October 2004 Archives

Kara and I watched the Boston Legal pilot (The Practice spin-off) last night and it was pretty lame. I’ve gotta believe that the main reason anyone wants to watch this new show is to see more of Alan Shore. But in last night’s pilot, he just seemed lost or castrated or something. Shatner’s Denny Crane could be fun for a while, but it’ll probably just get old quick. Rev. Sharpton’s grandstanding was flat out retarded, and the judge’s teary eyed silent response was even more retarded. I’ve developed a like/hate relationship with David E. Kelley’s writing for The Practice, so maybe now is a good time for me to cut all ties...

And finally, to anyone, anywhere that writes or might eventually write a TV episode ever: we do not want to see Larry Miller’s ass... ok?

Tonight was ladies' (game) night at our home. Mi esposa and I played a few games, her choice... she chose Wyatt Earp and Royal Turf. Earp is one of her favorites; it comes along for practically every vacation, which means I’m never super excited to play it (variety I say). It ended up being a very close game; Kara 3400, me 3500. Royal Turf wasn’t close AT ALL. In fact, we didn’t even bother tallying up the final round because it was painfully clear that I had trounced her. Turf (we play face down bets with the zero chip) has never really wowed me, especially for two players. With two, you own every other roll of the die, which means you have WAY too much control over the horses. And unless you both bet on the same horses, the probable outcome is a runaway game. I think it would be a bit more fun with more people (I think I’ve played it with 6 once before) but when you have that many around the table, the interest usually trends to meatier games.

I saw the first screens for Advance Wars DS today and just about wet myself. When Nin first proposed the wacky idea of two screens, one of them touch sensitive, the first thing I thought of was how sweet Advance Wars would be on that system. Looks like I'll be able to see just how sweet it'll be, AND with the added bonus of wireless multiplayer! The list of launch titles for the DS is pretty weak, so I doubt I'll be waiting in line to pick up the machine when it comes out, but expect me there as soon as Advance Wars DS hits the shelves.

I saw John Carpenter’s The Thing over the weekend; a one sentence summary: A research base in Antarctica must fight off an alien presence that infects people and mimics them. First off I thought the movie did a good job setting up, it emphasized the base’s isolation before stuff really started happening. Once the action started, I really liked the paranoid feeling where the guys didn’t know who to trust. There’s a scene where they test each other’s blood to find the infected, and even the person whose blood is being tested sighs a breath of relief when they see that they aren’t the Thing. There were some seriously gory scenes of dudes turning inside out and alien guts spraying everywhere, all in fantastic 1980’s monster gore glory. Funny thing though, neither of us winced until the people started cutting their own thumbs with a scalpel to draw blood for the test. Billy said “Why would they draw blood THAT way?” as I squirmed and looked away from the TV... When the movie was over, I said “I think that might be the best horror movie I’ve ever seen!” (admittedly, horror isn’t a genre I watch much of). But Billy set me straight by saying “What about Alien?”; “Oh, yeah” I said, “That’s still better.” So there’s my official review, it’s a good horror movie, but Alien is better.

And now a behind the scene look at this weekend's viewing of The Thing (as reviewed in the previous post).

As Billy mentioned in the comments of the DS post, he was here for the weekend. He came up to go to this evolution/creationism/intelligent design conference with me, but that didn’t really work out. We were hoping for a non-biased look at evidence and facts, so we left after the first video they showed was way skewed against evolution...

That was supposed to take most of our Saturday, so we suddenly found ourselves with a big chunk of time and no plans. So, we walked! I put Coop on the leash and we just started walking in no specific direction. We ended up walking way up Bel-Red before we found a path that branched off and ended up at Microsoft. We probably ended up walking 2 or 3 miles, and now my shins are killing me!! (flat feet, though I get new orthotics tomorrow, YAY!)

Once we got back, we watched some Seinfeld and Family Guy and eventually started getting hungry. Billy said he wanted hamburgers, but I convinced him that we should go for steak instead (my prime card gave me buy one meal get one free at the Tap House in Bellevue). As we walked in, Brian and Erin were walking out, so we said hi. We ate yummy steak and drank yummy beer and then went home again. We were both kind of tired from staying up late the night before, but it was still just to early to go to sleep. I started browsing through the movies that Comcast had available On Demand, and we somehow stopped on John Carpenter’s The Thing. Neither of us had seen it before, so I ordered it.

Today marks round two of my battle with the blister beetle. Dr. Curda (which, BTW, is the BEST doctor I’ve ever had!!) said that I had a good response with the first treatment, and there’s hope that this time we might get it all. The nurse was kind enough to tell me that it hurts even more the second time (very reassuring) but it’s been almost six hours and the pain hasn’t kicked in yet. The last time was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, so it should be a pretty fun next few days. At least I got my orthotics today, which should make my feet happy! I can’t believe my shins hurt SO much today because I walked for 2 miles, 2 days ago!!

