Christopher Nolan On Three Movie Franchises –

On a more superficial level, I have to ask the question: How many good third movies in a franchise can people name? [Laughs.] At the same time, in taking on the second one, we had the challenge of trying to make a great second movie, and there haven’t been too many of those either. It’s all about the story really. If the story is there, everything is possible. I hope that was a suitably slippery answer.

That said, I hope he tries to break the trend.

[Via Kyle Baxter]

Ars Technica on the new Call of Duty 5 Multiplayer –

Each player now has a fourth vehicle perk which privileges sitting in a certain part of the jeeps or tanks (say, faster turret turning). Of course, given the infantry-focused action of the previous game and its subsequent tight balance, the vehicles in World at War feel somewhat out of place.

I wish that was the only negative thing they had to say about the game. I’m kind of disappointed that they don’t think it’s up to scratch, Call of Duty 4 was such a great game – especially on the multiplayer side of things.

This just strengthens my belief that Infinity Ward still make the best Call of Duty games.

Chris Bowler Interviews Michael Mistretta -

If you’ve got a lot of free time (enough to read about 7000 words) then check out this fantastic interview, they cover such topics of education, GTD and of course; blogging.

Being the nosy sod I am, I was very interested in seeing how Michael manages to allocated his free time – of course it then turned out he had a lot more than most due to his homeschooling. I just wish I had the commitment to be able to sit down and get school related work done without being threatened.

Of course check out Michael’s blog if you haven’t, that’s sure not to disappoint (I owe him a link anyways as I got rid of my blogroll with the design change).

Today Revision3 announced that they were cutting their losses and canceling some of their programming and also (more importantly) laying off some of their staff. For me this really shows the global economic crisis has reached the tech industry. I’m aware the Mahalo had to a couple of weeks ago, but for me – it’s only just hit home.

We’ve had a number of great successes here at Revision3, including Diggnation, Tekzilla and The Totally Rad Show. But not everything pans out. Just as in the past, when we ended shows that just weren’t building audiences or driving revenue, we had to make changes. As you may have heard, today we had to make some tough staffing decisions as we ended the run of a few of our shows.

I didn’t expect the economic downturn to hit the tech industry until 2009 at the earliest, it really shows how unpredictable these things are.

Sadly, this is just the start, I’m not looking forward to seeing the inevitable changes throughout the internet as more and more companies are affected by the changes in the economy. It’s quite shocking to see people who I thought held such a solid role within Revision3 loosing their jobs.

But how does this effect us? What are we going to be seeing from tech companies when they begin to start laying people off? Well, apart from a very vibrant discussions of Twitter I guess that there is going to be less changes over a longer period time. All those brand new releases that you were expecting probably won’t come as soon as you’d like – but when do they ever? On the Rev3 side of things, a few shows got cancelled, including one of my favorites; PixelPerfect.

This show I think might have a bit of hope, it was originally produced by the Pixel Corps for Revision3 – I could quite easily see Alex and his team picking it up again. It’s so sad to see so many people from Revision3 leaving the company, I wish them the best of luck in finding a new job.

The Best MacBook Pro Review –

So far out of all the new MacBook Pro reviews, the best has been from ArsTechnica. It’s actually posted in two parts and covers, in a lot of detail, the gaming performance – something that I was especially interested in.

If you’re still undecided if you want to purchase one; check out this review.

It took a while for me to realise that this course of action was probably the best for both me and my blog. So what is this “action” that I have taken? Well basically to start over. I didn’t feel satisfied with my blog in it’s past form – even ashamed.

I decided that if I were to keep my blog as it was it would have hurt both my personal brand and further progression of the blog. There were too many articles there that did not reflect what I wanted to be as a blogger. To many rushed articles, to many rubbish posts. Every time I visited my blog I just felt disappointment.

So what changes are you going to see? Well, you have probably noticed that I have a new design which has a couple of cool features that I hinted at wanting previously. First of all… a link list. So I can now share interesting stuff I find with you a lot easier. They don’t have comments, so don’t look for them; but don’t worry, the regular entries still have comments.

When coming up with the design for the blog I decided I wanted something very content centric, after all – that’s why (I hope!) you’re here. You’ll find no fancy formatting. A very simple and to the point design – except for one very small thing. On a single post, if you’re nice enough to “share it” a fancy ajaxy menu will pop down giving you lots of social bookmarking options.

There are a couple other cool easter eggs, but I’ll leave you to find those out. As for the regular content, I pledge for nothing but my best. It will be everything or nothing.

I’ve tried to sum up everything I want out of this blog and this is what I came up with:

I write this blog for myself primarily, but also for others in the hope that just one thing I say might change the way people think about the world.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so excited about this blog and it’s future. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can get out of it.