Mike Browne’s Blog

I created this dancing dude at this site. My little guy, Zoinx, looks like he’s had polio or some horrible degenerative muscle disease. At least he’s still attempting to dance with his cloned pals, even if it is to crappy techno.

And as my IMDb profile says, I worked on it. Yes, embarrassingly, I worked on The Wickerman. You may remember a blog post or two of mine on just that subject.

While working I had sneaking a suspicion that it was going to be bad. Boy was that feeling on the money. If you haven’t seen it, you’re best not to bother. I can still smell it and we watched it over two weeks ago. I think we’re going to have to boil our DVD player or just toss it out.

Anyway to save you the cost of a rental someone has seen fit to edit together some of the worst scenes from this piece of dreck into a YouTube video. I have it right here. Enjoy, or not:

“My eyes! My eyes!”

I am so sorry. It’s not even campy-funny-bad. It’s just, well, bad.

I knew they could do it.

After winning a shoot out thriller last night the Canucks have won 7 games in a row. Outstanding considering their less than stellar start to the season. One cannot help but think that the Canucks amazing new star goaltender (pictured above) has just a little something to do with it.

I used to feel extremely uncomfortable with the fragile Dan Cloutier in net, but not so with Luongo. So, while ol’ Danny boy is stinkin’ it up in LA this year with the worst goals against average in the league as of this writing, we get to enjoy some solid net minding.

Watching Luongo play is a real treat.

In other Canucks news:

How does Nazzy spell relief? G-O-A-L!

Canucks captain, Markus Naslund, bumped his slump last night with a well earned goal as well. Thank the hockey gods for this one. He was looking mighty dejected although he never really gave up getting plenty of assists during his drought. Hopefully he’ll be scoring like a maniac for the rest of the season. Markus

Go Canucks Go!

Check out this a new edit of an old Hinterland Who’s Who on the reactions of spiders when given various psychoactive drugs. Thanks to Paul from RadioNL for tip.

What a doorknob. Showing off and karma took care of him. Nothing to do with the Canucks (who won again tonight.

Got this straight from Digg.

I woke up this morning to Carol telling me that it was snowing. Looking outside I saw that she wasn’t kidding. A wet and heavy snowfall that’s definitely sticking. Carol’s working at the mall of the dead tonight and I’ve been thinking picking her up is not going to be much fun at all.

I sat down to tinker with this website some more and got and MSN Message from Mark of the Hollywood North Report leading me to a news story. Here’s what it said:

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The roof of BC Place has collapsed.

Callers to News1130 describe that it looked like a panel of the inflatable roof ‘blew off’, which led to the entire roof to cave inwards.

According to the BC Place website, there were no events scheduled to take place under the dome this weekend.

My response? “Holy shit!”

Mark then sent me some pictures as well. Here they are (I captioned the after photo and found the before through a Google search):

I’m thinking the title of this post should have been “Vancouver landmark goes BOOM” but I’ll stick with what I have.

I’m sure there will be more photos. I’ll post them as I get them. If the weather wasn’t so crappy I would go take some of my own. If the snow is gone by tomorrow I will.

UPDATE [2:10 PM]: Here’s a Vancouver Sun story with a great picture of the tear in the roof.

UPDATE [3:12 PM]: Update from CBC

UPDATE [4:17 PM]: News 1130’s web site has more information.

UPDATE [4:32 PM]: Three videos from Gamegoof of the roof before, during and after the collapse after the jump.
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In September of 2005 I went to the Vancouver International Film Centre theatre to hear Ray Liotta, star of Goodfellas, talk about acting and the movie business at The Film and Television Trade Forum. I took some photos, one of which I posted, and video there and pretty much forgot about it until now. Flash video, YouTube in particular, were still the wave of the future and not nearly as ubiquitous as they are now so I had no real practical way of sharing what I saw. Well here it is. A clip of Ray Liotta speaking candidly about his experience with the casting process of the iconic mobster film, Goodfellas. Enjoy:

Although small, it looks and sounds okay considering I shot it on my digital camera and not a video camera. Editing was an experience but it turned out acceptably. Not everyone can say they've done a film starring Ray Liotta. I should put it on my résumé.

UPDATE: I popped the video up on YouTube as well. It should get a few views.

Ever since we were children growing up in Canada, many of us were puzzled by a TV enigma. That of the Mr Dressup Show (sadly off the air as of September 2006).

This blog post is in no way any statement against Mr Dressup. He helped me to become the person I am today. Thank you Mr Dressup! It's purpose is to give those interested place to give their opinions as to those long unanswered questions.

If we watched Mr Dressup on CBC in the 1970's we have all asked ourselves the same questions at one time or another. Who is this Mr Dressup character really? Why did he just hang around his house all day long? Did he have a job? Did he have a significant other of any sort? If so why did we never see this person?

Was Casey some relative of Mr Dressup? If so, why did he and Finnigan live outside in the tree house? Were they there by their own free will or were they being kept there? Why did Casey's mouth not move when he spoke? Was Finnigan really whispering anything at all? Could he truly be a talking dog or was what he was "saying" just a figment of sick and tortured imaginations?

Who's aunt was Aunt Bird? Why did a bird, that talked no less, wear glasses and a feather boa? What was up with Alligator Al and that goofy hat? What the heck does ta-wit ta-woo mean?

Finally, what (or who) was really in the Tickle Trunk?

Perhaps together we can solve these riddles.

We miss you Mr Dressup.

Happy New Year all! This new skin is in part what I’ve been up to.

I looked at my site the other day and wanted to barf. No wonder I haven’t been updating it. I’m still surfing and finding cool links. In fact I think I’ve learned more lately than at any other time. The web is growing so fast it has become even harder to keep up with, but I’m trying.

I don’t want to become like my Mom. So out of touch with technology I become afraid of it. She won’t even attempt sending an email. I love you Ma but you’re missing out.

I can think of no better way to “keep up” than to redesign the look and feel of my site. So for the past few days I’ve been cramming and boning up on the latest in web design techniques. There are many new technologies and design ideas out there I hadn’t been taking advantage of. The current Web 2.0 trend in design is interesting indeed. If you want to try out some Web 2.0 designing for yourself here’s a how to design guide that has been helpful to me.

I got into action by first giving Carol’s site a new look. After that my site was looking a little ragged in comparison so I spent the rest of my energy on polishing this tired old blog.

Maybe now that it looks a little prettier I may post more often.

After the last year in tech I’m excited to see what this year holds.

Away we go!