Patrick’s Rants

How do you rob a bank when money is mostly ones and zeros? A couple of keyboard entries and millions are transferred.

Harrison Ford plays VP of Security Jack Stanfield an aging, yet able computer expert whose family is kidnapped and held hostage forcing Stanfield to break into the computers of his own bank. His captors are tech savvy, determined and more than willing to use their guns to convince Jack that he needs to comply with their request: transferring $100 million to a Caymen Islands account.

Jack’s initial fears that his family is to be murdered once the criminals have what they want causes him to take some drastic actions first moving the $100 million back out of the Caymen accounts, then tracking down the whereabouts of his family.

The movie is suspenseful and action packed. The only thing that catches is that despite all the careful planning on the part of the criminal master mind, he only sets up one bank account. Many of these type of thrillers involve multiple accounts so the money doesn’t sit in one place but is bounced a few times to avoid being traced or returned to the rightful owners. Still it had me and my wife glued to the screen.

Want a movie that keeps 4 year olds, 13 year olds and even adults still? Check out Cars, the latest hit from Pixar (and-ahem-Disney).

The movie is the story of an arrogent upstart race car named Lightning McQueen who gets lost on the way to California only to find friendship, love and eventually himself. Radiator Springs, once a lively town on historic Rt 66, is a shadow of its former self when bypassed by Interstate 40. In this out of the way town, faded completely from the map, Lightning sheds his former superficial self finding deeper meaning in life.

I’m not a race fan, but the race scenes were done is such a way that even I was sucked into the action. I found myself cheering for this little car in the same way I would cheer for a live action character. This is a great movie that appeals to all ages and will be one that makes it into our own collection when it comes out on video.

If you happen to make it to the theater, don’t get up when the credits start scrolling. You’ll want to sit through at least the first five minutes.

When I opened the Netflix envelope and found The Ringer I started shaking my head. See my wife is the one who normally picks the movies and this was another of her picks. The storyline is that a clerical worker going nowhere fast manages to find himself in a serious bind and has to come up with $24,000 in less than two weeks. While trying to collect on an ancient loan from his gambling uncle a devious plan is hatched to fix the Special Olympics.

Johnny Knoxville’s character Steve enrolls in Special Olympics as Jeffy Dahmor. Although he is “caught” by other contestants as a fake they decide to help him since the can’t stand the perrenial - and arrogant - winner Jimmy. Jeffy, it turns out, is more work than even they would have imagined and they have to push him even harder than he thought he could go.

Although the only completely able minded and bodied contestant the uphill battle is hilarious and where Jeffy ends the Olympics is appropriate. As a comedy/love story, the plot ends in a fairly predictable manner although the journey is pleasant and sometimes unexpected. There is an insightful look at the creativity and intelligence levels of the actual Special Olypmics participants that helps to round them out as real people.

I broke down and got reverse lookups¹ working for my domain. With regular DNS² you just set up the Name Server and away you go. With reverse lookups, one has to get the address added to the list run by the authority. Normally I wouldn’t care about the reverse lookups - especially since I run multiple names or virtual hosts on the same server. Recently though, I have had my inbox begin to fill due to one of my oldest kids friends being stuck on AOL.

AOL started doing reverse lookups to determine if you are running a “legitimate” server. All email bounces if they can’t find your name by looking up the IP number. I personally prefer a combined approach using the reverse lookups as a point on the scale instead of a pass/fail approach. It makes more sense to me to reject mail coming from a non-existant domain than one without a proper reverse lookup, but that’s me. I use Spamassassin to catch the majority of spam - and very little of it catches on the no reverse lookup. At any rate, AOL should stop their arbitrary rejection of email from my domain and my kid can send goofy emails to her friend unfortunate enough to be stuck on that provider.

1 - Reverse Lookups

Converting the computer number (IP) to a name

2 - DNS

Domain Name Service. Finding the computer number address by converting the computer name.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock star in a new movie called The Lake House. While the movie reviews are positive I have to state that Keanu should not give interviews. He only comes off as a mental midget who only manages a decent line if someone else writes it and he gets more than one take at it.

On the Today Show, Matt Lauer asks Keanu and Sandra what has changed about the other since they were in Speed together. Sandra cleverly says that more of Keanu is on the surface, that she can see more of his “personality” than before. She goes on to state that it could be because she is older and has grown. Nice way to say that Keanu hasn’t grown and she’s noticed just how shallow he really is. Keanu meanwhile, doesn’t notice the digs at his character and intellect and answers Matt, “uh, she’s changed.”

Duh yeah.

Have you noticed that instead of teaching kids that hard work, perseverance, and completing school work is the secret of succeeding in the “Real World” we’ve decided that their egos are too fragile to accept failure?

Now everyone is told they are winners - the schools give kids “N”, “S” and “E”¹ instead of “A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “F”. Kids don’t fail school anymore - at least not elementary school. Some school disctricts have decided that keeping score for sports events is too hurtful and don’t.

Well, I hate to break it to you if you are a kid - not everyone’s a winner there are losers and you might even be one. Think about it. In the real world if you don’t turn in your work to your boss you lose your job. If you don’t fulfill a contract you get sued - or at best not paid. No one says, “that’s OK, you can get that raise and promotion even when you can’t prove that you deserve it.” And as the most perfect example - you will never hear of an egg telling the too-slow sperm, “that’s OK, you’re all winners in my book.” Nope - that egg only wants one sperm cell, the rest are all losers. I guess that means that all kids are winners though, at least in the great fallopian race.

1. • Needs Improvement
   • Satisfactory
   • Exceeds

There are a few major construction projects going on right now here in Flagstaff. Unfortunately, some of the contractors seem to be kinda clueless about directing traffic around their machinery.
There is major reworking of traffic around the mall area which will include changes to the onramps for the interstate, to the mall entrance, moving traffic lights, etc.

This is the worst construction zone I have ever seen. As one drives down Rt 66 approaching the zone there are signs indicating reduced speed ahead - behind the trees. Let me clarify. The “Reduced Speed” sign is hidden behind newly greening trees, the 35 MPH sign is visible (reduced from 40), and the 25 MPH sign is also hidden behind new leaves. I doesn’t help that the signs are about 20 ft apart. In the actual constrution zone there are no reduced speed signs, no lower speed limit signs and the regular signs (again 40 MPH) are visible.

In the same construction zone workers stand right at the edge of the roadway with the Slow/Stop signs - often blending right into the roadside.

I hope they are better at building than they are at posting meaningful signs.