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Gearing Up With ChaitGear

Posted: July 31st, 2005 | Filed Under: Uncategorized |
CG-Amazon WP Plugin
My rating: 4 out of 5

I am all about being able to look up, refer to and blog about products found at Amazon.com. I used to have a Smooth Jazz recommended listening page (currently in the works all over again), as well as a Recommended Reading list (to be ported over from AllConsuming.net).

ChaitGear’s CG-Amazon plugin is great for generating lists of Amazon products. You can lookup products using key words and categories just as you can at Amazon.com. The plugin returns a list of found items with pixtures (ooh!) and you can use a handy checkbox to add one or more — or all! — of the items to your CG-Amazon database. From there you can assign categories, add comments, reviews and ratings, etc. It is a snap with one line of PHP to include your entire list or variations of it on a WordPress Page.

But wait!, you are probably saying to yourselves. We can’t use PHP on a WordPress Page! No, you can’t. But David Chait, God bless his pointed head, has even thought of that! He’s got yet another plugin, called CG-QuickPHP, that stands in for the PHP code and allows you to have your scripts and eat them too!

I give the CG-Amazon plugin four out of five stars. I’m not as kind to the Amazon Media Manager plugin. I’ve used it too, but it’s a bitch-kitty to create your media lists because you have to use another tool like WP-Amazon or CG-Amazon or go to Amazon.com itself to look up the number and THEN enter it and THEN create your notes. Call me lazy, but CG-Amazon does it better and faster. Plus, you have to configure Amazon Media Manager from within one of its config files to get the output you want. On the other hand, with CG-Amazon, you’ve got an external stylesheet that you can modify, or you can add those classes to all of your stylesheets so that the display seamlessly matches your theme(s).

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Clockwatchers

Posted: July 30th, 2005 | Filed Under: Uncategorized |
Clockwatchers
My rating: 3 out of 5

Clockwatchers

This is another movie I must add to my All About the Office list. The list now includes:

  1. Baby Face
  2. The Desk Set
  3. 9 to 5
  4. Working Girl
  5. Haiku Tunnel
  6. Office Space
  7. Bartleby
  8. Clockwatchers

Eventually, I’ll feature these office-themed movies on a separate page like I do my Music and Books currently.

Back to the movie. I love Toni Collette. She was great in Muriel’s wedding and she plays a similar role here, albeit sans Aussie accent. She’s still the shy introverted misfit. But she turns out to be less of a misfit than her other three co-workers. Each has a different reason for keeping their temp job and each has a different dream. For Toni Collette’s Iris, one the homefront, she’s resistant to her father’s constant attempts to get her a “real job” and the more he insists, the more she clings to this temp job. Lisa Kudrow, meanwhile, escapes reality by pretending to have a budding acting career, complete with casting calls and rehearsals. The reality is that this is probably the only job she can get. Alanna Ubach is looking to escape her dead-end job by rushing headlong into marraige with a fiance who abuses her — at least mentally. The most colorful character is Parker Posey’s Margaret. She’s the only one of the four, it seems, who actually has a pulse. In a desparate bid for — Attention? Belonging? Margaret orchestrates a four-woman walkout. She returns the following day to learn that her three co-horts bailed on her and actually showed up to work. Already on shaky ground, she is but one coffee break away from being canned. And it comes soon enough, during the movie’s closing 10 minutes. You can’t help but think that secretly, the other three, watching while Margaret is forcibly removed from a job she now realizes she actually needs and wants, wish it were them in Margaret’s shoes.

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