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The election:
In case you haven't figured it out, this is one of the most important elections of our times (every election is important). Please vote. If you follow my tweets, it's not hard to figure out my candidate of choice. However, I want to encourage everyone (even those of you who are dead wrong and voting for those other people) to VOTE!!!
The economy:
Wow, can it be any more messed up? I used similar techniques of hiding bad financial decisions when I was in college and working retail, frequently resorting to bail-out packages to pay for my love of shoes. I'm not sure how I feel about that bailout package that was passed last week. I kinda think it rewards bad behavior but I'll leave that analysis to people smarter that me.
And now to more serious matters:
Dog school:
Lizzy continues to do well at dog school even though her fellow classmate, a german shepherd wants to chomp her. Max's hatred of Lizzy makes no sense other than he reads her body language as aggressive rather than playful. Or he's got something against retriever/husky mixes. Dunno. Those germans are an odd lot.
Here's a pic of Lizzy at her Beginner Class Graduation. She's wasn't a fan of the cap we tried to put on her. She's kinda wearing it too far back, reminds me of my high school graduation where I wore my cap virtually parallel with my spine (but I had to accommodate my bangs, in all their 1990 awesomeness)
Makeup:
I experienced Ulta for the first time a few weeks ago. Looooovvvveee their eyeshadow!
Movie standards:
I have determined that I will watch pretty much any movie with George Clooney in it. Not because he is pretty, but he makes some interesting choices in the roles he selects and seems pretty smart yet he doesn't take himself too seriously. He's now been added to the list of trusted actors (he shares the list with Robert DeNiro and Will Ferrell--but not for the same reasons). After seeing 'Burn after Reading' I may add Brad Pitt to that list.
That's all for now.
Ahem, well, it has been quite a while now, hasn't it?
Hmmm, what's been going on, letmesee here....
I've gotten a promotion, started my master's degree, gained weight, lost weight, bought some clothes, donated some clothes, gotten my hair cut, let my hair grow, polka'd, left on vacation, returned from vacation, tried acupuncture, signed up for facebook and myspace, gotten rid of my yahoo email account, started using my gmail email account, removed most of my old blog posts, visited babies, prayed at funerals, laughed at weddings, let my bangs grow out, started referring to the urban dictionary a lot more, started using our treadmill, stopped using stamps, bought a food steamer, returned a food steamer, been drunk with friends, been drunk with coworkers, laughed a lot, cried a bit, changed my cell number, got a new cell phone, found a career, stopped drinking pop, started drinking lots of water, was rude to fellow travelers, took a water aerobics class, took a women's boot camp class, used our george foreman grill, figured out the water jug puzzle from Die Hard 3 a few times, fell on the ice, volunteered at a women's shelter, went to an OHL hockey game, bought some pens at staples, saw some movies...well the list goes on an on.
Suffice to say, I've been busy.
...because I think saying 'and the oscar prize goes to' is far too PC for this blog.
This year was unprecedented because we had a FOUR WAY tie for first.
Suzy, Mark, Paula and Jason all tied with 10 correct answers.
While checking all the submissions it became clear that the two unexpected winners, Crash and Original Song "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" threw a monkey wrench into most people's entries. In fact, of the 4 first place entries, none of them got the best picture correct and only one got the best song correct.
Here's how I decided who won the prize...
Since not one of the 4 got the best picture category correct, I focused in on the next top categories, best director, best actor/actress and best supporting actor and actress.
That ruled out Jason and Suzy because Suzy missed the best actor category and Jason missed the best supporting actor category.
So that left Mark and Paula.
Mark and Paula's entries were very similar because they got a lot of the big categories correct but faltered in the smaller categories.
So, I decided to look at the music category. Neither one selected "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" as the best song (which almost made Jason the winner merely on that choice alone) , but Mark selected Brokeback as the best Score. Paula chose The Constant Gardener as best score.
CONGRATULATIONS MARK, YOU ARE THE WINNER.
Gene, tell him what he's won...
...Mark will be receiving a $20 gift certificate to a fine eating establishment and a one day supply of 'Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat'.
The correct answers:
Best Picture Crash
Best Director Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain
Best Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote
Best Actress Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line
Best Supporting Actor George Clooney for Syriana
Best Supporting Actress Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener
Best Original Screenplay Crash - Paul Haggis
Best Adapted Screenplay Brokeback Mountain - Larry McMurtry
Costume Design Memoirs of a Geisha
Original Score Brokeback Mountain
Original Song "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" - Hustle & Flow
Best Visual Effects King Kong
Best Animated Feature Film Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Best Documentary Feature Marche de l'empereur, La
Best Documentary Short The Golden Age of Norman Corwin
Best Live Action Short Six Shooter
Best Animated Short The Moon and the Son
Entry results:
Suzanne: 8
Thor: 9
Suzy: 10
Darrell: 8
Kathleen: 5
Brian: 3
Corinne: 6
Azita: 6
Mark: 10
Jane: 4
Glen: 9
Cindy: 8
Sharon: 4
JP: 7
Kimmy: 3
Clay: 8
Shawn: 6
Leah: 8
WDB: 4
Don: 5
Davo: 6
Paula: 10
JulieU: 8
Jason: 10
Most people chose Brokeback as best picture.
