Idiocracy

Well...

Meredith and I went to see Idiocracy last night. I was really looking forward to it, mainly because of two reasons 1) Mike Judge, 2) Fox's shunning. According to every piece of information I've read the movie was completely shut down by fox. No marketing, no promos, no t-shirts -- NOTHING. But I've read lots of reviews on the Intarweb that were very positive and the IMDB database and rotten tomatoes both have lots of reviews and a mostly positive (70%+) rating.

Ugh.

It was funny and the writing was mostly well done but there were really two fundamental flaws. Firstly, the humor and the jokes were all pretty lowbrow. Think "Beavis and Butthead", not "Office Space". Lots of potty humor and fart jokes. Secondly, the satirical premise was not biting enough. There were a (very few) places where the scope of current idiocy was alluded to (mostly at the very beginning and very end), but overall -- it was still very "even though we're all dumb as a bunch of fucking stumps, we're still cool heroes." I couldn't tell if that was intentional by Judge or possibly some influence by Fox to attempt not to insult its main constituents.

Overall, the movie was entertaining, but not the "$20 at the box office" type of entertaining. More like the watch it on cable, or maybe -- MAYBE -- pay-per-view or net-flix.

The best part of the evening was finding BB Rover's. They're open 'til 1 am and they  serve food until midnight. That's good to know because we discovered last night that North(west) Austin is in dire need of more late-night hang-outs. Kirby Lane is about it and they're always packed solid. BB Rover's was awesome -- some live music outside and plenty of room inside with a good crowd but not packed. It's pretty much everything I like in a pub -- food, free wi-fi, and piles and piles of different beer options (draught and bottle).

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BASICally speaking...

Ugh.

Why Johnny can't code

A friend sent this to me because he and I are both hobby geeks (in addition to being paid geeks) and we've been chatting about programming recently because I'm trying to figure out whether it's actually worthwhile to try and teach Hays python.

When I was in the 6th grade, in one of my weekly classes, we had a TI-99/4A and I learned to program in LOGO on it. Mostly that just meant trying (and mostly failing) at programming the turtle to draw the starship Enterprise. We got pretty good at math, mostly because we had to figure out the angles and everything and make the turtle turn.... But even before that, I remember a two-week summer camp where we worked on Apple ][ programming in BASIC some, but mostly playing games (I think Crystal Castle).

Anyway, what the hell are we going to do!?!

My kids already know the basics of computer usage. They're proficient with Safari and Word and they love playing games and surfing the Lego website.

But what about the good ol' days when you used to get a magazine and the back third of it was dedicated to source code listings (of course, the MacAddict CD does come with tons of cool stuff)? Can we possibly go back there? You know, I just don't think this:

public class Hello {
public static void main(String[] args) {
while ( true ) {
System.out.println("Hello");
}
}
}

Has the same joie de vivre as:

10: print "Hello"
20: goto 10

Ugh!

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Sweetness

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