As you may or may not know, I have two young boys. I am preparing them, as best I can, to be men. In order to do so, I've developed the following required watching, which I will soon be purchasing on DVD:

1. The A-Team
2. MacGyver
3. Knight Rider

I'm thinking about throwing in Dukes of Hazaard also. Any thoughts?

(Yeah, I know Knight Rider might be iffy, but it served me well)

I am seeing Episode III tonight. I will be meeting stoolpigeon at a theater, so if you don't ever hear from me again, it's because he has hacked me up into pieces or something.

Far too many great movies get released and are never heard of again. What are your favorite underrated movies? In my top three would be:

• Frequency - Stars Dennis Quaid and Jesus Christ. About a son who manages to contacts his dead father over a radio because of a the northern lights. Yeah, sounds strange, but a great movie. I ball at the end each time due to blatant emotional manipulation, but it is still fun. I watch this every Father's Day.
• The Iron Giant - An animated flick that got lost cause it wasn't by Disney. One of the few WB Animation releases, and it is quite good. It can be a bit scary for the little ones as a warning.
• Defending Your Life - Stars Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep. This is one of my favorite comedies. Story about what "really happens after you die". Anytime I see Rip Torn, I think of his character in this film.

What about you?

Jaguar777 was nice enough to email this instructional piece on turning your hampster into a fighting machine.

Good stuff. And yes, I intentionally spell hampsters wrong because the right spelling is incorrect.

sp is the only one who will probably care, but I'm posting anyway. If not just to mess up your /my/amigos :-)

Georgian Democracy - Apparently, our own Arizona Republic needs a geography lesson.

Suns lose - Am I the only ticked off at the fact that none of the western conference games seem to get televised on ABC? Yeah, I'm one of the few Americans left without cable, so I can't watch the games on TNT. At least the away games are on our local station. Anyway, I'm hoping Joe Johnson's injury isn't gonna cost the Suns their much deserved Championship title :-) Series stands at 1-1.

Weather - Woohoo. It's looks like we'll be breaking the triple digit barrier tomorrow.

Well, it happened. I never thought it would, but it did.

My wife just went to draw out the "weekly cash". The machine told her to take the money, and then gave her a receipt for the withdrawal. Only problem: no money ever came out of the machine.

She went inside and told them what happened. They gave her the "dispute" number to call. They didn't offer for her to use their phone, but just sent her on her way. She made a few comments about "theft" and left. After calling the number, the man was extremely helpful and said that this sort of thing happens occasionally. He said if the machine ends up not "correcting itself" in the next day or two, they could credit us. She clarified that the bank is not disputing the fact we didn't get our money, they just don't want to credit right now in case the machine ends up doing it for them.

Thankfully, it's no big deal for us because we can go to another machine and get our money for now. We don't go paycheck to paycheck, but it is still unsettling for this to happen.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

I'm done, I'm done, I'm done.

I am officially finished with the semester from hell. I took 3 classes this year, two of which had an unusual amount of homework and projects.

I took my last final on Tuesday and turned in my Independent Research Study paper 5 minutes ago. Now I can relax for 5 weeks before my summer class starts up. :-(

Posting and You

Definitely need sound. Audio NSFW.

I don't know if I'm the last person on Earth to discover this website, but I had to share:

The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology (SFW, as far as I can tell)

Daily code snippets, obviously written by Access programmers. (sorry CVR ;-)

Sorry, I couldn't couldn't resist. Thanks for the idea Sam.

IBM

Three letters that stir hatred in me that I never knew before.

In case you didn't know, IBM likes to make products that are "cross platform". By this, I mean, they write them to work on their favorite platform or two, and then get the college interns to port them to Windows.

Case in point: The .NET Classes provided with the WebSphere MQ Client. Here we obviously have two or three kids right out of college who are more than likely proficient in Java, writing the .NET interface to MQ Series. How do I know?

1. Classes that have a Close() method (for cleaning up unmanaged resources) don't implement IDisposable. Yeah, that's right, they just slapped on a method called "Close()". I discovered this when attempting to use the "using" statement to guard my access. Oh joy, try{}finally{} here I come. Oh wait, that looks a lot like Java!
2. Several of the classes have "options". These options are specified using an integer type. Again, hello? Have you guys even taken a remedial class in .NET? Why don't you look up Enum's and get back to me. Thanks.

I'm sure I'll discover more stuff like this throughout the day. Luckily I brought in my IBM pillow. This is the pillow that I can scream into and not disturb my coworkers.

I was reminded why I do my gaming on consoles instead of my PC this morning. I've spent a few hours working on my graphics project, written in OpenGL, trying to figure out why a certain texturing option didn't seem to work as expected. Ultimately, the texture was supposed to either appear once, like a sticker, or repeat itself and cover the entire polygon. Well, the repeating option was working, but the GL_CLAMP option wasn't. Instead of the borders of the image being stretched around the polygon, I was getting this weird gray color that popped in and out depending on how the object was rotating.

I searched high and low through my "red book". I looked through the notes for my class. Nothing. Eventually, I thought I'd try copying it from my laptop to my desktop and running it there. I have a GeForce Go5200 on my laptop, that actually runs quite well and some piece of crud Intel graphics chip on the desktop here.

Well, on the desktop, everything looked perfect. So I updated the drivers on my laptop (the date on the old driver was from last November, I updated them to April of this year) and everything looks ok now.

There goes 2 hours of my life.

Now that some of the controversy has died down, I have a question out there for practicing Catholics. I've noticed that a few of you had negative reactions to the election of Pope Benedict the XVI. This honestly confuses me, so I'm wondering which of my assumptions is incorrect:

1. You believe in the Catholic Church and it's teachings.
2. The Pope is chosen by God through the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those voting.

This is honestly not meant to be aimed at anyone in particular, nor is it meant to be a flame. I'm honestly curious as to how correct my understanding of Catholic theology is.

It just didn't make sense to me to see so much complaining from Catholics on the choice of a new Pope, from what I understand to be of the church's teachings. Honestly, I'm curious as to where my logic is wrong. Also, I'm not all that interested in responses from non-Catholics :-)

I am, in fact, too sexy for my shirt.

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Note: I can't take credit for this. My friend emailed it to me. We're having more fun making fun of 24 this season than watching it.

If you were paying attention, you might remember my bleg for help on how to spend bonus money. Well, I took everyone's advice and put it towards paying off the small CC debt.

I don't know if it was a reward from God, but I just received another award at work. This is quite a surprise, as I've been with my employer for 5 years now, and this is only my third award. I must be doing something right.

So this time, I got myself an XBox, with some XBox Live on the side. My gamer tag is "MC Hampster". If you're on Live, drop your tag here, so I can add you to my friends list. I only have Halo 2 right now (and Crimson Skies, since it came with Live). What are the best Live Enabled games out there?