Review: Ghost Rider - Spirit Of Vengance

Watched on TV on Bravo, so probably horribly chopped, but since it is a Marvel movie that wouldn't make much of a noticeable difference. Would have like to have seen Keith Ledger's Joker do some of the "I'm crazy" scenes because Nicholas Cage can't sell that kind of crazy. Frankly I don't understand why the fire is blue at the end. Another fine movie, only because you cue it up on the PVR knowing in advance it is a bad movie and you are willing to take the ride.

Let's Complain About The Weather Network

(or, because it's Family Day and I have nothing better to do.)

So we moved to Bell Fibe in January (there's a post on that coming up, I just can't finish it properly) and one of the changes we've noticed is to The Weather Network.

We have Autism in the family, so we watch a fair bit of Weather Network.  The kids like it, it is soothing, and it is better than some of the other things the kids want to watch to death.

First: the HD network for Ottawa is Toronto.  Why no HD for Ottawa?  Dunno.  So we have to watch SD Weather Network.  And while this is still an improvement over SD Weather Network On Rogers, it is still pretty terrible when compared to the shiny HD channels.

Second, the format of this Weather Network channel is terrible.  Instead of providing you with a local forecast and then a long-range forecast, you get much less information duplicated four or five times.  Yes, instead of telling us what the long-range outlook for next weekend is, The Weather Network thinks we'd all rather know what the current conditions for Ottawa, Vanier, Gatineau, Aylmer, and Ottawa CDA (whatever the hell that is) is.  And what each short-range forecast is.  And what each precipitation forecast is.

Critical Information Differentiation

Guess what -- most of the time, it's within the margin of error for the Ottawa forecast.  The most I've seen is a deviation of one degree C.  And precipitation is always the same.  So: less information, provided even less usefully.  Frankly I don't think the fine people of Vanier will revolt if they don't get a special mention every time the local forecast is on.  I think they would be like the fine people of Kanata, and just approximate from the Ottawa forecast.

Thirdly, every time the local forecast is on, we get a faint voice over detailing the local forecast for some part of Atlantic Canada.  Every. Damn. Time.  It is just audible enough to be annoying, and just irrelevant enough to be... well, annoying.

So I don't know if there's a programming difference between Rogers 21 and Bell Fibe 505, or if there was some kind of programming change at the same time we switched providers, but frankly I miss the old channel.

Review: Robocop (IMAX)

Loud, frankly -- this was the same theatre as we saw >>The Hobbit Part II in, and although it wasn't 3D, it was IMAX, and it was so loud that I could not tolerate it while the credits were running. Screenwise we sat about 2/3 of the way up the hill in the middle so the screen wasn't excessively big the way it was last time.

The movie itself was OK. Violence was a little on the gratuitous side, and the inevitable inexhaustable ammunition clips syndrome. The human element of Robocop wasn't really played out and the movie was a little vague as to exactly what happened in the end.

Just about everything else can be explained away with "Hey, it's Robocop, what do you want?"

Verdict: OK. Won't buy the DVD.

Review: 300: Rise Of An Empire

A big, arty comic book on film. Gratuitous blood and spraying. Lots of "big moment" speeches. Obvious "insert previous movie here" moment. I read about it ahead of time and thus knew that the film took ridiculous liberties with what really happened.

Did not like.

Income Splitting

Let's distill this income-splitting debate down to its basics:

My wife and I earn a combined $100K, with my $85K being the bulk of it.

Compare this to a hypothetical couple earning two $50K salaries.

Take kids and everything else out of it.

My family pays more in taxes.

Why is that fair?

Spring De-Archiving

So because I'm almost sick and got this idea into my head, I went through my gmail archive culling stuff.

The final body count: from 22000+ conversations down to less than 6000.  All deleted in blocks of 20, which seems to be the only way that gmail will show you search results.  And that was a lot of clicking, let me tell you.  Probably about two hours of work over two nights.

Most of it was archival stuff from when I still thought email lists were a good idea.  CentOS lists, several versions of RedHat lists, Cobbler and Kickstart lists, even several years of autsupott (the Ottawa support list for families with Autism).  None of which I would ever want to see again.  There was also a metric ton of old spam reports, cron barfs, root log reports from several systems long gone by, and the inevitable nonsense from our good old friend Mailer Daemon.

All gone.  My mailbox now occupies only 290M of stuff instead of the several GB it did before the clean up.

I mean, sure you can keep all this stuff, disk is cheap -- and in the case of gmail, largely free -- but if you can't find it and never look at it, what's the point?

Besides, now Gmail disk space is shared with Google Drive space, and I actually *use* that.