disney is stupid, film at 11

let me get this straight: they put Keith Richards in a movie, and now they're worried he might do something crazy and create bad publicity?

it's Keith fucking Richards, people. the man has taken so many drugs that you wouldn't need to mix his ashes with coke to get high snorting them. and you expect him to comport himself in a kid-friendly fashion?

shakespeare meme

when you see a quote from Shakespeare on your friends page, post one in your LJ:

Good my complexion! dost thou think, though I am
caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet and hose in
my disposition? One inch of delay more is a
South-sea of discovery; I prithee, tell me who is it
quickly, and speak apace. I would thou couldst
stammer, that thou mightst pour this concealed man
out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of a narrow-
mouthed bottle, either too much at once, or none at
all. I prithee, take the cork out of thy mouth that
may drink thy tidings.

in which time warner cable gets on my nerves

so last monday, i had cable installed. they gave me a brand new DVR, which the technician thoughtfully put on top of my stereo receiver. it didn't really occur to me at the time that i shouldn't leave it there. (hey, their guy put it there, so i assumed it would be okay.) when it arrived, i could get fabulous full 5.1 surround via the digital coax output, but by Friday it had developed a couple of flakinesses, most notably that it would now only receive digital output on the first 22 channels. on the others it would receive regular stereo via the RCA outs, but nothing at all via the digital output.

i moved the box, and the other flakinesses resolved themselves, but that one didn't. so i called Time Warner's tech support and went through the whole routine, and they finally said "the box is fuxx0red, you need to trade it in for another one."

today i took the box to the Time Warner office and asked for another box. no argument, but the one they gave me was an older model and clearly had been used before. no problem, right? i don't care what it looks like as long as it's got a digital output.

sure enough, this one gets audio via the digital coax output just fine... but while it claims to be outputting Dolby digital (according to the box settings), my receiver doesn't register it as surround, or even as digital. (and my receiver is smart enough to automatically detect these things. just to be sure, i tested it on the digital coax jack from the DVD player, and it handled that just fine.)

so tomorrow i get to take the stupid thing back again, and this time ask them to please give me a model that will actually feed me surround from the digital output.

on the up side, it's only about a mile out of my way on the way home from work, but jeez.

in other news, i spent a good chunk of the day wrestling with Frame's handling of variables, only to discover that it'll only let you define that kind of variable on a master page. which 1) isn't documented, and 2) doesn't make much sense to me.

but that's ok, the guy next to me spent most of the day trying to figure out how to link to named destinations in a PDF document from a Java application by calling the reader directly (instead of through a browser plugin), and he couldn't figure that out either. so at least i wasn't the only person who got nothing accomplished.