On the one hand, the honeymoon seems to be wrecked pretty badly*.  But on the other hand, I just got notice today that my Green Card application was officially successful and they’ll be sending it to me within three weeks.

* still not sure how this one will work out.

This interview with the creators of South Park is illuminating: I had no idea (for example) that they would put together an entire episode from intitial concept to implementation in under a week.  And that they still do the whole thing themselves.  Wow.

There haven’t been enough good zombie movies lately.  Where’s the recent equivalent to Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead, 28 days later, etc?  PLSFXTHX.

“[Hurricane John] was due to shave the Baja California peninsula on Friday, near the exclusive resort of Los Cabos which is popular with U.S. golfers and other vacationers.”  –  Reuters

By “other vacationers”, they mean me and my lovely wife.  Right now Alaska Air has cancelled flights to Los Cabos for tomorrow and friday, we are scheduled to leave Saturday.

Oh that was easy, you just punch in the email address right there instead of a phone number. Um, that was easy.  Nevermind.

My new printer arrived, a Brother 2070n that I described earlier. I plugged it into the wall, and plugged it into my modem. Then I set up my computer to print to that IP address, and presto I was done. The time from when I opened the amazon.com box to when it was fully working to the point where I could print out a test page from my laptop wirelessly was about 5 minutes. I don’t even think that the crappy Canon inkjet I replaced would have even finished printing the first page in 5 minutes, plus there’s all the fiddling with USB cables and crap too.

The time from when I hit print to when I get a page printed at 600 dpi resolution is less than 10 seconds. Brother even ships packages for Debian Linux *that work* — you download, double click, and it’s installed all in under 30 seconds. No crappy proprietary software, just the driver and it integrates perfectly with the built in printing systems for Ubuntu. The future is now!
This printer cost me $109. Why the heck doesn’t everyone have one of these?

Except not with the Rome burning part. I tinkered with the css of this site a lot though, so you should be able to do fancy modern things like resize columns to a percentage of your browser width, and uh… well that’s it really. That took several hours, it was only with the aid of a very excellent guide on the topic that I got it working.

Why, you ask? Because, I say… because the wtf mac store photo was slightly cut off on the right side with the default column width I had before. Is that not a good reason enough to spend hours tweaking css properties that you hardly understand on your blog even though most of the few people who read the side do via RSS anyhow? OF COURSE IT IS A GOOD ENOUGH REASON.

duh.

[UPDATE: this did not work in Internet Explorer, so if you’re using that it just won’t work.  So use a better browser, eh?]

link, via Iain.

From: Your friendly neighbourhood Ryan Thiessen
To: Complain Sallot
Subject: re: Top Posting

What’s top posting?

To: Mass Email List
From: Complains Sallot
Subject: Top Posting

Can you people stop top posting? It’s really quite rude.

A friend of mine lost his internets access when his roommate who owned the modem and subscription moved out.

yeah.  thats what i get for being lazy i guess

it’s a really tough call because being lazy is so damn important, but so is internet

Never before has anyone named “penis” said any words more wise than this in all of recorded human history.

I have a new cellphone number now, so if you want to know it you should totally ask me for (and include your own number) it and I will send you a hillarious text message in return. I already got my first text message from some random stranger to wants to “git with me” so it would be nice to have people I actually know send me creepy messages instead.

[UPDATE FOR PEOPLE LIKE JOHEN WHO CANNOT READ:]

Please include your phone number with your request, so I can re-add you to my phone!

[SECOND UPDATE SPECIFICALLY FOR JOHEN WHO REALLY CANNOT READ:]

Please include your phone number with your request, so I can re-add you to my phone!

I got myself up and running on Linux again, so I don’t have to suffer through the tyranny of trying to use Windows at home or to try to convince my wife to spend more money than we have on a laptop. To be honest, the installation was a piece of cake, everything was taken care of default — even the traditionally difficult pieces like internal wireless networking and the little special buttons like volume controls and even the special calculator button worked without any intervention at all.

Then I rebooted, and instead of the happy hp logo post screen I get a rapidly blinking cursor for like 10 seconds. Then it finally gets to the post screen but sits there for about 20 seconds or so. Um, okay… never seen that before. Then I get to the dual boot prompt (grub) that lets me select between Linux and Windows. Since I’m most interested to make sure that my work stuff is still alright I hit the down arrow a couple of times to select that option.

Except.

Er.

Oops?

What?

Okay, that’s totally frigging uncool. It doesn’t accept any keyboard input at all and boots right back into Linux. This does not make me happy, though the keyboard and everything else is working just fine once it all boots up in the lovely Ubuntu Linux Gnome environment. I try to reboot again, trying to select the F9 or F10 options at boot this time to get into the BIOS options, and throw in some of the other traditional BIOS keys like ESC and F8 and F2, but nothing works.

