Category: Side Notes

My Review of Captain America

I watched Captain America this weekend and thought I’d give everybody my thoughts on the movie (because my opinion is so important). The movie itself can be summed up by the following:

From a film titled Captain America this shouldn’t be surprising to anybody (although I did hear one person tell me that the biggest problem with Captain America was that the film was overly patriotic, I believe it was also a revelation to this individual when he discovered water is wet).

Obviously there could be some spoilers so if you’ve not yet seen the movie and wish everything to be a surprise stop reading now.

Captain America follows a scrawny Brooklyn kid wanting to join the Army during World War II. He keeps getting rejected because he’s medically ineligible for service, but damn it he keeps trying by going from recruitment center to recruitment center hoping one of the medical examiners will miss is numerous ailments. A scientist just happens to come across the kid at a recruitment center and decides he’s the perfect candidate for an experiment.

The experiment involves jacking the kid up with some magical serum that turns regular men into super awesome men that can jump higher and run faster than even the best athletes. It’s a superhero move so the story doesn’t have to make sense, just sit back and enjoy the ride. The beginning of the movie involves Chris Evan’s face CG’d (computer graphic’d) onto the body of a much smaller and scrawnier actor. Honestly I found this a bit distracting but it certainly was a better option than having a completely separate actor play little Captain America and then replacing him with a larger actor partway through the movie. Trust me you can easily ignore the obvious CG for a while.

The main bad guy is played by Hugo Weaving who happens to be one of my favorite actors, this was a huge plus in my book. Tommy Lee Jones plays, well, Tommy Lee Jones which is always good. After some time Captain America is tasked with fucking up Hydra’s (a fictional Nazi research brigade) new weapons that appear to be some kind of plasma cannons. Once again reality takes a back seat because this is a damned super hero movie, not a historical piece.

The rest of the movie can be summed up as Captain America kicking Nazi ass. If there is a person on this planet that can’t bring themselves to enjoy some good old fashion Nazi killing then make sure you never take movie advice from them. Nazi killing is always a plus in movies and Captain America has plenty of it.

Obviously all is well at the end as Captain America wins the day. After the credits finish rolling a trailer for The Avengers is played and informs the audience that the movie come out next summer.

On Chris’s scale of arbitrary ratings I give this movie a four out of five racoons. Why racoons? Fuck you that’s why, it makes just as much sense as stars. Either way this movie entertained me and that’s all I ask in exchange for a good rating. The movie didn’t get a full five racoons because it’s not Jurassic Park, didn’t star Clint Eastwood, and Iron Man was nowhere to be found. Still it was a fun movie so get your ass to the theater to watch it (or don’t, I really don’t care what you do).

Possible Site Maintenance This Weekend

Just to let everybody know this site may be unavailable at some point this weekend depending on how ambitious I get. I’m thinking about upgrading my web server to OS X Lion but won’t be sure until I’ve figured out some of the finer points (like how to get MySQL working on OS X Lion Server again).

If the site is unavailable I’m probably upgrading it, if it remains available I probably decided not to mess with it.

Buy Your Snow Blowers Now

There are a lot of people complaining that they can’t find air conditioners for sale anywhere in the Twin Cities area. Guess what? You should have purchased an air conditioner before the heat wave hit, not during. I’m a man who believes in being prepared and thus I usually buy things before I know that I’ll need them. Many people, on the other hand, seem to avoid planning ahead and thus buy things when they need them. The latter people often cite that buying something ahead of time is a gamble since you may never need it but when the weatherman tells you a week ahead of time that it’s going to be 95 degrees outside with very high humidity it’s no longer a gamble with odds in your favor.

If you need a device to handle something that will affect many people at the same time waiting until the last minute is a stupid idea. Waiting until the last minute means you’re going to be competing with everybody else to get your desired device. This fact should be apparent to anybody who waited until the first big blizzard to purchase a snow blower. After the first blizzard hit in Minnesota there wasn’t a snow blower to be had anywhere.

