I related this story on the Geek Dads @ Home podcast a few days ago, but I wanted to write about it here because it’s such a great story.

Checking your credit card statements regularly is a good thing. In my case, I was able to catch a fraudulent charge a week after it happened. I don’t check the statements daily, but I do try to look at them once a week – we only have two cards, so there’s no reason not to. I noticed a charge for $217.00 to an online bookstore called Better World Books. I knew that I didn’t buy anything from them, and my wife confirmed that she hadn’t, either.

I called up Better World Books, and without even telling the rep anything more than, “I was looking at my credit card statement…” he knew why I was calling. It seems that several fraudulent charges from several sources had already been caught and dealt with. He was quick to assure me that the charge would be taken care of and he reminded me that I’d need to have my card reported stolen. Fortunately, this was the only fraudulent charge on my account.

After I got off the phone with him, I decided to see what Better World Books is. Just another online bookseller? An Amazon clone? It turns out that Better World is far cooler than any other online booksellers I’ve come across, and here’s why:

1. They’ll take virtually any book you’ve got off your hands for free or better. Here’s what I mean. You can enter the ISBNs of any books you’d like to get rid of at the Better World website, and the system will tell you that it will be accepted either as a donation or as a buy. If it’s a donation, Better World will pay the shipping required for you to send the book to them. You need only supply a box. If it’s a buy, Better World will still provide you a shipping label, but they will also send you a payment (by check, PayPal or another method). I punched in the ISBNs of about 25 books, was offered $10 for one title, $3 for another, and the rest were donations. I then printed out the shipping labels and sent them off. The unwanted books are out of my hair, and I’ve got $13 coming to my PayPal account.
2. They support global literacy efforts. Every time you purchase from Better World or send them a book, they make a donation to a global literacy charity of your choice. They offer half a dozen or so to choose from. This is the core of their business, their reason for existing. Other booksellers will be always be bigger (Amazon, for one) but other booksellers have profits as their driving force. Better World Books has literacy concerns as their driving force, and uses their profits to reach their goal of improved global literacy. As I write this, they’ve donated over $6.6 million to literacy efforts.
3. They have an affiliate program. Send traffic to the Better World website and they will thank you with a small commission. Links in this article are affiliate links.
4. Free shipping in the U.S. Seriously.

Registering an account is free, shipping is free, and they have an extensive selection of new and used books from nearly every genre imaginable – and oh yeah, they raise money to educate people around the world. Sounds like a winner to me.

Please, check them out.

Never is a strong word. It’s easy to say that I’ll never go to the movies again after my experience this afternoon, but I’ll feel differently the next time an event film comes out. I’ll probably get sucked in again. This is about the movie, not the graphic novel from whence it came.

Earlier today I went to see Watchmen. It started at 3pm, so I paid matinee price, not full. It was seven bucks. Once inside, I got a small popcorn and a small Coke. The total was $10.25. That’s right, it cost me $17.25 to see a movie, by myself, on a Thursday afternoon. That’s not the worst part of the afternoon, though. No, I summed up the worst part on Twitter shortly after I got home:

back from seeing Watchmen… if i had to describe it in one word… boring… if i had to describe it in two words….&$^%ING BORING.

Spoilers from this point on. You’ve been warned.

The Highs

Two of the fight scenes were pretty good: Silk Spectre & Nite Owl in the prison and Rorschach & Nite Owl vs. Ozymandias. That’s… about it.

The Lows

For starters, it’s too long by about an hour. Clocking in just shy of three hours at 2:45, it’s a very long film. Many movies benefit from a length like that—Watchmen doesn’t. It just drags.

The acting was spotty at best. The casting was questionable, especially those actors chosen to portray real people like Nixon. The costumes were, for the most part, terrible. This, I attribute to the fact that you can’t put normal people in superhero costumes and expect them to look like they do in the comics. Comics are exaggerated, rather like Barbie dolls. That’s why the X-Men flicks had the characters all wearing black leather instead of their traditional garb. It’s why Batman in the movies wears body armor instead of what the character wears in the comics. It’s why Brandon Routh looks like a little twerp as Superman instead of the Man of Steel. The producers of Watchmen decided to put regular costumes on the real people, to the effect that most of them looked like your drunk uncle going to that Halloween party when you were seven.

The Rest

There are a few things that folks around the internet made a big deal out of with this flick. The first was the source material and how close the movie was to it. I’m not going to rehash all the arguments about it… it’s not completely faithful to the source, but that’s okay. You can’t take a 12-issue comic book series and turn it into a 2- or 3-hour movie. You just can’t.

