Does. Not. Want.

Do not accept deliveries from "The Messengers"

Don't remember this movie? Don't blame yourself. Though it was a major release with the producing might of Sam Raimi and Robert Tappert behind it, the actual film is kind of a mess.

We begin with a flashback to a child and his babysitter being stalked by an attacker through their house. After that, the main film begins. It the concerns the troubles that a family encounters in their quest to set up their sunflower farm in an old, abandoned farmhouse. The youngest child (a mute) sees J-horror ghosts, who then turn their gaze on the troubled teenage daughter. Finally, we learn the terrifying secret of the old farm and wackiness ensues.

Crimes:

• Trying to make crows scary. An ever-increasing number of the beasts hangs around looking vaguely threatening, until at the end a virtual cloud of them attacks a person (barely damaging him, sadly). If you're going to attempt to scare audiences with something that's not that scary, you'll have to do better than that.
• Shots that make no sense and/or are completely pointless. From repeatedly watching ghosts over the child's shoulder (ooh, a child sees a ghost and giggles, terrifying!), to an inside sequence where a girl walks towards a window and gasps when a crow's wing moves across the frame (how did he do that from outside?), to a people staring way down the hall at a door that closed in their faces in the previous shot, to people turning around in surprise at something they couldn't possibly have known was there... plenty of nonsensical sequences to go around here.
• Blowing its wad way, way early. The ghosts are shown in all their derivative glory as soon as the director could possibly work them in. Less is more when it comes to this kind of thing, as they could have learned from, I dunno, every horror movie ever made?
• More than one plotline goes absolutely nowhere. The guy who keeps showing up and wanting to buy the farm? Never really has anything to do with the plot, though he later pointlessly appears in a flashback. The daughter realizes that the child can see the ghosts and wanders around the house with him, but that sequence trails off into nothingness

There are some positives to balance the bad out a bit. It's beautifully shot, with nice use of color. The actors do as well as they can with the material. Um... the teenage daughter is cute? I'm kind of reaching here to find positives.

Ever wish you could Opt Out of your family?

You know, just check off a form saying "I no longer wish to receive mailings, emails or other communications from you."

It would be even better if there were some categories that I could opt in for. Pictures of nieces/nephews? Wanted. Family news? Yes, please.

"Hilarious" jokes about those darned stupid liberals? No thank you. Page after page of forwards that detail an event debunked by Snopes.com months ago? I'd rather not. Inspirational messages 'bout miracles the Baby Jesus has totally performed? Not interested. Rants about how the ACLU/muslims/homosexuals/atheists/anyone who isn't a WASP is destroying our God-fearin' Christian nation? Yes, great! Wait, sorry, I meant to say "NO PLEASE STOP YOU'RE KILLING MY SOUL AND MAKING ME DESPISE YOU OH GOD THE PAIN".

Defend Your Castle on Wii

My wife and I had a blast last night playing "Defend Your Castle" on our Wii. It's downloaded as part of their original software development lineup (WiiWare) for 500 points ($5, though you have to buy points in 1000 or more units).

It's a Wii-fied version of a flash game with the same name, though the graphics have been improved significantly for the console version. Gameplay consists of one or more people flinging invaders away from the castle at the right side of the screen, using the Wiimode like a mouse. Fling them hard enough and they die; otherwise, they brush themselves off and soldier on towards their objective. In-between rounds, the person with the highest score for the round picks out upgrades and repairs the castle.

The graphics upgrade is simple, but utterly charming. The most common invaders are stick figures topped by button heads, with later versions toting popsicle sticks and accompanied by giant bottlecap-headed giants.The clouds and sun looked as if they're made of construction paper, with the former held up by bits of string. Sound effects are similarly lo-fi, with invaders making a squishing sound on impact and bombs resulting in what's clearly just some guy making a "Bwoosh!" noise.

There's not a lot of depth here - just enough to keep that "one more round..." feeling going. The upgrades consist of a "well"  in which to throw enemies for resources, archery, sorcery, repair, and bomb towers. All of these are acquired fairly quickly, though it'll take quite a while to build them up to their full potential.

