Diary of a Wolfeman

Anyone who knows anything about my movie tastes and pet peeves knows I simply cannot stand Keanu Reeves. I have always maintained that he is not an actor, he just has a knack for getting roles written for him.

I’ve read other reviews lambasting the special effects, but I thought they went rather well. Their depiction of hell was a nice break from the traditional mountains of tormented souls burning in Hellfire.

In several places during the movie, I had the distinct impression that the director has watched alot of Sam Raimi’s films, most notably Evil Dead – the scene where Constantine is in hell and leaps up to grab the medical wrist tag of Isabela’s and just barely escapes the grabbing hands of the demons seemed almost familiar.

Hmm…would this have been better had it starred Bruce Campbel? I could almost see him doing it :)

Keanu Reeves once again has the amazing luck of landing a role written for him, so he doesn’t completely fail as an actor. It does, however, add another “I am…” line to his repertoire. (I’m Ted (Theodore) Logan…I am an FBI agent!…I’m John Constantine, asshole…etc.) Still, I don’t hate him more after this one, which is the big surprise.

Rachel Weisz is an infinitely better actor, and did very well with the lousy lines she had. I particularly liked her “baptismal” scene, where she’s there under water, waiting for something to happen, and gives that little flick of the wrist that says “Well? What the fuck am I waiting for?”

A small surprise was the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel; but looking back I suppose it wasn’t. The only other movie I have seen her in was Orlando, a movie in which she plays a mostly androgenous lesbian who dressed as a man. Here she is again, playing what many think of as a male role, but in an androgenous manner. Fitting, since angels are androgenous. In any case, she pulls it off very well. I particularly liked how she summed up Constantine’s life: “You’re fucked.”

Final thought: worth the rental.

Go on, read this and join the Pastafarians! You know you want to! Here’s an excerpt:

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

Ramen!

Here’s the Wikipedia article on Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Don’t forget the breadsticks :P

When faced with boredom, take a quiz!

The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test

a Ninja
You scored 10 Honor, 3 Justice, 6 Adventure, and 4 Individuality!
You are a soldier of the night. You rely on no more than your cunning
and your repuation to strike fear in the hearts of lord and peasant
alike. You’ve a sense of honor, but one that comes from within, not
imposed from outside.

Black clothes and shuriken for you. You’re gonna do just fine.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 80% on Ninjinuity
You scored higher than 15% on Knightlyness
You scored higher than 37% on Cowboiosity
You scored higher than 31% on Piratical Bent

It looks like me and the Roomie will be the Geek-Fu Ninjas stalking the night :)

Oh, and another ‘hell yeah!’ for the “Sword in one hand, pistol in the other, cannon behind me for backup.” answer!

One fine summer day, a young man was visiting a friend’s house and spotted an interesting book on the friend’s shelf. For a paperback, it was frelling huge – over 800 pages. Being the voracious reader the young man was, he figured this would keep him busy for a few days and borrowed the book.

Three days later, he borrowed the second book. Hooked! Equally huge, the books kept him happily reading for almost a solid week. He eagerly awaited the third book in what he assumed was a trilogy.

The third came and went, with the plot still unresolved. “Excellent! A five-book cycle!” he thought. The years rolled by, and at unequal intervals, books kept coming. After book 5, the series almost ground to a complete halt. New characters were added that did nothing for the story except strain the reader’s memory trying to keep them all straight. Each new book would drag on endlessly until the last 50 pages, which would suddenly rock into action – “could he finally be ending it?”

But no, the book would cliffhanger every time. Book 6. Book 7. Book 8. Book 9. All in excess of 600 pages, and the author can’t get anywhere with the plot. The young man’s shelves groaned from the weight of the hardcover editions. Book 10. Surely, this is the last one! He can’t drag it out any more!…

Yes, he can.

Then the bastard goes and spends over a year writing a ‘prequel’ book instead of the next installment. Plans are hatched to hunt the author down and go ‘Misery’ on his ass.

15 fine summers later, I got an email today from Amazon: “Pre-order the 11th book in Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of Time’ series – “Knife of Dreams” On sale today!”

From Publishers Weekly

…While more recent entries have maintained that beauty and scope, the pace has slowed to a crawl as the central characters dispersed in six directions. In contrast, the latest explodes with motion, as multiple plot lines either conclude or advance, and the march to Tarmon Gai’don—the climactic last battle between the Dragon Reborn and the Dark One—begins in earnest…

And thus we are faced with the question: Go we once more into the breach? Do we read it now, or wait until he finishes the blasted thing so we can get it all over in one marathon session?

One thing is certain: I’m going to beat Pax the next time I see him for loaning me those first two books.

(psa)

Just a quick heads-up for those of you out there who own a domain name that is due to expire anywhere within the next decade: you will be receiving a letter in the mail from a new Registrar trying to get you to switch over. There is no requirement to do so, and it is not a bill. If you’re happy with your current Registrar, throw away the letter.

(/psa)

I received another letter today, this one from my stepsister. I’ve never talked about her before because I don’t talk to her, and feel no need to talk about her. See, when The Old F.a.r.t. married the MallHag, he got stuck with her daughter as well. The both of them are the worst sort of mall-bunnies a man could run afoul of. I admit that The Old Man was never a good father, but it got worse after he married MH. This was back when my brother and I were both fighting tooth-and-nail to get by, and would every now and then get stuck in a “crap they’re gonna evict me!” or similar problem. Dad, however, was never in a position to help because the Hag had already spent all of the money – on the daughter.

They are currently long-haul truckers who spend a fair amount of their time on the West coast and could conceivably drop by to see us sometime, but they only ever see my bro, because her parents live in the same town. The last time, they spent the weekend with the in-laws, and saw my brother for an hour. I’ve been here for 4 years, right on I-5, and they’ve stopped to see me once.

Of course, this is the same man who bragged to me about how much money he was saving on his new house because the builder was using illegals to build it – at a time when I had been unemployed for 6 months and was signing up for food stamps because thousands of tech jobs had been outsourced to India.

Bitter? Moi?

In the eight years I lived in ‘Vegas, the stepsister lived there for I think 7, and the only communication I received from her at all was via her mother – something about having met an old girlfriend of mine and wanting to know if she could give out my phone number. Never heard from her again, and this was sometime before I got married, which means pre-1995. (The return address on the letter was First-initial.Last-name, and I couldn’t remember what the initial stood for. That’s how long it’s been.)

Well, she is finally worth something to me: she’s blogfodder.

Today’s letter was a teaser invitation about her upcoming wedding. Not a full invitation mind you, but a teaser invite with the pertinent names, date and location with a “More info coming soon!” tacked on the end.

Worse than that, the thing is printed on a fridge magnet, with a quote from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”. Ok, if you just look at the lyrics, it can me thought of as a love song – but it never struck me as one. More like a man reminiscing about a love that burned him, but he can kinda look back on it as a lesson learned.

The kind of song a divorced guy would sing.

On a wedding invite.

This article needs to be required reading for every programmer and developer in the world. It is a bit long winded, but I think I can actually combine two things into one. Here’s a shorter version:

#1 Default Permit and #2) Enumerating Badness really point in the same direction.

The idea here is that computers today either do everything unless told not to or let everything in unless told not to. This means you have to spend your time looking for all the things in the world they shouldn’t be playing with. Exhausting to even think about!

What they should be doing is only what we tell them to and allowing in the same. Brilliant concept, no? Here’s an example: a Blacklist vs. a Whitelist.

A blacklist is, of course, a list of all the things you shouldn’t do or people you shouldn’t talk to. Your Anti-virus client has a list over 75,000 items long of things not to do, that has to be updated weekly, if not daily.

A whitelist, on the other hand, is a list of things you should do or people you should talk to. How many programs do you use daily? Three? Maybe up to seven? That list just got orders of magnitude shorter. And how often do you install something new? Maybe once a month?

Obviously, implementing a whitelist-type security policy would benefit a corporate environment the most, where computers are used more as tools rather than entertainment consoles, but the home user would still see some benefits – like an end to spyware.

Here’s something that made his list only peripherally: Ease-Of-Use. In the early days, computers could only be used by people who had specific training. To generate a greater demand for computers and thus bolster the profit margin, they had to make them easier to use so more people could do so and grow dependant on them in their daily lives.

This has unfortunately led us to a situation where the average computer user knows nothing about how the computer actually works – which in turn means that to get anything done, the software needs to be designed to function on a single click of a mouse. That one click can now have the effect of executing millions of lines of malicious code, with the user none the wiser.

Me, I think we should ease up on the user-friendly bit and force the user to gain a little education and think about what they are doing. Yes, I realize that this would end up alienating a chunk of the userbase, but the ones who don’t want to learn are the ones that make it bad for everyone.

-Begin Rant- Read the rest of this entry »

This post tells us that there will be 6 (count ’em, six!) versions of Microsoft’s new Vista Operating System to contend with.

Good frelling Gods of Computing!

This is the definition of Bad Software Design, and the elimination of upgrade-ability. The distinctions between these six versions aren’t really all that clear yet (MS is splitting some hairs pretty fine), but my take is that the consumer isn’t going to know one way or the other what they really need or want, and are going to end up paying the premium to get extra functionality they don’t need, just on the off chance that they may need it eventually. Why will they do that? Because MS sure as shit won’t make those extra functions as something you can add later – you’ll have to do a whole-hog upgrade re-install.

They have now taken their approach of wraping everything into the OS to it’s utter extreme of idiocy, and the world will suffer for this.

On the other hand, since Linux doesn’t bend you over a barrel like this, it may just end up being better press for us. This should be fun to watch.

Excerpt from an email I received today:

I am contacting you today via your on-line resume and I was wondering if you would be interested in an opportunity to work with Brand-X Insurance and Financial Services by building your own Brand-X Agency. I am looking for a few business minded individuals who have the desire for personal growth, career fulfillment and financial success blah blah blah blah

Dear Salesfeeb-
I appreciate the fact that it took nearly every neuron you posess to find the email address on my resume, but I really have to ask how it could possibly have occurred to you that a techie such as myself would be even the slightest bit interested in devolving into a lower life form by becoming an insurance salesperson?

Since I have no interest in becoming a sales person, you sending me this email with no invitation to do so or any prior business between us classifies the email as SPAM. Not only is it the bane of my existence, but in some regions it is illegal and punishable by severe fines. In others, we will simply hunt you down and publicly flog you, because this kind of stupidity really needs to be more painful.

Please refrain from sending these “opportunities” to me or any other IT person in the future. It is a waste of bandwidth, a waste of my time, and a waste of your time as well.

I just got done reading the Engadget “historical” post Greyduck linked to, and all of the comments – most of which were kids saying “wow! 2 years before I was born!”

Hmm. I was 13 in 1985, attending 8th grade and learning to program in BASIC on a Commodore Vic20. Growing up in the hick town that I did, it wasn’t until 1991 when I moved to Portland the first time that I heard the term ‘BBS’. I used a Commodore 128 with a 1200 baud modem to log into that first SCA BBS as ‘Cyberwolfe’.

Yes, child, 1200 baud was once considered high speed.

And now I bitch about how slow DSL is.

Devil’s Panties – Sunday, February 3, 2002

‘Nuff said.