Author Archives: Shadowtwin

BCS; Survivor

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Just when I was starting to get back into a semi-regular posting schedule, basketball happened. I had completely forgotten about the College Basketball tournament (the brackets as my wife and many others call them) right until my wife got home earlier than expected on Wednesday. It turns out that since the ‘brackets’ had bumped Survivor from Thrusday to Wednesday, the wife was not nearly as inclined to ride her horse on Wednesday. That is, sure she loves to ride the Horses, but when that interferes with Survivor, Fuck ’em.

I am no better than the wife when it comes to revolving my schedule around that silly show. I didn’t even get to complete my daily surfing activities before it was time to go and watch the show. I know that is not such a big deal since I can visit a website at any time, day or night, while her horse riding activities don’t share the always available quality. But, It did screw up my day a little bit. Damn those Collegiate Athletes!

I really don’t care for college basketball at all, of course I really don’t care about the NBA either, so I suppose that isn’t all that surprising. I do like that they have a playoff system in place for the NCAA, however I really think that the system they use for basketball is at once too inviting and not inviting enough. I am not completely sure of the logistics involved, but what I do know is that in any given year there are teams who should have a legitimate shot at the national title that end up playing in the (secondary) NIT competition. As I say, I don’t follow college basketball so I don’t really know why it ends up this way. I would speculate that they are trying to make sure that they don’t end up with too many teams from a specific conference in the ‘Big Dance’, since, like everything else, this is all about money and too many colleges from a specific region would likely sour the viewing audience, thus leading to less revenue from advertisers. That is all speculation of course.

It is pretty sick of me to bitch about the way the NCAA handles this tournament though, since I really do enjoy college football. NCAA football, of course, has absolutely no playoff system. The national champion every year is picked by a combination of Coaches votes and a computer model that sends teams to face each other in the BCS. I would link to something to try to make sense of this all, were there anything on the face of the earth that could make sense of it. There is no playoff system at all in college football, the ‘Bowls’ (be it the Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, etc.) are alternated every year in respect to which one is hosting the actual title game. The teams that go to each of the ‘Bowls’ is somehow chosen by a computer. One of the many problems with that approach is the “Margin of Victory” category (which is one of the weighted categories in the BCS model). So, if your team is up by 24 points in the fourth quarter and you just try to run out the clock, you may be screwed later by a team that continues to humiliate the other team for the duration of the game. The computer can’t factor in humility.

I am going to try to piece together a scenario to prove the inherent flaws with the BCS right now. Bear in mind that people have been doing this for years and we have yet to see a change in the way it is handled. All information I am about to present is fictional and for the sole purpose of making the fallacy that the BCS is fair more obvious. I am going to use the teams Florida, Arizona and Texas in general terms and not related to any team from any of those states.

Let’s pretend that Texas has only won 3 games in a season. They have a mediocre offense, but a pretty darn good defense. Further, we must pretend that Arizona has an amazing offense, but a useless defense, while Florida has an amazing defense, but a useless offense. Now I have to pretend that both Arizona and Florida played Texas, and for the sake of this post I am going to say that they both won the game. The Arizona vs. Texas matchup (in my scenario) is going to end with Arizona’s amazing offense beating the Texas defense pretty handily, but, the useless defense of Arizona allows Texas to get some easy points. I’ll call it 37-24 just in case you are nitpicky, so a 13 point win. When Florida plays Texas (in my scenario) it is going to end with Florida’s offense unable to score against the mediocre Texas defense, while Texas can’t score against Florida either. The points that are scored are all on defense or special teams. I’ll call this one 16-7, so a 9 point win. What we learn from this is that, for one team, their offense alone won the game, while, for the other team, their defense alone won the game. If Arizona never plays Florida how do you really know which team is better? The computers will tell you that Arizona is better since they won by 13, but, the same computer is going to tell you that Florida is better since they only gave up 7 points. (not that playing a worthless team really matters all that much in the grand scheme of the BCS, I was just trying to explain it in a logical manner.)

If there were any type of a playoff system in college football the majority of the variables would be sorted out on the field. Of course the second anyone tries to modify the system to a playoff format there will be teams that want to be involved, regardless of the fact that they simply don’t have the players to win big games against good teams. I do understand that football is a sport that is a bit more draining than basketball; not a game that the players can play two days in a row. Yet, somewhere in my mind, I have to wonder why they don’t have all of the teams that have ‘Bowl Bids’ set into a playoff format. It would add a game or two to some of the teams’ schedules, but only the winning teams. That would also result in a lot more revenue for the colleges, with the extra ticket sales. Not to mention giving NFL scouts more opportunities to see all of the top players.

Perhaps the NCAA enjoys the controversy in college football since it allows many teams to believe that they were really the national champions?

• Survivor was what I really wanted to talk about today. It turns out that someone over at the studio had read my latest bitch about the show and bought a Time Machine, then went back in time to alter the episodes that they already had on tape. Sure, it is possible that they just realized it was all getting a bit too predictable, but what would be my stake in that?

The latest episode of Survivor featured yet another loss by the “Ulong” team. This one was a bit different though, for two reasons. The first reason is that both teams were going to have to vote out a player, the second is that I have never seen (in my survivor watching history) a team so easily and adamantly agree on voting someone. The guy that the strong tribe (Koror) was going to vote out has been obvious since day one, however they had never lost an immunity challenge so they never had to think about it. There was a twist, as there always is, that made it so Koror got to give immunity to a single player from Ulong. The winner of immunity was the guy that everyone in Ulong was going to vote off. So, instead, they voted off the only player on their team that excelled at anything…Survival of the weakest I guess.

I really have to hand it to Survivor, they took an impossible situation and made a nice spin out of it. Unfortunately the teams are now at 8 and 4. If they merge the first four to go are pretty obvious. Yet, the team dynamic is so precious to the game (at least to ratings) that I don’t know if they should try to screw it all up.

Half of me thinks that they should let the losers continue to lose. The losing tribe has shown over and over that they don’t really want to win. Perhaps, this time, they will let them all just get voted out. The other half of me wants them to mix up the tribes. Some of the alliances on Koror are getting pretty strong, strong enough that they may never break. If they mix up the tribes at this point, the are doing it only a couple of votes from the merge. If they leave the one team to kill itself it will be a whole new game. The other team has already shown, on several occasions, that they don’t really want to win. I really think that the best way to shake up the game right now is to leave them alone.

The people in the game are expecting a merge so much that they never stop to think about what would happen if they never merge. Which would lead pretty nicely into the winning tribe having to vote out people that they have very strong alliances with. Hell, with one team having only four people, while the other has eight (and they would have been 9 strong were it not for one screwy challenge), I am not entirely sure if the other team really should have the salvation of the merge. Of course with the one team doubling them in numbers it probably doesn’t matter anyway.

My vote is going heftly to the “no merge” theory. That would make for a much more interesting game.

It is possible that they would allow the losing tribe to pick two of the people from the winning tribe (or try to redistribute the members and end with the same result), but I really think the losers have chosen to lose. It was their choice to vote out the most athletic and intelligent players first. This is their Titanic, they should go down with it.