A few people made something of a big deal about superhero sex in Watchmen. While it’s true that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre get naked, that’s what makes the sex completely un-superheroic. The problem, of course, is that when the costumes come off (and they do come completely off), the people underneath are just… people. You could just as well be looking at any random couple, which, given that these people are actors, was exactly the case.

Then there’s the violence. Oh, lord, the violence. While not the most violent film ever made (um, probably), this flick had more blood and guts flying around than any movie I’ve ever seen. I thought Reservoir Dogs was bloody until I saw Watchmen. I’ve never seen so many bodies explode before—literally explode, with blood and guts and bones on the walls and ceilings. I don’t mind violence in my cinema—even over the top violence—but here, it was unnecessarily over the top.

For heroes, these people sure kill a lot. I know, it’s supposed to be some grand statement that in the Watchmen universe, the heroes aren’t squeaky clean. The problem that I have is that the two characters that I thought were the closest to moral, Silk Spectre and Nite Owl, kill with smiles on their faces when faced with unpowered gang members—only one of which had a gun. Silk Spectre stabbed a guy in the neck. What the hell?

The movie couldn’t decide if these people were super powered or not. Only Dr. Manhattan has real super powers, the rest are regular people that put on costumes to fight crime—like Batman (only without the gadgets). None of them should be able to punch through walls (which happens), or take an explosion in the face with no burns (not even a singed hair on her head when Silk Spectre took the brunt of a fiery blast that knocked her into the ship).

The Bottom Line

I paid nearly twenty bucks to see this flick; twenty bucks that would have been better spent on… well, just about anything. Maybe a DVD. To put it in more simplistic terms: 1 out of 5 stars.

Many are the days and nights when I have looked at a clock after using Wikipedia and realized that multiple hours have passed. Wikipedia is the greatest time suck ever devised by man.

Earlier today I remembered a conversation about music that I had with my chiropractic provider. We had talked about music, and he said that he likes +44 better than Angels and Airwaves when considering the post-Blink-182 bands. I told him that I hadn’t heard +44, but I’d been meaning to.

Today, I finally checked them out. I have a subscription to Rhapsody which allows me to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, without having to pay per track like at iTunes or Amazon. I listened to +44′s debut album, When Your Heart Stops Beating, and I liked it quite a lot. As I often do when investigating new music, I pulled up the band’s Wikipedia page—or tried to.

As a Firefox user, I simply type wikipedia whatever-I’m-looking-for into my browser’s address bar, and I usually end up on the right page. I typed in wikipedia +44, and was taken to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44 – a page all about the year 44. I clicked the For other uses link, and was taken to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44_(number). Getting closer. As I skimmed down looking for a reference to the band, I noticed the very first line after the Contents box. It reads thusly:

Forty-four is a tribonacci number, a happy number and an octahedral number.

A happy number? Numbers can be… happy? I opened that link in a new tab to come back to it later, found the link to the +44 page, and read up on the band. After that, I went back to the happy number page, and read this:

A happy number is defined by the following process. Starting with any positive integer, replace the number by the sum of the squares of its digits, and repeat the process until the number equals 1 (where it will stay), or it loops endlessly in a cycle which does not include 1. Those numbers for which this process ends in 1 are happy numbers, while those that do not end in 1 are unhappy numbers.

I remember learning about imaginary numbers in high school, so I wasn’t thrown too much when I first saw “a happy number”, though it did give me pause. What really got me, oddly enough, was the notion of a number being unhappy. For some reason, that made me laugh. I keep picturing little 2′s and 3′s running around with big frowns and sad eyes.

This is the time suck that Wikipedia is for me. I start out looking for something simple—a page that talks about the history of a band—and I end up reading about unhappy numbers. I do this for hours upon hours sometimes.

There can be only one conclusion. Wikipedia is evil.

We love to rent DVDs for our daughter at the local library. They’re free, they’re a good source of entertainment for a week or two, and did I mention they’re free?

Last week, a DVD called Bottle Fairy was brought home. It’s a Japanese cartoon dubbed in English. Now, I could write about the show itself, the characters or the maybe the DVD presentation. No. I’m going to focus on the lyrics of the theme songs, as translated into English and printed at the bottom of the screen.

All you need to know is that “Sensei-san” is the roughly college-age human male that looks after the four little female fairies that live in bottles in his house. Seriously.

