rounding up the interesting news of the day --

the nba's washington wizards have planned singles nights for this season. sounds like a ridiculous idea to me, although prolly mostly cuz it's the wizards. i have a hard time believing that any decent NBA team would bother with something like this, only a city with a perennial godawful team.

XM finally decided it made some goddamn sense to produce a portable player. a somewhat crafty idea, it's basically a portable delphi satellite radio with some flash memory that can hold about 5 hours of digital radio. only problem is it only holds XM content, you can't load mp3's or AAC's on it. that'll prolly be what kills it. if XM or sirius partnered up with apple and put out some kind of ipod that could connect to satellites, they'd empty the shelves i bet. my guess is with the hefty ~$350 + $10/mo subscription, they won't sell all that hot.

apple decided to put out a photo-capable ipod, although i guess i don't really see the appeal. now instead of just using your ipod for portable music, you can... carry pictures around on it too. and you can... look at them. you can't take pictures, but you can look at them. sounds like yet another way to fuck up the ipod's already abysmal battery life. i just don't really see what the use is here. unless a 1 gig flash card isn't enough for you to store your pictures on or something, but if you're that serious into high quality digital photography, wouldn't you just use a laptop or something. who needs to whip out a collection of photos from your pocket, or at least enough to take advantage of a hard drive instead of a flash card on a PDA? as much as i still love the idea of a having an ipod, i'm still interested in a joggable mp3 player and still waiting to see if Hi-MD goes anywhere to go out and buy one. i'd actually be more likely to buy an iBook with a reasonable raytheon discount. still pretty impressed with those customized color ipods though.

good to see firefox making some headway into the market. i may be writing this from XP, but i support open source software such as this. you may hate to admit it, but you'd love life just a bit more if we were all using firefox and OpenOffice on an open source Linux-based OS. keep in mind though that while i support OSS, i do kinda like getting paid to write and maintain proprietary embedded real-time software, okay?

--j

sundays have gotten pretty damn formulaic for me lately. they typically involve sleeping way in, not leaving the apartment and refusing to make 10 minutes to bother showering. i passed out at like 4am last night, face down amidst pillows and tivo remotes, only to wake up in my own drool an hour later. got in bed and slept till like 2 something today, thus completing the "i've slept in for the weekend, i can now begin another week" sequence.

been pretty lazy overall the whole weekend. i took friday off, didn't really have too much to show for it, slept in and did some laundry, fucked around. i felt like applebee's friday night, so alayna and i went there, had the obligatory mudslides. even at 7:30pm driving north on 75 to mckinney isn't exactly suggested. saturday we were actually up at 10am to go work out, so we were proud of ourselves for going out for that. we rounded out a "crazy" saturday afternoon by hitting the mall and grocery store. yet again we drove farther than we usually would for a dinner to pick up popeye's over in plano to eat while watching game 1 of the world series. that was decent, but somewhat embarrassingly we both fell asleep (her on the chair, me on the couch) for like 45 minutes right in the middle of it, heh. she eventually woke up in time to see it end, heh.

we were quite the loners this weekend. what the fuck's happened to the rest of ya's? i swear every weekend my buddy list completely shrinks and i'm left wondering if everyone else is in on something i'm not. sunday night comes and everybody and their mother's online.

basically been filling my free time with tv eps and games lately. we just noticed we haven't even been to the theater in 2 months, that's started to make us look kinda bad i guess, heh.

as far as tv, i've been catching up on season 3 family guy eps, went back to some old simpsons and king of the hill eps for nostalgia's sake. my futurama eps don't seem to get deleted quite as fast, it's a decent show but nowhere near as consistently funny. still enjoying curb your enthusiasm eps here and there, as well as cheap seats. i'm also still salvaging one episode of kiss me kate, a great britcom from '98-00 that was showing on pbs for a while. i'm starting to feel a bit guilty for not watching any of the animes i devoted a lot of time to downloading a few months ago, but... still got a few movies i gotta watch, like shrek 2, cowboy bebop, dawn of the dead and trainspotting.