Dogs

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It turns out that my online gaming activity is ever more boring than I had ever thought. This will be the third post in three consecutive days. I don’t know why or how this happens, but, in spurts, I enjoy the gaming a lot, that is nearly always followed by a period where I don’t enjoy it all that much and grow tired of it quickly. It might have something to do with the horrible problems that I have to deal with at work (pc problems), which leads me to come straight home and just play the mindless games that the internet is built on. Who knows.

On tap today, I have the puppy story that I plugged in yesterday’s post and that is about it. Hopefully something else will come to me as I retell it, else this may be a really short post.

• Our dogs, Warlock and Zelda, both have a bit of Pit Bull in their genetic makeup. I know that (to people who don’t understand the breed) the term “Pit Bull” brings to mind visions of huge, mean dogs. The problem with that is that most people get the breeds confused. A Rottweiler looks like this and is a vicious dog that is often put to death for biting/eating children. A “Pit Bull” is a breed of Terrier that is not vicious without the proper conditions. Even the term “Pit Bull” was only ever used to describe the dogs that were specifically trained to fight.

The majority of your Terrier breeds are possibly a bit anxious, easily excitable, little puppies but never actually bite anything. The term “Pit Bull” bears a black mark for the fact that they used to be trained to fight, and even today most owners just stick them on a chain in the yard and pray for the best. While I am not going to try to defend the entire canine family, I will go out on a limb to defend those Bull Terrier Mixes that we own. They are certainly not vicious, they love children (in fact, when we take them for a walk they will always stop to let all of the children pet them), the only growling that we really ever hear is while they are having bad dreams (since they do sleep in the bedroom with us), and the most vicious they ever get is when they are fighting over the kibble that the wife just dribbled the grease from a pan of ground beef over.

Perhaps, much like children, it is not the breeding of the dog that makes a killer, but the care of the child/animal?

It was never my purpose to spend so much time defending my dogs, but they do get a lot of bad press, so I kind of have to. Sure, your dog might have killed thirteen children, might still be on the prowl for new blood, might have rabies, and might be kill-on-sight material, but, had you taken care of the puppy, he/she would be a happy and well-adjusted dog. If you don’t understand that logic you probably should have your reproductive organs removed, lest you try to chain your newborn child in the yard and forget about him/her. The dog might not have a brain as big as yours, but it does have one, and it has a memory, and I doubt you would win the fight if it came down to jaw on fist action.

The dog story involves a “Bark Collar” which is a non-painful type, since I don’t want to hurt the little animal. It simply sprays a bit of citrus when the dog barks, which would suck for a dog, since their noses are so much more sensitive than humans.

The “Bark Collar” comes with a collar, strangely enough. Our dogs tend to fight when there is a collar involved. I assume that this behavior is directly linked to the fact that the harnesses that we use when we walk them is made of the same material. This collar, however, has a little electronic device on it that discharges a strong citrus odor when the dog barks. It is quite the effective deterrent.
The funny part of the story is that Zelda (the little girl dog) is the one that is usually wearing the device, since she is usually the one that is barking. While the collar does spray towards her face, it is coming from her neck, thus it is like a neck-mounted projectile of citrus smell. Zelda’s tiny little brain has seemed to work that all out.

Zelda does get the citrus sprayed in her face on occasion, but that is not story. The story is when she uses it as a weapon.

This all started when Warlock (the boy dog) jumped up onto the stove to steal a slice of yesterday’s pizza. Warlock knew he had done bad, but wanted to eat the pizza anyway, the spoils of war, I guess. Zelda barked at him, and it blew the citrus cloud into both of their faces. Warlock ran away, while Zelda finished the slice of pizza.

I think Zelda knows about it now. She knows that the collar will spray. She is just fucking with Warlock at this point. Both of their brains, put together, wouldn’t equal the weight of a pea, but they are learning. Zelda (the bitch) is learning just how much she owns Warlock. He (Warlock), on the other hand, is only starting to learn that Zelda owns him. Sure it isn’t dignified, but he didn’t lick your ass. Go Warlock!

[Adult Swim]

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Being that I am becoming pretty bored with playing silly little on-line games, I am gonna throw another post up here -Possibly a week before anyone is expecting it-, which is the great thing about actually paying for your own website. I don’t really have a deadline, I don’t really have a lot of fans, I just type something out when I feel like it, and stay silent for weeks when I don’t. That is not really a good path to follow if you ever do want to develop a readership, but, I have given up on that aspect of this whole ‘blogging’ thing long ago.

• On tap today, I offer you Robot Chicken. This is a really bizarre show that they show on Cartoon Network as part of the late night edition that they call Adult Swim. Since that seems a little bit confusing as I write it, I will elaborate in a moment. But first, I must elaborate on the aforementioned show.

Robot Chicken is basically a show that comes on, lasts for fifteen minutes (it plays straight through for twelve minutes with no commercials, followed by three minutes of commercials leading into the next show) then is gone. The airtimes for the show (as listed on the website) may differ by region. Since I live in Arizona, which is sometimes on Pacific time and sometimes on central time, we get some of the cable feeds hours early while we get others hours late. That is kind of screwy in and of itself, but I was wanting to talk about Robot Chicken so I will forget that all for now.

In a nutshell, Robot Chicken is twelve minutes of short sketches. Some of the sketches are as short as two seconds while some of them play out over several minutes. They are all done in animation, claymation, or using action figures (at least the several that I have seen), and they run the gamit from being dopey to outright hilarious. I am not even sure if it is possible to explain the show’s premise, not that I really think it has much of one. I really doubt that anyone much under the age of thirty would/could understand a lot of the parodies, some of them are contemporary, but the majority are spoofing stuff that I watched as a child. Things like G.I. Joe, Thunder Cats, He-Man, Voltron, and other cartoons or action figures that were popular in the early-mid eighties.

This is a show that is certainly not meant for children, yet it doesn’t seem to be specifically aimed at adults either. It is frequently hilarious, while being boring or confusing at other times. You really would have to watch it to get a sense of the weird fascination I have with it. To give you a sense of the humor involved, I must tell you about one sketch where they were spoofing Voltron. One of the lions was mounting (for reproducing purposes) another of the lions, while they were trying to build Voltron. Though when spoken (typed) it might not seem that funny, in the context of the short it was hilarious.

Seriously, if you have the cartoon network on your t.v. you should check out a couple of episodes. Hell, it only lasts for ten or twelve minutes and you will likely laugh a couple of times (if remember the cartoons and action figures from the eighties).

• The Adult Swim thing is what the cartoon network is doing after the sun goes down. It is far from porn, it has nothing in it that your average teenager hasn’t seen, but your five or six year old wouldn’t understand a word of it. They use the show Family Guy to lead into “Adult Swim”, after which you should not have children viewing, at least not if you don’t want to warp their fragile little minds.

I was thinking about Cartoon Network’s dilemma today, which was why I typed this out actually. They made a channel that you can sit your kids in front of so that you don’t have to take care of them all day, yet, when the kids go to bed at nine, the Cartoon Network is a Ghost Town. I really doubt that many infomercials would be willing to buy time on the Cartoon Network at two in the morning. They took the only logical step; cartoons for kids in the day, cartoons for adults at night. What were their other options?

