Long Drive for Dinner?

Why does my Garmin only have the Louisville Furlongs?

Peanuts and Corn Treats

Also known as two things that usually come out your butt undigested.

Avatar Review

Yesterday I followed up on my promise to watch a movie based solely on the way it was created and its special effects.

I give my brother a hard time about him doing this 4-5 times a year during the Summer, but there is something to be said about a film maker achieving something on screen that has lived inside of his or her head for years. If that realization comes from computers instead of the really, real world and it doesn't distract from the story then how can you fault the movie or the people behind it?

Yesterday I saw a Summer blockbuster that was released in the Winter, and I enjoyed it.

Another set of movies that were basically the same thing were the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. They were large in scope, adventure, effects movies that had a really simple story but interesting characters interacting with each other.

Where Avatar departs from the a for mentioned Tolkien masterpieces is that its characters are much more two dimensional and seriously underdeveloped.

Many of them are also taken directly out of other Jim Cameron movies like the asshole corporate executive and the military officer that doesn't care about anything aside from following orders no matter how immoral said orders are.

I know a lot of people have also considered this to be a massive rip off of Dances with Wolves, but an imperial, militaristic force asserting its authority over a weaker power is as old as David and Goliath. The fact that we are dealing with an indigenous people makes us immediately think of the US oppression of the native Americans.

The fact that an outsider infiltrates the natives and helps them in an uprising is probably a dream a of a lot of people, similar to how many of us have often thought what we would have done if we could travel back in time to September 11th to try and stop that devastation.

District 9 had almost the exact same plot as Avatar, but I don't remember its likeness to actual historical events or other movies that dealt with said events bringing down its credibility on the Internet.

I know it sounds like I am making excuses for Avatar, and there are many faults in the movie that make it less than perfect, but if you are speaking about the effects then this is where the movie really begins to rise above an Aliens, Dances with Wolves, ID4, hybrid.

It is a bit of a double edged sword, but my post that I linked up there talking about changing movies forever is right. The 100% digital humanoids movement was near perfect. Their facial expressions, arms, legs, and torsos moved like a real person. There were times in the movie where I completely forgot that I was watching what basically amounts to a video game on a big ass screen.

The good news is that most of the time I was brought out of it was because of the fact that I saw it in 3D. 2 people interacting on a screen is not the stuff of a 3D movie and it would get in the way of dialogue.

Now that I have said that, all of the flying scenes were amazing in 3D and that coupled with the fact that about 2/3rds of this movies grosses have come from 3D screens means that this medium is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

So, based on the effects and the successful realization of a tried and true storyline I would give this 3 out of 4 stars and recommend it to most everyone I know over the age of 14.

3D Glasses

The scourge of my movie watching generation.

Evidence of a Movie Night...

...or drunken barn dance...you be the judge.

Happy Christmas

I hope everyone has had a great Christmas.

For those of you that are traveling over the next few days please be careful.

For us it has been a busy 48 hours hosting the family, but all of the work and sweat was worth it.

The kids had a great time, and even us grownups got to sneak in a little fun as well.

As soon as all of the dishes are done and the mountain of toys are put away, I will be able to relax and enjoy the rest of my time off.

Are You Above or Below Average?

A bunch of numbers nerds wanted to know how many people in the US used Internet and how much time they spent on it a week.

About 80% of us are cruising along the information superhighway and spend an average of 13 hours a week browsing the web and accessing email.

There isn't much detail in the story, but it seems that they are including time spent on the web and accessing email at work, so I guess I might be just a little bit above average.

Assuming I spend an average of 5 hours a day surfing, working, blogging, and otherwise horsing around in cyberspace I am about 10 hours above the average person my age.

If you count Internet gaming, I guess that number would go up whenever me and my bro are heavily engaged in trying to squash a zombie, horde, or enemy of the state uprising.

Cooking/Cleaning Update

I started cleaning around 2 this afternoon after getting home from work.

