Archive for October, 2006

Who’s in it

No one you know and directed by this guy, Jay Chandrasekhar, you don’t know him either by name

Should you see this movie?

Maybe, especially if you liked Super Troopers. The director was part of Broken Lizard, Club Dread and all that silly stuff with Bill Paxton and he also directed Dukes of Hazzard and of course, Troopers.

This movie starts out pretty funny and has a lot of promise. A whole movie on drinking beer and beerfest and all of the craziness that naturally would go with a festival like that. Two brothers are taking the ashes of their drunken father to Germany to scatter at beerfest. Only then do they learn that beerfest is a secret competition that only the worthy are allowed to partake. Not only that, but their father and mother are not what they seem to be, stable boy and hooker, and this all lays a great foundwork for a fun story. But then, they start to train for beerfest and although that sounds funny, the rest of the movie really wasn’t. It was slow and the characters really didn’t keep you engaged, you just keep waiting for them to get back to the competition and “Da Boot”.

So, this may or may not be for most people, but this director’s humor does have a small following now, so if you’re one of them this will be great for you.

Stopped this morning at King’s Electronics, two blocks from new workplace, to get some capacitors for my R-Type game. I got to leave at a decent time and I stopped by Menards to get a new light fixture for the game cabinet as well. I figured I wouldn’t be able to replace the bulb, but what I was concerned about was the voltage of the light and the length of the cord, neither of which I satisfied either. It was a gratifying experience to stand in the store like a dufus, wonder why they had 15″ light bulbs, and no 15″ fixtures, and 13″ fixtures with no 13″ light bulbs.

After dinner I started to take apart my R-Type. My first working game, I’ve had it working for three days, and the only thought that goes through my head is, “Let’s take it apart and see if I can break it!”. It took some time to solder off an old wire that was used as a jumper between the capacitor connections, and get all three of the capacitors into place on the board, but once I got it done, and plugged it in, I had blaring sound right away, no problem! Very exciting and fulfilling for me to have that work and be that easy. And there is a pot that is located right in the area to easily adjust the volume on the R-type as needed.

Stopped this morning at King’s Electronics, two blocks from new workplace, to get some capacitors for my R-Type game. The day was a normal Monday, but by about 3:00 I was getting a sleep headache that didn’t let up. I got to leave at a decent time and I stopped by Menards to get a new light fixture for the game cabinet as well. I figured I wouldn’t be able to replace the bulb, but what I was concerned about was the voltage of the light and the length of the cord, neither of which I satisfied either. It was a gratifying experience to stand in the store like a dufus, wonder why they had 15″ light bulbs, and no 15″ fixtures, and 13″ fixtures with no 13″ light bulbs. Sometimes I don’t feel so bad that I am not a guy’s guy that knows all this home stuff, because I do think it is about experience and not about common sense in organization and labeling.

Went to the gym for an hour and then came home to a nice dinner with my wife. We haven’t done that in forever it seems, she is always at school so late doing something for someone else.

After dinner Sarah cleaned up and did some laundry and I turned on the tv for our Monday shows of “How I met your Mother” and “Two & A Half Men”, and I started to take apart my R-Type. My first working game, I’ve had it working for three days, and the only thought that goes through my head is, “Let’s take it apart and see if I can break it!”. It took some time to solder off an old wire and get all three of the capacitors into place on the board, but once I got it done, and plugged it in, I had blaring sound right away, no problem! Very exciting and fulfilling for me to have that work and be that easy.

I took a quick shower, and then wrote up my lesson plan for tomorrow. Then Sarah and I sat down together and talked, while I brushed her gorgeous hair, and wound down the day and even went to bed together which is also unusual. Class in the morning helps that.

I have found out since I launched this blog 2 years ago, that I started out energetic about posting photos, but it was time consuming, and I don’t have that much time at any given point in my life. Now, I know there are a million social networking sites out there for posting photos, this little industry has exploded, but I never liked having someone leave my site visually and I like my code and I want it to be written right and not bloated.

Well, my desire to share photos has overruled most else, and I started to play around with Picasa from Google and their new Web Albums feature. I like it. Talk about easy. All you need is a Google account, which gives you access to a whole bunch of awesome stuff rolled into one user interface on the web, word and spreadsheet creation and versioning tools (docs.google.com released this week), photo sharing, mail, calendar, and access to use their IM.

It gives you 250 MB of free space, which is a good chunk. I am sure I will have no issue filling that up, but for the average person that is a lot of space. Not to mention the galleries themselves are just awesome in what you get to do as a user. You do leave my site, but that’s ok, just come back:).

I have posted three sets of photos so far; This past weekend with our parents, our shoe ruining mission event at the airshow in August, and our trip to Cleveland from this past June. Enjoy

I went out to Radio Shack to see if they had the capacitors I needed to solder onto the board to make the sound work, but they didn’t. When I got home I removed the old florescent light, reset some of the dip switches back to pay to play, and took the cover off the inside of the coin mech that covered the switch to feed quarters.

It was a good day. We started off the morning with church, and catching up with Kate and Wes about their Saturday and how knocking down a house went, and of course, rehashing Friday night.

When we got home Sarah did a lot of laundry, and I worked on R-Type. I went out to Radio Shack to see if they had the capacitors I needed to solder onto the board to make the sound work, but they didn’t. When I got home I removed the old florescent light, reset some of the dip switches back to pay to play, and took the cover off the inside of the coin mech that covered the switch to feed quarters. Then I took some time to clean up the garage, put some more things in the attic like boxes and tires, and organize things such that I could start parking my car inside again for the first time in a month in a half.

Then I mowed the front lawn, hopefully for the last time this year, and sat down in front of the tv for the rest of the night. Sarah sat with me for most of it in some capacity. She did a ton of laundry and got through 98% of a curtain for the front guest room. Both the Colts and the Tigers won, the Colts with a little more flair, but a win is a win. Game three is one Tuesday for the Tigers in St. Louis, and next week’s Colts game is away against Denver, another late afternoon game which conflicts with our Dave Ramsey class. We skipped tonight, I don’t know what we will do next week, it is really a hard decision, finance lessons or Colts???.

All I can say was that it was a doozy of a night, and boy oh boy did Sarah live it up after a long first half of the week.