Tivo’s doing this referral reward thing, where every person that I refer to Tivo gets me points; four referrals and I get a free iPod. I’d probably not think anything of it had I not already gotten Cindy to buy one. Now I’m “only” 3 people away from a $300 device with a coolness factor of eleven. So, I command of you all, BUY TIVO! (and then put me down as the referrer) The 40 hour Tivo is only $99 after rebate right now, so there’s really no reason not to get one. I mean, that’s less than an Xbox, a PS2, or even a car! And let me tell you, once you HAVE Tivo, you’d happily give up your car over the magic of Tivo.

Look, I’ll even subsidize your Tivo purchase! I’ll PAY three of you $25 to knock down your cost to $75!! That’s just an insane deal, and if you reject it, you must be retarded or something. Heck, I’m even thinking about taking me up on the deal for a second one, so you better act fast! The key here is that I need 3 people to agree before I start handing out 25 dollar checks. I don’t want to end up spending $50 on two people just to get enough points to buy stupid Tivo coasters!

Update: Circuit City is now selling Tivo for $50 and Best Buy is selling them for $89 after rebate and BEFORE my $25 rebate. So, a new Tivo for $25... Seriously, what's your problem?!??

So, last week’s episode of Lost... I guess it was ok; they FINALLY started making shelters (geez). And seriously, this week’s immunity challenge of “find Vincent the dog” was, like, SO lame! I mean hardly anyone even tried (though the bald dude’s whistle was a good idea). That bald dude must not have learned ANYTHING from The Apprentice though, because he SO shouldn’t have given up his immunity to the black dude, regardless of how confident he was! I guess he lucked out though, because the cop was practically ASKING to be voted off the island. I mean all that sexist “she is dangerous” crap and making all that racket when people are trying to sleep... Voting him off was a real no brainer. Oh and what’s up with that Japanese chick being all naked and stuff? Here we go again with another Richard Hatch...

So all this Tivo talk made me start thinking about hacking mine some more. So far I’ve added an 80 Gig hard drive along side the original 30 Gig, and installed a TurboNet network card. On Tuesday night, I decided to go forward with the ultimate hack and get a bash prompt on my Tivo. This involved removing the original Tivo hard drive, hooking it up to Kara’s computer and booting up from a Linux CD. I was then able to copy some utilities onto the Tivo hard drive and tweak some settings. I put the hard drive back into the Tivo, hooked it back up to the TV and turned it on. Everything worked as normal, but now I was able to telnet to Tivo!!! And with that door wide open, I can do pretty much anything I want. I’ve installed an ftp server, TivoWebPlus, and TyTool and I’m loving every minute of it.

TivoWebPlus is a web server that exports all of Tivo’s information and functionality (minus the actual playing of the recordings) to a website. I can’t even get close to describing how rad this is. I’m now able to control the on screen menus of Tivo from my computer, manage my shows while watching something on TV, and TONS of other nice little tweaks. I no longer have to find the remote if I want to watch something while at the computer… I can just bring up the site and control everything from there!

TyTool is a video extraction program... As I type this, I’m pulling the Towlie episode of South Park off the Tivo and onto my computer hard drive. It’s kind of a slow process (looks like the raw dump of the 30 minute episode will be over a gigabyte!) but who cares? It’s functionality that I never had before. I don’t see myself pulling that many shows off, but now I can if I want to. And the SP ep is the perfect example because it’s something that I want to keep, but it’s been using up Tivo hd space since last November. Now I’ll be able to save it on my computer, and erase it from Tivo!

This past weekend I was talking about my senior class "Most Likely" list, and specifically that I got the "Best Hair" award. Billy made a comment like "Really?!? What happened?" I said, "Oh yeah, I have sweet-ass hair!" Kara said "You've got sweet ass-hair?" And Billy and Kara busted up laughing... Jerks.

Last saturday we left around 10am to go out to breakfast. We drove to The Original Pancake House in Kirkland but the line went out the front door. So then we drove to The Brown Bag Cafe in Redmond, but it had a long line too! So I said "well, I guess we could go to IHOP." We all sat there silently thinking, then finally Kara said "I guess it's better than starving..."

Well, I stopped reading Sword of Shannara prematurely... I only got 150 or so pages into it, and it just didn’t keep my interest. However, I don’t feel like I can officially side with Peter on the argument, because I don’t think it was primarily the book’s fault that I lost interest. First, a rash of good videogames (Burnout 3, Fable, Katamari Damacy) came out as I started reading it which caused me to neglect the book. And when I neglect a book for a week or two, I find it REALLY hard to get back into it. Also, this was my first “real” fantasy book in a long time (I don’t really count the Discworld books, since they are more about comedy than fantasy) and I think I’ve discovered that the fantasy genre just doesn’t interest me. I even had a hard time sticking with LotR when I read it back in ’97. So, Shannara has been returned and I think I’ll stick with Sci-Fi going forward...

