General Oversight

So I just finished watching the second Transformers movie on Blu-Ray, "Revenge of the Fallen".
I enjoyed the first one. And even the second was entertaining. Yeah, it was reviewed poorly and most will complain about plot holes, but the sequel was entertaining. I liked it.
What are you expecting anyway? It's a film about robots that have an exclusive deal with General Motors.

Yep, the autobots can only transform into marvels of humanoid engineering if what they scan is derived from the great minds at GM.
Chevy (those controversial, illiterate ghetto twins and Bumblebee), GMC (Ironhide), even Saturn (the Astra used to escape from evil robots at the college) were all pushed by the film.

This exclusivity (all-)sparked a train of thought...maybe we pay taxes to keep GM in business because they threw all their money into the movie and forgot about that secret to capitalistic success...innovation.
What's that? Transformers 2 was still a success?
Well that's the the sticking point isn't it?
...But I'm convinced there is an explanation.
While Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg realized about halfway through the film that they had a bunch of compost in between their fingers, they also knew there was a perfect solution: throw in a few more scenes with Megan Fox in a low-cut top running from danger in slow-motion.

General Motors had no such hottie to salvage their incompetence, resulting in any tax-paying U.S. citizen dumb enough to purchase a new GM vehicle not only paying for the (eventual) pink slip and right to drive it off the lot, but also putting up the dough for its production.

I don't know what the big deal is though...I always return to Safeway and pay (in full, with a huge markup) for my plate of pasta after I go grocery shopping (at Safeway) for sausage, cheese tortellini, peppers, tomato sauce, salad, and bread.
That's...the American way...?

Mi Muñeca

My girlfriend is la bomba.
Apologies in advance to any male or lesbian readers. Jealousy will likely ensue.
Quite simply, she is the best girl. Ever.

For instance...

• She walked right past the What Women Want, The Devil Wears Prada, Failure to Launch, When Harry Met Sally (which I actually really like) DVD's on sale at Target, and picked up Predator. On Blu-Ray, on sale for $9.99. She said, "We are watching this tonight."
• She likes good music. That's not to say she only likes music that I like. That would be boring. But she is appreciative, vocally so, of the not-so-on-the-radio-or-download-able-as-ring-tone catalog that pleasures my ears. And she exposes me to some really good stuff. She said yesterday, "I really like that elbow song, Grounds for Divorce. It's so bad ass. It just makes me want to tear something up." And then continued to swing her hips to Shakira. I always wanted eclectic love.
• She, like any girl, has a friend that visits every month, let's call this friend...oh...I dunno..."Redding". However, she doesn't transform into an enraged demonic aggressor, throwing the salt shaker squarely at my forehead for placing it too close to her cup of cranberry juice causing it to sprinkle on to her place mat. Nope, she is well aware that she might be a little moody, but in reality is just a little more quiet and indecisive than usual...and even goes as far as (unnecessarily) apologizing for that.
• She has no capacity for falsehood. When she says something to me, there is no question in my mind or heart that she means it. Entirely.
• She bypasses Sex and the City and watches The Simpsons and Futurama with me. And she turned me on to Futurama. She also has the insider info on when a season of The Simpsons is going on sale.
• She doesn't hold it against me when I let my silly Canadian friends convince me to have just 4 more shots of whiskey and I end up making (even more of) an ass of myself.
  
• She tells me I'm hot when I'm being a complete nerd. I have no qualms about telling her that Sunday afternoon, I really want to re-image my hard drive, swap out my CPU fan, and tweak my BIOS settings.
• She might like the Predator, but she sewed up the hole in my PJ's while we watched it.
• She personifies my guitars before I even get the chance to do it myself: "You haven't had time to play guitar in a long time baby, I bet you miss it. I'm sure they miss you too."
• She'll skip a walk through some garden to go to the Academy of Sciences, the Planetarium, the Tech Museum, or to just stay in bed and watch Transformers and The Rock all day.
• She is open to trying new things. She is as excited as I am to go snowboarding, having only gone twice. And when she gets tired and sees that I want to leave the bunny hill, she tells me to "Go on, I'll be in the lodge saving us a spot with some drinks and fries." And there is nothing behind that, no strange guilt trip because I went snowboarding for a while without her.
• She gives me a big sympathetic hug when one of my tank creatures passes away.
  

