Author Archives: brad

Thanks to Bill for this tip:

Walt Disney Co.’s Miramax Films unit forged a deal to co-produce animated movies with Wild Brain Inc., adding another Hollywood player to the increasingly competitive world of computer-generated animated feature films. The deal comes amid uncertainty over the future of Miramax and its co-chairmen, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, after repeated clashes with their corporate parent. Disney, Burbank, Calif., has its own partnership with a CGI-animation house, Pixar Animation Studios, but that deal is set to expire in 2005. Disney also plans to make its own computer-animated movies. Miramax and animation company Wild Brain, San Francisco, will kick off their new venture with “Opus,” based on the penguin character from the “Bloom County” comic strip. Miramax, together with Bob Weinstein’s production outfit Dimension Films, will distribute the films and share financing of the movies with Wild Brain, which will animate them. This is Wild Brain’s first move into feature-length movies.

An Opus movie. Now, I’m trying not to get too excited. It could suck. Like The Flintstones or something. But then again, it could be great.

This leads to all sorts of interesting questions, the most important of which is who would voice Opus the Penguin?

The election looms near, although I doubt anyone really believes it will be resolved by this time next week. I expect it will drag on for at least two weeks past November 2.

I may or may not write something up on how and why I’m voting this year, but in the meantime, we can finally discover if Bill is truly White House material by seeing his score on this game. Actually, play it yourself, too. It’s kind of fun.

Thanks to Dave, currently in San Francisco rubbing elbows with the Macintosh elite, for the link.

Vote Bill. A Desperate Choice for Desperate Times. Extra points to anyone who gets the reference.

It just never stops. More spam…

Hi again,

Here is Ina Vang. I wite you because we are accepting your mortgage application.
Our office confirms you can get a $220.000 loÀn for a $352.00 per month payment.
Approval process will take 1 minute, so please fill out the form on our website:

[address removed]

Thank you.

Best Regards Ina Vang
First Account Manager

My Dearest Ina,
Well, with such an obvious command of the English language, you’re definitely the first company I’ll consider when I want a loÀn whose monthly payment is, for some perfectly valid and rational reason, higher than the actual loÀn amount. Unless that’s supposed to be a comma there in the loÀn amount. When I need the loÀn, I’ll make sure to wite you back wight away. Please bear in mind that the competition was tight, because I received the exact same terms (and messages) from Augustus Mcclendon (I find it fascinating that Augustus doesn’t capitalize the second “c” in his last name), Janine Prather, and Michael Sloan. I figure you all must work out of the same office or something, right?

Thank you.

Best Regards Brad Rhine

PS: Ina, if you need any v1@agra or c|al1s, let me know. I know a guy and I can h00k y0u up.

Song: “Superman’s Dead”
Artist: Our Lady Peace
Album: Clumsy

Sad to see him go. We can make all kinds of cheesy Superman jokes, but let’s face it: the guy died with dignity. In the face of debilitating injury, his courage was inspirational.

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. – Christopher Reeve.

blah bnlah blah

We spent last weekend in Ocean City, New Jersey, with Jen’s family. Her aunt and uncle co-own a beach house on 3rd Street, so just about every year, in the fall, we get a free weekend at the beach. It’s a great time to go; there’s no one around and even the boardwalk is practically empty. I love it like that, because I hate crowds.

It might have been our last weekend there, though. There was talk of selling the beach house, or even rebuilding, which would take a long time. If they tear down the house and rebuild, they can only build two stories high, as opposed to the three they have now. But if they simply refab, they can stay at three stories. That means they can tear down everything but one wall. As long as one wall is still standing, the building hasn’t been demolished and it doesn’t count as rebuilding.

I asked what happens if you later replace that one wall. No one knew the answer.

Sometimes, though, it’s just easier to rebuild something new from scratch. I’m dealing with something similar at work. We have a program we’ve been using for years that was supposed to be able to let our teachers view student assessment data. We were just set to roll it out when we discovered that it was giving us completely bogus numbers. There was no obvious error or discernable pattern. They were just wrong.

So late last week I began building an assessment analysis system from scratch. Fortunately, most of the pieces were already in place: our PostgreSQL server, my copy of REALbasic, Corey Redlien’s brilliant ChartPart classes. All that remained was putting the pieces together, which I’ve been doing non-stop ever since, including at the beach.

As of this writing, the pieces are almost together. The bulk of the programming work is done. Most of what remains is moving our existing assessment data from a multitude of Excel spreadsheets into PostgreSQL. But when it’s done, hopefully our teachers will have a tool that will meet their needs. And when that moment comes, I’m going to take a well-deserved nap.

This was in my junk mail folder.

Although the accompanying email message doesn’t specify exactly how. But it does mention that Spyware is the leading cause for PC failure and hard drive corruption.

Because that has a lot to do with rectums.

By the way, if anybody out there needs v1c0d1n or c.ial1s, let me know. I may have a lead for you.

Remember all the fuss in the 80s about backward masking and the subliminal messages hidden in commercials, rock music, and such?

Remember the G.I. Joe cartoon series?

Turns out Destro did some backward masking in one episode. Check it out: In the G.I.Joe episode Sins of Our Fathers, Cobra Commander evokes a monster that dwelled in the ruins beneath Destro’s ancestral home. Destro and G.I.Joe team-up and Destro uses an ancient chant to lure the monster away. Destro is voiced by actor Arthur Burghardt, Dialtone is voiced by Hank Garrett.

I’ll admit here that I was, for all intents and purposes, a complete G.I. Joe junkie. I collected the action figures and sets, and I read the comic book religiously for several years, closely following the saga unfolding between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. I started to lose interest shortly after the quite ill-conceived Arise, Serpentor, Arise mini-series, though. By that time I was in seventh or eighth grade, and the whole “create-the-uber-evil-emperor-from-the-DNA-of-past-evil-people” theme was kind of silly.

So strange…

… and yet I cannot stop.