Ghost Rider Movie

My son and I just saw Ghost Rider. Maybe I'm a bad dad for taking a 6 year old to a late show featuring a flaming skull-head guy, but it was his idea so blame him.
I don't know what all the critics were grousing about. We thought it was cool. Flaming-skull-head guy on a hell-bike with chains, leather and destruction. The ads never promised any more than that. I read the third-rate comic a few decades ago...it was the thrash metal of 70's comics; disposable, macho, cool imagery.
I'm not a fan, or I probably would have disliked it as much as I did Superman Returns or any of the Tim Burton Batmans (characters that I am a fan of). Apparently the movie smushes bits of two different Ghost Riders together, gets everything out of sequence, confuses key characters and so on. But who cares? It's Ghost Rider, not The Dark Knight. As long as there's a flaming skull-head guy on a badass hellbike with chains, leather and stuff getting broken, then they pretty much nailed the only important parts of the comic. A Ministry-esque soundtrack and a more rumbly-sounding hog would've been appreciated but we were sufficiently entertained.

Put a snail on your forehead. REALLY, just peel it up off the ground and stick it there. Don't think about it, just do it and go walk around amongst normal people. Go to a restaurant. Go to class. Go on a blind date. If people ask about it, just shrug and say it's not important and change the subject.
I'm not going to lie; it feels really awful. I did this a year and a half ago and I can still feel the lovely thing slithering around on my forehead. But it was worth it for the shock value. Most importantly, children loved it! Good luck.

an iPox on iPods

My third iPod in two years has clicked it's last tune. I'm getting sick of this. I pay 30-60,000 yen for a lovely wonder of portable content hardware for it to go sad-mac in under a year. I take it all the way to Shibuya, toll roads, fuel and parking, wait two hours for their smug little "Genius Bar" guys to do less than I did: plug it in, notice that it doesn't show up on iTunes, listen for a HDD whir, then blithely tell me that "the hard drive is broken" and that I'll need to buy a new one. Can they sell me a replacement drive? Nope, sorry. It's proprietary. Please by a new one.

After the second one crashed, I only bought the third because I've structured so much of my business on it and I didn't have time to completely re-tool to another player. But this other one, a mini I bought off my luddite sister and it only lasted six months (she never touched it, and I bought it well after the warenty had expired). My video iPod is on the expensive 2 year warrenty and I expect to replace it at least two times before then.

But on the way home, I was thinking about when the iPod first came out. I remember reading all about it in the tech mags, about this amazing little portable music player that uses a little hard drive to store all the music. "A HARD DRIVE DISK" I remember balking, "IN A PORTABLE DEVICE???" Hell, I don't move my PC's CPU a more than a thumb's length without shutting down. I used to be a laptop hardware tech and I know how unstable hard drive disks are. You can't expect more than about three-to-five good years out of a laptop under normal usage...how long can I expect a hard drive half the size to last bouncing aroung in my back pocket? Seems my first impression was correct. I just forgot about it in the midst of all the iHype.