now that the year's almost over, my personal picks for the top ten alt rock tracks of 2005 --

1) emanuel / the willing
2) bloodhound gang / foxtrot uniform charlie kilo
3) nine inch nails / only
4) fall out boy / sugar, we're goin' down
5) beck / e-pro
6) all-american rejects / dirty little secret
7) alkaline trio / mercy me
8) the white stripes / blue orchid
9) the bravery / an honest mistake
10) death cab for cutie / soul meets body

honorable mentions --
gorillaz / feel good, inc.
coheed and cambria / the suffering
QotSA / in my head
SoaD / violent pornography
switchfoot / stars

take all this information and do something useful with it.

--j

everybody's talking about the weather today in north texas. i have to admit it is rather apocalyptic that last saturday we had mid-80s highs, and today our highs are like 30 with a chance of ice and snow. so saturday i went and got my oil changed in shorts, today i come to work bundled up with a hoody, beanie and the jacket i usually ski in. it all reminds me of lewis black's rants about the weather on the white album. go check it out. now.

i won't beat around the bush, some days at work are just fucking work. and i don't mean i'm so busy i don't know how to live my life, i mean sometimes i'm so ridiculously lacking on things to do that i'm privately amazed when i've been here for 8 hours and i can go home. everybody's job has its perks... i realize i've got a great job so i don't complain much but goddamn, being a cube monkey with little to do at times is vicious. there are seriously some days where i would have been so much more productive had i just stayed home and lazed around for 7 and a half hours, and cleaned the bathroom sink for the other half hour. it's frustrating when you're not contributing to any kind of good in society. i feel kinda stupid when i'll bother to get up in the morning (whether i'm coming in for the day at 7am or 10am), drive into work and just surf websites and complete necessary 5-minute tasks a couple times a day.

it's different at a small company. if you don't have that much going on, everybody in the office knows it and something happens because of it. here, there's just too much going on all the time, people are out of town, taking time off, working somewhere else in the huge building, nobody can really keep track of everybody. if you're not that high up on the food chain, people kinda forget you're there.

i value my job too much to ever really screw around that much, but i admit it kinda makes me wonder -- how much could i get away with and still keep my job? could i come in at 9am, take 1 hour lunches and leave at 4 o'clock everyday without anyone ever even noticing? what if i took an hour at a time to catch up with one of my friends in the building, would anybody be looking for me frantically?

it's a double-edged sword -- i don't really wanna be all that important and constantly swamped at this point, but i don't wanna be so damn bored all the time. for somebody like me, it gives me too much time to think. i end up just sitting here and spacing out wishing i was at home doing any number of more entertaining things. it's weird that i actually end up feeling more swamped at home (damn i need to watch this tv show, i should be playing this game, i need to sort through this music to see if it's any good, etc) than i do at work. granted, i'm not the average joe that just goes home and watches whatever's on tv that night from 7-11 and then saunters off to bed after 15 minutes of a good book, but still. the point is i'm more methodical about my hobbies than my job, cuz it's more fulfilling.

this can be a tough time of year in this type of situation though. it's supposed to be a holiday rush, but for me with everybody else around me wrapping things up for the holidays and taking days off, it's more like the holiday crawl.

at least this wasted some time.

--j

as mentioned in my last post, rick & i saw aeon flux last night. i didn't really go in with very high expectations, which was probably the right way to go, but it was actually pretty good. it moves at a quick enough pace to keep you entertained despite throwing seemingly random shit at you. i kinda liked how it didn't go way out of its way to explain everything on screen in more depth, would have made the movie feel a lot more bloated. somewhat faithful to the mid-90s MTV animated series, it felt like they didn't go out of their way to put more dialog in than they had to.

the action scenes weren't as stunning as the matrix or anything, but they were believably done. the art and costume designs were pretty sweet and upped the eye candy factor of the movie. i think charlize theron is incredibly beautiful, but i don't think aeon flux was guilty of trying to fill seats by just exploiting her. in the animated series, aeon's hair was always really impossibly pointy and angular, and they took a good shot at achieving that in the movie.

i'd say if you've never seen the animated series you won't be completely confused or anything, so i'd recommend it if you like stuff like the matrix and equilibrium. good innocent (in that ultraviolent way) fun. 7 out of 10.

--j

alayna and i joined chris & monica to hit up the stars game (our third this year already). against carolina, leading 4-2 going into the 3rd i was pretty much convinced we had it, but we gave up a couple goals and ended up tied. there were some close calls in OT, mostly on the hurricanes end. but time expired so we went to the shootout, the first ever in the AAC. came down to the 3rd round where it was up to modano to end the game with a goal. i didn't realize at the time that modano hadn't actually participated in the 2 previous shootouts we've had this year. he pulled a sweet deke to the left on gerber and got the puck to just barely cross the goal line, sending the place into a frenzy. made the whole game awesome.

rick and i are gonna go check out aeon flux tonight. tried to get robert and hoang to go, but robert never got back to me and hoang was too lazy to even bother with an excuse.

tomorrow night, dinner with yet another friend. it's a social weekend extravaganza. w-o-w.

--j

happy december.

things are slow so far up at work, so i figured i'd do some namedropping to convey what kinds of geeky shit i'm into everyday. expect this to be quite random.

right now i'm listening to the fight club soundtrack, if i had to list my top 5 movie soundtracks (that i can think of at this second), they'd be --

Fight Club [IMDb] (1999)
Magnolia [IMDb] (1999)
Requiem for a Dream [IMDb] (2000)
Ocean's Eleven [IMDb] (2001)
High Fidelity [IMDb] (2000)

i haven't really heard much buzz about last.fm, but i link to my last.fm page on the left of this page. i actually think it's a fantastic idea. there's a great description of how it works on wikipedia. i just like the idea of sharing with the world your own personal music tastes.

you might notice that i link to wikipedia a lot. i've actually grown to kinda rely on it at this point. the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit (within reason) is pretty cool, and it's probably the best site you can get lost in for 2 hours without realizing it. if you ever need to kill any amount of time, check out the wikipedia unusual articles listing, always something entertaining there. if you require more instant entertainment, check out fark or waxy.

that should hold you over for now.

--j

well friends this counts as my 100th post. i consider that to be somewhat of a milestone given how often i've doubted whether i should even bother to post updates. i've had this going since october '03, back when i was a senior computer science major at texas a&m and had much more interesting things to rant about. that comes out to about 25 months, and this being the 100th post, i'd say i stick to once a week on average pretty well. hopefully i can hash out 100 more before i lose complete inclination to maintain an online presence. ;)

the xbox 360's release yesterday has got me thinking about gaming. apparently from now on console releases are gonna be this ridiculous. people camping out for hours, and plenty of them going home empty-handed. one wonders if there was truth to the rumors of microsoft implementing an artificial shortage of 360 consoles to drive up demand. so far demand looks pretty high, and should get even higher closer to the holidays. microsoft had better hope demand is high, given the BusinessWeek report that they could be losing up to $126 on each console sold.

as far as my personal thoughts on the 360 itself, i think i'm less opposed to it than i remember being with the original xbox. i vaguely remember being pretty against the idea of microsoft getting into the console business. it wasn't until years later (probably 2003) that i had played a few games for it and thought it wasn't as bad as i had feared. what i don't like about the xbox realm in general is that they seem to have the least originality of the big 3 console companies, with nintendo leading the way and sony having established several solid franchises since bringing the PS1 stateside in '95. the first xbox system seemed to have garnered most of its success through halo and halo 2, and i'm not sure how far an everyday first-person shooter can get you, even if they're great FPSs.

although i haven't used it myself, it does seem to me like microsoft executes online gaming very well. i can see how putting on the headset and getting online and chatting to your friends while fragging each other or racing or whatever can be fun, although i can't really see myself getting into it all that hardcore. i think sony and nintendo could learn something from this type of online model, which i'm sure we'll see in full effect in the coming console generation.

the 360 console doesn't really turn me off, the round white theme they've got going on is much better than the darth vader vibe the original put out. being the owner of a purple gamecube i can hardly judge a console on its appearance though. i think the 360 could fit in my living room well, and i like the idea of the controllers being entirely wireless, it's about time. i was also impressed by the idea of being able to turn the console on and off through the controller, something i've always wanted.

it's microsoft's interest in pushing HDTV gaming that really makes me even consider the thought of purchasing their console. i'm willing to bet their 720p games would look terrific on my 720p native HDTV, far better than the 480p signals the cube feeds it. while i can't say the masses are entirely ready for high-def gaming to be the standard, i am. i see no shame in placing higher priority on 5.1 soundtracks and gorgeous graphics if you've got the means to fully enjoy it.

