Author: Jason

Blade: The Series

Reviews

I have two words for you: Randy Quaid.

Now, I’m not going to denegrate Mr. Quaid because he is a decent actor given the right material, but he is certainly not an “A” lister. I loved him in the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, and to be honest his performance in Category 7: The End of the World was one of the few watchable things in it. Here, he plays a vampire expert, and like the rest of the show it is just not worth it.

Blade without Wesley Snipes is… well, its pretty much the same because Wesley Snipes is one the most wooden actors in existance, and the man they got to fill his shoes is like a fake wood made of fiberglass.

Trash… complete trash. So help me I’ll probably watch the whole damn season.

A Hundred Highways

Reviews

If you are like me, and I’m told that there are few like me, despite a general dislike for country music you still hold certain singers and songwriters in high regard, and Johnny Cash is one of those. I’ll admit I lost touch with Johnny as a young man, but with American Recordings, Mr. Cash returned to the mainstream and began to truely influence other musicians all over again.

If you are like me, when you heard about American V: A Hundred Highways, being his last recordings, you were excited. Well, its not coming out for a few days yet, but over at MySpace you can listen to the entire album right now.

If you are like me, you’ll listen to the whole thing a number of times, and then buy the CD to complete your American collection, and deep down you’ll miss Johnny Cash, but you’ll still smile because of all the wonderful songs he left for us to listen to.

Ignoranceproofing

Random Thoughts

In Business, there are two types of people.

The first type is the kind of person who expects any individual who has a job to be able to do that job. This means that the individual needs to make the effort to understand each job function and why it is done. They also need to have a fundamental comprehension of the equipment they are involved with on a day to day basis.

The second type is the kind of person who expects the tools they use in their job to not allow them to make mistakes, so that even if they do not understand what they are doing, what they need to do is explained for them at every step and wrong choices are incapable of being made.

I’m the first type. And because of that, when I write programs, I write them so that everything that needs to be possible is available. Many people I write these programs for are the second type, and they want my program to analyse data (and read minds) and allow them on any given screen to only be able to do what they are required to do for their job.

For example, I have a screen that allows you to edit the status of a port and to edit the assignments of that port. I coded it completely open (you can edit either at any time) because our database and backend has been shown to have… quirks where data goes missing. The people I am writing it for want the screen to only allow you to set a port’s status to working if an assignment exists, and only to set it to available if no assignment exists. They also want adding or deleting an assignment disabled if the port is in a working status. So, if a bug happens that obliterates an assignment while leaving the port in a working status… my way, you add the assignment back. Their way… you have to set the port to available, then make the assignment, and then set the port back to working. And if for some reason you want to manually delete a port… my way, delete assignment, set port to available. Their way, set the port to available, delete assignment.

Now, the question is, do you see why my way is better?

This screen is not the entire application. And there are hundreds of people using the application. On another screen, there is an equipment assignment page that searches for and offers available ports for assignment. In both cases, they are making the port available for assignment when it is not ready to be (or is not going to be) available.

So, I do it their way… and the next complaint I get is that one person was working on the manual screen above and the port was assigned by the automatic screen after they made it available when it wasn’t really available. Now they want me to code in a delay, store a time stamp and only offer to automatic assignments ports that have been available for at least an hour… *sigh*

Puzzle Pirates Poker

Gaming

I think so far one of my favorite things to do in Puzzle Pirates is to sit down to a good poker table. What is a good poker table? Well, for one, you don’t have people who are binary (Fold or All In). Next, good table chatter… Usually good chatter consists of just random chat about some subject, or even talk about poker, or in the case of Puzzle Pirate the chatter can be incharacter piratey stuff. Sometimes, however, the chatter is, well, let me just give an example:

Mrbert: So what is everyone’s favorite suited pocket hand?
Killerjoy: A pair of Aces.
Mrbert: Naturally.
Gogoboots: I like a pair of Queens because they are more likely to turn into three of a kind.
Picklehead: I prefer to bluff with a pair of twos.
Ishiro: Isn’t it kind of hard to have a suited pair?