Thus it’s a good idea to get a snow blower now as they’re easily obtained and likely cheaper as there is little demand for snow blowers during a heat wave. Winter is the time to buy your air conditioner as it’s easily obtain and likely cheaper. I’m glad I have a father who taught me this. Do you know what he did when power went out during one of the blizzards last year? He plugged in his big ass generator and kept the heat going because he was smart enough to buy one before he needed it. Hell his generator can keep the air conditioner running in his home of power were to fail during this heat wave.

Do you know what else is good to have available to you? Extra food and drinking water. Did the last blizzard leave you stranded at home unable to get to the grocery store? Did it cause your water pipes to freeze and burst leaving you in need of drinking water? Neither problems are problems if you did your work and prepared ahead of time.

My advice to everybody is this, don’t wait until the last minute to prepare yourself for a future scenario. Get what you need before you need it and when it comes time that you need it you’ll have it and be happy.

This has been a public service announcement from your friend Christopher Burg.

Thanks Google

It’s time again for Christopher Burg rants about stupid shit that probably only affects him and two other people on this planet.

Let’s take a minute and talk about Google Reader. I use Google Reader is the back end for my RSS readers. I’m not a huge fan of the Google Reader website, or using websites as interfaces for my data in general, but I’m a huge fan of the Reeder Really Simple Syndication (RSS) clients. The Reeder clients are the only reason I’m still using Google Reader after the latest stunt Google pulled.

I haven’t a Google Apps for Businesses account tied to christopherburg.com. Before moving things to my personal server e-mail sent to any address on the christopherburg.com domain actually went to GMail. I also had my Google Reader account tied to my Google Apps account which proved to be a big mistake. I’m not sure when this happened by Google apparently decided it would be a jolly good idea to eliminate Google Reader support for Google Apps accounts. This meant I lost my entire list of RSS feeds which is really swell considering I rely on them to get a large portion of information you read on this very site.

Needless to say this really put a monkey wrench in my writing process. For the last couple of days I’ve been getting all of my material by manually visiting news websites like a savage beast of days gone by (you know, before RSS). This has proven itself time consuming as all Hell. Manually rebuilding my RSS list was going to prove difficult because I have so many that I can’t remember every feed I had on my account.

Let me just say right now that being a data pack rat isn’t a bad idea. I never delete any data unless it’s completely irrelevant (torrent files for instance). Fortunately in this case I remembered the NetNewsWire software I used to use as my RSS client and it still maintained a local copy of my RSS feed list. All I had to do was switch the Google account it was linked to from my @christopherburg.com to my @gmail.com account and tell the client to merge my feeds with the new Google Reader account. Thankfully I haven’t really added any new feeds since I abandoned NetNewsWire for Reeder so I basically have a complete list of feeds again.

Why do you care about this? No reason really as you’re probably not concerned with the process I used to find stories to write about. But this scenario does have a couple of lessons that may be applicable to others. First, have local copies of all your data because you never know when some online service is just going to vanish. Google may not go away for a long time but their services have been known to appear and disappear unannounced. If you don’t have local copies of data on a online service and that service goes away your data goes away with it. The second lesson is being a data pack rat isn’t a bad thing; disk is cheap so why get rid of data that may be useful someday down the road?

My little crisis has been averted and now I can continue punching out stories for this site without having to manually visit a bunch of sites. I still want to give a middle finger to Google for making my RSS fees vanish like a fucking specter though. So here it is (for those who can’t actually see me right now I’m giving Google the finger)! I now return you to your regularly scheduled news.

Everybody in Minnesota Should Know the Name Willis Carrier

I would like to give a huge middle finger to Minnesota’s weather. We have a dew point that is matched only by the Amazon Jungle.

All I can say is thank Thor for Willis Carrier and his invention of air conditioning. This man should be revered for his great invention that makes living in Minnesota (and many other areas) comfortably livable. Oh, I’d also like to point out that air conditioning isn’t a product of government decree or demand but of a need Mr. Carrier ran across when he witnessed quality issues at Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company. Air conditioning, like most inventions that greatly improve the lives of millions, is a products of the free market.

Transformers 3

I finally got around to seeing Transformers 3 and have to say the beginning of the movie had me worried but the ending was fucking awesome. Obviously there are going to be some spoilers in this post so if you’re not watched it yet and don’t want minor points of the story ruined stop reading now.