Funny aside here. The cable company where I grew up showed Nickolodeon from 6a.m.-6p.m., then switched it to A&E from 6p.m.-6a.m. I am not even entirely sure if that would be legal in today’s market, but it worked for that cable company. It was very specifically targeting the consumer. I only noticed it since I woke up late one night and turned on Nickelodeon. I was expecting to see more green slime getting dumped onto people, instead I saw the last half hour of the movie “Deliverance”. I have never been quite the same since…

Anyway, Robot Chicken, watch it once. You will either like it or hate it, there is no in between. Sort of like porn, only less gender-biased as to the likers and haters.

Funny puppy story to come later today or on the next update, I am not yet sure which.

Survivor; Oddity at work; Hockey

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An early day off at work today has made it possible for me to go ahead and throw up a post. Of course I could have thrown up a post over any of the past several days, but you wouldn’t have wanted to read it. That would be because it was all about computer problems, all week. Since my last post the computer problems have been virtually resolved on my Mother-in-Law’s PC, while the problems on the PC at work simply got worse. This was due directly to the fact that the boss ordered a brand new Dell PC, but he ordered it with a flat panel monitor, while he was planning to use his 19″ CRT monitor with the system. Without going into a lot of detail, I will just say that it took me many hours, over several days, to get that to work. What is more is that he is expecting that the flat panel monitor will work on the old pc, which is certainly not going to happen, but that will be a story for a different day. I am just tired of talking about PC’s at this point.

• Survivor, however, is on the block to be hacked at today.

Survivor is one of the only shows that gets myself and my wife to sit down together to watch the teevee (though I didn’t watch the first season, I have been a fan ever since). The bitch that I am having about the show currently is that it is a bit stale at this point. It is certainly true that the interaction between all of the players is the most interesting part of the game, hell it is really the only reason that you should be watching the show at all. The problem is that they have gotten to the point where they spend so much time showing the ridiculous challenges that they don’t show enough of the interaction of the players.

This season, for instance, one team has won damn near every single challenge. As a direct result of that it never shows what that team’s day to day dynamic looks like, while it spends a hell of a lot of time focused on the losing team. Net result: I know the names of everyone on the losing team and can identify them by their faces, the winning team…Not so much.

My wife and I do enjoy rooting against the losing team every week, but that can only take the experience about so far. They really need to quit doing such elaborate challenges and get back to showing a lot more of the interaction of the players, which was what made the show so popular in the first place. Imagine if they were to nix about half of the reward challenge time and replaced it with personal interaction, be it for the winning or losing tribe, it would make you feel far more emotionally involved in the show, regardless of whether the interactions really matter in the grand scheme of the game.

I certainly don’t want them to take the challenges out of the material that they air, I simply want them to show only the pertinent parts of the challenges. If one player really excells at a particular event, by all means show it, but, if it is a dead heat, do we really need to watch twenty minutes of people doing the same thing over and over? Especially when you consider that every player is making deals with every other player; deals that will be broken at the drop of a hat. They need to get back to the team dynamic or their ratings will continue to slide. It might only be my opinion, but, I bet if you were to poll 100 people that are not watching survivor this season (after having watched previous seasons), they would probably share my sentiment.

• Now for some strange happenings at work.

There is a nameless young lady where I work (yes, of course, she actually does have a name, but even if I did know what it was I would not put it here), who had rather a strange experience the other day. It seems she received two phone calls, about a minute apart, one from a man and one from a woman, who were both telling her that her car had been hit by another car in the parking lot. As luck would have it, I happened to be right outside the doors as the second call (the one from the man) came in, and was able to say defenitively that the guy on the pay phone was not the guy that made the second call (not that that really matters).

She ran outside to check her car only to find that it had not been in a collision, instead it had rather a morbid gift stuffed into the door handle. That morbid gift was a female undergarment, with attached feminine hygiene product, which was stained with the blood of some female (or at least I assume it was the blood of some female, I am not a detective). There was an attached note that said, “Please leave me yours. In the same place. P.S. you have a really nice ass.” Again, not being a detective, I can only speculate, but I would think that likely the note was not left by a woman. It is my guess that it was some sort of a sick prank that some of her peers came up with just to freak her out, and it worked in spades.

The police were called, the panties and feminine hygiene product were taken in as evidence. The girl moved her car to the front of the store (where she could actually see it), and she was really, really freaked out for the remainder of the day. She was fine by the next morning though, which leads me to wonder if whoever had perpetrated the prank had come clean. That, of course, is something that sixteen-year-old-peer etiquite would never be allowed to be discussed. The situation seems to be resolved, so, I guess it was the crack investigating team….That or the prankster told her about it and didn’t want to get into legal trouble.

• Did you know that the entire Hockey season has been cancelled? I know only because I occasionally watch the sport, and then I only watch it when my local team (the Phoenix Coyotes) are doing well.

The only reason that I bring this whole subject up is because the players are holding out for better contracts, while the owners of most of the teams are losing tons of money every year. Hockey is a really popular sport in Canada, as well as on the eastern seabord of the U.S., but they simply don’t fill enough arenas often enough to substantiate higher contracts. The market for Hockey is simply not as large as the market for the three major U.S. sports (being Football, Baseball and Basketball).

Here is a simple test: Name five hockey players that have ever lived.

I can come up with five off the top of my head. Brett Hull, Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, Jeremy Roenick, and (pardon the name butchering) Mario Lemieux. Could you do it? Beyond that, a new test. Name five current players in the NHL.

Umm…ehhh…umm…Is Patrick Roy still playing? What about Pavel Bure? Did Wayne Gretzky ever father a child? Did Gordie Howe’s DNA get used to clone him? Where is Nikolai Khababulin, is he still playing? Do you see a forming pattern here? (The reference to Khababulin was only because he used to be a coyote, the other names popped into mind because they actually were playing last I knew. Meaning only Roy and Bure, all cloning aside.)

For sake of comparison I am going to tell you five current players from each of the three major U.S. sports. Please note that the names may be butchered since I am not going to go and spellcheck the names.
NFL: Warren Dunn, Marshall Faulk, Donnie Abraham, Fred Smoot, Aeneas Williams. (I left out Quarterbacks on that one since everyone knows the Quarterbacks).
MLB: Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio. (I ignored pitchers on this one, since that would have been far too easy).
NBA: Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Vince Carter, Steve Nash. (This one I could have done fifty players, but I really don’t like basketball all that much and I didn’t want to focus on my home team).

I am able to easily name five players from the other major U.S. sports, while I can’t come up with a single, definitiive, name in Hockey. I think that this would imply that Hockey is simply not as popular as the other sports. I would then argue that sincce the ssport is not all that popular, the money should be split between the owners and the players. If the owners are making tons of cash while the players are in poverty, that is wrong. By that same metric, if the players are making millions of dollars while the owners are losing money that is also wrong. That all being said, when is the last time that MLB or NFL or NBA cancelled an entire season??? The answer is, of course, never. No other major, U.S., sports league has ever cancelled a season. There have been portions of seasons missing on lots of occasions, but, no season had/has ever been cancelled…Untill now…

The unfortunate downfall of the logic on this one is that no one who never watched Hockey previously is goinng to start watching it . Those who have never seen Hockey are more likely to think that the players are demanding too much money for a service that doesn’t reaklly pay off.

My logic here is pretty tough to quantify, but that is only becasue it is pretty tough to find a hockey fan in the middle of Arizona.

