Transformers 2 review

In my attempt to be relatively spoiler-free, some of my complaining will make more sense if you've seen the movie. I'm not sure if I succeeded on being spoiler-free or clear, but I tried.

Molly and I (and about 40 other people I work with) went to see Transformers 2 in IMAX yesterday. Really, not an awesome experience. The action was definitely good, I'll say that. Lots of stuff blowing up, lots of awesome cars. I totally want a Camaro (which actually isn't that expensive...they start at $22,000, FYI). But the story was absolutely ridiculous. I'll do my best to complain about things that were ridiculous in a bulleted list:

• 2:30 is too long. It really dragged out for far longer than it should have.


• I'm not sure if it was a function of seeing the movie in IMAX or not, but it was really hard to follow the action. The Transformer robots are SO detailed, there's just so much stuff going on in the action sequences that it was hard to tell what was going on. Probably it was made worse due to the immensitude of the IMAX screen, but regardless.


• Megan Fox was totally unneeded for the last hour of the movie. It's hard to complain about Megan Fox, I'm not gonna lie. But she really had no point in being in the last hour, except for being really hot (which she's quite good at).


• The ending. In the climactic scene, Molly and I rolled our eyes at each other in disbelief, as the movie totally jumped the shark. In a Twitter post I compared it with Mission to Mars, which is not a compliment. I won't spoil it here, but it's pretty miserable.


• Optimus Prime, for being the leader of the Autobots, was pretty lame for 80% of the movie.


• Sam's parents were obviously in the movie only for comic relief. Despite being annoying, and the weed brownie scene unnecessary, I was okay with them. But then you put them in the ending, where they totally don't fit in, and use the lamest, cheesiest, most overused device in the history of action movies with their kidnapping? Really, that's all you guys could come up with? Then you bail out of that whole kidnapping plot element in about 60 seconds? FAIL FAIL FAIL!!!


• Decipticons are apparently stupid, or really lazy. So the US government has been fending them off for a while, and they just now realized they should tap into the communications satellite? I know, it's a movie, but I feel like a giant robot instantly overtaking a "top secret" communications satellite to find the location of the world's most powerful hunk of cube is a HUGE cop-out.


• And along with that last point, really, nobody could find this magical key that's been lost for 17,000 years? It was behind one like inch think chunk of wall, just sitting there. Never crossed anybody's mind to look there eh? Good work. Sam Witwicky found it pretty easily. Also, I know it's just a movie, but I think this was a cheap cop-out too (especially in a 2.5 hour movie).

That's all I can think of to complain about at the moment. All that said, it's actually not a terrible movie to see in the theatre just for the high-octane action elements. But be forewarned, the story makes it rather painful.

(And was it just me, or did they play the Linkin Park song through about half of the movie? I feel today like I've heard it a million times...)

MythTV Update

The often-mentioned MythTV project actually has some progress. It's been a few weeks that I've had the box put together, complete with recording equipment, and it's mostly working. I can record TV shows from anywhere on the internet (or from the TV too). I can playback movies from the same box I recorded them from. The commercials are skipped automatically, which is way awesomer than even I thought it would be. One problem though, is that I can't watch HD TV from MythTV. On the list of things to do is figure out how to get HD from the cable box via Firewire. So it's standard definition only, which is pretty ugly on Pete's sweet 42inch LCD TV.

I do have music sharing working though - my music library is shared from my desktop Mac to the MythTV box, so I can listen to music from my desktop anywhere that has a MythTV frontend. That's pretty cool....except the interface for streaming music to the TV is terrible. Oh well.

Other things to do yet...I've always planned on getting an AppleTV box, so that would be a MythTV frontend instead of having the server sitting behind the TV (which it is currently). So that would make it way easier to stream music to the living room, and enable me to share my extensive iPhoto library to the TV too. Plus, I want to have access to streaming internet sources, like Hulu and YouTube. The best way that I can think of for that to happen is using this also oft-mentioned Boxee software, which is awesome. I attempted to install Boxee on my server, but there's not a 64-bit version available yet (and I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu). Moral of the story, it's going to require some severe hackery and lots of shady forum posts to get it working, and I may just bail on that plan until I get an AppleTV. Which sucks, because I really want to watch Hulu from the TV.

MythTV offers a lot of cool tiny options for tweaking your setup. Like having Apple's movie trailers on your TV. Simple thing, but it's awesome (and also, not working currently on my box). Or streaming video to an iPhone (also not currently working on my box). I'm going to start making an official MythTV to-do list, and it's going to be scary long. If only I could take a week off of work to work on my side projects....

MJ on iTunes

Michael Jackson is rather popular on iTunes today. Sad sad stuff.

Go nuts?

Rain defeated

GnuCash works!

Good news, I managed to get the OS X native version of GnuCash up and running! It was only moderately painful this time...for whatever reason, there's a couple programs that GnuCash depends on that have issues in the latest versions. So I had to force-downgrade a couple packages, and rock and roll, OS X native GnuCash is working. That was about 60 seconds ago, so hopefully there aren't further complications.

Also, this is my 300th post! Yeah, get excited!

I do have softball games starting in a half hour, so this was a pretty unfortunate time to post as I don't have much time. But in other news, I was transferred ("on loan" technically, but I don't believe that at all) to a new group at work last week. It's quite an interesting situation that will have to be documented another time...while I wanted a change at work, this is the pretty much the exact opposite of what I wanted. In any case, I'm enjoying something of a fresh start, which I think I've needed for a long time.

That's all I got. That and my hands itch, and I think/hope it's related to some soap I've been using.

What have I done??

I just uninstalled GnuCash, with the promise of re-installing a OS X-native version. As I was doing that, I remembered the months-long process that was getting it working the first time. Why can't I just leave well enough alone???

Medical forms suck

Medical forms are amazingly painful to fill out. If there was ever a field that is in need of some serious work, it's the field of producing medical forms. Every one is insanely complicated, and uses giant words that nobody understands. And even better, most of the time you're expected to fill it out wrong, and nobody cares anyway, so what's the point? Rarely have I gotten called out on skipping some fields that I don't understand.

Then there's the whole insurance situation. I was just filling out a form that they actually asked me what my co-pay was. Hah! Yeah, right, as if I have any idea! There are a ridiculous number of different categories of co-pays, and I have no clue what this would fall into.

So you don't understand what they are asking, the terms they use don't match up with the your insurance or the rest of society, and your insurance is impossibly complicated too - what could make it worse yet? Way to raise the bar guys, you made the form physically impossible to write on too!! Good work, you gave me little parenthesis that I can write my area code into...except NOBODY CAN WRITE THAT SMALL!!! Are you serious right now? And am I the only person that has a street address longer than "Main St."? Because that's about all that will fit on that address line.

It's not that hard to come up with a reasonable form people. Do you think that just because you can fit it onto one page instead of two, that magically makes it not suck? "Oh, at least it's only one page, that makes it all better." That would be completely wrong. Just look at the form. Fix it. Ugh.

I can't wait until I'm 80 and can't comprehend complete sentences, then this will be even more fun.

First attempt at sugar cookies

Hmm. Not quite as I hoped...

UPDATE: So despite the pancake-like appearance of these cookies, they actually tasted pretty good.

Reference salad

1 pound exactly