Quantum of Trailer

There's a new trailer out for the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. No, I'm not going to link to it; my iPhone doesn't have copy-paste, and you know where YouTube is as well as I do.

It looks like they're picking up the quality torch where Casino Royal left off and are keeping that train rolling.

Still. One of the major aspects highlighted in the new trailer is the "mysterious organization" the bad guys all work for, code named (apparently) Quantum.

Look, all I'm saying is, if Quantum doesn't turn out to actally be SPECTRE, EON is going to have some peeved nerds on their hands.

Must be September.

I had to turn on my heater on the way to work for the first time in
months this morning. So long, summer. See you next year.

Condition Win

I'm stopped at the last light before my freeway onramp this morning, and I look up to my left. Buisness 80 is stopped dead. Ouch, I think, but it's far too late to take the back way to work. So I grit my teeth and pull up the onramp.

To discover that the accident that's brought the freeway to a standstill is about eight feet behind where the ramp enters the freeway, and that I just pulled on to an essentially empty freeway. Made it to work on record time.

Here's hoping the rest of the day goes as smoothly.

There ain't no party like a hat party

Gabriel and Cristi looking pretty happy thanks to cocktails and lots of them :)

Google Chrome

Damn. I'm kinda in love with it.

It's not just fast - it's amazingly fast. Clearly, they've done some really nifty things up and down the whole pipeline to speed things up, and I approve wholeheartedly.

The new JavaScript engine is just fantastic. Gmail just sings in this thing, and google maps is pretty spectacular. As the world gets more AJAX-y by the day, this is a really good direction to be moving, I think. Also, as someone who is essentially a web desinger who wishes he could use more client-side scripting in an efficient manner, this gets me really excited. (I know Mozilla keeps talking about how great Firefox will be eventually, but it's hard to argue with the kind of results that Chrome actually has.)

The integrated search / URL bar actually works. I know every other browser out there also has such a creature, but this thing is so much better it's ridiculous.

Tabs are each their own processes and fully sandboxed. Fantastic. Really - why didn't Firefox do this from day one? (Yes, I know. Because it was 1997 and they thought they were writing Netscape 6 when the code's foundation went down, and no one knew multi-core processors were going to become the norm. Still, though.)

Also, the google gears "web application link" thing is just super slick.

I tend to swap between browsers a lot for testing purposes in my day job as a developer of web-based data systems, and there are a lot of things about Firefox, Opera, and Safari I really like. Chrome has, essentailly, glued all the features I like together into one browser (quite literally in the case of the mozilla and webkit code bases).

And then, there's the Terms of Service, which are INSANE.

On the other hand, it's also a fully Open Source program, so I fully expect someone to start publishing "Bronze" as a TOS-free alternative.

But, on the gripping hand, what I'm really looking forward to is Firefox 4 ganking the half of the codebase that wasn't theirs to begin with.

Words of Wisdom, stolen from an Email Thread

Chris: Bugs are like children. They know that, for best effect, they
should wait until you're in public to start flipping out.

Jordan: I use a tech. diff as an opportunity talk about our top notch monitoring... "So, y.com is the beta site and this does happen from time to time, but what you don't see is all the stuff going on behind the scenes right now. We use a fantastic system called Nagios and this exception is automatically getting captured and placed into our sustaining engineering queue where someone is going to prioritize it to get fixed... blah blah blah..."

Chris: Smooth! Turn it into a demo of something else entirely. That's like a weapons manufacturer turning a live demo into an impromptu bonesetting tutorial.

This SO happened

Last night was my aunt and uncle's 20th wedding anniversary party, and I found myself thinking, "wait- is this one of those TUXEDO OPPORUNITIES I've been waiting for?"

Yes. Yes it was.

The Drawer of Destiny

It's not much of a secret that Heidi and I have serious pack rat tendencies. Of course, in classic FOA style, we're pack rats about DIFFERENT THINGS. So, the whole Fortress is full of boxes of things that one of us keeps trying to throw out, while the other says, "well, I don't know, we might need those someday..."

"We might need 50 feet worth of late 1980s Parallel Printer cables?"

"...."

Therefore, the system that's developed is one of largely tolerance and selective blindness. This is, of course, highly exacerbated by our inability to actually put anything away ever. It's not so much that we're lazy, you understand - it's that we're both champion grade procrastinators. And again, about largely different things, which tends to end in a net result of us getting nothing done.

(As an aside, this is my official marriage planning advice to all single people is this: marry someone who likes to do chores. But will be classy about it. And while you're at it, someone rich.)

Where I'm going with this is this: When we manage to spend an afternoon taking the drawer in the dining room we've been using as the place to stick all the crap we don't know what to do with for the past year and turn it into this:

Well, it's a relief for me anyway. Our kids might not get tetanus and die after all.

Made available here for Reference

The Five Point Movie Scoring System is an infallible system developed over years of painstaking research. The System boils the total value of a Movie down to a totally accurate score between Zero and Five, the higher the better.

A Single Point is scored for the presence of each of the following:

1) Robots (also valid: Cyborgs or Replicants.)
2) Explosions (Any kind)
3) Ninjas
4) Nudity
5) Space Ships (or any other sufficiently advance mode of travel)

The Value of this system can be observed by the following ratings:

Star Wars: 4 points
Starship Troopers: 4 points
MORTAL COMBAT! 3 points (added by Heidi)
Raiders of the Lost Ark: 1 Point
Blade Runner: 1 Point
Citizen Kane: 0 points


No one has ever found a 5-Point movie. This is believed to be an entirely mythical concept.

And what did you do over the weekend?

Us? Um... we beat the Endless Playlist in Rockband. Yes, the one with 58 songs in a row.

Took us 6 hours.

Notice our highly sophisticated XBox360 cooling mechanism:

It's a fan. Blowing on a bowl of ice cubes. We had to change the ice every couple of songs - usually the XBox crashes on us every hour or two, but not this time.