the truth is, in moving from being a child to a teenager to a young adult, i think i place less importance on having allegiance to any one console manufacturer. i went from being an NES player (it was all anybody in my neighborhood really knew) to an SNES player (and thus automatically hating all things genesis) to a PS1 player (which i barely chose over the sega saturn, luckily; but since i was all about sony i snubbed all things N64) to a gamecube player (chosen for nostalgic franchises and a general boredom with playstation) to buying a PS2 once they got cheap and playing multiple consoles. a long-winded way of explaining it, but the point is as of today i'm of the impression that i have the means to buy multiple consoles if i want, it's a relatively low cost compared to the games themselves.

the good thing is i'm not really in much of a hurry to start the next generation. i actually remember feeling the same way back in 2001 when all the new consoles had come out. hell i was still enjoying playing my PS1 in my dorm room the first 2 years of college. so i kinda say so what if the PS3 and revolution are 9 months away from launching. i'm willing to bet i can still enjoy my cube and PS2 for that long. god knows i don't have a shortage of games to keep me busy.

to blow off my $100 best buy gift certificate, i did pick up an electric blue nintendo DS. it wasn't really one of those things where i always felt like i wanted one, just where the gift certificate could kinda offset the cost of the system so it became more attractive. mario kart DS was just released last week, and nintendo has reported that half of those that have bought it have played it online over wi-fi already. so i picked up the DS, super mario 64 DS (heard it was great), mario kart DS and a carrying case.

i'm quite impressed with the system. i've toyed around with a couple wandering around best buy before, but admittedly i never really know what i'm doing. i'll have to get used to the weird thumb-strap stylus setup, but the graphics and sound are awesome. i was able to set up the wi-fi to play mario kart online at 3am last night, against somebody with japanese characters for a name, heh. in a weird way it's actually kind of a dream if i stop and think about it. i've been playing mario kart since like 1992ish, and here ~13 years later i can play someone clear across the world. i'll have you realize that i could technically play a game against someone in another country while sitting on the toilet. that's just fucking cool. i fully expect lauren to try it out and immediately get one, after which she'll be kicking my ass in mario kart online in no time, heh.

well sorry for the ridiculous length, but nothing else to do up at work the day before thanksgiving. ;)

--j

well shit, this is work the week of thanksgiving, huh? last year i took the entire thanksgiving week off so i didn't really get to see what it was like up here. i had to blow some sick days earlier this month so i didn't really have a chance at taking any days off now. in a way, it's actually kinda nice if you don't let yourself slip into a completely depressed state of boredom. it's kind of all nice and quiet and there seems to be this unspoken sense of nobody really working incredibly hard. i kinda strolled in late today assuming nobody would miss me, and i was right.

i think it's funny that thanksgiving has kind of become the signal that the end of the year is nigh. it's sorta what fuels everybody into thinking life ain't that bad, and the next few weeks of december usually fly by pretty easily. in college you kinda have to associate it with exams and end-of-semester type stuff but when you're in the working world you just associate it with less people being all that serious up at work.

--j

i hate to ask... am i just getting old, or is system of a down starting to suck? i don't really get it, more and more of their recent shit is just annoying me more than impressing me. i don't mind that they don't seem to get over the idea of making every track of theirs political in some way (see the recent success of green day), but c'mon, why so fuckin goofy lately? and who said that lead guitarist should sing so often? let frontman serj handle it, hey?

a quick & pointless thought,
j

i seem to be on this roll of one post early each week, so why stop now?

shit i played like 40 minutes of grand theft auto 3 (yes, $5 used from gamestop) and i was proud of myself for just passing a mission and having something to save. i seem to have this thing now where if it's past like 1am i can't get myself to turn the ps2 or cube on. i've yet to really break out of this whole going to bed every night at 3am thing, so at 1am i should be able to do as i please. doesn't seem to work that way, it's like deep down i know i should probably just go to bed, so i can't be bothered to start a whole gaming session.

it's much easier to just watch something for 20 or 40 minutes, really. especially cuz it seems like such a ridiculous idea to eat a meal without being in front of the television. even when alayna & i eat dinner, 95% of the time it's in front of the TV, either catching up on tv shows or watching some kinda sporting event. it's actually kinda sad that we could get by without a real dinner table at all, heh.

right now i'm actually kinda light on short 20-minute shows to sit down and have a late-night breakfast to. my go-to show for a while was futurama, but i kinda just got sick of it. i had been going through season 2 eps, and i've heard it gets better as it goes along, but eh, i think it's one of those shows that's much more fun with other young gen-Y assholes around than by yourself at 2am. the truth is i'm prolly more likely to throw in an old 'the office' ep than something i haven't seen. i guess i could throw in the chappelle's show season 2 eps that i never got around to.

i seem to be quite well stocked up on 40-minute dramas though, which is what i seem to waste time with the most these days. i'm burning through (well not burning through 8-episodes-a-saturday [24] like rick or 4-episodes-a-night [sex & the city] like alayna) alias season 1 relatively quickly. it's a surprisingly easy show to watch and plenty of fun to watch late at night by myself with nothing but chocolate milk & pop tarts to keep me company. i've tried a bit harder not to stockpile too many other shows, but i've still got the first few seasons of 24 and dead like me to hit up.

rick mentioned that he watched some movie at home the other day, and it kinda reminded me that i haven't watched an entire movie at once at home (or anywhere else for that matter) in way too long. for a while there everything i had missed at the theater i'd just download and watch the retail DVD 4-5 months later at home. i've lost interest in a lot of the crap hollywood's put out lately and so that seems to translate to the lack of bothering to get anything a few months later. it's funny, you can look at our saved movie stubs and notice this huge downward trend of how often alayna & i have gone to the theater.

the truth is, i think you kinda tend to feel like you need to get value out of what you bother to put money toward. i'm paying $11/mo for direcTV's HD pack and $130 spread over 6 months for their NHL package, so i tend to watch that stuff pretty often. as much as i dog the concept of live tv, i'm still pretty motivated to just surf now and then, it's just these days i spend most of my surfing time watching hockey games and HD content.

it's kinda funny, we've completely fallen into this routine now where we basically watch nothing live, for two reasons: commercials and not being able to get ABC in HD. in general, pretty much everything is shifted a day or two late. a few shows i'll watch the day of, generally because i'm the only one that cares about them, like family guy and the office. desperate housewives & grey's anatomy don't get seen till monday & tuesday (waiting for HRHD 5.1 posts), prison break usually a day late, amazing race is still shot in SD, so usually just tivo'd and watched sometime later, lost waits for the high-rez posts, but the end of the week usually gets hectic and usually gets pushed to the weekend. all the thursday night shows we follow, survivor (probably our guiltiest "pleasure"), reunion and ER end up getting watched in between lazy naps on saturdays & sundays. just thought you should know the specifics. ;)

--j

i'm feeling somewhat philosophical here, so bear with me...

i've written about this before, but i'm still baffled by how anti-social being online seems to have become for me. it's funny, i think i started really getting online for real (meaning more of a constant IM presence, consistently checking an email account, etc) around maybe '97-98ish, so a good 8 years ago. i used ICQ daily for a while, mostly talking to dallas-area teens i had met online (and typically ended up meeting in person) and fellow honda del sol enthusiasts. i was still using it when i moved to texas a&m in fall 2000, but when i got there i realized everybody used AOL IM instead, so i switched.

in college, people add buddies to their lists at the drop of a hat. you have a class with somebody or do a project together, they're on your list. i've seen people with 200 names on their list. with a good 50,000 young people in a 10 square mile radius, it makes sense to know a ton of people online.

after graduation, you really have no need to keep in touch with a good 90% of the people you talked to occasionally in college. personally, i trimmed down my buddy list down to nothing once i started working. i kind of just assumed that i'd meet people up at work and the buddy list would grow a bit more. the problem is, not that many people seem to really use IM like i thought they would. i don't know if it's just chance that i happen to be in a circle of friends who don't really use IM all that much or if it's actually true that people in their mid-20s don't use it that much.

it's kind of depressing. at this point i literally only converse with probably 4-5 people over IM. i guess i pictured a good 20 people online every night, keeping tabs on each other with away messages and such. it turns out everybody just uses their damn cell phones to connect with each other, which is fine, but kinda old-fashioned if you ask me.

consider this my rant of just wishing the world was as high-tech as i'd like it to be.

