April 2007

Surely that can’t be right. I mean, I spent my fair share of hours listlessly poking at the mouse in an effort to prod my lowly farmer through level after level of Krugs, but a movie? Nonetheless, here it is: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Unsurprisingly, it is directed by Uwe Boll, famous for other video-game-turned movie monstrosities such as Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne (Both of which have sequels coming, by the way. Gah.) What is surprising, however, is that Boll routinely gets decent actors to commit to his otherwise B-grade video game knockoffs, like Christian Slater, Billy Zane, and Michael Madsen. This time around it’s Ray Liotta, Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, Burt Reynolds, and Claire Forlani. Really? In a Dungeon Siege Movie? Anyway, watch the trailer [.mov], and give thanks that Peter Jackson got to the Lord of the Rings before Uwe Boll did.

Traffic was frightful coming in to downtown this morning; there were no less than four accidents on the Eastex alone. Fortunately, my commute isn’t normally that bad, but four accidents will doom you on just about any Houston highway. Inevitably, one accident during rush hour has a cascading effect; traffic backs up in unexpected places, and commuters who haven’t yet had their coffee plow into the vehicles in front of them. I managed to avoid the worst of it this morning, evading a fender bender in a middle lane just after it happened.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that commuter traffic in Houston is bad; despite our wide highways, there is limited public transportation. Unlike a highly concentrated city center like Manhattan or Chicago, Houston is spread all over the place. Traffic is necessarily aggravated by the steep differential in housing prices from inside the loop to the suburbs. We could have paid two or three times as much for a house similar to our inside the loop—cutting my commute in half—but it simply wasn’t worth the money.

Lockwasher has a gallery of toy robot heads at Flickr. Also, check out his other sets, including robots, rayguns, and miscellaneous retro-futuristic toys.

Okay, so it seems I have WordPress re-installed, and I’ve got a new theme up and running. I still have some features to add and a few minor errors to correct, but I think overall the disaster seems to have passed. Let me know if you run into any bugs.

So, I was attempting to upgrade WordPress and play around with some new themes, and I managed to completely bork my WordPress install. D’oh! So, please excuse the mess while I clean things up.