No big deal here. Saw a nice new theme for WordPress and decided to install it. I did like the other one – called Green Marinee – but so many people are using it and I just can’t stand being part of any herd-like activity.

Since about 80% of the useful content from my portal site is already here on this blog I’m probably going to migrate the rest and make the blog the primary site for a while. I just don’t do that much in terms of gaming that requires maintaining a full scale CMS anymore.

I’ll probably convert a lot of the videos I have created and collected to Flash Video and publish them on the blog site. Flash 8′s video quality is close enough to what you see in QuickTime and Windows Media formats that it makes sense now. And it’s just a nicer way to view this stuff – you can do so many cool things in Flash that you can’t do with plug-in players. Besides which, Flash loads so nice and fast and works everywhere.

I was recently on a business trip and stayed at the W Hotel. Well in the mini-bar was both Grey Goose and Belvedere Vodka. I don’t drink much – the occasional cognac or champagne maybe – and the last time I had vodka straight up it was some horrific Smirnoff crap that soured me on the whole concept. Anyway, long story short, since I am half Russian and I had nothing to do the night before my flight home, I tried these new “premium” vodkas and found I liked them. A lot. The bonus is that they don’t make me sleepy when I drink like other spirits do, and don’t leave me with a hang over the next day. But that may be due as much to not drinking a whole lot as anything else.

Anyway …

I love historical movies. I’ve always loved history. Kingdom of Heaven had all the makings of a great one too. Ridley Scott directing and clearly the Budget of the Gods for special effects.

But …

I don’t know. I won’t go into the historical accuracy, or the political correctness. The Arab and Persian tribes of the day were a lot more brutal than the film depicted. Hell, as recently as WW1 they were pretty savage when it came to making war. And the politcal machinations of the Euro’s makes them look dumb in comparison – which is probably partly right, but I’ll leave that argument to people with more books on the walls than I have. As a movie, though, Kingdom of Heaven ended up falling short on several fronts.