Almost Famous

God, Anna Paquin is so gorgeous in this film. Too bad she just got a bit part.
Zooey Deschanel is also goddesslike. This is a really funny film.

"Your mom kind of freaked me out."

Google v Chicoms

I'm confused about this latest kerfuffle between the Chinese govt. and Google. Did Google really convince itself that the Chicoms would not abuse them? I guess they had some sort of agreement whereby Google agreed to allow filtering (aka censorship) while the Chicoms promised not to crack Google's systems. I'm guessing the Chinese government's crackers have been hammering google.cn ever since it was launched. I guess Google only now is getting pissed off about it. Why now?

New MacBook Pro

I'm glad I chose to spend the extra $50 to get an "anti-glare" LCD on this laptop. I will never understand the "glossy" screen bullshit most laptops come with these days. Maybe the marketroids discovered that people liked looking at their reflections all day.

"Yes please, I'll have the glare screen!"

The Prisoner 2009

So far what I like most about the remake of The Prisoner is, "wraps." All food served in The Village comes in the form of sandwich wraps. Wrap sandwiches? The one exception seems to be cherry cake.

I always hated wraps. Only people who don't know what good bread is could like wraps. In The Prisoner and in real life wraps represent bland, corporate catered lunches. A McDonalds hamburger bun has more character than a wrap. Wraps utterly fail to be bread. Pita bread is what you should use if you want a rolled up sandwich.

When wraps come into contact with something moist they get slimy and since most sandwich fillers are moist, wrap sandwiches are almost always slimy.

I'm not a big fan of burritos either. Burritos are fake Mexican, IMHO. Wraps are similar to white flour tortillas, which of course are not real tortillas. Real tortillas are made with corn.

rantmore re Windows

My employer was not willing to give me a Mac so for the next week I had to use a Dell E6400 running WinXP 64bit. He wanted me to run VMware on XP so I could run Linux virtual machines on the lappie. Great. That's like seatbelting yourself to the hood of a car and reaching in through a window to steer.

So wow. Big surprise; the experience has been pure hell.
The box spontanious resets itself at least daily. Yay! And yeah, I have all the latest recommended patches installed from the Beast of Redmond.

OS X and Linux distros have plenty of "features" that annoy me but they don't crash with anything like the frequency of XP. And I never know how J. Random Windows app will behave. There's no consistancy. Today WinSCP pissed me off severely. What does it do with a file you double click on? I assumed I was downloading the file to -somewhere- but POOF a blank window pops up and the file is nowhere to be found. WTF? Shouldn't the default action be "SAVE TO LOCAL DISK"??? I'd look in /tmp if windoze had one.

Verizon h8

Man, I fuckin hate VZN. At least three times this week I am alerted to new voice mail but the phone has not rung in hours! Apparently the call never made it to the handset because there is no "missed call" in the display.

This made me want to test my phone to see if it was working.
So I called my cell from a landline and immediately "BING BING BING" goes my cell phone. Is this because the landline was VZN? Do they send calls from other providers straight to voicemail when their oversubscribed network is saturated?

I'm guessing, "yes."


Oh, and when VZN does send me voice mail alerts for new voice mail, the alerts arrive TWENTY MINUTES after the inbound call was placed!

VZN, you are teh suck. If I was not getting this phone for next to nothing, I'd jump to some other provider. I may do so anyway.

If Obama straightened out the FCC that would make up for all the mistakes he's made to date.

I'd like to roast Michael Powell on a spit. Kevin J. Martin too.

Stargate Universe is teh suck

Man, such a blatant, pathetic attempt to ape the style and substance of Battlestar Galactica. What a odoriferous pile of steaming dung.