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My wife and I wanted to rent a movie and do the “home body” thing this past weekend, so Friday I went to our local video store to see what caught my eye.  We take turns selecting the movies and it was my turn.  The pressure was on.  My mouth was dry.

After wading through the TONS of movies out there, I was leaning toward a George Clooney movie: Leatherheads. My wife and I agree on most romantic comedies and with George Clooney and Rene Zellweger starring, surely this movie is going to be great!

I am also one of those people that scans the cover of the movie box to read the review snippets and there were two placed prominently on the cover to further convince me of the wise choice I was getting ready to make:

“Hilarious!” - Christina Vandre (KARE-TV)

“Clooney and Zellweger are comic gold.” - Kevin Steincross (Fox-TV)

Even though I had never heard of either of those two, I felt that surely they must be in the know when it comes to movies.  “They both work for TV stations”, I mused, “and TV stations are responsible for the things that display on people’s TV screens and movies are also shown on screens.”  The connection was obvious to me.

Selection in hand, I proceeded to the checkout.  In my world, things were moving perfectly.

Upon my arrival home, it became clear to me that my wife did not share my enthusiasm.  She was apprehensive about having to watch a “football” movie.  “But, honey”, I assured her, “two TV people said it was a score.  Look, right here on the cover.  Read that.”  I was confident that she could not deny my logic.  She was unimpressed.

Undaunted, I inserted the movie into the DVD player.  It was about that time that things fell apart.

Leatherheads could have been more entertaining were it made as a silent movie.  At least then there would be justification for keeping one’s eyes open and focused on the screen throughout as opposed to a) dozing off or b) reading the list of ingredients on the box of candy one was eating.

I have seen tomato plants that were more entertaining.

I cannot elaborate on the details of why this movie was a dud. Mainly because of these two reasons:

1. I dozed off in parts.
2. We turned it off halfway through, reasoning that we had already gambled and lost an hour of our lives and, since the movie was going to be 2 hours long, decided to not lose any more.

I can, however, tell you that a box of Good and Plenty candy has NO fat but does have nearly 150 grams of carbohydrates, most of that being sugar .

Here are couple of tech news tidbits that I ran across recently (translation: I am too lazy to do a real blog post):

• According to Nielsen, by the end of the 2008, an estimated 20% of U.S. households will have ditched the phone company and will only have mobile phones (they will be years behind us because we have exclusively used mobile phones since 2003 ).
• A recent software update for the Microsoft Zune gives its owners the ability to use Wi-Fi connections at 9,800 participating U.S. McDonald’s restaurants.  Microsoft partnered up with Wayport to help make that possible.

Secunia is reporting a vulnerability with Autodesk’s Design Review DWF Viewer which can lead to a compromised PC.

The vulnerability stems from a flaw in the ActiveX control including the insecure “SaveAs()” method. If exploited, arbitrary files on the compromised computer can be overwritten.

This vulnerability was originally discovered by “bruiser” from Nine Situations Group and outlined here.  Bruiser tested the vulnerability using Internet Explorer 6 along with Revit Architecture 2009 SP2 and Autodesk Design Review 2009.

DWF is a very popular file format for quickly and easily sending drawing files through email, among other things.  Many CAD users prefer DWF because of its vector based capabilities, small file size and the ability for people to view drawing files without having AutoCad installed.  I previously posted on the benefits of DWF for CAD users.

For all you travelers out there with a bazillion pictures from the hundreds of trips you have taken, here is a pretty cool piece of software that will allow you to Geotag your photos with ease.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools allows photographers to easily geotag photos, assign GPS coordinates, edit a picture’s meta data and lots more.  These types of functions will make it really easy to integrate your photos into Web2.0 mapping software.

There are dozens of programs out there that will do this type of thing and many of them are even open-source, but if you want a set of tools geared toward the professional photographer, this one has some powerful functionality and is priced right at $0.00.

To install Pro Photo Tools, you will need the .Net 3.0 framework in place. You can get that here.

Well, it has been a while since there was a significant laptop recall, but you knew it would happen again.

Sony has issued a voluntary recall of 438,000 Vaio laptop computer due to the possibility of overheating that could potentially burn the user.

According to the statement by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Sony gotten 15 reports of laptops overheating and one of those resulted in the owner receiving a minor burn.  Here are the Sony Vaio laptops included in the voluntary recall:

• VGN-TZ100
• VGN-TZ200
• VGN-TZ300
• VGN-TZ2000

The laptops can possibly short circuit and overheat due to what the CPSC states is an “irregularly positioned wires near the computer’s hinge and/or dislodged screw inside the hinge”.

Shares of Sony are down about 30 percent this year, so this information probably will not help.  If you have one of these laptops, contact Sony toll-free at (888) 526-6219 anytime, or visit Sony’s Web site.