All in all, it's a steal at $5.00. If you have someone to play with, I highly recommend it.

Simplified Integer-only Textbox in C#

I looked all over for something to accomplish what should be a very basic task in C#: Allowing only Numeric entry in a text box. Oddly for such an otherwise fantastic development setup, Microsoft provides only the MaskedEdit control, which insists on using a placeholder character (among other limitations). Any other validation has to be manually implemented.

Most of the solutions I found online looked confusing and did way more than I wanted. I found bits and pieces and cobbled together the following function:

public bool IsIntegerEntry(int intKey)
{
//Allow only numeric characters (48-58)
// and control characters (1-31) for copy/backspace/etc.
    return (((intKey >= 48) && (intKey <= 58)) || (intKey < 32))
}

Call it as follows from the KeyPress function of the appropriate TextBox: e.Handled = !IsIntegerEntry(e.KeyChar);

I'm sure there are plenty of gotchas (I'm utterly n00b-tastic when it comes to C#), but it doesn't need to be bulletproof for simple data entry purposes. If they manage to squeeze in a non-integer character in there somewhere, either later validation or database will throw it back regardless.

If you need to validate negative or decimal numbers, be sure to tack an additional "|| (intKey == x)" for the additional ASCII codes at the end of the if statement (45 and 46, respectively). Happy coding!

Hurrah, Google sees me!

Since this blog was started, Google has steadfastly refused to acknowledge its existence. Searching for quoted phrases returned no results, as did searching directly with the "site:doesnotwant.com", "site:www.doesnotwant.com", or "site:doesnotwant.typepad.com" parameters.

That is, until this morning, when the same search that returned nothing yesterday started returning normal results. I didn't change anything in the last few days, so the reason for the site's previous invisibility remains elusive.

Grand Theft Auto IV: Final Impressions

So GTA IV went back to Gamefly today unfinished. While I could have soldiered through the last 1/3-1/4 of the game, I just couldn't stomach having to restart the "Hating the Haters" mission again. It wasn't so much that particular mission (though it is a terrible one), it's that the mission gameplay is so frequently unrewarding, and takes so much aggravation to get to again if a restart is necessary.

I had plenty of money, and the limited progression in the game meant there would be no improvement for my character, so there was no reward-based motivation. I didn't feel much comraderie with Mr. Bellic (more on that below) so that was no motivation for finishing his story. The cutscenes are generally too silly/sophmoric for me to enjoy, so seeing another of them wasn't much of motivation.

That leaves the gameplay itself as motivation. Unfortunately, this mission and way too many others aren't particularly fun: Follow around a guy who can magically take corners at fast speed and is invulnerable to damage until the game magically decides that he isn't. Hope you don't fall even slightly behind due to ridiculously tight driving controls, even more annoying vehicle combat controls, or random pedestrian/car traffic. If you do, be prepared to restart the mission from scratch, including the part where you have to drive the guy to the park and slowly tail him while he jogs. Wheeeeeee.

As I mentioned a bit ago, I was completely divorced from caring about Nico's story by that point. The immersion factor of the game had slowly been draining out of me, and reached a crescendo with...

Click here to see spoileriffic textI found Michelle's nagging annoying and never bothered to talk to her after the initial date. I was quite surprised when she turned up with a story about being an informant and being terribly sad about their doomed relationship and how much they both cared for another. Nicco responds like a jilted lover. Huh.

Kind of breaking the immersion a tad there. The fact that I don't get to choose a response to that (have you met Mr. SMG, darling?) is just ridiculous. I grasp the fact that the GTA series is all about following the storyline that's laid out for you, but that sure doesn't make it feel any less antiquated, uninvolving or just plain silly.

Exciting meal at the Piccadilly cafeteria

We went to the local Piccadilly cafeteria with Zal's parents at the request of my father-in-law, after our first choice was closed for renovation. I was kind of leery, as the restaurant's in kind of a bad part of town in a shopping center whose anchor stores were abandoned years ago. He seemed really excited about it, however, so I hated to be the party pooper.

We pulled in and the parking lot was mostly abandoned. Uh-oh. We went inside the surprisingly nicely appointed restaurant and found it even more barren of fellow consumers. Double uh-oh. I wish I'd listened to my instinct to say "This doesn't look like a good situation. We should probably go." at that point.

