Wanted to post here that I’m starting to post at two new blogs I’ve been invited to:
clusterflock – a blog about everything with no filtering, so expect anything
SnaggleTruth – a blog about the TV Shows Heroes and LOST ( at least so far )
I know what you’re thinking, “But he doesn’t hardly post on his own blog”. Well, I’m trying to be better there too.
Live Free or Die Hard is one of those action films you just need to suspend your brain for a couple of hours and just enjoy the craziness.
It stars Bruce Willis, reprising his role as Detective John McClane from the previous Die Hard movies. This time, he’s bringing in a hacker, played by Justin Long, after someone cuts the power to Homeland Security’s cyber division headquarters.
The action starts pretty quick as the people Long’s character has been working for is killing all those who’ve helped them. After escaping a great gun and explosion battle in Long’s apartment, they head down to DC, which is where the real fun begins.
The villians are performing what’s called a “firesale” attack against the infrastructure of the United States. They take out traffic, power, and financial systems virtually all at the same time, creating a panic.
Willis and Long are then on chase after chase either running from the bad guys are trying to track them down. This leads to some pretty unrealistic physics and human body survivability, but like I said, if you leave your brain at the door you’ll have a great time.
Definitely a movie to try and catch in the theater before it leaves.
For some reason, I think because I was looking at Justin Long’s IMDB list ( you know, “Hey, I’m a Mac” guy ), I found this silly, but funny movie called Idiocracy. It’s a story about how the portion of mankind that’s actually reproducing is those with lower and lower IQs as the smarter people are making the choice to put off having kids and having fewer kids.
Luke Wilson plays an Army soldier who is chosen, along with a prostitute played by Maya Rudolph, to participate in an experiment to try and hibernate a human being for a year. Due to a series of mishaps, they aren’t brought out of hibernation for 500 years. When they awake, they find themselves as the smartest people in the world.
The writing is very clever and I think a nice statement about how we seem to be lowering our standards more and more to bring in the lowest common denominator and how that might eventually turn the world stupid.
If you have about 90 minutes and want to laugh, I highly recommend picking this one up.
As Maggie pointed out on her blog, I was one of the many who braved the crowds Friday night and got us both an iPhone. My friend Jim has a pretty good account of what we went through to get our phones.
After a fairly quick activation, and after having my corporate discount removed, Maggie and I were up and running. First sync went beautifully, at which point I grabbed the phone out of the cradle and began my weekend obsession. ( There’s a 14-Day return policy, and I want to make sure this is the phone for me, although as you’ll soon learn, that’s not going to be an issue )
The first thing I did was to play the “Make Love, Not Warcraft” South Park episode I had purchased a while back from the iTunes Store. It looked gorgeous! In fact, the screen is just about perfect. When it’s off, you can see smudges, but when the thing is on, you can’t see them at all. The iPhone performs just as it appears in the commercials, but I digress.
Next up was getting it connected to the Wifi network I have setup in my house, and that as always, was a snap. I fired up the Safari web browser and started poking around. My blog came up great and I used the pinching to zoom in and the spreading to zoom out. Worked like a charm. The only downside I’ve seen here is that occasionally Safari crashes ( which means the phone just abruptly goes back to the home screen ).
Next up was YouTube. I watched a few of my favorites and they again looked awesome.
The SMS client is great! I’ve sent more text messages in the last 48 hours then I’ve sent in the last 2 years. The client is actually worth using, much more so than my old Nokia phone.
The mail client, which I’ve only got setup to check my Yahoo account works just like Mail.app in OS X and is full featured. The neat thing about Yahoo accounts on the iPhone is that they are completely synced up, meaning when I’ve read something or deleted something on my iPhone, it’s had the same thing done to it if I view it through the Yahoo Web interface.
I wore the phone out in the first day, meaning I did about as much stuff as I could exploring every little feature I could find. And after all that playing, I did have to charge it last night.
The biggest negative I’ve read leading up to the launch was the slowness of AT&Ts EDGE network ( the network you use for the Internet when Wifi isn’t available ) and to be honest, it hasn’t been as bad as predicted. I’ve read reports that leading up to Friday, the EDGE network got a sudden speed boost.
There’s only one missing feature for me, and that’s custom ringtones. At present, you must use one of the 25 provided. Although there are rumors abound that it’s coming “soon” via software updates. Which is one of the reasons I wasn’t too worried about some of the minor things people have found missing or that could be better: The entire interface is software and can be updated through iTunes. I see a lot of updates coming as Apple works out the kinks and adds requested features.