As with the previous two Transformers movies the weakness in this one is the fact that the human characters are given too much screen time. I don’t think Michael Bay understands the fact that people don’t go to a Transformers movie to watch humans do thing, they go to watch giant transforming robots do things. The movie also took a bit of time to jack-off Obama. Whatever, I like to think of how he likely ran and cowered in some shelter when Megatron decided he had enough of the human’s shit for a while and started his killing spree again.

Thankfully, things improve greatly once the actual story beings to move along. The Decepticons go balls out in trying to take over the world which is pretty typical Transformers stuff. I do appreciate the part where Megatron blasts the Lincoln Memorial because that man was a tyrannical asshole who didn’t give two shits about freeing the slaves. In all honesty I have more respect for Megatron because he’s a tyrannical asshole but he’s honest about it.

The movie gets very good right around the time the Decepticons take over and blow the shit out of Chicago. After all of the destruction I must say Chicago looked better then it currently does.

Obviously, being a Michael Bay movie, lots of shit is blown up. That’s why I feel Michael Bay is the perfect directory for the Transformers movies, he knows very little about plot and story but he can blow the living shit out of anything which is what Transformers is honestly all about (if you’ve watched the original cartoons you know story was entirely second nature). Transformers 3 has a slightly more involved story than the other two but it still can be summed up as Decepticons trying to take over the world for some evil purpose and the Autobots stop them.

If you’ve enjoyed the previous two Transformers movies you’ll enjoy this one. Cinema snobs need not apply, this movie simply isn’t for you. The characters are fairly one dimensional, the story is bare bones, and every dollar was poured into special effects. On the other hand if you’re like me and enjoy mindless action films that feature completely implausible characters and story lines you’ll enjoy this film.

Site Migration Update

It appears as though the site migration has gone much smoother than I expected. With the exception of my embedded YouTube links needing repair everything appears to be working correctly. I’ve had a couple people report that the RSS feed transferred over without any trouble, my Twitter integration seems to be working, and all the links are going where they’re supposed to. I’m sure there will be some problems in the coming weeks but overall I believe this is one of the less painful transfers I’ve dealt with.

WordPress has some very good tools available to those wanting to jump from one server to another. Of course if you notice any problems (besides the YouTube links not working, I’m already aware of that) either post a comment or send me an e-mail at blog[at]christopherburg[dot]com.

Welcome to The New Site

If you take a look around you’ll notice absolutely nothing appears to have changed but alas I’ve moved my blog for WordPress to my own personal server. The migration isn’t flawless as all of my embedded YouTube video links are in need of repair but otherwise I believe everything is here as it should be. If you notice any bugs let me know (blog[at]christopherburg[dot]com) and I’ll get to fixing them right away.

I’m sure the next question out of your mouth will be “Why the move?” Frankly I’ve been working on getting my own “cloud” setup. My e-mail has been hosted on my own server for a while now as are several other accounts. That means when you send an e-mail to the above address it goes straight to my server. Regardless to you this move means basically nothing but for me it means I now have complete control over my website, e-mail, and other online accounts. It’s likely that I may experience some downtime here and there being I’m hosting this on my own personal server and not several servers distributed around the country but so far my personal “cloud” experiment has lead to great up times and I don’t get page hits twenty-four hours a day so I have times that I can perform scheduled maintenance.

A couple of other things have changed. First you can now access this website via christopherburg.com, www.christopherburg.com, or the good old blog.christopherburg.com. The first two URLs may redirect to a new site someday but I will keep the blog subdomain pointing directly here for as long as I have control to do so (unless I change my mind).

I hope you’ll bear with me as I work out the bugs here. I’m not sure if the Twitter feed is going to work perfectly, I think the RSS feed link will need to be changed, and there are probably a few other issues that will crop up as the weeks pass.

I Concur

I’ll just leave this thought for you guys to mull over:

If you have 3 visible holsters containing 3 handguns, attached to tactical gear at the range, I’ll automatically jump to the conclusion that you’re a douchebag.

I agree completely. Nothing says douchebag like the guy with the tactical gear which includes three handguns attached to various parts of his body. That shit may be funny if you’re purposely making fun of mall ninjas but if you’re wearing it because you honestly think it’s a good tactical decision then you’re likely a moron.