The Cute Robot Meets Reality

We saw the latest Pixar-Disney movie, "WALL-E", this weekend. I caught it along with ten other family members and friends.

This is a movie, as I've mentioned before, I've been waiting on for a long time. A friend of mine over at THQ--a game publisher that had the rights to create all the games based on their movies--had mentioned the wonder of this film way back when exposed to it long before the last Pixar movie ("Ratatouille") came out. Because of the lead times necessary to get the games out around the release of the movie the developers get to see the concept in its earliest stages. He mentioned, that while "Ratatouille" was good, the next film, which he couldn't say anything about, had blown everyone away. That turned out to be "WALL-E".

The first sign of trouble came with all the pre-movie hype. Reviews were almost universally good. In fact, that's a major understatement. The term "masterpiece" would come up time and again. I really didn't want the raised expectations but it was pretty hard to miss all the coverage.

The first thing I noticed was that this film included no preview of their next film. It then was time to see the traditional pre-movie short. This one was about a magician and his starving rabbit. It was quite cute and funny but it didn't have the same wow-factor that previous efforts had. I'm wondering if that's due to the short itself or our getting used to the technology.

Once the movie began I was pretty taken with it. The main character is undeniably cute. You can't help but identify with his situation and the lonliness of the world around him. It doesn't matter that he's just a machine. This is Disney and anything goes.

The movie is filled with memorable moments that I believe will stick with me long after the showing. The problem is that, for me, that's pretty much what the movie comes down to. It's a lot of moments strung together and turned out as a movie. Several scenes go on for too long. I found it interesting also that while I could connect with the two main characters in the film that all the other supporting cast had very little interest. Pixar movies generally excel at fleshing out a wide variety of the cast but that somehow doesn't happen here.

The look of the movie was typical Pixar. It looked great but it wasn't anywhere near as visually impressive as "Finding Nemo". WALL-E, the character, is simply lovable across the spectrum. I want one for my desk. Everything about the little guy is cute. The products division should have their hands filled producing related products for some time.

In the end I realized that "WALL-E" is a special movie. It's sort of Pixar's "Fantasia". You can see the wonder of it but it just doesn't compare to other films directly. It starts off with a bang and then runs out of gas trying to keep the "cute" aspect rolling. If I counted right, four of the eleven liked it to various degrees and the rest didn't. That's a much lower percentage than the reviews. For me I like it more than some Pixar efforts but not all of them. This is no "Finding Nemo" or "Toy Story".

Gliding Along With The Samsung Glyde

When it comes to cell phones I'm pretty archaic. I've never really been into the array of features that get packed into a phone. My favorite phone previously had been a very old Motorola Timeport flip-phone. That phone worked great for making calls, was simple to use and durable. The phones I've messed with before and after it were flimsy, complicated and unreliable. I've never fully understood the need for a camera in a phone. I get it. You're carrying it with you but not everything is a picture moment and the cameras in these phones are so crappy that I wonder why anyone bothers. Then there's the whole texting thing. I prefer computer IM'ing. If I need to get you by phone I prefer to just talk. Typing on a number pad is simply not productive. Yes, many can do it well but that doesn't make it beneficial or optimal.

My last phone was okay. It was an LG VX8300. It wasn't a bad phone. It was as close to the Timeport as I ever got but I didn't get to really bond with it. One day, while at Great Adventure, it vanished from my pants while riding Kingda Ka--the world's largest and fastest roller coaster. It was simply ripped right out of my pocket (which was closed with a full length of velcro). The problem was that I never g0t insurance with phones and when I went to replace it Verizon wanted nearly $300. No way will I pay that much for a phone so I pulled out my very old Motorola T730 and made do with it for 18 months until my semi-annual phone replacement period rolled around.

Thankfully I didn't have to wait quite that long. The period was up in late August but Verizon just called to offer to let me renew earlier. Enter the Samsung Glyde.

I'd been interested in the Apple iPhone for a while but wasn't entirely sold on it or the full touch screen concept. Plus there's no way I'm getting off of Verizon's service or paying the service fee for the iPhone. I wanted something similar but with a real QWERTY keyboard. I finally got it down to either a Glyde, the LG Voyager or one of the Blackberry's. In the end I decided to give the Glyde the nod as the Voyager looked a bit big and the Blackberry's just cost too much (service) and are too wide when they have the keyboard.

