linsenbardt.net
A Blog for Brooke and Andy
05.14.12 Dinner
May 17th
Pancakes, bacon, and strawberries and bananas. Meg and I talked about having pancakes on our way home, but then when dinner time came, she told me “I wanna cheese quesadilla pwease, Mama.” Huh?
05.13.12 Dinner
May 16th
Grilled Italian sausage and peppers and onions with egg noodles. This has also been my lunch so far this week and it’s still good!
Review: The Avengers
May 14th
Let’s be honest: Was there really a chance this movie wouldn’t be good? When it was written and directed by Joss Whedon and contained just about every star imaginable from recent Marvel-based movies? When it’s rocking 93% on Rotten Tomatoes? When it made $1 billion in the span of less than 2 weeks?
Yeah. It was good. And it’s not very surprising.
There are a variety of reasons why the movie is very, very strong, from the quality of writing, to the effects, to the “star power,” to the “let’s throw money at it and surely something awesome will come out” mentality to its production. However, I’ll focus on two things in particular.
First, Joss Whedon had his work cut out for him because much of the “origin story” was already told in other movies, including Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk. Almost every character that showed up in this movie was already introduced in a previous one, which allowed Whedon the freedom to spend his 2.5 hrs of screen time on the story at hand: not the description of each character and why we should care. I’ve talked with a few people that have seen the movie and now want to go back and see the “origin stories” of the characters they missed. It didn’t detract from their enjoyment of this movie, but it certainly inspired them to seek out additional material to help enhance the experience of this film.
Second, while I expected the dialog to be witty and amusing, I didn’t expect genuine laugh-out-loud moments. By no means is The Avengers a “comedy,” though it has its share of hilarious parts that don’t feel forced in the least. The theater cracked up on multiple occasions, typically centering on the Hulk, who ends up stealing the show during the latter 30 min of the movie. So even if you aren’t necessarily a “comic book movie” fan, I think you’ll appreciate the humor that comes of it.
Aside from these things, generally speaking, the movie is so well-paced that you forget how long you’ve been sitting in the seat. Each character is introduced so as to “ease you” in, rather than having the entire team show up together, leading to a longer slog through the film (Fantastic Four comes to mind). Heck, you don’t even see the Hulk until relatively late in the movie! But when you do, you’re ready for it. I guess I’m saying that no one over-stays their welcome and the characters all fit together in a very cohesive manner, which is very difficult to do when you’re dealing with a movie consisting of 8+ main characters. It’s obviously an ensemble cast.
I also paid the exorbitant fee required of seeing it in IMAX 3D. Let’s just say that this was another case where the money was worth it. The 3D wasn’t over-done and, overall, enhanced the viewing experience without too much “look at me, I’m in 3D!!” shenanigans. I’ll be satisfied with my Bluray release in a few months (when I definitely buy it…), but I’m glad my first exposure to the movie was in IMAX 3D.
To summarize, it’s a spectacular movie. In some ways, it’s a good thing that most of these characters have their own franchises, so we’ll have a few years of their own sequels before we get the inevitable “Avengers 2.”
To SSD, or not to SSD?
May 9th
Last year, my laptop died. Rather than replace it, I opted for upgrading my desktop PC to make it gaming-capable, among other things, as it tends to be far cheaper and is much, much easier to upgrade when components go on sale. At the time, I did the bulk of the upgrades, but I didn’t get new hard drives, as they were still functional and I didn’t think they were as important to spend extra cash on when I could put that money into a new processor or RAM. So, since that time, I’ve been using a previous-generation hard drive on my next-generation motherboard.
The drive I was using was 160 GB, so not exactly a large capacity to work with. As lots of stuff is moving toward cloud-based storage, and as we have a 400 GB external hard drive, 160 GB was still enough to do most things, though it felt “cramped” at times. Hard drives are relatively cheap things to upgrade, where you can get a 1 terabyte hard drive (that’s 1000 GB) for about $100, and frequently cheaper. However, that upgrade would give me all kinds of capacity, but not a huge jump in “speed.”
There are a variety of reasons for this, but part of it is that traditional hard drives actually have spinning parts, much like a record player. As an illustration, in the image above, you can see the compact disc-looking thing, and what also looks like a needle. Obviously, the drive’s operation is far more complicated than “it’s just like a compact disc,” but in many ways, that’s really all it’s doing. Bigger and faster, but the same basic concept (well, and without lasers…).
Enter the “solid state drive,” or “SSD.” Unlike a regular hard drive, this one has no moving parts. In fact, it works much more similarly to the SD card you put in your camera. For this reason, these guys tend to be fast in comparison with a traditional drive. However, the cost is also far higher when in a “price per gigabyte” paradigm. The highest volume SSD I can find sits at 960 GB, and is running $3,150 right now.
In order to run Windows and an array of programs (comfortably), you need over 100 GB, and then a second drive to store your pictures, videos, music, documents, and so on. Thus, when this 120 GB drive from Mushkin hit $100, I was ready to take the plunge. $100 for 120 GB was my “benchmark” price for such a thing, when it would be worth it to spend the cash on a low-capacity device when I could get 1 TB in a traditional drive for the same money.
After some hiccups concerning the cable I was using, I finally got the thing installed this past Sunday, up and running with Windows 7 Ultimate, a variety of games and “useful” programs, and a formatted 160 GB traditional hard drive (my old one) to be used exclusively for media storage. In running a Windows-based test on my various components, where the old hard drive was definitely limiting in my overall performance, now my drive is the fastest thing in there, and my processor is what’s lagging (though not my much). The computer boots up and is ready to use in about 20 sec, which is far faster than the minutes it used to take.
Overall, I’m a believer. Where people used to say “add some RAM to ‘pep up’ that old computer,” the SSD is, increasingly, what people are going to suggest. For $100, you can improve your computer’s speed to a ridiculous degree, turning it into the speed demon it once was when you first bought it.
