Kevin's Musings

Had a nice long weekend although, as always, I wish it was longer. On Saturday we went and saw War of the Worlds, which was fun and the effects were spectacular. BUT, that said, I wouldn’t give it full marks by any means. The ending was ABRUPT and the SCREAMING little girl was ANNOYING. Eee gad, who told her to scream like that and so much. Oh jeez. Grating on the nerves. It is funny because I generally like Dakota Fanning. But,Tom Cruise did a good job playing the dead beat dad and I appreciated he didn’t suddenly become a good dad. Go for the effects, leave for the screaming.

Deb made a tasty Mac and Cheese Dog Dinner. She has been watching 30-Minute Meals with Rachael Ray on FoodTV and getting some good ideas. Really good.

On Sunday we went to the Meadowlands Sports Complex and saw the Cirque du Soleil show Varekai. It is a traveling show. It was excellent. Great effects (well, mind boggling acrobatics) AND a complete lack of screaming kids in the show. A touch pricier than War of the Worlds to attend, but, a great show. After the Cirque show we went to theNew Jersey Fair which, umm, SUCKED. If you are into fried fair food and bad fair rides this is the fair for you. If you want something interesting, probably you should look elsewhere. There was a big portable maze that looked kind of cool. This fair was NOT worth the $16 entrance fee ($8 for each of us). At least we didn’t have to pay for parking (we parked at the Race Track, which offers free parking).

On Monday we mostly just hung out and watched some TV and relaxed. It was a good, relaxing day. Monday night, the city of Rahway, NJ put on a spectacular fireworks show. This show was really worth seeing. Part of the reason we originally went to New Jersey Fair on Sunday night was for a fireworks show. When the fair was so terrible we just left and didn’t get see the fireworks. I am so glad Rahway had such a great display.

We got some more pictures uploaded to our Flickr. This is a really nifty site. They have spent a TON of time on user interface stuff. I would like a slightly fancier Upload program, but, that will come. Also, there is a nifty badge thing I placed onmy homepage to show the latest images.

Finally took some time last night to try out Flickr. They have a pretty limited free version but I decided to just get the Pro version. This really is impressive an impressive website. It will take some time to get my images uploaded, but, it is MUCH easier than using the Coppermine Photo Gallery software I was using before — primarily because they have nice upload and management tools. I think I will probably leave all of my images public, unless I decide otherwise. I have about 4 gigabytes of images to upload, so, it will take a couple months to do it (which it would have anyway). I also want to make sure to tag them as I upload them. Title them as well. If you have a digital camera you should check this site out. I have looked around and not found anything comparable.

For local (on your PC) image albums and manipulation I still recommend Picasa from Google. The only problem I have run into is that when you modify a picture in Picasa it doesn’t change the source image. This normally is a good thing, but, if you want to move your pictures to Flickr you either need to do an email workaround (you can post pictures to Flickr via email) or you have to “Save” the image using Picasa or you have to Export the folder of images. There must be an easier way. If I think of one I will let you know.

Going to see Cirque du Soleil Varekai this weekend. Should be lots of fun!

That’s all for now.

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.

Over the weekend we went out to see Batman Begins and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Both are fine films. Well done with good stories and great effects. This Batman is, by far, the best Batman since the first Batman movie done by Tim Burton, and, it is possibly even better than that one. Christian Bale did a great job and having (just a few months ago) seen him in The Machinist (a really great film) it is amazing the physical transformation he went through for this role. This guy must have spent his entire life in the gym between the two movies. I easily recommend all of the films I have recommended in this paragraph.

Also this weekend we discovered a really tasty BBQ restaurant (chain) called Famous Daves. It looks like they are popping up all over. If you like BBQ try them out. We also discovered a great park that is relatively close to where we live in New Jersey named Roosevelt Park (I believe it is in the city/township/whatever of Menlo Park). Big park with lost of trees, basketball courts, a lake, ice skating rink, bike paths, etc. Really neat place.

We started watching the BBC version of the Office. We enjoyed the US shamelessly stole from the BBC version so we are enjoying it.

From my previous post… I realized when I posted it but have had it pointed out… The portable DVD player I bought isn’t huge and bulky, it is just somewhat large compared to the new, top of the line players. The size is actually quite reasonable. I continue to be very happy with it. Since I bought it I have watched the Spongebob Squarepants Movie, Man-Thing, and am currently watching Alien vs. Predator on it. Nice player.

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…

Well, another week or so has gone by and I can shirk my blogging duties no longer.

Last Friday night we went to see Crash. If you like movies such as Traffic, Magnolia, etc. which show different peoples lives and the unusual intersections, demonstrating that actions have consequences, etc. you will like Crash. We really enjoyed it. It is pretty heavy, though (not a light-hearted comedy by any means).

