trying to believe

We did it: We survived seven-and-a-half straight hours of Pauly Shore movies. Don’t ask why we did it. I doubt any of us could really explain it. But we did it.

I’m not sure how Scott and Patrick decided on it, but we watched them in this order: Jury Duty, In the Army Now, Son in Law, Bio-Dome, and Encino Man.

Seeing as I was the oldest out of the three of us, I was the only one who had seen all five movies in the theatre. (This isn’t something I’m exactly proud of…) Anyways, Patrick has already chimed in on his thoughts on things, so I thought I’d add my two cents… (Here’s how to interpret my ratings: 1 – Unholy Bile, 2 – Awful, 3 – Bad, 4 – Poor, 5 – So-So, 6 – Not bad, 7 – Good, 8 – Great, 9 – Fantastic, 10 – Perfect)

1. Bio-Dome 7/10 (Extra points for the brief and unexpected Tenacious D appearance in this movie.)
2. Encino Man 6/10 (Brendan Fraser went all out as the caveman. Pauly was actually quite the philosopher. It’s pretty bad when the Weasel is the wiser of two idiots.)
3. Son in Law 6/10 (Pretty good, well rounded movie.)
4. Jury Duty 5/10 (Meh… not great, but lots of great cameos.)
   
5. In the Army Now 5/10 (I didn’t hate it… and I certainly remembered liking it more the last time I watched it.)

The one thing I learned from watching all of these flicks again was that Pauly Shore wasn’t half bad… He was an icon back in his day… albeit a very annoying one. But his movies represent what was good (and bad) about the 90’s.

I am glad we didn’t decide to have a Steve Buscemi or Gilbert Godfried marathon. I probably would have killed someone if subjected to their flicks… Maybe next time…

I’ve been following Bryan Veloso for a couple of years now. He’s one of the most talented designers I’ve seen online. It saddens me to know that Avalonstar is offline… I’m not sure what’s going on, but I hope Bryan (and Jen) know that there are people praying for them… Hopefully they can work through whatever’s going on…

The last thing anyone’s heard from Bryan was a Twitter post three days ago:

says — It’s something that I can’t really control at the moment… not really in the mood to talk about it. Thanks for the concern though.

Between that blurb, and the note currently on the site, I’m definitely concerned for them.

Wow… now this truly is the very definition of irony:

Look over the descriptions of the following two houses and see if you can tell which belongs to an environmentalist:

HOUSE # 1:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and
natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

Which sounds like the home of someone more concerned with the environment?

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Anytime anything gets popular on the web, spammers exploit it. Case in point, I received a friend request from someone last night who’s sole purpose on Twitter was to show which chores they were working on, and provided a link to a web app they were promoting to help keep track of their chores. Umm, why would I want to read that? No thanks. Some people are a little more covert about it. One guy I was subscribed to started innocently enough… but then there was post after post about visiting a coffee shop and check out the coffee shop website and check out this blog and… Had to remove that person.

MySpace is infested with spam. Try viewing any bands’ MySpace profiles without wading through dozens upon dozens of “comments from friends” trying to solicit people to sign up for a VISA card or whatever…

YouTube is getting awful as well. No one cares about angels sleeping, or any of your retarded chain letters. No one wants to watch your video to learn how they can make money.

Stop breathing my air you venomous bloodsuckers! There are plenty of legitimate advertising opportunities that are out there if you are, in fact, running a legitimate business. The fact that so many of these idiots think its okay to try and sneak advertising into comments really blows my mind. Do you honestly believe I’m going to click your ads or respond to your chain letters?

Think again.

I’ve been really hard on Lost this season. I’ve been a devoted fan since the beginning, but I lost faith in the show when it started to lose direction. Honestly, I had pretty much given up on Lost. Tonight, the show redeemed itself. Here’s a short teaser of what was covered in tonight’s episode.

Lost 3×14: Exposé
Nikki and Paulo may seem to have just dropped out of the sky onto the mysterious island, but just like all the other survivors, they too have a story. At long last, their experiences on the island and what brought them there will be revealed. Hurley is suspicious of Sawyer’s involvement in an island mystery. Meanwhile, Sun learns the truth about her past kidnapping attempt by “The Others.”

