Last night Ashley and I watched this movie, and quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what to expect - I never saw it in theatres, and didn’t recall much about it. Originally a comic book series by Alan Moore (now collected as a graphic novel), the Wachowski brothers (of The Matrix fame) adapted the comic into a screenplay, and the movie was directed by James McTeigue (who was an assistant director on two Matrix films). Starring Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond, Hugo Weaving as V, Stephen Rea as Inspector Finch, and John Hurt Chancellor Sutler, V for Vendetta is a gripping movie with significant political ideas that are very relavent in our current times. I didn’t know who was in the cast other than Natalie Portman, so when watching the film I kept trying to place V’s voice - which had tremendous character and power - but couldn’t. It wasn’t until the last 20 minutes of the movie, when V gives a particular speech that falls into a more drawn-out delivery of vowels (Mr. Aaaaanderson), that I figured out it was Hugo Weaving behind the mask. He does a superb job of delivering emotion without relying on facial expressions, a feat not many actors can achieve. Natalie Portman does a credible job as well, though I never quite believed her British accent. The cinemetography was superb, the music was excellent, and the action scenes were gripping.

This is definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen in some time (Ashley concurs) - and, interestingly enough, the HD-DVD version is $3 less expensive than the standard DVD version on Amazon.ca right now. Unfortunately we watched this in standard definition, but I’ve added the HD-DVD version to my wishlist and my second viewing will definitely be in HD-DVD!

If you have a hosted Exchange account, you’ve probably dealt with the PRF file: it’s an automated setup file that you just double-click and it configures Outlook for you. Totally slick. But in Outlook 2007, Microsoft broke changed something and you can no longer easily import the PRF settings. There’s a way to do it under Windows Vista, but it’s slightly more involved. The instructions below are adapted from my hosted Exchange provider 4Smartphone.

1. Download the PRF file from your hosted Exchange provider and put it on your desktop.
2. Click Start, and then click Run. On Vista just type Run and his Enter. This will open Run command box.
3. In Open field, type the following and don’t forget the quotes. You may want to copy/paste this into the RUN box and just change the variables: outlook.exe /importprf “C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\FILENAME.prf”
4. Let Outlook 2007 do it’s thing - you’ll have to enter your username and password as part of the setup process.

And that’s it!

Leading up to CES, I was bombarded with a steady stream of communication, some from talented, relationship-building professionals, and some from cheap PR flaks who are an insult to the industry. One such cheap PR stunt came from a company called Dotster (no links, I don’t want to give them any more publicity than I have to). Dotster is a Go-Daddy wannabe, offering domains, Web hosting, etc. Somehow they thought that, rather than offering innovative services that customers would want and building their business on that, they’d instead use the oldest marketing trick in the book: sex. So they launched a nation-wide “talent” <chuckle> search looking for “ambassadors” <chuckle> near the end of 2006. Just before CES they picked the best “talent” and sent everyone a press release about it - complete with a link to download an image of the new “ambasadors”. Morbidly curious about the results, I downloaded the image and it was exactly what I thought: five “babes” in sexy poses. Check out the 57 megapixel version (yeah, that’s right 50-freaking-7-megapixels, 9526 x 6029 pixels). They say there’s no such thing as bad PR, but although I now know the name of the company, I know they’re more interested in cheap marketing tricks than focusing on their services. In the interest of fairness though, I should note that GoDaddy isn’t exactly above similar tactics - but at least they make no pretense of their advertising model being an “ambasador”. They hired Danica Patrick for that - she might be pretty to look at, but the lady also has skills!