LadyCrimson

There Will Be Blood: Ahhh....a strange movie. On the one hand, half the movie seems to about literally watching a bunch of dirty men drilling for oil. Watch the drill go up and down, up and down .... on the other hand, there were the great performances of Day Lewis and the guy playing the young preacher. But some supporting characters came and went with nary a word, and it felt disjointed in places. Basically a very slow character study and nothing more. However, the final line in the movie (from Lewis) had me rolling on the floor. It was perfect. No Country For Old Men: The first hour and 20 minutes or so, I was thinking "Fantastic! Brilliant! Cohen brothers strike again!" The last 40 minutes started a slow slide down to strangely uninteresting, and again, felt kinda disjointed and off-kilter, compared to the first half/first 3/4. So mixed feelings. But that first half was so awesome, I can forgive the somewhat disappointing 2nd part.

Fixed?

1. -- the only decent Aliens type smilie I've ever found 2. -- it's just cute 3. -- extra happy in a non-w00t way 4. -- for the exercise enthusiasts I've always loved that one too - so I suggest it too.

I use HyperCam when I want just a bitty clip of some net video. It's a desktop-recorder - I define/outline which pixel area of the desktop to record (just the YouTube window vs. the whole browser page/desktop, say) and let it do it's thing. If you use the right settings, it comes out looking just about as good as it does viewing it in the YouTube window. The program isn't really designed for this purpose, and anything longer than a minute or so and it starts to eat up too much memory etc. (on my computer anyway) and traditional methods of gaining the entire video would be better, anyway. But it saves your short recording as a basic avi instead of whatever format the video on the site is, which is easily editable/convertible in most any editor I've ever tried. Downside is you have to buy it if you don't want the watermark logo, ala Fraps. ...disclaimer: that's what I do if I want a tiny very specific fragment in my own internet or home videos, but such is probably different than your presentation application (?), so I'm not actually sure if it'd work/is applicable, in terms of the format converting stuff and all...

I walked to the nearby gas station to buy beef jerky today. Hey, I walked very fast. More seriously - I've been riding the exercise bike an hour a day, 30 min. twice a day, since so far it's the only thing that keeps the weird spongy-weak-knee thing from being a constant pain. It's odd how walking or weights doesn't help that problem at all. Doing the light weights/exercises for the back/upper body strength, hand exercises for the finger/wrist joints. Since I got "serious" about doing all of that consistently, it's improved my physical health/pain/abilities a lot, after so many back/knee/joint issues blah blah. I've lost a few pounds I guess, but since I haven't really altered calorie intake, that's about it. Losing that 15 or so pounds that I constantly struggle up and down with is not my specific goal anyway...the joint mobility/flexibility stuff is. Bottom line: After six months, I'm finally starting to feel like my joints/tendons/spine aren't 200 years old. Which is a good thing. :D

Today: Drove to our old house to check mail (which, we were told, was piling up) only to find...there was none. Wasted trip. At least it shouldn't have to be repeated, since the forwarding is in effect now. A couple days ago: So many birds here, I bought bird seed and food/water dishes and set it in the middle of the lawn. Then I spent half the afternoon sitting behind our blinds, taking pictures of the birds, and the squirrels who came to eat all the sunflower seeds out of the birdseed mix. That was fun.

Since all these games on my list are essentially equal to my heart, my list order is based on general number of hours spent playing. If I actually looked at all my game boxes, I might alter the list a bit, but eh...off the top of my head... Dungeon Keeper 1 --- (still play semi-regularly) Caesar 3 --- (still play semi-regularly) Diablo 1/2 --- (once in a very great while) Baldurs Gate 1 --- (not in years) Might & Magic 7 --- (not in years) Kotor2 --- (still installed, waiting for that mod...) Overlord --- (not in a while, still need to get expansion) Lords of the Realm II --- (not for a few years) Majesty --- (not for a couple years) Honorable mentions: Stronghold 1 --- (now and then) Tombraider 1 --- (not in several years) Summoner --- (once in a great while) Snake Rattle N Roll --- (once in a great great great while, since we still have the NES)

I used to buy that magazine/still have some in storage. I miss the days when magazines were awesome. They just keep getting smaller and thinner and less awesome ... on-line mags just aren't the same.

I've been surprised how close we can sit to the 50" and still think it looks fine, actually. Although I'm not sure what our eyeballs might actually think ... And today I did some yard work and bird-photographing.

