Posts (page 2)

I never really understood when I heard people worrying that HDTV was going to show them images that were too vivid and real for comfort. That was before I saw a 100 meter tall pile of bat guano crawling with millions of cockroaches courtesy of the BBC's incredible (and usually beautiful) series, Planet Earth.

Last fall when we were beta testing the Xbox Live Video Marketplace, I was had to force myself to download and watch lots of television shows. This can be much more painful than it sounds. There weren't a lot of shows available early on, so odds were pretty good that you'd end up watching something you'd seen before or flat out did not like. If you ever want to have a bad time, spend a couple of hours downloading and watching shows that you hate. Keep yourself honest by scanning for technical problems with the video.

Luckily for me, at some point in the process we picked up Babylon 5, which I'd never seen before. I'm not sure why I didn't watch this show when it was on originally, but I really liked it. I liked it enough that when the show dissapeared from the beta servers, I ordered the whole series on DVD from Amazon.

I need to pause for a moment here to talk about Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime is not really an instant gratification service like the late and much missed Kozmo.com. It's just this simple deal where you pay them $80 a year in exchange for "free" two-day shipping. The "two days" don't include weekends, so for any popular product for most of the week you will get it much faster by going to the store whenever it seems convenient to do so. There's really no rational reason why this program should transform you into an impulse consumption-droid. But it will. Do not sign up.

So I'm about halfway through the series, and it's really great. There are only two problems. First off, everyone else who's going to watch this show already did so a decade ago. No one is excited about the show except for me. Second, all these people who were into the show ten years ago made sure to fill the internet with B5 spoilers. I can't every look up background information on any of the actors or their characters, because then I will also end up reading a bunch of commentary about how upset everyone was when they died in [season I am watching] + 1.

Hello! You may have noticed that when I was thirty-one, I didn't write in this space very often. However, now that I am thirty-two, everything has changed. I write in the blog every single day (so far). That's because all my days are filled with fun (so far). Let me tell you all about it.

This morning I: slept in, chatted with my parents and brother, browsed the web, and all sorts of other exciting stuff that I'd enter into Twitter if I could figure out why anyone ever enters anything into Twitter.

Amy wore her prettiest dress today, because it's her Daddy's birthday. How sweet is that?

Somehow I managed to play some Crackdown on the 360 this afternoon, and picked up four achievements to finally bring my gamerscore up over 1000, a milestone that I never reached in my first 32 years. There's no need to comment on how impressed you are. I already know.

I also spent some of the afternoon playing around with the camera. If you like overexposed shots of me, today is your lucky day.

In the evening Liz's family came over for dinner. We had fresh pasta with Bolognese sauce. Great stuff.

After dinner Liz tried to kill us all with a chocolate bomb. This so called dessert is made out of brownies, lots of eggs, lots of chocolate and lots of Wild Turkey(!). And it has a fuse. If you have a heart condition, I strongly urge you not to look at the last picture in this post. You might also want to steer clear of this sentence if you're the envious type, because I'm going to tell you that the cake was delicious.

Those of you who ignored the warnings may have noticed that the fuse is a sparkler left over from New Year's Eve. A sparkler is a really fun/impractical thing to put on top of a cake. A regular frosted cake would have been ruined by all the ashes, but Liz was able to remove most of the crud from the hard chocolate shell of the bomb with a cooking brush.