One of my favorite commercials.

Friday July 28 is System Administrator Appreciation Day.

This is the day you give thanks to your System Administrators.
Give thanks for keeping the network up, for doing upgrades during your vacation and at night so your work is not affected and for answering all those questions that could have easily have been answered if you had just clicked on help.

Food seems to be the best way to show your appreciation.
Just remember….

I saw Clerks 2 and I have to say it was pretty darn good. In my opinion it was a better comedy than Clerks. But I don’t think that takes anything away from the first movie.

In Clerks 2 Pillow Pants was the scene I laughed the most at, but there were others that were roflmao funny, but apparently some didn’t see it that way.

Joel Siegel movie critic for Good Morning America didn’t stay long enough to view the entire movie to form his opinion.

At the 40 minute mark of the movie Siegel decided he had seen enough and leaves. As a movie critic this is kind of odd since a job of a movie critic is to watch the entire movie and write about it later. He walking out is really not newsworthy, but how he walked what has caused the buzz. Siegel said ‘Time to go!’ and let everyone around him know ‘This is the first movie I’ve walked out of in 30 fucking years!’ before exiting.

This during a private screening for the media. Dude gets to see free movies and gets paid to write about them, but acts childish when he sees things he doesn’t like? So bush league. Below are video and audio clips of Kevin Smith talking with Joel Siegel on Opie and Anthony. Siegel tries to defend himself and doesn’t realize he is actually arguing with Kevin Smith.

MP3 link

Clerks 2 came out today. I was going to go see it but things happened and I ended up not in the mood. Probably go Saturday.
Anyway Clerks 2 is the sequel to Clerks a kick ass movie made for about $27k by Kevin Smith. Below is a clip of one my favorite scenes from Clerks. Yeah its all in black and white, but the movie was great.

Running the grocery store like the death star eh?

Bryan a coworker of mine passed this along last week.
How to make IT staff less angry
Basically it is a 5 part guide to managers on how to manage IT workers. None of it rocket science, most of it is obvious at least to this IT worker.
Quote I find interesting from part 4.

On point two, you can’t force something to be fun. Forcing staff to go off on some ‘team-building’ exercise can have two disastrous effects; one, if they really don’t want to spend time outside the office with co-workers you’ll just make them more resentful and anti-social. Two, if they actually have fun doing something that’s totally unrelated to work you run the risk of simply highlighting how far away from fun work actually is.

Keep your motivational efforts focused on work. Encourage people to socialize by all means but don’t force it. If your CODE-IT workers want to spend more time together, they’ll do it without being forced. Also, social events have nothing to do with making the actual work more interesting. Enjoyable social events are part of the overall workplace environment as discussed in previous posts. This is linked to but distinct from interesting, challenging and enjoyable work.

Another point that I would add is not forcing staff to do team-building exercises with individuals from other departments that they don’t know or work with. Team building with basically strangers from other areas is really not TEAM building. AND please no teambuilding that involves such an encroachment to personal space that if the amount of touching or closeness took place during regular business hours that sexual harassment accusation could easily be made.

I wonder sometimes that if I actually learned Japanese if the clips would be as funny.

I am not a big soccer, er futbol fan although I did catch some of the world cup action and it was pretty good. It would have been nice to see the US team advance farther, but eh, that’s the way it goes. I did see the infamous headbutt by France’s Zinedine Zidane’s on Italy’s Marco Materazzi. Here is my view on the situation, one dude that headbutts someone and gets a red card should not be named World Cup best player, no matter what was said to him. There has to be other players that contributed just as much with out physically assaulting another player. Two, its pathetic that they are getting lip readers to try to figure out what the guy said. Does it really matter? What ever happens to sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me? Is it that bad that if Materazzi said something so bad that he should be penalized for it? This reminds me of the clip below with Kevin Stevens and Brian Trottier of the Pittsburgh Penguins giving some lip speak to Brian Bellows of the Minnesota North Stars.

Imagine getting that excited over graphics and game play like that.

Deleting swearing, sex and violence from films on DVD or VHS violates copyright laws, a U.S. judge has ruled in a decision that could end controversial sanitizing done for some video-rental chains, cable services and the internet.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by 16 U.S. directors, including Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Martin Scorsese, against three Utah-based companies that “scrub” films.

Judge Richard P. Matsch decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an “illegitimate business.” [.continue.]

Illegitimate or not I think these companies provide a good service. Since there are about 90 companies out there doing this apparently there is a market place for them. I do think DVDs that have been ’sanitized’ should be clearly marked so someone isn’t fooled into buying an edited copy of the movie. This is all about choice, giving people that don’t want to see the sex, violence, language or gore but wants to enjoy the movie a chance to watch it.

“Their objective … is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies,” the judge wrote. “There is a public interest in providing such protection.”

Is this the same public interest that gets served by editing movies shown on broadcast TV? Language that is redub typically badly or muted out all together. Scenes deleted for content or for time constraints? Why isn’t their reputations hurt over that?