Well, it finally happened. I’m in NYC, and there is snow falling from the sky. We had some snow Sunday night, but I didn’t get to see it falling and I was in Jersey at the time. It’s pretty cool to actually see snow falling in Manhattan. It’s very small and blowing around today. Supposedly we’re going to get a couple of inches.
I also guess Winter decided to show up in the North East. This week we don’t have a single day where the high is projected to exceed freezing. Finally, I can start bitching about how cold it is. 🙂 (Not really, I rather enjoy the cold)
Awhile back Maggie and I were looking at going to see Ocean’s Twelve the weekend it opened. I’m always a little fearful of doing so when a movie is probably going to draw a large crowd full of the types of moviegoers I hate (I will leave that for another time). But my biggest fear is getting there and having to sit in the crappy seats (like say, the front row).
I talked to Maggie about it and convinced her that we should give it a try, letting her know the features they advertise. She said yes, and I bought the tickets, which have a $4 premium on them and we were all set.
Some of the features are: VIP line to pick up the tickets , VIP line into the theater, assigned seats, and a waitress for getting concessions.
Of those features, we used the VIP line to pick up the tickets. Instead of waiting in the very long line other people were in to buy or pickup their tickets, we went to a line on the said for “VIP Reserved Seat Tickets”. That put us as next in line, in front of everyone else. It’s was just like the Q-Bot from SixFlags. Sure, I felt, a little bad about “cutting” in line, but hey, that’s what they sell the tickets for.
Next up, we went ahead and bought our snacks at the concession stand, mostly because we like to use our Visa Check Card to pay for things instead of carry cash and I figured the waitress would only take cash. But luckily, the lines for food were very short and we were on our way.
We found the VIP entrance to the theaters, and sure enough, no line for us. Briskly through the process, right to our theater were we were met by the waitress/host and she checked our tickets and showed us to our seats.
These seats were sweet! They were in a pretty good part of the theater, a lot of the way up, but not the absolute top. They were leather and wider than the normal theater seat. The seats were paired up in twos, and between these pairs are very large arm rests that are flat and made to hold a lot of stuff. Which is nice, I hate having to either hold the popcorn the whole movie, or having the put it on the ground and hope someone doesn’t step on it.
Another great part, was the waitress/host made sure everyone sitting in the reserved section had tickets and where in the right seats. And yes, the seats are numbered much like an auditorium or stadium.
All and all, it was certainly worth it. Especially if you are going to a movie that you know is going to be packed. These seats would have been very good for the Lord of the Rings movies. If your local Lowe’s starts offering reserved seats, you should check it out. Currently it’s only available at Jersey Gardens and the Lowe’s 34th St. Theater in NYC.
Joke #1:
A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of
them goes to a family in Egypt and is named “Ahmal.” The
other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.”
Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth
mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband
that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her
husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan,
you’ve seen Ahmal.”
Joke #2:
Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the
other and says, “Dam!”
Joke #3:
Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the
time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his
feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail
and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This
made him a ………super calloused fragile mystic hexed by
halitosis.
Joke #4:
These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so
they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since
everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival
florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He
asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not.
He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored
him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the
smelliest beggar in town to beg outside their shop. When
all the customers stayed away, they shut down, thereby
proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.
A while back Robert mentioned to me he was going to make the jump to Vonage, a Voice Over IP (VOIP) telephone service created to replace your actual phone company. I told him it all looked good, but to let me know what he thought after using it for a while.
After about a month I asked him what he thought, and he spent the next 30 minutes extolling the virtues of the service and how he hardly noticed it was there, except for lowered phone bills. Well, this had me very intrigued.
I then started convincing Maggie that we needed to give it a try and shortly after our move, we ordered it and the equipment arrived two days later (right on time). One of the huge bonuses for us is that we get to keep our existing number from Verizon, without keeping the higher cost of their service.
My biggest concern was getting all the phone jacks in the apartment setup. But I got lucky because our apartment complex wired each apartment as if they were their own house, so I had the normal external phone connections you would find at a house. Using that, I was able to follow Vonage’s wiring diagram for using the parallelism of the interior phone wiring to plug a phone line from the Vonage router to one of the phone jacks in the house and have that supply the phone service to all the other jacks. That made things very easy.
We’ve had the service for about a month now and can’t be happier. We can use their online management portal to see all the calls we have received and made. Also, we get email notifications when we get voicemail and can actually listen to them online. We get all the standard features of normal phone service all for 1/3 of the price. That includes unlimited calling to anywhere in the United States and Canada.
Another really cool feature is the ability to get virtual phone numbers in other area codes, so it looks like you have a phone number in any city you want. Kinda cool, especially say if move across the country and want to possibly setup a number that would still be local to all your friends and family. 🙂 (Haven’t done this yet, but it’s on our list to consider)
One more thing that hit me was you can “take your phone with you”. Basically, you bring the Vonage broadband router with you on a trip and plug it into some broadband, plug a phone into it, and your number will ring there. It’s a bit crazy, but if you were going somewhere for a while unexpectedly and you knew you would have access to broadband, it would be worth it.
The only drawback I have found is that our DirecTivo units can’t seem to make their daily call over the service. We can fax fine, I just think the dial tone times out too fast for the slow dialing modem in those boxes. I’m going to look into seeing if I can extend the timeout for the dial tone because plenty of people have posted that they have successfully gotten the DirecTivos to make the daily call. But luckily, the units continue to work fine even without that call since they get their program information from the satellite.
I highly recommend anyone out there who wants to save a ton of money on their phone bill to check out Vonage. Well worth the money.
