Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch, a rocking good time about girl power; if girl power involves mini-skirts and thigh high stockings.

Sucker Punch opens a little on the slow side.  Those first few minutes of background however help to set the mood and get you in the proper vibe.  But when Sucker Punch heats up it stays hot.

So, the story for those who don't know involves a poor lost soul without family, unless you count the evil step-father.  The step-father sends the daughter away and plans to have her silenced so she can never speak of his unspeakable crimes.  This is the slow part.

At the asylum, because there is always an asylum, things take a turn for over the top and we watch our heroine blossom into a kick ass take no names kind of girl.  This is also were things get a little crazy.  The heroine imagines herself in this sort of 1950's, speak-easy, bordello, strip club.  It is a really busy place.  Basically the girls dance, the man likes, the bordello happens.  You never see the dancing or the bordello part of the club however.

You see every time our girl dances she is taken away to another mystical place, where she and her friends are totally bad-ass, in mini skirts of course.  So, I am guessing that the writers and directors realized just how many men like to see a beautiful young lady in a mini-skirt, thigh-high stockings, toting machine guns and wielding swords and knives.  In fact the only thing missing from the, steam punk driven Nazi zombie, goblin infested dragon lair, cracked earth high speed bullet train, alternate universe: chain mail bikinis.  I really wanted chain mail bikinis.  I mean, I completely love chain mail bikinis, what guy doesn't?

It is during these alternate world dance numbers that the captured girls bond, and learn the true meaning of friendship, while completing a series of quests to escape from the all girl asylum they are trapped in.  I think this may however just be a ploy to have hot, young, scantily clad girls in a movie; but I could be wrong.

So that about wraps it up, to learn how it all ends, go see the movie.

Hint: It is about girl power.

Pros:  Good looking dames with great legs.  When Sucker Punch goes over the top it stays there.  Amazing cinematography and flawless CGI.  Fights are outstanding and very well choreographed.  Great soundtrack. Basically a drool fest for guys.

Cons:  A little slow to start.  No chain mail bikinis.

Grab your girlfriend and go have fun, just remember to tell her it is a movie all about girl power.

Parking Wars

In Parking Wars the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) does battle with the worst that Philly has to offer.  And the PPA wins.

This is a great show, it follows the PPA around as they issue tickets, boot cars and tow.  Then theres the impound lot,  always colorful characters at the lot.  The show has three segments each episode and covers all the elements of the PPA.

The ticketers who walk the beat giving tickets and taking abuse in the city of brotherly love.  I got to give it to them for not losing their cool.  Besides giving tickets they help out people they find in need.  This part of the show is fun mainly due to the ticketers themselves.  They are a collection of odd characters, just walking the streets of Philly doing their job.  Some of them are so nice and don't ever want to issue a ticket while others are all about setting personal ticketing goals and hitting the mark.  (The PPA does not have quota's nor due the get paid on a per ticket basis.)

My favorite is the boot teams.  They generally travel in pairs so they can watch each other's backs, because you never know what will happen when you are booting a car.  The best team is Garfield and Sherry.  Garfield is the fastest boot in Philly and Sherry hunts the computers to find the heavy hitters for him.  These to are a great team and fun to watch.

The impound lot teaches us why big gov doesn't always work.  One episode follows a man out to get his car back.  He goes to court, then the lot, then back to court, then the lot, then off the lot for a computer (insurance), then back to the lot.  It was crazy,  the guy was there for two shifts before he could get his car.  But the lot also introduces us to the next great Philly rap artist.  The impound lot has the best characters.  Every one of them wrongfully towed and all of them mad about it.

I am hooked on Parking Wars and glad I don't live in Philly,  I wouldn't want to due battle with the PPA everyday.

This is a great show and one to watch.

Monkey Shines Horror from 88

This weekend I watched a new premier, then followed it up with a throw back to my childhood, Monkey Shines.  Hats off to my wife for suggesting this one.  It is a great classic, from before the era of animals are our friends.

The movie opens with the star, Jason Beghe, getting himself ran over.  He becomes a quadriplegic, then later suicidal.  So his friend John Pankow decides to help him out.  At this point things seem to get better, before desolving into the horrors associated with having a genetically altered pet monkey, who has been trained to do your bidding.

Like I said, this film was made when animals could still be the bad guy, and that was okay.

The horror is classic 80's, which means the clothes are more frightening then the story.  Still I found it to be a fun movie and enjoyed hanging out with the wife for a few hours to watch.

This was George A Romero's first studio film, he wrote and directed it. So if you are a Romero fan this is a great film to watch.

Overall if you are looking for a way to spend a few hours and have a bit of fun, get some friends together and check it out.  Or go grab one of your favorite classics.

How Users Are Rewarded With Varolo

In this post I want to break down how you the member is rewarded through Varolo.  Just keep these three things in mind as you read through the post.  First, Varolo is 100% free for the user, advertisers pay for everything.  Second, Varolo does not require you to purchase anything.  Third, Varolo doesn't require you to sell anything.  With Varolo you are rewarded for watching commercials.

Varolo rewards it's members through several different mechanisms.  These include points, the weekly sweepstakes, and village earnings.  So lets get started looking at how you can be rewarded.

