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Long ago I used to trust Roger Ebert’s movie reviews. I’ve Tivo’ed Ebert and Siskel and then Ebert and Roeper for as long as I’ve had a Tivo. Well, with his review of Spiderman 2, I’m done. The Jacuzzi he got for saying what he did about the movie had better be worth it.

From EBERT AND ROEPER’S TOP TEN OF 2004
Here’s some exurpts from his review (this is an audio clip from the TV show)

The number 4 film on my list is Spider-Man 2… I’m as amazed as you are that spidey made my top 10 list. This was a really good film. The best super hero movie ever made…

Come on! VC and I watched it and and we’ve got different movie tastes but had the same problems with the movie. Comments like:

• Ok, so you spend your evenings dangling from the tops of buildings from ropes. You have a rope failure that nearly kills you. What do you do? Dangle some more! Oh no! Another rope failure! Dooph!
• Oh man, when she opens up that pizza box, the one that Spidey has been tossing around for the last 10 minutes, it is gonna be GROSS! That’s gonna be pretty funny! Wait, hey…. we didn’t get to see the pizza!
• Isn’t conducting nuclear fusion tests in a downtown manhattan apartment just a little… unwise?
• Ok, so, you built these really friggin cool, giant mechanical octopus arms that would gleefully take control of your brain if proper safeguards weren’t taken… And you’re telling me that the only thing between you and oblivion is…. a little blue light on the back of your neck?!?!?!? Dude, you’re asking for it!
• The entire movie was all about how Peter was totally broke, failing school, and couldn’t keep a job because he was busy being a vigilante… Now that MJ and Peter are going to live happily ever after, how are they pay the rent?
• A new Green Goblin? That’s coo. Wait, the movie’s over. Ughf. A sequel.

Ok, enough with the critisisms… you get the idea. The important thing here is that this was not, by any stretch of the imagination “the best super hero movie ever made.” A legitimate review would have been something like, “A fun ride. Peter is shown to be a real hero with real-life problems. Social elements are stressed over super-powers. Fairly true to the comic, though a lot of details are skipped over for brevity. Very nice effects, ok story, mediocre execution, somehow, it dragged a bit.”

I’m taking Ebert and Roeper off my Tivo Season Pass.

Peercast sits out there quitely. Some day in the not too distant future, people are going to start going crazy for it and products like it. It’s a good idea.

What is PeerCast?
PeerCast is a new, free way to listen to radio and watch video on the Internet. It uses P2P technology to let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of traditional streaming. This means you get to hear and watch stations not normally found on commercially funded sites.
…
PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast a radio station to the entire network.

(I have anarchistic visions of there being a few relay points in tropical desert privacy-haven countries really messing things up for the RIAA)

Since the first time I heard the word “groupware” in…. I think it was ‘91, referring to Lotus Notes, I have wondered what it was supposed to be. Like, in an ideal world where opening up a Notes database didn’t take 2 minutes. Recall that in Notes, each email you received was stored in “The Database”, so just the act of opening 5 emails would take 10 minutes. It sucked.

In a couple of the companies I’ve worked at, I was asked if I could help design a groupware infrastructure to, in pre-dot-bombeze, “optimize knowledge-flow”. My answer every time, partially in response to some careful review, but more out of visceral instinct, was to stay as far away from those slow, poorly written, hard to maintain, poorly supported, unscalable, unchangeable, non-interoperable, did I mention slow, proprietary “high concept” systems as possible. Good old POP3, SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SMB and maybe that new-fangled IMAP were, in my mind the only systems that worked reliably enough to trust a business’ information to. Exchange? Notes? Domino? Expensive poopie-ka-ka in my experience.

(To be fair, my last review was in 2001. Groupware might have changed since then… might have.)

Why am I telling you this? Because JWZ has written a blog entry that talks a lot about groupware that hits the nail right on the head! Thank you JWZ!