See that guy at the end? That’s me. It took me another twenty minutes to explain why you couldn’t have a suited pair. I mean, it took a couple minutes just to explain what suited meant (same suit). Then a few people at the table were insisting that poker was played with a six deck shuffle. My attempts to point out that blackjack, not poker, is the game that uses a multideck shoe. (“A shoe? You are making this stuff up!”) Gogoboots agreed that only one deck was used, and that was why she preferred Queens, because a single deck has twelve Queens. It took another five minutes to understand that when she said “Queens” what she meant was “face cards”, you know, Jacks, Queens and Kings.

After a while, I gave up and decided that indeed ignorance is bliss, and messing with the ignorant is hilarious:

Mrbert: I love to get a flush.
Ishiro: This morning I had a double flusher.
Gogoboots: What’s that?
Mrbert: Its rare. It is when you get two flushes in a row.
Picklehead: No, its when you can make two flushes with the same hand.
Mrbert: Oh, I’m thinking of a b2b-flush.
Picklehead: Yeah.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Killerjoy: I had a triple flusher once. It was awesome.
Mrbert: I bet! The chances of that are like a zillion to one!
Ishiro: The worst though is when you get upper decked.
Picklehead: Yeah! I hate that!
Mrbert: Is that when everyone else is dealt a pocket pair but you?
Picklehead: No, it is when you get a good pair and then two or more people deal into royal straights.
Mrbert: Wow. That does sound awful.
Gogoboots: I did that once.
Gogoboots: Flippered into a royal straight.
Ishiro: You have to be careful or you’ll flipper into a tilt.
Gogoboots: What?
Mrbert: A tilt. When you miss your straight by one card, like 4,5,6,7,9.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Ishiro: I’m going to get a high score!
[everyone folds]
Ishiro: Roasters!
Gogoboots: Roasters?
Ishiro: Kenny Rogers.
Mrbert: Who is that?
Ishiro: He’s a gambler.
Mrbert: Didn’t he win the WSOP last year.
Killerjoy: He did. I saw it live on TV.
Picklehead: I played in the WSOP last year, made it to the semi-final round.
Samson: He really knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.
You tell Samson: Bravo!

Yes, Samson, Bravo indeed.

The only thing worst than crappy chatter at a Puzzle Pirates poker table, are those “8s 8” idiots. You see, in real life, when someone makes an extraordinary effort to save, say, five dollars, they might say something like “Hey, five bucks is five bucks, man.” This indicates that saving the five bucks was worth the effort. In Puzzle Pirates, you don’t have dollars, you have Pieces of Eight (PoE or poe), and comparatively they have little value. Buying anything worthwhile in the game literally costs thousands of PoE. In poker, when some idiot goes All In before the flop and the table folds their blinds and he earns a whopping 3 or 6 or 8 PoE, what he would like to say is, “Hey, eight pieces of eight is eight pieces of eight, man.” But as we all should be well aware, typing is a skill some people refuse to learn, and so saying that would be too much, so instead he says, “8s 8.” Now, if this were a rare occurance, it would be fine… but most of these jackholes say it after every hand. “8s 8”, “5s 5”, “120s 120”, “807s 807”. Those people and the binary All In or Fold twerps drive me away from more tables than anything else.

Personal Responsibility in Transit

Random Thoughts

As always in the afternoon, I’m riding the bus… At the MARTA station, a man gets on and asks the driver what is the best way to get to the Gwinette DMV. The driver tells him to get off at the Buford Highway/Beaver Ruin Rd stop and transfer to the 30 bus (we are on the 10) and the 30 will take him there. So the guy says, “Tell me when I need to get off.” And the driver replies, “Sir, I can’t be responsible for every passenger’s destination, so just list for when I announce the Beaver Ruin Road stop and get off then.” The guy just nods his head and says, “You let me know.”

Of course, we get on up Buford Highway, the driver calls out that the next stop is Beaver Ruin Road and transfer to the 30 bus, and of course when the bus stops, the inquisitive passenger doesn’t get up. I wish I had been paying attention because I might have told the guy about his stop, but I was reading my book.

A few stops later, the guy gets up and asks the bus driver, “So how much longer until my stop?” “Which stop?” “I got to go to the DMV.” “Sir, I told you that you needed the Beaver Ruin Road stop, I announced it a while back. You must have missed it.” The guy stomps his feet, “You didn’t tell me to get off!” “Sir, I can’t be responsible for the destinations of every passenger, I told you the stop you needed, I announced the stop, it is not my fault you didn’t get off.” The guy is furious, he starts stomping some more and yelling obscenities and banging his hands on the hand rails.

