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Movie Magic

5 October 2007 No Comment

movie_marqueeThe holidays are over, school is back in full swing. And ,with winter on the way, with its demands for sweaters, winter coats and other coverups, we can finally let ourselves go and eat all the chocolate and cake we’ve been denying ourselves all summer. In other words, it’s time to relax and let the “real us” emerge from its summer shell. What a relief!

Bears have the right idea, hibernating all winter. We humans can’t sleep all winter long (I’m willing to give it a try, though). But we can do the next best thing – watch TV until the weather turns nice again a half year or so from now.

Too bad there’s never anything decent on! But fortunately, the TV people no longer have a monopoly on home entertainment; there are movie channels, movies on DVD, movie downloads (legal and otherwise). And nothing goes better with popcorn than a movie! Add digital movie acquisitions to your collection of videos from not too long ago, and you’ve got a formidable entertainment library to draw on for those long nights of “nesting.

” Too formidable, it turns out, for many. If you’ve got 300 or 400 titles in your library, chances are you don’t know – cant know- what all of them are about, who the star is, or whether it’s even worth wasting your time with it if the reviews call it a “stinker,” as they on the Coast. Is the movie you’re about to commit a couple of hours of your life to an Irwin Allen (good) or Alan Smithee (not so good) production? The viewing public has a right to know!

And know they can with Ant Movie Catalog (http://www.antp.be/software/moviecatalog), the only movie catalog program you’ll ever need – or want! It’s got space on its movie catalog card for movie information – year, actors, reviews, etc. – plus space to list the names of people you lend the film out to (for DVDs and videos), statistics (with graphs) about how often you or others watch the film, etc. – and it can do it all in three dozen languages, including Hebrew!

There’s just one problem with programs of this type that are used to catalog information – getting the information into the program! It would be nice to have a single database on our computer that has all the information we need about the movies we know and love – but not if that means keying in the data by hand!

But Ant’s got you covered there, with built in scripts that let you populate the database with movie information, downloaded from movie sites all over the Internet – including IMDB, Amazon.com, Blockbuster Video, and many others (nearly 200 online sources in all!). All you have to do is type in the name of the movie, press the magic key (F6), choose your data download script, and watch those data boxes get filled up – like magic! And isn’t that what the movies are all about?

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