Thursday night I saw The Dark Knight for the third time. I am not that obsessed, it just happened. Mary and I got tickets for an opening midnight showing. Mary was tired and had to work super early so she bailed at the last second. I flew solo and showed up for a front row seat just as it began. A week later, Mary wanted to see it, so I went again. It’s definitely worth seeing a second time. Yet another week later, Mary wanted to take a pair of nephews to see it and so I went along and I saw it a third time. I think that the only other movie that I saw three times in the theater was Pulp Fiction. I saw it three times in 1994/95 over a 3 to 4 month period. But now I’ve seen the Dark Knight three times, technically within a two week time span. Yowsa. It’s good … no, it’s great. But not “you should see it three times in a row” great.

One interesting thing that I noticed was that the Gotham license plates looked exactly like Illinois license plates. At first, when the bus backed into the bank at the beginning, I thought that they screwed up and left Illinois plates on the bus. But upon further inspection, they’d replaced the script “Illinois” with a similar script “Gotham”. And the picture of Lincoln from the Illinois plate was replaced with something else. Here’s an Illinois plate:

And here’s the bus plate:

It’s pretty obvious why they designed the Gotham plate to look just like Illinois plates … since it was mostly filmed in Chicago, the license plates on any non-prop cars that sneak into the film will, from a distance, match with the Gotham plates.

I watched them film a few of the big chase scenes in Chicago last summer. Seeing all of the equipment, personnel, security, props, etc. made me just overwhelmed when thinking about planning and project managing a project of this magnitude. Yowsa!

Why do people use the phrase or write “half a dozen” when saying “six” or writing “6″ would suffice? Saying “half a dozen” takes four syllables of breath, saying “six” takes one. Even if you use the phrase because the number of the things that you are talking about is not exactly six, instead of saying “about half a dozen”, you could just as well say “about six”.

Here’s a handy dandy table:

Even Google tries to set you straight. Here’s what Google gives you if you if you search for “half a dozen”:

So save your breath or 11 characters of typing and just go with “6″!

A couple of weeks ago Mary and I attempted to get tickets to the sold out Flight of the Conchords show at the Chicago Theatre. There were tons of people looking for tickets and extra tickets were very scarce. Mary was successful in obtaining a single ticket, which she sacrificed to me and I went to the show while she went across the street to Borders. Props to Mary. It woulda been better if she was there, but I enjoyed the show from the 12th row on the center aisle with some NEW lady friends

Here’s Mary offering free “dragon tears” to anyone who can help us out:

Here’s a shot of Jermaine and Brett that I took once inside:

Mary got a hot tip from a security dude that the Conchords were playing a post-show gig at Schubas after the show… We went there and ate dinner, and sure enough, they showed up … but they were quickly brisked off to a private party; no special bonus show for us.

It was a fun night … kind of felt like a stalker like their #1 fan Mel … when we went to Schubas to look for them.

I was thinking that it must kind of weird being a celebrity of medium-level stature … Jermaine and Brett probably would not be recognized by 98% of Americans, but for stalkers like Mel, they’re the #1 rock stars in the world.
Oh, and speaking of medium-level celebrities, I walked out of the theatre next to Jim DeRogatis, rock critic of the Sun-Times, co-host of the excellent Sound Opinions, and soon-to-be R. Kelly trial witness. Being the rock nerd that I am, I recognized him and told him that I loved his show … he gave a curt nervous “thanks” and hustled out the door (I’ll cut him a break for not being more friendly, he probably had a deadline to issue his review for the morning paper).

This post brought to you by Flight of the Conchords Season 1 DVD and the Flight of the Conchords Studio Record!

When elected official plaster their names all over bridges and welcome signs and whatnot, that takes work and money paid for by tax dollars. Then, when a new mayor/governor is elected, they have to pay to for it again to replace or repaint the signs. Bah.

If the mayor gets to put his name on fancy dancy things that he is proud of, he should also have to put his name on non-fancy-dancy things like the worst CHA buildings.

The end.

Experiencing local and independent art is fun. Sometimes it is inspiring.

Once in a while, you run into a FANTASTIC piece of work. Grade “A” stuff. And that is great.

Most of the time, local and independent work is tolerable to okay, you know, like if you had to give it a grade, you’d give it a “C”. You take SOMETHING from it, but overall, it’s not so memorable or inspiring.

And then the rest of the time, you run in to stuff that is SO BAD that you are embarrassed for the artist. I’m talking about stuff that you’d give a grade of “F”, or maybe “D-” if you are feeling generous.

I’ve experienced my fair share of HORRIBLE musicals, independent movies, sketch comedy, rock bands, paintings, photography, etc. But what always happens to me when I experience this stuff is that I say to myself, “I could do 10 times better than that guy without even trying”. Even if it is an art form that I have zero experience in, I feel as if I could crank out something better than the drivel that I have just experienced. It makes me want to go home and write a movie. Or write a book. Or record a song. Or paint a picture. And sometimes I do.

Don’t get me wrong, I have all the respect in the world for EVERYONE who is willing to put themselves out there and show the world their work. It often takes balls. Lots of folks who want to publish a song or write a novel or make a movie never even TRY. Usually fear stops them cold … fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, whatever. They never even try. So my hat is off to everyone who even tries.

But sometimes it is SO sad when an ambitious project that someone has sunk hours and hours and hours into is SO BAD. The good thing about experiencing this embarrassingly horrible art: it often inspires me.

