Short version: Good movie. Thoughtful movie. Emotional movie. (but don’t let that “emotional” word turn you off)

Long version:

Since Yetuc was out of town last night, I found myself staying up watching HBO for a bit. (Skinamax wasn’t that interesting) I first saw my first complete episode of Sopranos in over 4 years and thought it was interesting to see how the characters had evolved since the first season. I was about to turn the TV off when the “Coming up NEXT: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” blurb appeared on the screen. (accompanied with the HBO theme “Dun na na na na na na na na, dun na na na na na na na na, DUN NA NA”) Sure it was 12:30ish, but this was a movie that got a pretty decent review from one of my favorite movie review sites. I doubted I’d ever convince Yetuc to pick it up at CockBlockbuster so I figured what the heck.

The movie’s main stars are Jim Carey and Kate Winslet. Supporting actors include Elijah Wood (LoTR, The Fauclty, etc.), Kirsten Dunst (Spiderman, Little Women, etc.), Tom Wilkinson (Batman Begins, The Full Monty, etc.) and many others. About Jim Carey… either you love him or hate him, but he really does a wonderful job acting in this movie. The same goes for Kate Winslet. They really made their relationship believable and poignant.

I found it a little difficult to follow at first, but within 20 minutes I was really intrigued. I believe the movie was purposely confusing which worked to its advantage. I didn’t want to look away (read fall asleep) because I didn’t want to miss anything.

Without giving too much away, let me give the basic premise of the movie and the question it presents:

If there was a way to erase someone or something from your memory forever, would you?

Simple question; difficult answer. Recently Yetuc and I gave up our wonderful cats to friends. I cried like a baby and still get very sad when they appear on Yetuc’s picture montage screen saver. I am sure she feels the same way. Seeing their cute pictures makes me happy and sad at the same time. I miss them dearly and it hurts not to have Zero constantly annoying me or Leeloo being a pretty pretty princess. But what if I could erase the memory of our past pets from my head. Think of all the pain I could avoid? What about an old lover who tore a hole in your heart that has never been repaired?

I honestly can’t answer that question. I’d like to use logic and reasoning to say “I’d never erase the bad memories because I’d lose the great memories too”, but I am petty. Would I allow my pettiness to cloud what little reasoning skills I have?

Now I turn the question to you foozleheads: Would you erase a person from your memory if you could?

KK

Due to a bizillion viruses slamming our hospital systems, I have recently spent much of my last 2 weeks installing year old Windows XP patches on our systems. This should have been happening from the start, but things get put on the back burner and the rest of us get burned because of it.

But it seems that the lack of security patches aren’t just effecting boring hospital systems. Tens of thousands of WoW accounts are being hijacked by key logging programs. Just a heads up.

On a similar note, one of our poppycock interns recently left the hospital for a programming job. This guy was one of those paranoid, everyone wants to screw me kind of guys. He printed out a label and put his name on the PC titled “****’s PC”. He wrote a keylogging program and put it on his computer so he could see if anyone had used his computer. He was constantly hacking programs and installing them so he could “test” them at work. (Vista, DeepFreeze, etc.) Before I even knew he did this crap, there was just something I didn’t like about this guy. One day, I sat down on his computer, opened notepad.exe and typed “Joe sucks donkey balls.” Sure enough, the next day he comes in, sits down and checks the log saying “Who wrote that I suck donkey balls?!?” I fessed up and openly laughed at him. Hmmm maybe that was a bad decision in hind-sight.

Anyway, after he left I started talking to another one of our interns and the conversation turned to the poppycock guy. The intern told me that Mr. Poppycock had installed his program on one of the public PCs in the library and then went back a few weeks later and retrieved the file. There is NO TELLING the information he got off that file. He could have gleaned CC numbers, personal email passwords and any other information that a person would have entered. The intern also told me of a few other things this guy did that really bothered me. I sincerely think this guy was amoral. When I first found out that he had a keylogger program I asked if he ever installed it on a public PC and he got all flustered saying “I’d NEVER do that man!” All the while, he was doing it left and right. For him, there was no right and wrong. These type of people are dangerous. These are the people that code the crap that attacks your computer.

All of this to say, don’t be a asshat and make sure you get all your updates!

PSA OVER,

KK

Tim Hardaway recently expressed his feelings about gay people. Needless to say, it wasn’t pretty. May people in the gay community were offended, hurt and upset with his comments. However, there were some people who were able to rise above their hurt feelings and offer forgiveness. One such person was George Takei.

Thank you George for showing true compassion… passion… whatever.

KK

OH MY!

