Sometimes you have to boil a cd rom to flatten it out and get it to be readable. Usually this happens when you get a demo disk in a magazine. Plop it in some boiling water for 30 seconds and presto! You’ve got game…

These people couldn’t quite figure it out though. If boiling works… why not just skip the water and toss it in the microwave?

oops…

…this movie would have been really good. That’s kind of mean, maybe she just had a crap script to work with. I just didn’t believe her at all. No one ever would have acted like she did in those situations, maybe they would have but not nearly as chipper and stupidly. Just bad acting with a mediocre script I guess.

I don’t really like Robin Williams either, and I really didn’t like his character in this movie at all.

I think if I had written it I would have just made Robin Williams a shrink, and made some random guy be the priest and had him make them take the shrink’s class. I really didn’t like how they portrayed “the church” in this movie. (For instance, at one point you see he has hollowed out a bible to store cheetos in it)

If they had taken out Mandy Moore, and put the girl who played “Pam” from “The Office” in there, it would have been way better. I think she could have pulled off the lines and done a better job portraying the character. It had three other people from the office do cameos though, which were all pretty much hilarious (especially Kevin).

One thing was sort of irritating/refreshing, you hated Mandy’s character in the movie, and really like Jim’s. They really made the girl out to be a bee eye itch, and made the guy out to be cool. Must have been written by a man. Or maybe that’s how I perceived it since I’m a guy, maybe for a girl you would have thought Jim was being an idiot and Mandy was being cool. My wife didn’t really say either way…

So, if I were to rate it on laughs alone (and ignore the horrible dialog/acting in a few places), I’d give it a 7.5. There were some really darn funny parts. It was really clean too. I was expecting the obligatory stripper filled bachelor party, and they even referenced it, but they didn’t ruin the movie by throwing in pointless nudity. You could conceivably watch this one with your teenage kids. If only they hadn’t made the priest into a heathen…

No, don’t bother looking, you won’t find reasons 1, 2 & 3 on the blog. I haven’t quite decided what they are yet. Something to do with listening to musac in an air conditioned office, getting paid decently to do something I love, and reading/writing in code…

But reason #4 is that I love to make diagrams. Here is my latest masterpiece. I spent the last 3 hours on it, and I actually enjoyed it so much I worked through my lunch.

I did it as part of my documentation process for a website I’m working on, and because I was getting an error with my paypal payment. For some reason the paymentId wasn’t getting inserted into the right table and I couldn’t figure out why. Once I mapped this puppy out I saw it in a heart beat. Somehow I had two identical variables with different names. I instantiated them both to ” ” and then set one to the payment Id, then I inserted the other one into the table. So the payment id dropped off the face of the earth once the page closed, and the table received a blank entry. Oops. That’s what happens when you rename crucial database columns in the middle of dev and forget to propagate the changes to your code fully…

So I’m sure everyone has seen this and that I am the only loser who visited his site for the first time today. He’s kinda funny. Reminds me of Strong Bad…

This one is about pirates of the caribean:

Ok, since this is my third post within 24 hours, I’ll make it really short.

Winamp is the bomb.

Yeah… I just said “the bomb” because it hearkens back to the original days of winamp when it’s sole purpose was to play those newfangled “mp3″ things that you bought a cd of 500 of em from your friend, back when Napster was first coming out and you were waiting an hour per song for a download.

Back then winamp was literally a dinosaur. It hogged your ram and loaded you up with spyware. A real godzilla for sure.

Now? Well… now it’s a musical paradise.

I have GDTunes for my google desktop so that in an instant I can skip or even RATE songs. I have my playlist docked and auto-hiding to the left side of my screen, so that at the flick of a mouse I can view the next 60 songs that are going to play, and re-arange and delete with ease. I have the player docked and auto-hiding to the top of my screen so that in a split second I can access the main program.

How does this compare to windows media player (WMP)? I’d rate WMP 2.5 stars out of 5. I would rate winamp 4 out of 5.

Windows media player had the ability to run from your status bar, which was cool, except that it didn’t let you rate music from there. So you couldn’t just listen and rate so that at a later date you could just play all of your 4 and 5 starred music. Well, with the winamp/google desktop combination, I get all of the functionality of a status bar docked WMP and the ability to rate the songs as I listen without opening some big window to stop what I’m doing. PLUS I can edit/rearange/choose my playlist (WMP playlist system is a NIGHTMARE) with ease, again without opening some big window.

This will definitely increase my productivity…

So immediately following my last post I took a little break from programming and typed in “scrubs” on youtube. One of the first clips I clicked on was one of my favorite scrubs moments. ’specially after justing having finished reading “Wild at Heart”.

By the way, this is from the “musical” episode of scrubs (I think it was like sweeps week or something). The woman in the bed has a “rare brain condition” where she perceives everything as if people were singing or something…

It’s a hilarious song, plus it illustrates a normal healthy very close friendship between two guys without them having to be gay. It’s refreshing after shows like sex & the city, and will & grace… It’s rare to see this kind of guy friendship on tv. Last time I can think of was… Chandler and Joey on friends.

Sometimes programming (and textbooks) makes me laugh (after I finish crying). Especially when I read this line in my SQL textbook:

“Oracle’s query language has structure…but they are basically the normal rules of careful English speech and can be readily understood. SQL…is an astonishingly capable tool…using it does not require an programming experience.”

