Gnubbs Blog

I was reading an article about the decline in box office sales for the third year in a row. I am sure there are a lot of reasons for this, but I thought I would share why I don’t go to the movies much any more.

1. Remakes. F*ck remakes. In 2004 there were 4 major studio remakes of old movies. This year there were 14. This doesn’t even include foreign movies remade for american release, or television shows made into movies. I don’t go to see them. Period. If I want to watch the Manchurian Candidate, I can assure you that it is going to be in black and white.

2. Quality. We have skimmed off the remakes and that leaves us with original movies. These suck too.

3. Cost. Why would I want to spend $30 for two tickets, popcorn, etc. when I am pretty sure the movies is going to suck. I will pay it for something like Narnia which I have heard is very good, but I am pretty sure Fun with Dick and Jane (remake by the way) will be left out in the cold.

4. Annoying Crowds. Cell phones, talking, sweat hogs stuffing thier faces with nachos. Clapping. Who the hell are you applauding for? Do you think the movie stars are in the audience? How about some inappropriate laughter. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” stars Jim Carey, when he says something it must be a joke. All of you just shut up so that I can hear the movie well enough to rail against it later on my blog.

5. Length. No one mentions length. 3 hours for King Kong? Stephanie’s brother had a good idea — for $3 give me 30 minutes of just the ape running around breaking shit. That is worth $3 and 30 minutes of my time. I just don’t have 3 hours and 7 minutes for King Kong if the original could become a clasic at 100 minutes flat, so could the remake. But I guess you have to justify $207 million somehow (the original cost $670k or about $10m in todays dollars.)

In the end though, i am pretty willing to put up with annoying crowds for a good movie. I am willing to pay the money for a good movie. The problem is that there is so little chance a movie is going to be good that I am not going bet those $30. Instead I will use that to pay for 6 weeks of netflix.

And rent movies like “M”, “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari”, “A Fistful of Dollars”, “The Great Escape”, “Cool Hand Luke”, etc. The number of good movies available to me is countless, just not at the theaters.

gnubbs

Well, back from Cleveland at least. Stephanie and I had a good time hanging out with our families, seeing old college buddies, and generally being drunk. Although she was designated driver most of the time so I guess I was drunk a lot more than her.

I came away from the trip with some nice new new goods. Stephanie rented me a garage at our apartment complex, and bought me an air compressor to go with it. I also go an impact wrench and sockets, a pair of ice tools, some climbing stuff, books, a sports coat, and some other clothes. Generally I would not be too excited about clothing but this stuff is pretty nice.

Now that I am back from the Cleve, I have the following on my plate:

1. Finish The Sheet Music Company website for Stephanie’s cousin.
2. Finish the Reach Out and Read Indiana website for my sister.
3. Get Stephanie and my blogs running on our new web server.
4. Start on my mystery rails project.
5. Build a website for my brother’s law practice.
6. Build a website for Stephanie’s brother.

That is pretty roughly my priority. Although, to be fair I think the Reach Out and Read stuff might be higher up than the Sheet Music Stuff. They will be worked on in parallel at least. The sheet music work was quite extensive, but is starting to wrap up. The ROR Indiana stuff will be moderately extensive, but more time consuming than interesting or difficult.

I will be posting on getting Typo running for Stephanie and I, and will start talking about the mystery project pretty soon. The mystery project should be interesting.

gnubbs

So, I have been wrestling with medical insurance lately, and it sucks. I work for a huge corporation, and have great medical benefits. I am very, very lucky in that reguard because I never have to ask whether I can afford treatment. Whether it is an ER visit, braces, or heart surgery if my (or my wives) doctor says it is the best plan I get it. When Stephanie had heart surgery it ended up costing over $40k, but we only had to shell out about $1500.

However, of late I have nearly lost my mind a couple of times trying to get that coverage. Last night we sat in the eye doctors for an hour while they tried to figure out our insurance. I told them they needed to call our provider because we weren’t in thier computer system after about 5 minutes, but for some reason they didn’t believe me and wasted another 55 minutes before they finally listened to my insistent advice that they needed to call the insurance company.

Now, finally, over four months after getting stiches in my hand I have finally got all of my insurance staightened out and those bills paid. It only took 5 phone calls and probably an hour of my time.

I just can’t imagine being so amazingly incompetant and not getting fired. I would say that 80% of the insurance claims that I have submitted have been incorrectly declined when first filed. They never give a reason it was declined, when I call and tell them to fix it they just say it was done incorrectly initially and they will straighten it out. I wonder how many people get the incorrect bill from the doctor, assume that their insurance already paid thier portion, and just pay it.

