Martin Geisler Online

What a long title, and what a long movie! I’ve just bought this wonderful movie on DVD in extended edition. I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve just had a sneakpeak to see some of the new scenes — what I’ve seen already looks very promising. This version is 30 minutes longer than the one shown in the movie theaters and comes on no less than four DVDs. The movie itself is split onto the first two disks and then there’s two disks with about six hours of documentary footage about the film, the books, the characters, etc…

I don’t know why they’ve devided the movie over two disks, from what I’ve read, then it should be possible to fit four hours of video onto a single-sided double-layered DVD. But perhaps it’s because of the four audio tracks… Anyways, it’s a good oppotunity to go to the bathroom when the disks are switched, just when the Fellowship is leaving Rivendell.

The extra scenes are beautiful! They add much more depth to the film, because you get to hear more details about the history and characters. The beginning of the film has been changed, so that you now hear Bilbo talking to himself as he writes the foreword (”Concerning Hobbits”) for his book ”There and Back Again”. This should make it easier for people who haven’t read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings to understand the Hobbits. You also see more to the friendship between Legolas and Gimli, you see the presents given to the Fellowship in Lothlorien. This was probably the weakest part of the original film, the scenes in Lothlorien were much to short.

All in all, I think they’ve done a great job with the extended version and I’ll recommend it to everybody who liked the film in it’s standard version.

I’ve ported the good old theme from http://www.gimpster.com/ to work with PhpWiki, see GimpsterTheme.

Although I thought this last week was surposed to be my autumn holiday, I’ve still managed to spend around 6 hours at DAIMI each day… I’ve been working together with Thomas Mølhave and Mikkel Krøigård on our dPaSS project. And now it’s finished and it works! We were surposed to design a framework that will be used to build a calendar system. But we’ve actually made a working program where you can create new appointments, invite people to appointments and cancel appointments.

Everything is documented in the biggest document I’ve ever been part of, written in [LaTeX][] of course, we’re at about 70 pages right now. But it’s only about 18 of those pages that has text on them, the rest is titlepages, table of contents, and then all the code typeset using the excellent listings package. The definition we’ve been using for the BETA language is

\lstdefinelanguage{BETA}{
  morekeywords={
    origin, include, body,
    enter, do, exit,
    if, then, else,
    for, repeat,
    leave, restart,
    inner,
    suspend,
    dopart, descriptor, mainpart, attributes,
    true, false, and, or, not,
    none, this},
  sensitive=false,
  morecomment=[s]{(*}{*)},
  morecomment=[s][\footnotesize]{(**}{*)},
  morestring=[b]‘,
  moredelim=*[s][\slshape]{<<}{>>},
  moredelim=*[s][\scshape]{-}{-},
  moredelim=[s][\ttfamily]{[}{]}
}

The comments started with (** is used for the CVS headings which tend to be fairly long. Using \footnotesize makes then small enough to fit into a single line. We’ve typeset all the code using a basicstyle of \small\sffamily using the Lucida Bright fonts from Y&Y which look fantastic. Unfortunately I cannot show you the report with the fonts, because of the license on these commercial fonts, which says that

Scope of Use. [...] If you need to publish material in electronic form that contains fonts or partial fonts, then you need to obtain an electronic publishing license.

And I don’t have such a license :-(

Yesterday was Saturday night, so we had having a small party here at [Skejbygård][]. But it was only a small party: Christina Strøhl had gone to some sort of reunion party with the people from her highschool and Jesper Klintø was at a party in Aalborg. So we were just myself, Camilla Johnsen, and Torben Classen. But that was also enough!

We had rented both IMDB:Remembering the Titans (2000) and IMDB:Don’t Say a Word (2001) which were both good films. IMDB:Remembering the Titans (2000) was a particularly nice film, because it left you with a nice friendly fealing: it’s the story of how the black Herman Boone, played by Denzel Washington, becomes the head coach for a football team, replacing the white coach Bill Yoast, played by Will Patton. The local community isn’t pleased with this, and neither are the white players. But after a militaristic training camp everybody learns to accept each other, and things basically go from there to a happy end.

After that we saw IMDB:Don’t Say a Word (2001) which is surposed to be a thriller. I didn’t find it that scary, though. It was a fairly good movie, but nothing spectacular.

I’ve spend the last three days in Aalborg with my mom, dad and my younger brother Kristoffer. I was starting to feel better when I left Århus Monday morning, but the cold I’ve got quickly increased when I came to Aalborg.

So I didn’t do much when I was there — we watched IMDB:A Beautiful Mind (2001) on DVD on my parents new widescrean TV which was really nice. The film itself is amazing: Russell Crowe is fantastic in the way he can act using just his eyes. There’s several scenes where he doesn’t say anything, but his eyes and the expression on his face tells the whole story. I’ve really an amazing film, and if you haven’t seen it already, then you should hurry!

I also saw Kristian Kristensen while I was in Aalborg. It was really nice to get together and talk about the “old times” :-)