Snow is Cold

Not quite sure how I stumbled on this page but this dude has some serious beef :)

The title of his article is Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

Continuing with the movie theme, we went to see this film the other day. Actually I wanted to go see ‘The Longest Yard’, an Adam Sandler movie, but was outnumbered 2 to 1 :/ anyway I wanted to see this one too, so no worries.

We were pretty shocked to discover that on a Monday night the 10.10pm showing had sold out, but there were two more at 10.40 and 11, so we went for a beer then came back at 11 (see, big cities have stuff to do at reasonable times). Christian Bale was a legend, again, and the film was pretty wicked, I recommend you go see!

I’ve actually seen a whole bunch of movies recently, some good, some bad, and some just plain weird. Some good ones were:

• Sin City – awesome comic style film, if not a little gruesome at times, with loads of famous people in it
• Star Wars Episode III – just because it’s Star Wars, but actually a little rushed for the amount they have to fit into the film…
• Batman Begins – duh
• City of God – Can’t believe I didn’t see this film ’til now, very powerful
• Fulltime Killer – Hong Kong cinema at its best :)
• El Mariachi – a Rodriguez classic, predecessor of Desperado, and the film that made him famous

The bad:

• Paycheck – starts off good but is ruined by horrible direction, I actually got more angry with this film the longer it went on :)
• Kamikaze Taxi – don’t waste the 2 hours 50 minutes of your life on this, the case promises all action but instead you get this weird half Peruvian guy talking shit for half the movie
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – was expecting great things from this movie but the people behind Love Actually et al don’t make the conversion from romantic comedy to, well, any other genre happen

The weird:

• Y Tu Mama Tambien – Have wanted to see this movie for a while, eventually watched it last weekend, it was actually pretty cool but the sexual content of the movie is pretty, well, open…
• As Good As It Gets – ok I saw this before, and it’s also good, but I think it should go here :)

I’m sure there’s a couple others that I’m forgetting but I’ll have to add them another time (yay).

Loving this quote from Jack Nicholson in ‘As Good As It Gets’,

“Lady: ‘I loved your book, how is that you can write from a woman’s perspective *so* well??’
Jack: ‘Well that’s easy… I just think of a man, and then I take away logic, and accountability’”

Had me creasing up. That movie’s actually pretty strange, although he comes out with some genius lines in it :)

Last week I bought a basketball for $10 – under 5 pounds – having walked past the court down the road from my house many times. Also I’ve been watching the NBA finals on TV, which incidentally has reached game 7, the decider, on tonight at 8.30pm Eastern, between the San Antonio Spurs and the Detroit Pistons. Having knocked out my team, the Miami Heat, in the conference finals I’ve been rooting for Detroit to win, but I reckon with home advantage the Spurs could clinch it…

Anyway, I bought the ball last Sunday cuz we’d seen this big bucket of them on sale for a while in Sportchek (kinda like JJB) and I’d debated it every time. So this time there were only like a handful left in the bottom of the bin so I picked out the last one that was still fully pumped up (as we have no pump) and proudly purchased it.

The opportunity to play came by pretty quickly, me & Pete went down to play on Tuesday and ended up getting involved in a game with a couple Koreans, a Japanese and a Canadian. We weren’t expecting great things having sucked sooooooooo bad when we were just messing about but in the game situation it came together pretty well! Needless to say my team won both games of first to 11 ;)

It started pissing down with rain in the second game which made for some rather treacherous footing, and by that time we were nearly passing out anyway – it’s probably a good thing it started raining to cool us down… We passed by the liquor store (not off license) on the way home, soaking wet, and helped some Irish dude get his recycling deposit back on the shedload of cans he’d brought to the store (usually they only let you cash 16 at a time), then managed to persuade the cashier to sell us a 12 pack for $20 flat instead of $20.15, cuz that’s all I’d brought with me! Winner. Then we took said cans home and enjoyed in front of game 6 of the NBA finals :) see, we’re embracing the culture.

I’m enjoying watching the basketball, it’s nice to be able to watch it at a normal time rather than 4 in the morning… I’m still not keen on “football” or baseball though, they take forever.

Well the news is I do have a job and it starts proper on Monday, I think. I’m doing web design for a startup company called assemblenow, and all going well I should do pretty well out of it!

That day I went to meet the guy, who was half an hour late having semi-forgotten he was supposed to be there at 12, then going to the wrong Starbucks (there’s just too many of them), and we had a chat about the company and his vision and the inner workings etc. for about an hour which was actually very interesting. Anyway he sent me through a job he had as a starter to see what I could come up with and both he and the owner of the restaurant were very happy with it so all good.

In fact the guy took me to the restaurant I made the site for for lunch yesterday, so I got free Indian buffet, sweet. Actually I was a little disappointed with it, it was no Polash :) and the guy had talked it up a lot, but it was cool to see it from inside and to meet the owner etc.
The only holdup has been the fact that the guy needs a proper sales force before he can start directing work to me, but he called this afternoon to give the good news that he’d found a lady to head up his sales team so all’s kicking off proper on Monday. There’s a list of clients waiting for sites to be built too so I should be plenty busy enough…

Will let y’all know how it goes as and when it happens…