The Daily Goob

I know I’ve reviewed more than just a couple books on here before (HP: HBP and some of the Ender series are the ones which stick out), but I’ll add another one to the list that was really just kind of a random read by an author that my grandmother had heard about. The book is Utopia by Lincoln Child, and it, in a word, is awesome.

The book itself is set in a futuristic world just outside of Las Vegas at the Utopia theme park which is known for its technology and immersive settings. Well, without giving away anything, someone makes a threat against the park unless his demands are met, so the book is about trying to stop him while keeping everyone at the park safe. I read the whole thing over the course of the past couple of days, and while it’s not a part of a series itself, I could see myself reading more stuff by Child in my free time.

On another note, I decided tonight after two power outages that lasted for a combined total of less than a minute, a UPS would be a good investment to make, especially since many are reasonably priced now. Even though Office and Firefox have built in recovery functions, just not having that hassle (and being able to do a normal shutdown if it doesn’t appear the power is coming back on soon) is worth it in my mind.

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During my month off from school, I plan on doing two main things: playing games and starting to learn three new languages. As for which three languages I’ll begin to dabble in, they might not be exactly what you’d expect. I plan on dealing with 1 human language and 2 programming languages. These are:

Japanese: Considering I spent 6 years taking Spanish classes and don’t consider myself anywhere near fluent, I don’t plan on becoming a master of Japanese in a month. My goal here is just to learn the two syllabaries of katakana and hiragana. No real comprehension of words or anything, just being able to read (in Japanese) stuff that’s written is my goal. I’ve had the books and stuff since summer of 2004 but just haven’t ever spent the time to really go through them.

Python: Java is the language I have the best grip on, C# I can now handle with a reference available, but I’ve yet to add a good “scripting” language to my repertoire. PHP is a little too web-centric for me, so the choice was really between Python and Ruby. Since Python is the more established language currently, I chose it to learn first, but I plan on picking up Ruby also before too long.

Perl: Also in the scripting language category falls Perl, and this is a very recent addition to my list. Basically, a combination of it being essentially universal on web servers and apparently useful for the Unix class at UTD which I’ll probably take next fall, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to learn it.

Japanese is on there primarily for my interest in gaming; being able to (eventually) import games would be nice for those that never make it to the US. As for the other two, for people who program being familiar with a wide array of languages allows for the best one for the situation to be chosen. Every break from now on I’ll try to pick up one or two more, and the ones that really seem to interest me the most I’ll learn more in depth via books.

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This was supposed to be yesterday’s post and I had another planned for today (I’m working ahead in my mind ;)), but life won’t end for each to be pushed back a day. I tried checking around yesterday and today to see if any Wii shipments had arrived, but no such luck yet. I’ll be calling the EB Games over near my old house again tomorrow morning to check with them, but I’ll just have to be patient. Luckily that patience indirectly produces extra time for me to use to work on my backlog of games. Speaking of which…

I’ve made an executive decision that I think is my only hope for ever taking care of the backlog task before me. Basically, I’m going to go through the games I have for each of my consoles and choose approximately 5-10 games from each to keep out ready to play, and all the rest are going in my closet with my finished games. This way, I’ll remain slightly more focused on which games to play, I can go ahead and play new games as I get them, and if I ever hit a lull in new games, I can delve back into the ones I’ve never played before. Some of the consoles will be hard to get that low (PS2 and Gamecube especially), but I’ll be doing the pruning no later than this weekend. Some full series will probably even get the storage treatment (I’m thinking Onimusha is one of them).

Along with this, I need to be more selective about the games I purchase, maybe saving the ones I’m not completely sure about for birthday or Christmas presents. This is where it would be nicer to not have them both right next to each other, but I think I can manage. This isn’t to say I’m going to stop preordering all together, but in 04 and 05 I made a list of about 30 games demoed at E3 that I wanted to get, the majority of which I did and are now in this backlog. I didn’t do this during this past E3 though, and with E3 changing form, hopefully this won’t be an issue anymore.

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Depending on how you want to look at it, I either have one day of school left or one week of school left for this semester. The one day interpretation comes from the fact that tomorrow is my last day of classes; the one week variety comes from that I have exams from tomorrow (one being in a class period) until Friday. My schedule worked out nice in that I only have one exam a day, so I start tomorrow with Politics/Values and finish up Friday morning with Exploration of the Arts (both essay exams, my only two).

I watched Cars on DVD tonight, and I had forgotten about a couple of the (pretty funny) scenes throughout the movie, including one of the clips in the credits that actually sold me on getting the DVD in the first place. Still good, but it didn’t move up any in my Pixar rankings. I honestly don’t know if any new movies Pixar comes out with will be able to get higher than 3rd (the current ranking of Cars) because Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles are just that good, IMO.

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Let’s get right to it:

Casino Royale: I’ve only really been a Bond movie watcher since Goldeneye (i.e. the start of the Brosnan era), so I don’t have all of the older ones to take into account when making this review. Casino Royale is an awesome movie, but quite different from the recent Bond movies in many regards. These differences aren’t bad, they just give the movie a different feeling and pacing. Rating: 9/10

Deja Vu: Really, the only issue I had with this movie was that I didn’t love then ending as much as the rest of the movie. Yes, the ending is good (and quite apropos), but I just expected/wanted something a little more. It’s actually directed by one of the brothers behind Numb3rs, one of my favorite non-reality shows, and the ending really is a lot like some of the endings to that show: the big climax has occurred, most everything has been resolved, so the show just ends on a low note without any big punch top the ending. When that’s the only thing wrong with the movie, you know it has to be good. Rating: 9.5/10

Yes, a 9 and a 9.5. My standards haven’t decreased any (to my knowledge); both of these movies were just very, very good.

