This is a horribly cheesy, yet oddly fun movie starring the wrestler Roddy Piper. It boasts one of the longest, most tedious, fight scenes *ever* in a film. My favorite line features Roddy walking into a bank full of concealed aliens. He walks in and to get everyone's attention, he utters this classic line:
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I'm all out of bubblegum.
We got a new Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder yesterday from Amazon. It’s a very neat little device. It records in HD and holds up to 60 minutes of video on its solid state storage. It attaches to your computer, Mac or PC, using a built-in USB connection, and the first time you attach it to a machine, it installs its software. The above video was shot by Thomas about an hour after we opened the box. I imported the video into iMovie and poked around until I figured out how to add the title cards. Not an Oscar-worthy production, to be sure! Still, it was fun making it. I look awful in it, so please be kind with your comments. 🙂
On March 1, 2009, we here in the South finally got some snow. In fact, at my house, we got loads of snow. I took a bunch of photos at three different times during the day to document it. The first four photos were taken after it had been snowing for about one hour. The rest of the daylight pictures were taken after about five hours of constant show. The nighttime pictures were taken around 8:00 PM, when it was still snowing, though it had just about stopped.
View the entire set here.
This morning I finished reading Blue At The Mizzen, the last complete book in the twenty-book Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. I’m a huge fan of these books: I have read the first fourteen books twice, and only once before have I given any of them fewer than five stars. This last book, unfortunately, has left me strangely cool.
As I said, this is the last complete book in the series. The author was working on a twenty-first book when he died in 2000, so while I had hoped that Mizzen would wrap things up nicely, it didn’t. I had hoped that since twenty was such a nice round number, O’Brian had ended the series there, but then later decided to pick it up again with the twenty-first novel. Sadly, Mizzen was not meant to be the final book.
There are loose ends all around, and the story of this book is certainly the weakest of the series. A great deal of it is taken up with Stephen’s wanderings and observations and the two naval battles in the story aren’t described in nearly as much detail as in previous books. Jack does receive a certain happy news on the penultimate page, but given the number of loose ends, that is little comfort.
Apart from this book not being the finale, and not being particularly strong, I am sad to have finished the series. Jack and Stephen have been with me for several years now. They feel like old friends, friends that I don’t wish to leave just yet. I will miss Stephen’s ignorance of so many things about the Navy, despite his being afloat with Jack for at least 15 years. I will miss Jack gently poking fun at Stephen with his oft-repeated, “Lord, Stephen, what a fellow you are!” I will miss Preserved Killick’s perpetual grumpiness with calls for coffee greeted with, “Which I’m bringing it this very minute!” Barrett Bonden, Awkward Davies, Tom Pullings, Sophie Aubrey, and so many other regular characters, I will miss them all.
At the request of fans, the publisher has published the unfinished twenty-first novel, under the title 21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey. Will I read it? I don’t think so. As unsatisfying as this complete novel was for me, I can’t imagine an incomplete, unedited sequel would serve any better. (As I was editing this post, I stopped to read some of the reviews for 21 at Amazon. I may yet read it. We’ll see.)
I started reading the series because I had seen the movie, Master and Commander, starring Russel Crowe. Within the first five pages of the first book, Master and Commander, I was hooked. The books are full of exciting naval combat, political intrigue and tons of heart and humor. Sometimes O’Brian gets extremely technical and detailed in his descriptions of sails, spars and ropes, but you don’t need to fully understand those details to enjoy the stories. What’s so cool about this series is that each book is more like a chapter in a huge work rather than a standalone book; usually one book picks up directly after the previous one ended.
I should mention that because I saw the film first, whenever I’m reading the books I see Crowe’s Aubrey, and hear him in Crowe’s voice inside my head. My Stephen isn’t exactly like Paul Bettany‘s but he’s pretty close. I thought Crowe did a very good job of playing Aubrey, so I could have done worse for a mental image, I suppose.
I’m sure that I will reread the entire series again, probably more than once. But for now, I’ll have to content myself with other things. I’ve read some of Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower, so maybe I’ll pick up some more in that series.