It is now 10:30 and aside from taking a break to grab the kids and eat some dinner around 5:30 I have been going non stop cleaning ad cooking.

The annoying part is that I might have to make another batch of icing to properly cover my jam cake.

The not so annoying part is that I am about 3/4 of the way through a bottle of 2002 Mont Sur Rolle.

All things being equal, this could be a much worse night.

J to the I to the N to the X

Ken Davis wrote an article about which of the top 3 mens NCAA basketball teams will jank up their perfect seasons first.

I read the article thinking to myself, this is crap that only a sports writer would care about. None of teams or coaches could possibly care about anything other than showing up in the post season ready to make a serious run to the final four.

Well, my dumb ass opinion was proven wrong when 3 UK players didn't say that their team was going to be the last to get beaten...they said that they can go undefeated all year.

Now, I would expect something like this to come out of Wall or Cousin's mouths. They are Freshmen and caught up in something that would make any sane person say some crazy crap.

I didn't expect talk like that from Patrick Patterson. Especially since every interview with Calipari has seen him hedge his opinion of this young team even when they beat Drexel by 44 points.

/enable cliche machine
With all of that said, I guess it doesn't hurt for them to have a goal like this. Shooting for the stars is noble, but every UK fan had better hope that these young cats don't trip on a feather with their heads so far in the clouds.
/disable cliche machine

3 Hours from Christmas "Vacation"

Probably a little after 12:00 today I will leave the office and presumably not return until the 4th of January 2010.

The reason that I put vacation in quotes is because in about 3 hours I will begin cleaning, cooking, and preparing for 3-4 meals over the next two days.

I like cooking, I like cleaning, if I wasn't a fat, out of shape, lunger I wouldn't dread what was coming nearly as much.

No matter how much I am about to sweat, never mind my soon to be aching back, it will all be worth it on Christmas morning when the kids get up, run into the living room.....and start fighting over toys.

It really does warm the heart.

O Yeah I Forgot...I Am Pissed About Something

It is the end of the year and everyone and their mother, brother....other is putting out some manner of list.

I just happened across one at MSNBC's website about the 12 things computer users need to look out for in 2010.

I don't want to go line by line and talk about the dozen or so things this person cares about, it just reminded me of how much I have come to hate Norton Antivirus.

Let me preface my bitch by saying that when I was in charge of IT here at the office I spent about 10 grand a year on Norton for their enterprise software to license our company....and I loved the product.

They were the first program that made it easy to store everything on the server and deal out updates with minimal support once everything was up and running.

I used them for years and appreciated their support and service.

The other day, after about 2 weeks of warnings, our home version of Norton's subscription ran out. Now, back in the olden days of...I dunno, 2004 when your subscription ran out, you could not get any updates until you renewed...but you could still get virus protection for any of the nasties that came out before your coverage ended.

NOW, the mother scratching software just stops working until you renew it.

Norton, you are DEAD to me now. I will never spend another penny on your product and anytime I have a chance I will bother my readers with rants and gripes about you until you change your ways.

Yeah, that's right, LITERALLY 2 dozen people a day will know how much I hate you...

What do you think about that?

Should I Warn my Son...

...before his mom drops a dime and calls 911 on him?

He is home from school and daycare yesterday and Today and all he has done is sit in front of the TV and play Xbox. Yeah, apparently video game addiction runs in my family, but I am less worried about a physical or mental dependence on electronic entertainment and a little more concerned that my soon-to-be six year old can't handle time in the poky.

I get it it that the mom is frustrated with her kid, but is calling 911 so that he will shut off his game and go to sleep really the answer?

I suspect that if this woman would have put rules in place on when and for how long her son could play the game from the beginning instead of using it as a baby sitter every night of the week, she probably would be in a much different place right now.

Then again, why would I question the parenting skills of a woman that lets her 12 year old play a video game where the goal is to eff, steal, and kill as many people as possible?

