Nic Cage is starring in another movie, set to release in April; Next. After watching the trailer in HD on Quicktime I think it will be a good, or at least entertaining movie. Here is the synopsis from the very low content web site:

Las Vegas showroom magician Cris Johnson has a secret which is a gift and a curse which torments him: he can see a few minutes into the future. Sick of the examinations he underwent as a child and the interest of the government and medical establishment in his power, he lies low under an assumed name in Vegas, performing cheap tricks and living off small-time gambling “winnings.”  But when a terrorist group threatens to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, government agent Callie Ferris must use all her wiles to capture Cris and convince him to help her stop the cataclysm.

The movie site is probably very close to the most idiotic use of Flash I have seen to date, as the site does absolutely nothing. But check out the trailer any way - it looks to be an action packed 2 hours with a strong cast including Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore, Jessica Biel, Thomas Kretschman, Tory Kittles, and Peter Falk.

The short answer? Yup.

According to this news article, 126 stores are being excised from the hemhoraging company in order to either save it or reduce it's loses when they are ditched altogether. Either way it's no great lose. They're prices couldn't touch those online, and the store in Buffalo NY (which is no longer listed on the CompUSA store listing) was a complete disgrace. It was crowded, dark and dirty. Plus the service blew complete chunks. Not as bad as the Circuit City in Orchard Park, but close.

So long CompUSA, I hardly knew ya.

I guess if you're looking for a deal, head up to the Buffalo store tomorrow or maybe this weekend - fight the hordes of drooling geeks and enjoy the fisticuffs for parts.

The downside is all of those folks who are either getting tossed or have gotten tossed already, by what I have read so far they got shite for notice before being kicked out the door. Figures. A shite store would treat its employees like shite. The company will get what it deserves - and everyone will be better off shopping online.

Bad feelings gone

After much grumping and generally pissed off stompings, I received my new MoBo yesterday, and got it installed into my sweet Asus Vento tower. This new board, the ASUS A8N32-Deluxe is an outstanding (and heavy) Motherboard. It took me less than an hour to get it hooked up, screwed down and Windows running, and running exceptionally well. I took the liberty of buying a replacement CD for my XP Pro disc, since it was quite aged - and it made all the difference. Right off the bat it recognized the Dual Core AMD brain, and it was a snap to get the 2 gigabit ports working.

By early morning today, I had everything reinstalled and running like a champ. Well almost.

Symantec Sucks

I'm sure you already knew that, but this is a fact. I installed Norton just to find out that since I had installed it last week, only to have to ditch that installation, that I can only install it 3 times before I get locked out. After a 10 minute call with some flunky in India, I find out they will not release the key for any reason. They just say screw you, spend another 40 bucks on a another license. Well up yours Pete! Take your heavy, lousy AV and stick it! Norton is only what it is because you bought out Central Point any way, it's not like any of your chuckle heads built it.

Back to the good stuff, my 'puter boots in about 30 seconds flat, runs faster than a fat kid jumpin' on a dough nut, and is just about the coolest thing ever. Not even a Mac can touch this thing and it's Dual Core goodness.

Now I'm ready for some serious fraggin'!

You know, building a new computer  isn't always what it is cracked up to be. Sure, you can save a few hundred to a thousand dollars doing it yourself - but what happens when the silicon poo-poo plater you just assembled craps it BIOS all over your keyboard? You get left holding the plastic bag, asking why do I have to clean it up.

I just bought (what I thought) to be my newest installment of a good, fast and reliable machine - and it turns out the motherboard is a POS of galactic proportions. The Asus A8S-X motherboard is a big hunk of junk. The SIS chipset is unreliable, poorly configured and not very compatible in general. There are several dozens reviews that I should have confirming this. It's 60 bucks for a reason.

The rest of the components are hopefully fine. Asus is a big name and I have had several Asus moBos in the past, and the have all been great - so I bought a new Asus board - A8N-SLI, and it is very highly rated and comes well recommended - and it should. It costs 3 times more - at $160.00 - well that is from Tiger - it's a brain-staggering $240 at CompUSA.

The moral of the story is do more research ahead of time before you buy your own components.

Once completed, my machine will be a 64bit, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400, with 2gb of RAM, and an nVidia 7600gs with 512 mg of vRAM. w00t! w00t! I bought a new SATA drive as well, so my boot drive will be SATA, and the secondary drive too. The sucky part is reinstalling Win XP and Ubuntu too - I had just gotten Ubuntu to 75% of where I wanted.

At least I still have my new recliner and this lappy.

Dylan is currently slightly handicapped due to the fact that he hacked his hand a bit. Unfortunately it's his right hand too - but it's not too bad - it only needed 5 stitches.

Another one for the life lessons book, don't play with knives - especially sharp as hell carving knives. So now he gets to have his hand wrapped up, and it makes it a bit hard for him to be his usual thieving self, so he's a bit slower on the pilfer and go front any way. It happened a few days ago now, and I'm not sure when the stitches come out.

I did the same thing when I was a kid, although it was on my thumb, and I don't think I needed stitches.

Lesson learned.

I used to consider myself a Type A personality, but I really don't think that fits any more. I tend to be very detail oriented though, I try to be concise; sometimes to a fault; organized and very thorough. Why am I bringing this up? Because (in general) these are all things that Open Source files and applications are not.

This is a small example I know, but this is what sparked it. I decided to apply a new template to my other blog, DeliverMyLiver.com, and since I am addicted to WordPress - this is a decidedly easy task to accomplish. However, once I decided on the template and started to dive into it, I discovered that it was going to take longer than what I was hoping.

Overall the template ( Citrus ) is well designed and assembled, what always gets me are the details. Take the CSS files for example, in general 60 - 80% of the CSS is static, and only the remaining smaller percentage changes by user selection. So then why are all the templates not identical? Or even better, why isn't there a central CSS doc to govern the static styles, and 4 smaller ones to govern the variable styles? This would make the most sense from an upkeep stand point. The formating of the CSS is all over the place, and the actual HTML of the template is not 100% correct either, there are missing closing tags on lists, divs, and probably others I haven't found.

Overall, still not a huge deal, and maybe I am just too picky. It's just that if I were to make a template and put my name on it from scratch - I would want people to know that I know what I am doing, not just hacking something together in a half assed sort of way. I'm not a half assed sort of guy, so cutting corners like that, to me, is simply lazy development. And it's this attitude that can overall hurt the Open Source community and give it a bad rep to folks who don't really know better. It's so easy to write a piece of crap and get it out there for folks to use now, that just about anyone can do it. Unfortunately there is really no way to discern the good from the bad without jumping into it. Community reviews go a long way, but they are not always that helpful.

Never build what you can download.

Open Source is a great resource, and there are plenty of great applications out there that you can use right out of the can, or download the source files to customize - so in lots of cases it makes good sense to spend a couple of weeks finding applications/scripts/widgets to do the job of what you are looking for. In this case it's just a design template for a blog - that doesn't make it any less important to me, and it's always a bit discouraging when you find something you like, just to discover it's going to take more time than you thought to implement because you have to go back and clean things up, and standardize the way it works to be consistent and correct.

Maybe I will have to start building my own templates from scratch, but if I am being honest - it's not worth the time. There are so many templates; good templates available that why would I bother? It's not really that big of a pain in the arse, it's just annoying. I run into it a lot, and it drives me crazy. But since I am on my way to crazy already, it truly makes little difference.