We haven’t had rain in…let’s just say it’s been a while. So of course, tonight, we had to have thunderstorms that set off the severe weather sirens at the most inconvenient time of when everyone was getting to my house. Well, the evening was still fun with 360 and movie watching, but if anyone needed proof that the weather gods were out to get me and weren’t convinced yet, I submit tonight as evidence V.
Tomorrow is a “normal” day for me, and by that I mean that I have basically nothing on my calendar. Sure, Robert and I are planning to have lunch together, but beyond that, it’s just going to be me and all the technology in the upstairs of our house. I don’t have anything against our downstairs technology, but it’s just less fun than what the upstairs has to offer.
Personal - Dallas
The sound stuff for our church arrived at my house today, and I was giving myself about a 50-50 shot at having bought everything that I needed to at first. Everything connected together just fine (which in my book means it should work!), but there was a part I was missing. Rather than just go get the missing part, I did a live chat with the website that I ordered the stuff from and instead exchanged it for a new speaker that had the other part built in. I don’t ever see this system being portable or taken around anywhere, but in that event, one less thing to carry around would be nice.
Tomorrow I’m having what I’ve termed a “party-ish gathering” at my house with some of the people that I go play ultimate frisbee with, and it should basically just consist of pizza, swimming, and playing some video games. I guess if you wanted to get technical, this would be my second pool party, the first one being with Brandon and Crystal a couple summers ago. We had pizza then also, but it was Campisi’s. I’m thinking that tomorrow falls squarely into the Pizza Hut range of pizza though.
Personal - Dallas
Well, I’ll just put this very simply: my room didn’t see much cleaning today. Instead, I took the opportunity to work more on the baseball videos that I needed to finish up. That project should only last another day or two, and then the trick is figuring out Encore in order to make the DVDs. Fortunately the project is still fun (although time consuming), or it’s more of an issue of just setting the time aside to do it rather than having to force myself to work on them.
Tomorrow I have to stay at home and wait for UPS to arrive so that they can deliver a package. This really isn’t an inconvenience since, hey, it’s not like I have anything else to do. It’ll be good time to get some more “cleaning” done most likely…
Personal - Dallas
During commercial breaks in the NBA Finals game, I was switching over to CBS to watch parts of the Tony awards. Now, when I came in here to play WoW, I decided I wanted some background music on. Without realizing the connection at all, I just listened to the whole soundtrack of The Lion King musical. The fact that I chose a soundtrack isn’t that surprising since it’s something nice to be able to click and not have to continually change songs or whatever.
Jarrett and I just played some Halo 3 this afternoon, and the rest of my day was pretty standard/boring. I finished my CD wallet project for the most part last week (surprisingly), so now I should probably move on to beginning to clean up my room. The last thing I need to do is just move random stuff from here to Seattle, especially since I won’t have a whole house to spread it out in up there.
Personal - Dallas
The age old question: if I hold onto enough balloons, can I make myself fly? Yes, I went to go see Up today, and as with lots of Pixar’s recent movies, you don’t get a good grasp on the personalities of the characters from the trailer. Regardless, I haven’t decided where it falls on my Pixar movie scale yet. Definitely not displacing Monsters Inc. or The Incredibles, but I’d probably rate it around or slightly higher than Ratatouille. Granted, the fact it’s a Pixar movie to begin with means that it’s good, so it’s like working on a scale of 7-10, and on that scale, I’d put it right in the middle. My score: 8.5/10.
Jarrett is probably coming out here for a while tomorrow, so I’ll have to suffer through playing video games and stuff with him then. I also mat or may not be going to an ultimate frisbee game, but I’d probably be leaning towards not at this point just to save my still healing skin. In order to compensate, I might just have to play even more video games. Tragic, I tell you.
Personal - Dallas
I’m (re)reading the book Wyrm (I almost but didn’t quite finish it over my Japan trip last year) just for something to do, as if there weren’t any number of things that I could pull off of a list to fill that spot. One thing about the book is that it is extremely tech heavy, so there are all these computer related terms being thrown around and defined. I like every other aspect of the book except for this; people who know very little about computers are still going to be confused by it, and people like me just find it really odd to have these paragraphs of tech talk that has very little to do with the plot of the story. Fortunately since it’s a book about games I can look past that, but it does have its (glaring) flaws.
