Just finished watching Crash on video-on-demand. Two comments: video-on-demand is cool; Crash is an awesome movie. Wow! The movie is hard to explain, but highly recommended as worth seeing.

There is a tremendous amount of racism portrayed by this film. That is the whole point. Many times I laughed because the dialogue is funny, in a twisted sort of way. Its not a funny film. Its a wonderful commentary on the attitude of people as they perceive the world around them. There is something that we can all recognize in our own behavior, whether its the time we shyied away from Black people on the street or its the time we disregarded those of Persian or Arab descent or its the time we poked fun at the Asian kid behind the counter. Towards the end of the film most of the characters find something like redemption or at least recognition of their own failings. This part is unlikely in real life, as most people surround themselves with people who think, act, talk and otherwise behave like themselves, and as a result continue their bigoted attitudes and activities. But maybe a few people will become enlightened. Even if one person sees this film and rethinks their view of the world, its worthwhile.

The video-on-demand service came via Shaw (our cable service). I also get high-speed Internet service from them. Both services are good, certainly the cable modem provides great service with nearly zero interruptions. This is probably the second movie we’ve purchased via the video-on-demand service. Just awesome. We rent a fair number of DVDs from Rogers Video but I think I’ll be looking for films from Shaw more often. You get pretty much the same experience as a video tape with play, pause, etc. but without going to the store. I’ll miss out on the “DVD extras” but honestly I don’t get much value from seeing the seven different crappy trailers included as the bonus material. For those films that really have good material, we’ll get the DVD. But I wouldn’t rent the DVD for the bonus material without knowing in advance that it was going to be worthwhile. So that is a hint to the movie studios: when advertising your DVD releases, make it known what bonus material will be included and why its interesting. Otherwise I can’t be bothered to spend time at the video store anymore.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 today and created a new theme.

The upgrade was really simple and it looks like there were no problems. Not quite sure what I’ll get with the upgrade but the feature that sold me was the better management pages (you don’t see those, they are what I use to write new content and create categories and other stuff). The downside is that the spell checker I was using reportedly doesn’t work with this version. There are other spell check modules available, so I’m not too worried.

Also created a new theme, even though it probably wasn’t required. Had a couple of hours of time available and I really am starting to understand this CSS stuff. It looks sort of similar to the old theme, but works much better with Internet Explorer under Windows. I also got the Calendar and other nice features going on the left side bar.

Once again my WordPress experience is very positive.