I’ve finally made the time to sit through this movie. I grew up on the Transformers cartoon and remember going to see the original animated movie when it was in the theater. I was ready for a return to what made Transformers awesome, the epic battle between the autobots and decepticons. What I ended up with was 2.5 hours of “The Beef” and Megan Fox running around on screen. Shia did a decent acting job but I didn’t care for his character at all, Megan Fox could have been replaced by a blow up doll with a voice box and have worked just as well in the movie.
Then we get to the fight scenes. Just like the last movie the fight scenes were between undiscernable robots doing battle with one another. Yes, the animated series had bright colors and could do that but the problem is those bright colors were like jersey’s in the battle. Half the time you have to wait for the dialog to figure out who was fighting and who won.
I’m glad that some studio decided that Michael Bay needed more money to ruin a franchise with an excessive use of explosives and lack of actual story. Perhaps next time he can do a movie about Pearl Harbor and ruin that, wait…
Put this movie on a list of never watch. Go out and buy the animated movie and enjoy.
I thought I would finally update the blog with some of my favorite “Gemers” that we’ve had and reuse consistantly.
Wattgate 381 – gemerit.com/xxf + gemerit.com/x1om
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk – gemerit.com/x1on
xkcd – gemerit.com/x21
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – gemerit.com/x171
Assembly of the grill requires 30 various steps where it will ask you questions that quite frankly you don’t care about and wish you could do once the grill is assembled. The fuel for your grill is compatible with many types of fuel, but only one is signed by Microsoft and no one knows what it is. Since the grill is compatible with many things you don’t have to think to hard about buying grill tools as long as you don’t buy a the iSpatula or the iTongs. Because the grill tool isn’t perfectly compatible every time you use a tool for too long it will ask you if you want to send error data to Microsoft about the tool. Should you actually be able to use the tool you’ll move things around in the grill which will cause you to have to restart the grill. After restarting you can cook again until you have to move things again prompting another restart. When you’re done grilling and you go to remove items from the grill if you ignore the prompts you can remove all items before a restart is necessary. However once you are finished grill you can shut down the grill which will take you about 10 minutes. At some point though the grill will bluescreen which will allow you to shut down the grill sooner.
In an attempt to keep my skills up when I’m between jobs I decided to put in more work into my applications that I’ve been doing at home. Since the vast majority of companies are beginning to look for WPF and shockingly CAL I will be using these in my home applications. Note, I will be using these as they should be rather than just because they can. Since I plan on having a handful of applications that will all have the same look and feel CAL makes sense and I want WPF for the look (performance…pfft!).
That being said I am attempting to do something really simple. Get data from the database and display it in a simple table. Once the table is filled I want to give the user the ability to choose which columns they can view. Microsoft was nice enough to make the context menu items checkable very easy to design but what they didn’t do is make it so that I can modify the column visibility. From Microsoft themselves the solution is to set the column width to 0.
WHY!!!!
Is it so hard for you to add a stupid property that all it does is not render the column? Apparently it is, you know right next to threading the UI… So now I have to write a converter to bind the “visibility” property to the checkbox (how data binding was meant to be used) so that when the checkbox changes it changes the column’s visibility.
Thank you Microsoft for making yet another 10 second fix into a 3 hour task.
Posted in Rants
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Tagged .Net, Anger, CAL, Microsoft, WPF
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After a nice sabbatical from blogging I decided to return with a rant that is very near and dear to my heart.
I will freely admit that I am a fairly basic developer. I don’t dive deep into the intricacies of the code but rather just want to make it work. Being a fairly basic developer I expect the basic things to work if nothing else. Now that we’re winding down from a very stressful few months at work we’re getting into the problems that require some creative thinking and I get to an application that could use a fall-through switch statement. Why did someone along the lines think that needlessly limiting developers would be a good thing? I mean who on God’s green earth decided “hey they should use a goto to make a fall-through switch?” WHY!!!. Amongst the development community goto statements are like horrible infectious diseases, yeah we want them out of the general population but keep some around in a lab for future use.
Along the same lines was C#’s inability to multiply a boolean. So they want me to convert a 1 bit number to an 8 bit number to do the multiplicaiton? So instead of multiplying 1 times an integer value I multiply 00000001 times the integer?
If C# and the .Net framework wants people to adopt and make their performance sensitive applications with it they need to pull out the NEEDLESS stops. I understand if some developer couldn’t think of anyone wanting to do some of these things, but I honestly cannot be the first person to attempt these things.
On the same lines but not the same thing necessarily is the inability to edit the UI from another thread. From what I understand this is hard to do properly under the right circumstances. In this case perhaps the .Net developers wanted to obfuscate this better and so decided to make it unusable at the time. This is ok, if you don’t have a way to do it right don’t do it, but don’t put in the stops because you think you’re helping me because you aren’t.
Everyone is currently focused on the failing economy in one way or another. I felt a pressing need to discuss this issue and what I believe to be the problems. Lets attempt to start at the beginning and work up to present day.
Roughly 2005 – 2006 banks were loaning out money to homebuyers who had no ability to pay on houses that were above and beyond the value of the house. This caused the housing market to crash and banks to be stuck with outstanding loans that will never return
2007 – 2008 gas prices go on the rise. Businesses regularly raise prices to “cover costs”
Present day: banks and businesses are going under and laying off employees to keep in business. The President and other economists believe that these problems are being caused by people not spending money which is accurate, but not the root cause. Remember that raise in prices from the gas crunch? That price hasn’t gone back down with the gas prices. I believe that the problems we are experiencing today is greed and nothing more. If the businesses were to cut their costs people could afford their products and keep their employees employed thus fulfilling the circle of economics. Greed also accounts for the banks attempting to make as much money as possible off of low interest rates. Sorry people can’t pay back loans, but many of these loans would have been better off if the people could have given a button as collateral because the button would have more value than the house.
