shieldsville
2008.04.29 16.16
Look what my co-worker John found! Home base!
kingdom of the crystal skull
2008.04.28 9.35
the dark knight
2008.04.25 12.36
Opening nationwide on July 18, 2008, "The Dark Knight" reunites director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, who reprises the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne. In the new film, Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the city streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as The Joker.
The film also stars Academy Award winner Michael Caine ("The Cider House Rules") as Alfred; Academy Award nominee Heath Ledger ("Brokeback Mountain") as arch-villain The Joker; Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon; Aaron Eckhart as District Attorney Harvey Dent; Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes; and Oscar winner Morgan Freeman ("Million Dollar Baby") as Lucius Fox.
Warner Bros. Pictures presents, in association with Legendary Pictures, a Syncopy Production, a Christopher Nolan film, "The Dark Knight." Nolan is directing the film from a screenplay written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, story by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer. Emma Thomas, Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan are producing the film, with Kevin De La Noy, Benjamin Melniker and Michael Uslan serving as executive producers. "The Dark Knight" is based upon characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics. Batman was created by Bob Kane.
"The Dark Knight" will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company. "The Dark Knight Prologue" has been rated PG-13 by the MPAA for intense violent content.
keg stand
2008.04.21 21.18
I was pulling my hair out this afternoon trying to figure out why a group of servers we manage were dying 30 seconds after being restarted. We turned them off. We did some probing. We turned them on. Dead. Repeat. Eventually we decided to evaluate everything that connects to everything else. Nothin'. When we figured we'd turned over every rock we decided to just turn everything back on and hope for the best... and it worked. No smoking gun. Everything just works now. How?! I don't know how. I'm not going to sleep tonight until I figure out what the deal is/was.This past weekend saw the girlfriend and I visiting Breena and Chris' place for Bree's Birthday Party. It was an evening of firsts for both Samantha and I. It was our first keg stand experience. It was also Samantha's second and third keg stand experience. We played Flip The Cup Over On The Edge Of The Table. I believe that was the official name of that particular activity. I had such a great time that I'm thinking about throwing one of those here in the hella-expensive Uptown condo this summer. Check back here on this topic. That is all. Class dismissed.
and the next technology myspace will steal is...
2008.04.13 16.06
It's called STICKAM and it seems to be full of Life-Casters who are constantly on camera 24/7. The theory is -- if they're going to be sitting on the computer working most of the day then why not share? This is not a new idea as ANACAM.com has been hosting an uncensored view into the life of ''Ana'' for nearly 10 years. The embedded player below features Stickam Entertainer Jennifer Leigh. I'm not sure if the ''entertainer'' moniker is self proclaimed or not. Does it matter? When will YOU become a lifecaster?4 minutes
2008.04.12 14.35
"4 Minutes" is the first single by American singer-songwriter Madonna from her eleventh studio album Hard Candy and was released on March 17, 2008 by Warner Bros. Records. It features American singer-songwriter Justin Timberlake and Timbaland who also co-wrote and co-produced the song.
The song was originally titled "4 Minutes to Save the World". Madonna herself still refers to it as this title during an interview with UK morning show GMTV which was aired April 4 , 2008. "4 Minutes" received its first airing when co-producer Timbaland played part of the song at a concert on December 16, 2007 in Philadelphia. After brief appearances on YouTube and Perez Hilton, Warner Bros. quickly acted to prevent further viewing. Additionally, part of the song was played on a French radio station on February 29, 2008, later leaking online as a radio rip from the broadcast.
The single officially debuted on radio on March 17, 2008, and was released digitally in the UK on the same day. It was released digitally worldwide (except USA) on March 18, 2008 and in the US on March 25, 2008.
The song was also used for an television advertisement for Sunsilk that began to air on March 17.
Ironically, the song's lyrics and video suggests that both protagonists have no more than four minutes to "save the world," yet the length of the song is not four minutes, but rather four minutes and four seconds.
The music video was filmed in London from January 30 to February 2, 2008 with Timberlake and Timbaland, directed by French duo Jonas & François (Justice's "D.A.N.C.E."), with choreography by Jamie King.
