Les Bonnes Choses

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I had ordered some bits online from TigerDirect.ca for a replacement computer. A few days after that, most of the bits arrived courtesy of UPS. The motherboard, tied with the CPU for the most critical component, however, was not in that shipment. A check of my order status online showed that the motherboard I had ordered was on backorder. So I waited. And waited. And then, just to be different, I waited some more. I had already seen that the product had been discontinued on their website, so I could see no details for that particular item. Finally, today, I called TigerDirect to find out what the status was. It turns out that, not only are they not selling any more of them, they aren't expecting to receive any more of them either. Nice of them to tell me. I ordered a different motherboard from a different company this evening. It wasn't really out of spite though - since I returned home this evening, the tigerdirect.ca and tigerdirect.com websites have been unreachable. Their loss.

And now, for something completely different, I must mention a movie that Alan and I watched a couple of weeks ago. It was called Shoot 'Em Up, and it was the most abysmally awful "action" movie I have ever seen. I went to rottentomatoes.com to get some details, and was appalled by the fact that it somehow garnered a 66% rating -- not good, by any stretch, but for comparison, Sex and the City (also awful, I'm sure) got a 53%, 27 Dresses got a 39%, and the Golden Compass got a 41%. I'm sure that the Golden Compass was a better movie than this. For one thing, it had a plot that made sense, and the character exposition wasn't nearly as contrived. And for another thing, the main character didn't have this schtick where he ate carrots all the time, and occasionally use them to kill people. The saving grace of this movie was that it was mercifully short, coming in at 89 minutes. That, and the fact that the movie was laugh-out-loud funny at many times, usually not intentionally.