After letting it sit on my shelf for several months after purchasing it, I have finally gotten into the new Neal Stephenson book Quicksilver. It took me awhile to build up the nerve to really start it… I guess I needed to be ready to commit to the ~950 pages, as well as committing to historical fiction, something which I haven’t had much experience with. But I am about 150 pages into now and enjoying it thoroughly. I think the first 20 pages, which I read between the vast period between buying the book and before this past Monday, were a bit of an uphill climb, but I am up to speed now and each day I look forward to reading a bit more.
My family tells me I began reading at 3 years old, which I gather is pretty early. I have never, ever had trouble reading, but I have never been able to read terribly fast. But for this book, I feel like I have been reading it at a pretty fast clip, at least compared to my usual. Hopefully I am finally training my brain to read faster… I know I cranked through the second half of The Diamond Age (I listened to the first half in Audio Book format). And when I read Pattern Recognition I tore through it pretty fast. I feel like I am ramping up, so hopefully soon I won’t feel like an idiot when my friends read a book in a day that would take me a week or more to read.
That said, I’m not sure what my rush is… I guess to a degree I enjoy reading a book at whatever pace I happen to read it at. Sometimes I am just so into a book that I tear through it obsessively, other times I still enjoy a book but only read so many pages each night…
Last night and I took a ride to GameStop over in Mt. Olive to see what’s new there. While I was there I figured I would see what they would offer for Zelda and Mario, the two games I recently conquered. They were willing to give me \$15 and \$7 respectively, which seemed a tad low given they were selling the games used for \$40 and \$25. I called bullshit on that play and put the games up on eBay when I got home. I don’t have a whole lot of experience selling stuff on eBay, but I did it once before and had no trouble, so what the heck. I put Mario up for bidding starting at \$20 with a “buy it now” price of \$25, and I put Zelda up for bidding starting at \$30 with a “buy it now” price of \$35.
When I woke up this morning, I was informed that Mario was already sold! Since I had checked the “require immediate payment for Buy it Now transactions” box, I also had an email from PayPal that the buyer had wired me the cash. So I drove over to the post office today and got it in the mail (just before the snow started to get really heavy). Hopefully he will enjoy it as much as I did (as well as get as much hate over that Yoshi level as I did).
The first phase of our renovations, the Master Bathroom, was finished today. If you don’t know/remember what it looked like before, a quick comparing both sets of pictures should make it pretty evident why the renovations were necessary. (I only took pictures of what they finished today. Go back a few days in the gallery to see the ceiling, shower, etc.
In keeping with my current “beat a bunch of games I should have finished a long time ago” theme, tonight I finished “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker”. I started the game the day it came out, and played it for awhile until I got distracted by something, then put it down for months. I picked it back up a week or so ago when I finished “Super Mario Sunshine”, and played it every day that Corinna wasn’t here.. :)
The game was loads of fun, but the ending was god-awful. I mean, it made no sense whatsoever, I was kinda following the plot of the game up until the end, and then all of the sudden shit just became incoherent. Those crazy Nipponese.
I think I am all caught up on games now. Oh, no. I just remembered that I never finished “Metroid Prime”. I dunno about that one, though. I was cranking through that one, really enjoying it, and at some point I just got bored with it and disinterested with finishing it. That wasn’t my usual “distraction” problem, I really just lost interest. I will pick it up again, though, and we will see if it can hold me.
I should see what EB will give me for Mario and Zelda, now that I have finished them. It might be nice to put them towards a new game, but if they are just going to give me peanuts I won’t bother.
Awhile back, pointed me at Red vs. Blue, and I really enjoyed what I saw so I sent them some money so they could keep up the good work. Well, after they finished the season they decided to create a DVD of it before starting on season two. And even better, they sent copies of the DVD to people who donated above a certain threshhold… So I got my DVD in the mail today, and it rocks. It is hard to believe that the season adds up to almost 1 hour and 20 minutes! The production quality on the DVD is surprisingly good, and includes commentary, outtakes, and apparently easter eggs.
Anyway, check out the site and some of the videos, and if you like what you see send them some money or order the DVD.
Just got back from getting my hair cut over at “A Cut Above”. I’m sure that is jealous. :)
It was snowing this morning, coming down pretty good for awhile and it started to stick to the streets. If it kept up it probably would have caused some accumulation, even on the roads. I love snow…
So after hearing reports from friends that iTunes 4 is better at handling large numbers of files, I decided to drag my MP3 share (mounted via SMB from my file server) onto it’s window and let it index all my songs (but I’m still not interested in letting it manage the files and directory format for me). It took about 45 minutes to index 13684 songs, weighing in at 66.02GB, which according to iTunes is 40.8 days of music. iTunes takes a few seconds to start up, nothing unbearable given the hugeness of my music archive.. Searches are surprisingly fast and scrolling the index is “fast enough”. But what is unbelievably awful is adding to the archive. If I drag a single new album onto “Library” to add it to iTunes’ database it takes upwards of 10 seconds PER SONG. I guess I’d rather the pinch-point be on database insertion, but it still seems ridiculously slow… The one nice thing about having all this stuff in iTunes, though, is that it makes it easy for me to find missing/incomplete id3 tags in my collection. It is going to take me awhile to fix the thousands of incomplete tags, but at least I know where to start now.
