Okay, first thing first.  She’s fat.  Very fat.  I know we’re supposed to be accepting and non-judgmental but this girl is so big it distracted me the entire time.  I couldn’t focus any time she was in a skit.  She should not be on TV.

Second, because of her fatness, her voice was choked and strained the entire time. If it wasn’t bad enough she was visually distracting, she was also distracting to listen to. It made me want to cough. Gross.

Ok, but maybe she’s a great actress?

Wrong.

She’s not even remotely good. She messed up repeatedly. She belongs in a high school drama presentation. She was hard to understand and messed up very clear cues. So I had to look up the trailer for the one single movie she’s in. Precious. Oh. My. God.

Wanna guess what she is in that movie? Fat. Fat, ugly, stupid, and poor. Oh, and black. Cause that’s really important right? The entire trailer was her just looking like a moron.

So, is SNL really this strained for appearances? Maybe so, considering the musical guest was MGMT… halfway through the second song they just started hemorrhaging musical vomit onto their instruments. Literally, it would have been no worse with 5 year old t-ball batters hitting the instruments.

I mean they have good hosts. Recently Zach Galifianakis, Jude Law, Tina Fey, and Ryan Phillippe were hosts. All great shows. But this one should be flushed down the proverbial crapper.

I would seriously rather have no SNL than this sack of dog crap. Seriously SNL, stop grasping for turds… have some class. And get a really great actor back. There is nobody on the current cast I would say stands out and truly impresses me. Not even Andy Samberg. He’s good, but very niche and can’t be described as “hilarious.”

I’m thinking about one instance in particular: Engadget’s daily roundup feature that works from number of comments.  I thought it worked really well because it showed posts which were particularly controversial or engaging to readers.  It seemed they were more willing to comment if the post was particularly thought-provoking.

But it broke.  I’m about 99.9% sure both the Engadget editorial crew and the designers of the site did not see this coming.  It broke because they had to turn comments off due to unruly visiters.  So now, someone’s fancy idea of using comments as a method of implementing this feature of the website has completely screwed them.  A major feature.  On a major website.  Broken.

See all those floored purple dots?  Those are supposed to be all along the vertical depending on the number of comments for the particular post.

So how could this have  been avoided?  Proper methods of course!  Why base this major feature on comments if post views, trackbacks, and other activity are available?

In retrospect, they really should have seen this coming.  I mean, they even had a similar issue back in 2008.  That was before the major website overhaul, too.

Maybe I have this type of foresight because I’m an engineer.  Or maybe they just have crappy designers at Engadget.  Or maybe they knew about the potential problem and just didn’t care.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like my designs to break.  Think about how you’re implementing that new feature and determine if it’s hacky and going to break at the first sign of stress.  It will probably make your customers much more happy with your work.

For starters, to be authentic(ish), it really needs to be a CRT monitor rather than LCD.  Those aren’t really common anymore, so we might have to scrounge around to find one, or settle for an LCD.  Also, what about the style?  Standup?  Sit down?  How many players?  Arcade games are traditionally known because the controls scheme fits with the particular game in the cabinet.  Further complicating this is whether or not I’ll have different emulators or just one.  Also, there needs to be a launcher of some sort, because I don’t really want to use a mouse and keyboard.  Maybe wireless tucked away for emergencies, but overall, I would like everything to be joystick controlled.

So with all of this in mind and much more, I started googling.  Apparently, there are many people who’ve already done this!  I’m going to research it a bit more, but it looks intriguing.

Here’s Ana early in the day scoping out the waters.

Ana Fishing

Later in the day, after she was all chilly, I grabbed a photo of Tatyana when she hopped up on a rock.  Her hair is all messy cause I made her take off her hat.  :-)

Tatyana Fishing

On the way home Sunday, I had Mark snap this one in front of some snowy mountains at the divide.  This was at some 11,000 ft or so elevation.

Travis and Tatyana at the Continental Divide

This sequence was snapped with my sister fishing on the left side in the distance and Tatyana fishing on the right side up close.  Unfortunately, I was being very sloppy with the picture taking this weekend — sis was overexposed and wifey was blurry because I had my aperture too low.  C’est la vie.

Turqoise Lake Scenery

Everyone wandered about that day trying to find a good spot to fish.  I ended up helping the kids with a fire while Taty was out on this peak of land.  I snapped this panorama while standing in the cove.

Fishing at Turqoise Lake

On the way home we stopped at the Continental Divide when we took Loveland Pass.  This is a very large panorama that extended 360 degrees, but I pulled out a few photos because Autostitch was getting a bit confused.  Tatyana was sporting a tomboy look while we did this little hike.

Tatyana at the Continental Divide