Despite the Weather Gods Hating Him, James Cameron is Still Big at the Box Office

I am pretty sure we all remember back in 2006 when James Cameron's last movie, Aquaman came out.

There were rolling blackouts caused by the high temperatures all over California which was causing the numbers to look not so great for the heavily anticipated movie.

Well, by the end of the day Saturday burgeoning megastar Vinny Chase's worries were put to bed when it was estimated that the movie would gross over 115 million dollars securing the top spot as the biggest opening of all time.

It has been 3 long years since Jimmy Cameron made a movie, and the anticipation has really helped to fuel the box office sales. His fear of global warming and even more blackouts pushed the release of Avatar to December, but too bad he still owes favors to some pagan god of the atmosphere because big ass snow storms messed up the works for him pretty good in the east.

Still, this was a huge opening for this kind of film, and it looks possible that between the worldwide release and DVD sales this movie could make its half a billion plus production budget back.

Sometimes it Pays to be a Nerdy Collector

Friday night we were sitting around the table eating dinner talking to my son about his last day of kindergarten of the year.

Santa came by the school to hand out candy canes and the subject of what he wants to Christmas came up.

He named off a handful of Star Wars the Clone Wars characters which I don't think he had ever mentioned before, but fortunately I had anticipated this and already put them on Santa's list.

At the end of all of this he drops a bit of an unanticipated bomb on us, he wants Darth Vader as well.

Now, I cannot be surprised by him wanting an evil character especially since he plays him all the time in Lego Star Wars, but I could tell by the look on the CFOs face that she was not happy with this new development or with the prospects of finding a toy for a character that hadn't spent more than 4 minutes on film since 1983.

I got her attention and secretly informed here that there was at least 1 Dart Vader toy already purchased, sitting in a blue tub in the basement.

Saturday while the grandparents were in town we snuck into the basement to assemble some of the more difficult Christmas presents which included all of his Star Wars toys. I made a quick little jaunt into the underside of the basement stairs, and about 4 minutes later I came out with a Darth Vader, C3PO, and R2D2. I figured, "hey, they are in the clone wars movie that he likes so much" why not take advantage of having these things for 14 years.

I have no shame in admitting that yesterday while I was putting the last of his Star Wars toys together I had more than a little bit of fun setting them up in anticipation for what the floor was going to look like Christmas morning.

/can't wait

Turning the Corner

Beginning last week I had 3 big goals that needed to be completed before the end of the year.

I had to determine how to replicate a bug that is occurring in our software and get our developer working on a solution. - DONE

A test report needed to be created to document all of the drop testing I have been doing over the past 3 months. - DONE

A technical specification for the project in Canada needs to be created and approved by marketing before next Tuesday. - In progress.

I am just about finished with all of the Visio diagrams, and then I just need to assemble the spec and add all of the required verbiage.

I think that by this time next Tuesday I will be able to set the cruise control and be prepared for having the 24th through the 4th off.

Yay!

Evil Bank, or Stupid People?

First Premier bank is using some creative marketing ideas in order to create a new credit card that will continue to provide them with a high rate of return on their credit cards they issue to sub prime borrowers.

Instead of charging a 250 dollar first year fee for a credit card with 300 dollars in available credit (which will be illegal after the first of the year) they are just planning on raising the interest rate a bit.

And by a bit I mean 70%. Yeah, this new card will have an APR of 79.9 percent.

That number is so egregious there are degenerate gamblers in Vegas right now laughing at anyone that would accept such terms, meanwhile they are coring out their gold fillings to pay off their loan sharks lest their kneecaps will be permanently removed.

I think most people's initial reaction to something like this would be pity for anyone that is dumb, ignorant, or desperate enough to accept such terms because they are almost certainly not well off financially.

That is fine, but should you also feel sorry for a millionaires because he or she got hoodwinked and spent 10K on a gold plated, diamond encrusted cell phone from Tiffany's?

