JohnA lifeBlog

Hello again. Since I upgraded my Wordpress install (see the previous post about how bad that sucked), I decided that I should check out the available themes and find something new.

I really like this one, but I suck at all visual design. If you hate it, please let me know!

JohnA The Blogger®

P.S. - In celebration of this historic event, I even updated my About Me page. Go me!

So, I upgraded Wordpress to the latest version so that I could post remotely from my iPod. Naturally, the crack open-source developers demonstrated their epic fail at QA, and I lost all of my categories. I’ve tried to restore most of them, but I lost a bunch of the smaller ones.

Anyway, this is a familiar reminder of why open source software will never replace properly QA’ed commercial software. And it means that I get to spend hours fixing bugs from my “free” software.

So, I am late to this party, but here goes.

If you are a fan of the art of movie making then you have no choice but to watch Richard Donner’s version of Superman II frame by frame. If you own the LaserDisc version of that print, go you! I own that set of discs, but don’t have a working player right now.

Richard is a genius among geniuses, and he was written off because he wouldn’t simply stamp the changes dictated by the studio in the lame attempt to achieve greater profits. He worked day and night to define Batman as a conflicted hero. This is not something easily ignored.

I rented this cut on Blu-Ray, and while I can definately tell which shots are production, and which are not, I enjoyed the end product far more than what was released into theaters.

Richard Donner’s cut is the natural sequel to the original Superman film. Donner was never given a chance to develop the ultimate villain. Instead we’re stuck with “people” like Lex Luthor. There was a world to investigate from this corpus…

Instead, the writers chose to extend the legend beyond their initial encounter. Art works best when it has some imagination to work with.

What would you do if you lost everything? How would you react?

Darcy Burner, a congressional candidate from Washington, shows her true colors in the face of adversity.

As was stated on another site, every $5,000 she receives is a day long reprieve from the necessary fundraising against her opponent who doesn’t have this magnitude of tragedy to face. I gave her campaign $50 today. You should help, too.

Oh, and I totally want to know where she got the </war> t-shirt she’s wearing.

I just donated $100 to Sen. Obama’s campaign. It was only the second time in my life that I have contributed to a Democrat’s campaign.

We need someone to unify us. Someone who will work to unite America, not divide her. That man is Barak Obama.

God bless America. And God bless unity and progress. Thank you, Mr. Obama.

Wait a second… strike that, reverse it… thank you.

I have a number of things I need to write about, so I’m going to pop in a movie and get to it. I’ll be posting an update about my Costco situation, commenting on the Government “Free Block of Cheese” DTV Converter Program, how cool DropBox is, and finally mention that it’s my fifth anniversary of the great move west, so start shopping for some wooden gifts.

So, I had to move this blog to a new server, which has totally messed up the MySQL database that Wordpress uses, so all of my old posts have lots of weird symbols in place of things like quotes and apostrophes. Go Unicode. Anyway, I’m going to try to figure it all out soon enough.

So, I’m beta testing the 2-dot-oh release of the coolest Mac app ever, and as a fellow software developer, I was saddened to receive this message after I sent my latest comments:

—– Transcript of session follows —–
procmail: Quota exceeded while writing “/var/mail/bugs”
550 5.0.0 bugs… Can’t create output

Reporting-MTA: dns; delicious-monster.com
Arrival-Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:58:05 -0600

Final-Recipient: RFC822; librarybugs@delicious-monster.com
X-Actual-Recipient: RFC822; bugs@delicious-monster.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.3.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Unix; 73
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:58:05 -0600
—

I know that the last thing I would ever want my fellow developers to receive was a “YOU FAIL, PLEASE TRY AGAIN” message. Thankfully I have the preferred e-mail address for their lead developer, and I forwarded my comments to him directly.

Again, this is a testimony to the fact that writing AWESOME software really is hard. Beta tests and all… I mean, if it were easy, we’d just all buy it off the shelf at Best Buy using some kind of coupon…

Update!: And no, this isn’t a gratuitous name drop. I already run a top internet site, kthxbai, so I don’t need anymore recognition. I just wanted to share my understanding with another awesome development shop.

I have to give Burger King props… they know how to pitch a viral video.

Check out Whopper Freakout.

The truth is that this video has every single perfect element for viral marketing. It is clever, it is raw, and it is true. Well done, huge corporate enterprise’s marketing company!

I heart teh interwebs.

Ok, I upgraded Wordpress, and naturally it broke everything.

I’m going to move to a new server and upgrade everything to see if I can fix it.