See Ya Later, Vick

Let's all say it together now, "Michael Vick's career is over."

Personally, I think it would be fair to take him and everyone else convicted of running the dog fighting circle, as well as brutally killing the dogs in the underground fight circuit, throw them all into a room, and unleash about 20 stark, raving mad dogs on them. Bonus points would come from using dogs that were recovered from the fighting circuit.

I really hope that Vick never plays in the league again. I'm sure he will, however, as he's talented enough that some crappy ass team (read: The Oakland Raiders) will eventually suck it up and take him on board. Seriously, though, if you are convicted of a federal offense, there is no way you should ever get to play in sports again. What type of a precedent are you setting for young kids by letting criminals come back?

Sure, everyone should get a second chance after serving their time, but it's different for sports in my eyes. They're influencing kids and impressionable minds. Much like I could never work for an accounting firm again if I was ever convicted of fraud, embezzlement, or other crimes that impact my career.

Lock his ass up. End of story.

Screw Comcast

I really really really wish that we had more options for internet in our area. Right now we have Comcast and... Comcast. That's it. They have a monopoly on the internet in our area. They've been the worst possible company to deal with for anything. They've screwed up our billing repeatedly, given us the wrong hardware for cable and internet, not been able to properly authorize our router, and now are throttling and outright denying bittorrent traffic.

Both my roommates and myself use bittorrent for many purposes and we are now unable to seed particular torrents or use bittorrent. I know that once our running special on internet + cable runs out with Comcast I'll be switching to DishTV for television instead of Comcast and I might have to suck it up and try to see if I can somehow get DSL here at my place to avoid continued usage of Comcast's services.

If you have Comcast, call them or email them or do something to let them know you don't think this is a fair practice. We're paying for our internet service at $44.99 a month so we should damn well be able to use it, not just use it for select tasks that they feel people should use it for.

Demo Derbies

One of the awesome things about growing up in a farming community was the annual county fair, or the county fairs of local communities. With these fairs came a wonderful event--the demolition derby. For a few hours during each county fair, drivers would pit their reinforced junk heaps with big engines against other drivers' beat up cars to see who could keep theirs running the longest. It is like a scene from Mad Max come to life and it is awesome.

Last weekend I went to the Mower county fair with my family, girlfriend, and her nephew. We were there to give Kristi's nephew his first taste of the demolition derby experience and I think he thoroughly enjoyed it. As usual, I had a blast. Really, how could watching a bunch of cars crashing for a few hours not be entertaining?

Both my mom and me managed to get some shots of the action. You can check out my mom's shots here and you can look at mine right here. I also have some videos, but they're over 100 MB in size each, so I'll probably have to shrink them down before I post them or else put them on Youtube or something.

Next demolition derby on the schedule is the Steele county fair demo derby this Sunday at 4:00 pm. I can't wait!

42 Days Off...

I was having a really hard time getting going this afternoon so I went down to Caribou Coffee in my building and grabbed myself a mocha to get re-energized. One of the things that Caribou does is has a daily trivia question for 10 cents off your order. I find it fun to check out their question and it is a good way to get curious people like myself to come back, especially when they have some themed questions. Each Caribou picks their own questions (at least from what I can tell) as I've visited two different Caribou stores in one day and they had different questions.

Anyways, today's question was, "Which nation has the highest amount of average paid days off at 42?". I knew it had to be a European nation so I guessed France since they seem to often have a lot of vacation time. I wasn't quite right. It is actually Italy.

Now can you imagine having 42 days off every year? And remember, that's the average amount of days off. Some people get more, some less. Still, 42 days off is a whopping TWENTY more per year than I currently get, and I'm pretty lucky to get 22 a year. I know a lot of people who get 10 a year, or even less.

It's really sad how few paid days off United States workers get, especially if you're talking about the lower middle class and under. The lesser paying the job, the less time off usually seems to be the way things go. I wonder if people would be more motivated to work if they knew they had more fun time off? I'd like to say I would be, but honestly I don't know. I'd love the extra days off, but would it motivate me more? I know I'd definitely be a lot happier and, hopefully, a little less stressed.

So who wants to move to Italy with me? I know I'd put to use every last one of my 42 vacation days!

