Spaced Out Badges

I don't normally like to mention work things on-line. I definitely don't like to get into specifics since I work for a company that contracts to the US Government with the Department of Defense and US Navy.

Part of my job is boring receptionist work which in part means being at one of the reception desks to greet visitors and to get them to sign in the visitor's log and get a visitor's badge. Also from time to time I have to sit out in front of a meeting room checking visitor badges and having the meeting attendees sign in for the meeting. I call it meeting babysitting. If it is a classified meeting then they have to check all their electronic devices and leave them outside the meeting room and someone MUST be monitoring the area at all times during the meeting. To insure that only those people who are supposed to be in the meeting are in the meeting, no walk-ins. During the classified meetings the table or desk outside the meeting room or hall looks like some sort of flea market with boxes of cell phones and a bunch of backpacks, purses, laptop bags and other stuff strewn about or lined up against a nearby wall.

In general the generic badges for the meetings are the same as the general visitor badges. Sometimes they have a specific badge number sometimes not. Sometimes the specific group or department that is holding the meeting has their own special badges that are meeting specific.

The badge numbers usually are in some kind of logical sequence. At one time each floor had a specific series of badge numbers. The First floor would have numbers 100 - 199, Second Floor the 200-299 series etc.

Microsoft Word has a general badge template to match up with the card stock from Avery labels. Our badges are usually just simple card stock with the company logo on top or bottom. Marked "VISITOR: Escort Required" and maybe a badge number.  Possibly with the building address. Regular visitor badges are usually a little more permanent, plastic, laminated and more specially made than generic meeting badges.

After one meeting about a month ago, maybe longer, whoever had supplied the meeting badges left them on the regular reception desk. One day I was sorting through some badges separating specifically numbered ones from ones with no badge number. It was at this time I ran across a badge with the following number "THX 1138". I thought "Wow that's from the Lucas film" I double checked the film title because I often forget if it is 1138, 1139 or some other similar number. Digging a little further I noticed the entire batch of badges were numbers or letter sequences were mostly from the World of Popular Science Fiction. There were a few real navy ship numbers mixed in either to appear normal or they were from a different batch of badges. I'm thinking the latter.

Obviously someone was having fun when they made up the badges. They also are widely knowledgeable with the science fiction genre. Actually I'm a little surprised there wasn't a "TARDIS"  badge. I guess that one got time-locked.

Any way here are the fun numbers I found on these badges.

Battlestar Galactica:
BSG 75

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
42

History:
War of 1812 or 1812 Overture

James Bond Franchise:
007

Marvel Comics:
X23

Misc:
2001
A47 could be for AK-47 gun or AC-47 plane
P2501-  Not sure what they were referencing here

R237 - Not sure what they were referencing here

Pop Culture or Alternate SubCulture:
Leet 1337

Robocop Franchise:
ED-209

Robotech Franchise:
VF-1S

Sherlock Holmes:
221B

Star Trek Franchise:
NCC-1701
7 of 9

Star Wars Franchise:
BB-8
C-3PO
K-2SO
R2-D2
T-65

Technology:
ACR-1 or ACR-1 More likely the latter since it is Navy related.
Ti-81
TR-808

Terminator Franchise:
T-1000
T-800

*Updated 05 Oct 2017. I noticed a new one the Battlestar Galactica one. Hmm it should be 78. Maybe I saw the number wrong.

R.I.P. Zombie King

On Sunday 16 July 2017 Movie producer, director, writer George A. Romero passed away he was 77. He is best remembered for being the creator (writing and directing) of the cult horror classic Night of the Living Dead. He continued with zombie horror for several other films.

Hearing/reading about his passing reminds me of one of the first times I watched Night of the Living Dead all the way through. It was late on a Saturday night (maybe a Friday) late 1970s I was either in late elementary school or early junior high. My older brother was in High School. On one of the local independent television stations they were showing NotLD on their Creature Feature type show. I'm not sure if I had watched the movie before, I think this was my first time. I was really getting into the movie. It had my full attention. Now days I don't like Zombie movies much and get turned off of them very quickly. I think it was because of the Craze for Zombie movies in the 1980s through 1990s. Plus the gore still tends to gross me out.