PC issues

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More Computer Problems! I bet you are happy you checked in today!

Before I get going on this I just want to mention that I am going to name a hell of a lot of programs that are free for download, some of which are extremely usefull, I am not going to link to any of them though (nor am I going to link to the viruses and spyware that I mention). If you can not find one of the programs on your own just email me and I will point you to it. Now to the PC problems.

The PC with the problems this time was my Mother-in-Law’s. Even though my Brother-in-Law is Microsoft certified, he is strictly a hardware tech, this pc was having serious software problems. It turns out that I am this families resident computer geek so I got the joy of looking at it. Lucky me. It isn’t that I didn’t want to help them, more that I really hate getting involved with big pc problems since they can often take so long to fix that it would seem so much more effecient to throw it out and start with a new one. In this case that was not an option. A lot of files necessary for their business are on the machine, as well as a lot of imaging software (very expensive imaging software) that will not work on machines that are not running windows 98. Note that the machine is using windows 98 as a lot of the problems they were having would likely not have happened if it was a newer OS. Anyway, on to the problems.

I plugged the machine in on Monday evening. While it only has a 400mhz processor, it has 384mb of ram and two enormous hard drives, still a usuable system (in theory). It took, and this is not a joke, about fifteen minutes to get it booted to windows. That was just doing a normal startup and letting it load everything that was in it. Once it was loaded the mouse moved very slowly, like it would go an inch or so across the screen, completely freeze, then go another inch or so, rinse and repeat. I opened the task manager to see a listing of about 30 files, the PC being a Hewlit Packard I was able to quickly figure out which ones the machine was actually needing, but the others ran the gamit from outright viruses to malicious spyware to worms. Just for fun I tried to connect to the internet and it told me that there was no modem installed on it (even though they had been on the internet when my wife picked it up thirty minutes before), and it could not detect a modem when I tried to manually install it.

I ran Hijack This on it and found that there were about 100 things running that should not have been there. I deleted all of them with the Hijack This software and rebooted to find them all back. Next I went into msconfig and manually disabled all startup items, then I set it to load only the system.ini and win.ini (this is a trick I often use on my old pc to get better performance on graphics heavy games). The reboot went a bit faster this time, but Hijack This was still showing tons of crap that shouldn’t be there. This time I removed every single item that Hijack This had found, which would be a really bad idea if the pc wasn’t as totally hosed as it was. I was still not able to get it to detect the modem, so I booted to safe mode.

For reasons that I still don’t understand, the modem was detected in safe mode, but windows would not search for a driver in safe mode. I was thinking that I might have gotten rid of some registry crap that was killing the detection of the modem, that would require a restart to take effect. I ran Ad-Aware while in safe mode anyway, but it simply froze. Not the machine, just the program. So I booted it back up in the (I’ll call it clean boot) selective startup mode. The modem was no longer identified, the majority of the crap was back, and I was feeling a wee bit helpless. I said fuck it for the night, that being in addition to various other words of curse that I may have uttered at the piece of shit.

The next day it was on. The two biggest problems with the pc (as found by google searching for some of the files loaded) were a vicious spyware called ISTBAR and a recent virus named Bagle.b. I figured that the spyware was the reason that I was not able to run AD-Aware, so I decided to tackle that problem first. Symantec.com has a fix for it, but it could not even detect it on the PC, even though I could search for the term ISTBAR on the system and find over 40 references to it, all zip files, oddly. So I did what us back room techs do; I deleted every occurance of the ISTBAR that I found then ran Hijack This again. I found several files with ISTSVC.exe in them, so I searched for that term and deleted all of them as well. I closed everything that was running in the close program dialog -except explorer- and ran Ad-Aware again. It worked this time.

On the next clean boot Ad-aware would not run, but all references to ISTbar were gone. As a bonus the PC also detected a modem. Of course the modem driver could not be found solo online; I had to download a zip file with the driver for every operating system from windows 95 to windows xp, it was almost 5 megs, and I am on a dialup…Once the modem driver was installed, I was easily online, albeit very slowly. I then downloaded Spybot, Spyware Doctor, Startup Mechanic and Registry Mechanic. The only usefull file out of that bunch was the Startup Mechanic. It was not usefull in that it got rid of anything for me, no, it just showed the directory where I could find the file myself and delete it manually…Once again, in theory…

It actually took me cleaning the suspect files manually from the machine to get rid of the known garbage. The PC is running at least %1000 better now, but I am still not able to get rid of two files. One is in the system.ini and the other in the win.ini directory. The problem is that none of the software I used ever told me exactly where they were. In addition to that I am not able to get completely rid of a few references to the ISTSVC.exe that are in the startup group: As far as the computer is concerned there is no file with that name present, but I know it is there since I can see it when I run msconfig.

The viruses (and let me tell you she had the beagle.b virus, the Netzky virus, and one other that I can’t place) were far easier to take care of than the Malware. She (Mother-in-Law) is going to buy a new antivirus program and bring it over tomorrow to see if we can get rid of the last little signs of all the crap that was on the machine. I am honestly not all that optimistic about it, I mean if symantec.com can’t find it what are the odds that some other virus protection can? I must also mention that I re-subscribed to my Norton virus protection as a result of this. My thought was that I would be able to scan her machine using my info, that was not the case. I thought briefly about sticking her hard drive into my tower, but that idea was quickly nixed when I remembered how long it took me to get that hard drive to work correctly.

Perhaps it is the anal, perfectionist part of me that really wants to get rid of every single trace of the problem in her PC? I think most people would be happy to get it back in working order; probably ecstatic to see that it is working at least %1000 percent better. I dunno. I just really wish that I could find the system.ini file and the win.ini file that are seeming to keep it from running spyware and virus scans. Of course the software that would do that is worth more than the pc at this point.

Even as I type this I am downloading another program. If this one doesn’t find it, and if the antivirus that she buys doesn’t find it, then I am just going to show her how to use a couple of the programs that I downloaded. I will probably delete Hijack This from her machine since she really could do damage with it, but the program Startup Mechanic shows basically the same thing, only they identify the files by necessary, usefull, useless, harmfull or unknown. In my experience they have been right on every count. I do wish they knew what the unknown ones were though, since those are the same ones that no other program has been able to identify and point me to.

I sure hope that the next time I post it isn’t computer related. I would think that you share that sentiment, but if you actually read this whole post you must at least sympathize.

Computer service

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Strange posting schedules seem to have become the norm around here. I would like to say that I am planning to change that, but I am not sure if I have any intention of trying to. For the most part I am going to just use this site for what I never really intended it for; random bitching when I am really pissed.

I may actually get back into posting a bit more frequently though, just because one can only play so many on-line games of dominoes before getting really tired of it. That being said, don’t expect much.

The reason that I decided to bang something out tonight is because of yet more computer problems…Not mine though…

To start the story from roughly the beginning, the PC that is used where I work was initially bought in about 1997. The software that is used for the purposes of the store can not operate on any system later than windows 98 (it has to have a pure DOS environment, something that you really can not do with windows me/xp). Sometime around 2000, the owner was trying to upgrade his system. Problem was that his daughter was trying to build him a new machine using all of the old parts (a new motherboard and processor, everything else the same) including the antiquated windows95 operating system that was already on the hard disk. It went horribly wrong.

