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.

Sticking with the Alan Moore theme (the original creator of V), I finished reading The Watchme today. The Watchmen is the first graphic novel/comic book series that I have ever read. It was fairly entertaining, though I don’t picture myself reading much in the genre.

int links = rand(linkage);

Fiddler: Some people at work pointed me to a HTTP debugger named Fiddler. It will watch all HTTP traffic on your computer and it will allow you to more or less pause the traffic and modify it to your hearts desire. Sorry, Windows only.

Colibri: There is an app for Mac OS X called Quicksilver, which I absolutely can’t live without. Basically it is an application launcher which is invoked with a configurable keystroke. By default is it CTRL + Space, but on Windows, when running Visual Studio, CTRL + Space is mapped to Intellisence. Colibri is not a fully functional as Quicksilver is, and it is still in development, but for common tasks, such as running commands or launching applications, or browsing folders, it works very well. Details on how it determines it’s set of commands are sketchy, but I found out that it will scan your Start Menu items for applications to launch. So, I created a new folder called Colibri Actions there and placed shortcuts to the most commonly used applications or locations which I visit. Now, if I need to call up Visual Source Safe, I no longer have to navigate my mouse to the Start Menu to find it, I simply press CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE and then start typing the word Visual. Colibri will autocomplete the command for you and a simple press of the ENTER key launches the app. To make things simpler for myself, I renamed the shortcut to VSS so that CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE + VS + SPACE opens Visual Source Safe.

Ad-Blocking the Gnome Way: Use a proxy setting in Gnome to help rid yourself of annoying advertisements.

Upcomming outage

I have been contemplating switching web hosts to 1and1.com. They have Python support, which I am looking for so that I can run an instance of Planet to gather my web news and display them in a single page index.

Pregame Festivities: Stevie Wonder and ensemble cast entertains crowd. Procession of all the living Superbowl MVP’s (GOOD)

5:45 PM: FedEx commercial. Caveman A tries to send a package attached to a Pterodactyl, which is promptly eaten by a T-Rex. Caveman A returns to a cave where he explains to Caveman B — his boss — that the package was not delivered. The boss asks Caveman A if he used FedEx, Caveman A says “No”, Caveman B responds “Your Fired”. Caveman A pleads for his job explaining that “FedEx hadn’t been invented yet” to which Caveman B says “Not my problem”. (HILLARIOUS)

6:04 PM: First Quarter over. Pretty boring — Pittsburg no first downs and 3 punts, Seattle 2 punts and a TD taken away with Offense Pass Interference. Seattle 3 Pittsburg 0. (BAD)
6:04 PM: Jackie Chan appearance in a Pepsi Commercial. No sighting of a monkey commercial yet. (GOOD)

6:16 PM: Pittsburg gets first First Down followed by second consecutive first down on an end around (ABOUT TIME)

6:18 PM: The monkeys have been sighted! CareerBuilder.com is back, this time with a room full of monkeys partying and listening to Quiet Riot’s Come on Feel the Noise. (GOOD)

6:20 PM: Phillip Seymor Hoffman (GOOD) as the baddie in MI:3. (INDIFFERENT)

6:26 PM: Chris Berman doing play-by-play for Tim Allen’s Shaggy Dog remake. (SHOOT ME)
6:26 PM: Kermit the Frog in a Toyota Hybrid commercial. (GOOD)

6:34 PM: Rothlisberger scrambles on 3rd and 28 and completes a catch at the 2 yard line to Hines Ward. (GOOD)

6:38 PM: Commercial for Poseidon, remake of 1972′s The Poseidon Adventure. Looks really lame. (BAAAAD)

6:40 PM: Rothlisberger runs an options to the Goal Line. Ref calls TD but the play is under review. Looks close but it should stand as a TD. (GOOD)

6:43 PM: Call stands. Pittsburg 7 Seattle 3. Less then 2 minutes left in the first half.

6:56 PM: Sprint Commercial. Friend beans another Friend in the face with his cell phone claiming that in addition to being able to watch TV on his phone, it also is a crime deterrent. (GOOD)

7:04 PM: Can ABC fill the Superbowl with any more commercials for their stupid shows? They seem like they are really hurting for ratings. 4 straight during one span at halftime. (BAD BAD ABC)

7:32 PM: Willie Parker goes 75 yards for a TD on first drive of the second half. Pittsburg 14 Seattle 3. Game over??? Longest rush in Superbowl history. (GOOD)

7:35 PM: More ABC Commercials!!! (AARG)

7:43 PM: Fabio’s back??? I thought he fell of the face of the earth, like Axl Rose or Vanilla Ice. (PUSH)

7:50 PM: A giant robot and dinosaur give birth to a Hummer ?!? (WEIRD)

7:53 PM: Kelly Herndon picks of pass and takes it 78 yards to the Pittsburgs 20. Seattle back in the game ??? Longest interception in Superbowl history. (GOOD)

8:27 PM: Gadget Play. Randell El throws a 60 yard TD on a WR reverse play. Pittsburg 21 Seattle 10. First TD thrown by a WR in a Superbowl (GOOD)

8:30 PM: MacGyver! Richard Dean Anderson is back — in a Mastercard spot. (COOL)

Overall, the game was pretty boring and the commercials, with the exception of a few, were sub-par. Leave it to a Disney Corp production to screw up the Superbowl commercials, which many casual viewers actually watch for. ABC ran way too many spots for their own shows, something which I don’t recal ever seeing on previous Superbowls to the extent at which we say this year.

I spent some of the duller moments reading Freakonomics, which I just picked up. It is very interesting so far and I made a good dent in it over the course of the game.

I saw Hitch on Saturday. I was a little wary going into the movie, but I was glad my sister didn’t want to see Are We There Yet. I ended up being pretty good. Surprisingly good maybe??

Todo Lists — I am a big fan of post it notes and todo lists. Today I found tadalist.com, which is a free, web-based todo list manager which allows you to subscribe to your todo lists via RSS. Go Check it out.

In entertainment news, I watched Yojimbo last night. I was almost falling asleep during the first 30 minutes, but then the plot really ramps up as Sanjuro plays both sides of a power struggle in a small Japanese village.

Macworld SF 2005 — Today I got around to finally viewing the keynote. Steve really knows how to hype his products. Pages and Keynote 2 look really neat. And of course, I still want a mini.

In sports news, the Badgers won at Michigan today setting up the biggest game of the season on Tuesday at the Kohl Center against the No. Illini. This game will be BIG. The Badgers have a 38 game home winning streak on the line and first place in the conference might be decided by the winner. If the Badgers can hand Illinois their first loss and win out in conference play, they will again be Big 10 regular season champs. Go Badgers!

Site Update
Redid the photo’s section using Original and added a few galleries. I can’t seem to figure out how to modify the gallery date using the info.txt file

Music
I recently discovered a band called Travis, and more precisely the 12 Memories album. The album starts out a little brash or punkish but chills out (and gets better!) as the album goes on. My favorite track is No. 10, “Happy To Hang Around” which features my favorite lyric on the album, which is also the chorus

And I’ll never get into your heart
Though I don’t even want to start
I’ll never get into your heart
I’m just happy to hang around

Travis and Keane have been surprises for me as I anxiously await something fresh from Coldplay.