--j

bleh, alayna's been sick, now i'm sick. i tried to play it off like it was just some nagging allergies but it was bad enough to make me blow off work and just come home. i hate when you're not really doing all that much up at work and you've got the slightest thing wrong, you just can't motivate yourself to stick it out much.

so far i've been surprisingly shitty at going up to work during off-hours, which i knew would be a possibility now and then. during off-hours i think it's only like a 12-minute drive to work, but i rarely see the good in busting my ass putting in some weird hours. i think if i was still living alone it wouldn't be quite as tough, but i've found it pretty difficult to just call alayna up out of the blue and tell her to cancel everything we had planned. come to think of it, i've had more and more problems just working a dilligent 40 hours a week in the last few months. could be a good sign that i'm burned out on the project i'm on, although admittedly i bet a lotta people get like that closer to the holidays.

we finally got down to college station post-graduation for the first time last weekend. we went down to meet alayna's parents for the hurricane rita-reschedule iowa state game. the weather was absolutely perfect for being at the game (a frequent complaint of mine while a student) but the game itself completely sucked. we got totally blown out and the most entertaining portion of the game became watching how many people would leave when something else bad would happen for the aggies. our seats (which had to be re-reserved post-rita) were dreadful, and we spent 90% of the time watching the video monitor instead of the field. at least we got to sit down.

other than the game, our 200-mile trip was cool. we made it a point to eat out at places that we couldn't get up here in dallas, with the exception of a double dave's trip on a packed-in-college-station saturday night. fazoli's, chicken oil and layne's were great, and oddly made the trip entirely worth it. we had fun with lauren & ali as well as with alayna's parents. we didn't really go out and live it up all that much (admittedly we don't really know any students there anymore) but lauren and ali's apartment was plenty hospitable for us. lauren and i had a good enough time just watching 'the office' eps and trying out mario power tennis.

we've got some good stuff in the pipeline for november. i've got a luncheon up at work this friday which should be cool. we're lined up to go to a mavs game in a couple weeks and a couple more stars games. we'll be spending thanksgiving in dallas since we'll be in san antonio for christmas and in colorado immediately after till new years.

up to the same ol' tricks here lately. been enjoying the last of season 1 numb3rs episodes and the first season of alias. got some solid tivo time in today and giggled through cheap seats. actually watched a live ep of the office tonight, brilliant as usual. we're hoping some better movies hit the theater here soon so we'll finally have an excuse to go.

that's the gist of it.

--j

lot of sports stuff lately... i have some picks & pans...

jeff and rick came over to watch the world series game 1 tonight, which got me wondering: what are the best sports to watch for any type of social gathering?

baseball would actually probably be pretty far down on the list, as the game tends to drag a bit and not enough big events really happen. football may be a little better, since touchdowns, sacks and interceptions tend to often more often than baseball home runs, pick-offs and plays at the plate. hockey and basketball are probably a little better, since they have more constant scoring. basketball might be the best since points are always being scored, although the start-and-stop nature of basketball kind of hurts it a little. sports like golf and soccer have got to be the worst, where highlight-type moments occur very seldomly.

i'm actually more the type of viewer to enjoy surfing the dial more when it comes to sports. most of the time it can be a bit tough to stick to one 3 hour sporting event and not start to get bored. since i got the NHL center ice package this season, it's sweet when like half a dozen games are on and you can just flip around, finding the one with the best pace or a heated rivalry.

quite often the bulk of my sunday is spent just lounging around and watching whatever major sports are on. on average, between national satellite coverage and local antenna, i seem to be able to get about 5 HD NFL games each week, and have yet to be forced to watch dallas in standard definition. the sunday night ESPN game looks great, although the commentators are just awful. i can't pull in ABC in high-def yet, but hopefully that'll change in the next few months.

now that i mention ESPN, that reminds me how much they're starting to suck. they threw out their NHL deal, which given that i've got access to all the local feeds of the games anyway i don't really care that much about, plus OLN's national coverage so far isn't that bad. ESPN just seemed to get too big for their own britches, or something. some of their "oringal programming" has been pretty good, such as playmakers and some sports movies here and there. but their facination with milking the crap out of poker has gotten so absurd. honestly, i'd rather see a couple unranked college football teams play than to see poker. almost anything is better than poker in my opinion, how bout racquetball instead? lacrosse? and should i really feel all that bad for absolutely hating stuart scott at this point? his street slang bullshit is completely annoying and i'm tired of pretending that lazy eye or whatever doesn't completely freak me out. i'm completely fine with ESPN losing some baseball games to OLN and basketball to TNT, assuming HD versions of both channels are available to directv soon.

--j

i feel obligated to comment on the latest news from apple concerning video in iTunes, cuz it seems like a pretty big deal.

steve jobs has long said that he didn't really believe in the concept of a video-playing iPod. i don't think this is a case of selling out, moreso being a bit pressured by the swiftly moving tech market. personally, i just don't see it really catching on well. forget whatever content is available for download, it's kind of irrelevant. just the nature of what an iPod is useful for, doesn't really involve holding it steady and watching a video on it. sure, an occasional cross-country traveler or daily train commuters may be able to take advantage, but i have difficulty believing that's a large portion of the iPod userbase. people may love the iPod's interface, but they sure as hell don't gawk at it the whole time they're listening to music.

apple's serving 320x240 resolution video for $1.99, which includes music videos and hour long tv shows. i'm trying to look at that price and resolution and really spin it in a positive light, but it's tough. i know this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg in this whole apple video scheme, but that resolution for that price is frankly quite poor. plus it's 4:3, not even widescreen. the $1.99 makes sense compared to $.99 for music, but i've never really agreed with their music prices either.

i think on the surface, $1.99 per TV episode (decidedly much worse for a music video) isn't too bad for people now and then catching up on missed episodes. but as far as bang-for-your-buck, it's a relatively awful price point. at least with music, you can justify that you plan to keep the music as long as you have the ability to hear, with TV eps... not all that many shows have a lot of repeat watchability, particularly dramas. so now it's $2 just to watch something once and then not really care about owning it? i saw that the first seasons of lost and desperate housewives were about $35 each, compare that with roughly $39 per season from amazon for the respective DVDs. when you look at it that way, iTunes videos are terrible ideas.

going even further, the aforementioned DVDs have a resolution of 720x480 and multi-channel audio. the iTunes video will look terrible if you scale it to 2-3 times its size to fill a computer screen. it's just simply a no brainer that buying the DVD is much more economically sound.

don't get me wrong, apple is sort of opening the door to a terrific idea. i've relied on newsgroup/bittorrent sources for archiving and catching up on episodes for the past year. at this point i even avoid tivo'ing certain shows because i can get them in better quality online, commercial-free. so to people like me, what apple's doing doesn't really mean quite as much. but i guess to all those people who request VHS taped shows on TV forums, they'd be interested in paying $2 to avoid missing a favorite show.

apple's always been against offering a subscription renting-your-music plan for iTunes music, which i think is wise. but for video, i think a subscription service actually makes more sense, given that 95% of the content out there most people are satisfied with watching once. currently we follow like roughly a dozen shows, it's just a terrible deal if you have to pay per episode to catch up on those. seems like it makes more sense to pay $10/mo or something to always have access to episodes.

all in all, i see the good in what they're doing, just that the resolution and cost seem relatively terrible to me. but who knows, i say the same thing about podcasting and that's still a bit of a buzzword lately. it'll be interesting to see the success or failure of iTunes video in the next six months.

--j

what if i at least say that i've thought about posting? does that at least somewhat justify my drought lately?

we haven't done all that much lately, haven't felt overly social. we rounded up some friends from each of our workplaces and ended up having a total of 15 people go to the final rangers game of the season, using some tickets my dad scored for free. and last night we hit up the first post-lockout stars game, which we both loved.

i think i say it in every post, but really all i've come to do with my free time is catch up on tv shows. i hardly ever watch any dvd's or play any games lately. kind of a full-time task just keeping up with current shows. plus i still spend a lot of time downloading/sampling music, which i guess i should technically just list as a hobby now. for some reason it gives me a thrill to just suddenly find a great album (like fall out boy's "from under the cork tree" or the postal services "give up") out of nowhere.

...and let's kill it there.

--j

shit, figure it's time for just my 4th post of september, heh. i sure as hell haven't been up to anything much more productive.

so hey, look, the tv season's officially started for real! not surprisingly, that's sapped plenty of free time lately. lemme go down my personal list --

the simpsons - really having a hard time holding on, it's just... kinda terrible.

family guy - definitely back up to its old standards in my opinion, well worth the tivo.

arrested development - i watched parts of episode 1 several times, fantastic.

kitchen confidential - eh, where's the funny parts? might give it a few more chances...

how i met your mother - i heard good word-of-mouth on the TiVoCommunity board, but holy christ this was absolutely terrible. these traditional sitcoms feel soooo trite now. i can't stand where the whole show just feels like it's on a big stage the entire time.

prison break - we look forward to it every week. if you can manage to suspend belief, it's well worth it.

weeds - a surprisingly entertaining showtime 30-minute dramedy. kinda the deviant version of desperate housewives, complete with drug-dealing and infidelity. mary-louise parker's a MILF, and kevin nealon is still funny.

my name is earl - first episode wasn't as funny as i'd hoped, but i'll stick around a bit longer and enjoy the jason lee-ness.

the office - went back and watched the first ep several times, happy NBC decided to bring it back.

lost - fuckin awesome, glad it's back. always stirs up the most discussion on boards.

over there - well done, but gets a little old at times. i'm way behind on it.

survivor - okay so far, kinda well past any chance at originality.

reunion - a little cheesy, but engaging so far.