It took a couple of technicians several days to get the machine to a workable condition, but even then a lot of the stuff didn’t really work quite like it should. Most notably everything related to the files for the store. I wasn’t able to get any support from the software manufacturer for the store files since they went out of business, but I was able to get some support from the manufacturer of the actual PC to POS software, and got it all working again. It took a damn long time and I prayed I would never have to do it again.

One day, in December of 2002, there was a huge power surge in town (for unknown reasons), which shouldn’t have been a big deal since the PC was plugged into a battery backup/surge protector. Problem is that the surge protector was plugged into an outlet that was not grounded. You know where this is going. Thing is, the communication cable between the PC and the Cash Register was connected, and the Cash Register was also not grounded. The power supply in the PC was completely fried, the motherboard in the Cash Register was partially fried, the communication cable was fried, and, as a bonus, all related surge protectors were also fried. It was a bad day.

The Cash Registers are under warranty (service contract actually) so that was not a big deal. The communication cable only actually burned the contacts in the connectors, which was easily fixed. The PC, however, was a totally different story.

The PC was taken to a shop called Computers and Things in Casa Grande, Arizona. They said that not only was the power supply bad, but the motherboard as well. I actually believe that was probably true. After the surge hit you could smell electrical fire from a long ways away from the pc. They were going to build a new tower, using only the existing hard drives. There was a problem. They said that the hard drives were so horribly infested with viruses that they were not even able to complete some sophisticated virus scans, the drives would simply freeze up. After a lot of discussion (and my steadfast gurantee that I had backed up every important file on a weekly basis) we told them to throw away the smaller drive, format the larger drive so that I could use it for backup purposes, and install a new primary drive. When we got the tower back we thought everything was golden.

It took me, again, several hours to get all of the store files reinstalled and the communications between the register and PC to work properly, but I did. The hand held scanner, however, never worked properly. I had to remove that communications port (via the device manager in the control panel) and restart the PC every time I needed to use it. I thought that it may be something related to different versions of DOS on the new system, hell, even now I don’t know why that was necessary. The thing is that it worked for our purposes, albeit a bit laborsome to use it, it worked.

Fast forward to last Thursday…

The PC had been running so slow, and randomly freezing, that I thought that it might be horribly infested with spyware. I attempted to download AdAware, but was never able to since the thing kept freezing. A tech that I know (though more an internet tech, as he owns an ISP) ran a program called HijackThis on it and found that there was some spyware, but not much. I did a disk clean-up on it, then tried to defragment it, freeze again. The bosses called an actual PC tech to take a look at it. At this point I was thinking it was either a worm of some sort that was in the Regedit or a bad hard drive, but since the hard drive was only a couple of years old I was leaning towards the former. I told the tech the symptoms, one of which was a “windows protection fault” during boot, which he said was symptomatic of bad RAM. The RAM test came through fine. He tried to run a hard drive test on it, but it froze before it got 2% into it. He said that he wanted to take it back and put it into a “clean system” to check it for viruses and trojans, which seemed like the next logical step. Problem is that he was trying to take the old hard drive, the one that was there for backup purposes only. When I told him that, he re-booted the system into the BIOS. The guys at Computers and Things had actually installed windows onto the drive that I specifically told them to only put back in so I could backup my files. I never thought to check that when we got the pc back from them, I was more worried about the whole “does it work” factor. It was at exactly that point that I knew the truth.

The guys at Computers and Things had installed windows back onto the old, worn, possibly corrupt hard drive. They then installed a brand new hard drive as a backup. They did exactly the opposite of what I asked. Bleh. I really should have actually checked it myself, if not in the BIOS, I could have simply clicked the drives to check their size and seen what they had done. Let this be a lesson to me to never take the word of a ‘tech’ without using my own limited knowledge to verify. The hard drives, both, went to the shop.

It came as no surprise to me when the tech, who was working with me yesterday, called me to say that the hard drive was bad. Of course the hard drive is bad. It is eight years old, it is used on a PC that is turned on and off a half a dozen times a day, it lived through a power surge that destroyed the rest of a PC, yeah, no surprise there. The only upside being that I have been using the other drive for backup purposes exclusively, thus it was working fine. Installed windows onto it and the PC was all better, to a point. Of course there were no drivers for the devices, took me a good hour to find the modem driver, but the machine runs just fine now. I didn’t try to get the store files running today though, since the one program has a utility on it that stamps something from the hard drive into a file called ‘reset.exe’, which can only be deleted by a tech at the POS manufacturer. I am sure that I will have it all up and working by Monday, but I am so pissed that Computers and Things used the wrong hard drive that I just had to bitch.

The “Computers and Things” that I am talking about is located in Casa Grande, Arizona. They are a bunch of shysters. Do not ever take your PC to them. Unless, of course, you enjoy paying hundreds of dollars for extremely inadequate service. They will take your money for sure, what you get in return is a computer that is just as broken as the day you walked in. Broken a bit differently, of course, but, broken is broken. They also offer the c2i2.com internet access, which is as worthless as they are. I went through c2i2 for internet access for about a year, I could never keep a connection for more than a half hour. Stay Away.

Meta; PC; Games

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Okay, so just an open question here. Please do respond if you have any personal knowledge on this issue.

Since the problems (conveniently discussed below) with my old PC continue, I decided to try to find some other sorts of malware/trojan/virus removal programs. Most of which I got from download.com. Here is the problem: They all give you a ‘free trial version’ which will show you all sorts of malicious crap on your machine, but not a damn one will actually remove it unless you pay for the program first. But, you see, I wouldn’t be looking for a new program to remove this shit if the current programs I have could do it… Currently all of the programs that I have to remove this sort of thing completely freeze the PC when the trojans in the registry are being removed. They simply will not do it. How in the hell does a company expect me to pay 30 bucks for their product when they won’t even let me see if it will actually do the job that it was designed for? It is like I just said to my wife, no one would ever expect you to buy a pretty new car just based on looks, they always give you a test drive.

I do understand that in the world of computer software it would be far too easy simply steal the products, hell I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro that is on something like day 1246 of my 30 day trial period (I actually did buy the license for it, but lost it on a system restore and never bothered to register it again). Isn’t there some way that they can make it possible to actually use the software before purchase? I was thinking that maybe it could quarantine all of the objects, even if only for 24 hours, to let you run any system scan you want to make sure that it actually got rid of the crap. Then, if you don’t purchase the license, it just reinstalls all the crap that it got rid of. There has to be some way that you can actually test this type of software before laying out cash for it.

The open question is: Do you know of any programs that will actually remove the trojans from the registry before making me pay for the program? Or, failing that, a program that will simply give me the actual path name so that I can do it manually?

Any help would be appreciated

It is Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Well you may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I posted anything here. No real reason why, well I guess there actually are a couple of reasons why, just they aren’t very good reasons. The main reason is that I just really didn’t feel like it. The other reason is just a lack of interest stemming from very little response to what I do write. I never expected that I would be getting hundreds of emails every day, but I would have thought that I could have generated a hundred in the course of a year, which did not happen.

