Murphy’s Law strikes again

Let me tell you about my morning…

Last week sometime I noticed that the air in my left front tire was low. After a week of forgetting to take care of it, I finally decided to stop by the Chevron station near my apartment to top off the air.

I pulled up to the air compressor and hooked up the nozzle. I noticed I was down to 20 lbs of pressure… not good. So I pressed the button on the nozzle to fill the tire. I could hear air hissing, but couldn’t figure out why the little meter was still reading 20 lbs. After a few seconds of this, I realized that I wasn’t putting any air into the tire, I was letting it out!

I checked the nozzle, and it turns out there was barely a trickle of air coming out of the nozzle…certainly not enough to actually fill the tire.

By this time the tire is so low I’m not comfortable driving on it at all. I went into the gas station to talk to the attendants to see if they could help me. It turns out that someone had run over the nozzle on the compressor and broken it. Apparently no one had bothered to put up a sign, so it wasn’t readily apparent that the thing was broken. One of the attendants checked on the compressor and turned it on, but when I tried (again) to fill the tire after letting the compressor fill again it just continued letting air out of the tire. So now the tire is dangerously low on air, and yet the attendants are both telling me that I should be able to limp my way to the next gas station to get air.

I’m so not comfortable with that idea as by this time I’m practically on the rim, so I decided to put on the spare and head up to Les Schwab. So there I am in the parking lot of the Chevron (which has a garage) trying to change out my tire, it’s pouring down snow on top of me and neither of the idi… er… attendants on duty is bothering to offer any sort of assistance that might possibly force them to leave their nice warm station.

Long story short, after wrestling with the flimsy little jack that came with my car I finally got the spare on and got on my way to Les Schwab.

Now this is the part where I rave about how awesome Les Schwab is. I pull in, tell them my story, and within 30 minutes I’m back on the road and on my way to work. They even took the time to make sure the tire I was originally trying to fill didn’t have a leak or anything in it. They also pointed out that I need new tires all the way around, but didn’t hastle me when I told them I would have to wait. The tires are showing the wear bars, but I figure I ought to be able to get another six or so months out of them before they’re beyond all hope, which will give the boss…er… wife and I time to budget in new ones.

All in all I was only late for work by about an hour, which wasn’t as bad as it could be. My day has improved considerably and if nothing else I have an interesting story to tell.

Certainly it is a lot warmer.

Wow… just wow….

I ran across this last week while surfing Utterly Boring. I’ve been discussing it with Alex, who sent me a link he got from Brian (isn’t it fun how this new fangled Internet thing works?) to http://jerryleecooper.com which is an entire blog of quotes from this guy.

At first I was inclined to think he was simply trolling, but the more I read the more I realize, no, he’s really that ignorant. I especially love how he is almost condescending in his fanatical devotion to Vista and Microsoft, and while completely wrong on nearly… ok, on EVERYTHING he says, he’s just positive he’s right.

In a nutshell, the guy is off his rocker, and spectacularly so, but it makes for some entertaining reading. This guy is the perfect example of why you should take anything you read on the Internet with a grain of salt.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

Well, ok, maybe not “frightful” per se, but it’s damn cold out. It snowed last night which made the drive into work this morning interesting, although the roads (as it turned out) weren’t all that bad in my neck of the woods. I heard it was a virtual skating rink further west, however.

All that said, it was pretty out this morning. I have to admit, I love the snow. I love it even more if I don’t have to drive in it, but there’s something peaceful about freshly fallen snow.

The snow is supposed to be mostly gone by tomorrow although rumor has it that there might be a small amount of new accumulation tonight. I don’t think it will be much though and it’ll probably be gone by tomorrow afternoon.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

The streak is broken…

I went to the Portland Trail Blazers game on Friday (January 25th) against the Houston Rockets. I have spoken in the past that I believe I am a good luck charm for the Blazers as they had won every game I had ever been to.

I am sad to announce that the streak is broken.

The Blazers lost 79 – 89 to the Houston Rockets. I don’t feel too badly though because I heard this was their first loss after something like a nine game winning streak, so it was bound to happen.

The first thing I’m going to say about the game is this… Yao Ming is one tall dude! He was head and shoulders above most of the Blazers, and they aren’t exactly midg…er.. little people. Despite being tall enough to pretty much just drop the ball into the basket, he didn’t seem to be able to hit a basket to save his life in the first half of the game. In one case he went to shoot what should have been a fairly simple shot and then watched as the ball simply arced over the top of the basket to the other side. He did, however, manage to hit all of his free throws.