On the surface, this episode had a sucky premise… I hated the idea of Nikki and Paulo coming out of nowhere to be introduced as main characters. It was a stupid move, and fans didn’t care for the decision much. But tonight proved that everything happens for a reason on the Island…

SPOILERS BELOW

(Jeremy, forgive me… but a lot of the points I made in our brief chat after the episode tonight would be perfect here…)

• Given the type of people Nikki and Paulo were and their penchant for keeping secrets… I thought tonight’s episode was pretty cool way to:
  1. validate the idea that they were there with the survivors from the very beginning.
     • One of the main things that pissed me off about them originally was that they appeared out of nowhere… and it was strongly suggested that they were Others… By placing them in scenes we’ve come to grow very familiar with, it validated their existence as part of the survivors
  2. validate their presence in key scenes leading up to tonight…
     • It didn’t make sense that they were even involved in finding the ‘?’ hatch. Locke, Sayid and Eko were obvious choices. Nikki and Paulo were not. Now that we know that they had been to the ? hatch before and Paulo used it’s facilities as a hiding place for some diamonds… it makes a lot of sense. Add to the fact that Paulo met Juliette and Ben way before anyone else was REALLY cool

  I don’t think the producers wasted an episode on proving and/or validating the presence of Nikki and Paulo… Yes, this episode “proved” they were with the original crash… and in an almost cheesy way, they were able to expand upon scenes they were in. It’s further proof that everything happens for a reason on the island…

  PLUS the fact that Charlie and Sawyer kidnapped Sun… leads me to believe that Charlie may have raped Sun (which would explain her pregnancy…) (I admit that might be a stretch… but Charlie did apologize for what he did to her. What he did is anyone’s guess…) To me, that was pretty big…

All I can say after tonight’s episode is Wow. Lost, you’ve won me back. Can’t wait until next week!

I hate advertising as much as the next person, but I quietly added Google AdSense to the site earlier this week. Right now, it’s only a test, and I’ve tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible: Ads only appears on individual post pages. If you happen to subscribe to my RSS feed, you probably won’t even notice.

What do you think about the addition of ads? Love em? Hate em? Let me know…

In the meantime, if you’d like to support this site, feel free to check out what some of the advertisers happen to be, umm, advertising…

If I didn’t have to have Microsoft Outlook 2007 installed on my system for testing purposes, I would uninstall it and burn the disks and packaging the installer came on. I’m not kidding. Outlook 2007 is one of the worst “upgrades” I have ever used.

I’ve come close to uninstalling it several times now. I had to disable the one feature I really loved - icalendar syncing - because I discovered it was the cause of some data corruption issues I was having. Other than the slightly nicer GUI, there is no reason for me to use the app.

I may just have to unleash this demon upon a coworker and/or a machine not regularly used for production purposes. I’m not sure I can stand Outlook much longer.

A new graphic novel was posted to the official Heroes website today. This week’s story revolves around Hana (sort of, but not really):

The graphic novel comes in two flavors: interactive or printable [PDF]. Choose your poison.

If you’re not familiar with the graphic novel, you should be! (You can read all of the past graphic novels here.) In most cases they pick up right where the television show leaves you and fill in additional back story between episodes.

A brief introduction to this week’s graphic novel after the jump.

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This is too funny for words. Or, at least I find it funny… Joke Chasers is part of a new show called Acceptable TV on VH1 (airs Fridays at 10pm). The first episode aired with five TV pilot episodes. Viewers vote on their top two favorite episodes, and the top two vote-getters move onto the next week. Subsequent shows will feature three new pilots. It’s like democracy in action.

I’m still in shock over the news that Kathy Sierra, a fairly well-known blogger, author and speaker, was on the receiving end of some pretty heinous threats online. [See Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)] The threats were/are serious enough that Kathy has canceled speaking engagements and basically shut herself off from the rest of the world.The Constitution affords us the right to free speech - even hate speech, but your rights end when your “free speech” threatens to take the life of another. There is no place for this kind of BS in the world. There are some sick and, quite frankly, sad people out there. It isn’t funny. A line has been crossed and I hope the sick individuals responsible are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.Kathy, you’re in my thoughts and prayers. I hope justice will be quickly served.Thanks, Jina, for the idea about posting about this to raise awareness.