I went and saw a 9:00 a.m. showing Saturday morning, not because of any fanboy "gotta be first" mindset about it but because it happened to be available, I'm an early riser, and, well, D isn't. And since she had no interest, it was a nice happenstance.

First off, I must be honest. I went in slightly jaded. There's been this huge incessant buzz, "Oh, Ledger should get an Oscar for this!", and I was reading this with a sense of "WTF, it's fucking Joker, man? That's not Oscar material...."

Oh, how wrong I was.

Ledger's Joker makes Nicholson look like a fucking chump, and that's saying a lot for what was probably one of the best "villain" performances in the whole heap of Batman flicks out there. Nicholson's Joker exemplified "crazy", but Ledger's Joker actually went the next step past that to "insane".

I don't want to say too much, for fear of spoiling it for people, except to say ...

At 2h30m, it had the potential (as I was walking in) to be "too long". I thought to myself, "they edited it long to put as much Ledger material in there as they could, the bastards! They couldn't find the heart to edit out 'bad' material".... again, oh how wrong I was. It was over before I realized it, and there was very little that I looked at and wondered "why did that survive the editing process?"

Overall, this is, hands-down, the best Batman flick of the franchise, and quite possibly one of the best comic translations ever. (It's a toss-up between this and Iron Man for me right now, I see reasons both of them could lay claim to the title).

Go see this. Now. Wherever you are whatever you're doing. Call in sick, leave early, play hookie, whatever it takes. You won't be sorry. Unless you get fired. Then maybe you will, but don't blame that on me.

I say horseshit.

There was a wonderful quote on NPR this morning which talked about the inherent impropriety of corporations where you have "Privatized profits and socialized losses."

If we -- you and I the American taxpayers -- are going to be bailing out these two giants, who've been passing along corporate profits to shareholders for years instead of building up the capital reserves they needed then the shareholder interests are immediately forfeit.

But in reality. I'm all in favor of letting them fail. Yeah, it might have some repercussions. Yeah, the corporations in question will crap themselves hard and all that. But how many private entities are we -- the voting taxpayer -- going to allow to make really really phenomenally stupid business decisions, and then have us pick up the tab for them? We do it with the airlines, we've been doing it left and right with mortgage companies, and now we're talking about doing it to the tune of billions of dollars.

No. You made your bed, now lie in it. And maybe the next generation of investors will learn to research better when they invest their money in companies with unsound business practices.

... It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service--M-16 rifles and the like--may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment's ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

The court's writing here is essentially that "M-16s aren't covered, because they're not the sorts of things people have lawfully got around the house."

But the fundamental problem with this logic is that the reason people don't have M-16s around the house (in any numbers) is because they've been told by the government since 1939 that they can't.

The Court's logic here is circular. They don't want to override the 1939 prohibitions on automatic weapons and such, while still saying it's an individual right. But if it's an individual right to have "militia" weapons, the number of lawfully owned automatic weapons surely would have grown over the years.

In other words, the only reason there aren't a number of those types of weapons in place, is because there have been laws of questionable validity over the years preventing them. But now that they're "not common" (because of the government influence), they're not covered, which makes no sense whatsoever.

I simply can't see driving two hours, dealing with city traffic, etc., etc. to go to a NYC airport that has American Airlines, when there are two airports that are local, very convenient, mostly traffic-jam free, etc., etc.

So now I need to pick out a new "preferred" airline... Here are my options....

• AirTran (SWF)
• Delta (SWF, ALB)
• jetBlue (SWF)
• Northwest (SWF)
• US Airways (SWF, ALB)
• Air Canada (ALB)
• Cape Air (ALB)
• Continental (ALB)
• Southwest (ALB)
• United (ALB)

So let's get rid of some of them right off the bat:

Cape Air - goes to like two places. Seen that sitcom Wings? Yeah, it's like that.

AirTran - Leaving SWF the same day as American, I think.

Air Canada - Only connects through Toronto. I don't think I want *every* flight I go on to be an international one going through customs.

US Airways - If I fly out of SWF all my flights, and from ALB most of my flights, will fly through their Philadelphia hub, which according to consumerist.com has an absolutely horrendous lost-baggage rate, and a 60% on-time rate. Woot.

Northwest - Has anyone forgotten the way they treated their passengers in the 1999 Blizzard? Did they even apologize? :-)

jetBlue ... oh, jetBlue, how I want to love you. If only you flew to somewhere other than Florida from SWF. Fly me to a major city, and let me partake of your glorious service. Unfortunately, they don't, and my connecting options through jetBlue are limited to "fly to Florida, and then connect to somewhere else on the east coast, and then fly somewhere west." It's just plain silly, and won't work long-term.

So that shortens the list quite a bit....

• Delta (SWF, ALB)
• Continental (ALB)
• Southwest (ALB)
• United (ALB)

Southwest is usually cheap (which is sweet) but I really really really hate the cattle-call. It doesn't usually affect me that much, since (as D can attest) I am always early to my flights, but the fact is that when I connect through somewhere, I can't be any earlier than my flight drops me off. I've got long-ass legs and I want a guaranteed aisle seat so I can stretch them during the flight. So Southwest is really my "last ditch" airline, and certainly not where I want to start banking miles again.

I used to be a rabid United flier, but -- in all honesty I have no idea why -- I distinctly remember being SO pissed at them about something that I immediately "changed loyalties" to American. My memory is extremely hazy, but I remember that "United fucked me somehow, and American swooped in and saved the day with great customer service," and I was sold. But I'm not sure if I can hold against them something I can't remember.