Now to the bailouts. Only in America can you do a piss poor job of managing money and the government swoop in and give you MORE money. “Yep you failed as a businessman, he’s a few million dollars to spend.” Recessions, historically, do wonderful things for our economy. America has gone through recessions/depressions before and came out stronger for it, why is this? Because no one bailed out failed businesses. If I have an employee that can’t do his job I don’t let him continue, I fire him and bring in someone who can. My stipulation for the bailout of a company would have been that the company’s entire executive management and board would no longer be employed there, obviously they don’t know what they’re doing or they would have this problem.
All that being said, the companies not receiving a bailout from the government this recession will come out as big players. Those companies see the value in managing their mistakes and are going to live by “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.”
Adventure Comics #0
This one was a take on the old Adventure Comics from the 60s. The art style and storytelling were very similar and it was a fun read. The reason I picked this up was for the “Origins and Omens” storyline that it kicked off in a side story at the end of the issue. Looks like Lex Luthor and Brainiac are going to be playing major parts in the Blackest Night (amusing since both are Superman villains).
Deadpool #7
Looks like we’re wrapping up storyline from Secret Invasion and moving into Dark Reign. The comic is just as fun as ever, with a hint of actual storyline popping up. I can see in the future Deadpool being a major player in the next few months even though no one else in the Marvel universe will know it. On a side note, why is someone who has a healing power and pretty much can’t die so afraid of being shot?
Ender’s Titles
Normally I’d do an individual analysis, but with five titles here it was kinda tough. While I have not read the books, the comic story is very intriguing. The problem I’ve seen with comic adaptations of books is that they did what movies did for years, try to cram hours of content into two and a half hours of story. Thanks be to Marvel (you’ll probably never see that again) for realizing that these books need gigantic arcs to be told properly. Anyone who is a basic fan of sci-fi should pick up the Ender’s titles or even possibly the book its based of “Ender’s Game.”
House of Mystery #10
The House of Mystery at the moment for me is in a weird state. I read #9 and #10 but didn’t feel I got a good part of the story. Unfortunately #9 is part 4 of 5 in a story arc and #10 is the finale. While the story was decent, missing 3/5 of it really killed it. I’ll be buying the next storyarc to determine if the comic is worth keeping up on.
This is the first rant on this company’s software but surely not the last. Currently I’m attempting to accomplish a task that in reality should take about 5 minutes using basic controls but instead I’m stuck with Infragistics. This control is so horrid that it takes 2 days to figure out what it is attempting to do in the most illogical fashion and another day to correct that to make some semblance of sense. This will take hours of me navigating through the hundred line switch statements to find a single method which is abstracted into its own method by seemingly competent developers. Its almost as if someone thought “how can I make something so bad that people will remember me forever?” This crap is so bad that Frankenstein would have rallied the villagers to burn it to the ground. The spirits of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” wouldn’t have opened this damn box because the horrors contained inside are too horrible for any THING to bear. I got it, there was no big bang, someone just created this piece of crap and the universe just ran at high speed to get away from it.
This tool is like me asking for a screwdriver and someone handing me raw iron ore and telling me it is a screwdriver. Perhaps after come competent creation it could be but right now its a useless pile of crap that does me no good whatsoever. Anything I use this tool on becomes as unmaintainable as a stripped out screw that had the head cut off. The only way to take it out is to drill it out and put a bigger screw in which takes more time than using the correct tool the first time.
The more I drive in this state the more I’ve determined that it is a “right to drive” state. Anyone, no matter how stupid they are, is allowed at age 16 to get behind the wheel of a vehicle that easily end the lives of multiple people in one fell swoop. Now these same people for some odd reason don’t have enough sense to gamble, drink, and vote (which it seems only senseless people do as of late). Why do I feel someone not even responsible enough to vote is responsible enough to drive amongst the other people who in some cases are “responsible”, in age, but still drive as if they have no hands and half a brain. Perhaps this all stems from the fact that I came from the 3rd hardest state to get your license from. I had to go through countless hours of instruction and training just to get to the next step of instruction and training. Do I make bad decisions? yes, do I feel like a moron afterwards? yes. Everyone makes bad decisions but in most places on earth the bad choices and “accidents” are a minority not a majority.
On a side note though the city planners are partly to blame, I mean who makes a clover with a 40ft merge lane that your max speed is roughly a quarter of the highway speed.
Posted in Rants
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Tagged Drivers, Morons, Show-Mes
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I look forward all week to being able to play some L4D, Halo, or other online game. As it turns out like many other weekends my internet went out. Upon calling on Friday they said service was out for my area. I’m not really sure how buried lines always get shredded on Friday but they really need to stop this, its cutting into my happiness. Later in the weekend I found out that it is something more sinister and I may not have my internet back for a while yet. I found I am next to helpless without my internet. Unable to Google programming questions, Best Buy ads, and even a walkthrough for Castle Crashers so I could get achievements. Though I did have much saddness it did make me realize how much time I spend on the internet in a weekend because I managed to get almost our entire kitchen refinished this weekend so now we just have to do touch up and call it “done.”
Posted in Rants
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Tagged gaming, internet, kitchen
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