(the entry is below the cut for posterity)
(more…)

I was reading an article on kissing on Yahoo, clicked on a link to get a close-up of people kissing and noticed this odd conglomeration of eye-bites. (like a sound-bite, only…)

This gambling thing is too nerve-wracking. I’m invested in a bet at Tradesports that the Iraqi elections will have a turnout of over 8 million people. One would think that it would start to become obvious which outcome is more likely, higher or lower. But we’re now 13 days after the election and just a few hours before the results are to be revealed and we’re no closer to knowing!

(Below the cut is my running analysis and final decisions to make a large trade (IE: bet) at Tradesports.)
(more…)

The Gates, Christo’s latest crazy-giant art thing opened today in New York City.

From SignonSanDiego

“It’s a waste of money, but it’s fabulous,” said student Shakana Jayson. “It brings happiness when you look at it.”

Well then, it wasn’t really a waste of money then, was it ;-)

I got a prescription today. As I did before, I looked into Canadian drug prices. I found that the price from Canada for a generic is exactly (to within 1%) 1/2 of what I can get it in the states. My Rx insurance covers 1/2 of the bill so it’s a wash. I might as well go with a local, brand name product instead of a slow-to-ship, generic product.

I can’t help but think that some manipulation has happened here. I’ll guess that Canadian prices were forced up a little and American prices were forced down a little by some dealings. The machine is complicated, the FDA, Canadian drug authorities, rampant illegal drug shipments into the US through Canada, drug companies struggling to keep ahead of the game by any means… but it all works out (more or less) in the end. I don’t know, I guess I’m just happy that there are checks and balances and that no one of those organizations really has total control.

I can recommend Rx1.biz, phone 866-791-7711.

A few weeks ago I made Eggs Benedict for VC. To do so, I had to plan in advance, learning how to (this’ll show you how much effort I normally spend in the kitchen) clarify butter, make poached eggs, and make hollandaise sauce. It took me almost a dozen eggs to make a good poached egg. But now I know! The hollandaise sauce wasn’t difficult. I got it right the first time but it sure is time consuming. 20 minutes of “constant stirring” is a bother. So this week I tried hollandaise sauce from a mix.

Concord Foods Hollandaise Sauce Mix. “Simply Add water and cook”

It cooks quick enough…. 1 cup of warm water in a sauce pan, add the packet, set to medium-low heat, 6 minutes of constant stirring later and it had thickened.

But for taste it kind of fell flat. It -looks- perfect. Right-on consistancy & color. And it doesn’t taste bad, it just doesn’t jump out at you and say, “I am hollandaise, love and cherish me!” I don’t know, maybe my taste buds were biased by the amount of time they knew was put into real hollandaise. Maybe if I added a little clarified butter and lemon to perk it up. Yeah, thinking about it, I think it was seriously lacking in the tangy-lemon department.

I might try it again sometime but I’ll definitely have to fiddle with the flavor to make it work. That takes away from the ease of use, though if worked correctly, it could still save 15 minutes and setting up that odd double-steamer setup for authentic hollandaise.

For now, out of 5, I give it:
Appearance: 5
Taste: 2

(sorry, I never got to finishing this… but here’s a start)

Here’s the easiest way, assuming the old (source) PC is still working.
The steps below will import from Outlook Express to Outlook.

On Source PC, install Outlook. Start Outlook and import email and addresses into Outlook.
Copy outlook.pst from Source PC to Target PC.

For each Outlook account, all dbx files are saved in one directory called the
store root directory, which can be defined by choosing the command:
Tools | Options | Maintenance | Store folder

There are also several predetermined dbx files which are in the store root directory and don’t have a corresponding folder inside OE:

Folders.dbx - - - stores a tree structure of folders and other information.
Offline.dbx - - - contains the data of interactive access to IMAP and Hotmail accounts if those are available to you.
Pop3uidl.dbx - - - stores information from messages left on a POP3 mail server.

Here’s where Outlook Express stores folders:
C:/Documents and Settings/(username)/Local Settings/Application Data/Identities/(some crazy string)/Microsoft/Outlook Express
Or maybe
C:/Documents and Settings/(username)/Identities/(some crazy string, one per user on the machine)

Someone told someone who told TJIC who told me about this. Now I'm telling you.

From The Lord of the Rings… well not really.