Monthly Archive for July, 2005

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Talk About Small Airports

Published on 2005/07/11 in General Stuff. Closed

Flew into Springfield airport earlier this evening. I thought I had been to small airports before, but this one was the new champion. We flew into gate two. Well, up to it anyway. It was a turbo-prop plane, so you had to climb down the plane’s stairway to get into the airport. I’m not a big fan of passenger planes that aren’t much bigger than a Corsair, and having a propeller blade spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute within five feet of my head is a little disconcerting. If that thing slips loose for some reason… Thankfully the flight was only eighteen minutes and was without incident.


The airport only had four gates, as far as I could tell, and we were the only plane there, apart from the squadron of F-16s parked nearby that are the property of the Illinois Air National Guard.


Another way you can tell your airport is really small… Free parking. I’ve never even heard of that at an airport.


Tomorrow is the first day of New Job. I’m quite excited. I was really getting fed up with Old Job.

The (Not So) Fantastic Four

Published on 2005/07/10 in Entertainment. Closed

Shelled out $8.50 for this piece of crap tonight. I’m having a hard time trying to determine if this was worse than Daredevil or not. Or the Hulk, for that matter.


*****WARNING – SPOILERS BELOW*******


Where to start on this two hours of my life that I’ll never be able to get back? I guess firstly I’ll say that Michael Chiklis did a fine acting job, despite the fact that his suit didn’t really look right to me. Other than that, there wasn’t much else to the film.


The film seemed to spend all but the last ten minutes or so establishing back story and the interpersonal relationships between the characters. Booooooooring. I know a certain amount of back story is necessary for those who never read the comic book, but it doesn’t take an hour and fifty minutes. Well, it did, but it shouldn’t.


And Susan Storm wasn’t a scientist, she was an actress. They REALLY strayed from the comic, it was all wrong. And plot holes? So large, you’d think The Thing used both fists. Who wrote this thing? Not to mention the directing. My favorite part was when they were on the bridge, and a large spectacle was made of Sue trying to become invisible because she’s the only one that would be able to get through the police barrier. Next thing you know, they’re all past the police barrier, and no explanation of how they all got there, it just happened.


Oh, and then there’s The Thing’s transformation back into The Thing after being “cured”. They went to great lengths to point out that Ben wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he somehow managed to reverse the effects of the machine that cured him, all on his own while the other three were fighting Doom?


Lastly, the effects were mostly terrible. The Torch looked good, but Mr. Fantastic’s stretching scenes looked really bad.


If you haven’t seen this stinker yet, save your money. It’s starting to look like Hollywood is either running out of ideas, or just doesn’t care anymore. With crap like this, and rehashes of The Dukes of Hazzard, Willy Wonka, The Bad News Bears, The Honeymooners, and who knows what else, it’s no wonder movie profits are in a downward spiral.


I may have to go see Batman Begins again, just to cleanse my senses.

Long Time, No See

Published on 2005/07/09 in General Stuff. 2 Comments

Well, I was finally able to resurrect an old laptop, so I have access to the Internet again, so hurray for me. I’ve been bouncing around from place to place and haven’t had much time for the blog, but hopefully I’ll be settling into a semi-permanent residence sometime in the middle of next week. Hopefully there will be Internet access there and I can get back on a regular blogging schedule.


Currently, I’m in Des Moines. I’m flying out of here Sunday to Illinois for a few days, then flying back on Wednesday. Then on Thursday, I’m driving to Kansas City for a stint in some corporate housing (man is that place expensive!) until I can find a permanent residence.


Speaking of homes, barring some last minute disaster, my residence in Texas is now sold. Took some haggling and giving up of really expensive bar stools I didn’t plan on leaving behind, but hey, to sell a house in two weeks, I’ll eat the cost of the bar stools. I can always get more.


Since I’m lumping stuff together here, I’ll add that I just saw the new Batman movie. Now that’s what Batman films should have been all along. But instead, we had to suffer through that other crap. I still like the first Michael Keeton Batman movie, but the others were pretty much insufferable. And of course, the last few minutes of the movie were set up to prepare you for the sequel, which I hope is forthcoming, and is better than the last round of Batman sequels.


Of course, they couldn’t get much worse.


And speaking of movies, I finally saw Episode III earlier this week. Let me just say that I’m going to try and forget the prequels exist, and just keep enjoying the original three. Yes, III was by far better than I and II, but it just seemed like Lucas was trying really hard to bridge the gap and plug plot holes instead of tell a story. For example, if I was going to try and hide Luke Skywalker from his father, would I give him to his aunt and uncle on his home planet? With the name Luke Skywalker? If Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader couldn’t locate Luke under those circumstances, maybe he wasn’t quite the Sith Lord he was made out to be. Thanks for nothing, George.

What? Stamps Based On This Comic Book Are Racist?

Published on 2005/07/02 in Politics. Closed

Stamp


What the hell is going on in Mexico these days? Well, besides trying to get all their citizens across our borders illegally.

Seeing Something Weird

Published on 2005/07/01 in Geeky Stuff. 1 Comment

I had to turn off Chrissy’s most excellent implementation of MT-Blacklist, as host provider would not be as willing as I am to allow certain things to happen in the master database.


That being said, I turned CAPTCHA back on (the thing where you have to type in the code displayed before comments will be submitted). However, it’s doing odd things for me. When I first try to submit a comment, the spot where the image should be is missing the image. But if I submit a comment anyway without the code, then it comes back with a coded image, and then I can submit a comment.


This could be an issue. If anyone else sees this, please let me know. I still have a few earlier versions of the code, and I can roll back to one of those if need be. If you can’t leave a comment at all, then use the Contact link.


Thanks.


UPDATE: Confirmed that this was indeed a bug. Clicking on Feedback would produce the error, but clicking on the post title would not. Backed off to version 1.3 and the issue does not appear to happen. At least not on my end.


This should be fixed, but again, if anyone experiences any issues submitting comments, please let me know.

Finally Broke Down And Did It

Published on 2005/07/01 in Geeky Stuff. Closed

I’ve been hosting my blog from my house since its inception, but with the prospect of not being near my servers for maybe months (and the fact that one tends to go down every week or so) I decided to get myself a hosting provider and move my blog there.


So, if you’re reading this, it’s coming from the servers of webhost4life.com. Setup was a little sticky, but the techs there were able to get me fixed fairly quickly.


At least now I won’t have to haul ass home when something goes down to fix it, so that will be a nice change.