Well, since Picassa worked, we’ve used it again. Here’s where we went this weekend:
You can learn more about it at http://www.royalgorgebridge.com/.
Enjoy!
Category Archives: Entertainment
Ink
I just watched a really, really good movie. The name is Ink – the website is Double Edge Films (they’re the production company). Anyway, the website has a couple of trailers. It’s an indy movie, so you won’t have heard of it.
Their website does a much better job of describing it without making it sound overly bizarre. So I recommend that you go there and watch the trailers. But here goes – In the world of our dreams, there are good guys – they deliver good dreams – and bad guys. Then there’s Ink, who wants to be one of the bad guys and has to kidnap and deliver a young girl out of the real world to the assembly of bad guys in the dream world in order to be accepted by them. And then the good guys try to get her back.
And there are plenty of violent fight scenes, and the plot is complicated, and they don’t tell you everything (but in a good way), and at the end I really cared about the pivotal character.
And I would sooo see it again and I hope they get an actual distributor and I recommend that everyone watch it when it’s eventually available on DVD.
I even liked it with the jumpy film techniques and the occasional stobe light sort of thing that did its very best to floor me with a massive headache. But I have taken a massive amount of Advil (I’m out of Relpax, curses!) and I didn’t watch the very jumpy parts and it was a Very good story.
garlic
So, Ramona, you say you want a garlic thing, something to chop garlic. Do you mean a commonly available garlic press or one of the rather clever garlic choppers? BE SPECIFIC!
Rating a music library
I won’t say that I have the largest library around. I do have, however, more music in my library that I have not heard than I have. This is true due to the austin music festival South By Southwest. Each year they put a song or two from nearly every artist that is going to be playing on their website for public download/preview. I’ve downloaded every such song from the past three years. I’ve also downloaded the entire music library on OCRemix, a site dedicated to remixing game music. There are a few gems in there, especially for inducing nostalgia. So when I put my music player on “Random”, I get exactly what I ask for. Most of the time I have never heard the currently playing song before.
Now, this presents a kind of problem. With so many songs, there are quite a few out there that I’ll have no interest in hearing again. Some songs don’t even get to play all the way through. Others I’ll love, but I’ve got no chance of remembering which ones those are. Since I’m playing these on the Ipod, the only way I have to sort through these songs as they play is the five star ranking for each song.
After some debate, this is the system I’ve come down to:
0 star – have yet to get playtime, or I didn’t think enough of them to rank them. Every now and then I will up-rank the unstared but played songs to be 2 star ranked.
1 star – never play again. Incomplete songs, songs I didn’t like, or for other reasons.
2 star – Ok songs. Don’t mind them on random, but I probably won’t seek them out either.
3 star – Good songs. I like these enough that I will probably put them all on big playlist someday for when I want to listen to what I like without the drudge of songs I don’t care for.
4 star – Personal favorites. Songs that I can play over and over without getting tired of them. Songs I do seek out to listen to every now and then. I’d recommend these to people with music tastes like mine.
5 star – Songs that I would recommend to anyone. Best in class by me.
My goal is to really start figuring out what music I really like. A song can (and will) get moved around a good bit in these ranks. One thought I’ve had is squish rank 4 and 5 together for a time and use 5 star to be songs that I think are interesting on one listen, but need to hear more before really making an opinion. This would be good for all the artists that I’ve not heard before, as it might mean I go out and listen to/buy more of their music.
This is why I bought the camera
Here is an awesome shot from the past weekend while visiting the relatives down in Victoria.
That is as it came out of the camera. There is no photoshop magic, no cropping, ect. The only thing done is converting to JPG from RAW and the default resize that flickr does.
Personally, I love that I was able to get an action shot as Aleah was getting pushed around by her cousins.
Google Sky
Was anyone else aware of this?
Looking up stars, constelations, all that good stuff is neat and all but the feature that really hits me as ‘cool’ is the ‘historical overlay’. Essentially, and overlay of all the constelations. Ever wonder where one is? Search for it; I was able to verify that I do, in fact, know where Gemini is.
Anyway, it’s an interesting way to spend a few minutes.
