The Daily Goob

I downloaded the first season of Chuck earlier this week and started watching it this afternoon. In a word, it’s awesome. I never saw it when it aired on NBC this past year, but I’ll definitely be making a point to watch it as it airs starting in the fall.

Tomorrow afternoon is yet another full one for me. I start off going to work with Mr. McDonald some, I’m then heading to HP just to be there for (at least part of) the Blue/Gold game, and then I’m going by UTD for an SGDA meeting in order to brush up on my C++ skills. They’re the group that ACM is working on the game event with, so it’s probably not a bad idea just to make sure our relations stay tight.

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We were never really in the game tonight, and as such we lost 7-4 to Waxahachie. This means that hopefully I’ll be missing part of physicals on Saturday and going to Coppell instead. Regardless, Friday I’m headed to Waxahachie for Game 2, but not until after my Japan class in the morning.

So, with no game on Thursday, I’m on my “normal” work schedule. This means that tomorrow I have a free schedule with which to do whatever I want. Most likely it will be playing WoW, but who knows what else might make it onto the docket. Only time will tell…

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Two of the WoW instances I’ve done today (including the one I’m in right now) are both in the Caverns of Time, an area where you travel back to important times in Warcraft lore in order to prevent something from happening that would alter the course of events. The first one went just fine, but the second one had a couple issues. These aren’t exactly optional since they’re a part of my Kara attunement, so hopefully I’ll have more luck the next time I try it.

I was wrong on the baseball schedule for the week. They decided to throw me for a loop with a Tuesday/Friday/Saturday schedule instead. So, tomorrow night we play at HP at 7:30, Thursday is in Waxahachie, and Saturday will be in Coppell if the series goes that long. Even if it doesn’t, I’ll be working physicals up at the stadium, so my Saturday is tied up regardless.

Prince Caspian was a good movie; it fit in with the first one quite well, and despite being 2:30 long, it never really got boring or seemed like an overly long movie. I could definitely see more of the book’s religious themes coming through in this movie which never really stood out to me in the first one. Overall, on par with the first, and worth a purchase. My score: 8.5/10.

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Typically right before the start of each fall semester I will take all of the email that has accumulated in my UTD email account and archive into my Outlook PST file on my computer. Considering how much email I seemed to have gotten since the last time I did that, I went ahead and decided to back everything up now before the summer semester started. Well, the first time I did it, Outlook came to a screeching halt trying to open up the mailbox because apparently my computer couldn’t allocate it enough memory to deal with the issue. After a reboot it worked just fine, but maybe I should start doing in between semesters also now.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to see Prince Caspian, so expect yet another installment of my movie reviews tomorrow night (although don’t be disheartened if one doesn’t appear; recent history shows I can forget these things). Chances are I’ll learn our baseball schedule for the week tomorrow, but my guess at this point would be a three game series spread across Thursday-Saturday. Doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to make a prediction like that, so if I’m right, I can’t really get too much credit.

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After putting it off for a month or two, I just updated WordPress to the latest version. What this means for everyone except me is virtually nothing; for me, it mainly just means that everything looks a little different in the admin panel. Feel free to somehow think of this as a precursor to a future upgrade (as it would probably need to be done before any big new changes), but in reality, it wasn’t done for a reason like that.

Big, big upset in the baseball playoff picture today: Forney beat and eliminated Poteet in their series today, so that’s huge if we win this next week as we would have been playing Poteet the following round. I’d say that our chances of making it to the State tournament definitely just increased, but it’s of course by no means a done deal yet. Two more teams to beat before that comes up.

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First off, I’d like to point out that this is post #800, coming exactly one day after the 4th anniversary of this blog. Still nothing to announce or add, but I’m keeping my eyes and mind open. It probably won’t be another year before something big changes here.

Ok, now onto the main point of this post. I said two days ago that after the anniversary stuff was taken care of yesterday, I would provide my review of Speed Racer. That was obviously a lie but in more than one way. As it turns out, I went to go see 21 instead, so I couldn’t have provided a (non-made up) review of Speed Racer even if I’d wanted to.

If I was going to describe 21 in one word, it’d probably be “exhilarating”. As frowned on as counting cards is in Vegas, I really want to try it out the next time I go as a result of this movie. Vacation anyone? While watching the movie I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a DVD purchase or not, but after thinking about it for a day, I’m starting to lean toward that it will be. That decision is completely independent of the fact that it’s an awesome movie though. My score: 8/10.

