August 2004 Archives

I had some work friends (Aldo & Carl) over on Thursday evening to play some boardgames. Both are fairly new to the German game “scene” (Aldo had been over once before, Carl hadn’t) so I wanted to ease them in. I was planning on teaching them Settlers of Catan (probably the best game ever made, ESPECIALLY for newbies) but surprisingly Dave was in town for the night, so he came over too. Now with five players, I decided to pull out Ticket To Ride. I think TTR is a nice easy game to learn while having enough going on to stay interesting. Carl ended up WHOMPING us by completing three cross-country 20+ point tickets! I took second with a handful of short trip tickets, Kara third, Aldo fourth, and Dave in the caboose spot.

We started late and TTR, unexpectedly, took a long time to play (chalk it up to two inexperienced players) so Aldo & Carl left after the game. Dave & Kara were still up for another game, so we pulled out the most recent addition to our collection, St. Petersburg. It went smooth enough (outcome: Me, Kara, Dave) but I had the impression that Dave was underwhelmed by the game. I admit I felt about the same after my first game of it; however my appreciation for it has grown with each successive play. There are a lot of subtleties to the game that eluded us the first few times we played but as we kept playing, we’d discover new things to watch out for. I tried to help Dave out a bit by pointing out some of these as we played, but that seldom seems to help (it's like you’ve got to discover the finer points on your own to appreciate their import). Don’t know if I’ll be able to get Dave to play it again, but that’s fine, we’ve got plenty other games to choose from (and Dave actually suggested playing Taj Mahal!!! That's one of my favorite games, but no one will play it with me because I usually dominate).

Anyway, it was so nice to finally host a game night again! I hope that I can eventually generate enough interest to start up a weekly session again. I just gotta get them all to play Settlers, and then they’ll keep comin’ back for their weekly fix.

About 2.5 years ago, I received a call from a telemarketer for a credit card with MBNA. I quickly said “no thanks, not interested” but she was persistent (wait, aren’t they all?) She told me that with MBNA you receive points every time you use the card and can eventually get free airline tickets and stuff. Well, I didn’t have one of these fancy point makin’ cards, so I caved and said OK. We received our MBNA card a few weeks later, but there wasn’t one word in all of the paperwork about any points… We still have our MBNA card, and still hadn’t seen one hint at the promised points… until today.

Today we got a catalog of crap you can order with your world points, which reminded me of the points I was supposed to be earning! The catalog had an internet site, so I went there and logged in… we had earned 27,000+ points in the last 2.5 years!! (Thanks mostly to Kara’s photography classes) After some perusal through the online catalog, I determined that the best rate of return on the points was $1 per 100 points (the more points you trade in at once, the closer you get to this exchange rate). And then I discovered the cash option… Since we had earned so many points, we were able to get exactly $1 per 100 points, paid out in cash!! So unless this was some elaborate scam (I’d be VERY impressed with the scammers’ quality of work) I’ve got an unexpected $250 check coming in the mail!

My face got sunburned over the weekend, and now it’s peeling off. This morning I scrubbed my face to try to get all the flakes off, but no such luck. The flake to surface area ratio is definitely better now, but the scrubbed areas are now bright pink (brighter than the initial sunburn). I decided I’d put some lotion on to take care of the remaining flakes… BIG MISTAKE. I started rubbing the lotion on, and was nearly finished by the time the searing pain started. I hurriedly splashed water on my face, but the damage was already done. Now my face is semi-flaky, bright pink, and throbbing in pain. THIS is why I stay inside and play videogames when the sun comes out!

Hooray! It's package tracking time again. I ordered an ethernet upgrade kit for my Tivo from 9thtee.com. (I have a series 1 Tivo that doesn't have built in ethernet support). Why, you ask? Because we want to get rid of our home phone (which Tivo uses to download scheduling info) and rely solely on our cell phones. It seems that telemarketers are the only ones that call us on that line anyway, so why pay $50/month for it? I've actually wanted to do this for quite some time, but the whole Tivo thing was an issue... Then my parents actually dropped their home phone, which made me get off my ass. I mean, my parents can't pass me up technologically... that just cannot stand!

I've seen a bunch of movies in the last couple of months; here are quick impressions on some of them (I'll be posting more in the next day or so):

Spiderman 2
Very entertaining, the best superhero movie I’ve seen (and that says a lot because I LOVED the two X-men movies). Doc Ock was a MUCH better villain than the over-the-top Green Goblin of the first movie.

Bourne Supremacy
Loved the first one, liked this one… Not enough Franka this time around and they WAAAAAY overdid the shaky camera. There was one fight scene where I couldn’t even tell who was who because the cameraman was apparently having a seizure.

Dickie Roberts
Why do I watch these crap-tacular SNL alum movies? They always come out and I think “Oh man, that looks STUPID!” Then people around me say, “Oh, yeah it wasn’t that bad, you should see it.” Well guess what… they’re wrong. It IS bad, and I SHOULDN’T see it!

This weekend I dug into my small collection of old PC games and pulled out Dune 2. For those who might not know, Dune 2 was the first RTS (Real Time Strategy, ala Starcraft) game ever made. It’d been a while since I played it, so I installed it (four 3.5” floppies) and after working through some sound issues, started it up… I am amazed at how good this game still is!! There is a lot missing that you take for granted now (context sensitive right click, drag boxes to select multiple units, grouping, hotkeys) but the core gameplay is still very impressive. When I installed it, I expected to play around with it for an hour or so, but I ended up playing quite a bit. Kara and I were working on the deck this weekend, but whenever we’d take a break, I’d run down to the computer and resume my game. I’m already over halfway through the Harkonnen campaign and I think I’ll keep playing until I beat the game. Check out these beautiful screenshots.