So now I’m a bit worried. Before I installed this I cleared it with my TOTALLY AWESOME BOSS WHO RULES AND I’M NOT JUST SAYING THAT BECAUSE HE READS THIS BLOG SOMETIMES by casually mentioning “hey, do you think IT would care if I installed Linux on this computer?” over lunch. I didn’t however ask “hey do you think IT would care if I rendered this machine useless for my primary work task because I am a zealot freak idiot who cannot use windows at home?” which seems at this point to be the relevant question.
Thankfully, after a bit of googling I managed to get it All Worked Out. Turns out that for a couple of hp/compaq models when you shutdown Linux you have to explicitly tell it “modprobe -r psmouse” before shutting down. I tested this completely unlikely solution but sure enough it solved the problem, when I executed that and rebooted I could use the keyboard at the OS selection menu fine and I could get back into my work stuff just fine. Whew.

I then added a simple init script to run that modprobe -r command on reboot and shutdown, so now everything is happy and works just fine. And I’m happier than a pig in, er, mud, now that I can use my favourite apps and have stuff work and be less annoying than everything in stupid Windows. And once my internet starts working again, which it seems to most be doing lately (knock on wood) then I’ll be able to do stuff from home again that I miss doing.

#!/usr/bin/python
print “\a”

Salon has an article up announcing their winner of the Buffy award for unappreciated television shows — the winner in this case being the wonderful Battlestar Galactica.   Their delightful “ten reasons not to watch Battlestar Galactica” includes one particular gem:

10. I like my science fiction peopled with multi-nostriled characters sporting thick, blue, leathery skin. Too many of the “Battlestar Galactica” characters are preposterously hot, and stubbornly refuse to ooze green, viscous liquids. Who wants that?

The plot and setting of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was stolen from Scarface to an amazing degree. Since I’d never seen Scarface before but played GTA:VC extensively, the movie reminds me of the game instead of the other way around.

UPDATE: this site has a couple of good examples, some that I didn’t even pick up on.

After a frustrating and unsatisfactorary experience with VMWare, I have concluded that my plan to use that to run linux on top of windows will not work. Given that I really can’t justify a >$1K laptop purchase right now, my options are few.

With all the hype about OSX users using Parallels Virtualization lately, I thought I’d see if something similar exists for the Windows world. Much to my surprise it turns out that yes indeed something does exist, and it’s actually Parallels itself. So I gave it a spin and I must say I do know what all the hype is about. This thing flies — compared to the slowpokey and annoying VMWare my experience has been quite pleasant.

But still not great. Two minor yet glaring flaws would prevent me from using this to replace a proper installation. For one, it doesn’t support xv video which means that watching movies looks ugly and is very slow and goes out of sync. But worse than that, the Windows version doesn’t have the ability to support widescreen laptops like mine so the screen is all stretched and ugly. Oh well. Better, but not good enough.

When you hit “select all” in a label view, you now have the option of deleting every single message that exists under that label.  For someone like myself with >20K messages in various mailing lists that I want to delete, it’s sure a lot nicer than deleting 100 at a time.

Now only if they’d let you open new links in a tab instead of opening a new window every time.  grumble.

Summary review: decently awesome.

This movie has received more hype than a B movie ever really has before, which in itself is a pretty awesome development. I’m a big fan of the genre, I even saw The Man With a Screaming Brain in the theatre last year when it came out.  As this guy in Seattle said to me the other day: if you’re going to see this movie you may as well see it the opening weekend.  So I did, because I agreed.

The directors made a very major flaw though, one that is unforgivable. Somehow they managed to forge that what people came to see this movie for was to see Snakes, on a Plane, killing people. The first 15 minutes or so of this movie involved setting up the plot and I shouldn’t speak for everyone else but I think it’s safe to say that no one really cared. I know in the theatre I saw it in it actually caused a minor commotion as the hyped up fans were yelling at the screen for no reason in absence of the promised snakes on a plane. When then got the manager involved when some old dude called out “hey keep it down, some of us are trying to watch the film“.

I wonder what inspires a person to think they can go see a movie called “Snakes on a Plane” on opening night and not expect a rambunctious audience? But I digress.

Once the snakes came out to play and the stupid plot bits were over, the movie really shined. People got bit in places you really hope to not get bitten in, Samuel L Jackson said memorable quotes regarding being dumbfounded about the existence of these snakes on the plane. The passengers on the plane did a great job of playing up several obvious stereotypes, and the movie came together in a very satisfactory conclusion.

I hope this sparks a trend of things to come in Hollywood, this movie is obviously making a pile of money with relatively little cost while many of the other films are sucking it up big time. I for one would pay $10 to go see “Snakes on Another Plane” starring a very pissed off Samuel L Jackson next summer.