The Glyde is a bit like the iPhone in that it has a touch screen and you can do some limited finger scrolling and such. However, it also slides open to showcase a pretty full QWERTY keyboard. For the level of text messaging I do this is a huge feature. It also resets the display orientation whenever you slide open the keyboard. When it's closed the screen is tall and when closed it changes to wide.

I initially read some disturbing things about the touch screen regarding simple tasks like hanging up the phone. To conserve power the screen shuts off while you're on a call and then when the call ends you need to hit the screen, hit the Unlock button, etc. Instead I found that you can just hit the one real button on the front (the Home button) twice and it hangs up the phone. There are a slew of other little shortcuts like this that make things a breeze (for example, just hold the C key down to flip between Vibrate-only mode and Normal mode).

The contact lists are excellent. Each contact has two mobile phone entries, a home phone, work phone, fax, e-mail and more. That's plenty. You can also scroll them with your finger, with the keyboard, or flick your finger to have the list scroll as if it's on an actual Rolodex. The faster you flick, the further down the list you go.

The display is plenty rich enough for me. I can read everything on it just fine and it all looks very sharp.

The size is great. It's smaller, much smaller, than I expected but that's fine. It's also extremely light. The first thing I did was to order two protective products for it and I'll likely use both together. There's a popular coating material called invisibleSHIELD that everyone raves about. It supposedly is a very durable and resiliant transparent plastic film that goes over all parts of the phone and people swear it keeps all the scratches off. I also ordered a Body Glove which came highly recommended. The only problem there is that the designers forgot one thing--It makes the top slide tray wider so that when you slide the display up to use the keyboard, the top row of keys are partially covered by the new case. I like the case so much that I got out a hot cutting knife and manually melted away a rectangular section on the side so that it no longer gets in my way.

This is also the first phone I've owned that supports a wide array of customization. I have an eerie default ring tone and personal tones for most of my contacts. So many, in fact, that I've yet to hear the default one!

I was also glad to see that I can charge the phone using a USB cable. That should make things much easier in the future.

The camera/video camera is a 2MP camera and includes a flash and auto-focus (the Voyager doesn't have a flash and also, if memory serves, lacks auto-focus) but I really can't see ever using it personally.

It comes with 150MB of internal memory and that can be expanded via a microSD card (I popped a 2GB card in for now). Not sure what I'm going to bother putting on there but you never know.

There's Bluetooth support but I'm not a big Bluetooth fan. For now I'm trying out a Plantronics 520 headset but I'm not impressed with it.

It also supports a slew of additional apps and I've used a few. I'm a bit interested in the Navigator (GPS) feature but not for $10 a month.

In use so far it's been very good. Call quality has been solid. The touch screen has had some issues. It tends to be hard to push the buttons in the corners for some reason. However, someone figured out that if you put tape over the battery or simply put a piece of folded paper over it and replace the back panel that this fixes the touch-pad and darned if it doesn't! The battery has also been great.

I may have finally found a phone to replace the Timeport in my mind. Time will tell.

This Is Ridiculous

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now a mere 566.06 away from where it was nearly 8 years ago when Bill Clinton left office (when it was at 10,887.36). Lest people forget, it climbed more than 7,500 points during his tenure which included time with both Democrat and Republican-controlled Congress'.

People, once again, please tell me what the hell this idiot in the White House has done for us all the past 8 years? Is all of this really worth the mythologies that the hard right cling to?

1."9-11 hit us and caused everything bad to happen (and continue happening)". If Obama takes over next year this excuse will end the day he takes office. If McCain wins then it'll continue for as long as the troubles do.

2. "George W. Bush has kept us safe all this time." Yeah, and if you pull this finger, I sprout a fresh, rosy aroma. Yep. Afghanistan is a mess. Iraq is a mess. We're losing troops in buckets but our saving grace is that "the terrorists" haven't attacked us here? Uh huh. Prior to 9-11 a splinter group attacked us here in 1993 and before that? There's little reason to attack us here when our troops are right next door. How people can view this as a good thing is a mystery. At least with us here it takes a much more concerted effort to do us any harm and if we've learned our lessons and planned properly isn't that supposed to be unlikely?

3."Well, at least Al Gore didn't get in. Can you imagine how bad things would be then?" You know what? No. No I can't imagine it being worse than it is right now. Are people actually going to suggest that Al Gore, who seems to clearly understand how people work, would have botched the natural disasters more, would have gotten us attacked, would have driven us into a depression, would have taken us to $6 a gallon gas, would have had us involved in more troops deaths, would have spent even more money than this group, would have had more administration fiasco's than we've seen here? Get a clue people. Al Gore is yet another excuse you share amongst your equally-deluded friends to make it sound like you understand the landscape. You don't. You've all been wrong every step of the way and this is no different.

