Category Archives: Opinion

Ye Olde Footballe

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Today I had a brief party at my house wherein we watched some [American] football and consumed food. The food was good, I’ve had better football. The Denver Broncos, our home team, played so well that they gave a great demonstration of what not to do, while the Pittsburg Steelers (where, apparently I have some family heritage. No, not in steel, but Pittsburg) rocked the socks off of the locals. Yes, it was much like beating a dead horse.

Then, to make sure that my brother-in-law and his wife would have a good laugh saying, “Seattle is better than Denver,” the Seattle Seahawks spanked the Carolina Panthers. That is to say that the Panthers lost even worse than the Broncos. I didn’t know that two teams could be in the playoffs and have their playing be so off! Hey, at least the Colts, where my father-in-law is from, Indianapolis, weren’t playing… then it would be like a family feud, and we can’t have that.

Oh, and the Broncos did have a severe disadvantage this game: they hadn’t lost any other home game this season which put them at a near absolute situation where they would lose. I blame statistics and not the fact that Jake Plummer threw two interceptions and fumbled – its all in the numbers.

Snow-Brainer

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OK. There is about 2 inches – maybe 3 – of snow on the ground. Denver is devastated because people don’t know how to drive on the snow. I’ve got a dental appointment in about a 2 hours and I’m probably going to have to leave one hour from now due to goofy road conditions. So here is a list of appropriate driving approaches when you’re driving in the snow for the few readers who find snow driving difficult to grasp:

  1. Drive slowly. Your reaction time will be useless on slick or icey roads.
  2. Pump your breaks if you start sliding. That is don’t just put your foot on the floor assuming that you will stop sliding due to a greater amount of fear.
  3. Turn into a slide. That is if you turn left and your back end starts sliding out from behind you turn your stearing wheel to the right to straighten out and gain control.
  4. Did I mention slow down?

There. Those aren’t hard, but when you’re in an out of control situation having those reactions is not logical, so try to keep your wits about you and leave early, drive slowly and be respectful of the road condition.

Eye, Eye, Captain!

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I am going to the eye doctor soon. This scares me because I think that my eyes are fine. I think that I can see well. But the truth is that I know they will tell me that my vision is not 20/20 or some number telling me that I can see through walls and burn down buildings with the lazers that shoot out of my eyes.

Will glasses make me look sexy like Clark Kent or will they make me look like an old codger? Of course I may not need glasses, but I’m sure not going to wear contacts – I would go blind poking my eyes before they went in easily.

Pardon My Hurlage

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I just got a letter from ‘St. Matthew’s Churches.’ That would be a letter requesting I pray on their ‘prayer cloth’ then have someone else pray on the ‘prayer cloth’ and then send the ‘prayer cloth’ back in an envelope (hopefully with some money) with some checkboxes checked for what we need prayer for. I put quotes around ‘prayer cloth’ because its a cheaply printed picture of a very white Jesus with his eyes closed. And, if I have enough faith Jesus will open his eyes and look at me.

Yuck! This scam is rather annoying, here’s an article talking about the organization. Seed faith my rear-end. No amount of money that I might pour into some random ‘churches’ is going to bring money to me. What a blind bunch of morons that are sending in $26,000.00 or more a month to this group of schemers. Check out some of the schlockery in the ‘letter’ they send:

  1. “Read what God is doing here at St. Matthew’s churches.” And by ‘here’ they mean at their attorney’s office where the checks go. Not at their California mansions where the grand schemer lives.
  2. “Dear… Someone connected with this Address,” I swear I’m not making that up. It says someone connected to this address. They don’t even have their software putting names on these things.
  3. “Now, we must talk to you about something we see, in the Holy Spirit, concerning you and your family’s needs.” Oh, boy! They’ve got special revlation – what is it? “God’s holy blessing power is in the enclosed anointed prayer rug we are loaning you to use!!!” Yippee!!! Now they’re loaning out God’s blessing to “Someone connected with this address” so that we can have ”
    “holy blessing power” in our lives. Gee, surely this isn’t a scam.
  4. “You … are about to be blessed through this unusual, Bible Faith, Church, Prayer Rug…” Unusual all right! It is ugly, printed on paper, and can be recycled. I’m hoping that God will bless me for being environmentally sound with my recycling of this prayer rug.

I could keep going but I’m going to stop. I have to draw the line somewhere, and there’s already enough heresy in this one blog post to cause God to smite my site with a database failure [yes, that too is an attempt at humor].

The upside with all of this is that I know I’ve been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies (Ephesians 1:3), I’ve been given discernment against those who would use religion for personal gain (see contentment: 1 Timothy 6:6-8), and I have a good sense of humor that makes this entertaining. Poor folks who fall for this junk.

I’m praying for my superhero costume to go with my unicycle.

The Lion, The Witch and What Not To Wear

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Sorry about that strange play on words. Actually, no, I’m not. But it was something that needed to be done. I had to figure out a good play on words to offset the mundane topic of a movie that has been heaveily hyped by the Disney people. Jessica and I broke out of the house yesterday and saw the film whilst my parents baby-sat. Wow. We got out of the house. It felt good.

The movie was great on a lot of levels, the least of which was the actual witch, who looked like the Borg queen in the Star Trek movies. Not because she was attached to all of the borg, but because the actresses looked similar to me. For some reason both acresses have a similarly machabre look, similarly have weird things sprouting from their heads, and both of them are women, which helps the whole thing go along a lot better than say comparing Aslan to Captain Picard!
The Queens of Heck

The cast did a pretty good job of presenting the characters with an added exception of the the dward who was the sled driver for the queen. He reminded me too much of Deep Roy from the Willy Wonka movie last year wherein he was the Oompa-loompas. I kept waiting for the sled driver to sing a song about Edmond being a bad boy. He didn’t.