I am not a very big conspiracy theorist, but I am convinced that the insurance companies do this intentionally. I think they make it so difficult and time consuming that you just give up and they don’t have to pay. The only solution that I can see is making it hurt financially for them to falsly deny coverage. Every time they do incorrectly decline one of my claims, they should have to cover the claim at 100% — no copay, no deductible, nothing. If they screw up, they get to pay the whole bill. That would make it so expensive for them to be incompetant that they would have to fix thier processes.

gnubbs

Yesterday, my wife and I exchanged some christmas presents because we are flying out of town tomorrow, and didn’t want to be rushed with everything else we have to do tonight. She was kind enough to get me a gargae at our apartment complex, and an air compressor. Very cool. This opens up a world of opportunities to me, because now I have someplace to work. Again, v. cool. Here are some scenarios that I foresee:

a) Working on my car. Out of the sun and rain. Power outlets. I will need to get a space heater for winter, but this is the aspect I am most excited about. Man, working on brakes will be so much easier with an impact wrench. I am going to sheer off some bolts for sure.

b) Getting the mustang. Now I have some place to store it. This is a very promising development.

c) Working on JTs car. This isn’t as exciting for me, but he will be into this.

d) Renting out my gargage to a family of russian immigrants. I have always wanted to be a slum lord, and now I have my first opportunity.

e) Going to jail for vehicular man slaughter. This will happen the first time I am not paying attention after the russian family moves in and I forget there are people sleeping on the floor of the garage.

f) Suffocating on fumes. This could occur any number of ways.

g) Blowing up my apartment complex. This I would put down with near certainty. I am not sure how, but it could involve any number of things. Getting involved in some sort of anarchist group. Trying to supercharge the air compressor. Or simply covering up the fact that I just ran over a bunch of russians in my garage. Gotta destroy evidence.

I will keep you posted until I either suffocate on fumes, or am arrested. Oh the possibilities now spread before me. Any one know of a russian family looking for a place to stay?

gnubbs

Today I wrote my first ruby program to do anything useful. Don’t get me wrong, I am stretching the word “useful” here quite a bit, but I did use it to do some work. Just double checking some date calculations that had been (and were wrong…). I almost threw out a perl one liner to do the same, but if I want to start using ruby I should at the very least start using it for the ultra simple things.

So, here is my code. I think I would prefer splitting the string on “/” instead of asking for each component of the date, but I didn’t know how to do that off the top of my head in Ruby. So, this works.


#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

start_date = Date.new($cmd_year.to_i, $cmd_month.to_i, $cmd_day.to_i)
diff = DateTime.now - start_date
puts diff.to_i


[Updated 6:10pm]
Here is shot number two. I think that this is a bit closer to the ruby way. Look at that lack of semicolons, implicit return values, and stringing of method calls.

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

require 'date'

def calc_num_days(start_date, end_date=DateTime.now)
	year, month, day = start_date.chomp.split(/\//)
	start_date = Date.new(year.to_i, month.to_i, day.to_i)
	diff = end_date - start_date
	diff.to_i
end

print "Please enter the start date as YYYY/MM/DD: "
input_date = gets

puts "Days Elapsed: #{calc_num_days(input_date)}"

No constructor overloading? No class variables? No class methods? Wait, if there is not a var declared in your class it can’t be instantiated? Huh? PHP4 you tease me with your support for OOP.

Just thought I would heckle PHP4 again about it’s object support. I hear PHP5 is much better, but I have code from a vendor that breaks on PHP5 so I can’t upgrade my web server. (Yeah, I have read the craziness that can get multiple versions of PHP running at the same time and I will pass on that.)

That is okay. I have been reading through the Pickaxe book and am really digging Ruby. There are some things that strike me as strange (where are you dear “;”?), but overall my initial ruby impressions are very positive. Once I get a grasp on the basics of the language I am going to start in on rails. I have my first rails project lined up already so I should be getting to that around Christmas.

gnubbs

Yeah, you. The dumb f*ck who hit my car last night in the Whole Foods parking lot. Is it really that hard to leave a note? You can afford to shop at the most expensive grocery store in town, but the $200 to fix my car is more than you can afford? Well, rest assured. If you are hippy enough to shop at whole foods, you are hippy enough to believe in karma. And, if you believe in karma have fun with the guillotine of karmic retribution hanging over your head.

(If you didn’t hit my car last night, you might need more details on what is going on here. While I was shopping last night someone was kind enough to hit my drivers side rear corner panel, and drive off without leaving a note. It is a pretty bad dent, but it does not appear to have creased the sheet metal. There is a small paint chip right along the seam with my bumper. I don’t know if it is something easily repaired by a body shop. I will keep you posted.)

gnubbs