These photos are amazing. They are before and after shots from where the Tsunami hit a couple of weeks ago. It’s amazing that there were even survivors. I can’t imagine how scary it would have been to see that wave coming and be able to do nothing about it.
Ok, so this past week we were back home to visit my family and my wife’s family for Christmas. When we left New Jersey, it was 50 degrees. When we landed at DFW, it was 20 degrees and once we got to Sherman, there was 3 inches of snow on the ground. That’s more than we’ve had here!!! And of course, we get back Friday evening and yesterday it was 60 degrees! At least today it has cooled off, but there’s no super cold weather forecasted for the next 10 days. (That’s as far out as the Wether Channel’s website predicts) Jeez, I’m almost beginning to believe all that talk of snow is made up (and I’m sure I’m going to regret that statement)
We have a roasty, toasty warm high of about 17 degrees today , which a wind chill somehwere around -2 (or lower, depending on the gusts). I’ve come to realize that maybe, just maybe, I should have worn my thermals to work. Those last couple of blocks to the train station were a bit chilly. Not much snow fell last night. What even I would call a super light dusting. Barely any on the sidewalks. Oh well. I’m sure we’ll see more than our fair share.
It looks like the cold weather will be following Maggie and I back to Texas this week. They might even get some snow the night before we fly down. But at least it’s going to warm up to the 60’s a couple of days after we arrive.
Well, it’s finally happened. Some snow fell for the first time this winter in NYC. I’m sure I will be sick of it by the end of the winter season. But hey, it’s kinda cool to live in a place where they seemed prepared for it. The question is: Am I? 🙂
This has to be one of my favorite 404 error pages ever. Very closely followed by the SGI crying baby, for which I can not find a link to show.
For those of you not familiar with a “404 Page”, it’s the term given to the page served by the webserver when it can’t find a requested URL. The reason it’s called 404 is because that’s the “Not Found” error code for HTTP.
Ok, so I just got hit with my first ever taste of comment spam. 76 bonus comments advertising online casinos. That was fun to delete, especially since WordPress’s page to do mass deletes doesn’t appear to work.
I wonder where they linked to my blog from?
Anyway, going to have to disable comments until I can get a better system together to combat the comment spam bots. Bastards.
Update: Ok, so I’ve added some anti-comment spam stuff. We’ll see how it goes. I wish there was a way to force a registration for WordPress. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
Update 2:Well, so the anti-comment spam stuff I put in place wasn’t quite good enough. Going to disable comments again for now. Something to look into for the weekend. There’s a pretty good chance comments may just have to go away.
Ok, this may sound crazy to some of you out there, but after only being in our apartment for 5 months, we’re changing apartments in our building. The offere was too good to pass up. An additional 230 sq.ft. for only $60 more a month. We’ll be adding a Den, an extra bathroom and upgrading to full size washer and dryer. Not to mention having a pantry as well.
Although, now we only have 2 more days to completely move before we start getting double charged for the old apartment. Yikes! Luckily last night John and I moved all the heavy stuff and Maggie spent the day moving everything else. She’s spending today moving the rest of our stuff to the new place. (God I love her!)
So there you have it, moving again. But to bigger and what should be better.
Tonight we are going to the tree lighting at Rockafeller Center…hope to have a report about that tomorrow.
So I finally got around to seeing Team America: World Police. I laughed so hard I was in tears and my stomach hurt.
Compared to South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, Team America is a much better movie. The quality takes a bit of hit with it all being done with puppets, but at the same time they poke fun at themselves being puppets. But the story is good, the cursing has been toned down to less rediculous levels, and the satire is top notch.
I love the use of original songs as they are very funny and again seeth with satire and sarcasm. I am going to have to buy that album.
I remember reading that they had to cut out some of the puppet sex in the movie to get an R rating instead of an NC-17 rating, but based on what’s been left in the film, I want to know what the hell they cut out?!?
If you like teenage, male humor (aka, dick and fart jokes), this movie is right up your alley. Even if you aren’t into that kind of humor, I still recommend you go check it out and hopefully it will tickle your funny bone too!
So Maggie and I where headed to a silly art opening at a bar on the Lower East Side for a co-worker of mine’s wife and were recommended to stop at Katz’s Deli on the way.
Little did we remember that’s the diner from the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally! They even have a little sign above the table that says “When Harry Met Sally….We hope you have what she had.”
The food was fantastic…and don’t be too shocked by the prices ($13 for a sandwhich!!!), you won’t finish one of their sandwhiches in one sitting. They are HUGE!
Yes, I know, not exactly current cinema. But tonight Maggie and I went to the ClearView Cinema in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan to see the Moulin Rouge! on the big screen as a part of their Thursday “classics” night. We had missed the movie when it originally played in theaters and thought it would be cool to see the movie with the sound loud and the screen huge.
Probably the funniest thing about this Thursday night regluar gig is the host, Hedda Lettuce, who is quite the Drag Queen. Reminded me a lot of how Kathleen Turner played Chandler’s Dad on Friends. She/He did some stand up jokes of the variety you expect from a drag queen. Best part was her/his interaction with a father and his 10 year old daughter, politely informing them that they were in a theater full of gay people.
As a side note for my friends not familiar with the NYC area, Chelsea has a fairly substantial gay population and Hedda fit right in for the audience. I have never seen so many men arrive eagerly for a musical movie. 🙂
All in all, it was very good to see the movie and the audience reacted well to the film, acting as if they had never seen it. I love the movie, with all of it’s crazy music and amazing acting and awesome color contrasts. If you haven’t seen the Moulin Rouge! I suggest you go rent it today!