Working hard today with my good people Nick and Isaac, the heat and humidity swayed the discussion away from our work and towards the great topic of animal movies. The discussion started with my bad impersonation of Hank Azaria’s hilarious Spanish accent in American Sweethearts (a terrible movie, btw, oddly full of Home Alone-style crotch injury humour).

So it began: Speaking of bad movies… Nick claims to have once watched MVP: Most Valuable Primate and House Party featuring Kid ‘n Play in one night. A debate ensued over which sport the athletic primate in MVP played; baseball or hockey. A trip to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) proved Nick to be correct, it was an ice-bound chimp who, according to the cover image “…Skates a little faster… Shoots a little harder… And is driving everyone Bananas!“

Isaac and I, sure we had seem that monkey playing baseball, were perplexed. I was convinced that Charlie Sheen had starred opposite a sporting primate.
Nick claimed I was thinking of Emilio Estevez. This lead to a theory that Emilio Estevez was a clone of Charlie Sheen produced for the comedy classic Men At Work, which nick claims to have seen twice.

Isaac assured me that it wasn’t Sheen (or his clone), but the guy from Friends. Back to the IMDB where a search for Friends points us to Matt LeBlanc, whose resume includes Ed, a monkey baseball movie which boasts “Minor league. Major Friendship.“

Other amazing facts learned from IMDB:

• There was a three sequels to Air Bud (the basketball-dog movie): Air Bud: The Golden Reciever, Air Bud: World Pup, and Air Bud IV: Seventh Inning Fetch.
• There is an MVP II.
• Kid ‘n Play is actually Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, respectively.
• 
  Animals don’t get listed in the credits (so we can’t tell if the Ed is actually the same monkey as the Most Valuable Primate).

Aside from hysteria caused by photos of monkeys in sports uniforms, this little conversational aside brought a few other issues to light. First, that the IMDB is a fantastic website. You can search by actor, director, producer, movie, etc. More importantly, it became clear that instead of ‘building powerful web based solutions’ as we do so well, we should be a think-tank, paid to play Mario Cart and extract humour from the mundane.

I thought that ThinkGeek had cool geek stuff, and they still do, and since I’ve run Linux in the past, I justified buying a ‘Chicks Dig Unix‘ shirt.

However, I just discovered The Apple Stuff Store and every ounce of poser in my body wants that unjustifiable original Apple Lapel Pin.

A link found on MetaFilter pointed me to MSNBC’s The Week in Pictures. There are some interesting photos and they have an archive that goes back three years. Unfortunately, their JavaScript-based navigation makes it difficult to link to individual photos.

A couple of photos that caught my eye: 1 & 2.

I know we try to keep AOV a bit less personal so we don’t become an angsty blog, but I’d like fire off a quick note all the same.

Mad props go out to all my pals that threw me a birthday thing at the JunkYard. Also thanks to Kris for buying me a tasty coffee-like-thing afterwards at Cafe Diem.

The crew at design portal k10k.net (aka Kaliber10000) are taking the summer off. Good for them and thanks for the fine animated jakob nielsen.

My place of work is strange and wonderful. The perks are many and the hours are long. Being in close quarters for a long time with a group of people can breed a bizarre little sub-culture.

What follows is a post in its entirety made on our company intranet. The frequent and unproductive nature of my posts on this company intranet was part of the impetus for aov itself. I felt that this particular post was representative of my life at silverorange.

Subject: Bananas are way cool
Date: 2:56 AM Sunday, July 15
Posted By: Dan James

I was at the Ken’s Corner Petro Can doing some grocery shopping tonight (I barely escaped with my life) and I picked up some bananas. They were in suprisingly good shape for being at a Gas station for more than 10 minutes.

Anyway, while eating my second juicy banana of the evening I began to wonder about the nutritional value of this oddly shaped fruit. Google was able to give me a nice list of pages to look at. The most informative one was this one. Not only was it informative, it was halirious. I think we should hire this guy as our creative writer (sorry Daniel). My favourite quote (located on the nutrition page) was “Way to go Bananas!”.
This site, although entertaining and informative, is somewhat scary. It is owned and operated by Dole (fruit company) and is all about how you should eat 5 bananas a day (look at the web address).

Have time to waste? Me neither. Still, I managed to find time to play Tux Racer and so should you. I was searching for K-Meleon, an open-source lightweight web browser based on Mozilla’s rendering engine (which is quite good). Anyhow, the K-Meleon website is missing (if you know anything about the project status or where the website went, let me know).

A Google search for K-Meleon took me to SoureForge.net, a site where open-source developers can host their projects for free. One of these projects is Tux Racer. It’s a simple and fun little open source racing game (I’ve always loved racing games. I rule at MarioCart and loved F-Zero). It ran nicely on my machine (a PIII500/256MB/Voodoo3) at the bad-ass resolution of 1600 by 1200 (you have to edit a text config file to change the resolution).

The best part is there are only a few levels so far, so you don’t have to worry about a long term addiction (like matt has to flash mini-golf).

They’re just too dangerous to have wandering around untamed.

While complaining can give one a feeling of superiority, however empty and short lived it may be, good things do happen. A good thing for anyone purchasing computer components, especially in Atlantic Canada, is Robotnik Discount Computers.

Their website is, well, lively (as the hilarious graphic to the right indicates) but don’t be too quick to judge them. The have consistently competitive prices (ridiculously cheap RAM right now) and their shipping is prompt. They claim to have live help, but I have never needed it.

Treat yourself to some RAM while it’s cheap. For $32, you can get 128MB, which will make a world of difference.

Belated, as always.