As the anniversary for my site approached I briefly thought about not renewing the domain and giving up altogether. Why I decided against that is something I may never know. I guess I really do enjoy having the site when there is something on my mind that I really want to bitch about. It is a pretty liberating feeling to know that you can throw all your opininons out there for the world to see, regardless of the fact that only a handfull of the world ever actually read them.

This is all self-inflicted of course. If I had chosen to do something other than feature a couple of stories that I wrote a long time ago, like, say, have an actual theme, or actual content, it might make the readership swell a bit. Unfortunately, my only expertise is in the butchering of deceased bovines, I doubt that this would make for very stimulating reading for anyone who was not in the industry. I could spend more time commenting on news items, but that has been done to death IMHO and done far better than I could do it anyway. If I was really interested in generating some hits I could simply feature a Porn Pick of the Day, as it seems that the only search strings that result in hits to my site have the word porn in them.

When I made my decision to keep the site open, I made another decision at the same time. I am not likely going to ever be back to doing a daily update. That being the case I am going to quit wasting the time to save each page individually. I am going to start having a weekly update page with any posts made during the week separated by Horizontal lines. The latest update will always be at the top, and if the page seems to go too long I will add handy linking to the particular days (not that I forsee this as being necessary at my current posting schedule). This will have the added benefit of making it easier for me to set up an archive system, if I ever get off my ass and try to get caught up with that. The major benefit of this (for me) will be to have multiple posts on the same page, thus people who only visit once a week (and never click any links) may actually find something worth reading and, hopefully, commenting about. It’s my fantasy damn it! I can pretend to believe anything!

• Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I treated my wife to dinner at a local place and we exchanged cards. Of course we actually exchanged gifts on Friday night, as we both bought each other computer software, and they were both newer titles, and we didn’t expect that either of them would work correctly on the old PC. Boy were we ever right, but more on that later. The games that were exchanged were Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 , which she bought for me, and Leisure Suit Larry – Magna Cum Laude which I bought for her.

If you have never played any of the Leisure Suit Larry titles, you should know that it is not exactly the type of gift that you should buy for a woman unless you are very sure that she has the sense of humor to appreciate it. The entire premise of the game is that you are a guy, a real loser, and the entire game is spent trying to get women to have sex with you. This lends itself to a lot of hilarious situations, and it is one of the most entertaining series of games I have ever played. The wife also loves the humor and situational comedy, that is why I felt confident to buy it for her, as a Valentine’s day gift no less. I even went so far as to pay extra for the uncut and uncensored version, just to gurantee the most humorous gaming experience. Yes, it is fun. I would highly recommend it.

The latest Roller Coaster game is pretty sweet as well. They completely changed the interface and I have been having a hell of a time learning the new commands, but it has so many more options that it makes up for it all. The single best part of it is the option to ride the rides. That lets me actually get onto the roller coaster and see why the people don’t like to ride them. It took me a while to figure out how to import the roller coasters I designed in the other games, but once I did I was easily able to see why no one wanted to ride them.

One of the coasters that I built has an intensity rating that is about 24 (which the game calls ‘ultra extreme’) and having seen it run through on the pc screen, I can see why. There is probably not a span of more than a half a second where there is not an inversion, there are so many loops and corkscrews that I lost count, and it is a launched coaster; launched directly downhill. I can see myself having a lot of fun with this game just trying to make the most fucked up riding experience (for me at the monitor). The strange thing is that when you sit down in the chair and watch the ride, you feel yourself leaning into the corners (at least I did, but that may have been just since it was such a new experience). Definitely a very enjoyable game. I will probably write more about it later, after I have gotten a bit more used to the interface and all of the available options.

Getting back to the issues with the old PC. The old PC only has a 466mhz processor, but it does have 256mb RAM, a 64mb 3d video card and a 40gig hard drive. It meets most of the requirements for games that are coming out today, the only one that it really lacks is the processor. The thing is that all of the titles will install and run on it, then randomly freeze. Not like just run really slow and choppy, but complete lock up. It didn’t seem to me that it should do that if the processor was just a bit slow…

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to figure out just what the hell the problem was. I found that by running Ad Aware from safe mode I was able to remove a lot of crap that I wasn’t able to do while in normal Windows (98) mode. Then, via AntiVirus.com, I found that I have two Trojans in my Registry. The unfortunate part of that is that it doesn’t actually tell you anything other than a name (which a search of my pc did not find a match to). I downloaded a Registry Editor from Download.com and got the same result. If you know anything about computers, you should see where this is going.

The only way that I am able to get rid of the trojans (which are both just spyware, but they are memory resident) is to boot into safe mode and run Ad Aware. Then I have to go to either a normal or clean boot, either options is going to load the Windows Registry, thus reinstalling the damn spyware. If I knew the actual command lines for the damn things I could just go into the Registry and delete them myself. Problem is that if the trial version of the Registry Editor told you the command lines you would never need to actually pay for it. I am certainly not going to pay the $29.95 to buy the Registry Editor for this PC, since it may or may not actually be worth that much at this point, but I sure would like to be able to get rid of those damn PC slowing trojans.

I actually have a ‘rescue disc’ for the pc in question ( the one that I am typing on right now, as it were) which could restore the entire thing back to factory settings. There are many problems with that option, most of which are not all that serious, but one is horrible. I could get past any of the problems with most of the after market stuff, like the cd burner, the video card, all of that. The problem is with the hard drive. When I bought the 40gig hard drive for this pc, it took me several hours of fucking around in the BIOS to get it to work properly and recognize the size of the drive. The drive did not come with any sort of an instruction manual, so I had to do a long guess and check game to get it to work in the first place (not to mention that I had to modify a cable to get the thing plugged into the motherboard, since the motherboard did not support this type of drive). That is something that I am really not planning to do again, unless it is obviously necessary.

If you happen to be privy to information about removing trojans from the registry of a windows 98 system without simply wiping out and re-installing the software, please do tell.

That is all for today. Tune in at some future point for more…

Existential epiphone

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I posted a couple of things over the last few days that I am sure that no one ever read. Keeping in that spirit, I want to relay to you today an anecdote of sorts. It is not a story, as it has no real beginning or ending but, it is a story of personal triumph(?) over adversity.

I will get right to it.

When I walked into my home tonight, I just marveled at it. I am not completely sure why; It is the same house that I slept in last night, and the same house that I left this morning when I went to work. Somehow, though, it hit me a whole lot different tonight. I have been kicking this around in my head for the last several hours and I have yet to figure out why it was just now, today, that I had this feeling.

Now we must go back in time.

The year was 1990. I was living with my Father in Oregon, while both of my siblings were living with Mom in Arizona. The reason that I was still living with Dad, while the siblings were both with Mom, came right down to opportunity. I was (not only by my own testimony, but also mentioned by many of my high school teachers) a pretty intelligent child. I had very high hopes for myself. It was my goal to graduate High School, then go on to college to get a degree. My Ultimate goal had always been to work in Micro-Technology. That was what I wanted for myself and for my parents, I wanted to make them proud.