Importance of doing musical research
I usually have Pandora running in the background at work. I don’t have many stations as I’m pretty stagnant on the ‘must find new music’ front, though I wish I had more CD’s at home for my listening enjoyment. (1)
Anyway, if you have not heard of pandora, here is the way it works. First, you give it a ‘seed’ song or artist; something or someone that you enjoy. They look their musical style up in their database and start playing music that you’ll probably like by other artists. Your seed artist/song will get airtime too, but it won’t appear right away. As the different songs are playing, you get the option to vote ‘thumbs up/down’ on any track and it will use that information to adjust your station.
The way I have been using the service is to make a new station based off a song I liked on a previous station; something that is different enough that the new station is likely to have a different music set with the new beginning. I’ve been exposed to more different music through this service than any other medium using this method. Well, there is one song that I’ve been hearing that I have liked. The beat is good, the flow of the song is enjoyable, and the interplay of voices is good. Based off this one song, I went ahead and bought the CD is it on.
Now the CD has arrived and I’m not quite sure what it is that I just bought. See, I didn’t do any research aside from hearing the single song on Pandora. Maybe I should have. Thing is, this is the first CD that I’ve bought that has a sticker on the front proclaiming that this CD is a highly rated ‘goth rock/metal’ CD that fans of (other goth rock/metal groups I’ve never listened to) will enjoy.
Yeah. I’m not exactly sure what is on this CD. But I’ll give it a listen. I might even try to figure out the lyrics (2) , although they are probably a bit…different.
1: Funny how fifty someodd CD’s get boring after a while.
2: Really, figuring out the lyrics takes concentration these days
Gameboy DS Lite: Tetris
The first game I purchased for myself on the DS is Tetris. I have been enjoying the game and the new modes of play it offers. However, there is great fun in going back and playing Tetris in the original format: one screen, speed increases every ten lines, and it’s you vs the pieces till they win.
I will admit that the new tetris is not an exact copy of the original tetris released for the original game boy. A piece can be ‘flipped’ around when it hits the bottom much longer than the original. In fact, as long as you are flipping a piece, it doesn’t stick. You can flip a piece around until your thumb wears out. The same roughly applies for moving a piece left and right once it’s hit the stack. You don’t have much time before it sticks though and that time gets shorter the farther into the game you play. These changes might seem like a total re-work of the game dynamics… and you’d be right. They’ve also changed the game dynamic by giving you a ‘shadow’ of the current piece as it falls. As in you can see exactly where it will fall if you do a forced fast drop. (that’s one thing that hasn’t changed; if you know where the piece is going to go, do a force drop and you’re onto the next piece). There is one final change that makes all the difference: the speed of the game.
Level 0 is as slow as it ever was. Level 10 isn’t as fast as the original game boy’s Level 10… but it’s getting up there. But when you get to level 15+… the pieces don’t fall from the sky. They simply appear on the bottom of your screen. There is *no* time to move them as the fall. That’s why being able to continually flip and/or shift a piece on the bottom is crucial. Without that, you’d die in a heartbeat.
And the other thing: to ‘beat’ the classic tetris game, your goal is to get 200 lines. That’s certainly a change from the original tetris were beating the game was built around your score. I remember beating it with only 130-140 lines. Not so with the new version. It’s all the way to 200 or nothing.
Now, being the tetris fan that I am, I have played and played until I got those 200 lines. Christina thinks I’m insane. I tend to agree as I’m now playing on a newly opened option: unlimited line count. No stopping at 200 lines for me.
In fact, I think I proved my insanity today. I wouldn’t believe how many lines I got if I didn’t have a picture to prove it.
Although I have seen images of people with 999 lines. *that* scares me. And it’s my goal too.
The Gun Range
A friend and I went to a gun range recently. We figured it would be a good, relaxing thing to do. He’s in the process of figuring out what kind of weapon he would like to get for a concealed handgun license. I was there to put holes in paper. Well, and to see if I could actually hit anything. I don’t go shooting often.
One thing we did do to make it fun was pay the extra cash to rent an excessive five-shot revolver. The rounds we used were hollow points; we decided that was to ensure the round stayed in the shooting range.
Take a look at these pictures…. and keep in mind the spent shells laying around near the weapon are from the 9mm we just finished shooting. The 9mm help for scale, and I appologize for the blurry shots. They were taken with our older camera, without flash and without decent camera taking lighting.
Car Show
Christina and I went to a car show today. I took it as an opportunity to test out my new camera.
The cars there were mostly older cars that people rebuilt. A few cars were newer models (there was one of the new mustangs; it’s only custom bit was a little engine work and a paint job)
I would put all the pictures into this post, but I’ll just put these two…