Continental is, by most accounts, awesome to fly on, but you pay for that level of customer service, as I also seem to recall them being one of the more expensive airlines to fly.

Delta... I dunno. I've flown Delta recently (when I was flying back from LAX on AA a couple weeks ago, AA cancelled my LAX>ORD>ALB flight for weather (all flights through ORD actually) and AA only connects through ORD, so AA had to throw me on another airline, and hence I got to experience Delta. My Delta experience was ok (heck, they came through for me in a pinch), but my view is a bit jaded by the fact that my connection time was hellishly short (30 minutes), the first leg was late, and I ended up having to haul ass through Charlotte trying to get from my arrival gate to my departure gate.

Anyone got any good long-term experiences with any of these four? Recommendations for or against?

Baron, Peter, Vadim and Arjen did an excellent job updating the first edition, bringing it current to support 5.0 and 5.1 flavors of MySQL, expanding the content of the previous edition by more than doubling its size (from a first edition page-count of 275, to a second edition page-count of 708). There's a lot of good stuff in there, and if MySQL administration is your daily grind, picking up a copy would be well-advised.

I've always love Gordon's shows. He makes for entertaining television, and it's clear from watching him in various shows (other than Hell's Kitchen that is) that -- to a certain extent at least -- there is a bit of a softee behind the loud, abusive, exterior.

One quote I absolutely loved, from a recent tvguide.com interview, which made me realize how much I like him?

TV Guide: What's your favorite comfort food?
Ramsay: In-N-Out burgers [an L.A. chain] -- I absolutely love them.

Oh, HELL YEAH. My boy Gordon likes himself some In-N-Out? I wish the TVGuide reporter had asked him what his favorite Secret Menu item was.....

Yeah, seriously. There is such a thing.

Now, along the course of the film, I come to genuinely want David "C-Diddy" Jung to win. Partly, because he's a seemingly genuine dude, but also because his signature song, which he consistently nails when all the stops must come out, is Play With Me, by Extreme (from the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Soundtrack).

That's mostly because that song is a killer air guitar track, as anyone who could see into my bedroom during my junior or senior year of high school could attest.

It may seem weird to watch a bunch of people "not playing any instruments", but it was surprisingly entertaining. There's all these performers, with their stage personae, and it all just works.

Seriously, you should get this DVD.

Some of my personal favorites: 300 Jackson and B00m h34d5h00t!!1! Lincoln (but that last might only be because I keep longing for Unreal Tournament's deep bass of "head-shot!" while playing Halo3).

As a former Yahoo...

I'm glad Microsoft didn't complete the acquisition. It would have been a bloodbath in multiple ways. The "suicide rate" as people who hate Microsoft with a passion jumped ship would be huge. Then there would have been the inevitable layoffs as competing products were culled, or HR departments were merged, or whatever.

Even my friends who are "unhappy" at Yahoo would not have been happier with their new Microsoft overlords.

Now, as a shareholder?

I have to agree with Bill Miller from Legg Mason (Yahoo's second-largest shareholder). He told the New York Times that if you're going to climb up on the grandstand and say your stock is worth $37.00 a share, and you're sitting on $2.3 Billion in cash reserves, then the absolute smart strategy is to buy back your stock from the market whenever the market is valuing it so far below what you think it's worth.

And if you're NOT buying it back, then how can you honestly say it's worth $37.00 a share?

And if it isn't really worth $37.00 a share, and that's why you're not even willing to pay $24.37 a share for it to buy it back from the open market, then why didn't you accept $33.00 a share for it from the potential buyer?

Shareholders don't care about whether or not people like their new corporate overlords, they care about stock performance.

If Yahoo starts snatching up a crapton of stock from the market, then IMHO, they're putting their money where their mouth is with regard to the stock valuation. If they don't, then that was just a crappy excuse for not selling out to Microsoft, and is an affront to their responsibilities to the shareholders.

They set out to surprise two Little League teams in Hermosa Beach, CA with the full-blown Major League Baseball experience. NBC Sports and the Goodyear Blimp add to the experience as two teams of ten years olds have their best baseball game ever....

I contend that the new bill makes it easier to counterfeit currency. Why?

They keep changing the bills so goddamned often, it's impossible to keep up. Someone could come up to me a year from now and have a totally new design they worked up in Photoshop, and say "Well, that's the new design, I just got it from the bank this morning, crazy huh?" and y'know what -- it'd be believable.

Paper currency hadn't changed that much - visually - for a really long time. Now it seems like it gets a completely new design every couple years, reducing civilian confidence in "what a $5 bill is supposed to look like".

Your gov't at work.....

Don't ever buy 0U PDUs. If you're thinking about it, don't. If you're still thinking about it now, slit your own throat before you can verbally agree to the purchase. If you've already verbally agreed, chop off your hand so you can't sign. If you've already signed, then the phrase "down not across" should become your new mantra.

Seriously, there isn't a single fscking vendor out there that does them right. And heaven forbid you're stuck with a cabinet configuration that's not the Official Sanctioned and Blessed Configuration Manufactured By The PDU Manufacturer, because then you'll be lucky if you can get the PDU anywhere near the right location, even if you use arc-welders, chewing gum, and duct-tape.

Don't do it. Self-performed Lasik surgery would be a more productive use of your time, and far less painful.

Gary's health had been bad the past few years, and I felt really lucky when George and I met him last summer at GenCon - the gaming convention he had founded 40 years prior. He was as personable as any man could possibly be, warm and friendly, and very understanding as both George and I stood there with copies of all our first-edition books trying to get him to autograph them all (which, to his credit, he very patiently did).

Rest in peace, Gary, in whichever plane of the multiverse you'll call home from now on....