Nor am I

I found this article a long while ago that claims that hearing voices in your head is a common thing:

Voices in the head 'are normal'

One of the key points it makes are that it's not the fact that hearing voices in your head is the problem, but how the person interprets those voices.

I find this to be an interesting idea. People hearing voices in their being a common thing? It almost removes some pressure about being crazy.

One thing it doesn't really make clear is the definition of hearing voices in your head. After all, does giving yourself a pep talk in your head count? What about day dreaming? Technically you hear the voices in your head and not with your ears. Or is the definition of voices in your head simply that you hear voice that sound like they are coming from outside yourself but there is nothing there to cause it?

I quite often talk to myself in my head for things like pep talks and stuff. But I'm creating that voice with my mind on purpose. It's not something that's happening beyond my control. I've had incidences where I've been so tired that just before I fall asleep I hear my name being called by someone voice. When I lift my head to check there is no one there. It sounded just like the person was next to me, but it was something in my head. But those incidences are rare and I put it down to fatigue.

I wonder if anyone else goes through the same thing as me sometimes. Or am I the only crazy one?

14 May 2007 Spider-Man 3 movie review

Sometimes it can be a pain being a comic book fanboy, especially when it comes to movies. It makes you go to the cinema to watch the movie adaptation ignoring the inner voices telling you that it is an abomination.I myself have recently put myself through watching all of Spider-Man 3 just so I can get a glimpse of what someone else thinks Venom (one of my all time favourite fave comic characters) should look like on the silver screen. Fortunately the rest of the movie was not so bad.

Spider-man 3 sees our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Person enjoying the perks of having it all, a city that cheers for the hero, a beautiful girlfriend he plans to marry; then it starts to go all downhill, partly due to an certain extra-terrestrial symbiote. Not to mention a couple of other super-villains.

One of the good points of the film is the action sequences when Spidey gets fighting one of the villains. It does a good job of keeping the audience entertained, smiling at the computer-generated stunts, wincing at the rather painful looking collisions that occur. However the movie starts to suffer when it's out of the action sequences and starts to get into the story, where the story dragged on, the ending got very sloppy, and people where looking at their watches wondering when Venom will make his appearance.

What, you think people paid £7 to see Sandman? I think not.

Speaking of Venom I think Topher Grace did a god job portraying him despite his somewhat limited air time. He got the point across that he believes Peter Parker screwed him over life and wanted to make him suffer. And the CGI Venom was also pretty good, even though you only get to see about 20 minutes or so of him. And the fact he's not as bulky as this comic counterpart. Other than those minor points Venom was a good addition and deserves much more airtime. The other two villains, Sandman and The Green Goblin (Harry Osborn), I felt were shoe-horned into the movie to make the story work so I'm not going to talk about them. Me being biased towards Venom? I tend to agree.

Even though I enjoyed Spider-man 3 a lot more than Spider-man 2, which I felt had way really cheesy acting and Spider-man suffering from reveal-his-secret-identity-to-everyone-itis, I can only recommend you wait for the DVD release or even wait until it comes to TV. Of course my words of caution won't deter all those Venom fans out there, they're going to go see him at the cinema anyway. Hell I wouldn't follow my own advice either.

Oh one last thing to the people who made Spider-man 3. Giving Peter Parker an emo fringe does not make him a bad-ass; it gets him laughed at! I swear he wore a little eye-liner at one point too. I don't blame you Tobey Maguire. After all you were only doing your job.

GRAX RATING: 3/5 (less if you're not a Venom fan).

11 May 2007 Pandora's music box

I've recently found this rather funky online music player. It's called Pandora and it's created by the Music Genome Project. What it is in a nutshell is a Flash based music player that plays music based upon what the music sounds like and what other bands have a similar sound. Or something like that.

For example my favourite band is Alice in Chains. I create a station using the band's name as a criteria. Then Pandora plays music either by Alice in Chains themselves or other bands that sound similar to them. It also works on song titles too. It's a pretty bad-ass way of discovering new bands that you may never would have considered. You can create as many stations as you like and mix and match them as you like.

On top of that you can rate each song being played by whether you like it or not. If you like it the station will play that song more often, if you don't then the station will not play that song ever again.

The only minor negative points I have about Pandora are that sometime it tends to loop through some of the song you like a bit too often (but you can say that you're bored of the song and then it won't appear again for a month) and that because of some licensing issues you can only skip a certain number of tracks per hour per station (but you can simply change stations at that point).

Pandora is a great little online music player to use if you're bored of your music collection, or if you fancy listening out for some new tracks.

Give Pandora a try, you might discover a little musical gem.

GRAX RATING: 4/5

10 May 2007 A List Apart web design survey

I noticed this survey whilst on my lunch break and I filled it in.

To all the great web designers and developers out there (and I know you're out there somewhere) why not give it a go: