See...Other Drivers Really are Stupid

CNN.com - Study: 20M licensed drivers may lack basic safety knowledge - May 27, 2005

OK, I got a good laugh out of this one. GMAC recently ran a survey where they gave a test similar to that one you had to take when you first got your license to over 5000 people. The results say that on average, 10% of the people on the road could not pass. Among the scary highlights:

* one out of five drivers doesn't know that a pedestrian in a crosswalk has the right of way

* one out of three drivers speeds up to make a yellow light, even when pedestrians are present.

Funniest was the fact that the dumbest drivers are from the North East (haha Paul, Sue, and Uncle R). "Twenty percent of test-takers failed there." 20%? My faith in the liberal northeast just dropped by a few points. If one in 5 of them can't pass those brain dead tests they give at the DMV, I'm not sure they should be allowed to run government.

What Pre-1985 Video Game Character Am I?

I am Kong. Strong and passionate, I tend to be misunderstood, sometimes even feared. I don't want to fight, I don't want to cause trouble, all I ask is a little love, and a little peace. If I don't get what I want, I get angry, and throw barrels and flaming oil at whatever's stopping me. What Video Game Character Are You?

What Pre-1985 Video Game Character Am I?

I am a Gauntlet Adventurer. I strive to improve my living conditions by hoarding gold, food, and sometimes keys and potions. I love adventure, fighting, and particularly winning - especially when there's a prize at stake. I occasionally get lost inside buildings and can't find the exit. I need food badly. What Video Game Character Are You?

Your Mother Was Right. Keep Doing That And You Will Go Blind.

Pfizer today announced that in rare cases, people using Viagra have gone blind. Hehe. Make me think that they are using it by themselves:)

Also, I have to mock Yahoo a bit on this story. They attached the image below to the story:

Paul Mcerlane/Reuters

The caption read: Pfizer Inc. on Friday acknowledged rare cases of blindness in men taking its impotence drug Viagra and said it is in talks with U.S. regulators to change the drug's label...In this file photo, a young couple kiss in Ringaskiddy, County Cork.

First, I'm sure these folks are just tickled pink that their little public display of affection was captured by a Reuters photographer for all to see. And then associated with male impotence, well that just makes your day don't it?. Yeap, that is all I am thinking about when I am kissing my wife on a park bench.

Yet More Military Stupidity

Warning: This blog is probably only mildly amusing. Its more sad than anything, and it will really only be interesting to engineers. You have been warned.

My boss relayed a just plain sad story to me today that about one of the military software application frameworks we are working with. Lets call the platform CRAP. Obviously, I've changed the name of the program to protect the incompetent.

Anyways, my boss was on a conference call the other day about the quality of the CRAP framework. The conversation went something like the following:

Air force: We've measured the mean time between failures of your CRAP framework at 11 hours. That is pretty low for a platform that we want to classify as mission critical.

CRAP developers (in smug voice): Actually, the Navy's F-(something or other) program has measured the mean time between failures as 108 hours.

Air Force: Yeah, but there definition of mean time between failures is not the same as ours.

CRAP developers: Really? How do they differ?

Navy: Yeah, the Air Force is right. Our definition does not classify the application crashing as a failure...

At this point I think I would have thrown up had I actually been in the meeting. After that, the meeting went downhill really fast. Apparently the Navy's requirements for the CRAP program required it to have X mean time between failure, and they could do no better than Y, where Y << X. So did the Navy's testing unit ask the CRAP developers to fix the issues? Nope. They just changed the definition of failure until the mean time matched the spec. Why you might ask? Because the Navy's testing unit does not get dinged for every bug they allow to be released into the field. What they do get dinged for is spending too much money testing the program. Retesting after asking for fixes obviously takes money, so they are loath to do it unless the program is completely useless.

Some days I am amazed that anything in the military works...

Techno + guitar = odd but memorable

My great friend Paul turned me on to this group called "The Postal Service". They are a strange mix of techno, piano, guitar, and interesting indie vocals. Different from anything I have ever heard, but really great.

You can hear/watch one of their sets in the studio at http://www.kcrw.org/smil/mb030506The_Postal_Service.ram, which I would highly recommend.

More Irony From the Military

I was driving into Redstone Arsenal this morning when I noticed something that really made me laugh. Right before the gate is this sign that reads, "Firearms, ammo, and knifes longer than 3 inches are prohibited from this facility".

Now call me crazy, but I think that on a military installation those things are going to be pretty important to have :)

Weddings are Officially Insane

Ka-ching! Wedding price tag nears $30K

According to this article, the average cost of a wedding in the US is now roughly $26,000, and it is fast approaching $30,000. Jesus fucking Christ! I guess when Sue and I have kids, we will have to set two funds. One to pay for college and another to pay for their weddings (and assuming we have 2 kids and at least one will get divorced, that means we need to have enough for three weddings!).

Taking a larger scale view is even scarier. When I read the following, I knew we as a country were in SERIOUS trouble:

"A total of $125 billion -- about the size of Ireland's GDP -- will be spent on 2.1 million weddings in 2005..." (emphasis is mine).

That's right folks, in our country engaged couples spend on a one day event what other western countries create in total economic output over the course of an entire year. Please just smite us now God. Get it over with. We are doomed. DOOMED I TELL YOU!

I think Sue and I got married for about $8,500 total, not including our honeymoon to Italy (that was paid for with wedding gifts). So at least we are doing good in terms of the average. Still, sometime I wonder if I should not have just taken my father up on his offer to pay to fly us out to Las Vegas to elope. We could have gotten married with Elvis! I mean come on. You can't put a price on an Elvis wedding (Actually you can: $650 at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel).

Star Wars Episode III review

Sue and I saw Star Wars episode III this morning. My entire office more or less cleared out for it. Apparently someone forgot to tell our boss (same thing happened when Matrix Revolution came out). I would have payed really good money to see the look on his face as he wandered from room to room looking for ANYONE to answer his questions.

Let me just get this out of the way: This was the first Star Wars prequel I have seen and not walked out of the theater thinking, "Well that sucked...". My order of greatness for the Star Wars films is now:

1) Empire Strikes Back
2) A New Hope
3) Return of the Sith & Return of the Jedi
4) Attack of the Clones
5) The Phantom Menence

Good thing about this movie:

1) Does an excellent job of tying everything together.
2) Light saber battles, light saber battles, and more light saber battles.
3) Natalie Portman cleavage.
4) More light saber battles
5) Yoda speak. (Old am I, yet speaking well never did I learn).

Bad things (WARNING - SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON):

1) I thought Anakin's conversion to the dark side went WAY too fast. One minute he lements "what have I done?", and not 30 seconds later he is calling Dark Sideous master. Sorry, but that just went too fast to be believable.

2) The biggest bad ass bad guy ever created was a huge pussy. There I said it. He cries like a baby, and when he yells "NOoooooo" at the end in the Vader suit, it really damaged my whole outlook of him.

Questions left unanswered:

1) During the conversation in front of the bubbles show (what the fuck was that?), Sidious makes it sound like his master actually caused Anakin to be concevied. Did anyone else get that? It would make sense given Sidious's comments about Anakin completing his desteny when he switched to the dark side.

2) Why does C-3PO need to get memory wiped? Everyone I talked to mentioned that he needed to be, but I did not understand why. As far as I can remember, Vader never sees C-3PO directly in any of the movies. I guess you could argue that C-3PO might tell others about what he has seen, but then you also should wipe R2-D2.

Sony's New Bat Signal

Sony showed off some pictures of their new Playstation 3 system today. Below is a shot of the new controller:

When did Batman start working for Sony? Cause if that is not a cleverly disguised Batrang, I don't know what is. Holy poor ergonomics Batman!

Congrats are in Order

Sue officially graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing yesterday from the University of Alabama - Huntsville. I'm so very proud of her. Be sure to leave her much love here for her sacrifice and commitment:)

Geek Fantasies

PG-13 link below. But pretty funny for us geeks:

http://www.geekfantasies.com

I especially liked #2 and #5:)

You guessed it, more reviews...

First of all, I got the new Dave Matthews cd Tuesday, Stand up. The Stand up link will let you listen to a bit of it. Of course I had pre-ordered it via the Warehouse, DMB fan club, so that I could get the free extra cd with some live versions of songs and some rare studio recordings! I am a geek when it comes to DMB! Of course I love most of what DMB does and I really do like the new disc. It is different. I hate when people expect bands to stay the exact same forever. These guys have been together for 15 years so you expect some changes. The new album is more hippy with the lyrics and subjects of the tunes. The songs are more R&B this time, but I like the mix of R&B and the unique DMB sound. A lot of the songs make you want to get up and shuffle your feet like Dave and spin in circles like a hippy in your bare feet on the grass! Dance! I have only listened to it a few times so I have not memorized it yet. I will have to memorize the tunes before July 13th since Eric and I have tix to their show in Atlanta! The reason I joined the fan club is that we get tickets first and the more senority you have the better tickets you get. With 8 years senority, we are usually in the center in rows 1-5! I love it. I am not sure how the seating at this venue is but I think that we are in the first few rows again. I am in withdrawl since I have not been to a DMB show in 2 years. I usually go at least once a year. One year Eric and I went 3 times in a year and he said no to the 4th :( I am addicted. This is 12th or 13th time I have seen them!

On to some movie reviews. Since Eric's job sucks and insists on sending him on trip after trip I am here alone and usually end up renting some movies to stave off the boredom at night when I cannot sleep. This last time really angered us since they told him Monday, "By the way, you are going to Ft. Rucker today to fix a project you have never worked on and you have to stay there until you fix it!" Thanks Uncle R. I guess this was one of your old projects. So Eric had to stay until Thursday, our anniversary, and he did not get back until almost 5 pm. Now he has to go back next week again! I am going to a baby shower at Tybrin today so I am going to have to try really hard not to yell at the tools in charge for screwing up our anniversary plans. But I digress... Movie reviews.

I rented Meet the Fockers, Spanglish, and The Phantom of the Opera. First of all, I watched them as I played World of Warcraft so I was distracted at times. That game sucks time!

I rented Meet the Fockers since I knew Eric would never rent it. It was funny. Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand were hilarious and really made the movie good! Watching DeNiro with Hoffman was ecspecially funny. It is a good sequel which follows well with the previous movie.

Spanglish was an pretty good Adam Sandler movie. It was pretty funny since the family is very dysfunctional. It was a little too serious in some parts though for an Adam Sandler movie. Still, I liked it and the story was pretty good.

Phantom of the Opera was ok. Now as a huge fan of the original Andrew Lloyed Weber musical, having listened to the cd over 100 times, replaying the production in my room starring me in every role, and after seeing the real production twice, I must say I was disappointed, particularly with the casting. I hate when Hollywood makes musicals into movies and they cast actors that cannot sing into the roles. It is a musical people!!! Phantom is a very opera sounding musical and the songs are very hard to sing, trust me I have had to sing them for choir. First of all the Phantom they cast, Gerard Butler, sucked. He is a great actor, fine, but he had no singing experience at all before this role and Andrew Lloyd Weber cast him knowing this! He did hire a singing coach and practiced day and night for about 6 months but his singing was only decent with all of the studio modifications. His voice was way to deep for the role. The Phantom is supposed to sing like an "Angel" and it sounded more demon like. Michael Crawford, who played the Phantom for many years and made the role famous is very hard to follow and no one will ever be him, but I saw two great singers play the Phantom in the Broadway versions in Toronto. The Phantom is a very hard role to fill since the songs are written in a big range and it takes a very skilled singer to get notes just right. It angered me, since the Phantom is the main role!! Stupid Hollywood. The thing that really angers me is that they were supposed to make the movie a long time ago with Crawford and Sarah Brightman, original Christine and Weber's ex-wife, but Weber wanted to get as much money off of the Broadway version first. Minnie Driver played Carlota and also sucked. Another woman sang her parts in the movie. Hello, why is she still in the movie when most of it is singing?!?! Emmy Rossum, Christine in the movie, was great. She can really sing and is a trained singer. She did great. Most of the other actors did very well and the chorus did a great job. It is a pretty movie and it is pretty close to the real musical, but they made some of the singing parts into talking parts, which angered me. Oh well.

Celebrate...

Well, today is our fourth anniversary! Yeah! Yes, Eric and I have been married for four wonderful years and I think I love him more than the day I met him if that is possible. Of course we have been together for nine years! We will try to celebrate in between the graduation stuff I have to do. Now I wish I would have just skipped graduation so that we could fly off to NYC for the weekend or something like that.

Our wedding song was the one from Robin Hood because of the words (which we meant) and because of a special moment we shared early on at the end of watching that movie and that song was playing. It was the first time I knew I really loved Mr. Eric Wilson. I still love this song and it will always be ours even though our evil sister in law stole it from us without even warning us and used it in her demon wedding that was not about love at all! (Sorry rant!) Back to love. Eric and I are all about love...

(Everything I Do) I Do It For You
Look into my eyes - you will see
What you mean to me
Search your heart - search your soul
And when you find me there you'll search no more
Don't tell me it's not worth tryin' for
You can't tell me it's not worth dyin' for
You know it's true
Everything I do - I do it for you

Look into my heart - you will find
There's nothin' there to hide
Take me as I am - take my life
I would give it all I would sacrifice
Don't tell me it's not worth fightin' for
I can't help it there's nothin' I want more
Ya know it's true
Everything I do - I do it for you

There's no love - like your love
And no other - could give more love
There's nowhere - unless you're there
All the time - all the way

Don't tell me it's not worth tryin' for
I can't help it there's nothin' I want more
I would fight for you - I'd lie for you
Walk the wire for you - Ya I'd die for you

Ya know it's true
Everything I do - I do it for you

Written by:
B. Adams
M. Kamen
R.J. Lange

Weekend of Drinking

This weekend was really great. My friends Paul, Sue, and Kien came down for the weekend. There is something really uplifting knowing that there are people in the world that value your company so much that they will travel 600+ miles just for the pleasure of company. Whatever, it kicked ass. I spent most of it either drinking or recovering from drinking. Good times:)

Highlights:

- Kien's Birthday was last week, so we got him a copy of Karaoke Revolution. For the folks who know him, you already know that he loves to sing no matter where he is:) Props to Paul and Sue for thinking up such a good gift. FYI: I think my Sue was the best of the bunch (no she is not mine like,"I'll kill you if you look at her boobs one more time" sort of mine. That's just how Paul and I distinguish our significant others) . And no, I did not sing. I never sing around anyone but Sue and in large arena type areas where no one can actually hear me. Sue can tell you that you are better off not having heard it.

- Munckin games that lasted two days. I thought they were never going to end. And my friends are really good at having zero morals when it comes to that game:)

- Kien showed us what aggressive Texas Holdem play was is supposed to look like and proceeded to mop the floor with us, to the tune of $5 buck a person.

- Paul thinking that I actually don't have any friends and that actually posted as R, Uncle R, and Z-O just to make myself feel better.

- Me realizing that if Paul or Kien lived anywhere near me, I would pretty much play video games with them non stop for weeks at a time.

- 2 gay bars in one night. Just as an FYI for the Huntsville folk, Insomnia looked really cool, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, shows up before 2:30am. We left about then due to boredom.

Alternate Uses for Light Sabers

A little diversion on a Friday:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber5.htm

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber6.htm

Another Porn Stereotype On the Way Out

CNN: Texas House to cheerleaders: Don't shake it

I heard about this the other day on Leno, and I thought he was just joking. But according to the above CNN article, Texas is considering a law that "would forbid sexy cheers and give the Texas Education Agency authority to punish schools that allow "overtly sexually suggestive" routines at football games and other events."

Man that pisses me off. Look, 16 old girls have a lot of pent up sexual frustration. One way they get that out of there system is by shaking their groove thing in a outfit that screams "look please treat as nothing but sexy meat" while flashing their pseudo-underwear at a crowd of mostly men and pretending to encourage others to root for some sporting event that no one cares about (except, ironically, in Texas). To deny them this would remove one of the last safe outlets of teasing. Without it, these girl will have no choice but to become librarians, nurses, doctors, catholic school girls, sorority girls, strippers, or desperate housewives to get that sort of fix (did I miss any porn stereotypes there?).

The irony that the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are the sexiest cheerleaders in the world should also not be ignored. How is the girl from Texas supposed to grow up to be one of these fine "athletes" if we don't let them practice in high school? Huh? Answer that!

Doesn't the Texas board of education have anything better to do with their time? Is this really THE most important issue facing the board?

Final Thought: I like sexy cheerleader routines. Don't take them away!

Laura Bush Needs Loven

If Laura Bush's roast of the President at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner is any indication, the first lady needs someone to (in the words of Chef) make sweet love to her down by the fire:

"George always says he's delighted to come to these press dinners. Baloney.
He's usually in bed by now. I'm not kidding. I said to him the other day,
'George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to
stay up later.' I am married to the president of the United States, and here's
our typical evening: Nine o'clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I'm
watching 'Desperate Housewives' -- with Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife."

She went on to say:

One night, after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes
and I went to Chippendale's. I wouldn't even mention it except Ruth Ginsberg and
Sandra Day O'Connor saw us there. I won't tell you what happened, but Lynne's
Secret Service codename is now "Dollar Bill."

First: If Lynn Cheny only got the name "Dollar Bill", she is one cheapskate. Her husband is the Vice President of the U.S.A. and a former CEO of Haliburton. Can't she afford to slip a five in there sometimes?

Second: The media of course thought it was all very funny. After all, who doesn't like seeing the president getting ripped on? Jay Leno practically built a career doing nothing but.

But I saw it for what it was. A desperate cry for help for all the woman of politicians that they are not getting the sexual satisfaction that they so justly deserve. We have a 2.3+ trillion dollar budget this year. Can't we afford to get each of these women a nice vibrator? Maybe a couple nipple rings? I mean, is that too much to ask? Hell, I'm sure the Secret Service would chip in just so they don't have to go back to another Chippendale's show.

Coming Soon: Star Wars Sucks Posts

I'm trying really hard not to be excited about Star Wars Episode III. Really. I keep telling myself all of the following:

(1) Lucas is directing yet again, so it will suck

(2) Hayden Christensen is in it yet again, so it is going to suck.

(3) Sue read an early review that it was "tear jerker". Sweet lord would that make it suck.

And yet....

Try as I might, I'm getting excited. I know the date it comes out (May 19th). I know that I am going to the midnight showing. I know I will see it the next day with my co-workers. Today starwars.com released "A Hero Falls Music Video", which is really just the theatical trailer set to new music, and I am ashamed to admit that I have watched it three time already today.

sigh...

They should just rename episode III "Star Wars: digital crack for the geeky".

God DAMN IT I am good

Today is a good day. I'm having one of those days where I am so excited by my own brilliance that I really want to run through the halls yelling, "You all suck! Bow to might of my mad coding skillz!!!" (you have to use a "z" there to keep your street cred...wait...I just explained something that gives me street cred...now I have lost it all!... oh how fleeting is the cred of the street!).

Of course, all this ego-mania will most certainly be shattered soon enough by some bizarre coding issue that I will waste a hour trying to solve only to be farther from the solution than when I started. I have to enjoy my power over all electronic bits now while it lasts.

On another note: I'm terribly excited that (in alphabetical order to ensure one does not feel more special than the other) Kien, Paul, and Sue are all visiting this weekend. DDDR (drunken dance dance revolution) at my house on Friday night! w00t!

(Side node to Dana: I am so ready to reclaim my position as the official pace car of this group!)