I really don't know the answer to my post title, but what I do know is that congress giving the credit card companies all this time to alter the way that they do business before these "consumer protection" laws go into effect has probably undone anything positive that might have happened if the law would have immediately taken effect.

The US Military Drone Network has been H4x0r'd?

Round up Kevin Mitnick and Jonathan James right now. Only a famous and 3l1t3 hacker could have broken the defense department's encryption so I want those guys in police custody by the end of the day.

What? Whats that? There is no encryption securing the video feeds from the drones?

Say that again, Iraqi and Afghan insurgents used a publically avaiable program costing 26 dollars to "hack" the drones?

Says who some leftist blogger or website with an agenda?

O, the Wall Street Journal...

This really disgusts me. My company has spent over a million dollar this year preparing a product for government consumption based on a massive military spec with some of the strictest operational and security standards you can find on the planet.

All of this to lock up some files that are probably stored in a secure location surrounded by guards with M4s in their hands.

Why in the hell didn't they specify that the video feeds required encryption when they could have pulled any number of AES variants off of Internet for free?

I know they can't control the planes, but that isn't the point. They can definitely discern any patterns we exhibit and use the drones to achieve the same battlefield awareness that is one of our biggest advantages in combat.

God damn, it is crap like this that makes me laugh anytime some superstitious, myth loving asshole tells me that the government was behind some massive, high tech 9/11 conspiracy.

NO WAY, THEY AREN"T SMART ENOUGH!

Alby from Big Love is Gay...

...and MSNBC says that a story line involving him and another gay "Mormon" is going to cause controversy.

The link from Drudge hinted that the show was going to focus on one of its main characters dealing with a homosexual relationship.

I clicked as fast as I could preparing to be upset that all of a sudden someone in the Henrickson family was as camp as a row of tents, but about 5 paragraphs into the story they let on that the gay character is Alby.

Seriously? The time for us to be shocked that Alby is as bent as a butcher's hook came when his mom tried to assassinate him in a road side men's room MAKING OUT WITH A GUY.

What could they possibly do this season that is more provocative....or maybe I should say hotter than that?

Either way it has been way too long since I have spent my Sundays watching a bunch of religious maniacs and their wacky, illegal antics.

Especially after the disappointing last 1/2 season of True Blood, I need some good TV of the HBO variety.

The Things I Go Through to Save Money for My Wife

My wife has become infamous for intercepting my buying something that I want and then sending me to a specific store to buy it armed with coupons.

She explains to me exactly what to buy, how to buy it, and what the discount should be. Sometimes the coupons don't work and since I don't want my wife grabbing my receipt, product, and rejected coupon and heading into the store like she is my mom taking on the local bully, I always argue that my wife knows what she is talking about and that the clerk needs to give me money off.

Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't...it is always an encounter and very embarrassing.

So, today I get an instant message from her telling me that one of her deal beagle websites (deal beagle is my little nickname for her because she can always suss out the lowest price...plus it just sounds a hell of a lot better than cheap-ass-miser) for Inglorious Basterds on Blu Ray for 12.99.

That is an incredible deal for a blu ray so I ask her what I need to do in order to get this fantastic movie at a fantastic price. After about 10 minutes of browsing the site she linked me I left my office with 2 coupons worth 5 dollars and a printed copy of the Target coupon policy that states that you are allowed to use 2 coupons at the same time as long as one is from the manufacturer and the other is from the store. If there is going to be trouble with me getting this thing for less than 13 bucks I will be ready for it.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, it is 27 shades of cold outside, so I ride from Hooterville to the Fayette mall area in my winter coat and toboggan with the heat on.

I end up with a great parking spot so it is just a quick jaunt in the freezing cold into the blistering heat of Target. It took me 15 minutes of searching but I finally found the ONLY remaining blu ray copy of Inglorious Basterds. I walk past packed lane after packed lane and wind up at the express isle where the male cashier was leaning against his counter just waiting for a customer.

