Author: kelson

Electronica

I’ve finally done it. After resisting for years, I’ve bought an iPod.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Our music collection is on alenxa’s computer, which is old enough that its USB port is USB 1.1. This hasn’t been a problem until now, since she syncs her iPod with Firewire. Little did I know that the latest generation of iPod only supports USB. I charged it this afternoon, and started the initial sync this evening. So far it’s about 1/3 through.

At least future syncs won’t be so bad.

In other news, I’ve found myself in the middle of an online firestorm twice this week. Safari for Windows and a relaunch of the Flash comic book.

Quick bits

Finished The Bard’s Tale this weekend. [Review moved to website.]

Also watched This Film is Not Yet Rated, which alternates between an expose of just how arbitrary the ratings are, and an attempt to determine just who actually sits on the ratings board, since their identities are kept secret. I think I lost faith in the ratings system in high school, when The Joy Luck Club (which we’d read for school) came out with an R rating.

Visited alenxa’s family on Sunday for her sister’s birthday.

Finally packed up the old camera to send it in for repair so we can have two cameras at Comic Con this year. We kept trading off who had the camera last year based on who was going to which panel, and kept running into “If I’d only had the camera!” moments. There’s only so much you can do with a fuzzy, fixed-focus, zoomless VGA-resolution cell phone camera.

Pirates of the Coffee Bean

Dread Pirate KatieWent out to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End on Friday. alenxa wore her pirate costume again (previous versions at last year’s Pirates and, in a more appropriate setting, on the deck of the H.M.S. Surprise). We got to the Irvine Spectrum around 6:15, and ended up about 30 feet from the front of the line for the 8:30 showing. We had pizza from the food court, and later chocolate chip cookies from Donna B’s.

Since some moron genius decided to chop the courtyard in front of the movie theater in half and put in more shops (have they filled the shops in the last expansion, yet?), the theater has had to get a little creative in finding room for lines. Ours started between California Pizza Kitchen and P.F. Chang’s. Being off in the corner, we only got to see the pirates in our own line.

Anyway, the movie was a lot of fun. My main objection was that it got hard to keep track of all the double-, triple-, and quadruple-crosses. Despite what the reviewer for the L.A. Times thinks, it doesn’t require intimate knowledge of the previous films. All you have to know are who the major players are, and how they stand in relation to each other. You can do that by seeing the other films once while sober.

It let out around 11:30, and we went looking for a place that was still open to get something to drink. We stopped at Coffee Bean, where we discovered all the employees were dressed up as pirates. The guy at the counter was impressed with Katie’s costume, saying she was the first serious pirate they’d had all night (I guess they all stayed closer to the theater?) and gave us our drinks for free.

The rest of the weekend

Weekend Antics

Friday: Finally watched The Legend of Zorro (the second one with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones). Much better than I expected, even if they did play fast and loose with history. Odd moment when alenxa recognized one of the actors as Ben from Lost.

Saturday: Mostly trying to catch up on my website. (Lots of new stuff in the last couple of weeks.) Ran some errands. Dropped by the local comic store for Free Comic Book Day & picked up several books, including a BSG book which is supposed to be a prequel, but which I don’t dare read until we’ve gotten a bit farther along in watching the show. Also felt I ought to buy something, and not just grab the free stuff, so I picked up (and read) a JLA book I’d been meaning to read, Syndicate Rules. It’s a sequel to both JLA: Earth-2 (in which the Justice League meets their mirror-universe counterparts, the Crime Syndicate of Amerika) and JLA/Avengers, which I finally read a few weeks ago after picking the series up at Wizard World LA. Much better than I’d been led to expect by some of the reviews.

Sunday: Went out to see Hot Fuzz, figuring Spider-Man 3 was guaranteed to still be in theaters next week. Great fun. Keep your eyes open: Once he arrives in Sanford, no detail is wasted. I liked Shaun of the Dead better, but I think that’s largely because the genre conventions being spoofed were more straight-forward: Zombies vs. a combination cop-buddy/horror/action film.

