Wow, what can I say! I mean, I am almost speechless, but I will try to continue. Tonight was a very special night in the Mickelson household. Netflix, my DVD purveyor of choice, sent me the Transformers movie, which I had near the top of my queue. I won’t say that I had high hopes for the film, but I figured that it would be at least entertaining. I could not have been more wrong. For only the second time that I can remember, I had to press Eject on my DVD player before the credits were rolling on screen. Michael Bay, you really have outdone yourself this time! Maybe you really did deserve the Oscar your CGI team concocted for you.
Let’s take a look at the characters. You have the annoyingly awkward teenage boy, who uses the eBay account name, “LadiesMan217″. You have the hot chick who is mad at her boyfriend. She gradually warms to annoyingly awkward teenage boy even though they do not seem to share any chemistry. The only thing that seems to keep her with the annoyingly awkward teenage boy is the fact that they happen to have the same scenes together. And then there are the transformers themselves. I don’t ever remember the transformers in the original cartoons having so many spikes and shit hanging off of them. And lets not forget the obvious product placement: All of the Autobots are American cars. I don’t remember Bumble Bee being a Camaro. When asked where they learned to speak English, Optimus Prime responded with “The World Wide Web”, and when asked how they found annoyingly awkward teenage boy, he responded “I found you on eBay”. ARGH!!!!
The clincher for me was the scene where the 40 ft tall Autobots were trying to hide from annoyingly awkward teenage boy’s parents, all the while destroying the yard that the parents spent a few seconds in an earlier scene perfecting. That was some nice foreshadowing Mike. The awkwardness of the scene combined with the inane dialog between the Autobots was excruciatingly painful. All I was hoping for at that moment was a bunch of Japanese and European cars and trucks to swoop in and send the Autobots to the scrap heap. I knew that was never going to happen, so I fumbled for the remote and pressed the Eject button, loaded the DVD back into the envelope, and placed it in the mailbox without thinking.
To put things into perspective, using IMDB’s Bottom 100 films as a comparison, the only other movie that I can remember turning off for no other reason that I could not take it anymore was Glitter, the 28th worst movie on the board. I have sat through Troll 2 (36th worst according to IMDB), and I really enjoyed Chairman of the Board, 32nd worst, yea call me weird. There is just something about that weird orange haired man.
Ok, this is one of the most hilarious scenes I think I have ever seen in a Simpsons episode. What makes it even more funny is watching it in the context of the entire episode. The writers of the Simpsons rarely, if ever spend 2+ contiguous minutes on a side story. It seems more like a scene from Family Guy where McFarlane frequently takes the show off on a tangent that has very little meaning outside of the main story line.
Enjoy!
Edit: Apparently Fox made Google take the video down, try this Yahoo Video link instead.
When I use top, I generally use it to find runaway processes. The default behavior on Linux is to order the processes by the amount of CPU usage that they are taking. On OS X, this is not the case. If you want to order processes by CPU on Darwin’s top, you will need to run a command that looks like this:
top -ocpu -O+rsize
Plop an alias in your .bash_profile file and never think about it again.
Grep is one of my favorite tools to help me find something in a set of files. Since I cannot download Cygwin at work, I have to make due with what I have.
The following is a translation of grep -R "mypattern" *.cpp for Powershell.
gci C:\path\to\files\* --include *.cpp -recurse | select-string -pattern "mypattern" -caseSensitive
This has been all over the web - The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years (1953-2002) - the ones I have read are underlined. Apparently I have a long way to go to complete the top 50. I do have a gripe about Neuromancer being rated higher then Show Crash. Snow Crash was the most fun I have had reading a book since I read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and, come on, 27th for The Hitchhiker’s Guide?
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Apparently there is a lot of discussion out there as to the validity of this statement. The main argument for equality goes something like this. Say x = 0.99999… (or commonly expressed as .9). Multiply both sides by 10 and you have 2 equations that you can subtract from each other.