4. "Bill Clinton was lucky to inherit a surging economy." Really? Well if you can vote for the guy you want to have a beer with what's wrong with me voting against a cursed family? What was George H. W. Bush's excuse? He had a Democrat-led Congress but you want him to get credit for having 3.9 years of a bad economy and then want Clinton to get no credit for growing it under a Congress controlled by both sides. Then you want the current paper cut-out President to take no hit for keeping us mired in sludge (oh, can that be refined into oil?) for the last 8 years. This is a guy who spent most of his time in office having his party in complete control. It's amazing to me how such people manage to sleep at night. If Obama wins and the economy turns around it'll be pure entertainment to see how the fanatics turn that into a negative and tell us how the great GW actually had it all figured out in the last 10 minutes of his term.

How people who are so interested in the bottom line can sit there and support an idiot in the White House while they watch their earnings flying out the window is a real conundrum. Is it possible that the only way you know to complain about the hit to the bottom line is when it comes from taxes? Are you so brainwashed over Ted Kennedy that you can't understand the hit everyone is taking now and that things are not improving?

How low do the stocks have to go before you wake up? Give me a number. When I wrote about this back in January I really thought we'd have no chance of actually ending up lower five months later! Of course during all this time these same zombies have been telling us about all the great indicators that tell us things are getting better. So will it all be fixed when the power goes out and we're all standing around in the dark? Will you think you're in a better position then simply because you won't know how to get the latest numbers due to the outage? How great will we all be when corn hits $3 an ear? Do we all win the game if gas hits $8 a gallon while the Great Oil President is in office? Remember how he told us he was the perfect man for the job of tackling this with all his vast experience in the area? What I remember is how he failed in every one of those pre-Prez roles while you all got stuck on hating Al Gore. Nice job. Thanks a bunch.

Get Smart Could Have Taken It's Own Advice

We saw "Get Smart" this weekend. I have to say that I agree with what a few reviewers said about it. I felt very much like the producers couldn't make up their mind exactly what kind of movie they were making. It would shift back and forth from comedy to James Bond and then back again. The problem is that it wasn't all that seamless. The movie would be funny and then it we get heavy in plot and push a lot of effects and so forth while being way too serious and then stop all that to go back to five minutes of joke lines.

The end result is a movie that was, at best, mildly entertaining. Much of it runs on too long and I have no interest in any sequel though I suspect we'll get one.

The one major bright spot in the movie was Alan Arkin. He played The Chief wonderfully. This guy is great is most everything he does. Steve Carell did his typical decent job. The biggest thing I can say about him is that I spent a long part of the movie thinking he's really balding and has a really bad comb-over that I hadn't noticed before. Balding doesn't work for him.

Anne Hathaway, as Agent 99, wasn't bad. She just wasn't able to give the character the same feels as Barbara Feldon did. Dwayne Johnson as Agent 23 did nothing for me, though I think his career is going in the right direction. The real disappointment was Terence Stamp. I love this guy and he was just way too serious for this role. He felt like a complete miss for me from the word go.

In the end the movie was pretty forgettable. I'm already having trouble remembering most of it.

Open Mouth.... Insert Foot

Once again our glorious leader has managed to say something that just wasn't the best way to present it.

In an attempt to sell Congress on various measures he knows they object to regarding oil prices he stated, "There is no excuse for delay. I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these polices in the past. Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions."

Just how blind can this guy be? You don't drive 200mph without a seatbelt on, at night, without the headlights on in an unknown area down a winding road and then blame the road planners for the resulting accident. They're not very likely to take your commentary very seriously.

Nothing has impacted oil prices more than President Bush's policies in the Middle East. It's that simple. This guy just has no limits to his temerity.

It's Time For A New Music Standard

Back in the 80's and early 90's sound cards were pretty limited and that resulted in a brief period where something known as "Piano Roll Notation" enjoyed a bit of a resurgence.

Piano Roll Notation comes from the old concept of a player piano that played songs by reading a roll of material that had marks on it that told it what keys to hit. This concept evolved over time and was used heavily to create all sorts of MIDI (another standard) music and other types as well. Popular products appeared that supported it including one that became so popular for the company that they adopted the product name as their company name--Cakewalk.

