The Screaming Viking

God damn power flashed this morning…

I need to get a small UPS for the server or something. Nothing too big, something that will keep it up for 20min or so then shut it down cleanly.

So a buddy stayed down for a few days last week. He is use to the glory that is midco’s internet connection…needless to say he was bitching about my slow speed. I didn’t think tooo much of it, until my auto pay went through for the cable bill. It was considerably higher than it usually is…so I tried to search “my account” on their website for an online bill. There was none…but I found out my line was provisioned for a hell of a lot less than I was paying for.

I call them up…turns out the bill was correct because they missed last month’s auto pay with the switching between the house and apartment. Why that would cause any issues I’ve no idea…but the amount was correct. I then mentioned to her that my account didn’t look like it was setup properly. She asking me where I’m checking this speed at…I told her I wasn’t, that my connection with them has always sucked but I noticed that I was setup for the wrong speed tier in the my account report. Then the line goes silent. I assume she put me on mute and stepped away without telling me. I didn’t have time for that bullshit so I just hung up…

Well, today I have the speed I should have….for now. We’ll wait till 4pm and see how hard core I get throttled.

A little ways down in this I’m going to go in to a little discussion about the new Indiana Jones with enough spoilers to completely screw up the movie for anyone who likes a surprise.  If you want to be surprised about the movie, don’t read any further…

We went to the Texas Roadhouse last night, I’m a bit torn on the place.  It was a Wednesday evening and the place was freekin packed.  It was so loud in there that it wasn’t very pleasant to carry on a conversation.  Our service was poor.  It took a little too long to bring the beer, then my salad was brought by one person…then again by another.  We waited about an hour, then our main course came…two of the dishes were for another table which the waiter seemingly did not know.  But, all our food eventually arrived.  My potato was just a spud, with nothing on it that I ordered.  My steak was over cooked, medium well when I ordered medium rare.  Now, the flavor of the steak was amazing.  I’m not sure what rub they put on there…but I would love to get a hold of it.  And as expected, the place was a little spendy.

I don’t believe I would go back…not worth it.

So last week, I went to Indiana Jones.  I didn’t have high expectations because no one has a record for killing a strong franchise quite like George Lucas….but with Spielberg, I thought it had a chance.  The movie started off well, Nazi’s attacking area 51 looking for -something-.  The amazing Jones is the only one that knows where it is!  How the hell he’s expected to know where in the sea of crates this thing is located is beyond me.  Jones finds it, they look in it and show that it’s an alien.  After that we get a fantastic Indiana escape scene reminiscent of the previous films.  Ford is a bit old…but I believe this scene went well.  It didn’t look too cheesy, and felt like an older action star was going through the motions.

After that they hash out the secondary story line a bit, and Jones is sent on his quest to find his long lost friend that supposedly found the “crystal skull”.  blah blah, yak yak…..

It plays out like an Indiana Jones film with a couple of complete cheese dick parts that I’m going to go in to a little bit.  The story on the whole was pretty good up to the end.  Figuring out where these skulls came from, and that they were not in fact manufactured was pretty freekin cool.  The action in the jungle was horrible IMO.  The sword fight between Mutt and the evil ruski was good..but when he started swinging through trees I was a bit turned off.  The triple falls were lame as well.

Then the movie got good again, they found a “long lost” village, and had to figure some things out.  I think that was really a hidden strength in indy movies…when he went to figuring things out and making connections I really get sucked in.  Swinging the skull around to back off the natives, emptying the sand to get in to the “temple”…I was back in to it…right on the metaphorical edge of my seat.  Then they came in to the “throne” room.  I was soo intrigued, at this point I felt I was moved from the theater to South America…I was sooo in to this scene.  Having the 13 skeletons of these aliens, made of this crystal, all sitting on golden thrones above the circular floor, with one skull missing…this had so much potential!  Then when the skull was placed on the final skeleton…blamo, the movie went to complete shit for me.  How in the blue hell did the Russian suddenly know everything about these aliens?  A collective consciousness?  where the fuck did that come from?  If she already had all this information, why didn’t she know where the skull was?  why didn’t she know that asking for all the knowledge would kill her?  was she killed because she asked for too much knowledge or because she was “evil”?  I could see some information coming from the “insane” associate.  “they are whole”  “they wish to give a gift” something like that…like a spirit’s body finally being united and put to rest.  But, shit starting to spin around…all the Russians getting sucked into a space ship?  THEN ACTUALLY SEEING A SPACE SHIP!!!!  jfc, this was a horrific ending.

Why not have the skeletons glow a bit, maybe have their eye sockets light up….the “evil” Russian could have seen the entire image of the alien in her mind…been killed, have the bones fade in to energy or their dimension and the temple start it’s full blown collapse.  There is no reason to see an actual space ship.  Have Mutt pop off with something like “where’d they go?” the nutty professor retorts “to the space between space” and indy mumbles “dimensional travelers” or something like that.  AFTER that, then have the professor fill in the blanks about a collective consciousness and how they needed all their pieces to go back, it would make more sense since he was the one over powered by whatever insanity the skull caused in him.

It might only be minor tweaks, but it brings it back in to the comic book reality that indy has always been in, instead of an indy meets han solo trek that Lucas appeared to make.  It was a rich plot, one that didn’t have to be filled with the fluff of action as much as it was.  I would have cut out more of the action sequences and added a little more hashing out of the plot.  Overall it was a decent flick, one I’ll buy to finish up my Indiana Jones set, but not a flick I would recommend to anyone but the most dire of Indy fans.

A buddy at work turned me on to a gallery plugin that allows you to add all the pictures in a given directory to the gallery2 application. The simplifies the process of putting up pix…so I’ve added all my current pix to the gallery section of this site (/me points to the “pix” link on the right). There is also an RSS link in gallery now so users can stay updated. I threw in a bunch of other plugins as well…dunno if they are useful at all yet though.

We’re finally getting things put away a bit and seeing some progress around the house.  It’s such a slow tedious process.  I’ll see if I can’t get the kid’s room put together for her tonight.  It’s gotta suck to have to run around furniture to get in and out the door…I’d think it’s a little embarrassing when friends come over as well.

The dog is still working on house training.  It’s going well though as long as we take him out on a regular basis.  He has stopped playing around and looking like he’s unsure of what he’s suppose to do.  At given intervals he does his business right away, then comes around to play.  I expect another two months before this project is complete and I would be comfortable taking him to someone else’s house.  Another month in our house and he should be pretty much OK.  The major obstacle for us is during the day when were gone.  I can’t get home often enough to let him out so he’s forced to go in his pen.  He’s still chewing on everything..but seems to have a firm grasp on what “no” means.  Whether he listens or not is another matter.  The rawhide bones are a hit.  Everything I read online indicated that I shouldn’t give one to him…but he loves ‘em.  We’ve always given them to our dogs…so I really see no reason to deviate now.

Saw the new Indiana Jones yesterday.  I have a ton of comments, but I’ll save that for next week so people have enough time to watch the flick.  There will be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie don’t read the blog.