Oh so I'm watching this film in all it's glorious Black and White glory, in the family room in the basement of my childhood home. For most of it I'm lying on the floor probably with one of the couch cushions or a pillow under me so my torso doesn't hurt from the pressure of lying on the cold early 1960s tiled floor. There is a large area rug there as well but it is old and doesn't add any comfort. I might even have a blanket wrapped around me. Actually it might be Summer time so it might not have been that cold.

Near the end of the movie as the Zombies have surrounded the house and are breaking in. I'm not sure if the token black guy has gotten killed at this point or is about to be killed. The Zombies are starting to break in and.... Commercial break... at that exact moment...

...there is a knocking on one of the front basement windows. I got super freaked out and must have jumped in shock about 10 feet, OK maybe not that high as I would have hit the ceiling I think it was a little over 10 feet high. I'm not sure if I screamed or yelled but I was super startled. Turns out it was one of my brother's friends who came over and knocked on the window to get my brother's attention. Since it was late night he didn't want to disturb our parents who I think were already in their bedroom sleeping.

At the time my brother used one of the basement rooms as his den/alternate bedroom, he had a bedroom upstairs but used the basement room most of the time and was his "den of inequity". He did all his socializing in there (and entertaining the ladies). In later years I used that room as a den but not as a bedroom. His friends when they would come over late night, they were teenagers after all, they would knock on one of the windows to my brother's den then he would let them in the front door. Actually our house was designed in such a way you could hear the front door opening most of the time, or people clomping down or up the wooden stairs so it wasn't a perfect system.

At the time of the window knocking my brother was in the family room with me. I think he was also watching the movie until his friends came over.

Man was I super freaked as I said. It was perfect timing and the perfect set up for the scare. It was totally unplanned on any one's part. I don't think I had originally been planning on watching the movie but decided to anyway.

There are very few moments of the film that I remember in detail. Sure there was a lot of scenes of zombies walking around the cemetery and them trying to get into the house. I even have memories of the people in the house sitting around wondering what to do and jumping at every little sound. But there is very little of the plot I remember. I don't even remember if they explain "HOW" the zombies start stirring. I don't even remember the ending exactly. The only thing that really sticks in my mind is getting such a damn big startle from knocking on the basement window.

Myka Monday: More Swordplay

Word of advice:

Don't get into a sword fight with Myka

Image from episode "Age Before Beauty" Season 2 Episode 4.

I almost missed posting this week. If I had I would have been on the receiving end of Myka's wrath and her sword. I might have ended up like this:

 Black Knight Image from "Monty Python and The Holy Grail" movie.

Source Code: DVD Review

Colter Stevens: It's the same dream, but it's different!
Christina Warren: Deep. I hope it's different. I feel the same way.

Source Code (2011) PG-13

****

WARNING: This review might contain SPOILERS!

Source Code - When I first saw trailers for this film my first reaction was the plot was similar to the main plot device for the television show Seven Days, because of the time limit of how far back the "time traveler" goes, except it isn't quite the same thing. In the show it was the technology that limited the trips to only 7 days into the past, in this movie the main character goes back to earlier in the day but is limited to 8 minutes in the past due to the "source code" which is more like going into a Matrix of some kind than a time travel machine. I also saw similarities to the show Quantum Leap starring Scott Bakula who makes a vocal appearance in this film as the main character's father in a nod to Quantum Leap. The main character or at least his mind sort of "leaps" into another character via the technology of the "source code".