ER - purely watching it on 11 previous years of habit, hard to care that much about anymore.

---

alayna asked whatever happened to our idea of getting a netflix account for the summer, heh. seems like an unlimited newsgroup account works pretty well in its place. ;)

--j

TVgasm was liveblogging the emmy awards, thought it was funny that they said this --

Ellen Pompeio: the cheaper, TV version of Renée Zelleweger.

we've always thought that chick was a stunt double for zellweger! check out the comparison:



it's a conspiracy, c'mon!

--j

i admittedly like the idea of a 32 gig flash iPod. it'd certainly cut down their size just like the new iPod nano, which look even smaller than i had first imagined. looks like apple's getting better with their battery life, which is the biggest reason i opted not to get one back in january. in hindsight i don't rely on an LCD-display remote as much as i thought i would, so i really could've gotten an iPod for my main player, although my iAudio M3L is still working out well. i'd say i use it on average 15 hours a week at work, with no problems.

so far, apparently the "iPhone" [Motorola ROKR] sucks. i say good. i think the combined mobile phone / personal music player idea is shit anyway. i get the idea of trying to reduce the number of gadgets we have to carry around, and i'm probably not the target audience, but i think i talk on my cell phone on average maybe 4 times a week. i have no problem keeping it in my pocket when i'm not using it. plus in the commercial, the chick is carrying it around like an old portable sony discman. in this day and age i'm just not gonna carry around a device that functions as my cell and music player. i'm perfectly happy carrying a messenger bag with a player rigged up and my cell in my pocket. here's hoping it flops.

quick and to the pointless,
j

alright, i guess i haven't been *too* busy to post lately, just haven't had much interesting going on.

work finally picked up a bit (at least for a couple weeks) which is good. making little quirky blogposts at work can be fun and all, but the truth is i'd rather just be too damn busy to even think about any kind of web surfing.

no giant news lately, i've been lazy. paper mario's been collecting dust for 10 days. i usually game in bursts, so it makes sense that after playing for a few days straight i take a week off. so far we're hooked on prison break, i'd highly recommend it. i got the first reunion episode, cuz the idea that each episode encompasses an entire year sounded rather clever in that 24-gimmicky kinda way. i burned through all 6 episodes of BBC2's extras, which was terrific. not as good as the office, but the same type of humor, so go get your british english to american english dictionary and have a giggle.

i've actually been watching an alarming amount of live tv lately. i've been hooked on the US Open this year, and it's been surprisingly fun to watch. our plan was to watch the first NFL game of the season last night, but shit i lost interest fast. as much as i love football, it's gotten a little harder to watch over the years with all the tv timeouts. monday night games are even worse, and the games almost always last a good 4 hours, which means most of their audience is actually long gone by the 3rd quarter. tivo'ing NFL highlight shows (like NFL primetime on ESPN) seems like the way to go.

--j

the following was posted on slashdot in regards to rebuilding new orleans post-katrina:

A) Don't live by a freaking ocean. Oceans have hurricanes.

B) Don't live in a city that is 8 feet below sea level. Flooding WILL occur.

Problem solved.

as cold as it is, i kinda hafta agree.

--j

alayna and i both suffer from canker sores, so i was searching walgreens for some medication. knowing that one of the prime ingredients in topical pain relief is benzocaine, i searched for that to see what would turn up. along with the results i was expecting, i also got a link to Mandelay, which (fittingly enough) prolongs a man's ability to last. that would have been a great time for somebody to walk by my cube and get a good glimpse at what would appear to be my interest.

i'm on a kick lately of buying up some stuff that i've had burned for a while, but i feel i should probably own for real. it had occurred to me that some of my favorite albums i actually own only in the format of a circa 2000 memorex CD-R and often with 128kbps quality primitive rips. i'm much more of an audiophile than i was 5 years ago, and i can actually tell they're shittier quality, especially after i've abandoned playing CDs and rip everything to 192kbps mp3s. so rather than buying my favorite tracks on iTunes or napster (which highly unfortunately lock me into a proprietary format) i pick up the used CD for as low as i can find.

my favorite used CD store i've found so far is SecondSpin. this time around i've ordered the following --

Bush / Deconstructed – $3
Neve / Neve – $3
Caviar / Caviar – $3
Dave Navarro / Trust No One – $4
Silverchair / Frogstomp – $3
Fuel / Something Like Human – $4
2 Skinnee J’s / Volumizer – $3

each of those has at least 4 tracks that i like, which means they go into iTunes and my 20gb player. so for only $3 or $4, i average less than a $1 a track (so less than iTunes or napster) and i get it in uncompressed PCM format, so i can do what i want with it. plus an added bonus: the RIAA sees no profit from used CD sales. ;)

despite my giant lack of playing my PS2 lately, i've decided to go back and get legit copies of a few classics. i'm more likely to pick 'em up and play if i see the box over on the rack, heh. plus at this point a lot of 'em are pretty damn cheap.

as an example, i saw grand theft auto 3 on ebay with like 42 minutes left to go, highest bid at like $3.75. so i put one down with a max of $4.50 and had the winning bid at $4.25 till like the last second, when somebody won it for $6.50. i figured i had lost a good deal, but then i checked gamestop and saw they have it for $4.99 used anyway. vice city is only $8, beyond good & evil is $10. so i decided fuck ebay and half.com, i'll just buy 'em through good ol' gamestop. this seems to work for the older games, but newer stuff like god of war and gran turismo 4 is still like $40 used, so you're better off bidding on those probably.

a rare workday post, eh?

--j

been a lot of goofin around on the machines tonight. wanted to play paper mario for a while but i know i'll just end up getting sucked into a 2 hour gaming session. i messed around with google talk a bit, using iChat. it's a cool concept to unite all the major IM protocols, although you have to have a GMail account, which i had never even bothered with. so right now my jabber/gmail buddy list consists of... rick. heh, damn.

i was looking through some Growl applications and came across Last.fm, which looks pretty cool so far. it's basically a community for tracking people's music habits and meshing people with similar tastes. it tracks whatever i play through iTunes with a plug-in and uploads it to the site. you can even write small blog entries about certain artists or albums. it's cool to open up an album listing and see how popular each track is, too. check out my profile on the link to the left. (although i'm sure it'll be more interesting after a month.)

3am thunder is cool.

--j

here's what i'm looking forward to in the coming tv season, just for grins...

prison break (premiere) - aug. 29
looks kinda like 24, which is good.

the simpsons (season 17) - sept. 11
yeah, it's starting to get *really* played out, but can you blame them? still good for a late-night tivo.

family guy (season 4) - sept. 11
first half of the season was a bit hot and cold, but still some hilarious episodes.

survivor (location: guatemala) - sept. 15
couldn't be much more played out, but tough to avoid watching with alayna being a rampant follower.

arrested development (season 3) - sept. 19
season 1 was better, but season 2 was still some of the best shit on tv.

surface (premiere) - sept. 19
i dunno, could be cool. sorta sci-fi.

my name is earl (premiere) - sept. 20
yeah, it has jason lee in it. that's enough to at least try it out.

the office (season 2) - sept. 20
my personal second-most anticipated show. just got the season 1 dvd, absolutely terrific.

lost (season 2) - sept. 21
my most anticipated returning show. fantastic.

invasion (premiere) - sept. 21
could be cool, could suck. i'll know within 2 weeks.

ER (season 12) - sept. 22
last season was better than the previous, which is encouraging. i think us and 11 other people still follow it.

numb3rs (season 2) - sept. 23
still getting through season 1, but really enjoy it.

desperate housewives (season 2) - sept. 25
one of the biggest surprises of last year. only hope the pace picks up a bit.

grey's anatomy (season 2) - sept. 25
another great surprise of last year. it'll be nice to have more than like 9 episodes.

amazing race (season 8) - sept. 27
family edition instead of couples, but still my top reality series.

the night stalker (premiere) - sept. 29
sounds like a cool concept.

NCAA football and NFL seasons starting up soon as well. look forward to any games in HD. can't wait for the NHL season to start on october 5th. i'll focus on all that stuff in a future post...

