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My back has been acting up again lately, and it was especially bad yesterday. I ended up spending most of the evening laying around watching TV in a muscle relaxer-enhanced haze. I think muscle relaxers are the only way I was able to sit through all of the 2007 Lindsay Lohan vehicle, “I Know Who Killed Me.”

Wow. It stunk.

It’s funny, as I was watching it, I saw the possibility of it being something decently watchable, but it seemed to take every chance and completely blow it. And I kept watching, and hoping it was going to get better or maybe even start to make sense – but no dice. There were just so many things wrong with this movie!

The plot: ridiculous. It starts out OK, and seems like it might be a typical mystery/procedural type thing. But the FBI/police characters that are introduced at the beginning seem incredibly stupid and incompetent. Then they’re abruptly dropped about halfway in, and never seen again. You’re then expected to accept that this is now a supernatural thriller, which doesn’t even begin to make any sense, in the environment that’s already been introduced.

Lindsay Lohan: sucks. Seriously, has she done ANYTHING worthwhile since “Mean Girls?” Her performance here is dreadful. Her supposedly “sexy” pole dances are awkwardly performed (she seriously looks like she’s stoned, which judging by the other events going on in her life at the time, is a distinct possibility), poorly lit, horribly edited, and generally unappealing. She must also work in the only PG-rated “gentelmen’s club” in America.

So yeah, it was as horrible as you might have heard. If you surf past it on one of the cable channels this month – save yourself some agony and skip it!

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Ain’t that the truth, kids?

I’m so sick of all the “socialized medicine” fear-mongering being propagated by the right-wing, you-only-count-if-you’re-rich GOP dumbasses in this country. It makes me so sick, and so angry, I can’t really do an entire post about it because it will raise my blood pressure too much.

Here’s one example though. Douchebag-in-chief Michael Steele said this when he was (unsuccessfully!) running for the Senate in 2006:

“Who pays for universal health insurance? Who pays for socialized medicine? I don’t need government dictating to me when I go to the doctor, which doctor I go to, how much is going to be paid for my health care. That’s not the America I want to live in.”

Yeah, Michael. That sounds scary. Lucky for us that’s not the America we live in, huh? I mean, the government doesn’t dictate to me when I can go to the doctor, or which doctor, or how much will be paid. But unfortunately, you know who DOES decide all that? It’s not my doctor, and it’s not me.

It’s my insurance company.

(thanks to Politics Daily for inspiration)

I subscribe to (as of today) 248 different RSS feeds, and I follow 126 people on Twitter. Some of the feeds belong to friends or people I know personally, but most don’t, and the same goes for the people I follow on Twitter. I tend to follow and subscribe to “thinkers” – people whose writing I admire, who are interesting or entertaining, or who give me lots of links to other useful (and not-so-useful) information.

Of course a bunch of the feeds I subscribe to are related to technology and software development. Those feeds are really a mixed bag. In fact, just today I went through and unsubbed a few things because I found they weren’t really very useful or interesting or even relevant.

Here’s something I’ve found about technology bloggers and other such “personalities” – a lot of them don’t impress me. I’m not going to name any names, but there are certain “big” or well-known bloggers out there that I’ve tried to follow, and find that I just can’t, because they have NOTHING to say to me. They are people who are nearly revered among other people that I do respect, admire, and find interesting. But to me they’re boring and useless at best; loud, obnoxious, and bloviating at worst.

It’s like I was at this conference/training thing once, and a friend of mine was RAVING about one of the presenters, basically making him out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. I sat in one of his sessions and promptly decided to never attend another. What my friend found so great I couldn’t understand, because to me the guy was too loud, too full of himself, and basically taking it for granted that everyone in the room loved him so much they would take every nugget of bullshit that he spewed as the unquestionable truth, and love him even more for it.

I, as you can see, was just not impressed.

So what am I saying here? Not much, really. See, I don’t want to piss people off by naming names. But if I could, wow…I’d really like to tell some well-known “gurus” how full of themselves I think they are.

*Spoilers for today’s (5/11/09) Ellen Show in this post. LOL!

I’m working at home today, writing test cases for a product that is, itself, quite interesting. Sadly, the test cases are not so interesting – you know the drill (maybe): verify basic functionality, try to break it, repeat endless variations. Anyway, I took a short break just now to go downstairs and fix myself some lunch. While I was eating I caught a little bit of the Ellen show.

OMG! She had this 9-year-old guitar player on and he was AMAZING. He explained (through his interpreter, since he doesn’t speak English) that he started playing when he was 3 and said his favorite musical inspiration was Ozzy Osbourne. Then he played Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” and just shredded that mother to pieces. If you check out Ellen’s web site, it’s on the front page today.

Anyway, after he played, Ellen told him she had a surprise for him and guess who strolled out from backstage – OZZY!! At this point I got a little choked up because the look on that kid’s face was priceless – I thought he was going to cry or scream or faint from pure joy! And Ozzy was so sweet (isn’t he always?). Then they gave the little kid a framed, autographed photo of Ozzy in concert, or something.

Seriously, check out the look on this kid’s face. So awesome:

Pure joy!

That was a really nice lunch break.