Tag Archive for 'TV'

still don’t know

Published on September 12, 2009 in Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , , .

The Palm Pre is out of the running; I got to feel one at work and the keyboard is just too small. I’m a texter with big thumbs. So, it’s back to a waiting game… wait for that first android phone’s price and date to hit Verizon, the phone should be a Motorola with that spiffy new Motoblur UI slapped on top of Android … or wait for the Nuvifone, which isn’t Android and doesn’t have a release date or price yet (or carrier, officially),  but will almost certainly have the best GPS and probably handle gmail without any problems, at least. Or give in and get an iPhone; It’s so tempting.

In other news:

Work starts back up soon, one meeting next week and then officially back to a regular schedule the following week. I think we have Fridays off this season.

Got the annoying clicking noise the rear wheel(s) of my car were making fixed… it took three tries, but we got it done. Now I hear every click and creak the car makes when I hit bumps and stuff… still need to do whatever needs to be done about the little ding in the windshield.

And we’ve been using our game consoles a lot over the break… picked up the X-Men Origins: Wolverine for xBox 360 and Fat Princess for PS3 … and I might dig into our most recent purchase, Mini Ninjas during this last week off. Fall TV season be damned, we’re playing our video games!

‘tween-season coming soon

Published on May 10, 2009 in Family & Friends and Photo. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

I am looking forward to sleeping in more than one day a week… and being able to take some mini-vacations. There’s still all the season wrap stuff to get through, first, though. It seems an impossible task, right now, as I’m feeling completely exhausted. I guess that’s to be expected after an overnight for work, followed immediately by the wedding of our friends Jessica and Jason. This week shouldn’t be too bad. At some point, though, I need to start helping mom with her quilting shop web site.

Right now, sitting at the desk at the Y, all I can really think about is seeing Star Trek. I’ve heard so many good things about it… sure, some classic trek fans have their issues, but it’s trying to reboot the Star Trek world, not continue it. With a bunch of the Fringe team behind the writing and production, it has to be good.
update: Star Trek didn’t happen tonight, but we did a lot of research into how to set up a clothesline for Patti for Mother’s Day. Hopefully we’ll fit Star Trek in, tomorrow.

Good things coming up: more days off, mini-vacations, new Fable II downloadable content, macbook

In the bummer zone: Garmin announced more delays for the Nuvifone. The android phones are looking more and more attractive, even though they don’t have turn-by-turn directions, yet. Unfortunately, the only android phone even rumored for Verizon has a crappy-looking keyboard. If I didn’t think I’d miss the real keyboard, I’d already have broken down and gone with the iPhone. In the meantime, my phone is surviving… only shutting itself off once or twice a day.

my fault, sorry

Published on February 4, 2008 in Family & Friends, Photo and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

So, I’ve been reading a lot more, lately. Reading instead of doing my homework for adventure ed seems to be my favorite pastime. I reread Childhood’s End around Christmas. I finally decided to give it another read after I heard about Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday. Sarah’s mom picked me up a cheap hardcover copy of Anansi Boys on the clearance rack of a book store in the Borders Outlet at Gurnee Mills and I read it almost immediately. Sarah challenged me to read a book I wouldn’t finish in two days and suggested House of Leaves. I think I spent five to seven days on it. I remember when Drew lived in Woonsocket the first time, He and Candace were reading it, maybe, possibly they were just admiring it, I never really talked to him about it, cause I wasn’t reading it. I suppose I should ask him if he ever did end up actually reading the whole thing. I started American Gods on Saturday. As I’m reading, I get to a part where they visit The House on the Rock, up in Wisconsin, and I can see each room as he’s describing it. I think about all the pictures that I took when Sarah and I went there and pop onto Flickr to check some of them out… and they’re not on Flickr. I somehow managed to not post any of them or mention the visit in my blog at all. I guess it wasn’t until November or so that I decided I want to write here more often.

Sometime in late September, Sarah and I took a trip up to Wisconsin to see a play at an outdoor theater. We booked a hotel stay with the tickets and then planned a couple little adventures around the show. We saw [most of] the Mount Horeb trolls and had a wonderful dinner there. We visited the House on the Rock and took two of the three tours. I really got a kick out of the 60s/70s vibe to all the rugs and appliances and the various collections were really awesome… There was also a life-size whale & giant squid battle that reminded me of Childhood’s End [and the They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 album cover], but the little plaque said nothing of taking its influence from the book. We saw the show at the outdoor theater… in the rain. It was very wet, but the show was funny. There were some near-spills due to wet stage and a complete false start, due to a downpour about a minute into the first scene. We also picked up some meat on a detour on the way home from a favorite butcher of the family. It was a mini-vacation, it was a lot fun and I still don’t know how I failed to mention it here at all.

spindleI went through the pictures last night and picked out some decent ones and added them to my flickr. As I logged in to flickr, I shuddered at the thought of it becoming a Microsoft-owned and controlled site. The Microhoo merger seems like an all around bad idea to me. Maybe I’m still upset about Microsoft taking over HoTMaiL. I certainly stopped using it for anything but junk after that and it’s pretty close to unusable, now, with all the crazy Windows Live crap they turned it into. Yahoo didn’t ruin flickr. Hopefully, if that merger happens, Microsoft won’t either… but their online track record is pretty bad.