--j

sad news for nintendo fans today... zelda: twilight princess was delayed until at least march '06 instead of its original november release date. basically, everybody was looking forward to this zelda being sort of the last hurrah for the gamecube. but coming out in march of next year now? by that time the xbox 360 will already have been out for months and the PS3 could very well be close to launch, not to mention nintendo's own revolution.

the thing that baffles me is who the fuck's gonna want to play a game on the cube when the revolution is about to come out? isn't that kinda like having a good ol' time with super mario 3 while all your buddies were enamored with super mario world?

personally i'm behind enough in my gaming so that it won't affect me much, although i think over the xmas holidays i prolly would have been more likely to waste my days away with a zelda game rather than to fire up my long-awaited jumps into stuff like tales of symphonia and pikmin 2.

---

y'know, i still don't really know what my take on the next gaming generation is. i don't know if at this point i really lean towards any of the 3 with wholehearted support. i love nintendo for their first-party games, but as soon as they announced no HD support i was really disappointed. if the revolution doens't cost an arm and a leg it might work for a good second system i guess. i'd like to think that i'd purchase either a ps3 or a 360.

some stuff about the 360 turns me off as well though. microsoft's really rushing the console a bit, and the news that mulitple versions of it could come out in the next few years doesn't make you wanna run out and buy one on launch day. i have no doubt it'll be powerful and their HD support should be pretty strong, but i'm not sure if i'm the biggest xbox supporter. i didn't even play one till '04 actually, when i grew to love my roommate's ninja gaiden. i won't naysay the console enough to make myself look like an ass if i buy one, just that i'm not 100% excited about its upcoming release.

i feel like so far we just don't know enough about the ps3. sure it's gonna be powerful, but i dunno if their gaming network will stand up to microsoft's. i'm also really unimpressed with a lot of sony's decisions lately. if the console's gonna launch at $500, i sure as hell wouldn't buy it too quick. having a blu-ray player could be sweet, but let's face it, the HD-DVD vs. blu-ray battle hasn't even begun yet. i think the best feature of going with a playstation is knowing that you'll have good franchises for it, sorta like nintendo's legacy characters. if you go with the ps3, you at least know you'll have all of sony's best sellers coming soon, which could really drive its sales.

if the revolution drops enough in price or is considerably cheaper than its competitors, i'll strongly consider it. the idea of yet more advanced mario/zelda/f-zero/metroid/donkey kong/pikmin/etc franchises sounds too tasty to pass up. nintendo hasn't yet convinced me of anything with the classic gaming library access they've mentioned so far. i grew up playing a lot of fantastic nintendo games, but that doesn't mean i wanna spend my free time going back and playing 'em all for nostalgia's sake. if i wanted to do that bad enough, i'd invest more time in emulators.

sure i'm growing up a bit more and could maybe get by without any new console at all, but knowing me i won't go that route. it also helps that i feel i'm becoming more and more turned off by PC gaming now that consoles are so advanced. it's funny that i engineered my apartment to enjoy playing PC games on the 50" DLP, and yet i hardly ever use it to play games. a lot of PC games are plenty of fun, but i'll be damned if the instability of most of the games doesn't drive me insane. i always feel artificial pressure to fit in and play the latest junk that's come out, and yet it's so demanding on the hardware that it frustrates me enough to just flip on the cube or ps2 instead. i typically have like 20 minutes of fun with doom 3 or C&C: generals before the system just reboots itself and the monitor won't come back on for another 5 minutes. that kinda shit drives me crazy. i could do a million things to fix that kinda crap, but the problem is i have to spend 2 hours fixing something to play a game for 15 minutes. much easier to just bide your time on the console that never seems to crash.

--j

god dammit, i was gonna blow some hours playing paper mario tonight. instead i fell asleep.

stupid essential bodily function.

--j

hmm, miscellanous shit today, hey?

watched a couple dvd's over the last few days... sin city has got an 8.4 on IMDb, and i think i actually agree with it. the movie was a little confusing here and there, but the style and action were brilliant, i was quite impressed. i'm debating whether to buy it on dvd, since it does have a sweet DTS track on there. highly recommended.

i was also eager to come across a very long engagement. i loved amelie so seeing this had the same director and lead actress i was intrigued. it wasn't as good as amelie (only cuz of the world war I setting) but it was still terrific. a movie's gotta be somewhat good when you can watch it for 2 hours without hearing a single word of your native tongue. i've give it a 7.5. also highly recommended.

lauren let me know that dane cook's shooting a pilot, which as much as i love the guy's comedy, does not bode well. seems more likely to be cancelled than adored for the next half decade. it smells like... a sellout.

i dunno how i didn't catch it sooner, but ricky gervais (david brent from BBC's the office) has a new show on BBC2 called extras. i don't get BBC2, but i've watched the first episode. tricky, eh? it's not quite up to the office's standard yet, but it's still entertaining. it'll actually show stateside on HBO this fall. but i, uh, don't get HBO.

i might be in the minority on this one, but i was thrilled when i saw that the american version of the office is being released on dvd next week. a lot of people didn't like the vibe from it, but i think it's hilarious. bit of a rip with 6 episodes for $20, but if i did it for coupling, i guess i'll do it for the office. props to NBC for putting this DVD out quickly, as opposed to taking forever to put the scrubs seasons out.

we've got a handful of episodes of curb your enthusiasm season 3 left, so good timing for CYE season 4 to street on 8/30, in time for season 5 to start up on 9/25. hoping somebody seeds those episodes somewhere, heh.

big brother australia is finally winding down, and stateside BB6 is surprisingly better than last year's edition. i was proud to get lauren hooked on TVgasm's hilarious recaps of each episode.

an hour or so of paper mario was entertaining the other night. i haven't played a PS2 game in ages, which worries me.

i finally found a disease i can claim. it's called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS) and i hereby claim to have it from now on. that wiki article describes me to a T. remember, if you see it on wikipedia, it must be true.

--j

pardon me, i'm feeling ranty, and i haven't bitched for a while on here...

i think this is basically the closest i get to being bored. i don't really get bored. i've always got so many things lined up to entertain myself that i'm not sure it's technically accurate to say that i'm capable of actual boredom. but i think this feeling is as close as i'll get.

i'm not really one to fall in love with the idea of routine. i try to avoid routine as much as possible. i don't like showing up at work the exact same time everyday. whether it's 7:45, 8:30, 11, whatever, as long as it's not back-to-back-back days of standard 8am everyday. so far i've been able to avoid it well enough.

but at home, it tends to be a different story. alayna and i are comfortable with each other enough so that we're basically like a couple that's been married for a couple years. we're sweet to each other like a married couple, and we bitch at each other like a married couple. we're kind of the standard couple really... she's more apt to do the dishes like a woman, i'm more apt to get in trouble for not doing a chore.

when you're past college and into the working world, you're really free to do anything you want with your nights. people take a lot of different approaches to that... some take up hobbies, some go out all the time, some have organized events and activities that keep them away from the house for hours, some people work 60 hours a week and have no free time at all, some spend their whole night just couch potato'ing. i think i'm still trying to find my niche as far as how i spend my night hours when living with someone else.

i kinda see nightly interests as a venn diagram. some couples have a large overlapping area, some have virtually no overlap at all. i guess i feel like we've got an average amount. i consider both of us individually to have a pretty wide array of interests -- alayna will sit down and enjoy a basketball game just as much as she'll stay glued to the tv for an episode of rachael ray's 30 minute meals. i'll play first-person shooters one minute and watch a tivo'd episode of steven's untitled rock show the next.

the thing is, at times when we start falling slave to a routine i start to feel like we have very little interests in common. at this time of year, we've got australian and american big brother's airing, and we're both interested in that. she considers herself a bona fide reality tv fan, whereas i'm the complete hypocrite that shuns all things reality except big brother, amazing race and occasionally survivor. but my problem is i tend to grow a little weary of shows like that way quicker than she does, and i end up just kinda coasting along. big brother australia has a little over a week left, and thus far 126 episodes have aired this season. no, i didn't mistype that. when a show has been running non-stop (roughly 11 episodes per week) for 87 days, how can it not wear thin on you? you get to the point where you just watch till the end just to finish the damn thing, and you end up being completely relieved when it's over.

i get a little scared sometimes cuz i'm afraid we've sort of fallen into that every-night-we'll-be-tv-drones category. we aren't traditional tv watchers, we basically watch nothing live. but sometimes, it's... kinda all we do... it's weird. and this isn't even prime tv season, it's the middle of the damn summer. i mean it's great that we have specific interests and we're able to download or record what we want and enjoy it, but sometimes it makes me a bit embarrassed. i'm the one with the killer home theater setup, i've got the giant tv and great soundsystem, a gamecube and a PS2, and we spend 90% of our time watching shows 98% of the people we know care nothing about.