In Cakewalk you can choose just about any supported instrument and assign notes to it including details like duration, for example. This approach makes it fairly easy for people who don't even play an instrument to create extremely diverse pieces of music. I can't play a lick on much of anything but I created a number of songs this way.

Now, flash-forward to the present. Piano Roll Notation is back though I don't know if a lot of people realize it. In fact, it's more popular today, by a wide margin, than it's ever been historically. The presentation used in both the Guitar Hero series and its competitor, Rock Band (along with some other products) is a classic Piano Roll Notation system. All the notes they play are presented just as they would have been decades ago to a player piano.

The success of this approach is simply incredible. These two products have nearly re-written the rules for the music industry and I think it's time for the whole industry to take notice. Both Guitar Hero and Rock Band have the ability to add more songs to the mix. In fact, it's already been reported that an upcoming version of Guitar Hero will support the ability of users to create their own music (without vocals) and you can bet they'll be doing it using a Piano Roll Notation system.

So, what's the point of a new standard? My thinking is simple--It's time for the music industry to push for a new PRN standard that incorporates these popular product formats. Why? So that everyone can benefit. Right now we all have to wait for new songs to trickle out from the game publishers. They create the content and it all takes forever. Meanwhile there are millions of people who want to "play" their favorite music now.

Imagine if you're responsible for a major recording artist. Let's say you represent the rock band, "Rush". Rush already has three songs available for play on Rock Band but I want a lot more. Why should I wait for Rock Band's developer, Harmonix, to get around to expanding this content? How long am I likely to wait for them to do it with all the other music out there to get to? It could take literally years, if you're lucky. So now imagine you're Rush. Why shouldn't Rush be able to go ahead, following a PRN standard and create compatible song files of their catalog of songs that will work with all PRN-supporting products?

If I were Harmonix, I'd be all for this. If I'm Rush, I'd be all for it. As a customer I'm all for it. I could go to the Rush website and buy these PRN files and then add them to my Rock Band experience. In fact, I'd buy a LOT of my entire music collection again if the bands would offer new versions of their collections with PRN files included. Everyone can take a snippet and suddenly the music industry is a lot happier than they are now. They're providing something new that has our interest again. Meanwhile the consumer doesn't have to wait forever for their favorite songs to show up.

My father just came over and he'd have loved to take part in Rock Band but he wants to sing along with songs from Frank Sinatra, etc. How long will it take for a product like Rock Band to get around to Frank? Good luck there. Meanwhile you've got a huge retiring generation out there who would go for it. Had the option been there my father would have broken out his wallet and ordered a few Sinatra PRN tunes right then just to be able to sing them while the rest of us played along. Yes, those would represent easier songs for those of us used to playing much of what's offered now but it would have been worth it to get everyone involved.

So how do we go about getting this to happen?

Now That's What I Call An Election!

For some time now I've wanted to try out a fairly new board game called, "1960: The Making of the President". Something about it sounded like my kind of game.

I got a chance to play it Wednesday night and was so taken with it that I did something I rarely do and played the same game twice in the same night.

1960: TMotP is a 2-player game that immerses you and an opponent into the depths of the famous campaign of 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Before 2000 this was the most contested campaign in US history. It went down to the wire and has been contested and debated by scholars and pundits since.

The game does a tremendous job of bringing home the feeling of being there. It mainly takes place across a large map of the country that features wonderful artwork and a great overall look. The pieces, especially the event cards, are first-rate. They're made of very durable material and look like they'll hold up for years. Plus the detail that went into them is excellent. Seemingly every event and major personality of the time is represented here.

The game takes place over 9 turns. You play 5 turns before heading to the famous debate then two more turns and finally the election itself. During the main turn you choose actions from the event cards to direct your campaign. It's all about resource management. Where do you campaign? How much advertising do you do? How much emphasis will you put it the events of the day (Defense, Economy and Civil Rights)? Do you bother with going for endorsements? How much rest will you require? All of these items must be well balanced and the game does a great job of making them all count in an equally balanced way. If you don't get enough rest then you'll come up short when initiative is at stake or when you need a critical bit of luck.

Battles will wage back and forth. Your candidate will look to be turning the south towards them only to have the other candidate steal it back with timely plays of their own. In both the games I played (against two different players) all three of us were entirely unsure of the outcome. We could just as easily believe we'd win as lose. Tensions ran high as we calculated the final electoral college votes to see who won. Just as in 1960 the necessary count was 269 votes needed to win. As both sides drew closer the tension grew in parallel.