I drop my movie down, dig out my 2 coupons from my jacket pocket, wipe away sweat from my forehead, and swipe my credit card for 12.89 cents. BOO YA!

I grab my receipt from the cashier, thank him, and as I put it into my bag I notice that the DVD is still in its plastic protective enclosure.

I pull it out of the bag and say to the kid "hey, you forgot to take this thing off."

He responds with: "No, that is just how that movie comes."

I begin investigating the case preparing to protest but he turns his head to the man behind me, starts scanning his items, and as the man moves forward I am literally brushed aside.

Now, at this point I don't want to look stupid, but I am 99% certain that there is no way I can get my movie out of this case short of using some manner of power tool. So my plan is to go the car, take my freaking jacket off so that I can stop sweating, and see if I can get this damn thing open.

THANK THE GODS the alarm goes off as I am walking out. I do a 180 and head back to the little asshole only to see that there is now a line 5 people deep waiting for him.

Instead of walking to the front of the line and causing 5 people a lot of grief because I am too much of a pussy to have insisted earlier, I do the next best thing and head for customer service. I explain to the lady what happened, and she asks me which cashier told me that this movie comes this way. I turn around, point at the boy and say "THAT LITTLE FELLAR RIGHT THERE!". Yes, it said I louder than my typical conversation voice.

I don't know why I said it so loud, I don't know why I spoke like I was Carl from Slingblade, but all of the cashiers next to me turned to see who the fat, sweaty, hillbilly was pointing at.

The nice lady at the CS desk said that she would educate him on removing security enclosures, thanked me, and 30 seconds later I was again walking out the door with a DVD that is now only mostly impossible to open.

This time as I crossed the threshold and alarms went off (as she never scanned the thing) I just kept walking to my car.

How the Tiger Woods Situation is Affecting my Sleep

Last Thursday I was talking to my brother while we were playing some Xbox together via Intertubes.

I mentioned that some gossip site was saying that Tiger was going to quit golf in order to work on his relationship with his wife. That comment was met with more than a little incredulity from my bro, and I secretly hoped that he was right.

Fast forward about 24 hours to me sitting on the couch having a bit of Ale and Makers when Shepard Smith announces that Tiger is leaving golf indefinitely to work on his marriage.

Hearing this news from a reputable news person hit me like a blind sided gut kick. This was the first time I was REALLY mad at Tiger for what he had been doing for the past 5 years. Not only was he messing over his wife, kids, and extended family, but now he was messing with his sponsors, the PGA, and most importantly....ME!

Now every time I hear a tiger update on the news or radio show, instead of laughing at some punchline or bit of irony, I just sulk because I am going to have to spend another year not watching him play.

All of my emotions must have bubbled up to an overflowing boil because last night I kept having the same dream.

I was at a REALLY crappy golf course trying to petition the PGA to let Tiger back in. You see, in my messed up, Tiger obsessed mind the PGA kicked Tiger out.

In fact, they got word that Tiger was going to take some time off and that is when they came out and said that he was suspended for a year.

So, with all of this knowledge I was trying to find someone to get on the news and tell the real story so that Tiger could start playing again.

For some reason Ann Coulter was at this particularly crappy golf course. In an even more bizarre fashion she actually sat down with me in the club house and listened to my crazy ass story as I begged her to go on TV and expose the PGA.

I don't know if it was my over exuberance or the fact that I kept referring to the PGA as "those ccksuckers" but I could never convince her to do anything for me.

The dream was like a broken record, I would find her, fail to convince her, and then somehow I would end up driving up the country road back to the golf course looking for some unknown PGA official to yell at.

Needless to say I am a little embarrassed that my bromance with Tiger is now affecting my dreams, but hopefully blogging about it will purge my soul of this burden that I have been carrying around for nearly a week.

If not I shudder at the thought of having to use some of my mental health insurance talking to a shrink about my mostly non sexual love affair with Tiger. I am pretty sure that dudes in white coats and butterfly nets will not be far behind that admission.