Lots of activities on the agenda today. First, I went over and voted. This new rule about having to choose a party for the primary is BS, but I went with Democrat, for what it’s worth. The crazy blogger at Blogcritics who callse me a “right winger” probably won’t believe that.  Next, I went down to renew my driver’s license. It’s my birthday on the 29th and it was time to get a new license for the next 5 years. $25 for the renewal fee, which seemed not too bad. They soak it to people with cars and motorcycle licenses though: $50??? Why double the cost for motorcycles? Cycles don’t beat up the roads as bad as cars … that makes no sense. Now I’m off to a meeting in Tumwater on ASP.NET and they are going to give me a copy of .NET 2005 Beta 1 for attending. Looking forward to this meeting and seeing what new and exciting things are coming.

After Monday Night Football the debut reality show Benefactor with Mark Cuban
giving one out of 16 people one million dollars. Mark cut the first one
because the contestant called the game “stupid” and then cut the second
because she didn’t measure up to her own video interview hype.
Apparently this contestant had sent video of her running around nude
emptying garbage and playing an electric guitar. In an interview Cuban
asked her to play some air guitar with her favorite song AC DC’s Back in Black
says she can’t do — goodbye third cut came down that annoyed gal from
portland who seemed bit dry they played a game of Jenga (spelling?)
where you remove blocks to try make other player have tower fall poker
playing woman lost the annoying guy lives for another day benefactor is
interesting and we TiVo’d it. We’ll be back to view at least one more
episode.

Earlier I had written about how Gmail needed some way (before leaving beta) to mass delete messages in the spam bin because at that time the only way was 100 at a time (I erroneously mentioned it as 50 at a time, but there is a way to increase it to 100 at a time and have since been corrected [thanks Mike and Matt]). I even contributed this to Techdirt and Mike ran it along with some insightful thoughts of his own. I agree with him, BTW, that this isn’t something to get “super angry” about, and personally I have never been angry at all actually, just trying to be helpful to the Gmail beta team about making sure they added this mass deletion of spam feature before the product left beta. Also, to provide some level of reality to those users like myself who get a lot of email.

Good news! Over the weekend I noticed the addition of a new feature (well, a Warning: message in bold RED anyway) that promised to auto delete email in the “spam” bin after 30 days. Note the screenshot below taken on Saturday 9/11:



This shows that unfortunately this process has actually not started taking place (see update below), because there is still 207,203 emails in the “spam” bin that are older than 30 days. At least this is the case in my overburdened Gmail spam bin, anyway. So I wonder when this feature will actually be activated? The message is great, and gives me hope, but does anybody know when they are going to flip the switch and turn that trash compactor on? No, I haven’t had time to check into this in more detail but I’m hoping one of our readers might have done so. It will be a cool day when I login to Gmail and those emails are magically — poof — gone.

BTW, just want to thank the readers who commented on my prior entry, offering third party programming solutions (Jim Dabell suggested using a Python script) and/or those who sent the Gmail team a note encouraging them to add some sort of mass delete function. I suspected that there would be 3rd party alternatives to this issue, but I was really hoping that the Gmail team would address this before leaving beta. It appears now that they have … sort of. Just throw the switch.

Update: I noticed today 9/13/04, just as I was publishing this entry that my new Gmail spam bin message count is 205,803 (a reduction of 1000+ emails) … so some of those emails have been devoured by the Gmail system. Perhaps it is set to slowly devour the messages older than 30 days in the spam bin?

I was somewhat surprised to see that Shrek 2 has made more money in the box office to date than Spiderman 2. I’m still waiting for the Shrek sequel on DVD. I thought sequels, generally speaking, didn’t do that well but 4 of the top 10 box office grossing movies are sequels. Cellular which we just saw and reviewed is #93. Alien vs. Predator, which we also saw and reviewed recently as of this writing is in the top 20.

Just got back from this movie about an older woman (Kim Basinger) who is kidnapped and dials out to a stranger’s cell phone for help. Tonight my wife and I wanted to catch an action movie that didn’t require too much thinking. With a good title and promising previews, we chose Cellular, and ironically it turned out that thinking too hard would only ruin the viewing experience.

