WhistlinDixie

Crash This

While watching the new episode of Heroes tonight, I noticed a large number of advertisements for the new NBC show The Real Wedding Crashers. Personally, I think the concept of this show is absolutely horrible.

Punk’d is slightly entertaining because they are messing with people in everyday situations. Wedding Crashers, however, is based on the concept of people willingly ruining a day that should only come once in a person’s life: the day they are married.

I would never consent to anyone messing up my wedding, and I would more than likely beat the crap out of someone if they even tried. One of the teasers featured the reverend that was officiating the ceremony receiving a call on his phone while performing the vows and stopping the service to take it. Even with all of the respect that I have for clergymen, I would still have given him an earful. If I was the parent of one of the kids who consent to this (they don’t deserve to be called adults if they consider this to be funny), I would disown them for ruining such a special day.

What’s next? Ma’am, your baby died… Not! You’ve just been Punk’d! I don’t even understand why people watch this crap.

College Football is Back!!!!!

For the time being, anyway. The Sinclair Broadcast Group, the controllers of my local ABC and FOX affiliates, has just agreed to an extension to the contract negotiation period with Time Warner. That means that I will be getting ABC and FOX until January 12, long enough to see the rest of the college bowl games this season. After that, who knows? At least by the time the contract finally expires I will be back at school.

My Bowl Season is Almost Over

And I don’t mean my bowl picks (not that they are doing great). Rather, I am referring to the first of the new year, when all cable subscribers in my area lose both ABC and FOX. That’s right, no ABC or FOX, two of the big broadcast networks, over cable even though we have affiliate stations just 30 miles away. This means that we will miss seven of the eleven bowl games that occur on or after January first, including the national championship game. Instead, we get to watch bowl games like the GMAC bowl, which pits Ohio University (9-4) versus Southern Mississippi University (8-5).

This whole problem stems from the recent acquisition of local cable provider Adelphia by Time Warner. The contract that Adelphia had with the company that controls the local ABC and FOX affiliates expires at the end of the year, meaning that Time Warner has to renegotiate. It ends up that, since Adelphia was small, the holding company actually provided the channels for free. However, since Time Warner has lots of money, the holding company has decided to make Time Warner pay for access to the channels. Time Warner refuses to do so because not only did the holding company previously offer the channels for free, but also because they can be had over the air for free.

Time Warner has admitted that it is very unlikely that the contract will be worked out by the new year, or even January 8th, the day of the national championship game. In fact, periodically on both ABC and FOX, they scroll a message across the screen (during scheduled programming) informing people that this channel will not be available starting January 1st and that you should switch to DirecTV or the Dish Network if you want to continue receiving the channels. Both satellite providers are also putting lots of advertisements up on the channels trying to get you to switch.

I really hope this situation is remedied quickly because the lack of ABC and FOX means that I am missing NFC football, college bowl games, 24, Lost, and House, just to name a few. It doesn’t help that broadcast antennas and satellite dishes (only the small types) must be well concealed in our neighborhood.

Frustration

OK, first things first. Ends up that CJ won’t be able to make it up here in a couple of weekends after all. Financial troubles on his end. Sucks, since I already have scheduled half a day off to prepare, but, oh well, I guess that just means that I get a three and a half day work week because of Memorial Day. At least the trip to Mme’s is still on. Right now, it is just CJ and I since Chief most likely will have a job that will prevent him from making the trip. CJ is trying to get Kristen and Chelsea to come up at the same time as us. Sounds like Jordan might make trip too. It’ll be like one big, happy family again. And to think, it’s only a month and a half away.

Now, for my recap of a couple of season finales. First, 24. The show has been great all season, including the first hour of the finale. The second hour is where they screwed up. It was way to easy for them to take down the nuke once they located it. It took the excitement right out of the show. The hit man/Secret Service agent that was sent to pick up Jack was really a minor plot point at best, not something that you spend 40 minutes dwelling on. Then, possibly the most despicable character that I have seen this season, President Logan, goes and brushes off the former President Palmer, I was about ready to go and shoot the guy. After all, LA would be a hot zone right now if Palmer had never set foot in the bunker and taken control of things. Then, having Jack walk off into the distance on his way to Mexico, being a new person, since, to the world (outside of Tony, Michelle, and Chloe), he is dead, is possibly the worst way to end a season finale. It should have been a series finale. the way that they wrapped up every plot line in the story and basically killed the main character.
My grade: first hour: A; second hour: C

