Drive: Hey, I’m as big a Ryan Gosling fan as the next guy, but holy cow is this movie ever boring, filled with lots of silent, forlorn staring and longing. In addition, I can’t stand a movie where the “hero” drives away, leaving a bag with a million dollars in it lying on the pavement.  Seriously?

Crazy, Stupid, Love: This is actually a rather profound movie with great acting and terrific characters.  It deals with the nature of true love, and shows how people can learn from each other when they least expect to do so.  I could have done without the kiddie porn situation, but overall, I rather enjoyed it, especially the Tour de Force performances by Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell.

Mission Impossible 4:  This is a seriously excellent action film, especially when you see it at the new “BigD" theater like I did.  I know that Tom Cruise is insane, but I still find him a very compelling movie star.  I’d recommend seeing this film for the amazing stunts and a fairly compelling action plot. 

The Adventures of TinTin: I saw this delightful, highly recommended, must-see-in-3D film with my son this weekend.  It was very faithful to the original comic and is possibly the most visually appealing film I’ve ever seen.  I’d definitely recommend seeing this one in the theater.

• If you missed CodeRage 6, or you didn’t get to every session that you wanted to see (hear?), it is now all online.  That link also points to the latest offers and ways to find out more about XE2.  I love XE2, and think it’s the best Delphi ever.  And I say that not even using the FireMonkey/cross-platform stuff – so it’s even better than I think. 
• I was digging around in my boxes in the basement – we’ve moved a ton, and so I’ve got stuff scattered all over – and came across a CD labeled “Website”.  I opened it up, and lo and behold, there was a copy of one of my very first web sites, built with NetObjects Fusion.  It was fun to poke around and see some of my really old content.  (As a point of reference, the homepage has “This site was last updated on  Tuesday, December 18, 2001” at the bottom.  Remember when we used to do that?) Actually, I think some of the stuff will end up on my current site.    Not all the links work, but if you’ve been around a while, you might remember some of it.  Most of it was hand-maintained, but you can see where I tried to integrate in some early Delphi-based CGI stuff.   I actually still like the colors and the template. 
• The Generics.Default.pas unit is an interesting one – you may never have cause to use it directly, but it contains a lot of interesting stuff in support of the classes in Generics.Collections.pas.   It’s worth poking around in.  I was doing just that, and came across some interesting code – a function called (and I quote) BobJenkinsHash.  It is used rather extensively throughout the unit, and appears to be a general purpose hashing code.  Who is Bob Jenkins, you may ask?  Well, apparently he’s a guy that wrote a very powerful and useful hash function, and Embarcadero has utilized it as part of their generics library.  And here’s the interesting part – they created it using a set of GOTO(!!) statements whose use , well  -- I seriously can’t believe I’m actually saying this – actually kind of make sense.  The C code depends on the “fall through” nature of C’s switch statement, and the GOTO calls actually mimic that rather nicely.  I’m open to suggestions on how it might have been written better.  (Again – I can’t believe I just said that, but there it is.)  And to redeem myself, I’ll chastise the author for not defining his interfaces in their own unit.  (Sorry, Barry – I had to do something to restore my street cred for actually liking the way the GOTO’s worked…..) Anyway, interesting little find in the bowels of the Delphi RTL.
• I’ve added a new category, Three Sentence Movie Reviews.   I watch a lot of movies, and have all these aspirations of writing up movie reviews when I watch, but I never do because it takes too long.  So I thought I’d simply limit myself to three sentences in reviewing the film, and that way I might actually get the review done.  I might have to get a bit creative – sort of like keeping tweets to under 140 characters.  Should be fun.  If you read this blog via DelphiFeeds, you won’t see it as I’ll not be putting the Delphi category tag on them. Just another reason to subscribe to my real feed. 

Soul Surfer:  This is a beautiful and touching film about a very courageous young woman, Bethany Hamilton.  You are probably familiar with Bethany, who lost her arm in a shark attack, recovered, and went on to become a professional surfer.  I strongly recommend this film about faith, courage, and determination.