StillSecure, After All These Years

The new golden age of comics

The golden age of comics in the 30's and 40's saw the creation of the superhero.  The good versus evil storylines mimicked the real life events of the day. It elevated the comic book to an art form.  Comic style illustration and story telling in short dialog balloons had never before or since reached those heights. Than after WW II, with the advent of TV and one evil empire ending, comic books seemed to recede back into the background of young boys play things.  Their numbers never again reached the levels seen during the war and many of the characters faded away.

Over the years the comic industry tried to regain their former glory, but the age of the superhero was over.  Yeah there was the TV cartoons, who didn't watch Superman or Batman when you were little.  Some of you like me, may have even watched the Marvel Superhero Show that had short segments of many of the Marvel characters (check them out in the You Tube video), but they were campy and never appealed to an audience beyond young boys.  The Superman movies with Christopher Reeves market a turning point on the return of the superhero and the Batman movies were very successful.  But beyond those two, there were many flops.

With better technology and better story lines, Spiderman, Iron Man and now the latest, The Incredible Hulk have brought comic book superheroes from the page to the screen in a big way. I know that I was not a big fan of the Iron Man movie, but seeing Tony Stark come in at the end of the Hulk movie did get even me excited by the possibilities. Also seeing the Hulk and Iron Man, I began to see that these movies are not aimed at adolescent boys with stories that I am used to from comic books and TV shows.  These are movies aimed at adults with adult storylines.  The technology is great, the heroes are played by big stars (I hear Brad Pitt is playing Thor) rather than unknowns and the productions are first class.

Besides the movies already out, Thor, Captain America, and Namor, the submariner are all headed for the big screen. Once each of these and more have their movie debuts, the subsequent combinations and sequels are almost infinite.  This could be the biggest movie franchise of all time and make the original comic book owners more money then they ever dreamed of!  In the meantime, I am excited to see many of my boyhood heroes get this new big screen treatment! 

Iron Man was just not very magnetic to me

Took the kids to see Iron Man tonight with our cousins Jeri and Danny.  I generally like Robert Downey, Jr and he acted very hard in this movie. However, I just didn't get the story. I remember watching Iron Man cartoons when I was little and reading the comic books, there was some special thing about Iron Man's blood the way I remember it that gave him super hero powers.

In the movie incarnation, Tony Starks is the son of a weapons designer and a brilliant weapons designer himself.  However, he has some serious character flaws. He is kidnapped by some sort of mid-eastern terrorists and take some shrapnel in his chest.  A doctor attaches an electromagnet to a car battery on his chest to keep the shrapnel from going into his heart. Downey then designs some sort of mini-power source to power the electromagnet,  He uses the power source to power a metal suit he builds (long story) and escapes from the terrorists.  From there the movie is fairly predictable and frankly in my opinion not very good.  I didn't understand how he got the superpower, it was just a powered suit and how it worked was pretty silly. 

The ultimate thumbs up or down for me was that both of my sons fell asleep in the movie theater.  The good news is that this is the start of the summer movie season. I am really looking forward to Indiana Jones and the kids want to see Speed Racer!

Why didn't we think of this?

Saw a pretty funny video clip today over on the Hoff-miester's blog.  It is a viral video from the folks over at Palo Alto Networks poking fun at Juniper and Check Point.  Pay attention to the words, as it is good stuff. What could be next, Dancing with the Security Stars? I would like to see Amrit, Tom Ptacek and Mike Rothman (I hear he has been practicing dancing with his daughter for this) as the contestants. 

Seriously, these videos are a great way to get some buzz going and I think Palo Alto has done a great job.  Count on Chris to find this stuff. Enjoy!

Your life is an occasion

Your life is an occasion, rise to it - Dustin Hoffman as Edward Magorium in Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

In another lesson of you can't put much stock in what the critics say, I took my two sons to a delightful movie today.  It is called Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, starring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman.  It also features a great young actor named Zach Mills and former child star Jason Bateman (as the mutant, I mean accountant). Bonnie and I originally saw a coming soon trailer for this movie months ago and thought it would be great for the kids.  However, when it came out the reviews have been almost all very poor, especially the local Florida paper.  Well I guess I know why that critic is reviewing movies in a Florida newspaper and not the NY Times. So in spite of the bad press, we honored our family Thanksgiving weekend tradition of going to the movies.

Anyway, in an age where movies are judged by how cool the computer animation is, how many people the superhero beats up and crude bathroom humor, I found this movie to be a movie with a message I want my kids to learn.  It is about Mr Magorium's impending "departure" and a young girl who has not lived up to her potential finding the "sparkle and magic" in herself to fill those old, large shoes.  I don't want to give away more than that, but my kids were really into the story and we had some great discussions about some of the concepts the movie explored. It has enough CGI to give the kids the oohs and aahs they like, but that does not dominate the story, which explores some great lessons for the young and old alike.

So don't believe the press, go see Magorium for yourself and by all means bring the kids!