Today is the two month “anniversary” of my subscription to eDiets, an interactive website that provides exercise and diet schedules custom fit to your preferences. The problem that eDiets needs to solve, is their website works too well!! Their site helped me lose 15 lbs in 2 months... so what did I do to thank them? Continue as a happy customer? Nope, I cancelled, since I don’t need them anymore! I guess they’re getting some good exposure from it, because I highly recommend the site if you’re looking to lose some weight.

I planned on putting this response to Peter’s question in the comments of the last post, but it ended up longer than the original entry... So, I guess I’ll give eDiets more front page exposure.

The basic eDiets plan just includes dieting, but I threw in the exercise “package” as well, since I’m regularly pretty inactive. The diet schedule is actually pretty cool, because it gives you a list of meals and single serving recipes that are based on food preferences you initially select (which can be changed at any time). If you don’t like the sound of a meal, you can switch it out for something else or a frozen dinner if you’re in a hurry. Once you’ve tuned your week’s worth of meals, you can print out the shopping list, which contains everything you’re going to need for the whole week (very handy). The recipes are hit or miss, so when we found some good ones we ended up making them more often rather than take a gamble on a new recipe. Some of our fav meals are turkey burgers with mushrooms & peppers mixed in, grilled pork chops marinated in hot sauce, grilled steak marinated in balsamic, and turkey fajitas. The site does a good job at telling you exactly what you should eat, but it doesn’t take much to figure out the system and just start doing it on your own. I’ve been doing my own thing for the last 2 weeks and I’ve still lost 1.5 lbs/week.

As for exercise, I was riding my stationary bike 45 minutes a day, 4 days a week for the first 6 weeks. The last two weeks I’ve slacked off on the exercise but somehow I’m still losing weight... I don’t think I’ll be able to coast for good, so I think I’ll start back up, but only ride two times a week.

Overall I’ve been pretty surprised at how easy it’s been to lose weight. I’ve been averaging about 2 lbs/week (which is what eDiets advertises) and it has been great motivation to keep going. I’m about 5 lbs away from my target weight, but who knows, I might just keep going and go all Mary-Kate.

I’m getting antsy for my iPod, so I’m seriously considering referring myself for the last Tivo. I figure I can buy a second Tivo, and sell the old one on eBay or something? So, if any of you are still on the fence about whether to take me up on the $25 rebate thingy, this is your last chance. Amazon is selling the 40 hour Tivo for $179 with free shipping, so after the $100 rebate from Tivo and the $25 check from me, it’d cost you 54 bucks. Man, that is such a steal that I wish I didn’t have a Tivo and some other dude was offering that deal, just so I could take him up on it! Act now, or regret your indecisiveness for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Remember this list? I tried my hardest to resist the inevitable, but today I caved when I discovered that Amazon is running a buy two, get one free deal. So I bought Pikmin 2, Donkey Konga, and Paper Mario for a total of $115.81 including tax and shipping (or $38.60 per game). And it's far from over... I was hoping Ratchet & Clank 3 would be slammed with a Kerry-esque "more of the same" critique, but it's getting incredible reviews (Game Informer, the best video game magazine ever, gave it a 10/10 rating and said "Game of the Month? Without a doubt. Game of the Year? I wouldn't be surprised" and "[I] walked away with the feeling that I had just played one of the greatest games of my time. Don't miss it.")

Crap... If I can just hold out until Christmas, then maybe I can get some of them as gifts instead of blowing my own money.

As you can see on the left, I’ve been playing some Mario Kart lately. I was feeling a bit nostalgic for Mario and Co. sometime last week, so I dusted off the game and popped it in... and I’ve been playing it every night since. I beat the game back when it first came out, but hadn’t unlocked everything yet, so it gave me something to shoot for. I finished the game tonight, and I’ve definitely got that ‘job well done’ feeling going. The game got pretty dang hard toward the end (including an All Circuits Grand Prix where you must race on all 16 tracks in a row) and I can definitely say that I’m better at it now than I ever was in the past. The cool thing about the unlockables (characters, tracks, karts) is that they are all serve to enrich the multiplayer experience which is where the game really shines.

After updating the status of MK on my game collection page, I decided to go through my collection and see if there were any games that I’m ready to trade in. I feel the end of this generation of consoles quickly approaching, and I don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of games that I’ll never play again. Plus, the cash from the trade-ins let me justify buying an extra game or two during this deluge of spectacular games (DOAU and GTA:SA are now getting rave reviews along with the aforementioned Ratchet & Clank). Must... Stop... Buying... Videogames!