The family was sleeping during “Criminal Minds” Wednesday night…thought I should share the photo op with everyone else… 😛
On a side-note, according to my WordPress Dashboard, this is my 400th post on this blog. Crazy times, yo.
They was sleepin’…
A weekend of movies…
It’s nice not having much to do for a change! So, I caught up on all kinds of movies this weekend…
I guess I need to get some more movies lined up for next weekend… Recommendations?
What I want for Christmas 2009
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
It pays to shop early 🙂
New Toys
So, got all kinds of good stuff for Christmas this year, but one thing I didn’t get (and sorely needed) was a new iPod. I’ve had an iPod Mini for a few years now and, while it’s served me well, the battery is nearly dead. It’s to the point where I leave the car after having it on the charger, walk the dog around the block (in the cold), and try to turn it on inside only to have it tell me there’s no battery life left. Apple charges something like $100 to replace the battery in an old iPod, so a new one only made sense…
With money from Christmas (thanks, everyone!), I offset the purchase of a 4 GB iPod Nano (4th Gen), and it’s a glorious machine. One of the neater things I’m doing with it, as it has a full-color screen now, is downloading video podcasts to waste my “valuable” time with.
Problem was…I had a Griffin iTrip FM Transmitter so I could listen in the car. The thing worked pretty well, for the most part, and transmitted at 87.9 FM, which is almost never used anywhere (i.e. no interference, so relatively clear signal). Well, that iTrip doesn’t work with the new Nanos, so I needed a replacement. Wally World had one for $20, so I grabbed that. Belkin, the company that makes it, even has a website set up to give you an idea as to which stations in your area should be available for use with their transmitter. However, Belkin’s transmitters only go down to 88.1…sooooo, of the four stations they suggested, none of them worked well at all. I even went back and grabbed another Belkin for $30…perhaps it was a better model or something. Yeah, also crap. Didn’t work. Nada. I went to Walmart.com to look around and the user ratings for those two transmitters were both 1 star out of 5…so…not so good…
Anyway, went to Best Buy today for a THIRD transmitter. I grabbed this one, a DLO TransDock Micro FM transmitter. It was on sale, thankfully, but cost considerably more than the Belkins from Wal-mart…and, I guess you get what you pay for, ’cause it works like a charm. It searches for the best channel wherever you are and produces a signal I can actually pick up with the car.
Long story short, I’m back to iPod functionality, which is beautiful. All kinds of happy now 🙂
On another, unrelated note, I’ve essentially taken this week off of work, catching up on games and movies that I got for Christmas. Total, I got 10 movies (8 DVD, 2 BluRay), so it’ll take me awhile to get through them all. Got some clothes, some money, some candy…etc., etc., etc.
The best present, however, is my Bluetooth mouse (kinda like that one, but not quite)…thanks, Dad (you too, Mom, but I know Dad picked it out, so he gets the most thanks… :-P).
Carol of the Christmas Pickle
So, many a year ago, we were given a plastic pickle Christmas tree ornament because, apparently, it’s something of a German tradition (though Wikipedia says it’s “completely of American origin”) to hide a pickle on the tree and have the kids look for it. The first one to find the pickle is supposed to get an extra present (although, neither Kristen nor I ever did!).
Anyway, with this in mind, please enjoy the following! 🙂
A tele-what?
So, I was listening to an interesting “On Point With Tom Ashbrook” from NPR during my various runnings around tonight whilst they discussed young people in the digital age. They were largely talking about how youth today, whether in middle school or college are constantly “connected” via text messaging, e-mail, Facebook and IM. The discussion was sparked by a recent study saying that having your kids on the internet all the time may not be a bad thing, necessarily (a link to the study is on the On Point website).
It didn’t really get me thinking about anything specific, but a little about my history with similar forms of “connectedness.” My oldest IM name is alinsenb17…which means I started it when I was 17…which means that I will have been using AIM for a decade next year (eeesh!). Before that, I was already e-mailing “pen pals” of sorts and using another chat program, ICQ, that I don’t really use anymore (if I remember right, I was using ICQ for a good amount of time before AIM, meaning that I’ve actually been IMming for longer than 10 years already).
It’s also rather crazy just how many people are online at a given time, and generally available to “chat.” At the time of this writing (9:00 PM CST), there are 14 people on my Facebook Chat, 12 on Google Chat, 2 on MSN Messenger, and 7 on AIM. Nice way to stay connected, and still kinda crazy that all these people still use IM services when text messaging has largely taken over for instant messaging via computer. There was a time, back in my first year at Truman, where I’d have 9 AIM windows open at one time, with 9 separate conversations going at once…which was (obviously) difficult to manage.
I guess the part that really intrigues me about this is that I’ve been doing IM for 10 years, and e-mail for a little longer, and there are still people that don’t have computers, let alone an e-mail account, let alone an IM account of some form. I realize it’s a “different generation,” but I wonder how it’ll all, eventually, equal out. We’re already starting to see some integration of all these protocols, where one can couple their Facebook status with text messaging, or both of those with their Twitter account (which is a separate beast entirely).
Will it come to a point where all of these separate forms of communication (social networking, text messaging, e-mail, IM, voice/video chat) are all integrated into a single protocol? Where someone can communicate with someone else with the touch of a button?
Oh wait…that’s called a “telephone“…
Auto Bailout
In the words of Jon Stewart: “Wall Street lost $7 trillion without selling anything — at least when Detroit loses money, we get cars.”