Points

This is the simplest way for you to earn rewards.  Every time you watch a commercial, Varolo rewards you with points.  The average commercial right now gets you one point per view.  But there are several commercials that earn you as many as five points per view.  Also, as members in your village (Varolo's term for your social network) watch commercials you can earn extra points from them.  So as your village grows, the number of points earned each week grows, and you can cash out points for prizes that much faster.

Weekly sweepstakes

Every commercial you watchs gives you one entry into the weekly sweepstakes.  Now keep in mind that Varolo is growing the weekly sweepstakes by $25 dollars per week, at the time of this post.  So this is a pretty good incentive to watch every week.  And just like with points, you village helps out with this by what Varolo calls splash up.  Basicly if anyone in your village wins the weekly sweepstakes Varolo gives them 100% of the jackpot and you get 10% of the value.  So, a member of your village gets the $300 dollar jackpot and you recieve $30 for them being in your village.  Again, it pays to grow your village.

Village Earnings

With Varolo up to 20% of ad revenue gets payed out to the members.  In otherwords, as people in your village watch commercials you and members of your village can see up to 20% of the cost per view.  So people in your immediate village, or 1st tier, watch a commercial, you see 8% of the cost per view for that commercial.  The percentage goes down by 2% as the village member watching, goes down in tiers.  Here is the break down, straight from Varolo.

Tier 1 = 8%
Tier 2 = 6%
Tier 3 = 4%
Tier 4 = 2%
All four tiers = 20% paid out to village members

As of this post, Varolo's cost per view is between 1 and 5 cents.  But Varolo currently has about 55,000 members.  As membership grows the biding will go up and cost per view will increase, which means an increase in village earnings.

So, how about a real world check on Varolo's potential that anyone can do.  And lets use a social network vehicle that we all know,  Facebook.

Facebook has flat, image and text based ads.  Keep in mind Varolo is a streaming video ad.  If you go to your Facebook account, you can build your own ad.  As you build, can choose which groups you think will be interested, and Facebook will let you see the potential number of members, who will see your ad.   You also get to choose the time of day you want it to run and you can choose how much a day you wish to spend.

When I built my mock up Varolo ad for this experiment,  I left the catogories on face book at default.  This meant that 4 milion possible members will see my ad run at noon.  With a budget of $50 per day and a estimated cost of $2.18 per click.  That means $50 buys me 22 clicks, and then my add is pulled. Those 22 people are the only ones I can get that day to view my product.  Remeber Facebook is a flat image with a limited text file to intice people to go to your site and check out a product.

With Varolo $100 buys an advertiser 10,000 views, or over 9 hours of commercial air time.  This is set at 1 cent per 30 second commercial.  That means $100 dollars gets an advertiser 10,000 garunteed views.  With feed back on how people rated the ad and if they were interested.  These numbers are straight from the companies own site.

So you can see as membership in Varolo grows the potential for ad revenue growth increases.  Also keep in mind that 4 million is only about 2% of the 250 million adults in America.  So imagine what the bidding by advertisers will be when Varolo grows to just 1% of the population in the U.S., and 1% isn't even that high a number.

So if your not a member or Varolo and would like to be, join my Varolo village, by clicking any of the Varolo links in this post.  And lets start growing your village together.

Join Varolo and get rewarded for watching commercials.  Varolo takes about 10 minutes a day, and is 100% free to members.  So join my Varolo village today. http://www.varolo.com/village/Harvey75

L.A. VS Aliens

For our anniversery, my wife and I went to Battle: LA, this was her pick, but I was more than happy to go.  Like several new movies this year the aliens are not friendly.  This seems to be good  for Hollywood; bad world concuring aliens make money. 

Overall this movie was a rocking and rolling good time.  The acting was great, special effects were fenominal.  The camera work was just enough jitter and shake to help carry the mood.  This movie was top notch.

Story:

Overall Battle: LA has a decent storyline.  Marines duking it out with aliens, as they move to secure a group of civilians that were trapped behind alien lines.  Of course, consider a city the size of L.A., why would one small group matter and not the hundreds of others out there.  Don't know?

They go through trials and lose friends.  They battle bitter loss and resentments.  This movie has it all. It made me shed a tear.

The movie ends with.  Right.

Look the special effects rock.  The acting is good.  The battles are amazing, well thought out and filmed.  The aliens and thier tech work.  The aliens are actually very well done.  The tech has just enough rough edges to seat it in reality, and not break the gritty real world feel the filming brings to the movie.

This movie is worth the ticket.

Virus Hunting

So the question is; have you intentionally infected your computer with a virus lately?

For most of you the answer will probably be no.  But there is a small number of people in this world who would answer yes.  That's right, there are people out there who intentionally infect themselves, and they do it for fun.  And no, I am not one of them, at least not yet.  But last week, I found out, one of the guys I work with is.

Yep, I work with an amateur virus hunter, and he says, "It's nothing for me to pop my box a couple of times a week."

Before you get too excited, let me explain:
box = computer
popped = intentionally infect yourself with a virus

When I asked him why, he gave the answer of all great science, "I want to see what it will do."

