Best Buy saw fit to arrest a man who questioned the price of a GeForce 4 graphics card. This after several years back they arrested someone for writing down prices in their store. You know, come to think about it, I have never stood in line at the computer counter and not seen someone lose their shit in that store at the employees (including my Father-In-Law once). I just may never go to Best Buy ever again – I’d like to get through this life without being arrested if I can.

Pixar has announced their next three movies, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Cars. Hit the press release for more info.

The deal with Pixar and Disney is this – Pixar has a contract with Disney that, at this point in time, obliges them to three more movies by 2005, thus the announcement. One of the stipulations for them is that sequels don’t count towards the totals, so we won’t be seeing a Toy Story 3, unless there’s still some demand for it in 2006. Toy Story 2 was originally going to be a direct to video sequel – despite the fact that Toy Story took four years to produce, the logic was that Toy Story 2 would take considerably less time since most of the assets (like the characters and the software) already existed. However the movie/plotline proved to be “too damn good” so they went the extra mile and made it a full blown film, released in 1999. Toy Story came out in 1995 and A Bug’s Life came out in 1998, so at that point there must have been two “teams” working within Pixar. My guess would be that the Bug’s Life team turned around and did Monster’s Inc. for release in 2001. It’s somewhat representative of Moore’s Law that the technology in the films can improve while the turnaround time dwindles, but I would imagine Pixar must have three teams right about now.

Finding Nemo doesn’t have a date yet but the plan is for The Incredibles to come out in 2004 and Cars (my bet is the title changes – A Bug’s Life was originally Bugs) to hit in 2005. In order to work on three films more or less concurrently (Cars is going to have Lasseter back at the helm, so it doesn’t sound like it could be turned around in two years) is to have three teams. Come 2005 they’ll either renew their contract with Disney on better terms (sequels for starters) or venture off on their own.

The movie Shrek was fine and all, but I thought it was more of a fart joke than a film – and it sure as hell wasn’t Oscar worthy. Final Fantasy went to the other extreme – near photorealistic graphics and a horrible story. The recent film Ice Age was a decent movie but the graphics looked to me like a student working on a resume film – they didn’t do it for me like a Pixar film does. And as for that Jimmy Neutron movie? How in the hell did that one even get nominated? The crappiest Quake modification looks better than that.

Pixar hasn’t let me down yet – let’s try to keep it that way, shall we?

And the Treasure Planet trailer looks to kick ass as well.

Oh and I don’t care who you are or how much you like/hate Disney animation, this latest Lilo & Stitch trailer kicks ass.

Last night I watched Aerosmith ICON on MTV, or rather the last half of it. A much better choice than last year’s ICON special, Janet Jackson. Aerosmith kicks ass, always has, always will. One slight thing I take issue with last night, however, was the assertion that Aerosmith is the “only band to make three decades”. Umm, hello? Rolling Stones? Even if you count the album they did (either 1997’s Bridges to Babylon or 1998’s live No Security) as the end of the group (the Stones have not broken up, though the members are currently engrossed in solo projects) that’s still 35 years easy. Still, that Aerosmith is consistently good and even topping their former achievements, as opposed to the Stones which was quite possibly the greatest band in the history of Rock & Roll in the mid 70’s and has been decline ever since, is quite an achievement. Ironic that due to showmanship and Steve Tyler’s lips Aerosmith was originally labeled the “American Stones” or “The Poor Man’s Rolling Stones”.

As far as longevity is concerned, I guess the Stones do hold the record (provided they can be considered “not broken up”). The Grateful Dead came close, but then Jerry Garcia died. KISS is still around, though since they’re currently on a “Farewell Tour” it seems likely that if they do make it to the 30 year mark (2004 I think) it’ll be the end anyway. Besides, KISS has a problem keeping their lineup the same. AC/DC’s been around quite a while, but it’s not really the same since they had a lead singer change (drug overdose).

It still blows my mind that groups I grew up with are celebrating decades. They Might Be Giants started in 1982, Bad Religion’s been around slightly longer, and GWAR even has longtime fans bringing their kids to the show now. Hell, the grunge music I listened to in High School is over a decade old now. When I listen to Appetite for Destruction, I start to feel old.

The other end of the spectrum is the “burn out” artist. Jimi Hendrix recorded for four, maybe five years, but to this day new material is released. The man must have never left the studio, except of course to die of the occasional overdose. Perhaps if Led Zeppelin had not broken up due to the alcohol related death of drummer John Bonham they might have gone south and released imperfect albums – as it stands now their nine studio albums are still brilliant. Had Lennon not been killed we might have seen Beatles reunions and that group would have not enjoyed the legendary status they do now. The Eagles seem less mythical since we know they got back together. Like Denis Leary said, had Elvis died in 1958 we would have been spared the polyester jump suit years.

