First the manufacturing jobs went away, then IT, and now this:

The McDonald’s restaurant in Hermiston, Oregon appears to be “outsaucing” customers drive-thru meals.

The restaurant on Highway 395 has outsourced one of the most important jobs at the drive-through window — order taking.

When a customer drives through, they’ll be patched through to Grand Forks, North Dakota to place the order. Why? Because the minimum wage in North Dakota is $5.15, compared to Oregon’s $7.25.

Tim Nesbit is head of Oregon AFLCIO. He says this undercuts Oregon’s minimum wage by more than $2 an hour.

A McDonald’s media relations person in Illinois, where the corporate headquarters is based, never returned a phone call to the [Associated Press]

Thanks to a glowing thread about this movie on a web forum, I finally got a hold of the apparently popular 2001 Korean film My Sassy Girl.

The movie comes from the true-life experiences of author Ho-sik Kim who made a best-selling book out of stories he posted on-line about his relationship with his girlfriend. In the film, Kyun-woo comes across a young woman drunk and belligerent on the subway and in a series of accidents is mistaken for her boyfriend. From there an actual relationship starts, usually involving her threatening to kill him if he doesn’t act the way she wants.

It’s actually a far better story than I’ve described and though the girl can be a real pain towards him, the story unfolds around the reason why she’s that way, and how it’s very much a conflict between her past and how much she’s quickly grown to like him.

Honestly, this film is great if you’re interested in watching an asian movie with your woman, but she doesn’t want the usual over-the-top martial arts violence-packed stereotype. Good use of humor, some real emotions and a great ending.

If you find the idea of kinetic art that’s wind powered interesting, you might want to take a look at the Wired article “Wild things are on the beach” about dutch artist Theo Jansen.

Some of his work is truly astounding, such as this 2MB video of his animaris rhinoceros transport shows. For more videos of his work, check the “film” link on the artist’s website, strandbeest.com.

In four plus years of office, George W Bush has not vetoed a single bill passed by Congress.

If you look at the table of Presidential Vetoes, the only other President to do so was President Garfield, who died four months into his presidency.

The February 2005 issue of Wired Magazine has some articles that probably won’t please the Redmond company.

Features include:

• The Firefox Explosion - Behind the scenes of the alternative browser’s development.
• The Microsoft Memo - Fictional memo from October 31st, 2008, written by the newest Microsoft employee Linus Torvalds to Bill Gates about Steve’s attempts to kill WinX.
• Storming Redmond - Illustration of the various open-source projects that are chipping away at the Microsoft empire.

The article listed above on Firefox is a good read if you’re interested in the reasons why so many are switching over to the open-source web browser.

The UK Guardian has an article on Volkswagon’s latest marketing item involving a CGI Gene Kelly break dancing through his “Singing in the Rain” movie number:

Blingin’ in the rain: The advert for the new Volkswagen Golf GTI hits screens tonight and was the result of months of negotiations with the star’s family, the movie rights’ owners and record label EMI.

It remasters the scene using masks, wigs and a digital techniques to impose Kelly’s face on the dancers. …

“The idea of Gene Kelly doing this wasn’t disrespectful. If he was around it’s the kind of thing that he would do, he was very innovative,” said copywriter Martin Loraine, from the advertising agency DDB London.

Judge for yourself: video (5MB, Quicktime Format)

Personally, I find most of it creepy in that Gene Kelly’s face doesn’t line up perfectly with that of the dancer’s body and the whole thing comes across as an updated dancing zombie from Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

What do you think? Add your opinion to the growing list below …

I think this screenshot from Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, the new game for the PS2 and Xbox, answers the geek-cred question of “Who shot first? Han or Guido?”

This free-form combat game that takes place in a post-collapse North Korea plays like a Grand Theft Auto with air strikes and artillery. Since the game is from LucasArts, players who unlock the entire game have the opportunity to play as either Han Solo or Indiana Jones, leading to the screenshot taken above.