Ok, now to describe Speed Racer in one word… wait, what? Oh yeah, after I was done at HP today I went back to Stonebriar to see Speed Racer. Why Stonebriar, you might ask? Well, I had planned on being able to go home in between the end of the movie and needing to be back at HP, but as everything turned out, I just had to go straight back to HP from there. Speaking of, we’re now one round closer with a 7-3 win tonight (and as a result, a full weekend off!). But I digress…

Speed Racer in one word: “trippy”. Not trippy in a purely good or bad way, but there are definitely some Matrix-esque scenes in it. Going into the movie I wasn’t really expecting all that much, but I came out very pleasantly surprised. While it is (for the most part) a kid friendly movie, it’s not really a kid oriented movie (which I think was one of the things that surprised me the most). It was again questionable for the DVD release during and right after seeing it, but I think it’ll probably move to the buy column also. Another good movie that I recommend. My score: 8/10.

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Stat time!

• Past year, 366 posts!!! Starting with “Welcome to the Vlog” (silence!) and ending yesterday with “I So Wasn’t Ready For That”, I made a post every single day from May 15, 2007 to May 14, 2008. Unless something weird goes on with the calendar, I can never break this number — only tie it. Before this past year, I had only made 432 posts; I didn’t quite double that value (technically, I couldn’t), but I came awfully close.
• Longest updateless streak: 15 days (considering this couldn’t have changed in the last year, it’s still 9/2/04-9/18/04)
• Longest daily posting streak: 390 days and counting (4/22/07-today)
• And my usual count of the number of post titles I put “…” in over the past year: 12 (not quite as many as the 15 in the preceding year, and just 1 less than the 13 the first year)
• Fine, it can be said — number of vlog posts: 1 (5/15/07: “Welcome to the Vlog”)

As I mentioned before, I don’t have anything planned for today. No new theme, no new features, no new anything. As for my non-blog life, HP won 12-8 tonight (at home actually, the location got changed this morning), and Game 2 is tomorrow at McKinney North. At least it isn’t Kilgore or Tyler which is where we were going this week last year, so I can be thankful for small things like that.

Year #5, let’s see what we got.

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I believe that a year ago I might have been slightly mistaken in my thinking that I was ready to take on making this into a vlog. As the category shows, after my grand reveal, I made the great number of zero vlog posts in the past 355 days. I think it’s painfully obvious that this wasn’t one of my brightest ideas, but no one ever said that I have to be right all of the time.

Tomorrow morning I think I’m going to go see Speed Racer before heading to HP. I’m seeing it more out of having nothing to do tomorrow morning rather than really wanting to see the movie. We’ll see whether I like it or not, so expect another installment of my movie reviews after the anniversary post tomorrow.

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Anniversary #4 is just two days from today, and I still have no ideas on what to do to “celebrate”. I guess I still have about 48 hours to come up with something, but that doesn’t give me a lot of time to try to add anything big or drastically change something around. Maybe this year will just be a passing footnote in the history of this blog?

I started playing my other new alt on WoW today, and at least at the pre-10 levels, shaman are infinitely more fun to play than rogues. For starters, I haven’t died yet (which I’ve managed to do quite a few times on my rogue). Maybe it’s just because a shaman’s playstyle is a little more in line with a hunter’s; I still plan on leveling up both of those alts though

Tomorrow morning I’m going down to HP on a tech support call but not before stopping by Fry’s to pick up something for Andrew that he forgot while he was there today. No baseball until Thursday, so that’s really my only thing to do tomorrow besides go work with Mr. McDonald some. Ahhh, I love my schedule for this summer — already the flexibility is proving to be quite nice.

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I went ahead and created two of my alts today in WoW, but I only logged in and started playing with one of them. I forgot how worthless characters are at low levels, evidenced greatly by the number of times that I died. I don’t plan on leveling any of these sequentially to 70; in fact, I’ll probably try to keep most of them around the same level (possibly in two groups so I don’t get too bored of running the exact same quests over and over again).

Right now I’m in the process of running Shadow Labs, an instance that is part of my Kara attunement quest chain. This is apparently the “hardest” part of the process, but since I won’t be ready to run Kara yet, it doesn’t matter all that much at this point in time. At least it will be one more thing out of my quest log and done for when I am ready.

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