Before going through the pictures, though, I watched the game. I formally apologize to all of my friends back east who care about sports and to the Patriots for watching the game. I was completely aware that every Patriots game I watch turns into a loss for them, but I really wanted to see if there were any really funny commercials. In my defense, they were still in the lead when I paused it for dinner. So they may have lost while I was eating and not while I was actually watching… but I did return to the TV and watch the rest of the game. So it’s most likely my fault. Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your perfect season.

and we’re back

Published on November 12, 2007 in Family & Friends, Music, Photo and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

hacked… something about world writable folders, lots of accounts, not just mine. I didn’t even know I had any world writable ones. I had to go through and change them all and then test things to make sure everything still worked. I’m still doing it now, actually. After I post this, I gotta see if it worked and see if all the logs worked and then experiment with posting from the phone again. It took a lot of time and effort because my backup wouldn’t quite restore correctly. Had to kinda build a place for the site from scratch and then import it in piece by piece. Anyway, I think it’s all back now.

Thankfully this happened early Saturday morning, so I was completely distracted by the fact that I was going to see They Might Be Giants. It was a great show and brought back a lot of memories of some good times. Unfortunately, driving to a show in Chicago is worse than driving to a show in Boston. We learned our lesson though (took an hour to find parking). Next time, we’ll take the train in from O’Hare or go out early and make a day-long event out of it. They almost wouldn’t let Sarah in because she had her Diana camera with her. But she convinced them that it wasn’t going to take any high quality videos of the band, that it was basically a toy, and they let her in. The venue was cool, nice balcony seats and a few benches throughout the floor area. We were there a little too late to snag a seat for ourselves… again, lesson learned. It was a real treat to see them with the horn section. I do kinda miss the Eric and Graham/Hal days, but the Dans are good, there’s no denying it. The banter was as witty as ever.

Enjoying my day off, so far. The tentative plan was to catch up on all the TV shows we’re behind on. We’ll see what really happens once Sarah gets up and we get motivated (or don’t :) ). Got another Adventure Ed overnight this week (and next week). There’s pictures from last week’s trip on the gallery (mostly taken by the kids). There’s more staff lined up for this week, so I should be able to take more myself.

another little scare

Published on November 6, 2007 in Computers, Web, Work and moBlog. Closed Tags: , , , .

Last night, after a little issue with the scanner and a reinstallation of some drivers, a couple of my programs were acting weird, so I rebooted, and right after logging in, my screen went black. It seemed like the system was running. I managed to blind reboot it once. I couldn’t log in via VNC, though, so I knew the video drivers weren’t running correctly. I tried reloading the original Dell drivers, but it made no difference… still went black. Removed the video drivers and I could log in just fine… though I can only deal with giant chunky 800×600 for so long. At some point I found out that the user account I set up for Sarah could log in just fine with the Dell video drivers loaded… so that led me to believe there was some sort of software/driver thing going on. I couldn’t figure out what was causing it, though. I tried disabling everything I could think of, and it still went black on my username. So I refocused on the video drivers, tried a couple different ones and a couple methods of completely removing the old drivers… but still no luck. Finally, I tried these Omega drivers and they seemed to do the trick. I dunno how well hooking the laptop up to the TV is going to go, the next time we want to watch something I downloaded on the big screen, but at least I’m not computerless anymore. There’s a bit more fear, as time goes on, that this laptop will just plain die, one day soon… regardless of the transplant/replacement of most of its innards.

There was also a threat of canceling the Adventure Ed overnight for one of the schools because of some new electronic filing system that all trips have to go through and some CPS paperwork and legal department bull… but I guess they finally worked it all out today. We got the go ahead this afternoon. We were on the verge of coming up with some sort of concelation day for all the kids who had signed up. They were still signed out of their classes and stuff, so they were technically ours for the day, but we probably would’ve been restricted to school property. I’m glad that didn’t end up happening. The high ropes experience is really a key element in my mind.