Going up to the counter, the ancient woman behind the counter stared at us with wild eyes and babbled something that sounded close enough to "What you want?" for government work. This woman had an Old South accent like I've never heard before, and I grew up in the back woods of Northwest Florida.

I asked for the shrimp dinner and pointed towards it. More babbling, completely incomprehensible this time. "I'm sorry?" I asked. Staring. Babbling. My wife interpreted this as her way of requesting my sides and informed me of such. "French fries and macaroni and cheese, please." "Don't got no french fries." "Ohhhhhkaaaay...." She then thrust a plate at me and said something about a lack of fried shrimp. Whatever, I took the plate and moved down the line.

Did I mention what the food looked like? Not appetizing in the least, I can tell you that much. It was sitting under heat lamps, a position the food had clearly enjoyed for many, many hours. The meats sat in congealing, greasy juice, and the crust on the  casserole-type entrees and sides looked thick and rubbery. Yum!

After additional confused babbling, I managed to get some macaroni and cheese and a garlic bread, along with two empty plates that somehow signified that I was to get shrimp and french fries at some later point in time. We got to the counter and were kind of shocked to find that the total for my wife and me added up to almost $23. With only one drink between us. For terrible-looking cafeteria food served with a grimace and unintelligible babbling. Plus tip. Sigh.

We walked to our table, passing by our first choice because it still had remnants of the last meal eaten there. Our waitress (way too nice and good at her job to work there) eventually brought my fries (OK) and my shrimp (tiny things sized somewhere between a popcorn shimp and a normal restaurant shrimp,  fried to a dark brown color). She said to let her know if I wanted them to be sent back. As I had a feeling they'd return to my table with some of the chef's "secret sauce" added, I elected to soldier on with what I'd been given. I overheard the waitress telling the woman at the next table to send her food back if she wasn't satisfied as well, so kitchen problems appear to run rampant.

The food was as terrible as it'd looked. My wife's crusted chicken would have been good at some point, but had been sitting around long enough that the coating was now a greasy mess. The mac and cheese was completely flavorless. How do you mess up mac and cheese?! My garlic bread was soaked almost completely through with some sort of fake butter product and piled high with a horrible-tasting herb mix. My shrimp was as burned as I'd feared. I found out from Zal later that her rice dish was, if anything, even less flavorful than the mac and cheese.

I only ate enough to be polite, and I'm someone who has no shame licking the plate after a good meal. My in-laws said they liked their meals afterwards, but I noticed that they left food on the table as well.

I'm not sure why that Piccadilly's is still in business. There were a few more people when we left, but the restaurant was still at least 80% empty. Unless they have a massive lunch business (unlikely), they're probably throwing away as much food as they serve and probably not even meeting salaries much less making a profit. It's too bad, as the space is really nicely set up, well-maintained (lack of paper towels in the men's room notwithstanding) and, if our waitress is any indication, there are some employees who still care about the restaurant.

Impressions: Grand Theft Auto IV

"Mixed Bag". That's the best way I can think to describe this game. It's hard to say whether it's a good game or a bad game when there's so much content that some of it is bound to fall on both side of the fence for players. I'm only about 10 hours into this lengthy game, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

The good:

• Immersion - more than any game before it, this feels like a real city. Drivers generally follow the rules of the road, pedestrians pull out umbrellas or newspapers when it rains, and people cower/take cover when the big guns get hauled out.
• Pool minigame - It feels very realistic, down to the sound of a ball's muffled click against the felt as it almost goes into a pocket. Controls well, too.
• Combat controls - They've completely revamped them in this version, to the point that they work reasonably well and don't have me dreading getting out of my car.
• Storyline/cutscenes - Nicely done, with great voice work overall. Not Oscar-worth by any means, but certainly impressive for a videogame.

