Patrick's Rants

Funny, I didn’t expect to get negative posts regarding the Slowky’s commercial. Since I only got a half fired up response on the Microsoft Wuses Out post (until the poster realized I was joking), a lame post regarding my misspelling of bumper and a decent, if not brief, back and forth on OpenOffice.org 2.0.1.

It seems that I may have ruffled a feather or two. (What me?) But not with posts about abortion rights, by electronically spitting at land salesmen/women/persons or even by hounding “Bushie boy” (mentions of “Bush” on this blog). No, I get it for my personal review of cable internet which is based upon anecdotal evidence. In response, anecdotal evidence is fired right back.

As I respect the “freedom of the blog” (it has been recogonized as journalism even if bloggers can’t spell) I approve most comments – the ones I don’t are (usually) just spam.

It is interesting to see what gets a rise out of people. Sometimes, it’s not even what I would expect.

You know how movie studios sometimes put all the funny content in their commercials and then there’s nothing funny left in the movie (like “Throw Momma From the Train”)? It was kinda like that with Weather Man, the Nicholas Cage film.

Not that this was a bad film overall, it just wasn’t what we wanted to see. Nick Cage talking to himself in the movie trying to figure out how to be a dad to his kids living with his estranged wife and a son to his stern non-approving dad.

Nick does manage to find a balance in his life that comes from living through the absolute heartache that comes from being a parent. In the end, he also achieves approval from his ailing father.

The funny parts about people throwing food at him while he walks down the road and a scene where he’s walking down the streets of New York City looking like a suit-clad Robin Hood are already revealed in the commercials. When films advertise funny they should deliver funny.

Bill Murray is one of those actors who has shifted role types over the years. These days the Saturday Night Live cast member seems to have fallen into a character that might be too real to be funny.

In “Lost in Translation” he plays a declining actor hanging out in Asia to do some commercials. The character is beyond the midlife crisis but that’s the feel of the movie – midlife crisis. And it was definitely lost on me.

“Broken Flowers” is another recent middle aged movie starring Murray. In it he plays a just beyond middle aged man who is written an anonymous letter by a one-time lover claiming that he has a son. He embarks on a slow moving and fruitless journey to find the mother of his son.

Perhaps Murray has enough money that he can merely play the roles that he wants to play – these being somewhat out of the main stream, or perhaps he is personally stuck playing his life on the big screen until something better comes along. Here’s hoping it comes soon.

Well more like a two hour run to Sunset Point to pick up two of the kids – but I digress.

The rest rooms at Sunset Point are designed so that half of the bathroom can be closed off from the other and cleaned/maintained while half the facilities remain available for use. There is a type of locking stall door that blocks the two halves from each other and they used to keep it open so one could use the least crowded space, only locking it when afformentioned cleaning was taking place. This hasn’t been the case in some time, but in theory it’s a great idea. There are two entrances as well so that it all makes sense.

Since I am a “regular” to this rest stop I usually go around to the “back entrance” and use the often less crowded half. Yesterday as I was about to use the facilities the cross-eyed in-bred lowest bidding contractor that the State of AZ Department of Transportation uses to maintain these facilities walked in and announced, “this restroom is closed. There’s another one on the other side,” in a manner eerily similar to “everyone out of the pool!” I guess I must have looked a little stunned at this behavior (which only would have seemed ruder had he grabbed me by the belt and pulled me away from the urinal) since he spoke again, “I’m serious. This restroom’s closed we have to fix it.”

Not really wanting to teach some manners to the plunger wielding moron I merely kept my mouth shut and used to the other half of the restroom. But it makes me wonder how it is that the state decides to award these contracts. In some respects these are the emissaries that our state puts forth as a point of contact for tourists. Great impression. I can only imagine that if someone were in one of the stalls that they would have pounded on the door until that person left.

To top it off, they didn’t even put up a closed sign of any kind. Instead, plunger boy probably just waved his urine soaked instrument at anyone who dared to enter his domain.