It was amazingly clear out, since it was the first day of Santa Ana winds (though they died down by midday). I seriously considered driving up into the hills to find a nice viewpoint, but after the movie, a late lunch, and some errands, it was running late enough that we just went home.

TV Thoughts

Heroes: Excellent!

Veronica Mars: The rumors about Veronica and Piz just didn’t make sense. Then I saw the first 30 seconds of the episode, and it suddenly made perfect sense. Can you say rebound?

Lost: Locke did exactly what Ben wanted him to. The others are big on the concept of “good people.” If he’d killed his father himself, he wouldn’t have qualified to join. Getting Sawyer to do it proves that he’s resourceful and manipulative enough to get “bad people” to do the dirty work for him — just like Ben manipulated him into blowing up the sub.

So, how long did it take to pull the trigger on Locke’s dad, the con artist, being the original Sawyer? 1 year? 1½?

Also, I’m operating under the assumption that the wreckage was either planted or simulated. I never liked the “they’re all dead and in purgatory” explanation, and the show’s producers have denied it several times. If they’ve reversed course on this, I probably won’t be watching Season 4 (assuming there is one).

Weekend and Wayzgoose

Friday: rain, at last! Clouds were clear in the west just before sunset, producing a really impressive red rainbow towering in the east. Did some work on my Superman-Flash Races page, restructuring it to make it a bit more accessible to the sudden influx of visitors more familiar with Lost than the Flash.

Saturday: Went to Wayzgoose at UCI. Spent some time at the CHP booth catching up with Susan, katyakoshka & Dave, wayens and others. Missed sekl, non_seqvitvr & company, though. Wandered around the School of the Arts on the way out, getting a sense of what had changed. The last few years I’ve mostly seen it at night, on the way to or from plays. Remembered I had a camera, & took some shots of the campus, but wished I’d taken some pictures back at the CHP booth. Also wished I’d taken more pictures back in college. At the moment, I can think of one roll taken my senior year, plus stuff from trips — Ren Faire, camping, etc. But not much in the way of random pictures of friends.

Stopped at the market on the way home and ended up with pizza ingredients. alenxa made pizza, and we watched the Heroes marathon.

Incidentally, this weekend confirms that Saturday evening, if you happen to be home and have to share a laundry room with other tenants, is an excellent time to do laundry. There’s no competition.

Sunday: Mostly random stuff. Errands. Watched the first few episodes of Drive, with Nathan Fillion and some other Jossverse alumni (Tim Minnear’s a co-creator, and Amy Acker shows up from time to time). More interesting than it sounded from the description. Will probably watch the new episode tonight (fortunately, it’s on before Heroes, not during). Also spent way too much time reading Lostpedia.

Current Location: work

Off-by-one error

Since I came into work on Sunday afternoon, I’ve been feeling one day off all week. Monday felt like Tuesday, Tuesday felt like Wednesday, and Wednesday felt like Thursday.

Today I’ve evidently internalized three days’ worth of “No, it’s a day earlier than that!” because I keep thinking it’s Wednesday.

Drove out to Foothill Ranch yesterday on my lunch hour just to explore a bit and get pictures of the nearby hills where you can actually see what color they are. It’s been hazy enough that from my usual vantage points, they look faded grayish yellow-brown, instead of yellow-brown. (Though by this time of year they should look green. Yay drought.)

In other news, earlier this week I watched someone zip around a truck to pass it on the one-lane uphill cloverleaf section of the Ramp of Doom. Oddly enough, car and truck made it through unscathed.

Off to UCI tonight with alenxa to see The Lark, a play about Joan of Arc by the author of Becket.