I have no movie planned for this weekend, but that could all change on a whim tomorrow. I don’t want to fall too far behind in movies to see since I only have about a month left here in Dallas, but it is summer, so I have the time to go see everything that I want. If there is a movie that makes the cut this weekend, it’ll be Up.
Personal - Dallas
One type of program that interests me that I’ve yet to find a good instance of is a desktop wiki software. My note taking has progresses from sticky notes around the border of my monitor to creating text files on my desktop, so the next logical step would be to put all those notes into a single piece of software that would make linking them together much easier. I suppose that I could try to use OneNote for this purpose, but it almost imposes too much structure on what I really want to be doing. I guess that if I don’t find one, it could always get added onto the project list.
Last night I had to buy a new sound system for our church, and it was odd to not do a ton of research on something before I’m looking at individual products in order to figure out how they operate with each other. It should arrive on Tuesday so I can unpack everything and see if it all works as intended. If not, then I get to figure out what is missing that is preventing it from working as intended. I think I know what the one additional part would be that I need to buy, but in an ideal world, everything will “just work”.
Personal - Dallas
Netbooks are the new “hot” tech item to have right now, but the problem is that there are so many of them and no good site where you can do a side by side comparison with just the ones that you’re interested in. So, doing research goes something like: search for reviews on product A, click through multiple ones and hope that products B, C, or D are mentioned as comparisons, search for reviews on product B, etc. Tedious, inefficient, and something that you wouldn’t expect to be necessary.
Tomorrow I get to venture back down into the land of HP to, among other things, hook up a printer for one of my friend’s grandmother. I also need to make sure that I have her computer set up so that I can control/fix it remotely. Never underestimate the power of the remote desktop session, especially when most issues are fairly easy fixes that have nothing to do with the hardware.
Personal - Dallas
The game industry seems to suffer from quite a bit of leakage concerning new products, and everything that was pretty much a given for being announced at E3 this year was in fact talked about. Of course, there were a couple new things to salivate over. Unsurprisingly, the new Mario and Metroid games for the Wii are probably the most interesting to me (sorry, Microsoft), but interesting things are happening on all three console fronts within the next year. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to get around to playing console games again, but as I look at my self, the game that calls out the most to me is Mario Kart Wii. Actually, I’m probably going to end up playing that in the immediate future now that I’ve started to think about it.
All across the industry, games are moving more and more to a downloadable format. Part of me has issues with this since there’s an inherent “safety” in owning the physical disc, but downloadable titles offer the nice benefits of never being out of stock and instant gratification, especially for the smaller, cheaper games. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the next generation of consoles went almost exclusively to the downloadable method, especially with videos and movies becoming a part of the stores also.
Personal - Dallas
As if guided by some higher power, I began doing work last night on all of the CD wallets only to realize that I wasn’t really sure where I was heading with the color coding idea I originally had in mind. Initially I bought three colors of cases: black for desktops, green for laptops, and red for the recovery kits. Well, when I went back to Fry’s last week to get Andrew a hard drive, I picked up an additional green one to use to my new laptop since I believe I recalled not buying one for it in my initial purchase and needing to make a mental note to get it. When I started looking at everything, though, I now have an extra green one that I can’t associate with a computer. The three black ones are easy (my desktop, the HTPC downstairs, and our server), and one of the greens is my old laptop which my mom now uses, but I can’t figure out what computer I bought a second green case for originally. Granted, I’ll probably be getting a netbook soon so I can just use the case for that (in theory, netbooks don’t even come with CD drives though so all the software might just be download based), but apparently I need to take better notes since I can’t remember what I did or was thinking on a project like this.
Tomorrow I don’t have much planned, so that probably means that I should work on some more of the baseball videos. Aside from that, I’ll probably do the usual: TV, WoW, and enjoy my summer. Those aren’t all mutually exclusive; I could theoretically be doing all three at the same time, but with our house’s configuration, playing on my computer and watching TV simultaneously isn’t really a feasible idea unless I’m watching TV on my computer. In that case, all bets are off.
Personal - Dallas