The VOIP Plunge

Currently I have Cingular/AT&T as my cell phone provider. When it was just Cingular, the service was awesome. Rarely a dropped call, full signal just about everywhere, and great service. Now that Cingular has been taken over by AT&T, things have just gotten bad. I didn't think there would really be any perceptible change, but there definitely is. The most notable is that I often get next to no signal at my house. This is really puzzling because I live in one of the inner Minneapolis suburbs so it's not as if I'm off in the outback somewhere. I have also had numerous problems with bad call quality and dropped calls since the switch as well.

Because of this, and because I want to make calling people easier when I'm working from home, I decided to dive into the Skype world. I downloaded the service and played around with it for a bit, paying for the SkypeOut service (so that I can call any US/UK/Canada phone number) as well and found that it works pretty well. I only had one dropped call, and it was a conference call I'd been on for about 35 minutes. I chalk it up to an internet hiccup from Comcast.

Liking the service, I decided to go with a home VOIP phone so that I'm not tethered to my computer for making calls. Not wanting to spend a lot, I went with the Phillips VOIP 321 phone, which is designed to work with Skype. I set it up last night and it seems to work great. I plan on giving it a test run for a week or so and, assuming it works great like it currently is, I'll invest in a SkypeIn phone number so that it will work just like a land line (with the obvious caveat that my computer must be on and the internet up and running).

So has anyone else taken the VOIP plunge and given up on landlines? I have to admit, it's a ton cheaper than a land line, Vonage (which is just proprietary, crappy-ass VOIP), and a strictly cell plan. For a number and unlimited outbound calling, it's about $90 a year, which is the equivalent of about 3 months of Vonage or a landline. The only thing I'm a little sketchy about is having to leave my computer on for the line to be available.

Great Music Video (And Song)

Video for the song "Lords and Wolves" by Underminded. They're a great bunch of guys that stayed at my place a year and a half back before they headed out for a European tour. I'm really impressed with how their latest CD turned out. It's called Eleven:Eleven and you should pick it up if you enjoy heavy music.

Truthism

Truthism.com. From this amazing site you'll find all sorts of "true" gems of information... such as some of my favorites below:

"1.) The North Pole and the South Pole do not exist. In their place are polar openings that lead into Inner Earth.

2.) Anyone en route to a polar opening is eventually stopped by Outer Earth guardsmen."

"These humans who are in Earth's secret societies are merely pseudo-elites. On the other hand, the Reptilians are the ruling elite because they are at the very top of Earth's control pyramid."

"A complete science would place astral planes, parallel dimensions, synchronicities, consciousness, etheric fields, telepathy, vital energies, emotional energies, volition, hyperdimensional existence and timeloops all under the same framework. At present, these appear to be phenomena distinct from science, but that is because science as we know it is incomplete."

"Science = Faith"

Seriously, this site is one of the funniest I've read in ages.

Movies... More of Them

Well, here's the latest batch of movies I watched. See all of my 2007 reviews here.

1408 (7.5/10): The overall tone and execution of this film were both wonderful and dark, but in the end I failed to pull in any connections between all of the different "horrors" that John Cusak's character experiences and their importance to the character. Since this was billed as a psychological horror film, I expected there to be something to connect all the pieces and make the movie more than just a haunted house flick, but there really wasn't. Regardless, it was still a good movie that is head and shoulders above all of the lame torture porn movies rampaging through theaters.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (5.5/10): Having only seen the first Harry Potter movie (and hating it), going in to this film I found that it was hard to know why anyone was doing anything. Sure, I picked up the gist of this movie's storyline, but having not been entrenched in the Potter world I found I could care less about any of the characters since I didn't understand any of the underlying motives. Other than that, it was a decent fantasy flick with some notably terrible acting from the child actors. I'm sure Potter fans loved it. I didn't.

The Simpsons: The Movie (9/10): This is the real deal. Having been disappointed with the show for the last few years, my expectations were quite tempered, however, this ended up being extremely gut busting funny in classic Simpsons style. There are a number of new quotable lines that you can expect to be filtering into everyday vernacular, most notably the "Spider-Pig" lines. So far this is probably the funniest movie I've seen this year.

A Mighty Wind (7/10): Christopher Guest, the king of mockumentaries, puts together a film chronicling the reuniting of folk music's legends. It's decently funny, but lacks the amount of laugh out loud moments that Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman had. In fact, parts of the movie feel strangely like an actual documentary in that they lack the over the top nature that made Guest's other mockumentaries so fabulous. It is still a solid movie, just not as funny as I would have expected.