Farewell, Jack and Stephen, and good sailing.
Ball-point Pen
You always need a pen. I don’t like not having a pen. I really hate it when I let someone borrow my pen, and they keep it!
Multi-tip screwdriver
How many times have you needed a screwdriver, but didn’t have one? Or needed a flathead but only had a Philips? I had to MacGyver a screwdriver a month or so ago http://bit.ly/dIDvP
532nm Pocket Laser
Umm….. Why not?
I’m 38. I’ll be 39 in May (the 4th, if anyone wants to send me a gift). Last night, I felt older than I ever have. We had gone to see the Winter Guard unit that my sister coaches. They were competing against a bunch of other units down at her school where the competition was being held. We had a lot of fun watching the performances, and even Thomas loved it, which surprised me quite a bit.
But what made me feel so old was being around so many young people. Hundreds of teenagers were there who sang, danced and goofed around with their friends. They chanted chants and danced steps that everyone seemed to know. I was flooded with memories of my own high school experiences. Those times seem like a lifetime ago, but at times it feels like they were last week. As I’ve said before, I was an indifferent student in high school, but I loved being there. I had lots of friends and while I may not have always been part of the “in” crowd, I was at least part of the “nearby” crowd. I had good times. There were bad times, too, but there were far more good times than bad. As I watched the kids having such a time, I kept thinking to myself, “That used to be me!” But it hasn’t been me for a very long time.
So while I was enjoying the performances and cheering when a performer would flip a rifle 15 feet in the air and catch it, I was also simmering in self-pity for the times that are gone and will never return. And then… I started thinking of how it won’t be long before my son is in high school and then graduating and then… what? I hate getting into those moods.
My 20 year high school reunion was supposed to be in 2008, but it didn’t end up happening. Based on what I’ve heard, it should be sometime in 2009. I will defintely be there. Perhaps being around some of my old high school friends again will push these feelings away for another 20 years. I’m hoping so.
We went to my mother-in-law’s house this weekend, because my wife was singing at her mom’s church yesterday morning. We had a nice time, and had some great Southern cooking for dinner yesterday.
But on the hour-and-a-half drive home, tragedy struck: my iPod started dying. We were happily listening to ABBA’s greatest hits, when suddenly, the song paused. Then it came back a second of so later, then went in and out a few more times. At first, I thought it was interference from a nearby radio station, since I use an FM transmitter to get music from the iPod to the car speakers. When we stopped at the Dairy Queen for treats, I inspected the iPod, which means I sort of looked at it longingly. I said to myself, “Self, perhaps it’s a bad spot on the hard drive, directly under ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,’ that is causing your woe, and not the whole disk. Try a different song!” Agreeing with myself, I tried a different song by hitting Shuffle. What came up was “Sheila Nee Iyer” by Dervish. It started playing, but half-way through, it paused. I started clicking the button(s), and while they made their little “tick” sound, the UI didn’t respond. I immediately went into slow-mo, contorting my face in pain and screaming, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”
Thus, I spent the last 40 minutes of the drive with no music, which is not something I like to do. I’m going to plug the mostly-dead iPod into my Mac and see if iTunes can diagnose it or fix it or anything. I don’t have much hope for it. I’ve had it for five years, and it’s been used almost every day, for at least an hour or so, sometimes as much as eight or nine hours, so it’s gotten quite a workout. I suppose I should be happy for the time we spent together.
So last night I went online to see how much a new one could cost me. The iPod Classic, which is a 120G system (mine was only 60), is $249. Ouch. That’s a bit much, right now. So, assuming mine is well and truly dead, I’m going to try to live with just the space available on my iPhone. I had already pared down my music collection from 110G to 60G to fit on the old iPod, so paring it down to 8G is going to be tough, but I’m going to have a go at it. Wish me luck!