When my Father died (on Christmas Eve in 1990), it threw my future into a downward spiral. Not that his death had anything to do with the events that transpired, more that I made a lot of irrational decisions in the wake of his death. I, and I alone, chose to continue living in Oregon. I know that my Mother was not happy with that decision, but, at the time I had been dating a girl steadily for several years. I didn’t want to throw that relationship away to go live in a shack with my Mom and brothers… I was in love… That type of love that never works out and always ends up on the evening news…

I also had a weird notion that Dad was going to come back (I was sixteen at the time, mind you, you have lots of weird notions at that age), so I figured that if I did things that I knew he didn’t approve of he would surely show up to scold me. This was not an idea without merit, mind you, I did this on a lot of occasions with great success(not after he was dead of course). There were several times when he wasn’t yet home from a night of drinking by the following morning. Being worried about his safety, and with no way to contact him, I would just take one of his cars out for a joy ride. Alomost invariably he would show up only minutes after I put the car away. That was sort of what I was hoping would happen after he died, even though I really knew that he really wasn’t ever coming back.

The first thing that began to suffer was my education; With a lack of discipline I was cutting a lot of classes. I also was working full time at my job to try to make ends meet while waiting for Social Security to start sending a check. In the 20/20 of hindsight, I know that I really could/should have been going to classes everyday, funny how a sixteen-year-old mind doesn’t look further into the future than the weekend.

The next thing that happened was that I started drinking, heavily. That is a malady that I am sorry to say I still have to this day. Today it is in some sort of control though, while back then it certainly wasn’t. I lost one job because of my drinking; Failing to show up because I was hung over actually. I think that the drinking probably also had a great deal to do with why my wife to be left me, at which point it only got worse.

By 1994, I had been drinking like you would never believe, lost my wife to be, lost my job, got a DWI, and just generally didn’t really give a fuck about life. I spent some time living out of a friend’s van, sleeping under freeway overpasses, basically just a vagrant. I did eventually get another job which afforded me the luxury of renting a friend’s garage, which was not insulated in any way and had a horribly leaky roof. At that time I was also having to attend some faux AA meetings, which I had to pay for, my driver’s license had been revoked, and I was horribly in debt from various legal problems, as well as a lot of bad checks (mostly written by my legal guardian, but with my name on the account). I was at the point where if I were to miss a payment I was going to jail, not just for a day but until the entire amount of the debt to the state had been repaid, being that you only get a couple of bucks a day for time served, I would have been there for a very long time.

When I lost that job my life changed forever. Not to say that I was some sort of cowardly pussy running away from my debts or anything like that, more like I was some cowardly pussy that was trying to buy myself a bit of time to figure out what to do about the debts; I skipped the state. This was no small undertaking, I didn’t even have enough money to buy a bus ticket. My mother sent me the money to buy a bus ticket, but since I had no I.D. (when I say they revoked my license, I mean the physically took it away from me), I had to cash the check at one of those “check cashing” places, where they took 10% of the check for themselves. That meant that I had to sell the one posession that I had that meant anything to me, my guitar, to make up the difference. I then traded what stereo equipment I had (a receiver, cassete player and cd player) for a folding garment luggage type thing (as I had no luggage).

The day that I stepped onto the bus I was carrying only that bag. Inside that bag I had exactly three shirts, two jeans, a pair of shorts, a couple of tanktops, and a couple dozen tapes. Nothing else, really, that was all I had when I stepped onto that bus. I did have a walkman, which I was wearing at the time, but that was it. My enitre life’s work, for the first twenty years could easily be fit into a single overnight bag.

Once I arrived in Arizona, I had a job within a week. I still have that job today. While it might not be the most glorious job, it is my job and I take it pretty seriously. I went from living with my mother to living on my own within six months or so. With the help of my boss, I was able to start putting money into a Mutual Fund account, while still trying to take care of the problems I was having in the state that I had deserted. Within a couple of years I was able to pay off the debts (well my half) from the bounced checks and the legal problems. Sure I was living in a little studio apartment, using only used soup cans for both bowls and glasses, but I was getting a better start, albeit a bit later than hoped. My personal investment really soared during the ‘tech-boom’ of the late ’90’s, and I ended up far better for the investment.

To fast forward several years…

I am now very happily married, my wife makes almost 50% more than I do, and we have been making payments on our own home for the last three years. We don’t have any children (mutual agreement), but we have two dogs and a very large yard. We are happy, the dogs are happy, hell even the fish and cockatiels (we have seven cockatiels, 3 of the boys are for sale if you are interested) seem happy. This is a situation that I would never have imagined I would ever be in, at least based on my status when I originally moved down here, but here I am.

So, getting back to the walking into the house and having an epiphone, I really am a very lucky man. The trail that led me here is exactly the same trail that leads a lot of men to suicide (something that I tried three times, but only once did I really hope it worked). I am living proof that you can overcome any sort of adversity and go on to be successful. Not that I really think that home ownership proves success, more that I think that happiness is a sign of success. My wife and I are happy with no children, two dogs, and a home that is ours (well it belongs to the mortgage company for the next 27 years, but as long as I don’t miss a payment..). We may never be really wealthy, likely we will never be really wealthy, but we do have this little spot on the earth that we call our own. We have the fishes, and the birds, and the dogs, and that is enough for us. Especially when I think about what I came from to end up at this level; Life is beautiful.

A friend (knowing that I could have prevented the death of my father) recently asked me, “If you could go back in time, would you have made that call?” This is a horrible question to ask, but one that I really had to think about… If my father was still alive, I would likely have gone on to my career in micro technology, I would probably have married the girl that I had been with before his death, and My Dad would still be alive! The other side of that question is that if my Dad had not died, I would not have been subjected to all of the things that I have been. I would never have left Oregon. I would never have met my wife. I would never have been in this place at this time. That is a question that I certainly can not answer, yet, I can say that my life now is far better than I had ever hoped. So, would I change the past to make my father still be alive? I would only do that if the circumstances that put me where I am now remained the same. Which means that I likely would do the same thing if I had it all to do again. I dunno. My father’s life (at the point of his death) was pretty miserable. To trade his miserable life for my happy life is not the question, the question is, “Would I throw away what I have now to see my Dad alive?” I really don’t think that I could.

Sorry, Dad, I am happy and wouldn’t change this life for all the world.

Sideways

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Just a quick note to mention that today marks the one year anniversary of my little bitch site. Happy Birthday to me!

•My wife and I wanted to go to see a movie today, we still had one free guest pass and it expires at the end of January. The movie that we wanted to go see was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is currently only at 69% positive at rottentomatoes.com. Not that we really cared what the critics thought of it, we both wanted to see it regardless. Unfortunately, due to arriving at the theatre only fifteen minutes early, and an enormously long line, the show sold out before we were able to get tickets. That is where things started to spiral out of control. Let this be a lesson to all of us that we should buy the tickets online and pick them up inside the theatre, it would have saved us fifteen minutes -thus getting us into the movie we were hoping to see (which wasn’t an option for us anyway, since we had a free pass we had to go to the ticket window).

