The Rovia picnic was fun today… I even fixed a few bugs before I left work for the picnic, which made today productive and non-productive… Came back home around 5-6pm and took a nap. Went over Adam/Rory/Francis’ for a little soiree but I was feeling a little green so I came back.
The past few days I have found myself getting back into some old-school “industrial” music I hadn’t really let see the light of late. I think Einsturzende Neubaten or Throbbing Gristle might be a little bit much to go to bed with, so I popped in the Blackbox set… Perhaps I will just hang out and listen to music tomorrow…
I just noticed that my copies of " Armed Audio Warfare" and " Storm the Studio" are missing… I think they might have gotten swiped in Rochester though, cuz I don’t remember having them for quite some time… Perhaps I will try and replace them tomorrow (but I think they might be getting hard to find…)
I got the package that phyber mentioned sending to me yesterday. It was a cool Be polo shirt, but not the typical one. This shirt must have been designed for some trade show that came after the logo change. It is beige-ish, with the newer Be logo on the left breast with the word “media” under it in blue. It is just the logo, the word “Be” is not present….
I think it would be a good option if you could specify (within the TiVo) to call a 1-900 number to bill the \$9.95 a month service charge for their directory services to your phone bill, as opposed to doing it on their web page or by telephone… You only have to go to their webpage/call them once, but it seems that you could do it all within the interface of the TiVo as opposed to making the user use another device to make the TiVo work right.
Hanging out in the apartment just relaxing Friday night, watching the DVD of Nova’s documentary " Mind of a Serial Killer". I rented it on a lark, and 3 of the first 5 words of the show were “Rochester, NY”. It focused on Arthur Shawcross, who killed many prostitutes in Rochester in the early 90s.
Did laundry Saturday morning, and finally got fully caught up in that respect.
Jared arrived Saturday afternoon and we headed out to Harvard Square and hung out there for awhile. We ate lunch at the glorious Mr. Bartley’s.
Hung out at Molly, Matt, and Rene’s place on Saturday night and watched Pecker and realized that Pecker’s sister Tina was a Goonie.
Talked with Jared until the big room started turning blue, which was an indicator that it was time to sleep. :)
Went to the mall with Jared on Sunday and finally convinced myself to purchase a TiVo.
Connected the TiVo and set it on its way (it takes a few hours to initially setup). While it was doing its thing Jared and I were too lazy to go and do anything, so we just sat around and talked… He left around 9:30pm
Talked to chris for a few hours, and afterwards hit the hay.
Woke up this morning, got myself a gun…. er, took a shower. I bumped into my desk lamp (one of those halogen on a big arm jobbies) and the little plug that goes into the base broke off, so I guess I need to buy another lamp
And now I am here at work waiting for our staff meeting. I haven’t gotten to play with my TiVo much yet, but I am already pretty familiar with it. One oddity was that it was shipped with v1.3 of the TiVo software. That didn’t surprise me much, but I figured that it would upgrade itself on it’s initial setup dial in. It didn’t, so I figured that I would just stick with 1.3 until the next nightly dial in grabbed v2.0. Using v1.3, I realized how shitty that version of the software really was… The menus were laggy, the sound effects were crackly when the menus lagged…. I would have been really disappointed if I had to stick with that software. It annoyed me so much I forced a dial in, and then restarted it so it would use the new software. Everything seems cool now, but since it was in upgrade mode it prevented me from playing much. Another nuisance with it not upgrading itself on the initial dial in is that it grabbed and built the program database during its initial call, but they must have changed the DB format for the new version of the software, so after the upgrade it took a ton of time to import the data… Bastards. :)
Final Fantasy would have been better if I had brought my mp3 player with me and just watched it without bothering myself with the banal dialogue, the terrible soundtrack, and the absolutely horrific audio mix. It wasn’t a terrible movie, and it was a gigantic leap forward in realistic character animation, but the plot was “generic sci-fi movie” or a bit more specifically “generic anime movie”.
The audio mix… What can I say? It always seemed as if the various voice actors were licking the microphones, and there was absolutely no spatial depth to the audio, whether a character was close or far, it always sounded the same.
The animation was much, much better than I expected, but it was still slightly over-hyped…. But I was very surprised at the accuracy of movement, the realistic look of the characters (the hair was amazing), and the skin movement was impressive. The eyes were never proper, and the characters blinked way too much. The lipsynching was impressive at times, and completely wrong at others…
Anyway, it was neat to watch, but impossible to actually enjoy.
I am working on the distributed load-test client for work, which is a lot of fun. We have been talking about it for awhile now and we finally just said “screw it” and are hacking it out quickly with improvements to come later.
Jon Whitney introduced me to the Midwest Grill, otherwise known as the “Parade of Meat”. What a wonderful place, a simple \$19 gets you a never ending cavalcade of various meat products brought to your table on swords, from which you choose what you would like and they shave off a bit for you… We tried to catch Memento at the Kendall Cinema after food, but we just missed the show.
This CD is awesome, and on top of that, it has me dying to see some of these movies again. I haven’t really been watching many horror (other than the Brattle’s recent Italian Horror Series) movies of late (probably because I saw too many of them in my youth).
It looks like I am going with friends to see Final Fantasy this evening after all. I am the odd man out, since I seem to be the only geek on the planet who isn’t all hot and bothered by this film. Perhaps it is because I never got into the video games, but I think the problem is deeper.. See, there was a ton of hype, clips, and stills released during the production of this film that made the film look very photo realistic, especially in the character animation. Unfortunately, all of the trailer material I have seen has looked firmly cartoonish.. We will see I guess, but if the animation doesn’t blow me over, I don’t expect much from a film made by a video game company.
I went over to Newbury Comics over lunch to score the new Fantômas album “The Director’s Cut”, which is a collection of Horror Soundtrack covers which was released today. So far, it is freaking amazing… What a tight group of musicians. Mike Patton’s voice has always been top notch, but with Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle) on Bass, Buzzo (Melvins) on Guitar, and Dave Lombardo (Slayer) on Drums, wow… I really can’t say enough…
Update: I can’t believe I forgot to mention that I also picked up the newly released DVD of Wayne’s World… I wanted to pick up the new Die Hard Collection, but they didn’t have it at Newbury…