Now, for Lost. It ran a similar path to the 24 finale. Great first hour, disappointing second. The first hour was typical Lost, which is a good thing. The second hour was good up until the last commercial break. After that, when the raft was hijacked and Walt taken, I just wanted to scream at the writers of the show. That is how you loose viewers! Do you really want to come back and watch another season? After all, they might just go and kill another character in the most random and meaningless way possible. My theory on the whole abduction is that the people on the boat were "The Others". If you remember, Rousseau said that she header the Others say that they were coming for the boy. She took that to mean Aaron, Claire’s little baby. However, I think that they were talking about Walt, who was on the raft. Then it makes a little sense why the boat was attacked like it was and all the strange people on the boat wanted was the boy. I think that the best part of the second hour was finally getting the background on Hurley. What he is doing walking around with over $1600 in his wallet is a mystery to me. Also, an awesome quote came out of the second hour: "You , uh, got some Artz on you." (Artz was the guy who had just been blown up by an old stick of dynamite; a little bit of him was on Jack’s shoulder.) There will definitely be a second season, but I don’t have a clue where they will go with it. After all, the raft has been destroyed and everyone is running from the Others. We don’t have a clue what is going to happen to the people who were on the raft; the raft has been blown up, the only flare has been used, and it appears that Sawyer has been shot. I am interested to see what happens next season, but I almost hate the show now for the abduction of Walt in the last ten minutes and the destruction of the island’s only hope.
My grade: first hour: A; second hour: B-

Destruction, Total Destruction

Should have known that it would happen sooner or later. I have ruined my first piece of plasticware. That can happen when you microwave one bun’s worth of sloppy joe on high for three minutes. I kind of forgot how little I had in there. I put it in that long since yesterday it was still a little cool, but that was three bun’s worths. Oh well, first time for everything I guess.

Completely off topic, but the funniest thing happened two days ago on TV. I think it was NASCAR driver Rusty Wallace who was a guest on the Tony Danza show. Tony decided to challenge Rusty to a go cart race. As they were coming out of a turn, Rusty tapped Tony’s bumper, causing Tony to spin and actually flip over in his cart. Wallace said that he was thinking, "Oh my gosh, I just killed Tony Danza!" Actually, Tony was just shaken up, without a scratch on him. Bet he’s glad he had a roll bar and was wearing his seatbelt.

The Heidi Effect

I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the Heidi episode from many years ago. To catch you up, I believe it was an Oakland Raiders game that was on TV. When the time came for the movie Heidi to air, the Raiders were loosing, but in the process of making a comeback. Heidi then preempted the game. The Raiders ended up winning the game, but no one was able to see the end on TV. The NFL made an agreement with the television industry after the season ended and a game has never been preempted by other television programming again.

Why do I bring this up, you ask? If any of you were watching network television last night, you might have an idea. At 7:00 CDT, the President aired a press conference. When 8:00 CDT rolled around, the news person broke in while the President was speaking to tell us that the Simple Life was starting. I guess that networks other than FOX also did this. I just find it unbelievable that the networks would interrupt a Presidential news conference so they could air some crappy reality show. After all, we already know that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are incapable of doing any job correctly. Does anyone know what is right anymore? You know, it’s sad that I even had to pose that question. What has become of us?

Exclusive Cable?

You know how at hotels, they are always like "check out our premium channels"? I got to thinking tonight, if we get two Showtime channels for free, why don’t we get ESPN2 or Comedy Central or Discovery Channel or History Channel? They would have to cost less than the two Showtimes, and they actually have programs that I would like to watch. What is really sad is that I couldn’t even see the Bulls game last night when it was being played in Chicago! Talk about being disappointed. I was really looking forward to seeing the Bulls in the playoffs for the first time since the Jordan era. Maybe I’ll get to see their next game since it is in Washington.

Hard Time

Today I got to go to my first department meeting. It was actually the April TSG (Technology Support Group) Recognition Meeting. Birthdays, anniversaries, both marital and employment-wise, and A+ certifications were on the agenda. Also, I was recognized as the new guy, the quiet co-op that needed to be loosened up a little.

Right now, you’re probably thinking, "So, what’s so hard about that?" Well, yesterday, I was handled the TOFC project. This had been worked on for over two months by one guy in the Applications Group, but he left us for bigger and better things, leaving the project without anyone to do it. During the meeting, Marcia (pronounced Mar-see-a), the manager of the Apps Group announced that I had inherited the TOFC project. After she said that, I got a bunch of very sympathetic looks from the other TSGers and a few "I’m sorry"s. This project is actually a complete overhaul of a database application that has been in use for almost fifteen years. It DB2 for a database and uses a Q&A front end. Don’t feel bad if all of that made no sense to you, because it made no sense to me either, because it was all from before my time. Anyway, this system makes very little sense to me and the program that I started writing in Access with VBA is proving to be a pain. Who ever thought that Visual Basic would act so much different from Visual Basic for Applications?

OK, as a change of pace, a quick commentary on JAG. I just happened to be watching TV while I am typing this and caught the end of tonight’s episode. Rabb finally got promoted from Commander to Captain. He was way past due since I think he has been a Commander ever since the series started all of those years ago. (I don’t even remember when the first episode aired, but it could have easily been eight or so years ago.) The new commander of JAG, a Marine, has decided to reassign Mac and Rabb to new jobs. Mac will be transferring to San Diego and Rabb to European Command, staying in London. Next week will be the series finale. A sad day, since JAG was one of the better shows out there. I don’t know how I feel about the teaser for the finale. It appears that Rabb is finally going to propose to Mac. It has been obvious that they have liked each other for a long time. I just don’t like the way that shows always wrap up everything in their last episode. Would it really hurt the viewing public to leave a few loose ends, have some conflicts go unresolved? I would love to see that happen, even if just once. Now I leave you for Numbers, a geek’s dream come true.