On Saturday we drove down to the Jersey Shore (pics to follow in the gallery). We walked along the boardwalk at Asbury Park then drove further south along the shore for quite a bit farther. It was a nice drive. Saturday night we spend a bit of time at The Back Porch listening to a great band, The Booglerizers – acoustic blues and ragtime music. I highly recommend them.

On Sunday we came into the city. Attended church at the St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church. It was a good service, lots of energy. Afterward, we walked through Central Park and then went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For some reason I read it as the MOMA on the map, but, it was still neat. We bought an annual membership as we wanted to view it over time, not try to just do it in a day.

I read on Monday that Apple is brining OS X to the Intel platform sometime over the next year or two. I heard about the time OS X was being developed (i.e., a LONG time ago, before it was called OS X) that it would compile and run on Intel, so, I have been expecting this announcement for YEARS. I think this is great news. It would be nice to have a Unix-based OS with a -=GOOD UI=- (Linux is great but the X interface just sucks) that runs on the Intel platform as an alternative to Windows. Hopefully it is more stable than Windows. I would love to see Apple take a real bite out of Microsoft and am just amazed that Microsoft seems to be taking this so well and not offered to stop making Office, etc. for OS X. We’ll see how they actually respond soon, I guess. I have been considering buying one of those cute 12″ iBooks for some time now, maybe I will hold off. Also should be interesting to see if this changes how game makers support OS X… I imagine we might see DirectX ported to OS X and most games now coming with Windows and OS X version (or just more support for OpenGL in games)? Dunno.

That’s all for now.

Well the long weekend went very well. Friday night we took it easy, had some dinner at the Back Porch (the bar in our new back yard) and got to bed early-ish. Woke up on Saturday and played some Jade Empire (Xbox) before we got our day going by driving down south to Six Flags. We got Deb a three park season pass (Six Flags Great Adventures, Wild Safari, Hurricaine Harbor) to match my season pass. We saw the tigers at Great Adventures then headed over to Wild Safari — a drive through Zoo. Wild Safari was a lot of fun, lots of animals just walking around the cars, etc. See pics in the Dorffweb Gallery under NJ/NY Pics. (Also see pics of our apartment full of boxes and of the going away party in that same album).

After leaving Wild Safari we drove to the New Jersey shore. We walked on the beach the made it back to the car just before the rain started. We found a cute little restaurant on the beach and had dinner (a few pics of the shore in the same gallery album I mentioned earlier).

We drove back toward the apartment and stopped at IKEA. WOW! What a cool store! We browsed through IKEA for an hour or so then went to see the movie Unleased. Unleashed was a LOT of fun, really well done.

On Sunday, we did some shopping for stuff we needed to put the bed and dining room table together, went back to IKEA to figure out what we might need for bookshelves, then grabbed some dinner from another restaurant near the apartment (The Townhouse), and came back to the apartment and got the bed put together. At this point we realized we needed to re-think how the furniture was laid out in the bedroom (oops!).

On Monday we got the bedroom rearranged to fit things better then made it out to IKEA (AGAIN! Third day in a row) and bought the bookshelves that we decided we needed. We stopped and had dinner at Macaroni Grill then came back to the apartment. We moved the china cabinet/hutch, Deb put the dining room table back together, whew! We stopped by Fat Tuesday and got a drink.

It was a long, fun, productive weekend. We got quite a few good things done around the apartment that will help us to finish unpacking.

Over this last weekend we went and saw “Kingdom of Heaven” (KOH) and “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” (SW). We thought KOH was interesting and well cast but often felt like we didn’t really know were it was going for long stretches of time. It is likely it is because we aren’t overly familiar with the history related to the film, I know others have liked it quite a bit, but, I thought they could have done a bit to tighten it up. That said, it was fun, well cast, and we though well acted. If it seems like your kind of movie you should check it out. We don’t give it a “bad” review, per-se, just not a stellar one.

SW, on the other hand, had the same mixed cast — Anakin was still kind of weak and Padme still kind of clueless, but, Mace, Obi-Won, Yoda, and Palpatine were strong as always. The story was solid, the effects were spectacular, and it wrapped up all the loose ends nicely. I think this was a fine ending for the 2nd SW trilogy… Definately stronger than Ep1 and Ep2, but, I didn’t hate those as much as others obviously did (once you get past JarJar and the bad acting of every Anakin…). I think the series holds together overall. One thing to suggest to you SW fanatics out there: After you see SW:ROTS go pick up the book. The book was a lot of fun and explained tons of cool stuff about the story, the characters, and the Force that aren’t clearly explained in the movie(s). The insights into Anakin were very interesting.

On Sunday we got stuff ready for the movers to arrive. This included putting together a small TV stand/entertainment center for the bedroom.

