Coming soon: “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride: The Movie.”

August 15, 2003

My Mom and I finally got to go see “Pirates of the Caribbean” today, and it was everything I expected it to be: lots of fun, great swashbuckling, but generally overrated as to how good it was. Johnny Depp seemed like he was drunk throughout most of it, but heck, that’s OK. He was good nonetheless. I just read some trivia about the movie, and one that I found particularly interesting was that Orlando Bloom always had a scarf or something over his right wrist because that’s where he got his tatoo of the number “9″ in Elvish after the principle filming of “Lord of the Rings” was completed. Can’t mix fantasy and fantasy, I guess.

One problem that I did have with the movie was its inspiration. Now, I realize that this movie has a great cast (Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Geoffry Rush, and the uber-hot Keira Knightley), a solid director (Gore Verbinski, who’s last film was “The Ring”), and a producer with a proven track record (Jerry Bruckheimer, who’s brough us nearly every action movie since “Beverly Hills Cop”), but you know what? It’s based off a Disney RIDE. This sets bad precedent. There was a trailer before the movie for “The Haunted Mansion” starring Eddie Murphy. This sets more bad precedent. I can just picture a big long table of Disney execs with Michael Eisner at the end, all discussing what to do next.

“So what should we do next?”
“Well sir, we’ve already made movies of all the old fairy tales and legends. We also stole–er, made up some others.”
“How’s our sequel production coming?”
“Excellent! We’ve already made sequels for all of our classic movies, thereby ruining ‘Dumbo’, ‘Snow White”, and some of our other more beloved classics.”
“What about rides?”
“Excellent idea, sir! We can make movies from our more popular rides! We’ll do Pirates of the Caribbean first, then Haunted Mansion, and next year we can do Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain Railroad!”

What a load of crap. When’s the spinning teacup ride? As I said, fun but overrated. Disney is one of my more disliked companies, but this was OK. As I said, sets some bad precedents, though.

I’ve been following the MSBlaster virus that’s headed around the Internet, and it cracks me up. I realize how difficult it is to create software of the complexity that Windows is, but Microsoft doesn’t have a good proven track record for security things. They handled this one pretty well, though, and I was suprised at how loud they were about the exploit when it was first revealed a month ago. What really cracks me up is how despite how public Microsoft was at explaining just how serious the vulnerability was, people out there are STILL affected. Now, I don’t expect every Tom, Dick, and Harry to be like me with their personal computers and install every patch as soon as it comes out, but businesses should know better. What the HELL have all IT departments been doing for the last month? It’s been literally 30 days since the vulnerability was made public and a patch released, and unlike the SQL Slammer worm that almost brought the Internet to its knees earlier in the year, this patch actually solved the problem and wasn’t broken by anything else. Yes, it’s hard work to patch 5,000 machines in a company, but even over a course of 30 days you can do it without the aid of special software–which Microsoft DOES offer. I just don’t see how someone can be so lax about their job of maintaining computers. It’s like when you find out that a safety notice was issued for your car when you take it in to the shop and you need to have something special done to it. You probably wouldn’t know about it if you hadn’t taken it in because so few people follow that, but you’d expect a mechanic to know when something gets issued for HIS car, no? Lazy people like that bug me.

So speaking of exploits and vulnerabilities, I have a proposal for my readers. It’s been slightly more than a year now since I switched web browsers from Internet Explorer to Mozilla, and I haven’t ever looked back. Mozilla is a free web browser that is published by the people who originally made Netscape and is maintained by software programmers around the world, or what’s know as “open source” software–anyone who wants to work on it is free to do so and contribute to the greater good. Kinda like Communism, but this actually works. Anyhow, let me make a comparison between the two browsers.

Internet Explorer, while free and coming with the Windows operating system, has security patches issued for it every week. That’s right, every week. Every single week someone finds a new security hole that either exposes information from your computer to the outside, or makes it vulnerable to having your computer taken over by someone, or other nasty tricks, but here’s the kicker: thanks to Microsoft’s easy installation technology, these exploits can be done without even opening a file–if you visit the wrong web page, it gets installed for you. Microsoft is fairly good about issuing patches, but there are about sixteen long-standing vulnerabilities that they won’t patch for whatever reason. And then there’s Comet Cursor, Bonzai Buddy, New.net, Gator, and other software that sends personal information both to advertisers so they can sell your email address (more spam!) and back to the software developer. That all is easily installed through Internet Explorer. Best of all, Microsoft isn’t developing Internet Explorer anymore. Just fixing its mistakes. There hasn’t been any new development on IE in two years, and there won’t be any more for at least another two. Wish there was a feature in IE that isn’t there? Better wait it out. Microsoft has said that they will only issue upgrades for Internet Explorer with new versions of Windows. Whenever Internet Explorer 7.0 is released, you’ll have to buy the new Windows to get it. Lastly, there are the popups. You all know what those are, right? Go to a few pages, get a dozen or so little windows that open both under and over what you were looking at. If you go to a site you’re not familiar with, you might even get lots of porn popups that keep opening as you close them. So what you have is a web browser that is full of security holes, installs spyware–sometimes automatically–hasn’t had anything new added to it in years, and allows popups. What a piece of crap.

Mozilla has literally none of those problems. Literally, none. There are no security holes, none of the automatic installations of spyware (in fact, Mozilla doesn’t even support the “technology” of those installations), constant development, and it has *built-in* popup blocking with just about 100% effectiveness. I’ve had about two pop-ups in a year. What’s the downside of Mozilla? You have to download it yourself. Doesn’t come with Windows. For those of you that read my page and have a broadband connection, download it and give it a try. It will auotmatically import your Internet Explorer favorites if you have any, and it’s SO much better than IE, in stability, features, and security. There’s a lot to discover about it. So here’s my proposal: if you want to try Mozilla but just have dial-up Internet, just email me and let me know, and I will personally send you a CD with the latest version of Mozilla on it. Heck, I’ll even throw on copies of my trip pictures since I haven’t gotten them on my website yet, if you’d like. Take my word, it’s a great browser upgrade, and you won’t miss out on anything by switching. So think it over and let me know if that’s your situation. If you have the means, try it out for yourself and then post a comment so others can see.

Anyhow, this update took me about two hours to write. I didn’t get writer’s block or anything, but as I finished up that last paragraph long after I started it. My sister and I were invited to go to a birthday dinner tonight (our friend Scott, if my pictures were up I’d refer you to his borthday party last year at the Greek Cusina that I wrote about), but I didn’t go. I got a call after they were done with dinner, though, and they were headed out here to Lake Oswego (I’m at my Dad’s) so they they could have a beer with me. Good deal. The three of us (Scott, my sister and I) went to the Big Horn Ram Brewery, but man, I really don’t like their beer as much as other places, especially McMenamin’s that I’ve written about so many times (and where I spent my evening waiting for Mike last night). Their beer always has a funny aftertaste to it, so I don’t know if it’s the brewing process, how they store it, or what. It was a good deal, though, since we went in for happy hour and they were selling 18 oz. beers for $2 each. Scott and I each had two, bring the grand total to $8 and our cost for the night at $5 each with tip. Not a bad deal at all. Now I just need to find out if McMenamin’s has happy hour deals like that, and I’ll be there a lot. If I can find someone to GO with. That seems to be my main problem. So anyhow, I’m going to take my laptop into my room now and make use of the wireless Internet connection I have while I watch the new episode of “Monk” tonight. Have a good night, all, give my proposal a thought, and I’ll catch you all soon.

Posted in Beer, Geekery, General