The first game I took over the Kennedy campaign and won by about 40 points or the margin of one large state. In the second I played as Nixon and won by 47 points and again it came down to one or two critical states being the difference. All three of us thought this was one of the best games we've played in a long time. You could look back and lament earlier moves both made and unmade. If only you'd spent one more day in California. If only you didn't waste time in Hawaii.

What's even more interesting is that this would make for a wonderful educational experience. It really does showcase the major elements of any election and provides a historical reference for anyone interested in this particular moment in time. It's all here. Jackie might show up and woo the electorate causing Nixon to have to work much harder to regain momentum. Will Eisenhower endorse Nixon in time or will his silence go on long enough to raise questions? Will the Catholic issue bring Kennedy support or will it hurt him? Will Nixon's "lazy shave" doom the debate for him? Can Kennedy get Lyndon Johnson to join him on the ticket nearly assuring him Texas as a result?

The cards allow for all of these to be present but each game is different as you may get each card at times where you need to go in other directions than those historically followed. Opponents can also play cards that restrict your options.

The bottom line is that I haven't enjoyed a game this much in a very, very long time. I felt invigorated by the whole experience and can't wait to play it again and expose others to it. I can't possibly recommend it enough. It's not the lightest game out there. The manual is a bit lengthy and games can easily run 2 hours but it's worth every minute of it if it sounds even remotely interesting to you.

Ubuntu Comes Calling Again-Gets Busy Signal.

Okay, I just bought a new laptop. A bit of background. I previously had an Alienware Area-51 laptop that my previous employer bought for me. Since I'm in the games business it had to have that "I'm one of you" cachet value. The catch here was that the thing weighs like 20 pounds, burns your palms from the full video card used in it and gets you a whopping 20 minutes of battery life. It's really a lug-able desktop.

So this time around I picked up a Dell XPS 1530. It has a smaller screen and uses some mobile components but it also only weighs 6 pounds and the battery lasts 4-8 hours.

Anyway, the bad news was that Dell refused to sell it to me with anything other than Vista on it. I wasn't about to invest heavily in that so I took the Home Premium edition with plans to replace it.

I then realized it was another chance to give Ubuntu (a Linux OS variant) another chance. In fact, several people commented that a laptop was optimal for it. So I set about making it happen.

The first thought was to try the LiveCD version of Ubuntu which I mentioned before. This lets you boot a CD with the OS on it and test-drive it before you do anything. Unfortunately for me it would boot and end up at a black screen and then locking up. Not a good first sign.

Then I ran into a wall with Vista. Ubuntu likes to have two partitions of its own on the hard drive--one for the OS and the other for a swap file. I found that Dell, as is the way with most things Dell, had complicated my setup. There were already four partitions setup. One for a backup of key files, another for the OS, a third for a backup of everything as shipped and a fourth for something called MediaDrive that I had no interest in using.

I figured I'd use Partition Magic to get this all right but then found out Partition Magic doesn't work with Vista. Instead I needed to get something called Acronis Disk Director (so I'm out another $50) which does support both Vista and Linux. I installed it and it is actually quite nice and powerful. I wiped out the non-Vista partitions, moved the Vista partition over and then created two new partitions behind that for Ubuntu to use.

What Ubuntu does well it does so very well and the installer is usually a thing of beauty. I created an install disk of version 8.04 and started the installer. After having to do some verifying of partitions (still too technical for most) the installer ran flawlessly.

Ubuntu loaded and it was time to reboot. I rebooted and much to my surprise it came up to a login screen asking me for my username and password. Fantastic. I typed that in and then the trouble started.

First, the touchpad wouldn't work properly. Off to the forums. Okay, there's a fix for that. I need to add a command to my boot parameters to make it work. Again, this requires a bit of comfort with a text editor and some non-unituitive commands but it worked.

Then there's an issue with my video card not working quite right but at least it's functional enough for now. I'll address that later.

The sound sort of works. I get some noise but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to record anything. The settings ask me to choose from so many choices that I'm not sure what's right. Thankfully I have little interest in recording anything on my laptop so I can tackle that later too.

The fingerprint reader requires the addition of some other software and since I don't care about it I'll get to that later too.

Suspend and hibernate aren't working quite right and this seems to be the way it has to be.

Most annoying is that my wireless card isn't working. I went for the plain Dell card and apparently that was "my mistake". It's given people fits. To possibly fix this requires no less than 6 steps of more mumbo-jumbo including downloading a few other files and installing them and changing various settings.