Monday morning the Movers arrived just a touch early (perfect) as did the folks we hired to unload the stuff from the moving van to the apartment. The folks we hired did a great job and were worth every penny. We found them through MovingHelp/eMove.com. The eMove.com website seems a little buggy, but, once we got it booked and the helpers we selected accepted the job it went very smoothly. I would recommend checking this site out if you need a few extra hands for a move across town or country.

So, we now have a TON of boxes in our apartment. Deb is working hard to get everything unboxed and put away. We will soon find out how “too small” our new place is 🙂

On Saturday, May 7th, we got a call from the driver of the moving truck who was going to be moving our stuff (we had, about a month earlier, settled on using Broadway Express thanks in no small part to the forums at MovingScam.com). According to the driver, our moving date had been changed to two days earlier than we expected and there was nothing we could do to try to resolve the issue until Monday, May 9th, the day before the driver wanted to pick up our stuff. Needless to say we freaked out a tad. We went over all the possible scenarios and decided, if need be, to just U-Haul the stuff from NM to NJ. It turned out it was just a miscommunication between the driver and dispatch. We did end up with a different driver but back on the original day (May 12th). Deb had some great help and got everything loaded in less than the space we thought we would need in just about 2 hours. Yay teamwork.

I caught a flight to Albuquerque on mid Saturday morning, May 14th. Got into Albuquerque at about 4:30pm. Rented a car. I was amazed that a car with only 4450 miles on it could have such an intense smoke smell — the previous renter must have been a severe chain smoker. I thought about switching but decided for the very small amount of time I would be in the car it wouldn’t be too big a deal. It was oddly reminesant of the first NJ apartment I was in (but the smell in the car was actually worse). The car was a Mitsubishi Galant. It seemed to be a nice car, easy to drive, lots of space (overall), but, the headroom seemed to be a little tight. I am about 6 feet tall – if you are shorter than me you might really like this car, if you are taller than me I would guess you would hate it. Anyway…

We threw a “we’re leaving Albuquerque” party in our mostly empty house on Saturday night. People started arriving about 6pm. It was a great mix of Deb’s friends and work associates and my friends and work assocates. Lots of great people and lots of time to talk, remember, etc. I think a good time was had by all, good food, lots of fun. Almost everybody we invited was able to make it, which was really great. After the party Deb stayed up pretty late finishing the last bit of packing our carry on and check-in suitcases (the tail end of her stuff, clothes, etc.)

We got up kind of early to drug the cats and head to the airport. While you could tell the cats didn’t like being in their travel carriers (and you could tell they were drugged) they were generally awake just very relaxed — meowed a little bit, but, generally tolerated the whole “fly across the country” thing pretty well. We got them settled into the new apartment and they seem to be taking to it well.

Until next time…

I am sure most of you know about the extraordinary mapping software at Maps.Google.com — really nice stuff. Really easy to read, fast, draggable. This is by far the best web-based mapping software out there. It even supports display of satellite imagery for the maps you are viewing. Super slick. My only complaints are that I cannot click in arbitrary way points or just click in start and stop points. It would be nice if I could find a place on the map and click “Start from here” find another point and click “End here” and have it find directions. Also, given an established route a “route through” would be great. I guess you can’t have everything. Oh well.

The moving truck is supposed to be coming tomorrow morning to get the rest of (and bulk of) our stuff to move it back east. Maybe in a week or two I will have my TV back!

Not much new in the city or the job. Things are going well.

Saw House of Wax, which I really enjoyed. It is getting mixed and often negative reviews by the reviewers, but, I stand by my belief that most reviewers have no idea how to review a horror film. If you like horror, go see it.

After the movie I caught the NJ Transit train home and while I was wide awake I somehow managed to miss my train stop (had to happen eventually, right?). It was weird, I heard them say my stop was next, I saw a platform go by (presumably mine) but I didn’t feel the train stop. I guess with the reflections on the window I just didn’t register the stop. Under the right conditions at night it can be hard to see out the windows, but, I have never noticed that to be a problem at a stop. Oh well. I got off at the next stop, looked to see when the next north-bound train was, but, it wasn’t for almost an hour so I walked to a near by Quik Stop and got a cab. Unfortunately, it was one of the “flat rate” cabs and not a “metered” cab, so, I probably ended up paying 3 or 4 times what I should have — it was $12 instead of $3 or $4 — live and learn. The driver also had another employee of the same cab company in the car and had to drop him off way out east (where my stop was just slightly north). Needless to say I didn’t tip the jerk.

Started playing Jade Empire for the Xbox. Not very far into it but it seems like fun (an action RPG). I am considering getting a Sony PSP to play games and watch videos during my commute. Haven’t decided yet. I haven’t found the “killer game” for it, maybe Tony Hawk.

Until next time…