In this sixth twice-daily podcast episode, I analyze all of the factors involved and come up with a win-win solution for the much discussed conflict, one that will provide a solid foundation for lasting peace in the middle east.  And then I go on to prove how any other option is unavoidably destined to fail miserably.  So pay attention world leaders, I’m here to save the day!

podcast epsiode 6: the undiscovered country

Our crappy Cannon inkjet was on the fritz again so I figured SCREW THIS CRAP. I went to staples and found a decent Brother LaserJet that looked decent. But of course before you buy a printer you have to make sure you can get cheap ink/toner so I googled it first. Up came an ad from Amazon advertising the more advanced model Brother LaserJet for the same price.

$109 for a compact networkworkable laser printer? Woo!

Specs:

• 2,400 x 600 dpi resolution with laser print quality
• Up to 20 ppm black, first page out in under 10 seconds
• 250-sheet input capacity; supports a variety of sizes and envelopes
• Simple setup and operation; 16 MB standard memory
• Parallel, USB 2.0, and Ethernet interfaces; PC, Mac, and Linux compatible

Buying stuff is awesome.

One thing that really interests me is how living in urban centres distances ourselves from the social constraints that you would have in smaller groups.  For example: in a tribe of 100 people, if you do something antisocial like let your dog poop everywhere everyone else will treat you like garbage.  But in a large urban society, those societal pressures don’t really apply for better or for worse — the good or bad things you do that would be rewarded or punished in a smaller setting are just ignored.  If your dog poops on the sidewalk you just move on, and you don’t really have to worry ever seeing anyone again even if they give you a nasty look when you walk away.

This has a lot of implications, for example how small town people don’t like “big government” and large cities are usually full of liberals who regulate everything.  It just makes sense in the different contexts, because in the smaller towns there is a relatively greater chance that societal pressures will be able to accomplish things that big cities require rules and regulations to accomplish.  That’s obviously just one part of it, but I digress.

What adds to that discussion is an article I ran across from South Korea, where the internets are so pervasive that the societal pressures of small groups can sometimes even apply on a larger scale.  Read this IHT article and note especially the bottom paragraphs.  Even in (assumedly) a large city, the mob rule of the internet has transformed a large city into using negative social pressure to punish someone for letting their dog poop on the sidewalk — something that would have otherwise just been anonymous.

Regardless whether you think the reaction was overboard or not (I certainly do), it has interesting (to me) implications about what this means in our society.  Is this mob rule going to replace some of the rules that we enforce today?  Instead of a $500 fine for people not cleaning up after their dogs, maybe the parks should just post photographs of offenders on a blog somewhere to get better enforcement.  Okay, maybe not.  But nonetheless it has implications for the future.

When discussing the wiretrapping case at work, I pointed out that the US constitutional amendments don’t really apply to me anyhow as I’m a resident alien.  This guy who works in my building suggested that however, I have the constitutional right to shut up.
Hm.  This seemed funnier at the time.

I had this one on my netflix “saved” list for quite some time. A parody of several varieties of detective mystery films, starring Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, and Peter Falk — how could it go wrong?

The first clue to answering that question was in the opening scene, where Alec Guinness was playing a blind butler. In the opening scene he was stamping some envelopes. Lick, stamp, lick, stamp, lick stamp. Then fade out and HA HA THE BLIND GUY MISSED THE ENVELOPES AND STAMPED THE TABLE. HA HA. This was a sign of bad things to come.

I kept wondering while I was watching it, when was Peter Sellers going to show up? Then it dawned on me that he was the dude playing the “Chinese” detective with taped up eyes spouting ridiculous fortune cookie sayings. Peter Falk’s role was to be homophobic, misogynistic, and racist in a “charming” way. Though I must say in the few places where he wasn’t doing on of those things he did a really good job.

The sad part is that this movie had real potential — and in a few parts it really shined through despite the failings listed above. The conclusion of it was a wonderful parody of the ridiculous twists that are often given to films of this genre to solve a case. This movie could really stand to be remade, especially given how the detective genre has been really prominent lately with all of the crime dramas on tv.

Except that it makes reference to a fellow named “Borys Wrzesnewskyj”.

Call me culturally insensitive, but it really seems like you could get a better last name by mashing your hand against a keyboard.

aebadblkAVBKsd.

p;bjmhhhhhhgibjqerbinf

goqeogp;bhkibjaherbhqepobhj

Hm.  Perhaps not.  Still, it’s a very awkward name.

I’m a big Coen Bros fan so I wanted to round out their catalog  by renting these two older films.  Sadly I wasn’t really impressed with either, though they both had their charm.