The music video begins with Timbaland rapping his opening lines, in front of a screen showing exactly four minutes in the format of minutes:seconds:milliseconds. After some brief scenes of Madonna and Timberlake standing faced back to the camera, it shows Madonna leaning on car while pushing it back into a house where Timberlake and Madonna both sing while a removing a piece of clothing as the black background follows them both, the people living in the house seem oblivious to the black background as it removes their skin and part of their flesh. Madonna and Timberlake then jump out the window and end up in car junk yard where they begin to dance and evade the black shapes at the same time. After this they both run into a supermarket while the same black background follows them, Madonna and Timberlake begin singing in the isle of the supermarket while shoppers carry on as normal. Madonna and Timberlake move on to start dancing on the small treadmills at the checkouts. They then run into a bathroom and remove another piece of clothing while the black background follows outside, they then run out of the bathroom and appear to walk in to the same room Timbaland was seen in before, they immediately start performing choreography in front of the screen, now counting down from four minutes. They continually dance and remove a final piece of clothing from each other as the black background comes at them from both sides. The video ends with the black background finally catching up to them while they stop dancing and move closer to each other, as it starts to eat away at their skin and flesh.
The music video was released in some countries on iTunes Store on April 3, 2008. It also made a television premier on MuchMusic at midnight on April 6, 2008.
The song made its debut on the Official UK Singles Chart at number seven on 23 March 2008 based on download sales alone, reaching 21,106 within a week of it being released. Based on its first week of airplay, the song made its debut on the U.S. Mediabase Top 40/Pop Airplay Chart at number 23 with an airplay bullet of over 2000. The single debuted at number three on the Australian Digital Tracks chart.
In Latin America, has the best first week of the year in Brazil, at number 22 in Hot 100 Singles & Tracks, and 28 in your second week in Brazilian Dance Club Play.
In the Billboard issue dated April 12, 2008, Madonna surpassed Elvis Presley as the artist with the most U.S. top ten hits in the Rock Era with 37. "4 Minutes" went from number 68 to number three on the Billboard Hot 100, spurred by digital download sales, and is now her highest-charting single since "Music" went number one in 2000. The song sold 217,000 in its first week of wide release and entered the Hot Digital Songs chart at number two. "4 Minutes" also sold the most one-week digital sales in Canada, moving her to number one on the Canadian Hot Digital Songs chart.
girl scouts + superman
2008.04.09 23.37
Got an email today from a guy interested in attaining a copy of my 1983 broadcast of SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE. I'm still working on my response to him in GMail. As I've mentioned in previous super movie geeky blog entries, my dad and I recorded this when it first premiered on broadcast television. It was chock full of weird deleted scenes that seemed to have been pulled straight out of the film editor's trash bin. In retrospect it makes perfect sense why these excised scenes found their way back into the film. Advertising revenue. ABC was able to capitalize on showing SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE on two different nights because the cut was so gargantuan. This brings me to my latest deleted scene. I haven't posted one in over two years. Slacker! I've enhanced this clip using Adobe Premiere CS3 by widening the aspect ratio, adjusting the white balance, the gray balance, the saturation, the hue, the contrast, the brightness, and tossing in a partridge in a pear tree. Watch now and be amazed.
good morning uptown
2008.04.09 8.51
Check out this Uptown Minneapolis Blog which features photographs taken by a local photographer. I also live in Uptown, mind you. While I sometimes like to call myself a part-time photographer, this guy is a bit more... full-time. Here's how he describes his blog:This is a photoblog of Uptown Minneapolis. Centered at Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue in South Minneapolis, Uptown is one truly unusual high energy commercial district. Below are some photos I’ve taken and some observations I’ve made about Uptown Minneapolis and the surrounding area.
back from perl harbor
2008.04.07 1.40
I use a control panel called PLESK to manage the dedicated server that MARKSHIELDS.COM is hosted on along with a slew of other sites that I host for my friends. The software is auto-upgrading and, until recently, never gave me any trouble. The 8.3.0 upgrade, however, was really a huge pain in the arse as far as my ability to blog with MovableType which was negatively affected. I know this may be a bit boring, but check out all the s*** this guy at PLESK had to do to bring me back:Mark,Wow. That solution cost me $75 (the cost of PLESK's single incident rate). That's well worth it since I'd spent at least 12 hours of my own time trying to figure it out on my own. Yay.
The problem was caused by Perl impoperly upgraded with packages. I had to reinstall Perl, rebuild mod_perl and modules DBI and DBD::mysql to fix the problem.