- Cellular (2004) -
Official website: http://www.cellularthemovie.com/
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337921/

Main Cast:
Jessica - Kim Basinger
Ryan - Chris Evans
Chad - Eric Christian Olsen
Mooney - William H. Macy

Directed by David Ellis (Final Destination 2) based on a story by Larry Cohen (Phone Booth) screenplay written by Chris Morgan. I found it somewhat interesting that they’d try to make two movies with phones as a key plot element but Phone Booth turns out to be a much better movie than Cellular.

It all begins with young, buff stud protagonist, Ryan (played by newcomer Chris Evans) trying to tell his hot ex-girlfriend how much he has changed and that she should please take him back. She gives him a list of errands to do to make it up to her and on his way to do the first of them he gets a call on his cell phone from a frantic, scared and kidnapped Jessica.

Unsurprisingly she manages to convince Ryan that it’s not a prank call and that he absolutely cannot hang up the phone.  And then she convinces him to give the phone to a policeman. He drives to the police office and offers the one policeman just about to retire working the desk, Mooney (William H. Macy) the phone. Mooney takes some interest, but then a fight with a bunch of arrested criminals breaks out in the lobby and he must attend to that instead. Mooney tells Ryan to take the matter upstairs, literally. Later, Mooney shows some interest in following up on the case which eventually makes him much more significant in the plot.

Ryan goes upstairs, but then starts to lose the cell signal so he stops just shy of the place he needs to reach? He screams for help a few times but of course nobody hears him and comes to aid. Please. Twenty minutes later Ryan is going up a different stairwell without any concern over loss of cell signal! It’s moments like these that make you go: he didn’t just do that, did he? The movie contradicts its own plot boundaries.

As far as acting goes, Chris Evans is on par with leading men most-films-are-bombs guys like Ben Affleck and the ladies will probably get goggly over him shirtless and tatted up. The guys will likely enjoy his eye candy girlfriend who seems to only be there to get in the way later in the movie and serve no other really useful purpose. Why don’t ever find out what happens between these two troubled lovebirds? Why show a couple with relationship trouble and then never tell the viewers what happens to them? Also, there is Ryan’s friend who is there seemingly just to be comic relief in the beginning of the movie. He is not utilyzed much beyond the opening scenes.

Kim Basinger didn’t ring much compassion from this viewer and some of her technical skills seemed way out of character. I kept thinking of her in better roles and that was there to pick up a paycheck and little more. She spends most of the role with watery, mascara-run eyes and in desparation uttering too many unconvincing lines.

Cellular should have been preceded by an episode of Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Here’s some more thoughts and observations on the movie:

- I think they had too many “I’m here to threaten, Jessica” scenes. These kidnappers aren’t that smart … they have way too many opportuniies to kill Jessica and chose instead to keep on threatening her even after they should have determined that she couldn’t help them any more. It’s like if you don’t do what we want, Jessica then this time, really, we are going to kill you. Or your son … or your husband and your son. Really. Really, we mean it. We really, really mean it.
- in one scene we see a light on the phone downstairs less than two feet from one of Jessica’s captor’s eyes. Doesn’t her captor ever see this light on through the other 45+ minutes of time Jessica is talking to Ryan?
- in a struggle with one of her captors, Jessica displays an uncanny amount of medical knowledge for somebody who works at the bank. Where did Jessica learn so much about human anatomy? (I believe there was some very quick explanation uttered by her, but I didn’t quite catch what it was).
- why is Jessica’s husband such a wimp? He has only one moment where he really fights back … the rest of the time he’s getting his butt kicked.
- when Ryan is running low on his cell phone battery he goes to implausible extremes to get a charger from the store, but it does provide a couple cheap laughs.
- William H. Macy is a very good actor and makes the best of what is a mostly preposterous script. Thank goodness he was cast in this movie!
- The lawyer who wants to sue everybody (complete with a license that says something like: sue you 2) has some really funny lines (played by Rick Hoffman). He gets his snazzy blue Porsche stolen by Ryan, only to have it impounded, and then he goes to get it out and it’s stolen by Ryan yet again. I will echo the comments from another epinions review of this movie that I’d like to see this guy in more fuller roles than a funny stereotype bystander.