This Film is Not Yet Rated (8/10): I'm sure everyone has, at times, questioned why a certain movie received the rating it did. I do quite often. I also find myself wondering why it only takes a slip of a nipple to make something R, when it takes at least a bloody double-digit body count to get an R rating if there are no nipples or f-bomb dropping. It was quite interesting to see how closed off and out of touch the MPAA really is, but on the other hand, the investigative method used (hiring a horribly annoying private investigator) was often very amateur. If the PI sections of this documentary were left out and more focus was given to the secretive, cultish behavior of the MPAA it could have been a perfect 10.

Brick (8/10): I may be in the minority, but I loved this movie. Not so much because it was a cinematic masterpiece, but because it was a wonderful throwback to noir movies of ages past. This is, essentially, a film noir movie as portrayed in a modern high school. For anyone who doesn't view the movie as an homage, it will no doubt seem boring, cliched, and overacted. Viewed as an homage, it is a clever movie that takes the well established noir archetypes and injects them into a modern high school setting.

Boring, Silent Me

I really haven't had much to say since the 35W bridge collapse here in Minneapolis. I had kind of hoped I would have had something to say about it, but all I can think about in relation to it is how freakin' terrible my commutes to and from downtown are going to be.

Outside of that, I've just been busy. All weekend I had junk to do and so far this week I've been in Chicago for work, and that always leaves very little free time to do anything. All day meetings, going out for supper, and then catching up on sleep. Traveling takes it out of me. I was in bed at 9:00 last night and slept soundly until 6:30 this morning.

Anyways, that's why I'm pretty lax on the writing.

Holy Roman Empire / Gloria / Small Towns Burn a Little Slower Show Review

It’d been quite a while since I’d been to a show in a smaller venue so I was very anxious to visit The 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis to see the combination of Holy Roman Empire, Gloria, and Small Towns Burn a Little Slower. As I arrived, I was very surprised at the number of people already in attendance. The small venue was almost full, more than likely because it was Small Towns’ home town.

Opening up the show was Holy Roman Empire. Their debut full length, The Longue Duree, had received a fair amount of play in my MP3 player recently so I was pretty amped to see the band perform. Despite lead vocalist Emily Schambra having to sing through a cold, the band still put on a solid performance. Emily is a very confident and full bodied vocalist, able to belt out every phrase with authority. Even with her voice a little rough at times, it can’t be denied that she killed on vocals.

The remainder of the band were just as impressive. The band as a whole are extremely tight, no doubt because of the experience level of all of the band members. Bassist Geoff Reu was an especially captivating pseudo-frontman, managing to show tons of presence on stage while playing and occasionally adding some supporting vocals. Playing a fair mix of new songs and a couple from their debut EP, Lost in Landscapes, the set was both upbeat and, at times, heavy. The hardcore backgrounds of most of the members of this band shows through as they pound out what they’re playing on their instruments, yet they never miss a note. It would be great to see this band perform as a headliner some time.

Next on the bill were local pop-punkers Gloria. Revving up for the release of their EP, A Lesson in Self Destruction, the band put on one hell of a performance, most notably by their frontman. He possessed a pitch perfect voice that had just enough of an edge when yelling to give their entire set a commanding feeling. The only thing holding him back is the continual swinging around of his mic. It got a little annoying after the first 10 times or so he did it, but instead of quitting he kept doing it every second that he wasn’t singing. A minor quibble, yes, but one that deserves note.

Gloria’s brand of keyboard infused pop-punk was, crazily enough, much more interesting than the majority of the current popular pop-punksters (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco). The songs were very energetic and the band used every ounce of that energy to get the crowd into it. For a young, unsigned band they played like they’ve been doing this for years.

After such an energetic performance, it was hard for Small Towns Burn a Little Slower to top it. For being headliners, it didn’t seem like Small Towns really cared about the show that much. For most of the short, 35 minute set he simply wandered around stage while singing his lyrics. To complicate matters there were a few technical problems throughout the set. When they were on and playing together, they sounded great, but there was no energy to back it up.

It was really to bad to have the show end with the headliner being a letdown. However, Gloria and Holy Roman Empire were both impressive bands with very strong futures. Any tour that either finds themselves on is bound to be one you should see, just in order to see them!