eric135

Air conditioner be broke... it be hot as hell here...

 
It was bound to happen sooner or later. I woke up yesterday afternoon, and it felt really hot. I wondered if maybe we had set the thermostat a bit to high. I stumbled out into the hallway and looked at the thermostat. Set for 72. Current temperature 80.

Way to hot for us. I prefer the thermostat at a chilly 70-72 and sometimes we'll bump it up to 74. But at 80 degrees, we're sweatting where we really shouldn't be sweatting.

We called the apartment complex. At just before sunset, they couldn't send anyone out immediately because they wouldn't be able to go up on the roof (where the unit is) after dark. They did offer the ability to spend the night at a nearby hotel.

We decided to stick it out. 80's hot to us, but I did sleep during the day and am usually awake during the night when it is cooler. right now, it's 89 degrees outside, and about 82 inside. I've taken a cold shower, and then decided to sit in a tap water bathtub while reading my Kindle, and stayed pretty cool that way.

They said they'd be here at 730 this morning, so hopefully we'll get this straightened out this morning. If not, I'll have to think about that hotel thing.

Today is forecast to be the hottest day of the year at 115 degrees. Damn.

Dropbox permits unauthorized access to users' data... all someone needed to know was your email address... open access for four hours...

For four hours on 6/20/2011, anyone could access any Dropbox account contents knowing only the account's email address. The fix only took five minutes, but only after someone (not associated with Dropbox) noticed he got into his own Dropbox account even though he knowingly mistyped his password. Then he accessed someone else's account without entering any password.

Luckily he emailed Dropbox and let them know they were wide open. Otherwise, it could have been much longer before the problem was discovered.

Dropbox never made any general announcement, and never alerted their users via email. Most folks are discovering the problem through third-party blogs and by word of mouth.

Not sure this will deal a deathblow to Dropbox and other cloud providers. I know we really shouldn't be uploading sensitive content to cloud providers, but that isn't the problem as far as I'm concerned. It shouldn't matter if I'm uploading my personal tax records, my personal diaries, or, hell, even nudie picks with farm animals. Private stuff should be just that, private.

 

 

Super 8

 

Super 8

The trickiest part about having a movie with a cast primarily with child actors is giving them believable lines. I like child actors to speak and behave like real children, and too many movies and TV shows give them lines that would be more fitting for a 50-year-old Shakespearean actor.

This is not a problem with Super 8. All of the Goonies-like young actors are very real and believable.

There is a monster in this movie, and he (she?) is extra-terrestrial, but it hardly matters. They could have made it a bear or a runaway circus elephant and it would have worked up until the final few minutes of the movie, when some heavy sci-fy was called for.

In fact, I was a bit disapointed at how inconsequential the monster was. Yes, it did provide a source for dramatic conflict and danger, but you never got to get acquainted with it. ET wanted to go home, but in the end, what made the movie so great (and makes us cry decades after we first saw it) was that we actually got to know (and love and somewhat understand) ET. In Super 8, we validated his parking spot and he just left.

I still liked the film, and it did remind me a lot of the Goonies.

Jury Duty

Crap. Jury Duty. I can not TELL you how much I hate jury duty. Ever since we did our civic duty and registered to vote in the state of Arizona, we have been stuck with jury duty every two years. It happens so often that I have a set routine of where I like to sit, and I have a list of all the crap I like to take with me in my roll-along luggage. The parking deck closest to the Superior Court building is in my Garmin Nuvi GPS as a "Favorite Place" (which is so wrong on so many levels).

I'm supposed to show up in the middle of July, but one nice thing about serving at Maricopa Superior Court is that I can go online and delay the date of service up to 90 days, which puts me down to middle October (which is better than mid July because at least I can walk the streets of the city without sweating like a farm animal).

 

X-Men First Class; The Killing

•    We saw X-Men: First Class last week. For some reason,  I was expecting Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in it, at least for a little bit, CGI altered to appear younger. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender did an excellent job portraying Dr. Xavier and Magneto as young men. Their acting and the dramatic building of their relationship couldn't have been done any better had Captain Picard and Gandalf done the parts themselves. I normally would have been turned off by all of the character development, but I was entertained. And Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw served as a believable bad guy to balance out the heroes.
•    We sometimes are a bit leary about watching new shows. We sometimes like them, and then they get cancelled. But we're taking a chance with AMC's The Killing. It's a murder mystery that takes place in Seattle. The lead characters, for whatever reason, remind me of Mulder and Scully from X-Files. Particularly the redheaded female detective (our nickname for her is SourPuss because she's always walking around with a scowl on her face). The show makes Seattle look dark and rainey, I think they're doing it on purpose through a blue filter; the sun hardly shines and it's rained in most of the episodes. Thankfully, it's been picked up for another season.
  
  

Pirates of the Caribbean; The Event; bag lunches

•   We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides: the story was so-so, but Johnny Depp really has Jack Sparrow totally down. Some of the lines he trades with Penelope Cruz Geoffrey Rush and Ian McShane were very funny. My favorite part of the film though was the soundtrack. The music, especially with the action scenes, was terrific. We sat through the credits for the easter-egg scene at the end, and listening to the end credits music made the wait worth it (the easter-egg scene itself was really short and not all that exciting).
•   NBC has cancelled The Event. The final episode was excellent, and I really want to see more. There were rumors that SyFy may pick it up for a miniseries, but SyFy announced they aren't interested. I'm still holding out hope that someone will pick it up.
• I don't know how I do it, but I spend $30/week at work on food. No, I don't order out. That's hospital cafeteria food I'm spending all that money on. If the food were actually worth $30 (that's about $10 each night that I work), I would just spend it and go on. But the food isn't all that good and I always feel bad after eating it. I had read online about a guy that saved tons of money each year eating the same brown-bag lunch year after year. Nothing fancy, just a peanut butter and jelly sandwiche and some fruit, or maybe a granola bar. I'm starting to brown bag my dinner -- a couple of sandwiches, a fruit cup, cookies, and iced tea. I don't know how long I'll keep up the self-discipline of making lunch before I go to bed, we'll have to see. [Update: the guy mentioned earlier that ate the same lunch every day ended up being Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin. Oh well, the idea is still sound, even if his state is totally imploding these days.]