The special effects in the movie were top notch and while I knew some things were done with CGI there was in incredible amount of energy put into not making everything feel like CGI. I highly recommend seeing this movie for its technical merits alone. The battel scene could have been compared to some of the work in Lord of the Rings, but instead I’ll say this: they did a good job of mounting the tension and having things play quite differently from Lord of the Rings: kudos to those in charge of that decision.

This was a movie worth seeing and on a scale from 1 to 62.5 I would rank it a 52.369. It had some lame parts wherein Peter has no clue how to hold a sword, but there is also a really, really good portrayal of the animals, fictional or otherwise, as being quite real and touchable. The interplay between Earth and Narnia was fantastic and I must say that I’d love to play hide-n-seek in that house if I could. I would get so lost that no sons of Adam or daughters of Eve could find me in that big place.

Microsoft Windows Media Format Patch

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Some of you may be running Windows. If that’s the case you’ll want to install this update right away if you’re using Internet Explorer: Download details: Security Update for Windows XP (KB912919).

Here’s the thing: Internet Explorer is a security nightmare. If you are running Internet Explorer it looks at files with any sort of graphical extension and then ignores the fact that it is a graphical extension with a specific name and then tries to render it how it thinks it should. Thus, if someone runs the Windows Media File exploit on an image ending with GIF (a different graphics format) Internet Explorer ignores that it can’t render the image as a GIF file and runs the Windows Media File executing the attack!

Please, after installing that patch, install Firefox or Opera.

Being Rich Does Not Mean You Can Run

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In what has to be one of the most awkward moments in video gaming history last night at the Consumer Electronics Show(CES) in Las Vegas Bill Gates played a video game with Steve Balmer on the X-box 360. When the boxing announcer (who was actually going to call the video game’s fight) called out Bill Gates bill ran out onto the stage in what can be described as a mobile seizure. It was Bill Gates, the richest man on the planet (as far as monetary value is concerned), running like he had never run in his life and this was his first stab at it. He came out flailing his arms while his legs wiggled in a motion that must be described as a run since it was faster than his walk.

Steve Balmer came out screaming to get the crowd hype and then Bill Gates beat up Balmer on the screen while the announcer pretended to announce the game while instead he read some propaganda that was on the screan/teleprompter. In short it made me glad to not own an X-Box 360 and not want to buy one lest I start to look like Bill Gates or Steve Balmer.

Being rich does, however, mean that Bill Gates could pay off the International Olympics Committee to get them to change the rules for olympic running so that all athletes need to run like him, so that the next Summer Olympics have a recorded moment where two announcers actually say:
Announcer 1: “We’re seeing a lot slower running this year in the olympics.”
Annaouncer 2: “Yes, ever since the Gates rule was put in place things have really slowed down.”

Dang. That’s just wrong.

UMD

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No, not Weapons of Mass Destruction, UMD stands for Universal Media Disc. It is one of four(!) ways my new PlayStation Portable can get data into it. It has Memory Stick, USB, WiFi and UMD support. The memory stick is a ‘Duo’ memory stick from Sony. In short it is a locked-in proprietary format that means I will have to pay Sony somehow for the memory upgrades. USB and WiFi are standard (WiFi is 802.11b compatible) connection types for many computers. UMD is the most bizarre format though (and the games usually come in this format) because it seems overkill to have a plastic case around a CD/DVD type media. However, it is a great device and I surely can’t complain.

I bought this for work (seriously!) because it has an incredible browser and clients like one large one I have in Texas need me to do work that will display correctly on this device. The one major issue I can see with this is that the data entry control for adding text on web browser form controls (and in some games) is completely difficult for spelling words like ‘holly’, which requires you to select ‘l’ and then the ‘next cursor position’ button [I don’t know what else to call the button] then ‘l’ again.

This site does not currently render correctly in the PSP browser, but will do so shortly when I have a few moments to tweak the CSS. I am really impressed with the capabilities of this device and recommend it to those who are ‘on the fence’ about purchasing something like this. The screen is brilliant, the sound is good, the speed of the processor is excellent. I have to wait longer for my PS2 to load up games (granted they’re probably more sophisticated) than I do for the PSP.

It is a great device and I strongly recommend it for web developers (it supports RSS!), game players and regular travelers who want to watch movies on the go.

Its two downfalls for heavy media usage are that it requires the purchase of a newer bigger memory stick and a USB cable if you don’t already have one that is of the right spec (unless you buy the ‘giga’ package that Sony sells that comes with the 1 Gigabyte stick and cable). The media types it appears to support are rather broad so I can see it being handy for those who don’t want to get locked into one type or another. The latest OS patch (which I downloaded over WiFi!) includes support for the Windows Media Audio format (WMA) as well, though you do have to click through an end user license agreement to enable it. I haven’t watched a full movie on it yet but I can imagine that it will be handy to be able to bring video footage to various places to try it out.

Check out other reviews or buy it on amazon.com

Prophets on Profits Should Be Stoned

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Money.CNN.com [not linking because they’re not getting my page rank] has been predicting the demise of the housing market for months and months now. And it may quite well be going down but do they have to post it once a week somewhere on their site? I think they’re running a scam over at that site anyway, but the ‘news’ that they post is just bonkers at times.

You don’t take the content of this site literally very often, and I don’t take the content of their site literay or as reliable… ever 😉