The past week has been interesting. On Thursday we went to the Engadget.com Reader Meetup. It was held at Compact-Impact which is a nifty Japanese gadget store. Lots of people showed up which was cool, but, the store is pretty small so it was very crowded and warm inside. They really should have anticipated a larger crowd, many people were left outside where you couldn’t hear the Q&A session. They raffled off a bunch of gadgets and stuff, may of which they had to pick several numbers to find a winner. I attribute this to the lack of space and people leaving early. It was fun, though.
On Saturday we went down to Six Flags Hurricane Harbor (water park). The park itself is a good sized water park and we had a lot of fun. It was somewhat crowded, but, the parking lot was only like half full, so, I cannot imagine what it would be like if it was filled to capacity. The only problem is the park owners don’t seem to know how to queue people for either coming into the park or leaving. We showed up about 30 minutes after the opened and there was just a mass of people trying to get in. Granted, the metal detectors and bag searching slows them down, but, it was VERY inefficient and the lack of ropes forming the lines meant people just walked up and stood in places that weren’t lines and then just cut in where it was convenient. Being season pass holders didn’t help at all… there was a season pass holder line but it was much longer than the other “lines” (although better formed than the other lines). The line to exit was almost as long as slow, and that was 30 minutes before the park closed. They were only letting people out using ONE turnstile. It was amazing how inefficient the management allows this to be. All that said, though, we did have a nice day in the park. Got some sun but no sunburns.
Saturday evening we had BBQ at Famous Daves (which I talked about before) and went to see Bewitched. The reviews have been generally poor, but, we enjoyed it. It won’t win any awards but the story was fun, Will Farrell is always funny to watch, and Kidman did a good job.
On Sunday we drove around Staten Island and looked at the area and at some Open Houses to get a feel for the housing market there. Prices where high but at least most of the houses we looked at there were nice (most of the houses we have seen in NJ are both expensive and terrible).
Coming back from work on Monday the NJ Transit train I was on broke down. This caused me to get home 2 hours late (almost to the minute). This was kind of a drag mostly because the breakdown took the air conditioning on the train with it. I got to sit in the dark on a hot train with a bunch of cranky people. I didn’t find it TOO terrible because I had my portable DVD player and was able to watch a big chunk of The Godfather — always a fun way to pass time. Most people had nothing better to do than while. When they finally got another engine out to us and got us to Secaucus train station the mob of people all tried to fit onto the next two trains, which was mostly just amusing. I waited for the 3rd one (a delay of maybe 5 – 10 additional minutes over everybody else) and got to ride on a mostly empty train.
Hope all is going well with you, the reader.