I did have a plan b, which sucked as it turns out. I had seen a trailer for Sideways recently and it looked pretty good. Not to mention that it won 2 Golden Globes and is nominated for 5 Academy Awards. All of that and it is currently at 96% positive at rottentomatoes.com. It also had a showing at the theatre we went to at the same time as the movie that we wanted to see, it seemed like such a good idea at the time…

This is the first movie, that I have seen recently, that the critics at rotten tomatoes got this wrong. Sideways is quite possibly the worst piece of cinematic shit that has ever hit the big screen. No, I am not exaggerating. Movies of this caliber are rarely ever made, and the few that are are always direct to video. This level of trash has probably never been seen on a big screen. This film makes Amazon Women on the Moon (which I loved, BTW) look like cinematic gold, and believe me it would take a real stinker to do that. Unlike Amzon Women on the Moon, Sideways won’t even attract a cult following; It is simply too horrible, in too many ways -yet, not in a campy or funny manner. Simply put, Shit is the best single word that could be used to describe it. To use more than one word; the Shit the day after binge drinking and a lot of Mexican food.

There is a possibility that my unbridled hatred opinion about this movie is based a lot on expectation. The trailer that I saw for it, which is vastly different than the trailer at the official website, made it look like it was going to be a comedy romp. I went into the theatre expecting to see a couple of guys getting wild in the days before a wedding. Like an extended Bachelor party where awkward and zany things happen, but, in the end it all works out for the best. That is certainly not this movie at all, in fact it is almost the polar opposite.

I hesitate to call it a drama since that would imply a plot, something that was very sparse in this flick. As a matter of fact, the official trailer shows the entire plot of the movie in about thirty seconds, yet the movie is over two hours long! Two very long hours of mostly stunned silence, with an occasional laugh that is mostly forced since you had to pay for the ticket. I would highly recommend the trailer for Sideways, but, for the love of random fluctuations of time and space god, do not watch the film. Not now, not on video, not on pay per view, not on cable, just never watch it. It is that bad. Not that I am bitter or anything.

Now for a plot spoiler. Stop reading right now if you plan to watch the movie. Two guys go to Napa Valley a week before one of them is to marry. The groom to be wants to get laid. He does. Then he gets married. The other guy doesn’t want to get laid since he still loves his ex-wife. He gets laid. Then is the best man at the other guy’s wedding. His ex-wife is now pregnant with her new husband’s child. His book doesn’t get published. He knocks on a door. The end. I am sure something else happens; I vaguely remember a game of golf at some point. But that is the plot in a nutshell.

I have been trying to understand the critical acclaim for this film ever since I left the theatre. The only thing that I can come up with is that maybe the first guy that reviewed it gave it glowing praise, then other reviewers saw it and thought it sucked -yet, they saw the first review and were worried that maybe they just weren’t intelligent enough to understand it, so they gave it praise as well. The problem with that logic is that Sideways is certainly not some high brow humor that only someone with an IQ of 170 can understand, it is just a really lame movie. I suppose it really is like the Channing Pollock quote says, “A critic is a legless man who teaches running.” Which might not even accurately describe it since the critic gets paid to watch the film and then give his/her opinion about it; That would be more like paying Bill Gates to critique Microsoft’s performance, there may be a bias there.

I know that I am basically the lone gun here, hell, Ebert practically gave the movie a blow-job. I hated it, my wife hated it, and I might be the only one in the entire world that actually puts that hatred out there to be seen. This movie sucked! It is not a ‘guilty pleasure’, it is not a love story, it is not a comedy, it doesn’t have an actual plot (most of the time the only thing that holds it all together is the fact that they display every new day in type, on a black screen, to let you know that the movie is still happening), it is that bad. Critics be damned! I would rather put Tiger Balm on my nuts (again, and a long story of accidental encounter) than to watch this garbage again!

So, by the standard of the critic, I guess that would be 4 out of 5 stars?

Garfield; Dog in heat; Social security

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Normally I wouldn’t waste my time bashing a comic strip. Particularly not Garfield, since I really don’t ever read the comic. But, while in my daily surfing routine (internet that is), I happened to see a link to the latest Garfield comic, so I decided to check it out. It wasn’t even slightly humorous.

Just for fun I decided to take a peek at all of the Garfield comics from the month of January to see if there was anything there worth reading/viewing. Unfortunately, Flux’s bitch about Garfield, on BlackChampagne.com was 100% accurate: The comic strip isn’t even trying any more.

Here I offer up as evidence three strips which I gleaned from the internet. Their sole purpose to show you that I did indeed subject myself to all of the comics for the month. Well, that and proof that the strip isn’t even trying.



Note how in the first strip there appear to be 3 identical frames, the only change being Jon’s mouth? Then compare the Garfield from the first strip with the one in the third strip, do you think he looks a bit similar as well? Also the Jon from the second strip bears a pretty striking resemblance to the Jon from the third strip, and not just because it is the same guy.

There is toy that both my wife and I remember fondly, it was available in the late ’70’s to early ’80’s, I can not seem to find a link to the toy since I can’t remember the manufacturer, or the name of the toy. It is similar to This. The idea is that you have a background ‘board’ (which is a scene from your favorite show; Scooby doo, the Smurfs, you name it) and then you have decals that you can stick on it. You can make millions of different scenes, but the characters are always going to look exactly the same. When I got the G.I. Joe version of the peel and stick thing, it actually made it so that you could position the arms and legs (since the decals were separate from the torso). Now I am beginning to believe that Jim Davis might have died some time ago, and some jack-ass with an old Garfield peel and stick toy is ruining the strip. At least I wish that I was believing that, unfortunately I seem to be believing that Davis just enjoys the paycheck so much that he quit caring about quality at least 15 years ago.

As luck would have it, I did just find the type of book that I was looking for. All you have to do is do a google search for reusable sticker book. Who would have thought the answer would be so simple. No wonder someone was able to find an old Garfield sticker book and take over the strip.

• In other news, our smaller puppy (Zelda) has been in heat for the last week or so. She has the swollen parts to prove it! Our larger puppy (Warlock) seemed to finally sense this only moments ago, as he mounted up and started humping her. He doesn’t have any balls though, which leaves me a bit curious as to why is even trying to give it a go. Only slightly curious. And he has declined repeated requests to be interviewed about the subject, his stock response has been a simple bark.

• The idea of making Social Security a private fund has been on my mind since it was announced. The reason for that (it being on my mind) is that if it were in private accounts it would be in the stock market and based on an individual’s own decisions. If the Technology Boom that happened in the late ’90s, and the subsequent, catastrophic drop of tech stocks a few years ago, can make any point at all, it is this: Your average investor is really dumb.

Even during the technology boom there were people that were afraid to jump on, knowing that it could come crashing down at any second -which was true. Problem is that those investors watched as the other guys got in on the ground floor and made millions. That made your average investor want to get into the market when it was already terribly overpriced, leaving many the average investor broke; Most of the more intelligent investors would have gotten out long before the average guy tried to get in. Which leads pretty nicely into this piece that I saw on the Washington Monthly today.

I try not to be at all political around here. But the thought of tax breaks for the rich will lead directly to tax hikes for the middle class, and that is something that I find fundamentally wrong. I hate taxes myself (I do have to pay a fair share for my capital gains and dividends every year), possibly more than the very wealthy, but I can not see giving tax breaks to the highest earners when you know it will lead to tax hikes for the low/middle earners. If you follow along that scenario, eventually the low/middle earners will all be in poverty while the uppper class is in luxury. That will always result in a dictatorship.

Isn’t it funny how the U.S. administration seems to be trying to force us back a couple of centuries every time they pass a bill?

Gotta go. I have a brother who is gay. I don’t want this post to get intercep……