it's one of those things that never let up. there's always something else to watch. i have gigabytes and gigabytes of shows i like or have heard good things about. some of it i end up getting around to and love (the office), some of it i delay for a while and get to later (futurama) and some of it i get so lagged behind that i disgustingly delete it and forget about it (robot chicken). but i'll never run out. i know i know, terrible problem to have, but that's how i always approach it.

i have the first 2 seasons of alias on dvd. wanna know a secret? i've never even seen one full episode of it. but i've seen 20 minutes before that were great, and rick (who has similar entertainment tastes) says it's good. this fall, the fifth season of alias is starting. do i actually expect to watch 4 complete seasons worth before that? i'll be lucky to have seen 4 episodes. i have countless examples of shows i'd love to watch. but then i have a handful of burned dvd's i have yet to see. i have stacks and stacks of terrific GC/PS2/PC games i've only played 5 minutes of.

it's my nature sometimes. i have an interest and i squeeze the life out of it till i'm almost not interested at all anymore.

i'll admit, and alayna (now having had 2 months to observe my daily ways) has pointed it out as well. i spend too much goddamn time at the computer, and i have to find some way to stop. i remember when i moved from college into my apartment that i purposely set it up so that my tv was in a different room than my main PC, so i'd be more apt to stay near the tv (hence, more gaming/movies/etc) instead of at the computer all the time.

in college, downloading was my vice. didn't matter what it was, just to get something, to collect something was what i wanted to do all the time. who cares if i didn't listen to the albums i downloaded or played the PC games i burned. now, i think it's RSS feeds and message boards that eat all my time. i put too much stock into the latest slashdot and tivocommunity topics, the latest tech news and apple rumors, gaming reviews, etc etc etc. i'd say a tenth of what i come across actually interests me. most of the time i get to a point where i just realize i'm sitting at the computer(s) just for the sake of sitting and i'm too lazy to start something else in another room.

i think sometimes i just need to tell myself on particular nights that i don't need to do anything online. i like to be up on the news, but i don't care this much. i don't have to organize newly ripped albums or my latest catches from the complete_cd newsgroup every night. i just need to vary things up a bit. i need to feel the accomplishment of watching a movie everybody talked about but i never saw (sideways) or a guilty pleasure i wanted to see (constantine). i need to be honest and blow off big brother for a night or two and just say that i'd rather get back into paper mario or play a few games of NHL 2005. i think that's what will make me feel better. every night can't be about sitting around bullshitting on a computer and watching people trapped in a house with cameras.

imagine the irony of complaining about internet addiction on a blog. ;) i'm sure we've both had enough.

--j

oi, mates! we went out last night to mockingbird station on the DART train for dinner and a movie with another couple. we hit up trinity hall and the angelika theater to check out murderball [IMDb].

for a documentary, it was very good. we all liked it a ton. it's strange how it makes you feel like bawling one second and cheering the next. kinda enlightens you on how partial quadriplegics live, and it's only an hour and a half long so it's easy to get through quickly. i'd recommend seeing it while it's in town for sure.

hmm, other miscellaneous news... lost will have someone else on the island in upcoming season 2... the list of so far's best-selling games of 2005 was released, at least something for the GC was on there, hey? it was also interesting to see (from the nintendophiles forum) the list of top-selling GC games all-time in the US. hmm, another great GC slashdot thread debates whether the world should panic over reduced nintendo profits (uh, aren't we between major console releases?)... hey let's feign enthusiasm over the new doom trailer! (wasn't really impressed by V for vendetta, dane cook's waiting or the 40-year old virgin either)...

prolly enough to chew on for now, hey?

--j

why are you reading this? go listen to dane cook's retaliation now. some good new comedy shit. thanks to hoang for letting me know it was coming out.

--j

i don't really have anything epic to post. we didn't really do all that much this weekend, which is kinda sad, i guess? what may be sadder is that sometimes i think i sorta prefer it that way.

it's funny when to an outside person it looks like you've gotten nothing done, but you personally feel like you've been productive. this weekend we didn't really even see anybody or be social at all, but i got a lot of good little things done at home, mostly on my computers.

i've found that it's tough to claim that you're organized in both real life and in your "digital life." soon as i get things cleaned up and organized in real life, i realize my home network and tasks and shit are all in disarray. so sometimes it's actually nice to focus more on that instead. don't have to paint the town red *every* weekend, hey?

alayna's usually giving me the ol' stinkeye cuz she's all "go vacuum that room" and i'm like "but i'm getting so much done!" and all she can see is me sitting on my ass looking back and forth between two monitors. can't say i really blame her, cuz i usually end up sitting in here for hours on end.

i'm been trying to figure out a better reminder/to do system, so i'm trying out backpack to see if it's a decent alternative. still pondering trashing winXP on my left-hand box and going back to linux, but things like PDA ActiveSync prevent me from doing so. oddly enough, my iPod shuffle doesn't wanna talk to my mac right now, so i had to quickly import my whole library to XP and try it on that machine, and for once it worked.

as much as i love working out with my shuffle (as it works *quite* well) i'm really disappointed in how fickle the goddamn thing is. we already had problems with alayna's, where it just wouldn't work with her machine any longer and i couldn't fix it for the life of me. it kinda acts like a little flash drive that wants to work sometimes, but then decides that it won't work on a particular machine for a week. we've got 5 working machines in here, most people only have 1, so what the hell do they do when their shuffle decides to crap out every now and then?

i've been a little too surf-happy lately, just spending a ton of time sitting at the PCs, not really sure why. i'm coming across new-to-me sites like technorati and del.icio.us, which are good time wasters. i'm still trying to figure out how i like taking in my RSS feeds, whether it's a standalone program or built-in to the web browser like safari. i messed around a bit with synergy, which allows you to use a keyboard/mouse on 2 PC's at once without a KVM, but lost interest when realized that it was tricky having custom mouse shortcuts set up for both computers, something i kinda rely on.

sometimes i get in these little moods where i'm just trying to oversimplify everything. i want everything in my digital life to work without me having to micromanage everything, yet in order to achieve this, i spend all my time anyway, heh.

i leave you with a penny arcade article i found rather amusing. ;)

--j

well i finally got around to seeing equilibrium, after i found a dvd rip of it a month or so ago. it's got to be one of the best movies in the past few years that didn't have a wide release at all. some of the effects were slightly hokey and seemed a bit cheap, but the storyline's awesome and the plot moves quickly without leaving you behind. the gun-based martial arts style was impressive and made for some terrific fight scenes. i think it achieved an action movie as well as a dramatic movie simultaneously, which seems tough to pull off most of the time. i'd highly recommend it.

i was happy to hear today that the NHL lockout officially ended today, so play should resume as usual next season. yeah that's really great and everything, but uh... with ESPN deciding to drop most hockey coverage for next season and now-considered-the-bottom-network NBC signing on to broadcast games (uh, when? and where do you show weekday games?) is anybody gonna even be able to watch hockey in the states? i'm all for some of the rule changes, like adding shootouts to eliminate ties and trying to increase the total number of goals scored in each game. i was also kinda interested in the idea of the league ditching 6 small-market teams to save some cash. i think 30 teams is too much for the NHL, and 20 would prolly due the trick. anyways, i'm cautiously optimistic about the whole thing...

--j

i'm not really one to ever be offended by much, and i'm all for a complete lack of censorship on the internet, but i actually can't help but be a little taken aback by one of kevin smith's latest posts. in case you're not aware, he's the director of several cult movies like clerks and chasing amy, some of my favorites.

the part i have a problem with is that the guy is really detailed about how he spends his days, which is typically really entertaining. he never fails to mention every time he has sex with his wife, but he's got even worse lately about throwing little details about their sexlife in his regular posts, which is... just weird. it's almost like he's bragging, and i can kinda understand why. as brilliant as he is, the two aren't exactly mistaken for brother & sister. she's generally regarded as a bit of a hottie, while he's sort of the fatass adult-fanboy type. it's cool that they're genuinely in love and married, but what's with laming it up by putting the sexual shit on a blog? he's even had his blog mentioned on tv so you know he gets a lot of hits. just weird that given his audience he doesn't mind bragging about his wild sexlife.

instead, do like me and fill your slow moments of your day by reading Overheard in the Office or Overheard in New York, both highly entertaining.

well i'm not in the mood to work right now, so i figured i'd post.

just came off the 4-day holiday weekend, which was pretty damn lazy. friday night was prolly the most active, a dinner+movie date. alayna and i checked out the angelika in plano for the first time. it's in the shops at legacy, which was a surprisingly little quaint area. we saw howl's moving castle, the latest anime from famed jap hayao miyazaki, who also did princess mononoke and spirited away.

howl's was... okay. i've seen several of miyazaki's movies now, and i always walk away feeling the same. i always think "goddamn that was pretty" but then i think "but what the fuck was that all about?" it's a perfect example of anime being too much fantasy and not enough engaging plot. during mononoke, spirited away, howl's... i remember getting bored for like a half hour with all of them. i love the artistic elements in all of them, but i get so lost on what the hell's going on that i really lose interest. typical IMDb fanboys have it rated over 8, but personally i'd give it more like a 7 flat cuz it was pretty, but lacked any sensible plot.

saturday night we decided to stay in instead and had chinese delivered and finally got around to watching closer. we both enjoyed it, which is a nice rarity when we both enjoy a movie together. it wasn't particularly all that complex, only centered around 4 characters, but it was an entertaining two hours, which is enough for me. we'd highly suggest it for a night in.