Overall, I think the iPhone lives up to what I want it to be, a convergence of my Music/Video Player and my cell phone. I love being able to just carry one device and the fact that’s it incredibly small and still pack in the features is just icing on the cake.
If you’re on the fence about getting one, I suggest going to an Apple store and playing with one. I think the form factor and overall weight will surprise you. And if you’re worried about what happens when you accidently drop your iPhone, you need to watch this video from PC World.
I’ll post more as I get more experience with it.
One last note, the clownfish background in all the promotional materials leading up to launch isn’t available as an actual wallpaper. I think that’s pretty funny.
I’ve now been in Atlanta since Monday for a Microsoft Certification Bootcamp to get a certification to help please my company. I’m going to continue to be here until Monday, and even though the company put us up in some nice accommodations, I’m still missing home a lot.
The only thing that’s helping is that we are constantly busy, even after class as we need most of the night to continue to study to get ready for the tests we are taking for the certifications. The only real break has generally been dinner.
One cool thing has been the ability to use iChat to video chat back home with Maggie and Brenden. Although it’s been confusing Brenden that he can hear me and see me, but that I’m not there. He keeps grabbing the phone in the office like he wants to talk to me that way.
I’ll be happy when I get to come back home and see my family. Not to mention sleeping in my own bed. For one of the first times in my life, I’m having a hard time falling to sleep. I’m chalking that up to having so many things I’m trying to store in my head combined with being in unfamiliar surroundings.
Well, according to Time Out New York, my New York age is:
This New York age puts you into a middle category between young and old (but not “middle age” per se). Be proud. You’ve got a nice balance between going out hard-core and staying in. You care about culture but also like some quiet nights. Keep it up, but think about expanding your horizons in the other directions. Head to Studio B or Anthology Film Archives for the first time, or finally check out the Village Vanguard or Elaine’s for a dose of old-school NYC.
Does your age reflect how you’re living? Let us know.
What’s your New York age? Take the Time Out New York quiz and find out!
I don’t know how I feel about my real age being younger than my New York Age.
(via Robin)
Before I left on the cruise, I had one last test for the week in Calculus, and I knew I’d have grades to check either during the cruise or after it. I’m happy to report that I got a B in Calculus and an A in Financial Accounting. So 2 more classes down, so many more to go.
I’m taking the summer off due to some scheduling conflicts, but I’ll be back at it in the Fall.
The week after the cruise ( the next day in fact ) I left for Durham, NC to attend a training program my employer runs there. The purpose of this training to have the attendees asses areas about their work and life that might be out of balance. The goals of the program is to have you seriously take a long look at what your future goals are and to make plans to achieve those goals.
One of the really cool activities we did during all this learning was to go to Cameron Indoor Stadium and meet with 5 assistant coaches of Duke’s basketball program. After an inspiring video featuring Coach K, we set out onto the court to learn various basketball skills leading up to learning an actual Duke Basketball play. During a break we got to shoot some hoops on the court before we executed the play against other attendees. I’m happy to say the team I was on won during our run.
Here are some photos
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Me shooting some hoops, we got to keep the practice jerseys |
The Krzyzewskiville sign that marks where students camp out for tickets to the game |
For the longest time, Maggie and I have talked about going on a cruise and we decided for our 5th anniversary that it was the right time to book it and have some fun.
After about a month of searching and looking at deals, we finally decided on a 7 day cruise to the Western Caribbean aboard the Carnival Conquest. We were told that we were being “brave” by bringing along Brenden, who’d be about 12 and a half months old for the trip. Even though it caused some interesting things to occur to his normal sleeping pattern, I couldn’t imagine the trip without him.
We left on Mother’s Day out of Galveston and looked forward to 2 days at sea before making our first stop. Those 2 days were a lot of fun and very relaxing. We explored the ship and I even played in a Blackjack tournament, where I almost got to the final table, but alas, was knocked off the board just before round play ended. Monday night was formal night, and we had fun dressing up and being fancy for an evening. We walked out on the main deck afterwards with Brenden to let him run around.