Ready? And-a-one, and-a-two…

Bottle Fairy Theme Song

The girls in a magical land
Are very small fairies
Study the human world
We want to be
Nice ladylike girls
Puki puki payo
Ah, teach us Senseisan
This and that
We want to know more
Ah, do it, do it, Senseisan
Big secret
Beyond words, and everything
Lan lan lan la la

Bottle Fairy Closing Credits Song

The closing has different lyrics depending on the episode, and some of them were translated into… Japanese. It’s quite surreal. There are six episodes on the DVD, here’s two of them, from episodes themed with spring and summer.

Feelings of spring
Anticipate an encounter and hope
While being puzzled
You come closer
My heart is beating fast, but…
Ah, cherry tree, cherry tree
A row of cherry trees along a street
Sincerely I pray
Cherry tree, cherry tree
To make new friends
Turn pink

Feelings of summer
Think of the ocean and mountains
Look, a thundercloud, too
Is calling you
Run, run, and frolic, but…
Ah, festival, fireworks
Yukata patterns, watermelon, pool
Bathing suit marks
Summer, summer
To create lasting memories
Turn into sunlight

You need to go find this DVD and watch it. Trust me.

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where “Japanese cartoons are weird, man” comes from. Hint: he wears a red lucha libre wrestling mask and he’s really strong. And bad. Strong and bad.

I know it’s easy to blame everything on “the economy” these days, but honestly, who wants to pay $55 a month for basic cable service, even in a good economy?

In an effort to reduce our monthly bills a bit while we ride out the poor economy, we decided to axe the cable television service. Our rationale is that we never watch TV on a schedule, and we’ve got broadband internet access, so why pay? We can watch all the shows we’re interested in online. Granted, we won’t be able to watch the season premiere of Lost next week as it airs (ABC.com will have it available for online viewing the following day, if they do it the same way as they did with season four), but is it really that important? Is it $55 a month important, just to see it as it airs? I say no. Two days ago, I spoke with Comcast and cancelled our service. Yesterday, the technician showed up to collect the box and do whatever it is that technicians do to the lines. This is an account of our first day, yesterday, without cable television service.

Quitting Cable: Day One

I woke up to the sound of the house alarm being turned off and the cable guy coming into the house. Angela dealt with him while I got up, and by the time I made it downstairs, we were a cable-free house. First order of business: figure out…

Okay, the first order of business actually had nothing to do with this. But after I was finished, the next order of business was to figure out my audio/video situation and how to tune in our local channels. Our TV is a five-or-six-year-old Sony, standard. It’s got the coaxial connection and component connections in the back, and that’s it. Needless to say, simply setting it to channel 5 had absolutely no effect. Lots of lovely snow.

Well, I figured that with the digital transition coming up next month, it would make sense to just go ahead and get the converter box and an antenna. I had a chiropractic appointment at noon, and stopped by Best Buy afterward to pick up the necessary equipment before heading home.

Side note – I didn’t bother to wait for the government coupon, or even to apply for it yet, because according to a report on the radio a few days ago, the government is out of money for the coupon program. I’ll get on the waiting list later, and try to work something out with my receipt from the store if I ever get a coupon (I’m not holding my breath). If it doesn’t work out, well, I still paid less than I would have for a full month of cable service.

Installing the converter box and antenna took about five minutes. Using the remote control, it searched for signals and found a few dozen – far, far more than I expected. The downside? Nearly all the stations seem to be either Spanish-language or Christian. It’s the strangest thing… there’s NBC, there’s ABC, there’s PBS… then there’s about 32 channels in a row with names like “God TV”. Weird.

Winter was watching me work on the TV with great interest, and asking if she would watch Word Girl, to which I could only respond with, “not right now, honey. Daddy’s working on fixing the TV”.

Many months ago, I connected my MacBook Pro to the TV and home theater system, so I didn’t have to worry about setting that up. I’m able to move a browser window over to the TV and stream shows from a variety of sources.

For the rest of the afternoon, we watched a few shows online on the TV and, well, that was about it. Dinner. Bedtime for the kids. A bit of online poker, then some work on my sites, with the TV off the whole time.

So far, I’m not missing cable.

Two GNR-related posts in one week? Let me see… yeah, there’s my picture… there’s my logo… this is definitely my website. Huh. Whaddayaknow?

My initial reaction to hearing the new Guns N’ Roses tracks was a definitive “meh”. I wasn’t impressed, and my expectations were close to zero. I heard about it, coincidentally, on the night that my cousin’s GNR cover band was performing on Letterman. I gave Chinese Democracy a spin on MySpace, where the entire album is posted for your pirating – I mean, listening – pleasure.