The first half of the game saw the Blazers come out strong, racking up a 15 – 20 point lead in the first quarter, but Houston was hot on their heels and the score was quickly tied by the middle of the second quarter. At the Half the Blazers were up by about four points.

The second half was a totally different game. In the first five minutes of the game, Portland only managed to score two points, and those were free throws. The remainder of the second half saw Portland losing steam and in the end while they managed to keep the score within a couple of baskets most of the way through the third and fourth quarters in the end they lost by ten points.

I’m not terribly disappointed, however. For starters, I went to the game with my Father-in-Law, which was a good time in itself. Secondly, they were handing out those inflatable clapper thingies that I’ve seen people with, but always assumed you had to pay an extravagant amount of money for. They’re kind of fun, and I’m keeping mine for the next game.

In other, related, news the Blazers won their game on Sunday 94-93 against the Atlanta Hawks.

It’s so nice to see the team recovering from their reputation as the “Jail Blazers”.

I am so sick of this crap…

Check out this video, then read the rest of my entry.

Ready?

This is just another example of why Fox News and their ilk need to die. Geoff Keighly, while valiant in his effort to defend Mass Effect, was obviously fighting a losing battle with a group of closed minded morons who really had no business talking about the game.

Here’s a short list of my specific issues with this:

1) When asked if she had actually played the game, Cooper Laurence says “no” and in such a way as to make it appear that she is offended by even the notion that she might have. Which means she’s offering what amounts to an “expert” opinion on something she has no first hand knowledge of.

2) The lead into the interview is some 20 or so seconds of clips from the game with the caption ‘”SE”XBOX: New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity and Sex’, which remains pretty much throuought the entire article. This leads the uneducated (read, “most Fox viewers”) to believe the game is nothing more than interactive porn. It is interesting to note that none of the clips shown during the lead in, nor anything on the Mass Effect website seems to support this opinion, not to mention that when asked specifically about nudity in the game, Geoff claims it comprises less than 30 seconds of a 30 hour gaming experience, and is nothing more than a partial view of an alien breast from the side… Lindsay Lohan has exposed more breast than that, and those pictures were all over Fox News.

3) The host, Martha McCallum, speaks of visiting the Mass Effect website and how easy it is to get into it despite being required to enter her age. As an added bonus she points out that once she’s done that the screen says “Scanning” before taking her to the site. First off, it probably says that instead of “loading” to keep with the theme of the site and isn’t really “scanning” anything (If it is, I’d be interested to know what and why). I visited the site and wasn’t presented with any sort of age verification, until I tried to view some of the videos. There was no “scanning” text anywhere, it simply took me to a page to download and view the videos. All that aside, I saw nothing on the site that indicated that the game contained any content that was worse than what you’d see in a typical Fox movie or television show.

4) Martha does a pretty crappy job of giving Geoff equal opportunity to speak, which seems to be a pretty standard tactic in the media these days. The end result is that you get a very skewed and lopsided view of the topic at hand. In fact, it seems like the only reason they even bother having an opposing viewpoint is to give the appearance of being unbiased. Of course, if they really want to be unbiased they should at the very least allow the opposing point be heard instead of talking over him.

5) Once they’ve finished interviewing their guests, they embark on a discussion of what was just heard, which merely continues the original opinion, completely ignores the opposing opinion, and leaves the intelligent viewer wondering why they just wasted five minutes of their life listening to what is obviously a biased report from a bunch of people who have no idea what they’re talking about.

I’d love to claim that this is a single and very rare instance. I’d love to claim that it is a mistake. Unfortunately I can’t. Setting aside the topic for a moment, this seems to be the type of tactic that is being more and more commonly used by the mainstream media, and is one of the biggest reasons I don’t typically watch those networks… at least not for the news.

As I have stated many times in the past, “ethical journalism” has become an oxymoron and this is a perfect example of why. If Fox News was really interested in presenting an unbiased view of the issue, they would actually allow Geoff Keighley to speak. The moderator would have played the game, or at least enough of it to get a feel for what the game is really like.

My issue here is not the question of whether or not Mass Effect is appropriate for young gamers, it’s not and not even Keighley is denying that. My issue here is that the game is being massively misrepresented as being something it isn’t. Not having played the game, I can’t tell you if there’s any real nudity in it, all I can tell you is that nothing about what I saw in any of the previews of the game leads me to believe that the game deserves anything more than an MA rating for violence and maybe some animated sensuality.

The bottom line is that parents need to be parents and watch what their kids are doing. I’m sick of hearing people whine about how tough it is being a parent when both parents work (which is pretty much the norm now) and thus unable to keep an eye on their kids 24-7. If you don’t want your kids playing a certain type of game, don’t have them in the house, problem solved.