First stop was Montego Bay, Jamaica, which was very nice. It was cloudy and did eventually rain, but it didn’t seem to bother us. We shopped in the morning and for the afternoon we had booked an excursion to go out on a glass-bottom semi-sub to check out the coral reef. Once we got to the reef and after going over it a bit, we got the opportunity to snorkel, which I took advantage of. Maggie was a little scared of the creatures in the water and stayed on the boat with Brenden. They served us Rum Punch on this little trip and it was very strong, although quite tasty.
Next up was Grand Cayman which seemed like the shortest day due to everyone needing to use a smaller boat called a tender to get to the shore. The cruise ships are too large to dock because the water is pretty shallow. It didn’t help that we had an early excursion planned, and that it took most of our time during the day. We did get to stop and get my required Hard Rock Cafe shot glass ( I collect them and have them from just about everywhere I’ve been that has one ). We then rushed over to our excursion and were off to visit Hell, Grand Cayman, a sea turtle farm, and to swim with stingrays. All of these were great and the sea turtles were awesome, but being in the water with the rays was a definite highlight for me. Maggie did make it into the water and held on to Brenden ( who loved splashing and playing in the water ) while dodging the rays.
Our final port of call was Cozumel, Mexico. This day was hot, like really hot. Amazingly, none of us really burned on the trip. I chalk that up to 50 SPF sunscreen applied at least twice a day. In Cozumel, we didn’t have anything planned so that Maggie could take full advantage of the shopping there. They sell a ton of silver since it’s mined near there. Also, I got to go to a Tequila store which had over 200 varieties. I sampled several ( many of which tried to put me on the floor ) and decided on a nice smooth sipping tequila and one that was infused with pomegranate juice which tasted like fruit punch.
We had a scary moment in Cozumel where we thought that maybe we had overheated Brenden ( did I mention it was hot? ), but we did not. All the heat did make him pretty lethargic the rest of the night.
One more day at sea and then we were back home. It was a fantastic trip and I would recommend taking a cruise to anyone. In fact, Maggie and I have decided that cruising is either our first choice or our plan b for future vacations if we can’t think of a place to go.
Here are some photos in fairly random order
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| The beautiful water of Cozumel | Dad and Brenden hanging out before taking a nap |
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| Dad and Brenden hanging out on the deck | The Burleson Family out on deck on Formal Night |
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| The Burleson’s and the Stingray | Me “kissing” a stingray |
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| One of the many towel animals that were made by our cabin steward | We finally caught a sunset on the last night on the boat |
At the end of March, Maggie and I went to NYC for a friend’s wedding reception. We didn’t take Brenden along as we made it a “day” trip, so he stayed behind with Maggie’s mom at our house. When I say “day trip”, I mean, from Arrival time to Departure time was 29 hours! Very quick trip to NYC.
One of the things I’ve talked about on this blog is my absolute love of what I affectionately call “Street Meat”. You know those random food carts around the City. Not the hotdog guys, the guys making chicken and rice, gyros, and various other more substantial meals. I have a favorite of these at Broadway and 40th street. I practically ate there every day I could. It was $4 for a large chicken and rice with a small side of salad. I’d have them mix in a little lamb for a final price of $5. This was by far one of the cheapest ways to get really full in NYC. And after I became a daily fixture, they were really sad to hear I’d be leaving the City.
I had a friend of mine check with the guy to see if he would be open the weekend we went and get this, the guy opened special just because I was coming! When we got there he said he opened because he needed to train a guy on a slower day, but he drove in special to be there when I’d be around. I was touched.
I finally remembered to gets some pictures of things this time as I realized some of you have no clue what I’m talking about, so without further ado:
This is me and the “Street Meat Guy”. Sadly, I’ve never been able to understand his name.
This is him at work making my order. These carts have a grill, a deep fryer, and a place for drinks.
Finally, the finished product.
I saw a cool site today: Speed Demos Archive . It features movie recordings of people playing games from start to finish as fast as they can. I think my personal favorite is:
Super Mario Bros. done in 5 minutes (using the world warps) and just under 20 minutes, playing all 32 levels.
I played a lot of Super Mario Bros. when I was much younger. And I finished it several times. But after watching these guys, I realized my skillz, they be lacking. And watching these people finish all these games I spent hours playing and finishing them with astonishing speed, I also wonder “is playing like that fun?”. I guess we all play for different reasons.
Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been lucky enough to be taken along to entertain clients at a couple of Stars games. The seats were very, very nice. I went to the Minnesota game on February 6th and the Red Wings game on February 14th (yes, I have the best wife in the world, she let me go to a hockey game on Valentine’s Day). And when I say these seats were nice, I mean it! Third row in the corner of the goal the Stars defend twice on the players’ bench side. Here are some pics I took with my phone:
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| Warm Ups | Dallas Stars’ Bench |
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| Mike Modano | Faceoff! |
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| Some live game action | |
The Stars won the game against the Wild, but lost to Detroit. Both nights were awesome either way because of the great vantage point. Nothing like seeing the players’ eyes darting around looking at the play. Just amazing!
Ok, so maybe it’s not the day after like I talked about before, but here are the pics I took during the YoungStars/NHL Skills competition here in Dallas. Our seats were pretty awesome. One of the cool things was that for every team that has a mascot, they were there. I got shots of several of them. The funniest thing was the Islander Mascot (pic below, still trying to figure out why their mascot is a dragon) and I “got into it”. He came and sat on a kid sitting in front of us, I was taking his picture and he came up to get in my face. I took the picture and as he’s turning around I yelled “Go Rangers!”. For those that don’t know, the Islanders and Rangers are a huge rivalry. He turned around and proceed to “eat my head”. It was all in good fun. It was a great night and I got to see a lot of NHL talent on display. A once in a lifetime thing.
Pics in no particular order:
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| Joe Thorton in the most acurate shot contest | The All-Stars just hanging out |
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| Blackhawks Mascot | East Young-Stars |
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| Islanders Mascot | Penguins Mascot |
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| Thrashers Mascot | West Young-Stars |
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| Young-Stars game action | Young-Stars final score ( East 9 – West 8 ) |
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| Young-Stars post-game | Pre-game scoreboard for Young-Stars game |
I saw this on Fark today and it made me laugh. Thought I would share.
This week, the NHL will hold it’s All-Star Game here in Dallas. I’ve been lucky enough to obtain a ticket to tomorrow night’s YoungStars/Skill Competition. It should be high scoring in the YoungStars game (average goals scored by winning team is 9.3) and I’ve always enjoyed the skills competition when I’ve watched it on TV.
Look for a post on Wednesday with the pictures.
Ah rabbits, should we think of them as cute and cuddly, or something very different:
I found this little game today. It’s a test to see how fast you can type the alphabet. The clock starts when you hit the “A” key. My best time so far is around 7.1 6.1 5.5 4.3 4.2 4.0 seconds. I’ve read others in the sub-4 second range. I don’t believe the high scores though, the quickest being 1 second or so. That just doesn’t seem possible.
Well, here we are in 2007. Maggie and I kept it pretty low key. After putting Brenden to bed, we played a rematch game of Trivial Pursuit: Totaly 80s
Hope you all had a wonderful New Year’s and here’s to a fantastic 2007!
As if to emphasize my previous post, Maggie and I ran across another interesting vending machine at DFW Airport on our way to NYC:
(sorry for the blurry pic, it’s from my phone)
That’s right, for all your emergency Sony product needs while traveling, there’s a Sony Kiosk at the airport. The items range from the reasonable ( headphones ) to the not so “impulse” ( PSP, $200 noise canceling headphones, digital cameras, etc ).
Ah, what will they sell from a vending machine next?
As I mentioned earlier, we decided to take a trip to visit New York City to see friends and our favorite New York places. As the time to travel neared, I began to get a little more anxious about this “taking a 7 month old on his first plane ride”. Well, as Maggie points out, Brenden was great during the trip. Which was amazing considering some of our travel woes.
It started with our departing flight. We got rushed into boarding the plane and after finally getting arranged in our seats, on a plane with malfunctioning air conditioning, the following announcement is made:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have good news and bad news. The good news is your flight isn’t cancelled. The bad news is that the flight that the pilots for this flight was just diverted to Alliance airport. It will be at least an hour before they will be here and ready to take off.
We are offered to de-board the plane if we want, but if we do, we need to take anything we brought on board. Since we were loaded down with a lot of baby stuff and our backpacks, we decided to wait it out on the plane. Well, 45 minutes later, we’re told that they still haven’t taken off to come to DFW and that it would be at least another hour before they got there. At that point, they recommended that everyone get off the plane. We decided at this point, that was probably the best idea.