Overall Cellular makes for a barely passable action popcorn movie. The sounds are decent and the camera work is merely competent but nothing just stands out. I felt the movie was a silly, completely unbelievable, action flick (instead of a serious action drama like Diehard with some comedic moments, as was intended) and when I left the theater and started thinking about it to write this review, the experience overall was mediocre. It was, however, much better than talking to a phone solicitor. Grade: C-

Sept 24, 2004 is the day. PayPal clearly wants to send a message to companies who still continue to use their service for processing payments for gambling, adult material and one more area of contention: unauthorized prescription drug sales.

PayPal, the online payments arm of eBay Inc. (Nasdaq:EBAY), on Friday said it will soon fine people up to $500 for uses related to gambling, adult content or services, and buying or selling prescription drugs from noncertified sellers.

If webmasters who do business in these areas have not already started using other services which do allow these type transactions, I’m sure this will provide some additional incentive, which seems to be PayPal’s plan. Or is it? Not unsurprisingly, some comments over at Techdirt are anti-PayPal over this move:

“Fine people $500? I think you mean steal $500 from people. This is prima facie evidence that they’re crooks.” - bbay

I bet sites like paypalsucks.com – that provides a forum for alternative places to Paypal — are going to be all over this news.

Play $1000 worth of Atari games for $14.95/month at Atari on demand

Pakistan Information Minister Sheikh Rashid believes Al-Qaeda terror network kingpin Osama bin Laden may be dead and conversely Secretary of State Colin Powell thinks Bin Laden is still alive:

“I don’t know where he is,” Powell said. “I don’t know his state of health. I believe he is still alive, but I can’t prove that. He clearly is in hiding and he is on the run.”Powell went on: “He is not popping up on television and he is not showing himself in a way that he can be captured.”

Will capturing and bringing to justice Bin Laden ever bring closure to the families of the 9/11 tragedy? I still remember that day, 9/11/01 as we were on vacation, of all ironic places to be, in Vegas at the time. Vegas was not the Vegas you’d expect, but then no place in America was normal on that fateful day. I distinctly remember waking up and seeing those horrible images of the planes hitting the building on the news and thinking I must have been watching a movie and not real news. As I turned channels and saw the coverage on every channel, the horror swept over me.

I do think Bin Laden will be found by next year’s anniversary of 9/11 but whether he will be dead or alive, I don’t know. I think it would impact the terrorists more if Bin Laden was captured alive, as Saddam Hussein was, probably in some dirty hole in the earth. There are some wild conspiracy theorists who believe Bin Laden has already been captured and the Bush administration is going to wheel him out like some puppet just before the election. I don’t think so.

Please put the families of 9/11 victims in your thoughts today.

I’m not one that believes album cover art and packaging tells anything significant about the actual musical content of the album, but I may have been wrong in this line of thinking when it comes to listening to the Scorpions new album, Unbreakable. When Iron Maiden released their new album, Dance of Death there was controversy aplenty because the album art wasn’t up to their normal quality standard, but when the album came out it was really your typical — or better than typical — Maiden album.

Some notable Scorpions album cover art through the years:

A cheap Blackout knockoff with a bunch of their songs unplugged, circa 2001. According to various reviewers, this one is so bad it’s never been released in the US.

1996. Are those nude people inside the cage with the albums? Sort of reminds of Inside the Electric Circus from W.A.S.P but with more intensity and nudity .. at least from the paint brush, if not the music.

1985 - the Scorpions best live album to date

1984 - was there a fascination with sex and sexuality on Scorpions album covers?

1982 - the best commercial album the Scorpions ever recorded and their best cover art (nearly 20 years later to be ripped off by their own Acoustica).

1980 - hmm, wonder what this lady is thinking about?

1979 - one of the oddest Scorpions album covers to go along with a great album (contains “Lovedrive” and “Holiday”) to finish the 70’s and show that the Scorps would have serious commercial potential in the year’s to come. This bubblegum cover was banned and might find it harder to buy the album with the original cover shown here. If you don’t care about the cover and just want the music then Amazon has the music with the scoprion and black background as a cover.

So what did the Scorpions do for Unbreakable’s album art? They ripped a page out of the AC DC Back in Black camp with an uninspired, silver package with an embossed scorpion.

Unbreakable isn’t bad, but not all that good either. Maybe it’s time for the Scorpions to pull their tail in and admit that the stinger isn’t what it used to be. Average score = 2.76 rounded up to 3 stars. Grade: C+

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