Basically, you CAN get the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive and use it on a Windows computer. Paying $200 > Paying $500 for an HD-DVD drive.

So RUN, don’t walk to your nearest BB and pick this thing up before M$ changes the drive in some evil way.

Oh well.

KK

Sadness.

Tonight our babies are going to another home. Due to allergies and other reasons we are having to give our cats to friends of ours. We’re going to miss them greatly. They are the best cats in the world and it makes me so sad. Yetuc and I love them dearly and pray that their new parents will care for them just as much as we did. They are a part of us. It won’t be easy saying goodbye tonight, but I think we both know that it is for the best. GAH GO AWAY TEARS! I just wanted to share our babies with you all.

Zero and Leeloo
Leeloo

/?

KK

I am not going to pretend that I know much about Global Warming. Like most, I blindly trust what I’ve been told and the data I’ve been given on the issue. Got data? Good! Are you a scientist? Excellent. I’m a open skeptic of man made Global Warming. I could go into many reasons why, but that’s for another time.

I found this article online and I figured I’d share it. I realize that everyone has an agenda so take it for what it’s worth.

KK

*edit: Yeah, I know the site has an agenda too.*

So I got my shiny new monitor. Received it Jan 4th. From this day (Jan 24th) back to Jan 4th is exactly 21 days. 21 days is the amount of time I can return said monitor for a full refund. The Dell 24″ I currently own is version A03. Since I received mine, they have released a newer version of A04. It has better HD quality and 1:1 Aspect Ratio.

However Dell is saying the 21 return policy starts when I order the monitor. Not when I receive it. (Which was my understanding of the whole return policy. Had I known that it was 21 days since I purchased it, I would have had this conversation with them earlier.) So now I’m in a standoff as to what will happen about it. I will not pay 15% restocking fee for an $800 monitor. I am not asking them to do anything that is unreasonable. (That is of course my opinion) So I am waiting for the Dell person’s supervisor to call me back so I can have a nice conversation with them as to how we are going to resolve this issue. The Dell support person told me that the 21 days included shipping time and that they had made sure to include those extra days due to shipping. < sigh >

I’m not giving up on this one. It’s something that was unclear and should be able to be easily resolved.

KK

Update: 1-25-07

I was finally able to find a Dell rep who understood my plight and is allowing me to return the monitor. It wasn’t easy convincing him that I was not asking for anything special or for something free. I just wanted to get what I paid for and the A03 didn’t have what they had advertised on their site. After a long tirade and talking over him when he tried to interrupt me, he went and got permission to make a special exception. This shouldn’t have been so hard. This is an expensive item that I have purchased and semantics should not keep me from being able to return a product.

So I packed it up and it is on its way! Whoops. Forgot to add the VGA cable in the box. I called UPS and they told me they’d hold it till 6pm tonight so I can rush over there and drop the cable in the box. Maybe I can just stuff it in the pick up hole in the side of the box. That’d save me some tape and some time!

Back to playing with my 19 inches… Rawr!

Yar Pirates!

We have had an influx of new players to our Lightninghoof guild and I wanted to take this time to welcome them. We are regularly having around 14 people on a night which is great. The more the merrier. Because many of you are new, I thought it’d be a good idea to go over some of our guild rules.

1) No cross-gender male characters. If you are female you can play a male or female character. We’re cool with that. If you are male, you can only play a male character. No one wants to see a large bulge in your tight Blood Elf lady’s pants. This is just a precautionary measure put in place so there will be no awkward experiences when talking to someone for the first time on Teamspeak. Why the double standard for women? Because I think we can all agree that lesbianism is HOT! And please ladies, if you do take it to Teamspeak shoot me an email first.

2) Do not ask for free stuff. Every time you ask for something from another guildmate, you will be fined 3 pretzels. As you can see, we take this rule very seriously. And don’t think we’ll only go for your regular pretzels. We want those damn chocolate covered ones! I guess you can ask for help now and then, but if you continually ask for items/dungeon runs/happy endings from every member 7 days a week, you will find yourself guildless! That is until you get invited to < donkey Nutz >. I hear they are a very mature roleplaying guild.

3) Initiation is required for all players. Since we are on a roleplaying server, this part of the guild is a very serious matter. There are many things that may be asked of you during a guild initiation process so be prepared. Every initiation is governed by Hresh and Erissa so make sure you don’t piss them off. They are quite inventive. One sure way to get on their good side is to use L337 speak in every situation possible. This should keep the beatings to a minimum. One of my favorite hazing experiences is when Hresh made a new level 50 Warlock member delete his character and reroll a Troll priest because the guild needed one. I was really impressed when he did. Too bad we had to let him go the next day be