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I’m fine with improbability in movies.  1 in a million shots, superhuman sniping abilities, random things exploding that have no business exploding, I can deal with all of them.  The blatantly impossible, I will not suffer.

Joe and I saw Quantum of Solace and in one part the protagonist his temporary partner jump from a plane and fight to deploy the parachute.  I’m fine with the fact that they happened to extend their fall by dropping into a sink hole, I’m fine with the fact that a plane down an engine was able to climb skyward, I’m fine with the fact that a Douglas DC-3 was able to out maneuver both a helicopter and a SF .260.  But the fact that the parachute was deployed within a second of impact and neither person was harmed enraged me.  Not a f&#%ing scratch.  I litterally yelled in the theatre “he should be a puddle!”

Some other notes from Quantum of Solace:

  • There were six different people listed in the Costuming credits.  It’s James Bond, go to Costco and buy a 24 pack of Tuxedos and you’ll be fine.
  • I want to become a glassmaker in a town filming a Bond film.  So many windows, glass tables, chandeliers, and french doors are destroyed that one could power a small guild.
  • The director shouldn’t receive nearly as much credit as the stunt coordinator.  Anyone who can arrange a chase scene through a cathedral under a church under construction, a horsetrack and the roofs of Milan has far more skill and creative power than Quinton Tarantino.
  • Good thing Bond only subdues people that are the same suit size as him.  Infiltrating a dwarf convention or a symposium on Marfan Syndrome would be impossible.
  • There’s also an end scene I’m miffed at but that’d be a bit of a spoiler.
  • I’m glad I have a better phone than James Bond.
  • The movie has the same amount of plot action of a two hour movie but jams it into 20 minutes of exposition.  I’ve talked to four people about the movie but everyone’s missed 1/2 of what happened.  I had to consult the Wikipedia article during the movie to keep characters straight.

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After a few days of sitting on the countertop the drippings from the twin turkey breasts should probaby have been moved.  The fat had gelled, which I don’t think should happen.  I took the tray of fat outside and dumped it down our hill that leads to the corpse of pine trees where most food waste resides.   The meat Jello landed near the turkey carcass and I thought, like the turkey, it’d be picked clean by the fauna about the Robinson house.

About two hours later, on walking to the garage/hangar I saw a raccoon taking it’s first tentative licks at the wriggling mass of congealed fat only to stop and look at me saying “you expect me to eat this?  I’m better than that” before wandering off.  So now, there’s a slowly decaying mass of fat outside our house that none of our spoiled wildlife will touch.  On the plus side, the spring soap harvest should go well.

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Two years running I’ve broken the tape measure I received for Christmas.  Most recently I broke the one given to me by my brother’s girlfriend Amanda.  I got her a day-to-day calendar which she’s obviously exhausted.  If I can keep up breaking her gifts we may have figured out a solute to the problem of buying for a family member’s significant other.

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After my desktop reinstall farce I was caught bewildered when my laptop BSODed me on startup.  It couldn’t possibly be related to removing the hard drive while the computer was still on during a RAM upgrade.  No, not at all.  Boot CD after recovery disk failed to circumvent the BSOD until I hit up that it could be problems with the boot loader and that I should try another file system.  So I installed Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibix) and the format went splendidly.  Ubuntu was up and running in a jiff with no noticable errors, prancing about digital fields as per its namesake.  Then I inserted the Vista disk and I could see the computer frown “so soon?” it said.  Inviting me with prompt boot time, the freedom of an open source OS that I could cock-up to my hearts content, and really a much nicer default background than Vista.  But alas, I wanted my tablet interface I never used to work, and support for an office suite that I often replace with Notepad, and finally the knowledge that it’s slow but so is everyone elses.

Edit: Looks like the Ibex shit in the punch bowl.  It’s replaced boot loader, and now my computer’s shitting out something about GRUB errors.  It appears Linux can play hardball when it wants to.  I’ll get the best of him, I’ve yet to meet a hard drive that can resist the allure/destructive field lines of a neobdynium rare earth magnet.

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Team Interrobang has had a spate of people (we think) using wall hacks (ways to see through things you’re not supposed to, like concrete) to cheat in Team Fortress 2.  I talked to a high school friend about what he did to track cheaters when he ran a server he said he’d use a coordinate tracker to help make demos showing impossible shots and such.  I follow his instructions, jump into a game, he tells me the start command and suddenly I can see through everything.  His solution to dealing with wallhacks, was to run a better wallhack.  Shit.  Team Fortress has built in software that generates hashes of game files to find cheaters, I think I could hear his hack humping and ravashing the EXEs and DLLs that Valve monitors so, knowing I couldn’t wait for a normal shut down before I received the irrevocable title of “cheater”.  I ripped the power cord out of the wall.

