- Worth Watching...

- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8520847761350501823

A former ACLU staffer has produced a great, 40-minute video on understanding your rights when you get pulled over by a cop.This "flex your rights" video which uses dramatizations with actors to illustrate how you can protect yourself using 4th, 5th, and 6th ammendment rights during commonplace encounters with police.

The film seems pretty cheezy, but the info in it is great. The info conveyed in the film is extremely useful to avoid nasty searches, seizures, and mishaps which could land a well-meaning person in jail or just ruin their day.

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- Garfield deserves better...

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Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties
Reviewed by: Scott Chitwood
Rating: 5 out of 10



Cast:
Bill Murray as Voice of Garfield (voice)
Breckin Meyer as Jon Arbuckle
Jennifer Love Hewitt as Liz
Billy Connolly as Dargis

Summary:
Despite a cool animated cat, "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties" is just as bland as its predecessor.

Story:
When Liz goes to London for a conference, Jon decides to fly there as well and surprise her with an engagement ring. Little does he know that Garfield and Odie have tagged along in his luggage. Once there, the fat feline gets mistaken for a missing cat named "Prince". Prince is the heir to an eccentric animal lover's fortune and now owns a large castle and is pampered by a large staff of servants. It turns out that the woman's nephew, Dargis, attempted to dispose of Prince to win the fortune. However, his plans fall apart when Garfield was mistaken for Prince and returned to the castle. After the accidental switching of identities, Prince finds himself dealing with Jon and Odie while Garfield finds himself in the lap of luxury. But what will happen to Garfield and the other animals when Dargis attempts to finish him off once and for all?

"Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties" is rated PG for some off-color elements.

What Worked:
If you liked the first "Garfield" movie, you're probably going to like this sequel. It's more of the same in a slightly different package.

One of the strongest points of the film is Garfield himself. His animation is very good and the voice of Bill Murray is perfectly suited to the personality of the character. Any time he's on the screen, the movie is at its best. And like in the previous movie, he's well paired with the cute live action Odie.

Besides our established heroes, a few additional characters have been added to the mix. Garfield's look-alike, Prince, is well-voiced by Tim Curry. The pampered pet has some amusing moments as he discovers what the real world is like. Bob Hoskins is also funny as Winston, the bulldog assistant to Prince. His constant praise of Garfield/Prince is funny, even when he has a fart delivered to the face. (Yes, there are a lot of farting jokes in this movie.) Other notables in the voice cast include Rhys Ifans and Vinnie Jones.

I'll also add that my kids enjoyed this "Garfield" sequel. While they did get quite antsy in the last third of the movie, it generally kept their attention quite well.

What Didn't Work:
I already mentioned that this movie is very similar to its predecessor. Unfortunately, they repeated many of the same mistakes. Breckin Meyer is still incredibly wooden and boring. There's no chemistry between him and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The film still doesn't hearken back to the best of the Garfield comic strips from the early 80's. And despite a few good jokes here and there, this sequel is just as bland as its predecessor. It's just not as funny as it could have been.

Despite making many of the same mistakes, "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties" manages to make a few new ones, too. First of all, it uses the tired old plot of "mistaken identity". This story has been done so many times in so many different incarnations and it simply doesn't work anymore. There are also a couple of poor musical numbers. One takes place while Garfield makes lasagna with other animals and another is done to "The Jeffersons" theme song.

I suspect most adults will find themselves bored midway through the film.

The Bottom Line:
Only see "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties" if you saw and enjoyed the first "Garfield" movie. Everyone, except for children, will probably be bored.

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- Cancelling Service

- How to cancel a service
After reading posts about people who have had to beg to be disconnected from AOL, J2, and Sky TV, Vodka offers the following advice:

I've worked for a telecommunications company that I would prefer to go unnamed, and I'd like to offer some tips to anyone trying to disconnect a service they no longer want. The biggest tip is to call well outside of normal business hours -- in my company, customer service was open 24/7, but the retention department closed in the evening. If you call, say, before bed, or during the middle of the night, you'll just be talking to a regular CS rep who has no incentive whatsoever to keep you as a customer. It can turn a twenty minute phone call into a two minute phone call.

Second, if you get a rude rep, hang up and call right back. Some reps, especially in commission driven departments like sales and retention, are especially pushy, where as if you call back you might get someone who is right at the end of his shift and just wants to get you off of his phone.

Third, there is one reason for disconnection that will work for almost every service--moving. Tell them you're moving out of the service area, or moving in with someone who already has the same service, and they should be required to cancel everything for you.

Also, it would be helpful to remember that the representatives in retention are paid to retain you as customers--threatening to record the call, asking for their name or ID, or asking for a supervisor will not do anything. All calls are recorded and the representatives have responses they are required to give for every customer question or complaint. The rep who actually gets in trouble will be the one who disconnects you immediately without trying to retain you, not the one who spends twenty minutes using every tactic in the book the company wrote for him.

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- Another Day

I was at work today and someone asked me the date. I stopped and thought and eventually came up with the 14th. I thought to myself, the 14th? I know that's something. When it came to me, I wished I had gone through the day without realizing the date. Today is the 2 year anniversary of losing my mom. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about her. I rationalize it to make it easier, but I still miss her a lot.

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- Webby

- Webby Awards are out. There's always a few great sites that I've never stumbled upon before. For instance, my blog is listed in Technorati now (yeah, I'd heard of it, but never looked at it). So check it out, my geeky friends.
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- Spamming

If anyone noticed, I turned off comments for a while because I was getting a lot of spammed comments... I just upgraded my blog version and it has a nifty little verification feature for comments so hopefully I'll stop getting the spam. Feel free to comment on anything now! And PS, click on my Google ads once in a while .

- Magnetic Fingertip???

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Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense...
This morning's Wired News has a fascinating article on the practice of implanting small, strong rare-earth magnets in one's ring-finger. The result is a kind of "magnet sense" -- people who've had the implant report that they can tell when a wire is live and when they're going through a magnet security-scanner at a store, even when their laptops' hard drives are spinning up.

Quinn Norton of Wired News has had the operation and writes in detail about how it felt, what the problems were, and what she was able to do once it was in place. The most amazing part is that months after the magnet implant fragmented and Quinn lost her "sixth sense," it reassembled itself (magnets tend to draw towards one another) and the sense returned.

What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch...



According to Huffman, the magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other recipients found they could locate electric stovetops and motors, and pick out live electrical cables. Appliance cords in the United States give off a 60-Hz field, a sensation with which Huffman has become intimately familiar. "It is a light, rapid buzz," he says.


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