Axl’s voice has matured, and while Geddy Lee of Rush, for example, has aged gracefully, Axl just sounds old. It’s been over twenty years since the classic Appetite For Destruction, and this record makes that point in a fairly negative way. There will certainly be a significant number of die-hards that defend the album with fanboy intensity. Those that aren’t fanboys will likely give the album a bland reception. Over the next few days and weeks, I fully expect there to be a chorus of “it took them a decade to make this?”

Last week I got a message from my mother, saying that she had talked to my Aunt Pam. The big news was that my cousin, Drew, was going to be on the Late Show with David Letterman with his band! Now, Drew is in a project called Takka Takka, and my first thought – since I wasn’t specifically told – was that Takka Takka was going to be performing. Turns out… not so much. Shortly after I got the first message, I was told that he’d be on with Mr. Brownstone, the Guns N’ Roses cover band that he’s been involved with for many years. I confess, I was a little disappointed – I’m a big fan of Takka Takka. Hopefully, with the release of the new album, Migration, and their inclusion on the soundtrack of the Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist movie, Takka Takka will have a shot to play Letterman in the near future!

Living in the Southwest as I do, and Drew living up in the Northeast as he does, I’d never seen him perform in Mr. Brownstone. Here’s the clip, via YouTube – my cousin (who wasn’t even allowed to listen to Guns N’ Roses when we were growing up) is the shirtless, leather-panted bass player:

Hopefully the clip won’t get yanked off of YouTube! The guys clearly had a great time on the show, and okay, it was a little over the top, but wasn’t Guns N’ Roses themselves always a little over the top? Great job, guys!

Learn more about Mr. Brownstone

Learn more about Takka Takka – can’t recommend them highly enough!

I’m watching Nick Jr. with my three year old daughter right now, and I have a question. Since when is it okay for the between-show commercials on Nick Jr. to market hair care products on the premise that they will make your hair “sexy”? Now, I’m no prude. I don’t think that children of all ages need to be shielded from every marginally grown-up word or concept until they hit 18 years old. I think that, for the most part, people who raise the “WE NEED TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!!!!” battle cry are using kids as an excuse to censor ideas and language that they simply don’t like.

Nobody had to explain to a 5-year-old what Bill Clinton did with Monica, and anyone that says they did is either lying or they didn’t realize that 5-year-olds are really easy to distract with a shiny object. I’m old-school; I firmly believe in simply telling a kid that some things are for grown-ups and some things are for kids and leaving it at that. It worked for me when I was a kid, and it’s working great with my own daughter.

I do think that the commercials need to match the programs, though. When I’m watching shows on the Food Network, I fully expect the commercials to be food-related. When I’m watching The Shield, I expect the commercials to be aimed at adults. I don’t want to see a commercial for Barbie dolls during The Sopranos, it’s inappropriate.

It’s also inappropriate to run a commercial for Pantene hair care products between Dora the Explorer and Diego featuring a beautiful woman in a short black dress who says of her hair, “I think volume is sexy”. There’s a time and a place for everything, and I think that if they wouldn’t use a word or concept in the show, they shouldn’t use it in the commercials attached to the show. If Dora ever turns to Boots and says “you know, Boots, I think when my hair is up like this, it’s really sexy”, then I’ll have no problem with Nick Jr. running the Pantene ad.

Buy it at Amazon

I’ve been a comic book collector for over twenty years and I love a well-done comic book movie – but it’s rare that I buy new movies on DVD these days. I don’t have as much time for movie watching, so it’s becoming more economical for me to rent. I have watched Star Wars enough times that it costs me pennies per viewing, but I’d rather spend $4.00 at Blockbuster to watch a movie like The Incredible Hulk than spend $20 to own it, knowing that I’ll probably only watch it once or twice.

I watched The Incredible Hulk last night, and came to a few conclusions. First, it’s not as good as Iron Man. Second, I love how they drop hints throughout the script about what’s coming down the road – Captain America, the Avengers, and more. Third, Tim Roth is a tiny, tiny man. I mean, that dude is small. He’s only about 5’6″ or 5’7″ and has a thin frame that makes him look like a maniacal Frodo next to Ed Norton (at 6′) and William Hurt (nearly 6’2″). Small guy, great actor.

The movie was good, overall. Not great, but a hell of a lot better than Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie, which was just… ugh. This one’s not for the young kids; it definitely earns the PG-13 rating for violence.

Depending on how Marvel handles the upcoming movie tie-ins (Iron Man 2, Captain America, Thor and Avengers), I may end up buying this one on DVD – or Blu-Ray, if I upgrade in the next two years. I mean, I own Daredevil and Elektra… and The Incredible Hulk smashes both of them to bits (that should go without saying, but still).