In other other news, today’s Forgotten English phrase is “crotch-trolling.” No, it doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Current Location: work

Vacation: Week 1

Long story short, alenxa needed to use up some vacation time, fast, so we ended up taking two weeks at the end of March.  Unfortunately, we didn’t realize until later that our tickets for Wicked were smack in the middle (tonight, to be precise), which meant no two-week trip because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to exchange the tickets.

We’ll be going to Las Vegas next week.  This week was mostly hanging around, not having to go to work.

Saturday: Helped andrea_wot move into her new apartment.  Later drank my annual Murphy’s Stout in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

Sunday: I went to Wizard World LA.  My con report got linked on The Beat.

Monday-Wednesday: Expeditions to Halloween Club (Katie’s planning a new costume for Comic-Con) and Fry’s (new video card).  Hooked up the spare monitor my brother gave us when he moved to Florida.  Discovered our current switch setup couldn’t handle more than 1024×768 without serious ghosting.  Back to Fry’s for a new switch. Watched several more episodes of Battlestar Galactica season one.  Invented a drink: 1 shot mango rum, splash of orange liqueur, fill the rest of the way with 1 part pineapple juice, 1 part cream soda, leaving room for a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

5 Minute Wait!Thursday: Disneyland — for the first time in maybe 5 years.  There are definite advantages to visiting in the off-season, during a weekday… like the 5-minute wait for Pirates of the Caribbean.  Thankfully, the changes to align it with the movies were minimally invasive, and the last view of Jack Sparrow demonstrates some seriously impressive motion capture.  Some other nice updates to Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise.  The new “wildest ride in the wilderness!” recording at Big Thunder Mountain, however, is a travesty.  Splash Mountain and the train were closed.  They seem to be piratifying Tom Sawyer’s island.  Pirates, Indy and Big Thunder kept breaking down, but we still managed to hit all three (some of them twice).  It was odd to see fruit carts all over the place.  It’s actually possible to eat mostly healthy food at Disneyland now.  Finished off the day with dinner at the Blue Bayou.

Friday: Took the car in in preparation for the road trip.  Then spent the rest of the day hanging out at home.  I mostly worked on my website, while Katie mostly tried out new games.

Now I’m looking at the pre-trip to-do list, trying to figure out how I’m going to get everything done in the next two days and go up to LA tonight and get together with friends tomorrow.  (And yes, “post to LiveJournal” is on the list.  One item to cross off!)

Leading up to Sunday

Spent Thursday and Friday at home, sick. What started as a “mild cold” ramped up to a more moderate cold-like thing, which refused to disappear after 2.5 weeks. So, stayed home, went to doctor, got prescribed stuff. Spent two days alternately sleeping and lying on the couch reading, chugging water and juice (I went through two bottles of Trader Joe’s pineapple juice in two days), checking my temperature and taking tons of medication. Since I gave up my lunch hour to resolve the near-disaster on Wednesday, that means I still haven’t taken care of the errands I was planning to do in the middle of the week.

Half the office has been out over the last week or so, probably with the same thing. When I emailed in sick on Friday, my boss wrote back a note along the lines of, “you should hear the people who *did* come in!”

Meanwhile, UCI Drama’s doing a production of Sunday in the Park With George, one of my favorite plays. Reprise Theater also did a production last month, and I considered going to both… until I found out the cheap seats at Reprise were $70, and I could get tickets to UCI’s production for $14. So back in January, I bought tickets for Saturday night.

Amazingly enough, I managed to keep the coughing under control until we walked out of the theater after the show. (Which was quite good, though they made some really odd choices for “Putting it Together.” Everyone was dressed in some costume from an iconic 80s movie, and instead of propping up cardboard stand-ups of himself in all the different conversations, George removes an article of clothing and leaves it with each one. And it was kind of unnerving that they managed to cast leads with similar vocal qualities to Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. They had distinct voices, but especially in Act 2, as Marie, the actress could have been channeling her.)

OK, I’ve finished my tea. Time for bed.

Current Music: Putting It Together (in head)