Author: andy

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Two Unrelated Subjects

So, church has been going pretty well, recently. There was a time during the fall/spring where we were losing members of the band to go do other things, making it exceedingly difficult for Brooke and I to leave for the weekend and not be there (not that it’s required that we go, of course, but I feel guilty being gone when it will leave 2 people on stage to do the playing!). Anyway, this past weekend was pretty awesome on that front in that we christened a new drummer for the band! Chris will be back for the summer (he’s been off at college), which was going to relieve me to do some guitar playing, sound running, or **gasp** simply sit out in the congregation and do nothing else. But besides Chris, Steven also is joining up to play bi-weekly (or all the time?), which will help out come fall in that he’s in 8th grade and will be hanging out for conceivably 4+ more years at the church. That means that pressure will be off me having to play in the fall, too! Anyway, Steven did an excellent job on Sunday, especially considering that he’s in 8th grade now and plays as well as I was doing in 10th grade (I started playing drum set in 8th grade…). We also may be getting a youth guitar player sometime over summer, too, which will further aid the ability of musicians to rotate in and out of the band on any given week.

Regardless, I’m pretty happy about these prospects because I really don’t want to leave in 2 years with everything falling apart there. Yanela is running the show, of course, but Brooke and I both do quite a bit of stuff and it’s nice to think that someone will be there to pick up the slack after we head off to the next step in our lives…

Anyway, speaking of “next steps,” I’m heading to Columbia this week to help Mom and Dad move across town. We have lived in the Georgetown subdivision off Scott Blvd. in Columbia for just about 20 years now, and Mom and Dad felt it was about time to move some place a bit different. They’ll be moving out near Columbia Regional Hospital to a much bigger house (…how they’ll fill it up, I have no clue…my vote is to have a “ball pit” room in one of the bedrooms…that’d be pretty awesome…), so it’ll take a little adjustment getting used to a new address, a different exit off I-70, etc.

The best part, of course, is that the new place includes a wet bar…w00t!

So yeah, if you’re in the C-town area this week, lemme know…I may be able to make a little time…assuming Mom doesn’t have all my time monopolized… 😛

Edit: I looked at the date and realized I should say “happy anniversary” to Mom and Dad (#29 this year…) and “happy birthday” to my Grandma (who won’t be seeing this, I’m sure…as she’s now 93 and doesn’t know the first thing about computers). Either way, I hope both parties have a good day! Mom, that means you need to chill out and have a beer amongst the boxes in your living room… 😛

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You know it's bad when a blind guy is better than you…

I heard this mentioned on NPR this morning…they like mentioning these 30 sec. funny stories before the regular news starts…and one of them before 8:30 am mentioned a guy in Alta, IA that bowled a perfect game on Saturday night. This wouldn’t normally be that big a deal, but he’s 78 and legally blind – apparently, he could only see the ball when he picked it up.

Yeah…my high score is still only, like, 160…grrrrrrrr…

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You know it’s bad when a blind guy is better than you…

I heard this mentioned on NPR this morning…they like mentioning these 30 sec. funny stories before the regular news starts…and one of them before 8:30 am mentioned a guy in Alta, IA that bowled a perfect game on Saturday night. This wouldn’t normally be that big a deal, but he’s 78 and legally blind – apparently, he could only see the ball when he picked it up.

Yeah…my high score is still only, like, 160…grrrrrrrr…

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Review: Iron Man

Rightfully considered the first true blockbuster of 2008, Iron Man was released this past weekend and already raked in over $100 million in ticket sales. As per usual, when a Marvel superhero movie comes out, I had to go see it! It was even worth the 35 minute drive to Chesterfield to go see it on the Mega Screen… And overall, I thought it was pretty damned awesome…

The story centers around billionaire Tony Stark, who runs the weapons developer/manufacturer Stark Industries. While in Afghanistan giving a demo of his new missile to the U.S. military, he gets kidnapped by terrorists that want him to build the missile for them in a cave. During the course of the kidnapping, he gets some shrapnel caught in his body that will kill him once it reaches his heart (eh?) – he then develops a mini electromagnet to prevent this from occurring and save his life. In order to escape from the terrorists, he builds an iron suit from left-over missile parts, powered by the generator now in his chest. After escaping, he realizes the error of his ways and decides to do good for humanity, mostly buy building an even better generator and an even better suit to help combat evil around the globe.

The acting by Robert Downey, Jr. is excellent. As many other reviewers have said, and as I thought when his casting was first announced, Downey was born to play Tony Stark. It’s one of those things where there is no one else alive who could possibly play this role. Besides him, the acting amongst the other players was pretty good, but it all pretty much relied on his portrayal of Stark…and he succeeded admirably. The effects, of course, were also top-notch (as should be expected from the first true blockbuster of the year). It was good enough that you knew it was mostly computer generated, but it wasn’t all that easy to tell when Downey was in the suit, or whether the suit was actually CGI.

The thing that gets me about this movie, however, is the story… When I look back on movies like “Spider-man” and “X-men,” you can point to the “origin” aspects of the story, and then the “villain” part of the story. In the case of “Spider-man,” the first half of the movie is spent with Peter Parker figuring out his powers and what he’s going to do with them. The last half has him meeting up with the Green Goblin 3 or 4 times, culminating in a last battle leading to ultimate victory. So far as “X-Men” goes, there wasn’t as much “origin” to the story, but at least there were interactions with Magneto throughout the entire film, making that last scene where he’s defeated much more intense…

“Iron Man,” however, seems to follow the “Fantastic Four” formula of relying mostly on origin story, and then finally having a “boss battle” at the end of the movie…with no real interaction between the protagonist and ultimate antagonist until the very end (by “ultimate,” I mean the guy Iron Man eventually battles…even though he interacts with the villain throughout the movie). “Fantastic Four” was similar in that they coped with their powers for most of the movie, and finally fought Dr. Doom in the last scene…which made me dislike “Four” to an extent.