I could go on and on, but I don't want to make you too jealous. You might accuse me of blogging about my girlfriend just to score some brownie points...and get her to bake me some brownies later...and while that might be a happy side effect, it's not the case.
I just like to brag about how lucky I got.

Like

facebook. A grand old place.
These are all posts I saw when I was pretty angry with life a few weeks back. I was inclined, with all my cynicism, to "Like" every bad status post I could find...
Here are some of them...


We had a good run but nothing is forever. Gibson Stratocaster will be missed.
(Dead Cat?)
...Like

Another month with no driving = super sad XXXXXXXX.
XXXXXXX has no car...DUI? Wrecked? Can't afford insurance?
...Like

Tow company said it would take 20 minutes to come jump my car. Called at 30 minutes to see if they got lost and they said it will be another 10. :/
(Car trouble)
...Like


XXXXXX is sort of pissed to be paying for this calculus class. What a joke.
XXXXXX decided to take a course at an all Russian school? The professor is her junior high school teacher that got fired for reaching down some young man's pants?
...Like


Just not my day.
...Like


XXXXXX was hit today by a guy speeding through a red light. I'm okay. My car is not. My poor poor car :(
XXXXXX's car is totaled?
...Like

But who's to say I wasn't happy that all these people, with their rough times and hard situations, were still in a place where they could log on to facebook and troll for sympathy...

Obscure Hilarity

Caught this over at Geekology (yes, the one with a 'y', not 'ie').



I lost it at "Twit on My Face".

Wow...I've become a nerd...

Like minds like mine

Musicians I enjoy tend to flock together. And I don't mean those from the same label or even the same genre - that would be expected.
I guess those I like also like who I like.

Excited for Massive Attack's new album, I did some internet poking and found a flash player with tracks from their EP (click "Media Player" on the top left of their page).
It seems Guy Garvey - the vocalist for one of my other favorite bands, elbow - will be appearing on their new record, Heligoland.
There is also a track featuring Tunde Adebimpe - the cat from TV On The Radio...

Here is a remix of the track with Garvey from the EP:


This makes me happy.

Fresh President of Bel Air

No where in this article was Mr. Smith mentioned...


Should I take the risk of biting the hand that feeds and use Blogger to tell Google News that all success does not look alike?

...I think I just did...

Whoever said, "There are two sides to every story", is an idiot.

At the Actel Engineering/Marketing Christmas party, our (supremely NOT nerdy) table was engulfed in a debate about which OS is the best...
While I generally don't take sides, comfortable in my own stoic cynical romantic indifference...ism, I had to put my foot down and take a side here...sort of...

Macro Hard On

Bill Gates is the man.

Our society is entirely too hung up on 'what should be' and entirely too disconnected from what is - and why.
I'm talking about Windows here. Huh? World outside of computers? Get out...
What's that you say? Microsoft steals ideas? Windows is a purely evil necessity, shoved down our throats?
Money-grubbing, monopolistic companies like Bill Gates' are everything that's wrong with the world?

As the Sector 9-welcoming concrete at John Muir College says,
"Consume Excrement".

It's easy to tear apart those in the lead.
Criticism is to be expected: the wider your base of users, the more common you are to hit untested cases and fall victim to those crying, "It doesn't have this...it doesn't do that..."
And yeah, I agree, far too many people know what a 'BSOD' is, but what about the rest of the candidates?
Can you deny that the front-runner obtained the lead in the same race as the competition?
The answer is "no".
Like my mom used to say..."Because."

Critics of Windows are by and large the population of nerds who open more command prompts than they do doors, check the temperature of their CPU more frequently than they check their scent, and sniff more packets than they have members of the opposite sex.
If this small elite dictated the industry, then yes - Windows would probably be better, if not run out of the market.
Yeah right, and Ubuntu would have ads on highway billboards...

But they don't. The truth is that economics usually parallels evolution, and most of these folks don't buy software to begin with, they torment it...er get it from turrets...er...torrents...so how are they going to sway how many arms the product has, or how well it can change its skin color to blend in to the tree it's resting on?

