Just saw "The Blind Side", the best sports drama I've seen since "Remember the Titans". Go see it. It was seriously, seriously awesome.

WARNING: The beginning of the film explains, using TV footage, the horrific compound fracture that ended Joe Theismann's career, which made me cringe. A good description of it can be found at this Wikipedia article, but even that description doesn't quite convey the awfulness of the injury. I actually remember it -- I was at a relative's house that night watching the game on TV. I've never forgotten it.

... Silverlight no longer contains the ArrayList or Collection class. They left IList and ICollection in there, but that's it. The bastards.

If you happen to be a SQL programmer who knows Teradata and is in Miami (or, I suppose wants to be in Miami), let me know. A buddy of mine is a recruiter and he's looking to fill the position either full-time or contract.

Like lolcats? Here, have lol-18th-century-french-painter-who-did-an-awesome-self-portrait (l18cfpwdaasp?)

I particularly like "FORNICATE THE CONSTABLE".

Inspired by this:
TCAGT
CGTGACT
TTGGC

Walk into the middle of a shopping mall or Target and yell at the top of your lungs, "Allahu akhbar!" Do you think folks would look at you funny, or run for the hills? I'd like to think the former, but to read the news these days one would almost expect the latter.

If I didn't know any better I'd say that the Democrats don't actually want health care reform. They're certainly giving their political opponents every opportunity to criticize them and define the debate. The Stupak amendment is another example of that -- to get a bill passed they threw pro-choice Democrats under the bus. So not only do they have to contend with Republicans who hate the bill on principle, Democrats wary of the cost, and independents wary of both cost and principle, they now have to worry about the support of pro-choice Democrats as well.

It seems to me that this "piss everyone off and hope enough votes are left over to pass" strategy isn't the brightest of ideas.

According to NPR this morning, gay marriage ballot initiatives have now lost 30 times in 30 states out of 30 tries, Maine being the latest. It occurred to me that this is the very definition of a losing strategy, but I couldn't figure out what a good alternative would be. Then I saw someone hit on it in the forums at Salon.com (which normally I find a general cesspool from both sides of any debate).

Have the Supreme Court take the case. Drop the legislative fixes.

Frankly, this is what the SC is there for. Gay marriage isn't a legal issue -- legally, gay marriage is not recognized. It's a civil rights issue, in exactly the same category as segregation. Thus, if the Court (via Brown v. Board of Education) was the appropriate venue for racial segregation, why wouldn't the same principle apply here?

Ultimately, this is a battle that's not winnable in our generation, at least not from a legislative point of view. Voters today have decided time after time not to legalize gay marriage, and while I think they're wrong I also have serious doubts that my opinions will change any minds. What it will take is a new generation being raised to see gay couples as perfectly normal, a generation that doesn't remember a time when gay couples had to hide from the public, before there's any true acceptance.

In the meantime, the best chance for anything resembling justice here is the Supreme Court, since voters certainly don't seem to want to do anything about it.

Lawyer: Roman Polanski feels depressed in jail

Poor fucking baby. Maybe he shouldn't have anally raped a 13-year-old girl. A fact that, I might add, no one has contested, to my knowledge. Including Polanski.

And while I'm at it, the article mentions that Swiss authorities are currently deciding whether to release him on bail. If they do we can safely say that they're not paying attention, considering as how this whole mess is still ongoing because Polanski, you know, fled the fucking country. Why the judges even feel the need to deliberate is a mystery to me. "What, you want us to let you post bail so you can be out of our sight while we decide whether or not to extradite you to another country to face the sentencing that you fled from the first time? Are you kidding?"

I find it absolutely embarrassing that the game I bought from the Microsoft Company Store -- Dungeon Siege 1 + expansion for five bucks (a good deal for a game that I liked when it first came out) -- doesn't work at all with Windows 7. Even when I set it to use compatibility mode with Windows XP Service Pack 3. Really, if we are going to make something compatible with older software, make it compatible with older fucking software. The expansion came out in 2004, so it's not like we're talking a 25-year-old game here. The damned thing's 5 years old, and I can't even get it to start in "compatibility mode".

On a related note -- and something I intend to expand into its own post at a later date -- I'm absolutely convinced that unless we manage to do something about it whole decades of history will be unavailable to future generations thanks to an inability to read the medium they're stored on. Bitch all you want about cutting down trees, but stuff written on dead trees a thousand years ago is still available to be read. On the other hand, find me someone who has a floppy disk reader anymore. 5.25", not the 3.5" ones. Anything on a disk like that is toast.

Between this (I bought the game on Friday) and my experience at Delfino's tonight (I'll put up my own letter tomorrow after I write it), this has not been a good weekend for treating customers well. At least, for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like Obama. But he's been president for 10 months and is still sort of riding the "OMG NOT BUSH" wave. Isn't giving him the Nobel Peace Prize a bit premature?

