After seeing the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie (yes, I do actually plan on going to see another one of his), I learned that it was based on a Nickelodeon cartoon series. While an odd source material I believed, I went ahead and started watching the series. Surprisingly, while targeted at kids, it’s actually fairly entertaining with an engaging storyline. There are three seasons, the movies are planned to be a trilogy, and I can definitely see how the source material could make a good movie adaptation.
Tomorrow is another one of my days with alternating on and off hours as far as meetings go, but I’ve learned that actually works fairly well. When you have back to back to back meetings it’s really hard to be on time to all of them, so part of the Microsoft culture is that a meeting actually doesn’t even start until 10 minutes after it’s posted time. For someone like me that can be aggravating to no end, but I’m sure that once my schedule gets more full, it’s an aspect I’ll learn to appreciate and embrace.
Personal - Seattle
As I went out today to get some shopping at Target and Safeway done, I decided to stop by Blockbuster and pick up a couple of movies. My intention was to watch at least one of them tonight so that I wouldn’t go the whole weekend without seeing a new movie, but that didn’t happen. Actually, as it turns out, one of the movies I rented, Duplicity, I actually saw back when it came out. Apparently I liked it, was questionable about whether it would be a DVD purchase or not, but I remember literally nothing about the plot or anything related to the movie. When I get around to watching it, it will be interesting to see if it jogs my memory or if it will be an entirely new movie for me again.
The other movie I picked up to watch is Push, a movie that somewhat parallels Jumper in my mind as being a cool, superpower movie that might end up being a huge disaster. I actually don’t remember reading too much about it review-wise, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the critics almost universally disliked it. See, there’s my problem. If the critics hate the movie, I may end up loving or hating it; I can’t really use their reviews to judge. If they love the movie though, then I end up thinking it’s one of the worst movies ever made. I wonder if there’s a specific level of dislike where my enjoyment seems to maximize itself? It would be an interesting math problem to work out…
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With no new movies out this weekend, today was actually the first Saturday I think I spent with no plans. Next weekend is accounted for with PAX, and by the following weekend, hopefully something will be out that I want to go see. Andrew made me want to watch Galaxy Quest before I go to sleep tonight, so I’ll probably start that up once I go take a shower. While it is one of the discs that gets the distinction of being left out on the shelf, I don’t actually need the disc for any reason thanks to my streaming setup. Thanks, streaming setup!
Today marks the end of the XKCD comic week. For this last one, I decided to go with a programming one that shows you just how damaging bad practices can be when writing code:
Better watch out for those dinosaurs.
Comics, Personal - Seattle
Rather than hope the site switch goes through my tomorrow night, I figured I’d just make a second post and delay it’s posting until Friday. Unfortunately, this means I have no new information to talk about as nothing has happened in the last couple of minutes since my previous post. Fortunately, I have my comic to take up the rest of this post.
Yesterday’s comic picked on the reputation that Vista has (which I and many others feel is somewhat undeserved); today’s takes a shot at Windows ME which I have first hand experience with totally sucking. Well, I say that it “sucked”, but that’s because I only ever used it when I was trying to fix a friend’s computer, so I never really had a significant amount of time with it in a functioning state.
Maybe if I was one of those XP fanatics I’d feel the same way about Vista, but I’m pretty sure ME had more problems overall anyway. Given how often I was trying to fix things, it sure didn’t seem like a very stable OS to me.
Comics, Personal - Seattle
I’m going to start the process of transferring this site over to my new host, so this post is coming early in hopes that the part of the transfer out of my control will be done by tomorrow night. I’d really prefer not to have to make a post on the old server, have it erased once the transfer goes through, and then have to make it again. Just not my idea of fun.
