Adventures in Paycheck

As you may already know, Schulte is staying with me for a few days. He came with two free movie passes, so last night we decided to see Paycheck at a theatre in Worcester. Just before we left, there was a brief snowstorm, so the roads were all snowy and icy. Neither of us had been there before, so we printed off directions to the address online, and were on our way.

We get in the vicinity just as the movie is starting, but the directions lead us to a dead end on some dark, snowy back street. We were right next to the theatre parking lot, but it clearly wasn’t accessible from the directions we had. Not knowing our way around the area, we proceeded to drive up over a curb/sidewalk, through a fence that was left open, and back down into the parking lot. Success!

So we walk into the place, movie vouchers in hand, and look for the ticket counter. There are two people working the snack booth and a few customers in line, but no ticket-sellers to be found. So we just look for the “Paycheck” sign and head in that general direction. In addition to the lack of ticket-sellers, there were also no ticket-takers. So, we walked into the theatre and sat down. Schulte expressed dismay that he wasn’t able to use his free passes.

There are a few people in the theatre… a somewhat intimate crowd. Schulte makes some homosexual comments, and I eventually believe most of the surrounding audience thinks we’re bona fide homosexuals. I resist making any such “hilarious” comments for the rest of the evening, and go out of my way to lean away from Schulte in my chair.

The movie itself started out interesting, and proceeded to turn into your run-of-the mill crappy action movie. It might have been a decent action movie except that Ben Affleck was in it. My commentary after the movie was: “Paycheck covered the otherwise interesting topic of seeing into the future about as well as Hollow Man covered the topic of invisibility.” Incidentally, the part about seeing into the future I guess is technically a spoiler for the movie. But, don’t worry about that. They end up giving away that big “secret” about 30 minutes into the movie. The rest was pretty much like any other movie.

Unless you can get tickets for the same price Schulte and I did, I wouldn’t bother going. Even then, it’s still debatable.

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A fine idea

This recent slashdot story is similar to something I’ve been wanting to do but never gotten around to. This pluto box really shouldn’t be very hard to build with commodity parts. I would probably cut out the PVR stuff so you could use really mediocre hardware, and I figure you could put this box together for well under a grand. The trick would be creating a nice GUI to tie the whole thing together. It really doesn’t sound hard, and once we got it right could be sold out of a garage (or apartment) online with minimal inventory required.

I’ve been working on getting a voicemail system running in my apartment with VOCP but it’s been tough finding a good modem with working Linux drivers. Working out all those hassles and then selling a box with known good hardware sounds like the way to go.

I’ll post back shortly when I make my first million.