I just realized we should be due for a new pitch drop any time now. :)

From here (emphasis mine):

[2008 Ig Nobel] CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

A few weeks ago I tried adding the digits of my birthday together and came up with a series of prime numbers. For example:

12/12/1976 turns into 1+2=3, 1+2=3, 1+9+7+6=23. 3, 3, and 23 are all prime.
3 + 3 + 23 = 29, also prime
2 + 9 = 11, also prime
1 + 1 = 2, also prime

After mentioning this to our intern, we started thinking: what if you multiplied all the digits in a date together, then did the same to the result, and so on and so forth until you were at a one-digit number? An example with the same date:

1.) 12/12/1976 -> 1 * 2 * 1 * 2 * 1 * 9 * 7 * 6 = 1512
2.) 1512 --> 1 * 5 * 1 * 2 = 10
3.) 10 --> 1 * 0 = 0

Thus, in three steps we end up with a result of 0.

So, I wrote a program that does just this, then collects stats. I ran it on the last 25 years of the 20th century (doing it on the 21st century would be pointless, as the presence of a 0 in every single year would turn every date to 0 in one step). That is, 1/1/1975 to 12/31/1999.

I got the following results, which were interesting in a "totally pointless knowledge" kind of way ("result" is the final value, "hits" is the number of dates that got that result, and "steps" is the number of steps it took to get to the result):

Result          Hits
------          ------
0               8202
1               0
2               223
3               0
4               2       1/11/1981, 11/11/1981
5               5       1/11/1975, 1/15/1975, 5/11/1975, 11/11/1975, 11/15/1975
6               419
7               0
8               280
9               0

Total Days: 9130
Total Steps: 17605 (Min: 1 Max: 7)
Average Steps per Day: 1.928259

I'm pretty sure this officially qualifies me as a complete dork now.

Prediction: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell will not be a flop, despite boycotts and "bad" publicity. Frankly, the people who are protesting it aren't its intended audience anyway -- this is the type of movie that is made for people who already like this type of movie and the Max Tucker personality. No boycott will change anyone's mind. And honestly, all the attention brought to it might actually bring new fans, who had otherwise never heard of Max Tucker, out of the woodwork. So it might actually boost the film's profits.

For the record, no I won't be seeing it. But then, I never planned on doing so, which is exactly my point.

Well, it took two tries, a loss of 25% of the product, a lesson in pumps vs. siphons, some experimentation sucking on the end of a hose to get siphoning working, a google search to figure out how to start siphoning without sucking, 5 minutes to clean the hose so I'd be comfortable putting it in the product, and a few trial runs on water, but I managed to rack the first batch of mead. On the bright side, after all that, the next time won't take me more than 5 mins since I now know exactly what to do.

In case you haven't seen this elsewhere (such as faecat's post), avoid Gamer at all costs. Rather than go into detail about why, as there's no way in hell I want to remember that movie much less recite what happened in it, I'll sum it up using the same thing I said when it ended:

"The first half of that movie was quite possibly the most appalling thing I've ever seen, and I liked the Saw movies."

Homemade mead!  If this works, in 6 months I'll start a larger batch that I can bottle next August. :)  I'm looking forward to seeing how this will come out in February. :)

( Picture! )

Recipes (Modified from http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/index.htm):
Blueberry-Vanilla
1 gallon spring water
3 lbs honey
1 oz vanilla extract
1/2 cup blueberries
1 package Fleishmann's yeast
1 balloon

Freeze blueberries then smush them.  Take half the water out of the gallon container and set aside.  Add all of the ingredients to the container and re-add some of the extra water until the level is a couple of inches below the top.  Cap the container and shake vigorously for 5 minutes.  Remove the container.  Flip the balloon inside out and poke pinholes in the end (I made 5).  Stretch the balloon over the container and secure if necessary.

Now wait.  In 2-3 weeks the balloon will deflate.  At that time, remove the solids from the mixture and put the balloon back on.  Then wait.  Six months is good, but any time before then is fine.  The mead will clear up during this time, and the clearer the better.  (I assume it will never get completely transparent, but ask me again in 6 months. :) )

Orange
1 gallon spring water
3 lbs honey
1 orange
1 package Fleishmann's yeast
1 balloon

Same as above, but skip the blueberry step. :)  Cut the orange into small enough slices to get into the container, but leave the skin on.

Question: what does it say about a filmmaker when they remake or adapt racist material and put it on screen?

Take two examples here: The Jungle Book and King Kong. In The Jungle Book, Disney was working with material from an author who was a product of his times, and his times were pretty bad. (Kipling in Victorian, Colonial England.) Disney didn't help their case with their artistic style and voice acting, which really futhered the racist case of the movie and keeps Disney on the hook for that one.

At the other end is King Kong. A lot of people see this movie as extremely racist, but even its detractors can't really deny the fact that the movie was extremely influential to moviedom in general, if not elsewhere as well. So, what to make of Peter Jackson when he remade the movie? Is he furthering racist stereotypes by remaking the movie, or is he paying homage to one of the most influential movies of all time? Or both? What level of responsibility does he share due to remaking it?

Those are only two examples -- you could come up with countless more. The question, though, is this: at what point does the remaker deserve to be exonerated for remaking racist material on the grounds that they're remaking something important that just happens to also be racist? What would you say about someone who redid, say, Gone With the Wind, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or even D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation?

Smashing frozen blueberries is not nearly as easy as it sounds. I ended up settling on a method involving two steel measuring cups. Put the blueberries in the bigger one, smash with the smaller one. For a full half-pound, that took about a dozen batches. :P