I really like Panasonic plasmas, but the Samsungs we looked at seemed fairly decent too. All I can say is that once we became used to the 50", which didn't take long, we started thinking "glad we didn't buy the 42"." So I'm gonna have to vote for the 50" over the 42" if you have the space and the money. Especially if you're really into watching DVD movies/shows or HD programming etc. ... or when programs wants to put black bars both on the sides and on the top/bottom. Argh. The one advantage of 42" is that it's going to be a little more tolerant of poorer image quality (old video tape collections, poor TV signals etc) in terms of you being able to watch such from a closer distance without going "UGH".

Ohhhh, that nook. Well, it's a smallish house, and a lot of the older houses like this one don't have fireplaces that are flush with the wall - not uncommon. The other side of the fireplace is in the garage, which I also think is a bit odd. The living area is an open front/living/dining area in the shape of a stubby, backwards L, so the front door opens right into the living room, by that big window, if that makes sense. Some of the houses we looked at were really crazy floor plan wise, so I feel your pain. But the lot has room to expand so we might change things around later. My bitterness comes from how even small houses like this one cost $550K-$700K....

Don't like those pollutin' fireplaces eh? We don't use them very often, but once in a while it's nice. Tho now that we have wall heaters we can stand in front of, we'll probably use the fireplace even less often. I love gas wall heaters...they don't make me sneeze.

The area you're supposed to use as a living room is so much smaller, it was hard to find a spot for the cat's sleeping basket that he liked. We finally found a spot, but in the winter, he's gonna have to move. :D

Sweeny Todd. Interesting. Not as fantastic as I was hoping/expecting, but it was typical Burton, being a little more camp than horror/drama, so I enjoyed it overall. Alan Rickman in those funny pants and singing was worth the price of rental alone, imo. :D And that "pretty women" song is one that gets stuck in your head.

Ideally, I'd like to be an "audiophile" but when I see the probable cost my lips pucker up in distaste and suddenly I decide I'm not very demanding, after all.

Finished moving. Not finished with all the little stuff that goes along with moving. I hope we don't have to move again for at least six years. Nice thing: our cable internet is much faster up here, since we can get a Comcast business account w/absolute static IP's, which we couldn't down where we were before. We had to switch to a different firewall unit cause the old one was too slow and limited the incoming speed. Not-so-nice-thing: I'd forgotten how much more drivers are "crazy and rude" up here, on average. I'm sure it won't take me long to join in as being one of them.

I use a pair of Sony headphones that I think I paid about $75 for. They're nothing super-special, but sound pretty good for both music and games. They are a little light on the bass, tho. But I'm really into high quality bass and tend to think all headphones in the $50-$125 range are generally light/wimpy in that area. They're a lot better than little earbuds, absolutely, but they certainly don't "boom" imo - the cones just aren't up to it. I'm happy with headphones that don't turn my ears to mush on the high frequencies, which I'm extremely sensitive to. I think any "decent" quality/brand headphones in the $80-$150 price range will serve you more than adequately, unless you're a very demanding audiophile. I didn't even know they had made "surround" headphones. That sounds odd...

Interesting. I guess I don't embarrass easily or care about being embarrassed, very often, so I don't see the humor.

Jason and the Argonauts & The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes I love the Turner Classic Movie channel.

The weekend was full of patching small holes in drywall and painting. And a cooler full of soda and beer. We know how to have a good time.

Yes, Okona has a similar characterization as Atton. And Han Solo. I wish my Star Trek Companion book wasn't packed away. I thought it was confirmed in there that the writers/producers/whatever definitely had Solo in mind when they created him. But I'm not 100% sure - my memory isn't always, uh, reliable.

Hehe The point being - it's boring to listen to to unless you're somehow "in" on the joke.

Another old film: To Die For, w/Nicole Kidman. I'd forgotten how enjoyable the movie is to watch. It's not a belly-laugh film, but a good piece of satirizing America's unending fascination with crime in media. Also rented I Am Legend. Great special effects and atmosphere - loved seeing the overgrown/untended NY - but mostly a big snore. Maybe I was expecting more action than the movie actually gives you and should watch it again with less expectations in that area. Oh...that one 'zombie' male they kept showing ... every time he opened his mouth to do a CGI zombie scream, all I could think about was the mummy's water/sand/dust cloud open-mouthed faces in The Mummy Returns. Heh.

Cable on-demand has some of the British version, and I tried to watch it. I still didn't like it. It's just not funny ... I guess the humor is far too subtle for me and is too much like watching people in a real office occasionally mutter to each other - it puts me to sleep. Hubby doesn't like it either. I guess we're not with it.