I think “Iron Man” does a better job of bridging the gap between “origin” and “villain” relatively well, but not as well as “Spider-man” did. So, to that end, I don’t think “Iron Man” is as good a movie, but I still think it was really good and I’ll grab the DVD…

…mostly because “Iron Man 2” has already been green-lit… 😛

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Review: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

So, I was a big fan of Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. It wasn’t reviewed terribly well, but it was arguably the funniest comedy I’d seen in years. As in, I’ll usually go to a comedy and chuckle a bit, or maybe laugh out loud some…but White Castle was to the point where I couldn’t breathe for half the movie. (No Mom, you wouldn’t find it funny…not your kind of humor… :-P)

Therefore, we went and saw the second iteration, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay this weekend, which picks up right as the previous film lets off. The basic premise is that, at the end of “White Castle,” Harold finally kisses the girl of his dreams, but promptly finds out that she’s off to Amsterdam. So…Harold and Kumar, being the stoners that they are, are all about getting on a plane and heading off…

Well, the crazy old white lady on the plane sees our Indian (read: Al Qaeda) and Korean (read: North Korean) protagonists, gets freaked out, comedy ensues, and the Air Marshalls send the two off to Guantanamo. After a brief stay (as in, like, 2 minutes), they escape and make it to Florida with a boat of Cubans. Anyway, the pair go through all kinds of shenanigans as they make their way to Texas to clear their names…

In all honesty, I’m glad I saw the movie, but it wasn’t as good as the first one. It still had breathless funny moments, but it wasn’t quite half the movie…maybe a quarter, this time. The cameos alone are hilarious, as Ed Helms, Rob Corddry, David Krumholtz, Beverly D’Angelo, Christopher Meloni, Jon Reep (of “Last Comic Standing” fame), George W. Bush (yeah…that George W. Bush…) and, of course Neil Patrick Harris.

This isn’t the kind of movie you see for the acting (which was good, of course), or the special effects (there weren’t any), but it was quite funny and worth the money…especially if you liked the first one.

And yeah…watching a George W. look-a-like smoke weed and speak ill of his parents isn’t funny…I don’t know what is…

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Stupid Blue Shells…

(Courtesy of Friday’s Penny Arcade cartoon, of course…)

So, I’m very much looking forward to Mario Kart Wii, which should be arriving on Tuesday. There aren’t all that many video games that Brooke will consistently play with me, but this is one series that she’s always enjoyed…or at least seemed to… 😛

We also grabbed a Nintendo DS this past week, just to complete my collection of modern Nintendo products… More seriously, we got Mario Kart DS and Brain Age 2 to help entertain us for the likely long car rides that are coming up this summer, whether it be spent down to southern Florida with Brooke’s family, or whether we make a trip down to Houston (Brooke seems to want to visit Liz…I figure I could tag along and visit Brett/Andy/Nierling, as well). Either way, 19+ hour car rides warrant a video game system, especially when I get headaches when I try and read in a car. That, and I saw how useful a DS is when you’re waiting at the airport to catch a flight…or while actually flying, for that matter. Anyway, if you’ve got Mario Kart DS, lemme know…I suck at it…but I’m trying 😛

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Mmmm…new toys…

So, we went ahead and switched from DISH Network to AT&T’s U-Verse service, which means that we still have AT&T DSL and phone service, but now our TV comes through the phone line, also… U-Verse is amongst the first (along with Verizon’s FiOS service) that uses fiber optic cabling to increase bandwidth along phone lines, thus allowing robust television signals to travel on there as well as digital data and analog phone signals. The benefits are as follows, from our perspective:

  • Two receivers (i.e. two TVs) rather than just one that can access cable programing
  • HD programming cheaper than DISH (w00t!)
  • More channels (including ones we’ll actually watch)
  • Four tuners for television viewing (i.e. we can watch programs on two separate TVs and record two other channels simultaneously, whereas we could only do two channels total under DISH)
  • We can set up recordings remotely…which is awesome… So yeah, through the internet, we can tell our DVR to record something even if we aren’t at home to do it through the DVR directly…w00t, indeed!

    • These three primary things for ~$10-$15 more a month than we were originally spending… So yeah, we’re spending a bit more…but we’re also getting more, and personally, getting more value per monetary increase in cost.

    Anyway, I do have a concern or two with this new service, primarily in that everything now goes through a cute little box sitting next to my computer. Meaning, our DSL modem and router are now combined…but not only that…the TV signal now goes through that same box. If that box decides it doesn’t want to work anymore, we will not have TV or internet until AT&T can come out and fix and/or replace it. I guess it’s my same argument against the iPhone, in that if my phone dies, then my iPod and organizer go with it… There are certain things I like to be separate, and this may be one of them. Then again, perhaps it’s the wave of the future, so I should just get used to it.

    So yeah, this will be an interesting experiment. Everything seems to work well so far, though!

    …now, they just need SciFi in HD and I’ll be happy… 🙂

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    Long Live the Wesley House

    So, Wesley House was pretty important to Brooke and me, and took up a great deal of time for the five years I was at Truman. Mike sent me a few YouTube videos of the band playing in Troy, IL (Troy United Methodist Church) and I must say, it brought back memories. The crazy thing is that Mike, himself, was the only person I recognized in the video. I know it’s been 3 years since we left, but still…it’s great to see all those new people as part of the band! And also good to see that the band is thriving, and so is the Wesley House as a whole (despite the state-wide organization deciding it isn’t a “vital ministry” anymore and not funding it anymore…grrrrrrr…).

    Anyway, good times, yo… Good job, Wesley House Praise Band. Great to see you all in action again!