This last weekend we drove down to the NJ Shore to spend the day will some relatives who have a great bay-side house on Long Beach Island. It was fun catching up with them, relaxing, walking on the beach, etc. Got home kind of late, but, it was a great day. There will be pictures in the gallery soon.
On Sunday we slept in a bit then I did some searches for NYC Street Markets. I decided to check out the one that supposedly runs along St. Marks Street between 3rd Ave and A Ave. There is some stuff there, but, it wasn’t terribly interesting. So, we took the subway train down to Coney Island. The subway ride into Coney Island is a long run, but, it was eventless as always… did some people watching, listening to music, etc. Coney Island was a MODHOUSE! TONS of people, far more than I’ve ever seen at the NJ Shore. We got a couple hot dogs from Nathans then walked around a bit. We decided to go to the New York Aquarium, which was a decent aquarium (although not as nice as the Monterey Bay Aquarium). After the aquarium we walked along the Coney Island boardwalk for a bit them returned back home.
An interesting side note… If you pay for your NY Aquarium tickets with a Bank of America Visa Debit Card or Credit Card you will get a big discount on the second ticket. I will have to figure out where else I can get these BofA discounts.
There is a new show (on FX, I think) called 30 Days by Morgan Spurlock — they guy who did the Super Size Me documentary about eating only McDonalds. This looks very interesting. In the first episode he and his wife are going to try to live 30 days on minimum wage or some such. Worth TiVo’ing, I think.
Finally, I have been looking for quite a while (a few years?) at portable DVD players and watching the price come down and the screens get bigger. I have lately been tempted to get one, but, the last holdout was I wanted one that supported both DVD and Divx/Xvid/Mpeg4/etc. I have seen these ocassionally on eBay, but, they seemed overpriced and I just didn’t know how well they would work. I noticed in an Engadget article that the Ever Green EG-D770X is coming out (has come out?) in Japan. This seemed decent but something I could get HERE would be preferable. Then I discovered that the Magnavox MDP820 is available both at Amazon and local Best Buy (on sale this week at Best Buy for $225), so I picked one up. Yes, it does play Divx and Xvid, but, oddly you have to rename the “.avi” files to “.mpg”. Very strange. You NEED the remote for many of the necesary functions (such as fast forward, rewind, on screen display, subtitles, etc.) and it is a little bulkly compared to top of the line portable DVD players, but, the size is certainly resonable and the screen is a good sized (especially compared to my PocketPC or the PSP I was considering). There are other small quirks like I cannot determine how it supports (if it even does?) “resume” (to finish a movie hours or days later) and during Divx/Xvid playback you cannot enable the OSD display to see how far you are into the movie (at least not that I can tell). I am still looking for a forum of other users of this player. I would say I am glad I found it. Hopefully portable Divx/Xvid players will become more abundant feature rich in the near future, but, this one suits my needs, I think.
Until next time…