Bare with me here for a moment. The "technology" or science that allows for source code traveling is more sort of a biotechnology than mechanical technology. The basic gist is that after a person is clinically dead there is still some brain activity for approximately eight minutes after death. The source code technology allows someone to tap into or "leap" into that persons final memories and allows for them to "live in" that person's final moments of life. It also allows the "leaper" to go back multiple times. They don't state a specific number of leap attempts that can be made but they seem to indicate there are limits, due to the deterioration of the dead subjects brain activity.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens the protagonist a US Army helicopter pilot who last recalls being stationed in Afghanistan and the source code "leaper". He wakes up on a train as someone else, who he later learns is one of the victims on the train when it is blown up by a terrorist outside of Chicago and that it was believed to be just the beginning of a bigger terrifying plan. It was determined that the train had been bombed remotely by a former passenger on the train. Colter's mission is to find out who bombed the train and stop them before more bombs go off. Along the way he learns that he is in the body of a man named Sean Frentress and the woman who is sitting across from him is a friend of Sean's named Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan).

After the bomb goes off Colter finds himself in a dark chamber that slightly resembles a larger version of his copter's cockpit. He learns that the isolation chamber he is in is part of some military operation. He is told he is in a place called "belegerd castle" a part of some experiment called "The Source Code" by a female Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). Goodwin briefs him on his mission to locate the bomb and try to determin who put it there. Just when he thinks he knows what is going on he is sent back onboard the train to relive "his" or rather Sean's last 8 minutes. Along the way Colter meets the creator of The Source Code Project a Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright).

Colter falls in love with Christina and then his main goal is to figure out how he can save her and the other passengers. Rutledge and Goodwin inform him that stopping the bombing is NOT his mission and that he needs to concentrate on finding the bomber. Of course he does manage to find a way to save the day and change the future a bit.

I really enjoyed this film. The time limit of the traveling reminded me as I said of Seven Days. Colter's waking in the body of someone else reminded me of Quantum Leap. There is even a slight nod to the show both in the casting of Scott Bakula as Colter's father and a scene with a mirror when Colter first learns he is in another body.
Both of the main actresses Monaghan and Farmiga are beautiful and give great performances. The interaction between Monaghan and Gyllenhaal was also very good. They have a great chemistry which shows and in the extras on the DVD is talked about by the actors and the director.

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Summit Entertainment

DVD Release Date: 26 July 2011

Region 1

1 Disc - 93 Minutes

DVD Update - January 2012

JANUARY 2012 - DVD UPDATE

For January it looks like I just have two DVDs and I didn't spend a single dime on them. I got them from a "yankee" gift exchange party.

Leatherheads (2008)

I've only seen bits and pieces of this movie. It is one of those dramatic "feel good" sports movies where a group of ragtag players end up beating the odds and making history. I'm not sure if this is based on a specific historical events or just based on the early days of football in general.

Time Bandits (1981)

 This is a comedy/adventure classic from the demented directing of Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame. I forget how many times I've seen this film the basic story is about a 10 year old boy who gets mixed up with a band of time traveling thieving dwarfs who have stolen a cosmic map from the Supreme Being (aka: God) to collect historical wealth.

DVDs From May

OK so I only got a couple (literally) DVDs in the merry merry month of May.

The Green Hornet

 I got The Green Hornet from Columbia House it was the "Director's Choice" for May I think (or was it for April)?

Bitch Slap (Unrated)

This second DVD (Bitch Slap) I got for some of the actors that are in this. Most of the main cast  members from the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess - Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless, Michael Hurst, Renee O' Connor and Ted Raimi have supporting roles in this film. I think most of them are small cameos or supporting roles that many movie watchers consider "small roles" or "unimportant" roles. 

I just got some Doctor Who DVDs but those I'll mention for my June DVDs Update. Technically I ordered and paid for them in May (Monday 30 May) from Who North America. The post office attempted delivery on Thursday 02 June. Today (Saturday 04 June) I picked up the order. I also ordered some stuff from Columbia House again. A couple of those were pre-orders that are being released at the end of this month so those two might have to wait til my July Update.

DVD catchup (2011 DVDS)

Wow I thought I had mentioned something along these lines back in February or March but I haven't mentioned my recent DVDs from ANY of 2011. So here is what I have gotten up till April. I will try to update once a month unless I don't get any, then I occasionally slip up and forget the next month or two.