EDIT: Apparently Electronic Arts wasn’t any happier about this than I was. Thanks to Alex for the link.

Movie Review: Cloverfield

The first time I saw the trailer for Cloverfield my interest was peaked. The odd movie trailer showed scenes from a going away party that ended in disaster as something caused an explosion in New York City. At the time there wasn’t any other information given other than the cryptic “1-18-08″ at the end of the trailer. I was intrigued, and the more I saw of the film the more interested I became. Yet I felt a little uneasy about it once more details started coming out. I was worried that the movie would be just a stereotypical “Monster comes from the sea and starts eating people” kind of movie.

The movie is about a group of friends who, as indicated in the trailer, are at a going away party for one of their buddies who has just gotten a nice cushy job in Japan. During the course of the party, something attacks the city and thus begins a thrill ride of explosions and falling debris for the next hour and a half.

The best way I can describe this movie is to think of The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. The entire movie is filmed as if you’re watching a government archive of some camcorder footage documenting what happened when the monster attacked the city of New York. While some might argue that what makes this movie good is its decision to focus on the “…ground-level humanism rather than epic disaster…” (Eric Alt, Premiere Magazine), that just isn’t enough to carry the movie through.

Once you get past the creative camera shots what you have is a very typical monster movie. In fact, it’s just another Godzilla style film with less plot. There is no explanation as to where the monster came from, or even why it was there. The monster just randomly decides to show up and attack the city of New York for no apparent reason, and the film just kind of ends. In one scene, one of the characters gets bitten by smaller monsters that had dropped off the main monster, and true to form for these kinds of movies, something bad happens as a result. The movie is predictable and full of cliches, and I found myself wishing the monster would just eat them all and get it over with.

Overall Grade: F- for tricking the audience into thinking this might actually be a good movie, which apparently worked as the movie has grossed $41 million in its first weekend alone and managed to get a 76% freshness rating on RottenTomatoes.com. I’m not sure how they managed to bamboozle their way into that high of a rating, but my recommendation would be to just skip this one. I guarantee you’ll leave the theater feeling cheated.

I’m a proud papa!

Check these out… I scanned in the ultrasound images of my future child to share with the world. The first is baby from the side, if you look carefully you can make out the little head and body:

And this one is from the back:

I’m not sure, but it looks like baby might be giving us the finger… which wouldn’t surprise me a bit… probably takes after its mother.

Oh yeah, I’m going to pay for that one.

We still haven’t come up with a name, so for now it’s floating between Mac (for Macedamia Nut), Hummingbird (because its heartbeat is at 168 bpm), or my personal favorite, Sea Monkey (because it irritates my wife to no end to refer to our future child as any sort of monkey).

Yeah… I’m probably going to pay for that one too.

Trip down memory lane…

I remember when I was very small my grandfather volunteered to help the church with setting up the sound equipment for the Sunday service. One day before the service he asked me to help test the microphone by saying “Hi” to my grandmother. So I proudly stood up to the podium and said, “Hi, Grandma!”

About 20 women in the congregation turned to look at me, my own grandmother included.

In hindsight it was quite funny.

I guess you had to be there.

Baby it’s cold outside…

To say it’s icy out is a bit of a misnomer. It’s like a skating rink out there. I ended up taking a freeway I don’t normally take because it involves fewer twists and turns to get there than my usual route.

I’m happy to say that I made it to work, but man it’s cold out there!

Movie Review: Juno

I had the great pleasure of catching a movie last Friday that was not only witty, but was also exactly what the trailer promised. Juno is a quirky, witty, fun movie that I’ll just say outright is the number one must see movie of 2008.

We meet Juno (played by Ellen Page) as she has just learned that she is pregnant. We then follow her as she goes through the process of trying to decide what she wants to do about the situation. After getting cold feet at the abortion clinic, she decides to have the baby and put it up for adoption. What follows is a series of witty one liners and misadventures as Juno progresses through her pregnancy and in the process learns a lot about life and love.

I loved the movie for a variety of reasons. One being that it is one of the first movies I’ve seen in a long time that actually delivers exactly what it promises in the trailer. I got exactly what I expected which I found to be refreshing after seeing many films where the trailer is actually more interesting than the movie as a whole. Another reason this movie is so fabulous is that the characters are all very likable, and the witty repartee between them keeps things interesting.

Overall Grade: A+ for being witty, funny, and a refreshing change to all the crap films that have been coming out of Hollywood lately. I highly recommend seeing it, and it’s one of the few movies out there that is well worth paying full admission prices for.