The bad:

• Music - Gratingly bad. I've heard a total of about 2 songs that didn't suck. I've enjoyed the occasional track outside my favored genres in Tony Hawk games, but this stuff is just bland, terrible crap. If you don't like the kind of music you hear booming out of idiots' cars at stoplights in real life, prepare to hit the "mute" button often.
• Humor - It's the Howard Stern brand of humor, where shouting/cursing constantly = teh funny. While there's the occasional clever bit (the pregnancy/STD prevention posters in the hospital are brilliant), most of it's at that very basic "HAHAHA! BITCHES R DUMB! FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!" level that embarasses me to be playing the game.
• Every other minigame - the darts minigame is ridiculously easy, while the bowling minigame controls astoundingly poorly.
• Meeting requests - the mission-giving NPCs in the game constantly pester you to go out to darts, strip clubs, etc. with them, and react poorly when you refuse. It's incredibly annoying to be in the middle of doing something and have to choose between finishing what you're working on or fulfilling the requests of these whiny babies.
• Lack of choice - there's occasionally an opportunity to not kill a target, but that's about as far as the opportunity to develop your own path goes.

Does Not Want: More Tivo freezing

It appears that I spoke too soon in my last post. We encountered the Tivo HD freezing bug again last night, unable to watch any shows recorded in the last couple of days.

Reading the Tivo forums, this is appears to be a common bug that appeared with the last patch (9.3). So far, the Tivo techs are strangely quiet on the issue. As it appears to be a patch-specific bug, it shouldn't be *that* tough to determine where it's coming from (at least in theory).

Luckily for us, soft-rebooting the Tivo allowed us to watch the previously borked shows as normal. Thank God - if the wife doesn't have some Forensic Files on tap, things go downhill. Quickly.

Does want: Tivo HD

We've been using Tivo HD along with Cox Digital Deluxe Cable for about a month now, and, at least so far, we're pretty happy with both.

We would have been okay with basic, standard definition cable if we hadn't upgraded our TV to a HDTV (Sony 46W3000). The channels that used to look fine now looked like blurry, pixelated ass. The Sony's supposed to have a good upscaler in it, but there's only so much it can do with a poor-quality signal. When it got to the point that I was actively avoiding watching TV because of the embarassingly bad picture, we decided to upgrade.

The $60 charge to install the cable cards seemed kind of ridiculous, but it really did take the installer almost two hours to get everything working and tested. It did a weird lockup thing (menus show, but background is blank, Live TV is unavailable and the menu options don't work correctly) while he was installing and had to be rebooted. Annoying, since it required us to restart that part of the install. It had done this a couple of times before, when we just had it hooked up to basic cable, but it hasn't happened since the cable card installation.

More annoying is the fact that we're not eligible for the significant discount for new digital cable customers because we didn't get the Cox DVR. We would have been okay with getting it instead of buying a Tivo the one they offer wasn't the very poorly-reviewed Scientific Atlanta DVR (the Motorola version is apparently far better). We even asked if we could specifically request the Motorola box, but no - apparently this area just gets the hand-downs from more affluent cities. Yet another bit of awesomeness that makes Pensacola just such a delight to live in.

The Digital Deluxe cable package is a huge boon for us, as my wife works at home and likes something to be on in the background. BBC America and truTV are pretty much in constant rotation. Unfortunately, they're on different tiers of the digital service, so we have to get the whole shebang (about 95% of which holds no interest for us whatsoever). Tons of music and sport channels. Great.

The picture quality is generally somewhere between "quite good" and "phenomenal", even on non-HD channels. There's no comparison - digital cable is basically a requirement if you own a large-screen TV. I love being able to read the book titles and see the actual wood grain in the background of shows like "The Office" and "Dirty Jobs".  It really makes a difference, particularly in the science/visual/technical shows.

I'm really disappointed in the Encore movie channels, though. I'd been looking forward to their mix of relatively new and older movies. Bizarrely, they apparently display every movie in 4:3 format rather than letterbox. Ick. Nearly unwatchable for anyone who loves movies. Watching two people hold on a conversation when only a sliver of their face is visible on either side of the screen is just ridiculous.

What could Encore be thinking? Are they just catering to the people who feel cheated if the picture doesn't fill up their entire screen, or does it cost them less if they display it in the crappier format? Regardless, they were removed from our channel list entirely. Screw that noise.