Guess who’s got two thumbs and is going to spent Turkey Day scrubbing his hard drive with a rare-earth magnet?  This guy!

If the above was a little too technical for your taste, here’s a video of a warthog running into a lion.

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The conference room was packed today.  Jammed full of at least 40 people.  Why? Ladder training.  Well, that was the title of the lunch seminar, the power of free pizza such that everyone for one hour is mystefied by the mist-shrouded deathtrap that is the standard ladder.  When I walked by the slide was something like “Never let someone borrow your ladder” as if they were loaded weapons or someone one should horde for the coming apocalypse.  When I passed again, someone was passionately asking a question.  Like they had a ladder question their entire life and now, finally, the confusion could end.  But again, the pull of pizza was strong as everyone was glued to the screen as ladder mishaps were played and common ladder safety statistics that had been painstakingly assembled were shown.  I think we should see how far people will go for free pizza.

December: Shredder Safety Training
January: Stapler Safety Training
February: Glue Stick Safety Training
March: Chair Safety Training

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Exam MLC is an odd combination of life contingencies, properties of aggregate distributions and Markov Chains so goes back and forth between old retiring, old people walking picking up coins and old people dying.  There’s always a medium sample question where you have a bunch of old farts and you’re asked to determine the likelihood they’ll all die.  The group isn’t large enough to assume normal distribution of deaths nor small enough that you can grind it out by hand in a reasonable period of time so you have to use stupid tricks that all start “assume seven people are one person” but somehow work.  This one involved auto accidents and having no idea how to solve it swiftly wanted to put: “Probably that all 20 will die auto accidents before they’re 85 = 100%.  Bus accident.”  I know, I know.  I’ll revolutionize risk management.

There was a question that I’m pretty sure was written in doublespeak and no matter how many times I read it I couldn’t make it out.  It was something to the tune of “given accidents occur with the following intensity (equation) where each accident involves at least one victim, what’s the minimum average number of victims per accident.”
1) Minimum average is like saying “exact approximation” in that the words are fine next to each other but mean nothing.
2) Would the minimum be 1?  Almost all the answer were less than one.  Unless they were saying accident victims had it coming and should be counted as people.

The actual exam was fun if one enjoys being frisked for black market calculators and shims of paper.  The next exam will probably involve either a cavity search or a polygraph test.

Hazaa to professional development.

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I guess this is my second article about hidden archaeology.  The sink clogged, a lot.  My brother had made pumpkin “things” after unleashing fatal fury upon it.  I tried undoing the clog with two toilet plungers but as my surroundings acquired a petina of clogs past, toilet paper particles and the remains of my chicken chutney I realized the correction was beyond me.

My father and I unleashed the three horsemen of the sewage apocalypse of plunging, a drain snake and liquid plumber.  The drain snake pulled up some pumpkin parts, a piece of a mop head and furhtest down some plaster of paris which reflected a clear record back to early September.  The pumpkin seeds were from last week, the mop shards were from something I’ll simply call “The Accidental Floor Cleaning/Soap Disaster of October 2008 and the plaster of paris was from a failed demo piece for the early October Cub Day.

The drains are yet to be clogged and saying “Rotorooter” would be an order of magnitude worse in terms of lost manliness as asking for directions.  So there are two options, using a drain-cleaning concoction I call “the widow maker” that generates both explosive hydrogen and corrosive chlorine gas or to simply wait and pray.  I’m not much of praying man myself, so it looks like my dad’s going to have to smoke outside tomorrow.  If I come into work with no eyebrows, a swollen face but a clean fork, know I have won.

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Intel’s Atom processor intrigued, nay, called to me.  A 8 watt draw for a 1.6GHz dual core CPU making it the most efficient dual core processor for the desktop.  I changed the processor in my home server from the Pentium D.  The Pentium D was the least efficient processor ever created for home use pulling in a whopping 133 watts.  Legend has that systems that fluid used to watercool a Pentium D could poach eggs and fish.   Each Pentium D required its own coal-fired power plant and 3 fans to cool.  Mine was slung in a 45 lb behemoth that was 12″ x 24″ x 28″ and could be used as a fall out shelter.  Had I not opted for a four drive RAID array I could have put the entire new server in something the size of 2 math text books.

I’m not sure what to do with the old system.  It still works, much like one’s gas guzzling JEEP but I can’t think of much that could justify its continued existence.  Maybe it’s time to finally try Ubuntu.