As good an answer, as anyone could ask for.

So being a fool, I asked how exactly one goes about popping his box and if there were any special tools you needed.  Basically, the tools are free, and you just need to be willing to spend a few hours in prep and recovery.

So for any of you who think this might be fun and want to give it a try; here are the basics.

First, use an old computer if possible.  This is one I already knew, but he did mention it.

Second, mirror your drive while it is virus free, or at least you assume, it is virus free.  The mirror is what you will use to restore your computer, after you have "seen what the malware will do."

Last, download and install Wireshark. This is a pretty impressive piece of freeware used for packet capture and analysis across your network.  You will use it to identify how exactly you were infected and to see if the malware is sending any calls back to home.

When your ready, you proceed to hunt down viruses. Our virus hunting expert suggested a web site, but upon sober reflection I have decided not to post it.  The websites warning banner says it all.

This is a site for computer security specialists and enthusiasts, if you don't know what you are doing, leave now.

And that's why I am not a virus hunter.  Still, I intend to do a little light reading and explore this odd little branch of home hobbies.

Who knows, maybe with a little advice and some knowledge, I just might go out hunting.

The World Is Flat

So there is this great book, thats been out for a few years now.  It is by Thomas L. Friedman, and is called, The World Is Flat.  I only picked it up a few weeks ago because it's on a leadership reading list for work.  Basically, the boss believes that the more we read, the better employees we will be.  I happen to agree.

The premise of The World Is Flat, revolves around the internet revolution that took place in early 2000.  Mr. Friedman reffers to this as Globalization 3.0, to learn about 1.0 and 2.0, read the book.  With Globalization 3.0 the world was basically flattened with the internet and high productivity software.

The Internet allowed us to connect across the globe, and the new software tools developed to take advantage of the internet, allowed us to work around the globe.  More importantly, it allowed companies to work literally 24/7 by sharing the workload out to remote partner sites anywhere in the world.  So if you ever wondered why your account suddenly started working faster, its not that he got faster, but that he exported the books out for somebody else to work on while he slept.

This book has some amazing insight into business, leadership, and the way companies large and small are working today.  So if you want to give the grey matter a gentle workout and learn something new, I would suggest picking yourself up a copy.

After Five Years, Why I Watch Commercials Now

It's been five years since I last watched a TV commercial; thanks inpart to the DVR.  So it might seem strange that a few days ago I started watching them again.  Then again, if you already know about Varolo, maybe not so strange.

About four days ago I stumbled across a link to Varolo.  Being skeptical I took a day and checked the site out.  When I didn't find anything to make my spider sense tingle, I decide to jump in and see what this website was all about.

Basically, Varolo lets you leverage the power of your social network; join it with the social networks of other's, and earn big rewards in doing so.  At this point, you are probably asking yourself the same set of questions I was, when I found the site.  How does it work?  Is it legitimate?  How much is this going to cost me, in both time and money?  Well, let me help you out, and answer these questions for you. I'll start with the big one:

What is this going to cost me?

Nothing!  Varolo is absolutely FREE, to you the user.  Thats right, FREE.  I'll get to how this is possible in a minute.  First a word on your cost in time.  Varolo will take up about 10 minutes a day, in time, thats it.

Second question:

Is it legitimate?

Yes.  Varolo is a real bussiness.  It's based out of Utah, and its a legitimate service.  Check them out yourself, they are above board.

So the last question:

How does it work?

Varolo matches members with advertiser, based on the members profile and current interests.  Simply put, Varolo is a T.V. channel, without the T.V. shows.  Thats right, they just have the commercials; and thats why it only takes about ten minutes a day.

Varolo rewards the user (you), for watching these commercials, in three ways.  First, you earn points, that are redeemable for prizes, with every commercial you watch.  Second, every commercial you watch enters you into the weekly sweepstakes.  Third you earn even more points and earnings the larger your village is.  A village is what Varolo calls your social network of members.

So, you are probably asking why advertisers, would pay Varolo, to give you points and prizes, for watching their commercials?  Thats, an easy one.  Because guys like me haven't watched a single T.V. ad, in five years and the advertisers know it.  Yep, its that easy.  The advertisers know that people are watching fewer commercials thanks to all the new technology out there.  So the advertisers are trying to find new ways to get to the customers.  So that is why they choose Varolo and so should you.

Look, check out the website and see for yourself.  Each one of the links to Varolo, on my post, will take you to the website, allow you to watch the two minute user tour, and let you join my Varolo village.  Once you have joined, you can build your channel profile and start earning points for prizes by watching commercials. 

After you join Varolo, you also get the chance to start building your own Varolo village, and get even more rewards.  Varolo also has some great tips and blogs to help you learn how.

And now for the best part about Varolo.  You don't have to sell anybody anything.  All you do is what you are doing right now.  Watch commercials, surf the web, and post on your favorite social websites, your own link, to your own Varolo village.  And if you are still wondering how its possible that is all you have to do.
Remember what I said earlier.

Varolo lets you leverage the power of your social network; join it with the social networks of other's, and earn big rewards in doing so.

So Join Varolo Today!