The bus driver remains calm, “Sir, you have two choices, you can either stay on this bus and we will come back around to that stop in about a half hour or so; or you can get off at the next stop, cross the street and catch the southbound 10 and take it back to that stop.” The guy is screaming, “I don’t want to wait, I don’t want to switch buses! I wanted you to tell me when to get off this bus!” “I did.” “No you did not!”

This “Did not”/”Did too” argument went on for a while, then finally the guy decides he’s had enough of this “Nazi bus driver” and his “flagrant racism” and gets off the bus. The driver tell him he’ll need a transfer to which he replies, “You can take your transfer and shove it!” As we pull away the driver is shaking his head and says, “Now not only did he miss his stop, but he’s going to have to pay for the bus again.”

A couple of people behind me started talking in hushed tones about how mean the driver was being, and all I could think to myself was, “What?” Seriously, how hard is it to pay attention for your bus stop? And really, do you expect the driver to remember which stop thirty different people want to get off at and to individually remind them that it is time to get off? Sure, the driver could have done it, but I’ve ridden the bus with that driver before and he never does it, but he does clearly announce every stop, local destinations, transfers, and all that, which some drivers don’t.

The Government Inaction

Random Thoughts

If you read here, you may know I am buying a house. This house is a HUD home. From the neighbors I have heard that there was a messy divorce, the husband moved out and stopped paying the mortgage but did not tell his wife (nor did she know who the mortgage was with, etc etc), so the bank repossessed the house, and eventually turned it over to the government. Or something like that.

Anyway, in our process of buying, we had to fill out a ton of forms. Mostly just signing and initialling stuff that came preprinted from the HUD website. We sent in the documents and then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. After sitting on the papers for two weeks, HUD finally looked them over and rejected them.

Not the sale of the house, that we are still moving forward on. They rejected the paperwork. It seems that their program did not include either my or my wife’s middle names. This isn’t stuff we filled out wrong, it is stuff their program printed out wrong. So they said we had to reprint out the documents and re-fill them out.

Well, that’s done, and hopefully today they will look over the forms and find nothing else wrong and sign the contract. Meanwhile, I am having dreams that parallel the movie “Moving” starring Richard Pryor. Since the house is already missing appliances and a few odds and end, and a couple more were missing the last time we walked the house, I dream that we get the house and find it nearly stripped bare of all fixtures and windows, the sinks and doors gone… I just hope my dreams are not prophetic.

Wolverine: Weapon X

Reviews

I actually finished reading Wolverine: Weapon X by Marc Cerasini a while ago… like the other superhero books from Marvel and DC, this one is written very well. The story is that of the creation of Weapon X, meaning the experiment that bonded the adamantium to Logan’s bones. The entire story is being told in two parts, the first is the experiment itself from the doctors’ points of view as they subject Logan to the process and later attempt to mold him into a weapon. The other half of the story is told inside Logan’s head. As the doctors try to destroy Logan’s self for some reason, and one assumes it is related to his healing factor, one memory remains unsuppressed, a mission he once did into Korea, and he relives it while externally they are controlling him.

Like the other books from Marvel and DC, I definately recommend this if you are into superheroes. Maybe even if you aren’t. The story is tight and well crafted, and the references to external comic characters are few and far between so that a non-comic reader will be able to follow it just fine.

Life in the Spin

Random Thoughts

There was a great quote on Commander-in-Chief a couple weeks ago, and yes, I am aware that the wife and I are probably the only ones watching the show. Anyway, the quote was the mother of the President reflecting back on her days as a young ERA advocate and she said something like, “I preferred spin back when they called it lying.”

Honestly, that is how I feel. I hate that people try to make lying okay by calling it spin or damage control. When you are asked a question there are three answers: Yes, No, and I Don’t Know. “Yes” means you tell the truth. “No” means you lie. And “I Don’t Know” means you cannot answer the question and you side step it or put it off until later. It seems that these days “I Don’t Know” is something people are scared to say, and so they’ll try to twist some lie into the truth they think you want to hear.