“I think I killed it…”
So, a few nights ago, I tried installing Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) on my PS3… This is a version I know relatively little about, except that it’s based on Red Hat/Fedora (which I haven’t used in years) and it classically has been used for Macs, as they used PowerPC processors back in the day. As the PowerPC and the Cell Processor in the PS3 are related, YDL is specifically geared to run on it. There aren’t really any specific benefits to having Linux running on my PS3, except that I can potentially plug in a keyboard/mouse and do computing on a 32″ HD TV screen…or stream content from upstairs (Linux server box) down to my TV…or stream a variety of Flash-based TV shows to the TV without having to fight with the PS3’s installed web browser.
Anyway, I flipped through a few tutorials and used this one from PS3grid.net. Essentially, just as on a PC, you need to format the hard drive to make a 10 GB partition capable of housing the Linux install, leaving the rest for the PS3 to use. The guide says NO DATA WILL BE DELETED.
Not so much.
Apparently, it doesn’t work like it does on a PC, where the formatting simply resizes the existing partition and makes room for a new one, deleting (essentially) no data from the existing drive. The PS3, on the other hand, formatted the whole thing in order to get Linux on there…sigh…
Long story short, I had to re-download all the games I’d purchased through PSN, but thankfully, some of my progress through games (online progress, at least) was saved to external PSN servers. However, my progress through the single-player campaign of Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet were both lost (along with Wipeout HD and Burnout Paradise…), so now I’ll have to go back and re-play what I lost.
My holiday season is now planned, I guess!
Edie: Wonder Dog
So, Edie isn’t the happiest dog when we leave her alone at someone else’s place. She was kind enough to hurt herself over the summer at Brooke’s parent’s house by getting her mouth stuck in the cage doors of the kennel she was in…so this time, at my parent’s house, we locked her up in Pepper’s old kennel (which is a bit bigger and constructed differently than ours).
Well, we got home from church and dinner (a total of, like, 4 – 4.5 hrs?) and found her loose inside the house. “What the heck,” we say…
We go downstairs to check out how exactly she got the door open. Apparently, as the picture above shows, she didn’t get the door open – she tore a new hole in the bars…
Needless to say, this is getting a bit ridiculous. To top it all off, once loose, she got into our cooler and stole some of my deer jerky (courtesy of Uncle Mike…thanks!) and ate some leftover cheese cake “bites,” keeping her awake through most of the night.
Grrrrrr…
Review: Quantum of Solace
Wow, I haven’t seen a movie in nearly forever, but I did finally go see the new Bond movie, “Quantum of Solace,” over the weekend. This one picks up shortly after the end of “Casino Royale,” where Bond is out for vengeance against the people responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd. It’s a search that takes him all over the world, from Italy to London to Bolivia, with excellent (as expected) car chases, fight scenes and explosions. What else could one want from a Bond movie?!
Well…a little bit more than that… I have a few qualms with this movie, and while it was quite good, I don’t regard it as good as the previous outing. First of all, I appreciate the use of “shaky cam,” as it gives you the feeling that you’re chasing/being chased with the main character. This is the same problem I had with “The Bourne Identity,” where the “shaky cam” was used almost exclusively, leading to closer fight scenes where you couldn’t see the action from a very good view. The later iterations of the “Bourne” series pared that down a bit and got a good mix, but in all the fight scenes where I’d like to actually see some of the action, I think they could have zoomed out a bit with the camera.
Secondly, Bond movies aren’t exactly well-known for their stories, but I thought “Casino Royale” actually had a somewhat decent one (again…for a Bond movie…). This one really seems abstract to me, where the “villain” is a bad guy, but not really bent on “world domination” or “world destruction.” He wants to make some money off third-world countries. It just doesn’t seem like he and Bond really have any connection. Like he’s “just another guy.” You could make the same “just wants to make money” claim off Le Chiffre from “Casino Royale,” but in that case, at least the money was being used to fund terrorist organizations. I guess I just wanted a bit more of a connection between the guys than simply “he is bad and I should stop him.” It doesn’t seem like there’s any anxiousness to the situation, where Bond could take him down at any time: there is no countdown clock to the end of the world.
Finally, the general story that these two movies seem to follow. Old school Bond movies are good about having a single story arc taking place in a given movie, with very little tie-in to the previous movie (at least, of any significance). “Quantum of Solace” is a direct sequel to “Casino Royale,” so theoretically, it should significantly move the story forward from where it was, as opposed to being “stand-alone” as traditional Bond movies are. This one feels like it’s more “stand-alone” than “sequel” in the way the story is set up in that it takes the lead off the previous movie reminds us of some of the questions we had at the end…and then continues on to not answer those questions. At the end of “Quantum,” we actually get the opportunity to have them answered…only to have Bond walk off into the dark, cold night without telling us. Seriously? If anything, more questions are now put on the table alongside the existing ones. If you’re going to do a true sequel, you’d better wrap up the previous story line, or at least parts of it, before you go on adding more and more questions to the pile.
That said (and those are my three qualms…while relatively big, they aren’t all _that_ important in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think), the action sequences were still top-notch, Daniel Craig still gets the award for “most beat-up looking Bond of them all,” and the ladies are as lovely as ever. A “pass” can be given on the story, but again, since when is “story” the important part of a Bond movie?
In short, “Casino Royale” is a better movie overall, but this one is still a fun ride and likely the best action movie you’ll see this holiday season.