Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Texan home.

As I mentioned prior, I worked at four stores other than my own this week, which has shown me just how bad the video store rental experience can be when you have a severe lack of intelligent, store-conscious employees at an individual store other than your own.

Tonights story: The Perils of Pirates of the Caribbean.

I had a customer approach me, as the manager on duty, at the store which is currently in the process of getting a new manager, because the old one made the PHB from Dilbert look downright competent.

The customer had a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD case, as well as a receipt, and handed both to me, while asking where the discs were. I opened the case and noted that in fact there were no DVDs inside.

Of course, in inspecting the lack of DVDs, I also noticed that there was no price sticker on the cover, no signs of cellophane having been ripped off, nor traces of that annoying sticker that goes on the edge that many people just end up leaving there.

The other thing that struck me odd was the fact that the customer had purchased the movie this morning, according to the receipt, when I knew that this store had been sold out of the movie for a week now and was unlikely to have gotten some more so soon after Christmas, due to the lack of internal inventory shipping on those days.

I politely asked the customer where he had gotten the DVD from in the store, and as I had suspected, he pointed directly over to the “New Releases” rental wall, where all the rental copies of Pirates were, behind empty cover boxes.

It turns out that the untrained monkey of a manager who had worked the morning shift, who should have known the store was out of POTC, and also should have immediately noticed the lack of retail price stickers and cellophane, had cheefully sold this poor soul one of the empty cases that the unknowing customer had assumed were regular copies for sale.

I aplogized for the error, explained that those were all rental copies, despite this being pretty self-evident, refunded his money and put a free rental on his account for his trouble.

… and then I decided that I needed to start drinking on the job.

I watched American Wedding today, having liked the first two American Pie movies, yet not having seen the third in the theaters.

I ended up fast-fowarding through much of it. It’s humorous to me how most of the characters routinely expressed the opinion that they didn’t want Stiffler in the wedding, because that’s pretty much how I felt about American Wedding in general: Scenes with Stiffler bored me greatly.

The film gets a decidedly “meh” rating.

I am constantly amazed at just how often the average person fails to slow down and take their time on things. Nearly every night at ye olde video store involves a good number of people who will grab a movie without actually stopping to look at what they’ve picked up, let alone read enough for real understanding and comprehension.

Examples:

• People who ignore the sixty copies of The Hulk and instead pick up the one copy of The Incredible Hulk, on which we’ve helpfully put a label that reads “This is the television series, not the movie” and still become upset with us when they get back home and it is in fact not the movie.
• People who pick up the empty cover art box for a rental, ignoring the actual blue rental cases shining out from behind the now removed case and taking the cover art box to the front counter and looking at us like we’re crazy when we ask if there was a rental case behind it, to ensure whether there’s actually a copy of that title left in stock to rent.
• People who completely ignore the large ESRB rating system for games that they rent for their children, only to complain loudly about our allowing it to happen. Sometimes, you’d think a game title like “Manhunt” or “Killswitch” or “Celebrity Deathmatch” would be a clue.
• People who pick up a cover box without reading the back, tracking down an employee and asking them what the movie is about, especially when it’s one that none of us have seen and can only read the back cover text back to them. For some reason it seems to satisfy them when we read it, but not when they need to themselves.

Personally, I always take at least a modicum of time to understand what I’m purchasing, be it motherboards, games or even video rentals. Despite getting free rentals, I know I don’t want to waste my time on something I can have a far better guess at whether I’ll like merely from reading a few lines of text.

So take your time. Read, understand, comprehend, be happier.

The local Microcenter was having a 10% off sale on all DFI Lanparty motherboards, which was good as the mainboard in my Windows XP machine had begun to act highly unstable, to the point of shutting down randomly.

The Lanparty series of motherboards are slightly more expensive than boards with similar chipsets, but they do come packed with features that will immediately catch the eye of overclockers and actual LAN party participants.

I ended up getting a Lanparty NF2 Ultra B.

Visually, the boards are interesting in that all the plastic ports are covered with a UV reactive material which glows nicely with a simple in-case light, which makes a nice show for those of us who’ve gotten into the field of in-case windows and other computer cosmetic modifications. Additionally, the board comes with two rounded cables (one IDE and an FDD) covered in a similar material.

The board itself has an nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, which I’d been looking for as a nice, powerful and far more stable alternative to the VIA chipset based alternatives. There’s an on-board 6.1 channel sound card, as well as two network cards, one of which even has gigabit ethernet capability. The 8x AGP port will be a nice upgrade from previous 4x slots, at least when it comes to my ATI Radeon 9800, and while I’m not currently finding a use for them, the Firewire and SATA Raid capabilities of this board are tempting me with future upgrades. The board’s BIOS has the ability to save up to four seperate configurations, which makes switching between diferent overclocking profiles a new and tempting possiblity.

The rather large box that the board came in even included such things as a “PC Transporter” case harness to help lug the case to your next lanparty, and a really nice bit of kit from FrontX which puts several ports in the front of the case in a drive bay slot to provide USB, Firewire and audio port access.

Basically, this is a really nice motherboard, and provides a really solid base for me to start upgrading the other bits and pieces, with a slightly newer revision of the AMD processor with twice the L2 cache and a third faster FSB being my next choice on the list.

I stumbled across a nice little rental at the video store by the name of Princess Blade, a Japanese action flick which takes place in an undetermined time in the future, with an odd mixture of ancient Japanese family and political hierarchies and a post-cyberpunk oppressive government.

The story itself has been done before, with a supposedly heartless killer by the name of Princess Yuki of House Takemikazuchi, who uses her sword without fear or remorse, yet is suddenly reminded of feelings and emotions upon the discovery of the true reason behind her mothers death, and the love for a man she meets while on the run.

The movie plays well, and has a few slight twists that do add to it, such as the subtle background of the world the characters inhabit. In other films, the social-political situation of the world the characters inhabit would more likely have taken over the plot, whereas here its never really brought forward enough to serve as anything other than backdrop and stage for the events to unfold upon.

The other twist is that the person she meets while on the run isnt merely the usual helpless individual that the trained killer must protect while re-discovering her humanity, but is in fact also with closet skeletons of his own, as hes a reluctant political terrorist with blood on his own hands.

On the down side, the character of Yuki seems to become rather weak once she starts showing emotions, and it becomes sometimes difficult to believe shes the perfect professional killer that the plot seems to set her up as. But then, I can really think of a few films in which the transition from coldhearted to human assassin has been handled well. The first would be L�n: The Professional, and the second being Soldier, which as a film has many flaws but still has Kurt Russel managing to portray a character thats discovering emotions while still being a believable professional killer of killers.

Overall, Id give this film thumbs up as a rental choice for those of you looking for a little Japanese produced action flick, provided you dont mind such a film ending on a slightly down note.

I just noticed that Apple’s Quicktime Movie Trailer site has Scooby Doo 2 up now.

Hey, at least it isn’t that horrible Garfield trailer.