As far as the features of iTunes that everyone raves about, namely smart playlists and the like, I am not sold.. But perhaps over time this will change…. I wish more organization was available for playlists (folders, etc). I have the same gripe with iPhoto, I have tons of folders to organize my photos, but I wish I could organize the folders into some kind of logical hierarchy.
I am still not interested in having an application manage my music for me. But it is nice to know that iTunes 4 performs a bit better than it’s predecessors. And as long as I don’t let iTunes manage my actual music files but instead catalog them it seems a bit less annoying to me.
Lots of catching up to do, I guess… Corinna arrived Wednesday night, after a surprisingly “short” bus trip. We expected the holiday traffic to slow her trip considerably, but that demon never manifested. She arrived very early, and we got back to Hopatcong before my father had even gone to bed! I had to do some turkey/brine preparations when we first got back, but that took only about an hour. I put the turkey in the bucket around 11:30pm, and we went to bed soon after. Around 4am I woke up to flip the turkey, I had the turkey flipped up in the air, and the bastard (bitch) slipped out of my hands and into the brine, sending a mushroom cloud of toxic turkey juice onto me, the dishes, the counter, and just about everything else. I cleaned off the counter with bleach, moved all the (formerly) clean dishes into the sink, and went back to bed, aggravated.
I got my 9am wake up call from the ‘rents and strutted out to see what was going on. Dad and I got to work on the turkey, pulling it from the brine, rinsing and drying it, and putting it on the rack. The oven was ready to go, the probe thermometer placed, and the turkey was rubbed down with butter (not canola – we were out). Thanks to the magic of convection, the 22.5lb turkey was ready 3 hours later. After a 30 minute resting I got to work carving the turkey.
It was a very big Thanksgiving celebration this year. In addition to my immediate family and Corinna, we hosted Grammy & Grampy, Uncle Jeff and two of his three children, Chris and Andy. The spread was fantastic, it was really a whole-family effort. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food once again, and we received many compliments on the turkey. The new oven worked like a freaking champ, it’s so nice to not have to deal with ancient equipment. I can’t wait until the kitchen is actually renovated!
Friday night “The Gang” finally went to see The Matrix Revolutions. I had expected a horrible movie, but what I ended up with was about as good as the second movie: Some bad spots, but overall enjoyable. It was nice to see the trilogy end, but I think Corinna was right when she stated that the second and third movie should have been one awesome sequel. Perhaps it is time for someone to “Phantom Edit” them. Regardless of all that, this movie just reinforced my impulse to ignore other people’s opinions of movies. People (both critics and friends) made this film out to be a crime against nature, when instead it was a flawed but enjoyable movie. All-in-all, though, neither of the sequels approach the first in terms of quality or “specialness”.
On Saturday, Corinna, Chuck, and I rented Poolhall Junkies, which was a fun movie. Christopher Walken made it though, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it without him.
Sunday I took Corinna to the PATH station for her return to Boston, which sucked. It was good having her here for the holiday, though! After I dropped her off I returned home and cleaned a bunch of projects off my computer that were all 90% done. One of them was finish making the latest World Poker Tour DVD. I had made it before Corinna arrived, but I noticed a problem with the media that Adam sent me. It turns out that the Optodisc 4X DVD-R media he bought is pretty damn unreliable at anything above 1x, which sucks but at least it isn’t completely toast. It’s going to take awhile to burn discs now, especially since I don’t feel comfortable skipping the post-burn verification now that I don’t trust the media. I ended up coastering about 4-5 discs yesterday trying to track down the problem and find a working solution.
You know your family is a little different when you wake up, go to the kitchen for a drink, and see this book sitting on the dining room table.
Turkey Day is approaching, and I just put the turkey in the tub (inside a bucket) for some thawage. Hopefully by around midnight tonight it will be ready to take the plunge into the brine. I am picking up Corinna tonight from Hoboken, and she will be staying thru Sunday, which rocks. She’s going to have to endure meeting the rest of my family tomorrow, though, so hopefully she won’t get scared away. :)
The boys grouted the wall tile today as well as “floated” the floor (levelling it to accept the floor tile on Friday). Things are looking good (pictures in the usual place).
Go download some free, legit music: “Two Zombies Later” is a pretty cool collection of music released by members of the Exotica Mailing List. It has apparently been published under the Creative Commons license, but I don’t see any licensing information listed on any of the pages related to the album. Regardless, what I’ve listened to so far has been groovy, and you should totally check it out.
I just uploaded a few new pictures to the Master Bath Renovation Gallery. I’ve been updating it every couple of days since the project started. I originally was updating it every day, but when they got to spackling/sanding you couldn’t really see much progress from one day to the next until they started painting, and then again, photos of each coat of paint looked pretty much the same as the prior day’s photos.