the games i happen to have going at this very second are halo for the PC, beyond good & evil for the PS2 and star fox adventures for the cube. i've got tons of good shit to play on the PS2, but lately i think my plan of gaming in the bedroom isn't working as well as i'd hoped, mainly due to not having as much fun gaming on a 20" tv compared to the 50" that the cube claims. as recommended, beyond good & evil has been good so far, can just be a bit tough on the smaller tv when i'm only half sitting up, heh. the halo single player campaign has still been fun, think i'm almost on level 7 out of 10. for the cube i'm kind of in the mode of going back and getting my money's worth out of my older games before i start buying any more. i had been playing pikmin for a while, but was losing some interest so i went to metroid prime. problem with MP is it's too frustrating to have *that* much fun playing it, so i went to star fox adventures and now i'm having a decent time with that. alayna's official position on that one -- "it looks fun to play, but i don't wanna watch you playing it." prolly couldn't argue there.

as far as the week ahead, not taking any time off this week, so i'll prolly be there still at 4pm on friday unless i really grind the early part of the week. i'd imagine i'll watch 2/3 of each of the WS games this week, so that'll prolly take up the bulk of my evenings. glad i didn't plan to watch that whole cowboys game today, what a waste. no new ER this week, and i'm still a bit behind on survivor. so i guess that leaves lost as my show to look forward to this week.

best'a luck,
justin

man i've spent 10 years hating the goddamn yankees and it finally paid off. they lost the world series in '01 to the diamondbacks and in '03 to the marlins in 7 games but seeing them up 3 games to none and then lose it all is even better. i'm typically not much of a red sox fan, but for the next week i sure as hell will be. although admittedly if houston can pull out game 7 and move on to the series, i don't think i'm gonna know who to root for.

all in all, while the division series wasn't really all that great, this has been one helluva baseball postseason. it's too bad we're missin the NHL right now, but this is the next best thing to me.

bring on the world series in HD... bit of a step up from watching the NY subway series of '00 on a 13" tv in my freshman dorm room.

always a sports fan,
justin

(16:12:51) Justin: i really have no idea how that company is still in business
(16:13:07) Rick: b/c its cool to hate msft
(16:13:31) Rick: its all these mac users driving their damn vw's around
(16:13:58) Rick: i only know one vw driver that doesn't use a mac
(16:14:04) Rick: but he is catholic so that doesn't count

...and stereotypes fly.

--justin

faithful readers! sorta ran out of things to do at work so i'll post...

it's kinda been a bad october so far. health issues have kinda gotten me down and i can't really say i've been myself for a week or so. already hit the doctor and everything, doubt it's serious, but it's a pain in the neck, quite literally. back of my head and neck just have a dull pain most of the time, if i exert myself too much the pain really grows into a serious headache. so i've had to stay out of the gym/track to see if that helps, which combined with taking celebrex and a muscle relaxant just makes me feel so damn lethargic. so far i don't think any of the drugs i'm taking are really doing much besides giving me more and more side effects. 3 aleve's (the max) a day were kinda helping a bit, but they gave me all these sores on my tongue and lips, almost not worth it. so at this point i'm kinda just hoping the ol' immune system will do its job and fix whatever's up with me. don't even know if it's all related to tension/stress or if it's a strength training based neck/spinal strain of some sort.

having a cubicle-based job really doesn't help for those kinds of things. yeah i know if i was in like construction or something it'd be even worse, but having to sit in a chair and look at a monitor all day just isn't gonna help you for head/neck type aches. i wish i could take some time off to see if it'll help but i'm really trying to spread out my paid-time-off to maximize 3-day weekends and stuff. 75% of the time lately i just don't wanna be at work, which at some point is prolly gonna start coming across to anyone's peers. i've been bringing the pda to work and listening to music for about half the day which seems to sorta help me take my mind off the pain.