Blood Simple had a few really good scenes, the best one being where the PI reaches around the building and then… well I won’t spoil it.  The acting was solid but nothing really stood out.  It was more mediocre than it was awful, it just didn’t capture my attention and I didn’t care about any of the characters all that much.  The only really interesting character was M. Emmet Walsh’s and didn’t get enough focus in the film.

Miller’s Crossing was better, though it suffered from two flaws: the protagonist was unsympathetic and not really that interesting either, and also that it had no real standout scenes or characters that would make it memorable.  If Gabriel Byrne was supposed to just act aimless and confusing all the time, he did a good job in that.  Thing is though, everyone around him did a pretty good job.  John Turturro at his very finest, but yet again his role is extremely minor.

This wasn’t a new release by any means, but it had been on my list for a while now.  Surprisingly it was pretty good, though the plot was laughable at some points it didn’t fall into any obvious traps aside from coming close to stretching the bounds of our ability to suspend belief.  The actors here did a very fine job, Carrie-Anne Moss in particular was very good which surprised me after those horrible Matrix movies.  One exception is Val Kilmer who was too damn smug the whole way through, perhaps that was the intent of his character but it seemed like his own smug personality shining through for some reason.

Colour me unimpressed.  It was slow moving and I just didn’t buy the acting of Jake Gyllenhaal* (though Heath Ledger did a fine job).  The cinematography was great, but in the end it was just a story that trudged towards an inevitable conclusion with very few surprises from what you would predict would happen.

Not to slight the guy, he did a superb job in Jarhead where he carried the whole film.

When I see something cool in a genre I’ve neglected I then move on to explore other elements of that genre only to be massively disappointed.  I posted once before here how I found this with Nausicaa where I loved the movie but then hated all of the anime I saw after that.  Well once again it struck me.  I really enjoy zefrank’s daily video blog (we failed to resist blog, but I think we as a species can resist “vlog”.  Please?) so as per usual I went exploring to see other popular video blogs.

And sure enough, they all suck.  Except for Ask a Ninja which is pretty awesome.  But for example, rocketboom?  Totally frigging lame.  I thought maybe it was the new host that sucked so I checked some earlier episodes — but even though the old host was much cuter the show sucked just as bad.  And don’t even ask about the one’s I’m not mentioning.  Video blogging is totally frigging lame, except for zefrank’s the show and ask a ninja.  You heard it here first.

I realize I’m probably the last one to point this out but apparently this is what Microsoft’s “iPod killer” will be.

They really have absolutely no idea why the iPod was and is popular, do they? Microsoft has jumped the shark.

Today to describe a panicked person I used the phrase “running around like their head was cut off by a chicken”.  An improvement on the original, I think.

Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr writes to inform us that comedian Steve Carrell and that insane racist dude who runs Iran are actually the same person!

In Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, when the muppets are robbing the rich people’s house one of them grabs a giant pair of antlers and tries to put it in his sack before his partner stops him.

I always loved this scene.

The lovely wife and I have booked a trip to Los Cabos at the Marina Fiesta Resorta for our long-overdue honeymoon in September. It’s not the sort of travel I usually do, but it should be a good relaxing time. I actually meant to book a place in Cancun so that I could maybe check out some of the ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula… except I just wasn’t paying that much attention. Heh.

I went through a whole bunch of travel sites before I finally made the purchase, and I have one thing to say: all these travel sites totally frigging suck. Expedia, why can’t you ever explain where a hotel is actually located? Travelocity, why can’t you explain details about hotels beyond the bare basics? I ended up going with Air Alaska Vacations even though their website was equally crummy for one reason only: I got a direct flight there and back. Also the hotel they listed had its own website (thank you google) so I could actually know something about it besides the fact that it may or may not exist.
We chose a place in the actual town instead of a resort strip so that we would be close to things to do and would be near supermarkets and restaurants without having to take cabs everywhere. From what I can understand the most annoying thing about resort towns in Mexico is the omnipresent timeshare sales pitch, so I’m thinking of making a shirt or hat that says “No I don’t want a frigging Time Share now bugger off” so I can just point instead of repeating it over and over.

Yesterday I watched every show of theshow with zefrank since march, much of it back to back.  It’s pretty annoying how despite repeated efforts of my friends to direct me to this site I never really clued in to how completely and utterly awesome it is.  Here are the things zefrank and I seem to have in common:

* obsessed with awesomeness and things that are awesome
* taking close up pictures of our heads
* smug political rants that are a just a touch condescending
* loves duckies
* endlessly amused by normal things viewed in a different way
* deliberately trying to confuse new people by doing strange things
* goes for the easy joke when the situation requires it.
So yeah.  I’m now a sports racer.  Rawk!  Now all I need to do is submit a power move and I’m set.