Multi-purpose appliances

With Mitchell talking so much about software appliances and the converging of networking and security appliances, I thought I would contribute my own post on what I call multi-purpose appliances.  This You Tube video was sent to me anonymously and shows what you can do with a Checkpoint UTM-1 appliance if you have another need for the box.  Funnier still, I think the Checkpoint box is actually an OEM of our favorite enterprise/carrier class UTM vendor.  I am sure they are thrilled to find another use for their boxes.  What can be next, a flower pot? Maybe a fish bowl?  Anyway, enjoy!

If you don't see the You Tube player, click here to view the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUleb72-8Os

Pixar does it again, Cars has something for everyone

Just got back from the movies with my sons. As I wrote about earlier, we went to see the new Disney-Pixar film, Cars.  Over the years, we have seen every Pixar film.  Cars is one of the best!  It has all of the elements of the previous Pixar blockbusters, a great story with a lesson, fantastic characters and phenomenal, keep you in your seat, computer animation.  In fact, the animation in Cars is their best yet.  If you thought the underwater scenes in Nemo were good, you ain't seen nothing. At some points you don't even realize it is an animated movie. The "sets" of the race tracks are great, but the scenes of the American west around old Route 66 are breathtaking.  This movie raises the bar for animation technology. The car characters themselves look so realistic, you almost forget that cars don't have eyes in their windshields and mouths in their grills.  The light reflections off of their paint are fantastic.

Another very different thing about the movie, is there are no people.  It is a world of cars.  The fans in the stands, the folks inhabiting the world, the TV crew, everyone is one sort of vehicle or another.  Making these characters exhibit human emotions was quite a task, but Pixar pulled it off beautifully. You can really connect with the characters, they did a great job of humanizing them. From the peripheral characters, like the VW Van hippie and the Italian tire store owner to the main players, every character is done perfectly

This movie has something for everyone, including a hot little Porsche, named Sally.   Boys and girls, city folk and country folk, young and old, will all find something for themselves in this movie.  The tractor tipping is hysterical!  Don't worry if you don't have any kids to take with you to see this movie, it is no excuse.  I would recommend you go out and see it right away.

Just two more days until Cars is here

Forget all of this network security stuff, this Friday the new Disney-Pixar (they are the same now aren't they) movie, Cars, opens up.  I don't know which of us is more excited, my two sons or I.  We have been waiting for over a year for this one to come out.  It is by Pixar and is the latest in a long line of classics like Toy Story 1 and 2, A Bugs Life, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Monsters, Inc.  Everything we have seen indicates this one is going to be just as good.  My kids already seem to know the whole story and who wins, but lets wait and see if they are right. I will be taking them on Saturday, but expect big lines. Will be buying my tickets in advance tomorrow. It is good to see a movie with buzz coming out.

I know we are not the only ones waiting for this either.  Raj's two kids, Chloe and Rishi are all jazzed up by this one, too, as is Raj for that matter.  I think he is taking them Friday afternoon.  So you can run out and see it yourself or wait until after Saturday and I will post my review here.

The future of the movies

With all of the great home theater equipment available today, I have often felt that it spelled the doom of the movie theater experience as we know it.  Though popcorn at home never tastes as good and its still a relatively cheap night out, going to the movies seemed to have lost something.  The box office numbers certainly seem to prove that out.  Well movie theater fans, fear not.  I have seen the future of motion pictures in a theater environment and it is really cool!  I took the boys today to see the new Disney movie, Chicken Little in Disney Digital 3-D.  I know, I know, Chicken Little, huh, the future of the movies?  Forget the movie for a second (though it was a really funny G rated, computer animated, movie that the kids loved and had lots of stuff that just flew over their heads, that made me laugh too), it was the 3-D technology that blew me away.  This was not your parents red and blue paper glasses.  It was more akin to the 3-D movie experiences you see in the theme parks like Shrek 4-D at Universal in Orlando.  They gave you the same green plastic glasses that had a film like tint to them.  The effect was out of this world.  Really ultra-sharp 3-D pictures that put you in the middle of the action.  I am sure with the chance to experiment with this type of technology, the creative Hollywood types are going to give us some unbelievable experiences in the years to come using this.  This is not something you can recreate at home either I believe.

Go out and see this movie as soon as you can.  If you don't want to go without a kid and you don't have one, borrow someone else's but see the movie.  Also, be careful as there is a non 3-D version as well.  Be sure your theater has the 3-D one.  You won't be sorry 

It's still a great movie

I was a little hesitant at first to buy it, it seemed like such a girlie movie, but could not resist getting the new DVD of Cinderella from Disney.  Landon and Bradley had never seen the movie before. Tonight, while Bonnie was out at a concert with some friends, we sat down and watched the flick.  I had not seen it since I was their age myself.  The Disney people have done a great job restoring and remastering the original. It looked and sounded great on TV at home.  Most of all, pretty much right from the first scene, both boys were mesmerized by it.  They just about did not move for the whole movie.  For a 4 and 6 year old that is really saying something!  They and I highly recommend it to the young and young at heart.  A classic is always a classic.