Once we finally got on the plane, with a flight crew, Brenden actually fell asleep before take off. So I held him for the first 2 hours or so of the flight asleep on my arm. It made getting a drink and other things an adventure. Once he did wake up, he was in a good mood and made faces with the people sitting around us. Little did we know, we’d need every last ounce of his good mood before we got off that plane.
We land just fine at Newark and start to taxi to the gates. I noticed we stopped quite short of them and then we get the following notice from the flight deck:
I’m sorry to add insult to injury folks, but we were scheduled to park at Gate 34, and unfortunately Gate 34 is currently broken. The ground crew is working on it, but in the mean time, we’re waiting for one of the planes at gates 32 or 33 to pull back and we’ll park there. Sorry for the additional delay.
So we finally get out of the plane at 3:30 PM EST when we were scheduled to arrive at 1:00 PM EST. Gotta love the airline industry.
We had plans to meet with the people I used to work with at 5 PM. Needless to say, we were a bit late for that after getting a taxi and checking into the hotel and getting into the City. But we did make it and had a very good time seeing those folks and them meeting Brenden. Afterwards, we called up some more former co-workers, who had also moved on, and met them at Ruby Foo’s in Times Square. After some delicious Pan Asian food, Maggie, Brenden and I headed back to the hotel to crash as we were all very tired from a long day of travel.
The next day, we made a plan to meet up for lunch with my childhood friend John and his family. They have a new daughter that we hadn’t seen and of course they hadn’t seen Brenden either. They have the cutest little girl and their older boy had definitely grown and was a lot more talkative than I remembered when we lived there.
After lunch, Maggie wanted to go to Century 21 before our dinner plans with some of our dog walking friends (Mark and Valerie, and Suzanne). We went there and braved the crowds, which by the way, were huge as it always gets just before Christmas in NYC. Before coming back to New Jersey, we stopped and looked at the new photos they had put at the World Trade Center site. No matter how many times I see it, when I start to think about it, the events of that day still bring tears to my eyes.
Once back in Jersey, we grabbed a bottle of wine and met our friends at this great Italian cafe that was in our old neighborhood. It was quite an evening as there were two huge parties there making a lot of noise. And this wasn’t the largest of places. The food was amazing as was the conversations. Mark and Valerie were also gracious enough to offer to baby sit Brenden on Sunday, more on that later. They all walked us back to our hotel and we settled down for another good night’s sleep.
Sunday morning, we took the whole family to Central Park. The one big thing we wanted to do while there was to get hot chocolate at this place we had always gotten it while we were living there. Sadly, we found that it was closed at least for the day. We’re hoping not forever.
After that, we made our way back to New Jersey to drop Brenden off at Mark and Valerie’s and made our way back into the City. We ate at our favorite place in Chinatown where we got their amazing steamed pork buns. After that, we headed off to see the New Jersey Devils play the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden. I was in hockey heaven as it was a hockey game at MSG and also one of the biggest rivalries currently in the NHL. ( My wife is the best for letting us choose hockey over broadway ) New Jersey ended up embarrassing the Rangers 6-1 and the crowd got “rowdy”, with a fight breaking out two sections over.
We went back to Jersey to pick up Brenden from Mark and Valerie. They had a good time watching him and came to the conclusion that they weren’t ready for the work it takes to have a baby. Not that Brenden was bad or anything, just that they didn’t realize the amount of energy needed.
For Monday, we planned a lot of stops. First we hit FAO Schwartz, then the new 5th Ave Apple Store, Rockefeller Center to see the tree, then M&M World, then we had my favorite meal in the whole city: Street Meat. Yummy! Then we went to see the Macy’s windows and finally headed back to the hotel after a very long day.
On our final day, we went to go see Maggie’s former co-workers at a place in New Jersey. They were very excited to see Maggie and Brenden. After hanging out there, we left for the airport, where we had another fun adventure flying home. Luckily, we were only delayed an hour this time.
Overall it was a great trip. It was really good to see everyone and for us to be able to have a good time bringing the little one along. He won’t remember it, but we have plenty of pictures to prove he was there:
Brenden asleep on the plane
Brenden and Maggie in Central Park
Brenden and I in Central Park
The skating rink from Serendipity
Brenden bundled for NYC
Brenden really, really, liked this mirror in our hotel room
Brenden plays on the piano at FAO, the one in the movie Big
Final score of the hockey game
The Macy’s Windows
Finally, Brenden and I spend a little recoup time waiting for the plane ride home