Therefore, the fact that Aerosmith is still here, still kicks ass, and still has the original lineup is all the more impressive.

One of the most annoying things about being a programmer in a “periodic” environment is that sometimes you’ve made an error in a program and by the time it becomes a problem you can’t even remember why you did it that way anymore, let alone if you were in fact the one to do it in the first place. Today we ran up against a problem wherein people were unable to add a fee option for the summer. Turns out the program had a bug in calculating the timeframe in which this option could be added. The bug was placed there by me in August. After Summer in other words. Actually the section of code it’s in is in two places, one for summer and one for fall & spring. The fall & spring code worked fine and has been working fine. Why I would have dickered up the second section is beyond me – I’m 100X smarter a programmer now than I was back in August, and compared to a year ago when I started this gig, I wasn’t even an amoeba back then.

This is not to say that this bug was a big deal per se – my Boss isn’t losing her hair over it and no one’s mad or anything, but it’s still annoying to wonder why I would have made a seemingly obvious mistake like this back then. On the other hand, I identified a pretty nasty bug that’s been broken for some time now, and people are just now starting to complain. I guess it happens to everyone.

One Tony Jimenez points to another reason the headlights in Canada were out more often (besides being on more often). To wit:

Cold weather causes the lights to go out more often, which would explain why you saw it all the time in Canada, but very few times in Texas. My wife was from Minnesota so there were many there. My guess is that the constant freezing and thawing makes causes the vacuum seal for the light bulb to fail more often, thus requiring a local law forcing people to get them fixed.

Works for me.

This evening was full, lemmie tell ya. We loaded down my Wife’s credit card with crap from Lowe’s, then we discovered the two large plastic lawn chairs were in fact too large to fit in my car. After a few failed attempts to flag down friends with trucks, we just tied the trunk down as best we could (as it turns out, Lowe’s gives you free string to tie your trunk down with, along with those red plastic flags). This killed most of the evening.

Because my wife had things to do I volunteered to go to the grocery store for us, as well as picking up this evening’s dinner. I wanted to hurry up and finish the shopping since I was hungry and I wanted to get some coding in before the night was shot. I got nine of the ten things on the list with no problem, then I hit the problem point: Velveeta. Crap. Without going too deep into Seinfeld mode, I have a mental block against Velveeta. That is, I can never remember where it is in the store, no matter how many times I get it. Plus, the stores tend to move it around. Once, at a different store my wife and I finally found some, and the clerk actually complimented our ability to find it, which she told us was rare for that store.

The key problem with Velveeta is that it’s not a defined food. It’s not in the cheese section (usually), since it doesn’t have to be refrigerated. However, there’s not a really logical section for “unrefrigerated cheese”, so it’s a crapshoot where the Velveeta is. I was happy since right off the bat I spotted small boxes with “Velveeta” on them. But when I got there they were Velveeta Shells and Cheese dinner. Shit. I even walked past a large can (tub is more like it) of Nacho Cheese, the kind they spread thin at band booster concession stands. Cheese? Hello? No Velveeta to be seen.

Supermarkets are laid out in such a way that you can usually narrow it down to where your food isn’t. At some point in the store, the items stop being food and tend to be things like mops and detergent, until you hit the wall where the frozen stuff is. Then on the other end of the store tend to be things like produce and the deli/florist/pharmacy. So I had the Velveeta narrowed down to a subset of rows, but I went up and down these rows repeatedly. Add to this the fact that I’m getting more hungry, tired and flustered and the situation started to really suck.

Finally I found it. In the snack section. The snack section. Who in the hell is eating Velveeta as a snack? I mean, I’m making a snack out of it, but the Velveeta itself is not a snack. Good grief.

After getting home, eating and assembling a VCR thingy (more later) I was too frayed to get any coding in. Oh well, there’s always tommorow.

Bastard Mac users, getting a new Virtual Boy emulator while the old PC ones go unupdated for years now.

This post is kinda weird, so bear with me.

When I was in my latter High School years, the ones when I was driving, there was a popular thing to do while driving at night. I was in the car with a friend of mine and he suddenly punched the ceiling of his car and shouted “SEX!”. Suffice it to say, this stopped the conversation cold. He told me, “whenever you see a car with one headlight, you call ‘sex’. If you call three in one night, you get laid.” The when, where and who of getting laid he didn’t specify.

