Karen and I went to see "
War of the Worlds" earlier this week. I forget now how I became aware of this story back in my childhood, but I distinctly remember that when my grandmother offered to buy me any record (yes that's vinyl for those of you born after 1985) I wanted, I insisted on the
"War of the Worlds" audio story.
I can tell you that the story scared the crap out of me, even though it was audio only. I was totally unaware that a movie had been made of this story but I do remember staring at the vinyl record and dreaming up a machine that could one day play video from such discs. Of course when I eventually saw the Laser Disc, I wondered if someone had picked my brain.
When Karen and I eventually immigrated to the US, we learned of how
Orson Welles scared the crap out of bits of New Jersey by broadcasting the story as if it was a real news broadcast. I applaud Orson for doing that. I would have loved to have experienced it myself actually.
Now, to the new
"War of the Worlds" movie. Since I already knew how the story would end, I wondered if I would enjoy it. To my surprise I found myself enjoying it immensely!
This film is absolutely brilliant and tells the story in such a way that I didn't only experience the sudden scary moments, but found that I was kept in a state of panic for long periods of time. I can't remember when last a film had this effect on me, if ever.
I'm not sure if I had this experience because I had incessantly listened to the record in my youth, and it was helping to heighten the terror, or if my reactions were entirely based on the film, but nevertheless it was scary.
I had a strong reaction to the scene where Ray Ferrier is covered in white powder and later shakes it out of his hair and pats it off his clothes after first being stunned into silence by what he has seen. This brought back strong memories of what happened to me on September 11th 2001 when I too was covered in white powder which was the engulfing cloud of debris that billowed out after the first tower collapsed.
My final verdict. Go and see "War of the Worlds"!
So, what's the excitement bit then? Part of it is work related and part is personal.
On Tuesday July 12th, Onset Technology officially released the new legal version of METAmessage. As the product manager for METAmessage Legal, this is my baby. I'm very proud of how this product has turned out, and have a large sense of satisfaction. You can read the official press release
here or the BBHub version
here.
On Monday July the 18th,
my book is officially released. I am excited to see how it will sell and how people will react to it. I haven't done anything like this before, and I am really "putting myself out there".
It was very gruelling writing this book because I could only work on it after hours and on weekends (even though some nasty people would have you believe that I worked on it during working hours - not true!). Most weekday evenings, the last thing I felt like doing was sitting down to write, but I just forced myself to do it.
The
Wrox web site even has the index, contents, and chapter 1 up in PDF form if you want to take a sneak peak.
Finally after what seemed like an eternity, we are moving into our house on August 1st. It will end the relentless renting years and take us into the home owners world.