So next time you’re stuck, go seek out a horrible play or indie movie or rock band. It may just give you the inspiration to produce something that is at least a “C” and who knows, you may produce an “A”!

this is a cross-post from acidfreeink.com

Say I am an engineer who designed, oh … say, a lamp. It’s kind of fancy, it’s got a programmable timer so that you can set it up to turn on an off at specified times.

A technical support person comes to me and says, “I’ve got a customer whose lamp doesn’t work, you’ve got a bug in the logic that handles time zones in the timer.”

“Hmmmm” I say. What makes you think that there’s a bug in time zone stuff?

“Well, our customer was living in NYC and he moved to Chicago. When he set it up in his Chicago loft, it didn’t work. NYC is Eastern time, Chicago is Central.”

“Hmmm. Couple of questions. Is the lamp plugged into a working AC outlet and is there a working bulb in the lamp?”

“Yep” says support technician.

“You verfied this?” I ask.

“Yep”

“How did you verify this”.

“Oh, the customer said that it worked in his NYC apartment.”

I say, “OK, humor me here. 1.) Plug some other electric powered device into the outlet that the lamp is plugged into and verify that it the outlet is delivering power. 2.) Take the bulb out of the lamp and make sure that it works in another working lamp.”

“OK, just a minute” says technical support technician. “Oh, it wasn’t plugged in. Now it works.”

Support technician does not say thanks. He does not apologize for prematurely playing the blame game and saying that we coded a bug into our product and I don’t hear from him again until there’s a new problem in which he has prematurely come up with a hair-brained explanation as to what the problem is.

It never ceases to amaze me how few technical folks are good at asking the fundamental questions to themselves when trying to figure out a problem. When I am presented with something that does not work, the first thing that I ask myself is “What are the things that make this thing fundamentally work?” 80% of the time, the problem can quickly be solved after asking this question. The fact that time after time after time folks come to me saying they’ve found a bug with something deep in the product and 80% of the time they not correct, is very disheartening.

Now, sometimes there ARE problems. The 20% of the time that the problem brought before me is indeed a bug, I will be the first one to climb on to the mountain top, say “we’ve got a bug!” and take responsibility whether it was directly my fault or not.

On a side note … folks need to learn to leave their ego at the door and always be open to the possibility that they made a mistake and fess up when they screw up. We all screw up. People trust you and like you a lot more when you fess up when you screw up … people who play the blame game for 45 hours a week at work are universally hated, whether they are correct in assigning blame or not.

Ok, that’s enough of a rant! Have a joyful weekend and I hope that you don’t run into any problems that you have to troubleshoot. But if you do, please first ask your self “what are the fundamental things that make this thing work?” There’s a decent chance that you will find that the “broken” lawnmower can be fixed by putting a $4 gallon of gas in it

Two ex-Onion writers started the e-card site someecards.com about a year ago. I’d never heard about it until I just saw it written up on TechCrunch today. Man, are these cards good. I talked with Mary several years ago about making a card company that made blunt, honest and sometimes crude greeting cards that said exactly what you were thinking but that most people would never say.

Well, someecards.com probably did a much funnier job than I would’ve ever pulled off. There are TONS of good ones.

Here are 11 of my favorite workplace cards

This one is totally the current situation at my work:

I am notorious for not turning my timesheets on time. I am sure that there are some folks in my company who would love to send me this one:

I tend to speak pretty freely at work. Sometimes, in trying to warn me to watch what I say, some folks say things that are ten times worse than anything that I would even think of saying in their effort of trying to warn me:

I’ve got one of the better cubicles in my workplace, but some other folks have got to feel like this:

Everybody’s run into this person before:

I never feel like this on my projects, but I have observed many projects from a distance that makes me appreciate this:

George Costanza would be proud of this guy we’ve all met:

I haven’t first hand experienced this, but Mary did way too many times at her previous job:

Two words at my office complex … “Deli Time”

It’s really funny to listen to all of the Blackberry scrolling/button punching in the bathroom stalls:

Some people, you’ve just got to wonder about:

Google announced Google App Engine tonight. At first I thought it was going to more directly compete with Amazon’s EC2, S3, etc. It really doesn’t. What it gives you is a somewhat limited Python development environment to work in. I quickly read through the getting started docs. I really love Python, but I was initially a little under-whelmed after reading the initial docs. But then I realized that you could deploy an entire Django application (with minimal tweeks to use Google’s datastore) and, hmmm, that might be compelling. I’ve got a little project that I started a year and a half ago that I put on the backburner that I might just finish developing in Django (check out my Django Quickstart) and deploy it to the Google Engine. You can host Google Engine apps on your own domain, but, by default, Google Engine apps are deployed to APPNAME.appspot.com (I’ve got the exciting domain for my super-secret project!).

Clearly the big thing here is hosting your stuff with Google who have proved that they can make things perform well and scale and all that. Hmmmmm …. where to focus my limited time and resources ….

Anyway, I’d bet that the Google App Engine will help push Django over the edge and more into the mainstream …

When Mary and I walk the dogs, I am nosey and like to pick up used lottery tickets, receipts and other random pieces of paper that we find on the ground. After studying the item, sometimes I just put it back where I found it. Mary always accuses me of littering. I say that I am not littering, it was already litter! Sure, it would be a nice thing to dispose of the item properly, and sometimes I do, but if I don’t, it’s still not littering. Can anybody back me up?

[BTW, I have cashed in $14 in instant lottery ticket winnings from fools who bought these things and didn't even know that they won a few bucks and threw them on the ground!]