Politicians and diapers
need changing for the
same reason

Crazy Bill’s sign today:

U PUT THE
P NESS
IN HAPPINESS

The line gets blurrier and blurrier.

Comcast has a couple of commercials starring a turtle couple named the Slowsky’s. In this commercial they complain that Comcast high speed internet was too fast for them – so they switched back to DSL.
I have used both cable and DSL and prefer my DSL(currently with Qwest).

1. DSL doesn’t block my incoming and outgoing ports
2. I don’t share the line with my neighbors
• Timmy next door isn’t sniffing my packets
• I don’t get bogged down when Timmy’s computer is turned into an internet zombie
• My speed stays consistent throughout the day, not falling off when all the kiddies get home and have to email/Instant Message their friends
3. With DSL I can (if I wanted to) get a dedicated connection to my office
4. Speed is not guaranteed with cable internet

As for the speed guarantee, my wife’s boss recently upgraded to dial-up. When I write upgraded to dial-up I mean that she tried cable internet and the slower than dial-up speed and lack of customer support caused her to go back to the old modem.
So if DSL is slow and steady (and we know who wins the race in that fable) then cable is somewhere between hanging yourself and a saint bernard trying to get through the kitty door.

There have been a number of sites that created “value” just by being goofy or having a somewhat unique idea. There is the million dollar home page a grotesque compilation of internet ads piled onto a single page. A version that attempts to do the same in “real space” is the Fill my Room home page whereby $1 buys one lego block (and a listing on the site). Finally there is the billion hit home page which will equate to about $1,000 in beer.
Of course I have a somewhat humbler goal – and good thing too since my blog is worth $0.00 according to Business Opportunies. That’s a far cry from Jake’s blog at around $70k
The problem seems to be that all two of my readers don’t link to me (or something happened to Jake’s Page Rank )
One of these days it could get to over $1.00. I’m not going to hold my breath though.

I had some time over the last few days and – since I was required to take it easy – we got the second and third installments of The Matrix. My wife refuses to see Keanu movies since his poor interview performance so it had to be when I was off work and she wasn’t.

These are the continuation of the Matrix – the scientific/geeky thriller about the future of the human race when we are merely the power supply for a massive computer network.

I was expecting more of the special effects from the original movie with fantastic fight scenes and bullet dodging Neo giving us a spectacular display of the inside world of computers and the artificial world created to keep the human race strapped into the power cables that drive the machine dominated world.

Instead we are given a mix of landscapes eerily similar to the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and even Dune. The balance of inside vs. outside the Matrix is nearly completely opposite of the original. Where Matrix strives to develop a story in the computer world Reloaded and Revolutions strive to pull the characters completely out of the Matrix – creating an incongruous and disengenuous interaction with the original.

Where Matrix tried to hide reality behind the computers, the sequels rip the lid off the entire charade where characters are programs and freely admit it. It’s too bad the can opener is so rough that it leaves the edges still sharp to poke at us. In the end, instead of being the science fiction thriller that I was looking for I am instead bludgeoned with a thinly veiled biblical story where Neo is crucified as the savior of the world right down to the unforgetable quote straight out of the bible, “It is done”.

Watch these at your own risk.

My brother bought a Toshiba Portege from someone for $100. He’s going to use it to edit his eBay items because his desk is a little cramped.

The thing is it came without the external CDRom drive that probably once existed for it. It has a modem jack, a jack for an external monitor, 2 pcmcia slots, a jack for a keyboard and USB port. Notice there wasn’t a printer port or a serial port mentioned. I didn’t forget, they aren’t there. The wireless card that came with it doesn’t have any drivers installed on the laptop.
To get his information from the laptop to his desktop machine he bought a USB bridge. The thing is he can’t load the drivers or software for it. So here we have a classic catch 22: he can’t load the drivers without connecting to the network and he can’t connect to the network without the drivers.
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