Here is the steps I had to pass:
1) there were two Perl packages installed in the system:
[root@4169 ~]# pkg_info | grep perl-5.8
perl-5.8.8 Practical Extraction and Report Language
perl-5.8.8_1 Practical Extraction and Report Language
I have removed them both forcedly:
[root@4169 ~]# pkg_delete -f perl-5.8.8
[root@4169 ~]# pkg_delete -f perl-5.8.8_1
2) I have got perl-5.8.8_1 precompiled package from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/All and installed it:
[root@4169 ~]# pkg_add perl-5.8.8_1.tbz
3) then, I have rebuild mod_perl2 port (with FORCE_PKG_REGISTER environment variable set, to reinstall already installed package):
[root@4169 ~]# cd /usr/ports/www/mod_perl2
[root@4169 /usr/ports/www/mod_perl2]# export FORCE_PKG_REGISTER=1
[root@4169 /usr/ports/www/mod_perl2]# make clean ; make install
4) After that there were no more Segmentation fault errors. However, CGI scripts were not working still with these messages in suexec log (/var/log/httpd-suexec.log):
[2008-04-07 00:42:20]: uid: (10050/bethdeth) gid: (2525/2525) cmd: mt.cgi
[2008-04-07 00:42:20]: command not in docroot (/usr/local/www/vhosts/queenbeth.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi)
This was caused by Plesk suexec overwritten by Apache's one. I have restored Plesk's suexec:
[root@4169 /usr/local/www/vhosts/queenbeth.com/cgi-bin]# cp -fp /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-suexec /usr/local/sbin/suexec
[root@4169 /usr/local/www/vhosts/queenbeth.com/cgi-bin]# chmod 4755 /usr/local/sbin/suexec
5) and generic scripts started working. However, http://queenbeth.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi still does not work:
[Mon Apr 07 00:47:45 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/DBI.pm line 1212.
[Mon Apr 07 00:47:45 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Had to create ::imp_data_size unexpectedly at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/DBI.pm line 1212.
[Mon Apr 07 00:47:45 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/DBI.pm line 1212.
[Mon Apr 07 00:47:45 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Premature end of script headers: mt.cgi
[Mon Apr 07 00:48:01 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/DBI.pm line 1212.
[Mon Apr 07 00:48:01 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Had to create ::imp_data_size unexpectedly at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/DBI.pm line 1212.
[Mon Apr 07 00:48:01 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/DBI.pm line 1212.
[Mon Apr 07 00:48:01 2008] [error] [client 82.200.65.190] Premature end of script headers: mt.cgi
To resolve this problem I had to rebuild ports databases/p5-DBI and databases/p5-DBD-mysql50. Now, I see that scripts are working fine.
Please check and let us know if you have any further questions.
I also had another issue with my server performance coming to a screeching halt. That solution I did figure out on my own. The cause? China. Yes -- China the country. Over 30 sites were hot-linking images of my Batmobile among other things. This activity was pushing my server over the 900 connection barrier. Normally my machine can handle something like that, but an HTTP connection to China is open a LOT longer than normal. Too may open requests and performance took a tumble. So, anyway, sorry China, but find your own Super Genius. Either that or copy my images and host them yourselves for crying out loud.
And now... presenting Avril Lavigne. Photography courtesy of Mark and Sam. If this isn't enough, look what we saw here and here and here and here because we saw this. Ashlee: Sorry about the time when I posted that SNL video of you.
you should watch this all day
2008.03.12 18.23
Watch new FLICKR photos posted in real-time geographically in this fascinating mash-up. Thanks to ''Crazy'' Carl for ruining my recent streak of doing 100% work during work this year.Don't watch this. It's some kid trying to explain how to get AlienWare skins for free -- I think. You can *barely* understand what the heck he's saying.