My most recent encounter with this is with Home Mortgage Loans. If you can’t afford to put a sizable down payment on a house, you’ll likely be offered an 80/20 loan. This means you get two loans, one for 80% of the cost and another for the remaining 20%. The main reason this is done is to avoid Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). PMI is basically you paying up to a couple hundred bucks a month insurance for the bank so that they don’t get screwed if you default on the loan. Most loan companies have a rule, if your current monthly debt payment plus the mortgage payment is greater than 45% of your monthly income, they won’t do 80/20 with you, they’ll do 100 with PMI. Pretty standard.

Now here comes the “spin”. The loan officer will likely tell you something along the lines of, “Since you don’t qualify for our 45% debt to income ratio, what we can offer you is a 100% mortgage loan, with a slightly higher APR, but a lower monthly payment.” The lie here is two fold. First off, the only reason you get a lower payment (supposedly) is that the loan is likely to be some sort of Interest Only or ARM loan, which means you pay Interest up front, or at least a high percentage of Interest. The payment is lower because the bank is willing to let it be lower since they will be getting “their” money first, because the bank earns its profit in the interest. See, if your payment is Interest Only, you are not paying anything into principle, and this means you don’t really own anything of your house, except appreciation of value. Buy a house at $200k and pay only interest, when you sell it you will still owe the bank $200k. The only thing you get to keep is anything that is left over $200k after all the fees are paid. And if you just did the math… if your house didn’t appreciate in value in excess of the agent commission and taxes, you could actually lose money when you sell your home. Now the second part of the lie… your monthly payment? It will likely be higher. I know what you are thinking, “Didn’t the loan officer just tell me it would be a lower payment?” Well, yes, and technically, in an I’m-an-evil-banker sort of way he’s not wrong. The PI (Principle & Interest) payment will actually be lower on the new loan as opposed to the 80/20, by as much as a hundred dollars a month. But, with the new loan, in addition to the PI, the taxes, and home insurance, you will need to also pay PMI which is likely to be one hundred fifty to two hundred dollars.

So, here is the logic… you fail their ratio, meaning that they don’t believe you are a worthy risk due to your ability to pay, and in return for not making enough money they will force you to pay more. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why doesn’t the loan officer just say, “Given the price of the house and the payment schedule, we recommend you find a cheaper house.” At least that would be honest. It is almost like they want you to default on the loan…

Click

Reviews

Openning today is a new Adam Sandler film, Click. Last night, the wife and I went to a Sneak Preview of it.

Click is about Michael Newman, a typical guy with a wife and two kids who spends a little too much time at his job working to provide a life for his family that barely shares with them. Frustrated when he can’t even figure out which of his dozen remotes turns on the TV, he sets out to find a universal remote to replace them all. The only store open is Bed, Bath & Beyond, and wandering into the Beyond section he meets Morty who hooks him up with a truely universal remote, one that controls his universe.

If you’ve seen the trailers then you know he does some silly stuff with it, but the movie isn’t all about the jokes. There is also the story about deciding what’s more important: work or family. Michael keeps picking work, and soon enough the remote’s built in intelligence starts skipping moments in his life for him base on the decisions he’s been making… and everything spins out of control.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie if you want slapstick comedy. If you are looking for a Wedding Crashers or a 40 Year Old Virgin, this one isn’t quite as balls out funny. But, like Robin Williams “Bicentennial Man” from 1999, this movie is funny (riotously funny in moments) with a sentimental undercurrent that surges to the surface as the story unfolds. And if that is the kind of film you want to see, Click is an excellent movie.

Perfect Inefficiency

Random Thoughts

I dropped by the local branch of Bank of America last week to do some banking. While I was waiting for them to open at 9 AM, I sat in my car and listened to music and watched the road crew continue to work along side Satellite Blvd.

They’ve been digging up the side of the road for a while now, either laying some new cable or preparing to widen the road or something, I’m not sure. So there is a crew of six guys there. Five of the men are literally leaning on their shovels, while the sixth man operating a mini-backhoe is thrashing around trying to align himself correctly in order to use this machine to put dirt into a two foot hole. It took him over thirty minutes to complete the task… a task which the five guys with shovels could have completed in under two minutes.

I just don’t understand why people would want to deliberately work so inefficiently. The gasoline alone that it must have taken to operate that thing for over a half hour… It hurts to see my tax dollars wasted.