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I rented the latest Indiana Jones movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I loved the Indiana Jones films when I was growing up and had high hopes for it when I sat down to watch it. The new movie is absolutely horrible. Let me explain.

I was sorely disappointed. The plot was just awful. The whole movie felt like a family presentation on the Disney channel. The boy that Indiana brought on his adventure just happened to be his son, and the mom of the boy was being held captive, which just so happened to be in a place they passed through. The movie was so “family” it was disgusting.

The stunts performed in this movie were absurd. At one point, the boy is straddling two Jeeps that are speeding through a dense jungle, while simultaneously sword-fighting a passenger in one of the Jeeps, and all the while, taking time to smile at the camera. Half of the movie was done by stuntmen. The entire movie looked like it was filmed in a small studio surrounded by green screens. It looked so digitized the whole time, it was a major distraction.

Despite the tens of thousands of bullets flying at Indiana and his family, not a single one of them got hit once. It was unrealistic to the point of being cartoonish. And I haven’t even mentioned that Indiana Jones literally survives a nuclear blast at a bomb test site by hiding in a refrigerator, only to emerge a half a mile away in the debris without so much as a speck of dust on his clothes. Geez! Even during the final scenes where they are supposedly battered and bruised, Harrison Ford’s jacket still looks like it was just taken from a hanger at the store! Don’t waste your time with this disaster of a movie!

Everybody knows about YouTube, and I think most people have visited Hulu or Vimeo. I recently discovered three amazing websites to find an amazing amount of streaming videos. On my searches of ovguide.com, I found most anything I thought of…TV shows, movies, you name it. That site is my personal favorite of the three in my list below, and one you must check out.

1. OVGuide.com
2. Ninjavideo.net
3. Truveo.com

I have two tools to recommend if for optimizing your Windows Registry. Both are completely free and I’ve found both to be very effective. If you think you don’t need to clean your Registry, you’ll think otherwise once you scan it with a cleaner. Make sure you back up your registry before using either of these! Creating a restore point using the Windows System Restore will do the trick.

First clean up your registry with the Wise Registry Cleaner. Be sure to get the free version, not a trial of the pro version. This program will remove old registry entries that point to things that no longer exist, etc. On my installation of XP, the Wise cleaner found hundreds of useless entries that were fattening my Registry.

Second, you can actually defragment your Registry and remove wasted and unused space, which can possibly help the computer to be more responsive, though probably minimally. There is a tool that can do this for you in seconds. For this job, use the freeware app Auslogics Registry Defrag.

This gag is not new, but I ran across this picture in a folder with some old email attachments. I thought it would be worth sharing for a laugh.

If you’re a Mac user and want a more powerful text editor than the one built into OSX, you should definitely download TextWrangler. It is totally free and has more features than I can list here. One of the most convienent is the ability to search and replace across multiple files. That reason alone is worth the download. Dare I say, this is the best text editor for the Mac. And totally free!

Everyone American by law is entitled to a free annual credit report. I’ve often wondered how one goes about that. I don’t trust any website with the words “credit report” in the address, since the info is so sensitive. Today I was reading my latest PC World magazine and they address this. Here’s the scoop.

The official website is: www.annualcreditreport.com

It is indeed free with no strings attached. Don’t fall for commercials for “free credit report dot com”, which is only free after you sign up for a monthly credit monitoring service that is ridiculously priced. I wasn’t about to enter my information on just any website, and I’m thankful the magazine has cleared up. And now I’m telling you.

I hate the fact that year after year, Christmas decorations pop up earlier and earlier. This year beats all. Today, October 21st, I drove past my local mall to find it decked out in holiday lights and decorations. Have they no shame? It isn’t even Halloween yet. I’m disgusted.

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A couple of months back, my family turned me on to a hilarious TV show called Arrested Development. It aired on Fox for three seasons from 2003-2006, when it was then cancelled by the network. I had heard of the title in the past, but had no idea what the show was actually like. So I started renting the DVDs from Netflix, starting from the very beginning. Today, I have almost finished watching the entire first season. The show is very funny! It is a character show, and getting familiar with the cast and characters are essential to your enjoyment. You’ll find that the casting for each character is just perfect. If you want to check out the show, plan to watch four to five episodes before you get a true understanding of each character. Once you’re hooked, you’ll fall in love with this show’s humor and crazy whit!

It’s a shame that this show was ultimately cancelled by Fox. However, according to Internet rumors, an Arrested Development movie is due out sometime in 2009! I haven’t been able to find a release date or finalized plot details, but IMDB already has a page for this future movie, which I assume is still in the making. What fun! I look forward to it!