Psyched that I got the mophoblogging going again. I was doing that stuff back in early 2005 (via Livejournal). I’m pretty sure moblogs and that term existed then, but I wonder if I could’ve coined mophoblogging, or snagged a related domain name or something.

upgraded

Published on November 1, 2007 in Photo, Web and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Since the Flickr integration went so well, I decided to try the Wordpress upgrade, too. I’m not terribly attached to tags, but the tag integration isn’t as cool as the tag plugin I was using… I really miss the click the tag to add it thing on the post writing page. I have yet to go through all the old posts that linked to images on the Gallery2 pages. I’ll get to that soon enough. Maybe I’ll even add some more photos… I’ve got some from Adventure Ed class days. I totally didn’t break out my camera during the day trip… I don’t think it even made it out of my car. I’ll be sure to get pictures at the overnight trips. Those are coming right up, too. The first one is next week! This season flew by. I feel like we missed out on a lot of great activities, but it hasn’t been a bad season.

Feeling a little hungry, I think… waiting for Sarah to come home. Maybe I’ll watch TV.

back east trip journal; entry no. 4

Published on August 31, 2007 in Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

Tuesday, I hooked up our sweet new toy from the Sony store, the Sony VRDMC5 DVDirect DVD Recorder. It’s a simple, yet effective way to transfer Mom’s VHS stuff to DVD. It has all sorts of nifty features that make it super easy from Sony video cameras, but it works quite well from any video source with composite cables. Its built in software makes a simple menu interface and you can force new titles wherever you want. I got through a Fox News “Zip Trip” to Dudley, but didn’t manage to get to any of the high school performance videos… maybe on Monday?

Tuesday evening, I met up with Erika and Shane. We took a little shopping trip to pick up a remote controlled dragonfly (like this one). Then we headed back to Webster and went to Friendly’s for some dinner and ice cream. I love their peanut butter sauce. I had kinda forgotten how much.

Wednesday morning, I headed out to the Mazda dealership, where we bought the car, for an oil change and tire rotation. I had Kristin with me and we took a walk to Honey Dew Donuts while we were waiting for the work to be done. Honey Dew is the same as I remember it… good competition for Dunkin’, even if it is just in a small regional market. Kristin and I also visited Steve at Toad Hall, and I got my dose of Wormtown music and gossip and such. We also swung through Woonsocket, while we were killing time and I went to Hava Java, where they still remembered my order (six months later). I took a few pictures of a local landmark while we were in the area. That evening, we swung out to the Hockomock Teen Center and saw all the kids who weren’t there on my last visit.

I had no specific plans for Thursday morning until Erika called and asked for a ride to Worcester. She needed a CAT scan because she had sneezed and then gotten a sudden headache and problems with vision and tracking with her left eye. I left her at the huge new “Medical City” in the early afternoon. She was there until 7PM, and they sent her home, but another killer sneeze has made all the pain come back since then. I dunno what her plan is, the big shiny hospital seems useless, from my point of view. On my way out of Worcester, I stopped by a new shiny diner, fairly close to where I used to live. It had a 50s theme and was fairly good.


Name Me?

I ended the night with the only official plans I had for the day – a visit to Sara, my old roommate, and Tyler, the cat. Tyler was as cute sexy as ever and there’s a new kitten, who is being called bit until he gets a permanent name. We watched some awesome TV and had some awesome sandwiches and were entertained by the cats.

This morning, I grabbed a coffee with Mark at Victoria Station in Putnam and then tooled around Webster, chatting with some other local artists and talking about upcoming Webster-Dudley events. Now, I’m trying to decide what to do until I pick up Sarah at 11PM in Providence tonight. I’ve got plenty of options, but no idea which one makes the most sense.

different kind of camp/computer/movie

Published on June 30, 2007 in Computers, Family & Friends and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Inner city camp is a new kind of experience. It’s still camp, it’s still summer, there’s still songs and activities and such but having no real home base means we take a lot of trips… some walks to parks and playgrounds and a lot of field trips (on school buses with seatbelts!) to interesting places around the city. It feels like an extreme version of those school-vacation-week camps that I’ve been part of in the past. It’s also a much more liberal and less restricted camp, in terms of contact with the kids; I’m finding it hard to break out of the mold of the Y camp no-unnecessary-touching behavior/style. Another mind-blowing difference is that we provide the lunches for the entire camp and staff, every day. The food’s not bad, either. I need to start bringing my camera every day, the camera-phone is probably not doing these scenes justice. Oh, and I went in Lake Michigan for the first time, on Tuesday, with the campers. It was cold.