down the hollister
2008.03.03 19.58
I'm at Hollister in the Mall of America. My GFF is perusing the fine fashions of the San Diego beach set while I blog on the iPhone a few feet away. My right ankle is definitely twisted but not as injured as I feared. I'd call it a light sprain. I won't be doing any running for at least a week. I'm annoyed, but there's plenty of other similarly distressing cardio that I can do. Hmmm. I got an unexpected kudo at work today which was nice. I help out a lot of other divisions in my company. Let's just leave it at that. Ah the GFF is determining her final purchases. More to come.twist and shout
2008.03.02 19.47
I'm blogging and driving. Don't try this at home. It's frozen slick conditions outside. I didn't realize this until I slipped on the ice and twisted my right ankle. Ow. Ow. Ow. It's only been 10 minutes and I can tell this is not going to go over very well. I'll be back. Trying to drive and blog is hard... And maybe illegal.nude sushi
2008.03.01 22.05
I was taken aghast at the concept of Nyotaimori. That's the rare Japanese practice of eating sushi off of a naked woman's body. Nantaimori is the dude version. Shocking, yet not surprising given the liberal maturity of Minnesota's residents. My girlfriend Samantha informs me that a cast member from the reality television show THE SURREAL LIFE participated in this activity with MC Hammer and Corey Feldman abstaining. Why do I bring this up? There's a nyotaimori / nantaimori event being held at a local Minneapolis restaurant called Temple on March 8th at 7:30 P.M. Intrigued? The cost is a whopping $75.00 per person and includes sushi, sake and champagne. The real question that I have is -- how much of the $75 is for the sweat and body hair?the googler returns
2008.02.28 6.09
I was thinking about posting something fictional about my trip to Google. Didn't happen. Why? It seems that the dreaded blog apathy has stricken me yet again. Well, there is this one thing I've been blogging about elsewhere, but it requires some explanation.I was briefly caught up in the drama of the 90 Day Jane phenomenon. Here's a copy of her profile information which detailed her imminent plans:
I am going to kill myself in 90 days. What else should i say? This blog is not a cry for help or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to? I mean, as an atheist I feel life has no greater purpose. My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3. So, if I feel like saying "game over", why can't I? Anyway, I hope you enjoy my thoughts as the clock runs out. Please don't attempt to "help" me. If you want to truly help, please send me ideas on how to do the deed. thx-JaneAs you can imagine a *LOT* of people freaked out at the suggestion -- which is completely understandable given the serious nature of suicide. The topic is not a matter to be taken lightly. However, I was able to determine through fairly rudimentary internet forensics (i.e. timestamps and filenames) that the entire Jane story was all a lame attention grabbing hoax that was never going to happen. Risky assessment? Not really as my analysis was quickly proven correct. By Day 84 (she was counting backwards to 0), Jane was receiving so much attention from the internet, the media, and presumably her local law enforcement, that she decided to take down her site. She posted a respite for the fictional Jane along with an explanation of why she did it:
90DayJane is a personal art piece about me. It was meant for me and (what I ignorantly thought would be) a small number of people who might find it on BlogSpot. It is the result of me tapping into the darkest part of myself and seeing where it led. [...] I feel a massive sense of responsibility to my art, but more importantly the readers of this blog. My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours.Duh. The people who were serious about trying to find help for Jane were furious. I, on the other hand, declined to become furious and instead created a parody blog called 90 Day Jayne -- which I'm behind on updating (no surprise there). You see, after my aforementioned forensics confirmed Jane's plot was all a sham, I decided to take the character Jayne Cobb from the FIREFLY series and have him count down 90 days to a dangerous mission where he was going to kill all the Reavers. The idea of a countdown is ingenious in that it guarantees you a returning audience within a specific window of time. As far as the topic... I would have preferred that Jayne Cobb kill all the Ravers instead, but Ravers are so cute with their little pacifiers and glowing light sticks in their mouths and fluorescent body jewelry. No friends, this was the Reavers he planned to off. They are the fictional zombie-like characters that are fully explained in the film SERENITY. I could easily post a link to Wikipedia that gives a detailed public domain description of the characters, but I'd rather you go log into NETFLIX and request FIREFLY and SERENITY instead. It's really well done and you will laugh more than once.
Yes, I do feel somewhat uncomfortable that I took a bamboozlement meant to illicit emotional distress from the reader and turned it into a parody involving a fictional science fiction character that farts and likes to shoot his guns because he likes the sounds of weapon discharge. However, it turns out that I have a lot of fans of FIREFLY who are enjoying my fictional rants as Jayne, so I've decided to forge on ahead and have Jayne complete his mission of non-mercy. Good times.
Briefly in other super genius related news, I'm considering moving my blog over to BlogSpot instead of MovableType after having discovered how easy it is to use and customize. It will also allow me to post photos from my phone and user commenting can be enabled with some level of spam protection. We shall see. I'm converting SuperHeather.com to blogspot format currently but at a snail's pace. Sorry. I'll work on scheduling my bursts of semi-creativity.
If you really want to know what happened at the Google event, Read Wade's blog around the late January 2008 time line.