--j

check out this link.

at what point do consumers start to think that apple just updates their product lines way too frequently? i only have an iPod shuffle and i'm a bit annoyed by this. the rumor is that 2 and 4gb models of the shuffle will be released, but i really don't see the point. the smaller mini's have 4gb drives, but that makes sense when it has a proper display and menu system. the shuffle's just a simple stick that plays either a selected or random selection of tracks, nothing more nothing less. i've got the half-gig model, and in my experience i can fit about 90 tracks (~6.5 hours) on it, which are mostly 192kbps mp3s. i mean the shuffle is really meant for small trips or working out, why the hell would you need to put 50 hours of music on it?

i could have easily used a HD-based iPod if i hadn't preferred the features of the one i ended up buying instead, but i'd like to think i'd constantly be annoyed if i had an iPod and several times a year superior models were released.

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apple also released iTunes 4.9, now with podcasting [wiki] support. thus far i'm kinda ho-hum about the entire concept of podcasting, really. it's kind of a neat idea, but i think it's a little overhyped. the theory is that it's supposed to match other current tech trends, namely timeshifting, and fit into our "digital lifestyle." that's all well and good, but i still don't see the best application for podcasts, at least not in their current form. okay, so i can download some podcasts covering the latest world or tech news, or a certain guy's daily rants, so? in my personal daily life, i can really only listen to those at work, and i usually prefer not listening to spoken word type stuff while i'm bangin out line after line of code.

it would make a lot more sense to me if the vast majority of daily commuters took the train to work or something, but so far i see mp3 players in the car to be an entirely clunky process. until someone like apple puts more effort into getting easily portable music in & out of our cars, podcasts will probably go underutilized.

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i think podcasts fall into one of those internet-fad-of-the-year categories. in the late 90's it was the personal web page, then in the early 00's it was the blog, now we've moved on to podcasts, which are basically audio blogs. they're all essentially a way of trying to get our own opinions and interests into the public eye. i see the worth of all of them, i've had webpages since the 90's, lost interest because they were a dime a dozen, now i maintain a blog, and admittedly at times sure i lost a little interest. i don't have any interest in creating an audio feed to distribute to others. the problem is that too many other people do have an interest, which just makes for plenty of crap to wade through.

i guess time will tell if they're really useful enough for mass consumption or not. even big companies like ABC/ESPN are jumping on the bandwagon, so some quality content should be available. the funny thing is, the more popular this stuff gets, the less popular live radio seems. i'm all for anything that pushes old FM radio out of popularity.

anyway, enough of a post for now. just felt like a quick semi-rant.

--j

tonight i'm forced to deal with my rabid spurs fan native san antonian girlfriend, who oddly enough reminds me of my ups & downs from stars teams of the late 90's.

i price-matched target vs. walmart vs. best buy for some dvd's to see if they were anywhere near deepdiscount and figured they were close enough, but oddly enough target seems to consistently have better prices than best buy, my former promise land. so i picked up reno 911! season 2 and home movies season 2. can't really say what prompts to buy certain shows on dvd and pass other ones up... for example i collect episodes of things like scrubs and chappelle's show, but thus far don't feel the need to pick them up on dvd. can't wait for a dvd of the american office, i'm all over that one. just gotta find the 4th season of coupling.

lately we rarely branch out and watch anything but big brother australia, since they actually broadcast 10 shows a week. takes up a ton of time. only other stuff we've bothered with lately is some curb your enthusiasm season 3. other random tivo'd shit has been stuff like cheap seats, family guy, etc.

i got a glimpse at some of this past week's tv ratings and i was a little embarrassed to see that dancing with the stars crap at the top. kinda sad that stuff like that does better than the NBA finals. also thought it was interesting that a family guy movie is slated to come out straight to dvd in september. i'm thinking i'll await the rip, but it'll be interesting to see how well it does.

i think it's actually kinda good that these reports are popping up that show the american movie industry is kinda plummeting lately. while dvd boxsets are making a killing, less and less people are actually bothering to go to the movies. kinda makes you realize how popular buying movies/shows as well as renting through places like netflix really are, when it's obviously stealing away from theater business like that.

we'll try to help them out and see batman begins tomorrow night. it's the least we could do, right?

--j

lemme do the usual "omg i haven't posted since [x] date." hey, at least i've actually been out of town and shit so i've got a good reason.

me & laynie took up dad's offer of free AA tickets and chose to go to NYC. 4 night stay, cost us a grand. which basically means we ain't doin that every other month.

we had a good time, and it was pretty successful for our first real vacation together. we had to do our best to avoid burnout, cuz all the walking and the godawful heat really exhausted us, so i had to kinda push to make sure we were out enjoying our time there as much as possible. it's almost impossible to leave a place like new york and not feel like there was more you could have done, but we achieved plenty.

we didn't really wanna be all touristy, but it kinda ended up that way. you can check my photo page linked to the right for all the details, basically so i don't have to go into all the details about everything we did everyday, heh.

some tidbits about NYC --

i had looked forward to hittin up the nintendo world store, but it was kind of a letdown. the gamecube section isn't all that impressive, and they obviously care more about showing off the DS than anything. i've always kinda found the DS to have a really sharp learning curve, so it's not exactly fun to pick one up and fuck around with it. i got a $6 beanie as a souvenir, and deemed it as a bit overhyped.

another letdown... central park. i'm sorry, but central park's kind of just a shithole of a park. i think it's just overhyped cuz NY is basically nothing but buildings, so any open space is a big deal. it looks alright from overheard cuz it's encouraging that the city has at least *some* greenery, but walking through the park just ain't that impressive. washington square park and battery park were also kinda letdowns.

i thought it was kinda fun to see just how rampant iPods are in NYC. i couldn't believe how many we saw on the streets and subway. it's at least encouraging how quickly mp3 players have been adopted in one of the largest urban areas of the world. they even had little ads on the subways telling people to mind their headphone cord since they're giving away that they have a valuable little gadget on them. you couldn't swing a dead cat without seeing iPod ads all over the place.

it was cool to see that each neighborhood/area of manhattan actually had differences in things like the people and buildings. it's strange to think that just a mile away the streets are just absolutely packed (think midtown) whereas there's plenty of open air on the southern tip near battery park.

continuing with the high-tech theme, it was sweet to see all the NYU kids in one of the 10,000 starbucks (we went to this one!) they have. apple notebooks everywhere. even people meditating and shit, we were giggling.

check out my photos link to the right to get a sense of what we did.

time to hit the gym...

--j

well i dunno who reads these anymore, since my diminishing reliance on AIM prevents me from advertising this URL, but i figured i'd post for my own sake, heh.

alayna's finally moved in, go read her blog to read about that. it's been working out well so far.

we've got our NYC trip travel arrangements all ready for next week, just gotta nail down how we wanna spend our time. as long as we can stop off at rockefeller center and hit the nintendo world store at some point, right?

it's been kinda nice that june doesn't really have much tv on. it's given us plenty of time to keep up with bb5au. i should prolly start trying to go back and watch the earlier seasons of alias and 24 while i have some free time.

i'm trying to find some kinda game that alayna and i can both get into, something a little more substantial that a couple rounds of mario kart. we tried the 2P pikmin 2 last night, but we didn't really understand what to do and little laynie got frustrated quick. a lauren-style controller heave was quickly prevented. whether it's ps2, cube or pc i just wanna find something we can both play and enjoy, even if not at the same time.

as soon as alayna started copying some files over into her own iTunes database to throw on her shuffle, i knew we'd have to come up with some kinda better solution. so i'm gonna hafta figure out how to integrate all the pc's in the house to make our music management much cleaner. i'm actually starting to wonder if i shouldn't just link all our music to iTunes and just use some crafty smart playlists to sort out what we actually wanna play. the way i'm doing it now, i use winamp-happy m3u playlists to push to iTunes and only grab certain songs from an album.

however i do it, the whole thing seems to end up a big nightmare...

time to leave work, so i stop here. ;)

--j

well, i finally replaced the aging gs-r with an infiniti g35 coupe. given what i paid for it, the plan is to not make any mods to it for quite some time. which isn't too hard given that it kicks ass already. kind of enjoying a semi-quiet car for a change.

seeing episode III this afternoon, although i can't really say i'm all that pumped. i don't think it has anything to do with the movie, it's more like i gotta drive a long way just to see the movie for free.

i'll post more when i have something worthy to bitch about.