Soon after it became a trend amongst me and my friends whenever we were driving in a group. It became a game – who could spot the one-headlight cars first. It was just like “slug bug”s, only no one had to get punched in the arm. I can tell you this much from my High School days, however – the “getting laid” portion didn’t work – not for me at least.

Suffice it to say that the game went a little bit nuts on our Senior Band bus trip to Canada. A few years prior Canada had passed a law requiring that all cars sold/manufactured in the country have their headlights on when running, even during the day. Consequently the law of averages wasn’t in the favor of a lot of Canuk headlights.

About a month back I noticed a car with no headlights and I instantly thought “SEX!” but I didn’t say or do it (it would probably have freaked out my Mother-In-Law in the back seat). And it occured to me – I was last in High School nearly seven years ago. Since then I’ve been to College, graduated, gotten married, gone off to the “real world”, an entire lifetime. And yet, I think I can count on my left hand the number of one-headlight cars I’ve seen in those seven years. Back in my High School years I saw dozens overnight, but few if any since. I don’t know why, and I don’t even know what to point to to guess about. I started to wonder about some theories, however, during a recent car trip back from Dallas – you can do some good thinking in a car with two sleeping women.

1. My first two years in the Corps (Black Belt years) I wasn’t allowed to leave the dorm at night, or not very often anyway. These last few years I’ve been married and so when I come home I’m “in for the night” and I don’t go out. This would explain a little bit of the phonomena – if I don’t go out at night, I can’t see any cars – headlights or no. However, I didn’t notice it those three years in between very often, either.
2. It was a stupid thing I did in High School. I was lucky and didn’t have a job in HS, so I didn’t have to worry about a whole lot. College was rough, academic wise, for me, so perhaps I just didn’t notice the cars. Same goes for today – I work for a living now. Perhaps I’ve just become unobservant on non-important matters.
3. Perhaps local law is more stringent on burned out headlights. Odd that I would have never heard of this by now. By this token, isn’t it a bit odd that I owned a 1990 Lumina for eight years and never had a light burn out on it?
4. Perhaps headlights have just gotten better as of late. Headlights may outlive the engine these days. By that logic, in my hometown people tended to have cars because they got them to their job and back, most of the people in this town are College Kids and many of them have nice new cars their parents gave them (as was the case for me).
5. College Station, TX is mostly centralized – I live five minutes from my office, for example. Want to go to a kickass restauraunt? You could almost walk. Perhaps what kills headlights is extended uninterrupted use – short trips are fine on them (but murder on batteries). In my hometown where people have to drive thriry minutes to get to the neighbooring town because that’s where the Paper Mill is at (like my Dad, for one) you’re more likely to burn them out. When you’re hopping across town to go get liquored up, the tax on the bulbs is less. Having written that, I realize I never see too many broken bulbs in Dallas, but then I’m usually having to drive like a madman on the highways, so perhaps this is another “observation” issue.
6. By the centralized logic, my trips are shorter. I don’t drive clear across town to go visit friends anymore – I go home to my wife. I make a quick occasional jaunt to the Albertson’s. The odds of me running into someone with a broken headlight is slim because I don’t drive much at night and when I do, it’s not for long. Even when I do drive at night for an extended period it’s usually on long highways in Texas, where there’s nary a soul around and if you are going to go driving, it won’t be with one headlight.
7. Maybe people are just more prideful of their cars here.
8. Finally, maybe I never would have noticed broken headlights at all if someone hadn’t pointed them out to me.

I don’t know what’s up with the broken headlight issue and why it went away, but I have a feeling as soon as my Wife reads this post she’ll have a quick, simple explanation for it – one I would have never thought of in a million years.

There’s a change a goin’ on with PC Game Packaging. Essentially, most of the game publishers of the world are putting them out in smaller boxes. I forget the dimensions, but it’s roughly the size of a DVD, and about an inch and a half thick. The first stores to get these were Wal-Mart stores and originally I was against them – I liked the big PC game boxes and I figured the change was aimed at the “redneck idiot” mentality that tends to populate Wally World and was designed to confuse them into thinking it was basically a video they were buying. These were literally smaller versions of the boxes in other stores.

But then Electronic Arts came out and said that they would start supporting the format universally, initially in the game Medal of Honor. I was against the idea, but I realize it makes more sense – the boxes don’t need to be that big and it makes for more shelf space. However, I do feel sorry for any game that comes out until all new games are like this, or until most of the old games on the shelves are the same size. Until they do, the games in these boxes are going to look cheap and rinky-dink in comparison. Medal of Honor ships in a tiny little box sitting next to its full-size direct competitor, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Serious Sam: Second Encounter makes sense at $20 in a small box, Jedi Knight II in a tiny box seems like a ripoff almost.