See that little picture of the Scarface movie box down at the lower left of your screen? Those things don’t make themselves… Every time I change the current movie, I have to search Netflix for the image and Rotten Tomatoes for the link. But I have this thing, once I do something SO MANY TIMES, I get so fed up with the process that I automate it. That’s what I did tonight for those little movie pictures.

First off, here’s a screenshot of my spiffy new app:

And now how it works… When I click 'Find', the app searches both Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes for the string in the upper TextBox (hellboy in the screenshot) using Google’s web services (Web services are basically classes and functions that are exposed over the web that can be called remotely). The app assumes that the #1 returned item for each site will be the one I want (yes, I’m Feeling Lucky). To grab the image address from the Netflix URL, I make an HttpWebRequest with the address from Google, call GetResponse and search the returned Stream for the image URL. I drop this URL and the Rotten Tomatoes URL into some HTML boilerplate and spit out the final string in the lower TextBox. If ‘Preview’ is clicked, the text in the lower TextBox is dumped into a temp file and the app creates a new IE process with that temp file as its arg.

Now here’s the scary thing… I didn’t know how to do any of this before tonight. .NET makes everything SO easy to do that a novice can make pretty powerful stuff (ok, maybe I’m not a novice, but I’m definitely no .NET expert…)

Now I need to start watching movies like mad so that I can use my happy new program!!

The Cooler
Great movie, Alec Baldwin (not one of my favs) earns some respect for being so good at being so bad. Macy is the perfect shlub and Bello is the skank with the heart of gold. In fact the whole movie has that “gold hearted skank” feel to it. It’s definitely dark, but has a bit of happy swirled in.

Love Actually
Avoid at all costs, and not just because it’s a chick flick. These Studio Canal movies usually hold my interest well enough, but this one is a real turd. There’s this whole section of the movie where this little boy has to run though the airport to tell this little girl that he likes her… And I’m supposed to care about this, why? The beauty of Keira is the only redeeming quality of this movie, and it’s wasted on a small dopey part.

Big Fish
Hmmm, I wanted to like this one, and I guess I kinda did… But, it was a bit long and pretty slow. While I watched it, I liked it, but after it was over, it seemed pretty empty. Some of the special effects were just beautiful, but it didn’t really add up to much.

I got my Tivo TurboNet yesterday, installing it was a breeze! However, the 3’ patch cable that it came with didn’t work, and of course I didn’t find this out until I had closed up Tivo and hooked everything back up (I had tested the card before I put everything back together, but hadn’t tested the cable). So, 9thtee.com is sending me a new cable but I just used one of my own so I could close it all back up. Kara called Verizon today and cancelled our phone… as of tomorrow we are free from the influence of the evildoers (aka telemarketers).

About a Boy
A chick flick worth seeing. I usually just tolerate Hugh Grant, but I actually enjoyed his character in this one! It’s still a bit overly sentimental, but Grant’s narcissistic attitude (and voiceover) make the film fun to watch.

Paycheck
Man, this movie was a real bummer. The setup is absolutely delicious, but then the action starts and blah. I swear the movie even disses itself. I remember someone saying something like “what fun is life if you know what’s going to happen?” That’s exactly what’s wrong with this movie! The solution is all laid out for Affleck, so there’s no peril and no close calls. He just digs in his magic bag of tricks and pulls out the perfect escape in every situation… boooring.

My Neighbor Totoro
I LOVE Spirited Away, so I put this Miyazaki movie on my Netflix queue… I wanted to like it, the beginning was a lot of fun while the two sisters ran around their new house… but then the movie didn’t ever go anywhere. It literally put me to sleep and I had to finish it the next day. I can’t say this is a bad movie, but it just didn’t keep my interest.

We had to take Cooper to the emergency animal hospital last night. Cooper and I were hanging out outside yesterday (I was reading, he was chewing a piece of wood) when Kara got home. She came over to us, and I noticed a weird bump on the top of Cooper’s snout. I asked Kara if she noticed, and by the time we got a hold of Cooper to take a look, his whole snout had started swelling. I looked it up on the internet and it looked like he’d probably got stung by a bee, but since the swelling continued (it spread to the top of his head and down his chest) we figured we better give the vet a call (since the internet article said there is a chance that his breathing could become restricted). The vet told us to err on the side of caution and to take him into the emergency hospital.

By the time we got there, his face was about two times the regular size and his left eye was swollen half shut, he looked like someone had beat the crap out of him (we really should have taken pictures because it looked pretty funny). The vet eventually came to see him and said that it was good we brought him in because the reaction was rapidly progressing (he developed hives while we were there). They gave him a few shots and sent us home $125 poorer :( It was a nice little practice session for when we have sick kids, I guess…

I went to the dentist today for the first time in 7 years! As you might expect, the prognosis wasn’t good… I’ve got 9 teeth that need fillings and 4 of them need more than one surface filled. I’m trying to decide whether to go with the cheaper silver amalgam fillings or spring for the extra cost of the white resin fillings. But since the cost difference is looking to be pretty substantial (almost $500) I think I’m gunna go with the cheap solution.