--j

wow, no meaningful posts since easter, awesome. only like, 800 things have happened since, so yeah, i dunno where to fuckin start, heh.

last month i got a nice big tax return, so i decided to replace my 5 year old linux box with a mac mini. so far, it's really worked quite nicely. it's actually funny cuz i've got the mac and win boxes running side by side, and ever since i got the mac i've been using it for IM and email as well as downloads/torrents, like the linux box was designed for. so the XP box is kinda just relegated to playing music now and then and some general file organization assistance. i don't think i can qualify for someone who's made "the switch" quite yet, but i would certainly recommend an affordable macintosh to anyone.

i never really thought i could say that with a straight face, but it's true. from a power user standpoint, mac os x really does combine the sexiness of XP (well, quite a bit more actually) with the functionality of a linux box, and that's highly appealing to me. somehow apple's made it possible for both a power user like myself and a casual user like my mother to thrive in the same environment.

i've always been a bit of a softy for overly sexy GUIs, which is why i've always preferred XP over older windows versions, it just looks better, despite what some say. so it's no surprise that i find os x's graphic scheme, aqua so damn appealing. it's just sexy in my opinion. and with a unix backbone, i'm sorry but nothing in kde or gnome has ever looked this good.

so yeah, with the minis going as cheap as they are these days (no, not as cheap as a PC by any means, but still) i'd highly recommend trying out a mac for anyone's next average idiot home box. i just installed OS X 10.4 tiger last night, and it really just improves the experience even more. but enough blowing sunshine up apple's ass, i've helped their stock enough the last month.

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haven't really done all that much epic in the last month. alayna and i have done some activities here and there to keep entertained. we've really gotten into a routine every weekend here without anybody really saying anything. she comes over to my place like 6pm friday and doesn't go back to her place till maybe 8pm sunday. so we've kinda already had a taste of living together, since she's officially moving in at the end of this month. we're already starting to bring some of her stuff over here and figuring out where to put everything, so it's creeping up on us.

we're seeing a lot more of the positives in it than the negatives. both of us know it'll take some readjusting here and there, but we realize it's time for us to take the next step in our relationship. things have gotten a little stagnant in the past few months, and i think a lot of that is due to our growing weary of dating so long without upping the commitment somehow. our honeymoon phase is certainly over at this point, and i think that's relatively easy to tell, but you can't blame us for being eager to live together since we'll have been together for 3 years this august. we know we'll be living in my allen apartment at least till probably august '06, and we're assuming at some point before then we'll have determined that yes, we can live together successfully and we'll be engaged.

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as far as how i've been biding my time lately, i've obviously ramped up a lot of my sitting around at the computer time with my new toy here. that phase should wear off here soon, so maybe i can move on to other things than collecting tech news RSS feeds and reading message boards.

i know i rant about it all the time, but i have to admit tv overall this season has been phenomenal. a number of new shows have kept our attention all season, and it's been fun. my pick for best new show of the season is without a doubt lost. it's the show i look forward to the most every week, even without being able to get ABC in high-def. i'd put grey's anatomy as my second best. i'm always a sucker for compelling medical dramas, and it seems an apt replacement for a rapidly declining ER. desperate housewives at times wanders a bit aimlessly, but it's still entertaining tv. i dunno what the hell happened to NBC recently, but their american remix of the office has been terrific. i'm sure i'm in the minority by thinking so, but i thought that show was insanely funny, and did an excellent job in capturing the same vibe as the original BBC version. sadly, it's ratings were just dreadful, so i don't realistically expect to see it back next season. overall, here's what i gave a shit about this tv season, meaning i either watched it or archived it:

sunday - the simpsons (fox), arrested development (fox), desperate housewives (abc), kelsey grammer's sketch show (fox), grey's anatomy (abc)
monday - 24 (fox)
tuesday - the amazing race (cbs), scrubs (nbc), the office (nbc)
wednesday - lost (abc), alias (abc), eyes (abc)
thursday - survivor (cbs), ER (nbc)
friday - numb3rs (cbs)

things will actually continue to be good following the above season finales. it's great to see family guy back on the air, and even american dad could be good. i know i'm not the only one thinking this, but the simpsons is really barely entertaining anymore. tivo'ing old eps from the 90's seems to always net funnier results. assuming alt.binaries.tv.big-brother hooks us yanks up with down under feeds, we'll follow big brother 5 australia for another season. what's funny is that there's prolly 300 people maybe in the states that follow this show, but we love it. amazing race seasons should continue this summer, as well as the obligatory stateside version of big brother, hopefully for its last season.

that should keep us plenty entertained, but just in case things are slow i got the first couple seasons of 24 and alias to catch up on. seems like i should have started watching those back in '01, but with the glory of the tv dvd, what's it matter?

i've spent a bit more time in front of the cube lately, trying to work my way through paper mario. got a little burnt out on katamari damacy and EA NHL 2005, but i'll return to those soon. with the generation gap we're in, hot games are coming out a lot less these days, which should help me hit up my stash for a while. lately it looks like the gamecube's market presence has just plummeted, so it's not exactly the hot system anymore. doesn't really matter, still have an assload of cube, ps2 and pc games left to fuck around with in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

hopefully, i can lose a little interest in such a pretty GUI long enough to go do other things besides surf and giggle, heh.

--j

my apartment smells like bananas.

--justin

oh, hello.

well it's easter weekend and alayna's back home down south, so it's a rare loner weekend for me. i'm not complaining, i'd hate for it to be like that every weekend, but now and then doesn't hurt i guess.

long fuckin week at work though. between a few physical therapy sessions (almost done, shins go back and forth between hurting and not) and a couple trips to airports, along with the requisite 40 hours of work, i feel like i earned my weekend.

i've only ever worked around march/easter back in 2000, so i wasn't really expecting everybody in the fuckin world to be taking good friday off... that made the afternoon go even slower.

we went and saw the ring two thursday night. imdb has it at a shockingly low 5.1, and the saddest part is that i think i completely agree with that rating. maybe a generous 6, but still. not entirely sure why, just didn't have the "magic" the first one had. this one was too cheesy and formulaic to really be all that scary in the same kinda way the original one was. seemed to me like another movie that could have done without a sequel. hopefully i won't hear anything of a 3rd in the works, there's enough horror movies on the horizon already. i should know, they showed previews for 'em all before the ring two.

we've found that kelsey grammer's the sketch show on fox is actually pretty funny. i'd highly recommend grabbing the torrent of the first 2 eps and appreciate its short-and-sweet humor. i watched that first ep of the US version of the office, and it's about as mediocre as i'd figured. it could have maybe some potential if given a chance, but something tells me the show's concept just ain't gonna work on this side of the pond. i won't be surprised if it's belly-up after 6 episodes or something.

i'll use that to launch into a quick aside where i wonder aloud what the hell ever happend to nbc. back in the mid/late-90s, nbc was basically *the* network. thursday nights were amazing, friends, then a typically good show at 7:30, followed by seinfeld, then usually a crummy show at 8:30, then ER at 9pm. in my opinion, go back and look at '95-96, for instance:

Friends
The Single Guy
Seinfeld
Caroline in the City
ER

at least to me, that's when thursday nights i wouldn't think of watching anything else. now, besides scrubs and ER, what does nbc have? it's funny how fox is even considered a better network than them now, and to me arrested development, the sketch show, simpsons and king of the hill all prolly prove that fox actually is the stronger network.

i know i've mentioned it before, but it suddenly dawned on me earlier today that i think it had probably been 2-3 weeks since i last actually sat in front of the tv and just flipped around the channels or watched something other than one of my mainstays live. kinda makes me wonder about my stupid almost-$60 directv bill, that's for sure. i guess as far as what i do at night when i've got some free time, i don't seem to ever just sit and blankly watch tv. i'm either surfing or doing something semi-constructive on my pc's, catching up on some shows thru tivo or catching up on some shows that i downloaded.

and speaking of catching up, time to sleep without the alarm set. see ya in a few days.

--j