Only 3 people chose "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" as the best song, so congrats to Jason, Clay and Kimmy. Way to think outside the box you guys.
Thanks for playing. If you would like to see how you did, per category, leave a comment with your email address and I'll send that right over to you.
Julie
Win a fabulous (really, on the mediocre side of fabulous) prize!
Play here
Winners will be announced when I get around to it.
I've made some updates so check at the end for the new people...this will help you with one of the new features I am installing in the next few minutes.
To protect the (not so) innocent, I have changed the names people/places for the purposes of this blog.
Godric-The husband.
KatM6-A female friend, you can read her blog here.
BT-A very Polish male friend.
Davo-A not so Polish male friend. Check out his record label here. His name hasn't been changed because we never use his given name.
DD-An extremely Polish male friend that makes the best pierogies. You can read his blog here.
Mr. Noland-A friend from college (who married another friend from college). He was quite the ladies man. Karma got him tho' and blessed him with 3 daughters. I could post a link to his blog, but he never updates so nevermind.
Mrs. Noland-A friend from college (who married another friend from college) and bore him three girls (two of them are twins)
The Noland Girls-Noland Offspring, The oldest is MC and the twins are GE and MA.
Spoozy-A friend from college that we were recently reunited with. You can read her blog here.
Foodie-A friend from college is really into food. He's a good cook. First rule about dinner at Foodie's house...you can read his blog here.
Candidate-A friend from college that is involved with politics.
Salsagirl-The current-former-who knows girlfriend of the candidate. We've all stopped trying to figure it out.
Mr. Mexillent-A Sueve dance instructor/hospitality workin' type guy.
Mrs. Mexillent-A friend from college who married Mr. Mexillent. She's fine.
Mr. & Mrs. Rockin'-Friends from college, with their son, Wee Rockin'
The Mighty One-A friend from college who worked on the school newspaper with me. She was there when I burped and uttered the immortal words 'Damn, I could have finished my fries'
Giggles-JulieU's friend from high school. A great mom with 2 alarmingly pretty kids. We'll call the kids Princess and Muckdog for now.
Mr. & Mrs. DogTBH-Our friends who dressed as Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife for Halloween a few years ago. One of them also uses the word dog in their email address.
Mr. & Mrs. KISS-Not because they are KISS fans, but because of the word that appears in their last name. They have two daughters Z1 and Z2
Mr. & Mrs. ZN- Because of the ending of their last name. No other reason. They have a daughter that I'll call Wee ZN.
I was in Iowa visiting
and a couple of these...
and the Julie the Jinx phenomena continued...
Less than 100 miles away, in Iowa, a town was wiped out by freak tornadoes.
We noticed that Saturday night the winds were pretty darn strong. Gusts were measured at 38 miles per hour.
I had a great time and got to play a bit of Barbies with MC. Excellent!
I haven't been writing much...lots of stuff to do and most of my computer time is spent keeping up with my rss feeds. Have you checked out how many I read? Yep, all those sites on the left side of this page are feeds I keep track of (rather my bloglines keeps track of them). Either way, it's a ton of reading (on any given day I read over 250 posts on technology).
I've been pretty interested in the whole Sony Rootkit debacle. If you haven't read a thing about it, well, the geek world is ablaze with the tale of Sony's malicious software.
It seems that when you pop some Sony music CDs into your computer, the autorun feature (that most XP machines have--click to learn about disabling this feature) will automatically load software that allows Sony to 'protect' it's property from illegal sharing. This is also affecting Macs!
What this rootkit also does is open a hole that anyone can exploit. It masks software on your machine that you would never know is running unless you use a rootkit scanner (which you have to be a pretty computer savvy to even know about).
Where the danger comes in, is the fact that any hacker can write a virus that exploits this same software and load other malicious things on your machine. Much in the same way keyloggers and other nasties can run on your machine without your knowledge, these programs can hide on your machine. On top of all this, if you try to delete the offending software, you can disable your CD drive. Finally, the uninstaller Sony has provided makes the problem even worse! Nice, good job Sony.
If you are interested in the timeline on how this story evolved, check out this link.
For a list of infected CDs, check out this link.
And just so you don't feel like a fool, here's a story about just how many networks are infected.
It's so bad, that Microsoft is even treating this software as malware.
Finally, today, Sony announced that they would be exchanging the infected CDs. Too little too late.
Now, for the rootkit scanner that you need to find this malicious code.
That's why I just haven't had time to post. Yeah, that's it.
I promise a much more interesting (and non-technical) post soon.
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