Fish tank computer is going slowly. Booting off an external drive is proving more difficult than it seemed. It wouldn’t be an issue, except that I’m trying to preserve the Windows XP OS from the Gateway. I believe Linux would happily boot off a USB drive. I don’t think the machine is quite powerful enough to attempt OS X x86. I attempted a few portable XP installations, with no luck, and I think I’m going to give in and go eSATA instead. Otherwise, it’s in good shape. It runs, and the tray fits into the frame and acrylic piece that I cut to shape (which snapped into two pieces, but we’ll solve that with the silicone sealant). We decided that a blue light was necessary, so I picked one up, and then found that there are blue lights in one of the fans and the power button and the external hard drive enclosure. The machine might need a blue-themed name, when it gets finished.

The Serenity screening was very fun, it was definitely a different experience on a big screen. I knew the fan base was extreme and had obviously accomplished some great things, but the Done the Impossible documentary was pretty informative and really pointed out just how special they all are. We got a couple of Sarah’s friends hooked on the show and have been watching Firefly from the beginning with them.

Serenity

Published on June 15, 2007 in Computers, Family & Friends and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , .

In one week, Sarah and I are going to see Serenity in the theater. Every year there is a charity event called Can’t Stop The Serenity, and we’ve got tickets for the Chicagoland show. In preparation, we’ll probably be watching Firefly – The Complete Series. We were also waiting for the Serenity (Collector’s Edition) DVD to come out, and now we’ve got it pre-ordered at Amazon. I’ve learned to love Amazon. I used to boycott them, when they were still trying to enforce their patent on cookies (via the one-click shopping patent). Hopefully they won’t abuse the new patent they were just awarded. I’d hate to give up my Amazon fix.

Phase One of this week’s computer upgrade project is complete. I gutted the old Gateway that Frank, Sarah’s little brother, had been using and put in a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive. It took a little more work than I expected, due to the fact that gateway’s choice of case didn’t have all the right holes on the back for the motherboard ports… so some creative sawing was necessary. All that’s really left to do on that machine is add some front audio ports so frank can plug in his headset for his games.

Phase Two involves all the hardware we pulled out of the Gateway and a fish tank full of mineral oil. I’m following the specs detailed by Puget Custom Computers on this page. Fish tank and oil and random parts are all ordered and on their way. I’ll have to go to Home Depot to get the sheet of acrylic and all the necessary sealant. Wish me luck!

weekends are my friends

Published on March 2, 2007 in Computers, Family & Friends and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Work is different in this adventure ed. program. The pacing of a group is spread out over about 20 45 minute sessions and a couple field trips. These sessions are a couple times a week, and there’s a LOT of time for them to forget the things we do and process between some of these sessions. It’s throwing off my whole sense of pacing and timing… and no matter how I look at it, it’s a lot more low-level initiatives than I’m used to doing with a group. Hopefully I’ll get into the pace soon, but the first days with these groups had me fumbling for ideas with a couple of them, and jumping ahead to things that might’ve been too much, too soon. It’s definitely fun, though, and I had some good laughs with a couple of the groups, too.

Sarah’s family took me to Medieval times for my birthday. I had never been before, but I had gone to Medieval Manor quite a few times when I was younger. I couldn’t help but compare them, especially since wenches (and man-wenches) served food to you without silverware and there was the castle themed waiting area. Obviously, though, Medieval Times is family oriented and more of a big-production kind of show, while Medieval Manor was comedy, adult-oriented and in a small, more initimate setting. It was definitely fun, though, and not a bad meal, either. We had a good time laughing at our knight, who was having a sorta bad day. The jousting and swordplay was all pretty cool, but from certain angles, it was painfully obvious how fake the hits were… occasionally, someone actually got a hit in, or some sand in the eyes. We also felt some pity for the guy who carried a pot and a pitchfork around and picked up the horse poo during the show. We figured he must be the new guy.

The Dell is still working great. I experimented a little, trying to get OS X to run on it, on a spare hard drive I have, and had some mild success. The hard part is proper drivers for all the network, sound, video and such. I was pretty close on all of those things, but then had a bunch of random application crashes… so I put the whole thing on hold for now, until I find the right info from the various forums. The native resolution makes everything even smaller and harder to read than it is in Windows, but it was still fun to see this thing boot up the Mac OS. If I could get it working well, I’d probably use it quite a bit. If only Paint Shop Pro had a mac version…

And now I’m enjoying my long weekend (except for front desk work tomorrow night at the Y)… there’s some local school holiday on Monday and we don’t do groups on Fridays, so it’s like a mini-vacation. I can catch up on my TV and maybe read some of the class material or whatever, I really appreciate weekends again.