So, all of you non-programmers out there. It seems then that (according to my textbook) you should all, with extreme clarity and speed, know EXACTLY what this query does:

UPDATE PARTICIPANT
SET renewal_date = (
TO_DATE(
TO_CHAR((
SELECT ADD_MONTHS((
SELECT DECODE(‘1′,
(SELECT SIGN((
TO_DATE(TO_CHAR(PARTICIPANT.renewal_date, ‘MM/DD/YYYY’), ‘MM/DD/YYYY’)
) – (
TO_DATE(TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, ‘MM/DD/YYYY’), ‘MM/DD/YYYY’)
)) AS greater_equal_less FROM dual
), PARTICIPANT.renewal_date, SYSDATE
) AS the_date FROM PARTICIPANT WHERE userid = ‘testName’
), 12) AS the_future FROM dual
), ‘MM/DD/YYYY’
), ‘MM/DD/YYYY’)
)
WHERE userid = ‘testName’;

Right? I mean, if SQL is so easy to understand that it’s just like speaking English to the computer, then I don’t even need to tell you what this does, right?

It’s overly optimistic statements in introductions to complex programming language textbooks like that that make middle and upper management who take basic classes believe that programming is “easy” and “quick” and that you should be able to construct the above SQL in about 15 minutes. It took me a little over an hour and a half (with a few breaks). Granted, I have only been using SQL for TWO YEARS so I guess I’m just a noob…

By the way, if someone knows the “right” way to do what I am trying to do above (in oracle) please let me know…

Oh, and all the query does is adds 12 months to the renewal date of a member. If their renewal date is in the past, it just adds 12 months to today’s date.

Ok, so today I am developing a site with paypal, which means every time I make a change and am ready to test it, I have to go through the process of “redeploying” the site. This means sitting and staring blankly at the screen for right around 5 minutes (I wrote some scripts to do all the work for me, which means now instead of typing and clicking and dragging and mindless drone work, I just sit there bored while the computer does it all).

Well, I got tired of spider solitaire and free-cell, and since there are two unanswered B4s I didn’t want to make another, and no one is blogging today… sooo…it’s time to watch 80s music videos.

We start off with “You can call me Al”. Boring. Not even really funny at all. In fact, just skip it (I’ll still put it so you don’t have to go see for yourself if you are really curious). It looks like they snagged Chevy Chase for 5 minutes, and shot the whole thing one time, and that was it. Just him and Paul Simon in some chairs. Moving on…

One of my all time favorite songs, Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, and all I can say is… huh?(in the Tim Allen home improvement sort of way) Take a look for yourself, one of the weirdest things I have ever seen:

Another one of my all time favorites, again from Bonnie Tyler “Holding out for a hero” and this one is just funny. There are actually a lot of fan renditions that are a lot better, but here is her version:

Now for Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time”. I’m just shocked… I couldn’t even watch more than like 30 seconds before I had to stop to keep from laughing at the HORRIBLE outfits/style. hilarious. I’m not even sure what the heck is going on in the video… What’s with the dog statue, and why is she snuggling with it???

ok after that winner, I had to go for Cyndi’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. Check it out! 80s computer animations! Oh, and take a look at her dad, lol. Wow… Like Hagrid…

Lol… Heart “These Dreams”… This video is horrible. Just watch like the first 20 seconds to laugh at their horrible hair and how they look like they are rocking out on their guitars even though it doesn’t match the music AT ALL…

Belinda Carlisle “Heaven is a place on earth”. Ok, and this one I don’t know what is going on. Children in masks holding globes, belinda carlisle running around singing to you, and kissing some guy. Interesting contrast with the other ones since she looks normal. No crazy hair and makeup.

ROFL. “The Safety Dance” from Men Without Hats. He looks so angry. They keep making the little “S” with their arms. This is just classic…

and so is this (Turk is awesome)…

Pat Benatar “Love Is a Battlefield”, This one is a shoutout for my wife (she likes this song, doubt she would like the video though). It’s so dramatic… Check out the dramatic climax with the “intimidating” should shaking rofl…

Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. No… just… no… I actually couldn’t finish this one without just ruining the song. Pony tail, pink shirt, gyrating, soo sooo gay. But the black guys in tuxes dancing in front of the port-o-pot are hilarious. The video doesn’t even make sense…

lol, this one is actually kind of funny… kind of ‘crazy’ too. Thomas Dolby “She Blinded Me With Science”

And once again Wham! Shows us why you shouldn’t watch men’s music videos from the 80s… If those shorts were any shorter… well… let’s just say they are deserving of the name ’shorts’. Oh, and “choose life”.

Ahahahaha! Whitesnake “Here I go Again”. This dude borrowed Bonnie Tyler’s wig, I swear. So intense… (Don’t miss the giant pink boots the chick on the left is wearing… wait, is that a girl? Can’t really tell, everyone’s hair looks the same…)

Hey, this one is actually kind of cool. Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”

And now, the first video ever played on MTV: The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star”. Not that great, but funny to see how people are always afraid when new technology comes out. If anything video made the radio star more pupular… I heard this band made this song because they were so ugly they were afraid that when music videos got popular they couldn’t get big with them because people wouldn’t want to see them.

Ok well, that’s it. I’m done with that part of my project, so no more down time. Hope you enjoyed…

I don’t know whether to sign up immediately, or start weeping uncontrollably…

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/ferriss-book-outsourcing.htm