Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

As is tradition with my family, we attended a movie, and for the past few years it has been a Harry Potty movie, and this year was the Goblet of Fire. Why, I'm not sure. I haven't read all the books, I'm in book 3, last few chapters. But my kids love it and they have read all the books. I know when I've read a book prior to the movie I have a certain level of expectation from the movie and I'm usually disappointed. Since I haven't read the Goblet of Fire yet, but I expected to see the same thing as the others. But it wasn't.

You can definitely see the maturity of the actors finally coming through. You can also see the directors are getting comfortable with the story and the expectation. The movie was great. This time around it was all about the clumsy Harry, Ron and Hermione. They actually had substance and there were a lot more supporting roles that played a bigger part. The story seemed to have breadth the others didn't.

So, our usual Thanksgiving movie was better than I expected. But, even if it wasn't I was having fun with the family.

Categories: movies

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Creating an RSS Feed with IceRocket

First you want to go to this URL http://rss.icerocket.com/. Once you're there create a free account. It only takes about 5 minutes and then you're on your way.

Start with their 3 step process. First, create a channel. This is basically the details on your RSS feed. The channel link is basically where you want someone to go when they click on your feed link. I just choose the main URL like http://www.thomallen.com/blog.

Next, you will want to add content. What I did was take the first paragraph of a press release and put that in the Entry Summary field. in the Entry Link I added the URL to the actual press release. This way when the reader clicks on the entry link they will be taken to the main thomallen.com site.

The last step is to publish your RSS feed. You can do a couple of things here. The first is to host the actual XML on your server. This requires you to upload the file via FTP. What I would recommend at first is to let IceRocket host the feed. They give you a URL that basically generates the RSS (XML) on the fly. In the future when your feed gets larger or you want to customize it more, you should think about hosting it on your own server.

IceRocket provides an XML button to add to your site which allows someone to add the RSS feed to their reader. That's about all there is to it. Then, every time you add new content, you just log into IceRocket, add the Entry Summary and the URL to the full page and then save. The next time someone refreshes their reader your new post will be available.

The whole process took me about 15 minutes from start to finish. If you are in the market to create an RSS feed from content that isn't related to a blog, this is a great solution.

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Talking in the 3rd person

The guy that owns this blog wants to post tonight about people who write in the 3rd person. Why in the hell do people do this? Is it supposed to sound more professional? It's like if you write in the 3rd person I'm supposed to believe or agree with what you write?

Bull. Writing about yourself in the 3rd person only makes seem a little self centered and unbelievable. Just say it like it is. Writing in the 3rd person won't make me believe you.

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Another hockey day

The Av's did pretty good today winning 3-2 over Dallas. Dallas is a tough team and I didn't think we could pull out a win.

As I was reading other hockey news I came across this story. Uh yeah, it's stupid not to be wearing a facemask in the NHL today. If you take too many objects to the head at 95 MPH you bound to have a
problem. So yeah, wear the damn thing. If I we're the owner and I had invested several million dollars in a player you can bet your ass he'd be wearing a full face mask and
helmet. I don't care how tough the guy thinks he is. It's just common sense.

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Google Reader, oh my!

I'm a bloglines user, for now. Have you seen Google Reader yet? Wow, nice. Same awesome simple interface that seems to have great usability. I'm giving it a go for a while.

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