This all from an OS that purports to be ready for primetime for the masses. Sorry, I'm just not buying it. There are still too many trade-offs and things that just don't work out of the box as you'd expect. What it does well it does great but far too often too many things don't work and getting them to work is a major hassle that pretty much means you either give up your life to the undertaking to understand it and remember it or so these tweaks without really having any clue what it is you're doing, why you're doing it or how to do it again later.

I like what I see when it all works but I want so much more than I'm getting here.

Crazy Password Demands

I've had it. This is getting insane now. For some time I've taken issue with websites that place demands on my passwords and think they're doing me some favor by enforcing these. The only thing they're doing is forcing me to have dozens of different passwords that I can't recall.

My Yahoo account has a very short password that's many years old. This morning I had to try to recover a password from another account and instead it wanted me to just create a new one. No problem except then it started with the BS. It has to be at least x characters long. It has to contain at least a letter and a number. It has to contain at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter. I tried for 20 minutes to get a valid password accepted. It has other restrictions. It can't contain your name, your username and other limitations. I now have NO idea what password I just picked. I didn't mind that because.....

Here's the really stupid part. To get full access to the account all I needed to know was the username and the birthdate associated with it. Now what sense does that make? All this security when all I need is two readily available pieces of information?

Dell then did the same thing to me when I went to set up an account to access support forums for a new laptop I bought from them. Different rules but close. Another account insisted I include one special character--ONE and one only.

It's my data. Ask me to agree to a legal document letting you off the hook for any lose of my data and be done with it. If I want a 2-character password then that's on me. There's nothing in my Dell support posts or Yahoo e-mail that I care to protect. Stop trying to protect me more than I want to be protected.

I saw a movie that was Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

We hit the local theater on Friday night and were met with a sight I haven't seen there ever before. There were kids packed all over the outside of the theater. The strange part about that is that this theater had always been an adult venue primarily. Clearly they were all there to see "Kung Fu Panda". I'm not sure why but the previews for that movie have done nothing to interest me in it. I'm waiting for the end of the month for, "WAL-E".

What we did choose to see was a film I hadn't even heard of prior to yesterday called, "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*". It sounded interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it was running at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes which is the only time I've seen that happen after at least 25 reviews (it had 33). I was curious to see if our problems with movies rated in the 90's would hold up with movies holding a perfect 100 score. Second, the movie is a documentary that touts being from the producers of a couple of top Michael Moore movies. While I like Moore personally, the idea of a Michael Moore-like movie without Michael Moore actually in it might be curious and could appeal to a wider audience given all those who despise the guy.

The movie is about the world of steroids and the reasons behind its impact on our society. The guy behind it, Chris Bell, did a tremendous job of balancing the issue. It was a wonderfully eye-opening experience providing a perspective much wider than any previously put forth that I'd encountered. It challenged all the current "wisdom" on the issue and pushed thinking on all fronts.

In the end the movie really isn't so much about steroids as it is about the impact of American society on the issue of steroids. It's about the pressure our lives put on us to be perfect and on those who fight steroids instead of attacking the bigger issue of that predominant pressure. It makes much use of the obvious double-standards that are applied at every turn on the issue.

I will say that I would think twice, as a parent, about bringing any of your kids to see it. I would much rather leave my son in the dark on the issue for now as there's a chance upon seeing this that they might get the impression that using steroids is perfectly fine.

While it's hard to say that the movie matches it's 100 rating (universal appeal?) we certainly enjoyed it. For a bit it felt more like it should have been a documentary on A&E or some other cable network but that's not that big a deal. In the end it's a movie that's going to challenge you on your views of this issue no matter what they are and that's not a bad thing.

Can Obama Win Without Hillary?

I am left to wonder, now that the Democratic side of things is finally winding down, if Barack Obama can choose another running mate other than Hillary Clinton and still manage to win the race in November. Note that as of right now I'm undecided between Obama and John McCain with a lean towards McCain.

It seems to me at this point that if Obama doesn't pick Clinton as his running mate there's no way he'll garner enough support to make this a real race. Clinton won most of the key Democratic states--some in landslide fashion. Hillary as the VP candidate won't energize the right the same way it would have if she were at the top of the ticket. Meanwhile her supporters will be most likely happier to have her on the ticket at all than completely gone from it. They can dream of 2016 (though she'd be pushing McCain age issues by then as she'd be nearly 70).