So here is the breakdown for February through April 2011.

FEBRUARY

 

Extreme Days

 

Evil Alien conquerors

 

Despicable Me

MARCH

 

Red

APRIL

 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

 

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 

 

Primeval: Volume Two

 

Resident Evil: Afterlife

 

Salt (Deluxe Unrated Edition)

That is about it for that. I will have at least one title for the May Edition in a few weeks.

FINALLY!

Hey they finally did it. Now Netflix accepts payments through Paypal. It's about Time!

I restarted my account, I had to build a new queue since my old one was older than 5 years old or so. Weird when they used to ask me to restart before they accepted Paypal they would let me use my old queue. Guess they finally deleted that since they are pushing their "View INSTANTLY" download service. I also had to fiddle a bit with the "renewing" to "delete" my old credit card info and be able to choose Paypal payments. Now I have switched to the 2 movies out service instead of the full 3 movies out. That was a bit over the top. This way I can still have one to view while the other is in transit. Now to fiddle with my old excel file (which I have actually updated to keep track of purchases somewhat) and get some of those obscure titles back on.

Facebook Fun or Princess Bride Classic Stuff

I found a humorous picture on Facebook.com.


Ah a famous quote immortalized in it's literal sense. For those of you who have been under a rock for about 20-25 years or don't get to the cinema much. The quote "Hello my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!" is from the movie The Princess Bride uttered by the character of the same name Inigo Montoya portrayed by Mandy Patinkin who starred in the TV shows Dead Like Me and Criminal Minds.



Hmm must be a popular idea. OH Well. Hey I like this red version.

Why CNET Why?

It was a sad Monday today 29 September, 2008. A beloved website designed to keep track of DVD collections was given the old heave-ho by the corporate weasels that had bought it about a year or so ago. I am talking about one of the best, if not the best, DVD collection tracking websites. DVDSpot.com was an excellent resource of DVDs that are available world-wide. Each entry for a particular title had just about any and all information you would want to have for a DVD release (so long as it was a legitimate release, no bootlegs or pirated copies were allowed). I have yet to find a compatible collection website for other hobbies, or even for DVDs. There are a few that come close, but I really loved the feel of The DVDSpot.

Well during the day on Monday 29 September, the following message was posted on the main home page of my beloved DVD tracking website from the current corporate owners of the site CNET.com. Red text on a bright yellow background.


"On Wednesday October 15th DVDSpot will be closed permanently. This decision was made to allow us to focus on other great web properties. We sincerely appreciate everyone's contribution to the DVDSpot community and hope you enjoyed the free services it provided. We understand many people will not want to lose their personal collection data, so we remind you that you can export that data to file by going to Membership Tools while logged in and clicking the Export to File button. This will create a file with all movies in your Owned and Watched lists. Also keep in mind the editor system for approving DVD additions and edits has been disabled, so no new or edited DVDs will be added."

To say that this angered many of the regular users would be an understatement. The site also has a forum board, that I visit and participate in on a daily (when I can) basis. It has many people who share a common interest, the collection and watching of movies and TV shows on DVD.


Similar sites and forum boards have come and gone. One that stood out was called Guzzlefish.com (a petstore website occupies that domain name now), even though it had a neometal/punk type feel to it, the GF site was a useful site. Unfortunately I didn't take full advantage of it when it was around. It had categories for music and the VHS format in addition to DVDs. I took a break from it for a year or so, returned (never completely filled out my music collection or videos) and then 6 months to a year or so later it was gone. For a while there was a forum board website called Guzzlefish Forums Refugee which was an attempt to give former members a nostalgic feel on a different site. Well the traffic on that site died down and so did the site. Now the url to that site, which was somebodies personal ID name from the old GuzzleFish site, is some sort of personal website of some guy (I guess the same guy) and his hobbies which I think include hunting and para-military groups or something. DVDSpot.com has followed in the website death march.

