Xanascrewed!

The latest Cutting Room Floor is up. Go see how our Vegas premiere went! Or don’t. No one else did.

Snakes on a Hoff

After a short, unplanned break, we’re back with another Cutting Room Floor episode. Have fun! We didn’t.

Well that just made it worse

For around 2 months or so now I’ve had this little half bubble under the screen protector for my iPhone. I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but today for some reason I decided I had to get rid of it.

Of course I’m at work, don’t have any other screen protectors on me and nothing that’s remotely useful to clean the screen properly, yet I did it anyway.

Good news is, the original ½ bubble is gone. Bad news, there’s 6 new ones that took it’s place.

I’ve given up on it for now, I have more screen protectors at the house.

But it’s going to drive me nuts looking at it between now and then.

What – No Red Carpet?

Today at 10:45am Pacific time Fan Film The Movie had its official premiere! Well, at least episode two of Fan Film.

Given the fact that it wasn’t on the schedule, we got a standout crowd of three people. Including me and Ken.

On the bright side, people laughed at the Shocker scene.

Matt, time to submit to IMDB.

With the good news comes the sad

A couple of days ago I was excited to share that the new Trailer Park Boys movie trailer was out. Well, in other entertainment news from Canada – Corner Gas aired the final episode of it’s 6 year run this past Monday.

If you haven’t seen Corner Gas, you’ve really missed something special – special and freakin’ hilarious. WGN currently runs the series in the states, if you stumble on it, stick around to for a few minutes, you’ll be hooked in no time.

Here’s a sample. It’s a smashdown of the episode “World’s biggest…” in 3 minutes:

And from my personal favorite episode, “Buzz Driver”. For anyone that’s met my father, you may experience some Deja Vu at about 2 minutes and 20 seconds:

I’m not sure what’s sadder – Corner gas going off the air or that I have to turn to Canada for quality sitcoms.

F%$#, Yeah!

If you haven’t heard about the greatest entertainment to come out of Canada since Richard Dean Anderson, The Trailer Park Boys 2 Movie teaser trailer is out!!!!

See it here, now!

Screw You, Fitts!

Does Microsoft hire people to intentionally make working interfaces worse?

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Microsoft design, but I will admit that Windows XP is a mostly usable OS – you can get work done on it, pretty much most of the time. I disagree with many of the choices they made, but some of those are just my personal bias.

But when they went and redesigned the interface for all of the Office apps (which has been lambasted by better writers than I elsewhere, I’m sure) I just don’t know what they were thinking.

One of the most egregious problems is their brutal raping of the title bar in general, but specifically in Outlook. First, they went to the whole tabbed toolbar design, getting rid of the menu bar that has served WIMP GUI’s pretty well so far.

Which meant they had to throw a bunch of the other actions into the big butterfly Office-logo button at the top left, and  whatever didn’t fit there was strewn across the title bar, reducing useful area for dragging.

Now, since no one can find the tools they need in the tabbed toolbars, Outlook has decided to put hints above them. For instance, if you insert a table into an email, a “Table Tools” hint appears above the Design and Layout tabs, letting you know to look there as you hunt for the tool that you want.

Fair enough – complex programs sometimes have many options and it’s not always easy to let people know where they are, so little hints are sometimes useful.

But in this case, the entire “Table Tools” area of the title bar does not allow you to drag the window. So now the target area for dragging the window has been reduced by around 40%.  I can’t for the life of me think why they would do this.

The Most Obvious Marketing Ploy of the Year Award Goes to…

So I’ve been wandering around the internet, looking at places I’d rather be than at work (so, we’re talking nearly endless wandering here) and I went to check out Six Flags Magic Mountain’s website to see what’s new since my wife and I are planning to head out there sometime this year.

The news of new rollercoaster at the park was the first thing that caught my attention, further fueled by the name; “Terminator Salvation: The Ride”.

At first, I found it odd that a whole ride was named after a movie that wasn’t released yet, but hey, “Star Trek” already has a sequel in the works so why not? It is a rollercoaster, so if Terminator Salvation bombs, they could probably just change the name and go on with life.

But having looked more at the posts on this new ride, it’s pretty hard to miss that the ride in question is clearly a wooden rollercoaster.

Wooden rollercoaster?

When I see a wooden rollercoaster, I have to admit I don’t immediately think of futuristic apocalyptic wars, intelligent mega computers, and assassinating robots. In fact, I can’t really think of any type of amusement park ride that’s further from futuristic computer robots than a wooden rollercoaster.

Oh, except maybe “The Whip” at Dorney Park:

So, obviously it’s a marketing ploy. There’s no way a committee said “What kind of ride can we built that best represents the story of ‘Terminator Salvation’” and came up with the answer “Wooden Rollercoaster”. Rather, then rubber stamped the ride, then pound the pavement of all the major Hollywood studios to see you’d fork over the most cash to through they’re potentials block buster’s title on it for the summer.

Am I saying there’s anything wrong with that? No. I just really loved the irony of the wooden coaster bit.