02/02/2009 12:59:23 Update: I put the iPod into diagnostics mode, which didn’t tell me much. I then did a full factory restore on it, followed by a re-sync of all my music. Once that was done, I randomly picked some songs on it, and they all played fine. Here’s hoping that it was some bad sectors or something, and that the restore got around them.
The world after Day Zero.
Thomas and I started our first game of Risk last night. We got everything setup, I explained the rules, and then we began. As I was reading him the rules, when I got to the one that states that during an attack, a draw always goes to the defender, his response was, “Aww. That stinks.” Little did we know how much his opinion of that rule was about to change.
After we placed our initial armies, he moved first. He placed his new armies and decided to attack me in New Guinea from Eastern Australia, and it was bloody. I lost and he moved in. He then tried to take Indonesia from me, but there, he failed. He decided to end his turn, and then it was my turn to start a war.
I placed my new armies, and immediately set out to take Congo from him. I attacked from Egypt, we rolled and it was a draw. I lost an army. Undeterred, I decided to attack Congo from North Africa. Again we rolled, and again it was a draw. I then attacked Congo from South Africa. Again, a draw. I tried once again to take Congo, this time attacking from East Africa. Against all odds, it was another draw. I was stunned. He was highly amused.
We played through, I believe, four turns each, and then called it a night. Since we have cats, I decided to take a picture of the board, so that when we continue the war, we’ll know if anything has gotten moved.
I am thrilled that Thomas enjoyed the game. I had fun, too. But I’m no longer sure I like that “defender wins all draws” rule…
I mentioned back in December how much I liked my Netflix player. I still do, but last week I ran into a problem. I have finally caught up with the rest of the world and realized what a great show Heroes is, and I’m happily working my way through season one. Everything had been going great, until I got to episode seventeen. The picture was flawless, as was the playback, but the dialog track was about two seconds behind the actors’ lips. I hate that. We soldiered through, pretending that we were watching a foreign film that had been dubbed into English.
Hoping for properly-synced dialog, we fired up episode eighteen. This one had music, but no dialog at all! I tried fast-forwarding, rewinding and restarting, but nothing worked. Since you can’t really skip an episode of Heroes and know what the heck is going on, we didn’t want to move on, but I did want to see if any other episodes were borked. I watched the first few seconds of episode nineteen and it suffered the same fate as eighteen: music but no dialog. Grrr…
I kept trying episode eighteen over the next few days to see if the problem would correct itself, but it never did. As a test, I tried viewing these same episodes from my Mac, just to see if it was a problem with the player or the source. Seventeen had the same sync problem, but eighteen did have dialog. Nineteen was silent, just like on the player. I decided the problem was on Netflix’s end, and that eighteen on the Mac had been served from a different server.
So, with this information in hand, I decided to contact Netflix. I assumed that all interaction with Netflix would be through email or “customer service” forms, like so many web businesses, but I was wrong. There’s a toll-free number that is staffed 24/7. When you check the support page and see the phone number, they give you a “priority code” and tell you how long the call queue is. On Sunday night, it was listed at “about a minute.” I called, entered the code, and in under a minute, I was speaking to a real, live human, who spoke perfect English (she sounded like a Texan to me, but I could be wrong). I described the problem to her and she checked their system to see what she could tell me. She said that the three episodes I reported, plus episode twenty-two, had already been reported and that they were already working to correct the problem.
Now, the call could have ended there, but here’s where the good customer service comes in. I asked if there was an ETA for getting them corrected. She didn’t just say “no,” or “not yet” or “we don’t know.” Instead she explained the process that Netflix has to go through to not only get corrected content, but to get the content in the first place. I had assumed, naively, that Netflix was just ripping DVDs to their servers and serving them up, but in fact, they get the content in ready-to-stream format from the studios, themselves. In the case of problems, they have to contact the studios, re-sign distribution agreements, and wait for the studios to provide them with corrected content. While I still didn’t have an ETA, her description of the process gave me a much better feel for how long it would be before the content was corrected. That’s good customer service.
So, in order to continue getting my Heroes fix, I figured out which discs I needed and put them on the top of my DVD queue. They should be here today.
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