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We all knew that we had to lose eventually, but at least we got a 26 game winning streak out of it. We lost to Texarkana today 24-40, so no more football for the rest of this year. I’ve started my 18th hour of being up today (over 6 of which was spent in a van), so I plan on going to sleep fairly soon.

Tomorrow I’m going to see Deja Vu, and I’ll post a combination review of it and Casino Royale tomorrow night. Aside from that, most of the rest of my time this weekend is going to be spent playing video games and working on exam preparations (not quite the same as studying). My phone case and headset should come Monday, so next week I’ll have the chance to really try it out and report on it.

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This post is being made so early in the evening because I don’t plan on being awake (or at the very least being up) in 2 hours. Since I have to wake up around 4:45 tomorrow morning, I’m going to sleep early with the intention that I might get enough sleep to not be absolutely dead after the game tomorrow.

I upgraded both AIM and Firefox on my computer today to versions 6 and 2, respectively. Both feel most like a visual update, but AIM especially has some features that are new (at least when compared to the 4.x branch which I was still using). I find it slightly amusing that of the 8 things I had on my to-do list, only one of them I actually did today. Granted, this is more like a list for the entire weekend, but it shows that I really just wasn’t all that productive.

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Just realized a football update was in order: we won Friday, 35-31. Texarkana won their game also, and Coach Allen had met with them earlier in the week to decide on the game location/time if we ended up playing each other. He didn’t want to agree to Tyler this year, so it went to a coin flip with the winning side getting to choose the stasium of their choice. We chose SMU, Texarkana chose Independence Stadium. Texarkana won. Now, where is Independence stadium you might ask? Shreveport, LA…

I know, we were all thinking that this had to be against some rule or something, but apparently it isn’t. Therefore, I get to wake up before 5:00 Friday morning, be at HP in between 5:30 and 6:00, and our game will be at 1:00. We’re apparently renting another van that Dr. Galatzan will be driving (according to Coach Harris) that I’m guessing Preston, Austin, KK, Coach Gibbins, and I will be going in also. So, there’s the state of football playoffs currently. At least the good thing about that early of a game is we’ll get back to HP probably between 6:00 and 7:00.

I’ve still yet to get a Wii, but I did go pick up my copy of Twilight Princess today. The reviews on it have generally been awesome to near perfect, so I’m looking forward to playing it (hopefully soon). Seeing as how I still have a multitude of other games to beat, however, maybe it’s not a bad thing that I don’t have a Wii yet.

I ordered a Bluetooth headset and a case for my new phone today, so that only leaves a larger memory card as a potential purchase until I’m done accessorizing. I went with the Plantronics Voyager 510 (which I got for about $45) and then the official Nokia case for my phone. Maybe this weekend I might venture out to Fry’s to look for a memory card (and who knows, maybe even a Wii), but I think the 64 MB card it came with should be sufficient for the time being. Aside from that, the two other items from my summer purchasing list are the case fan for my computer and the HDTV tuner to use in conjucntion with the antenna in 1 of our 4 our attics. The fan I’ll probably buy next week once I take my computer back to my house, and the tuner card I still don’t really have a use for since I haven’t made a media center computer yet.

And of course I can’t forget to mention the fact that tonight will be the last night I spend in my apartment until either January 7th or 8th. With that, I’ll end my longest post in a while.

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My experience with our Tivo has generally been positive. Sure, there are a few quirks, but overall it functions like it’s supposed to. Well, with an update that got pushed to it a week or two ago, the transferring to a compuer function is very tempermental. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when it wants to work and when it doesn’t, but probably a good half of the shows I try to transfer it fails on. Tivo puts the blame on my end (which I know isn’t the case), but I guess there’s nothing really more for me to do until more people experience it and Tivo hopefully fixes it in a future update.

My new phone came in the mail today, and with the short time I played around with it, I really like it. I’m still using my old phone since I don’t have a case for this one yet, and I’m also looking into getting a Bluetooth headset to use so that I don’t have to continually take it out of the case and put it back in when I’m done. Which BT headset I’ll get is an entirely different issue, but I’ve already started to do my research.

To close the post, let me just say that I hate Physics tests. No explanation is necessary, I just hate them.

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I was supposed to work on homework for a significant portion of the day today with slight interruptions for going to see Casino Royale and The Tempest at HP. Long story short (since I only have a few minutes to get this post in today), I left my house at about 9:30 this morning and didn’t get back until 9:30 tonight. Basically, our church flooded sometime during the week so I went to go help carry stuff. That took until close to 2:00, and afterwards my grandmother still wanted to go see Casino Royale, so by pure luck we made a 2:15 movie at a theater over very close to our church. Awesome movie, but my full review will come later.

When I left there slightly before 5:00, I knew that going home and then coming back to HP would be pointless, so I showed up at the school around 5:40 and volunteered to be put to work so I wouldn’t be sitting around until 7:00. After the play was over, I stayed around to help clean up a little bit, and then I finally got home at about 9:30. Let’s just say I hope tomorrow somehow is made up of 36 hours because I think I’m going to need it…

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