Those unheard from on forums - the loudest at the store - are the middle-aged aunts, anxious to catch a fresh whiff of social interaction via mybook or facespace, the lonely hot clerks eager to see if anyone replied to their harmonic match profile solicitations for a date, the secretary - contently ignorant of OpenOffice, pounding away at that Excel spreadsheet - and the teeny boppers, pimping their page with phone pics and the latest from lady rhigaga or lil' cent.
These folks have no need to push their hardware to the max, no goal of overclocking their CPU via FSB increments to squeeze every last cycle they can out of some silicon for obscure forum status and bragging rights.
They have no interest in disabling anything *Microsoft* from their startup processes and no reason to open their desktop case to run plastic tubes full of neon green coolant professing, "convection is a quieter and more efficient way to rid away heat from your CPU than fans."

Windows has a niche...and it's a good one:
The profitable one.

Unless you built your computer from scratch, your hard drive is likely shipped with an installation of Windows.
This fact alone is evidence that Windows is the best operating system offered. If it wasn't, the majority of our planet wouldn't boot up to a Windows flag.
That's how business works. Pissed off? Angry? Jealous? Why didn't you, or more accurately, why didn't those other companies do it? They were in the same race as good ol' Gates...

Recognize there is a reason that in all likelihood, you have a pair of jeans with a Levis tag, there is a Sony device in your line of sight, you've consumed a Coke or Pepsi in the last month, the image of a guitar is shaped like a Fender Strat or a Gibson Les Paul in your head, you brushed your teeth with Crest or Colgate this morning, and you own a computer running Windows.


Also, Macintosh turned something peaceful and happy into morbidity:

("Beach ball of death", courtesy of www.macmerc.com)


Return of the Mac

I own an Apple MacBook Pro. I have since they called these things "PowerBooks".
Mac OSX, while criticized as purely aesthetic and aloof to functionality, is awesome.
If you don't agree, then odds are you haven't used it for long enough, if at all.

Sure, Apple computers are much more expensive than other computers, even those with similar hardware specs.
But what good are those superb hardware specs if they aren't being utilized by the OS?
More specifically:
What's the point of having 4GB of RAM when your OS can't utilize it, requiring 2GB just to boot to your desktop in under a minute?
Why drop in a 10,000 rpm hard drive when your OS will ...monopolize..ech hem... on 60% of those revolutions just to index the files you have already written to the drive and forgot about?
Why install insanely powerful graphics cards when your favorite game can't even run because it tries to establish network connections deemed 'unsecure' by Mr. Gate$ and company?

So what if more - and more common - programs run on Windows.
Open those programs and click away as the OS asks you over and over, "Are you sure???" Do you really want to install it, because "Running this program may put your computer at risk!!!!!"

A Mac takes full advantage of those extra CPU cores you were suckered in to buying.
It knows how to efficiently handle every bit (haha) of RAM it is offered.
It recognizes any third party solid you can connect to it and knows what kind of file that is.

However, it will have those unfortunate drawbacks of "looking pretty" on the outside and "making the GUI nice" on the inside. You just have to deal with those shortcomings...


They mixed up the placement of the Ctrl and Alt key...but it's forgivable...I guess...

("Blue screen of breast - I mean death", courtesy of www.thenextweb.com)

Like Linus really likes Linux

Umm...I was going to say something about this OS...but I haven't had to use it much outside of work because...well...
I have a Mac.

So I guess they were right. There are only two sides to every story...I'm the idiot.


Listening to:
Felt 3: A Tribute to Rosie Perez
Murs and Slug (Atmosphere) as MC's? Nice.
Aesop Rock handling production...not bad...

Them Crooked Vultures
The guy from Queens of the Stone Age?
The guy from Nirvana and Foo Fighters?
The guy from Led Zeppelin?
...good...

The Fountain Score
Clint Mansell writing with Kronos Quartet + Mogwai performing?
...amazing...
Clint Mansell is a hero of mine.
Even after the commercial success of the Requiem For A Dream piece...
He is still indie-legit and deep like ocean.
Add in Mogwai? Forget about it...


Watching:
The Fountain
I am a romantic.
A romantic crybaby. Cry every time I watch this movie.
But like Josh says, "If you don't, it's because you have no soul."


Drinking:
Nothing!
I've been working on this compiler project non-stop.
No time for the happy fluids.
It is done though. And I'm due for a Friday SWD...