i really wish i could figure out how to get tired from like 10-11pm. most nights i'm completely wiped at about 8pm and usually end up passing out somewhere in the house for half an hour or so. problem with that is, i'm tired in the evening but then i wake up for the night. believe it or not, prolly half of my weeknights are spent thinking that i'll try to get to bed around 11 or 11:30, but that's hard to pull off for me. i just can't go to bed knowing i'll be sitting there bored for half an hour. so most of the time i end up being tired for a while in the evening, either taking some kinda nap or getting thru it, doing whatever for a while and finally getting tired around 2am. then a lot of the time i get in bed and realize i'm not quite as tired as i thought, so i end up watching an episode of family guy or something. so realistically, i'd say i probably average sleep from 2:30-7. so 4 and a half hours every night. i wouldn't really say i even get *that* tired at work, it's just i wonder sometimes if that affects other aspects of my health.

in some ways that's kinda why i think living alone is somewhat dangerous for me. i think as soon as i went to a&m, i forgot how to really have any self-discipline. after 5 months of work it's starting to hit me more that i haven't regained it yet.

when you live alone, there's really no reason for anything you do. you have no one else to frustrate, disappoint, excite, etc. you don't have to work around anyone's schedule, you have your own schedule, whatever you make that. sometimes that just burns you that you can do so much without consequence. i think that's part of me not getting very good sleep, i don't have anybody else in the apartment to shut up and be quiet for to facilitate anything other than halo at 1 in the morning with work the next day.

hmm, i'll slow down on the mopeyness...

the show of the new season has gotta be 'lost.' so far it's been terrific, and in HD it looks phenomenal. finally a reason to look forward to wednesdays, although i can't pull in ABC in HD, so it's kind of a moot point. luckily HD rips are posted at alt.binaries.hdtv, so you can wait a few days and see it in pure HD.

survivor and ER have been so-so thus far. everybody in the world is starting to feel like they've gotten their fill of survivor and the format's wearing thin. they've had one too many competitions that were exactly like those in the past for the whole experience to really feel all that enthralling anymore. ER looks good in HD, but i think the show has a shitty slate of characters right now. i'm not planning on giving up on it or anything here soon, but they need some new exciting shit to happen.

the networks are getting more and more pathetic every year man. i remember in the late 90's being completely in love with NBC, and now i think they're such a fuckin joke most of the time. scrubs and ER are still worth watching, but holy christ i can't believe what crap they (and the other 3) are playing these days.

at least directv put up the MLB playoffs on fox in HD. prolly not the best postseason i've ever seen, but it's been alright considering we'd usually have the first games of the NHL season by now. i'm not even gonna go all into the NHL lockout, it's such a crock of shit that i'm somewhat embarrassed to be such a hockey fan.

times are a-changin, man. alayna and i hardly ever go to the theater anymore. when we're likely to be able to get the dvd rip a couple months later anyway, there's not that much motivation. if she's gonna fall asleep halfway through the movie, she might as well do it when i'm not paying $15 at cinemark. it's the same reason my blockbuster card is gathering dust.

lately i think tv dvd's is where it's at. i'd say if a show's been on within the last 10 years, it's still mostly current, it's got the same sense of humor to it. we're always so obsessed with the new shows on tv, we have to see what's just come out, to the point where the networks now market it so heavily. how many times now do you see a promo for a show where their tagline is "all new?" and what the fuck does "all new" mean anyway? as opposed to half new? imagine watching the first 15 minutes of a show, knowing you've never seen it before, then finding the last 15 oddly familiar. my point is you can watch sex & the city from 1998, curb your enthusiasm from 2000, home movies from 1999, whatever, and it's still new to you, it's just as good, if not better, cuz you're watching something you sought out, not just what happens to be on when you're bored.

i've found that's pretty much what i do when i just wanna sit around and i'm too lazy to play a game or whatever. i've got these long queues of shows i like to just burn off one by one, watching them at whatever pace i want. whether you burn through sex & the city in a manner of weeks like alayna, or indulge in a home movies episode every few weeks like me, it still works.

tonight's a celebration of mom's birthday, with the family + sig-o's going to see everyone's favorite clean comedian brian regan perform. alayna and i saw him in houston and enjoyed the show, so we're ready for another round. i figure my parents will prolly like him, since he's not ridiculously profane or anything.

thanks for riding that one out,
justin