As usual, I’m late with the news but wanted to give everyone a heads-up on a lesser repeat next year in May.  Reading yesterdays newspaper today I saw the report on the sequence of numbers that occurred yesterday in the a.m. and again in the afternoon.  I missed both :(

01:02:03 04/05/06

I love these things.

Is is just me or does Jack look like a turtle? I mean, if the camera shows just his face, his serious face, he kinda looks like a mud-slider( my teacher has one, and they look alike).

Tonight Kim and I ate at this new restaurant called Boston’s Sports Bar and Grill.  We were eyeing up their BBQ Chicken Pizza but it had cilantro on it, and we couldn’t figure out what that was.  I thought it was somehow like parsley, but wasn’t really sure.

I asked the waitress, and she said that it was, in fact, parsley, and she even said "you can’t really taste it."  So we got the pizza with the cilantro, and while it’s similar in appearance to parsley, that’s where the similarities end.  The taste is very strong, which sucks because its taste is the taste of soap.  After a few bites of it I realized where I’d tasted that before: in certain salsas.  In fact whenever I buy salsa I buy ChiChi’s brand because Tostitos’ salsa tastes like soap; it’s all so clear now that I know why.

So I vote that we ban cilantro.  Admittedly, it’s not quite the most offensive food known to man -- a distinction which I reserve for gorgonzola cheese -- but it’s pretty nasty.

The pizza itself was pretty good, but the crust was entirely tasteless.  It was strange; they’re all about their "gourmet" pizzas but the crust was not unlike cardboard.  The other strange thing was the french onion soup that I got as an appetizer: the cheese on it was some of the best french-onion-soup cheese I’ve ever had, but in the soup itself, in addition to there being the normal onions, there were soggy breaded onion rings.  Normally french onion soup has bread or croutons in it, and they get soggy and it’s all good.  But the soggy onion rings were just nasty.

This week’s episode of 24 was fantastic.  OK, so every episode is fantastic, but after weeks and weeks of good guys dying left and right, it’s nice to have a week where the good guys in their various subplots all not only live, but win.

Did you notice how when Wayne snuck up on Aaron he had an M16 or some such beast, but then after the commercial break Aaron had the M16 and Wayne just had a pistol?  I’d love to know what it was that Aaron said to Wayne in order to get the big gun.  Aaron is a man of so few words, and he’s so tough, I’m sure whatever it was, it would have been hilarious to witness.

And this has got to be one of the greatest Jack Bauer lines of all time:

Quoting Jack Bauer:

He’s using you.  He wanted you to get inside my head, and it worked.  And now I’m... upset.  You have three seconds to tell me where the target is or I will kill you.

I get an infinite loop when I log into VNC on an XP box.  Saw your posts and no answeres and wondered if you found a solution?

Thanks,

Last year, Sony sold some audio CDs that secretly contained rootkits -- essentially a nasty virus, albeit one that doesn’t self-propagate -- that not only seriously messed up your system, but also contained security holes that allowed hackers to mess up your system, too.  They’ve received all kinds of bad press about this, and rightly so, and have since been schooled by the justice system for it.

The settlement allows people who purchased one of their nastyware-infested CDs to get a free replacement along with 3 free album downloads from places like iTunes or Wal-Mart.  The list of available albums is pretty slim, but I can find 3 on there that I’d like to have.  And since I purchased the album "Faso Latido" by A Static Lullaby last year, which is one of the infected CDs, I’m in the money.

Not owning an iPod, I thought I’d check out some of the other download services, like that offered by Wal-Mart.  I won’t even bother to link to their site because 1) their site structure is awful, with ugly unintelligible links that look like they might not even work outside an existing session, and 2) their music download service is IE-only, Windows-Media-Player-only, and Windows-only.  From their FAQ:

How can I get the best performance out of Wal-Mart Music Downloads?

To avoid problems with downloading and playback, please make sure you do the following:

Use Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, or Windows Media Player 9 or later

Disable pop-up blockers

Disable firewalls

Disable download accelerators

Oh, sure, that sounds great!  While you’re at it, why don’t you unplug your computer, put it outside in the rain, and have your dog take a dump on it.

If I’m not mistaken, you can buy songs from ITMS and burn them to a CD, even if you don’t have an iPod, right?  It looks like that’s what I’ll probably do.

While watching the new movie V for Vendetta on Friday night, all I could think of was Trogdor and how the "s" is for "sucks."

OK, so the movie didn’t totally suck.  It was entertaining and interesting, but also annoying.  The thing is, with all the hype about "it’s by the Wachowski brothers, creators of the Matrix!!1!", I was expecting something great.  I guess I should have more heavily factored the suckiness of Matrix II and III into my expectations.

[Warning: spoilers follow.]

V for Vendetta rather overtly panders to the liberal crowd.  It paints a picture of the future where Great Britain has become a totalitarian state in the wake of an awful terrorist attack.  Of course, in the end it turns out that it was actually the British government who carried out the attacks, in order to have an excuse for stomping out civil liberties and amassing more power in the government.

In other words, it’s everything the crazy leftists believe that America is today.  The ruler of Britain was depicted exactly like Hitler, complete with raised arm, buggin’ out eyeballs, and red flags waving all around him.  If V for Vendetta were a thread on an online forum instead of a movie, it would have been over pretty quickly thanks to Godwin’s Law.

Then there was the pointless lesbian subplot.  Apparently some liberals believe we’re on track for a future where homos are collected up and put away by the government, again Nazi-style.  Never mind the fact that in the real America today, some states have gone so far as to change the centuries-old definitions of words in order to give special rights to homos.

In general, I liked the characters in the movie, I liked what little action / fight scenes there were, and the plot itself wasn’t bad.  They managed to not include the pointless sex scene that virtually every movie has nowadays, so that was cool.  If it weren’t for the whiny liberal tripe underlying the whole thing, I’d give it two pretty solid thumbs up.

I run another blog over on Encodable, and I’m now putting some of my more technical type posts there instead of here on ND.  That’s mainly because blogging == money (or more accurately, blogging == traffic =~ money) for business sites.

So anyway, if those kinds of posts interest you, then you may want to frequent that blog too.