Good news is that some of the die hard moderators who helped on the DVDSpot have started a new Refugee Forum for DVDSpot members at bulletpointreview.com. Many of the regular DVDSpot folks had been old GuzzleFish folks so a lot of them have tried all sorts of sites. Most agree that The Spot was the best. Others have said that DVDProfiler is better, well it does have the offline aspect to it, in addition to the online database. There is also DVDAFicianado.com (DVDAF.com) which not as many like, mostly because it is slow to get updates, hard to make additions (or wait for approval to make the additions) and it looks awful. A semi-recent update made it even more unbareable to use.

Well I guess it's back to the slide rule, colored construction paper and paste.

Books, Books, Books And More Books!

Recently I had been having problems with one of the book tracking sites I use, bibliophil.org. First I was having problems logging in, it turns out I was trying to use what I thought was my password except I had an extra character. UGH all these passwords for every single little website. Then their forums go down, well actually it has been taken down now due to problems with hackers and spammers. No problem I rarely use the forum anyway, but the list I tend to refer to now and then, although not very often.

Anyway I had intended to use listal.com as an alternate several months back, but haven't gotten around to populating it too much. There you can also track Movies, TV Shows, CDs and I think make lists of stuff. Then the realization that I didn't have a reliable back-up to my collection as listed on bibliophil sort of sucked. To complicate matters some (besides the fact that I don't have ALL my books listed on any site) the bibliophil site was down for at least a day, maybe it was down for longer, I'm not sure.

Well the time came to search for another reliable book tracking site (similar to my fave DVD site DVDSpot.com, and the long gone GuzzleFish.com Multi-media site) I found an article or two and a blog post or three for possible sites and of course kept running into my longtime book site enemy LibraryThing.com but I don't like that site. The main reason I don't like it is, it is only free if you have less than 200 books to list. If you have more than 200 books you need to upgrade to a paid membership ($10 yearly or $20 Lifetime I think). I also kept running into some of these book community trading/book club sites that would be cool if I wanted to trade books around, but I'm a selfish bastard and want to keep my books. I suppose for some of my books I may sometime trade, give away or sell them, but I don't want that as my main focus.

Long story short I found a site that suits my needs and is similar in someways to bibliophil.org, except it seems to be more reliable and probably gets updated faster. It is called Goodreads.com and it seems to be pretty user friendly. The community aspect of it reminds me of the early days of amazon.com when they had a forums/community section. You can explore the world of books, browse other members collections, contact them, make friends socialize or do whatever bookwise. I LIKE IT! I think I will still keep my bibliophil list active as long as they are still around, or I grow tired of them. LOL.

So in short some collecting sites.

BOOKS:
Goodreads.com - Very Good site for collectors.
bibliophil.org - OK site for collectors.
listal.com - OK fair to midlin site. Seems to cater to those who want a community atmosphere.
LibraryThing.com - OK book site for people with small collections or those who trade their books often.

CDS/Music:
rateyourmusic.com - OK site for tracking CD and Record collections. Mostly alternative and specialized genres, but good for overall. Sometimes the moderators are picky about what gets added or how to do it.
CDComplete.com - Barebones CD tracking site, not updated very often, needs major improvements and needs to become more user-friendly.
listal.com - OK fair to midlin site.

DVDS:
DVDSpot.com - Excellent collection tracking site for DVD collections. This is the creme of the crop in my opinion. The moderators have some strange attitudes, but then you don't have to visit the forums if you don't want. LOL! This site is my litmus/acid test for all other collection tracking sites. Very user friendly and the people there are very helpful.
listal.com - OK fair to midlin site.
DVDAficionado - Was a decent DVD collection tracking site, but is slow to update. A fairly recent update to the site has made it super ridiculous. It isn't as user-friendly as it once was (it was never really great in that department). The front index page doesn't look like a site that would be for DVD collecting, I don't know what to expect from it. Well that is what happens to sites that are run by huge mega corporations.
GuzzleFish.com - Dead and Gone but not forgotten. This site was a great CD,DVD,Record,Video Game collection tracking site, it might have done comics too I forget.