What The Hell!?

This is the worst halftime show ever!

I would love to know where this came from.

Seriously.

(Found via Greg.)

“Hello” with Attitude

Title: "Hello" with Attitude

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

It’s Been An Interesting Week

It’s been one of those weeks at work.

On Tuesday we struggled with a major outage resulting from power loss at one of our data centers, as well many other unrelated issues that managed to crop up during the day. I worked all day and into the evening, after eating some great Italian food with my friend Tom, but didn’t have everything fixed until Wednesday morning.

Speaking of work, I got a promotion today. I now have the title of Senior Systems Administrator, but won’t know about money until next week. I’m crossing my fingers.

I think its time to get out of here and go home!

Instant Watching on Netflix

I just finished watching my first on-demand movie on Netflix’s new video service. I watched Born Into Brothels, about children growing up in the red light district of Calcutta, India, which was one of many movies in my queue that was available for immediate viewing.

Some positives:

• After initially installing the software, watching a movie was very easy: just press play.
• The quality of the video was very decent.
• Seeing your used and available time per month is very easy. I still have 13 hours and 38 minutes of viewing time left until May 4.
• It’s a value-added feature, as part of your regular monthly subscription, so this doesn’t require any extra fees.

Some negatives:

• It only works on Internet Explorer on Windows. Firefox and Mac OS support are currently unavailable.
• The selection of available movies wasn’t all that impressive, but I imagine there will be more coming in the future. For now, I am happy with what they have available.
• The video quality may not be good enough for some people, depending on the screen you’re using to view content. I was satisfied using my laptop, but HD television viewers may not be as happy.

Overall, I am impressed! I am probably going to spend a lot of time watching movies this way, and I imagine I’ll find some films I hadn’t previously considered watching; it’s just too easy.

(The movie I watched, Born Into Brothels, was a very good documentary, by the way.)

Gun Control

I don’t like guns.

I don’t think people need them as much as they think they do.

And I think it should be very difficult to get them.

With that being said, I also don’t think that having stricter gun control laws would necessarily have made a difference in preventing Cho Seung-Hui from killing 30-some people at Virginia Tech on Monday. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that it would have stopped a deranged lunatic from getting a gun and shooting it at a bunch of people.

My point is that all of this rhetoric right now about changing the gun laws is nothing more than damage control. People are justifiably upset, and we all have an emotional need to explain what happened. People demand action and politicians make it a political issue, so it appears that someone is going to fix it.

If you want to take the overall issue we have with shootings in the USA in to scope, I would be inclined to agree that stricter gun control laws would have a measurable and provable impact over time, but I think we need to get off this notion that it is some kind of silver bullet.

Regardless of whether or not we have stricter gun laws in this country, someone will always be able to find a way to kill lots of people. There are plenty of alternatives for someone who is hell-bent on hurting and killing others.

I guess I’m a pragmatist about it. I believe that these things just happen. If history has taught us anything (for those that bother to understand it), bad things have always happened to people, and they will happen again.

As I’ve already said, there just isn’t a silver bullet solution here.