Windows 7 will finally get Microsoft out from under the bad PR cloud they’ve had for the past three years concerning Vista. Honestly, Vista isn’t seen as bad by people who are actually using it, it’s just the initial bad reviews it got compounded by the Apple ad campaign. In fact, Microsoft conducted a test called the Mojave Experiment where they would sit people down in front of a computer, tell them it was an early version of a new OS, and have them use it. People almost universally loved the “new” OS, but it wasn’t 7 — they were just using Vista. XKCD made fun of just how bad some people perceived Vista to be in this comic from early this year when the beta came out:
Comics, Personal - Seattle
After I got spoiled with the cleaning service at my corporate housing apartment, I decided to have them come once a month to my new one in order to get that fresh, clean feeling every once in a while. As a result, this means that I’ve been alternating between watching TV, being on my computer, and doing some general tidying up. Effectively this just consisted of throwing away paper that hadn’t made it into the trash yet and getting rid of the last of my boxes that were still sitting on the floor behind my couch. If for nothing else, this at least gives me a reason to kind of mini-organize everything once a month in order to keep my place from getting too cluttered.
With today’s comic we enter into a set of three that are all Microsoft related. This is the most recent of the bunch, and given how often Mr. McDonald and I would make fun of “Microsoft time”, it was very well received by me when it first came out:
If you actually click through on any of these comics to go to the XKCD website, each comic has accompanying “alt text” (basically, what most people only see when you hover your mouse over the image). I haven’t been reposting that part here since, to be totally honest, even if you find the comic funny, a lot of time the alt text is more subtle. Therefore, my solution for those of you wanting to see it is to click through to the XKCD website and partake of its glory there, and while you’re at it, you can see the other types of comics from the series that aren’t making my blog posts.
Comics, Personal - Seattle
My goal is to keep all the comics this week somewhat technology related (yesterday’s I can justify by being linked to the first one), so for today, I present an XKCD classic:
As I feel my category system is horribly underused at the present time, I’m also planning on making these and the leasing comic part of a new category called, appropriately enough, Comics. That way whenever you just want to come to my blog to read the funnies, there will be a simple way for you to do so. Of course, you could also just go to my source material, but there’s not a whole lot of fun in that.
Comics, Personal - Seattle
So, I could tell you all of this cool (and admittedly, quite a bit of not so cool) stuff that got talked about today, but according to Microsoft, I’d then have to kill you. They didn’t exactly phrase it that way, but the underlying tone was there. Effectively I have two more days of this Microsoft imposed dome of silence, so that will make my post content require a little stretching for the next couple of days, That is, unless I keep talking about how I can’t talk about anything. Hmmm, maybe Microsoft won’t even let me talk about that, though…
The XKCD comic I posted yesterday appeared to resonate with a bunch of people (and not just my blog stalkers) because Alex made a Facebook status post saying that three of his friends (with no mutual friends in common) all posted the link to it on their profiles, and as a result, it showed up in his news feed. I can’t really do an “XKCD comic of the day” type thing in every post because they only release (normally) three a week, but maybe I could just make it a this week thing. Genius! I just discovered what I have to talk about for the rest of the week. So, for those of you unable to follow the comic yesterday, I now present this one from a month or two ago:
(It’s ok if you don’t get the joke in the box farthest to the right; these comics do tend to have a sense of humor that not everyone will get.)
Comics, Personal - Seattle
To everyone who has ever asked me for tech support help, I present this to you:
Yes, this comes courtesy of the same site as the leasing comic a couple of weeks ago. I think the funniest part about the comic is that this is so very, very accurate. Chances are that if you’ve ever asked me for help in the past, I have no preexisting knowledge about what you want to do. The people who are the ones supposedly very knowledgeable about computers just learned the secret of this flowchart before anyone else did.
Oh, and don’t even think about asking me how to print out the flowchart.
Comics, Personal - Seattle
A new movie has come along to displace The Village as being the worst movie I’ve ever seen. No longer can I make jokes about how something wasn’t as bad as The Village as I’ll have to start using this new movie now. In fact, I managed to sit through all of The Village which is more than I can say about this movie. It’s pretty sad, especially since I had such high hopes for District 9.
I sat there for 45 minutes and really, really tried to like District 9. Unfortunately, the movie did everything it possibly could in order to be as boring as possible. The main character had absolutely zero reason to like him (zero reason to hate him too, so it was like he served no purpose), there was no draw into the story to make you care about anything that was going on, and the documentary style that so much of it was done in presented a boring look at boring action. The Village, I must apologize for calling you the worst movie ever all these years; at least you tried to have somewhat of an interesting plot (even if it was the stupidest twist ever at the end). My score: 1.5/10.
Personal - Seattle