What I am doing on my Summer Vacation
So I'm about mid-way through my July vacation.
It's been very cool so far. The highlights have been going to the Taste of
Chicago, a house warming party, and seeing the Transformers movie today. For
the Taste I got to see Cracker, Soul Asylum, and Cheap Trick. Very cool. I've
got those picture posted in a few places. The most accessible place that has
all of the pics is on my Picasa page (Google). Flickr restricts the bandwidth
of my monthly uploads having a free account. With Google, I don't have that
restriction. So here is the link to my
page: http://picasaweb.google.com/marz888 You'll see most of the pics are from Cheap Trick, especially Rick Nielsen's guitars. Every song had a different guitar. I may have missed a couple. Very fun. We got the awesome front row, center seats due to knowing some people that work the venue at the Taste. We never had intended to go. We were chatting with them for a while, and next thing we know we are getting our hands stamped and getting escorted to our seats. I've heard the music from Cracker and Soul Asylum before, but never really paid attention to them. I have a better appreciation of their music now. And Cheap Trick? What a bonus. A favorite band growing up. I never had any of their albums, but I always enjoyed listening to them or watching their videos. So to get to see them was cool. Not much to say about a house warming party other than it was a party with a bunch of cool peeps. Played some Guitar Hero, ate a lot of food, and had some drinks. Not many pictures of that. I'll pass those along to the person who had the party and she can do what she likes with them. Not really my place to post those necessarily. Transformers. Well, I liked it. However I need to say that I never watched the cartoon. By that time, I had "grown up" as far as cartoons were concerned. I just wasn't interested in them. I remember thinking that they were silly and childish. I knew who they were, I knew some of the history, but never really cared. So I see the movie not as a fanatic of the series, but as someone that wants to see a cool movie with big robots. I think it succeeds on that level. Most of the people I know who have seen it were fans of the series and they loved it. I can relate to that, just not with this movie. The good thing to me is that they enjoyed it too, so it's kind of like a stamp of approval. The closest thing I equate this to is when I saw X-Men. I never read the comics, but I did see the cartoon that had came out. By the time of the cartoon I had decided that the ones that were coming out were cool enough to watch as they had some adult theme associated with them. Not kiddie fluff entirely. While X-Men wasn't perfect, from what I had seen it was close enough. Plus I had a friend who was a big X-Men fan and he gave it his approval. So what did I get out of the movie? Except for the fact that it's pretty cool. I find no reason why there cannot be a BattleTech movie. The CG technology is there to do this. And I think there are some stories out there that could easily transfer to film. The problem is that there are so many books, you couldn't realistically create just one movie, or even just three that could encompass everything. So I'm sure there would be some issues with that. But hey, there are a few books in the series that are the backbone to the entire story line that could be used. What else...got a webcam. Really cheap too. It works as well as any webcam. I'm using it to do "MeToday" videos to win an iPhone on VIddler http://www.viddler.com/Marz/While I don't want to buy a first gen iPhone, I wouldn't mind getting one for free. I think the iPhone is very cool. One of my staff has one, and I was impressed with it for the very limited time I played with it. But the negatives for me are features it doesn't have that my phone does have combined with the price. Bottom line is that the cell phone aspect of it compared to my Razr falls short on a few things: 1. No 3G. I've gotten spoiled on this the past few months. I upgraded from a slow cell phone internet experience to a very fast one. It's like going from dial-up to broadband - literally. iPhone's EDGE is slower than what I have now. 2. Cell phone as modem. iPhone can't do it. One of the reasons I got the phone that I have is this. I've had to use it as a modem in a pinch when I switched ISPs and a couple times when I had connectivity issues with my current ISP. Plus it's very convenient when I take my laptop elsewhere and I have a true internet experience. 3. No MMS. This is Multimedia Messaging. I don't use that function all the time on my phone, but I use it enough to matter. Apple's reply to this is you can e-mail it to someone. Sorry Apple, that's not the same. Plus I don't have e-mail addresses to every person in my phone. 4. No stereo bluetooth - This is really just nit picking. I don't have a stereo bluetooth headset, but if I had an iPhone, I'd want one. 5. No Flash, Java, or other web browser functionality. There are enough web sites out there that use this technology as part of their webpage that it diminishes the experience. 6. 3rd party apps. Apple has told the community to create plug-ins for the Safari Browser. Now, that's all well and good, but there are some things that I'd like to be able to just tap a button and access, instead of open the browser. 7. Related to the above - no chat clients at all. Including their own - iChat. Not that I use the chat clients installed on phone very much now, but that is due more to the ease of use (or lack thereof). iPhone's interface is much more suited to do this. Yes there is a web-based way to do this, but I honestly don't know if it would work on the iPhone. 8. No GPS. My phone doesn't have it either, but then again I got the phone for $50, and if I had paid full price it would have been about $300 or less. Other smartphones have this capability. I think it would be a nice thing to have. 9. Price. The price itself isn't necessarily the issue. To get a smart phone and iPod/music player separately would cost about the same. But a convergence product should make things easier, and maybe a little bit cheaper. Like buying in bulk, right? I'm not asking them to price it the same as an iPod Nano, but maybe $100 less would make more sense. Plus, many of my above objections are things that are on my phone. 10. Addendum - SIM card. From what I've been able to glean from the 'net, you can't share a SIM card with the iPhone and another cell phone. While the iPhone is cool and all, and not that big, I have a phone that is smaller and more suited to certain situations. I'd like to have that phone instead of a $600 one with me sometimes. Now almost all of the Wow this is turning into a long entry. I've got more: Music. My parents sent me a lot of CDs. 21 to be exact. Outstanding music on these things. It took a long time to get them into the computer. Plus there are quite a few duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate songs across the CDs. I've got them all in. I also have a program that analyzes the songs and will give a suggestion as to artist, album, title, etc. So the vast majority of those songs were labeled automatically for me. Now is the task of typing in the rest of the info, and deleting the extra versions of the songs. Don't have any one favorite CD from the bunch as I viewed it as a collection of songs. However I have enjoyed listening to them. But, I didn't just start with CD1 and listen to the entire set. I listen to my music on random or shuffle. Both in iTunes and on my iPod. So I could be listening to Tarantula by Faithless one minute (the song I'm listening to right now), and the next minute some Beethoven Symphony. Sometimes I'll pick a genre, but that will almost always be either Techno or New Age. So thanks Mom & Dad for the extra music. My collection is now over 30GB. So the next thing about music is a service I joined a few months ago. It's called mp3tunes at http://www.mp3tunes.com/ It allows you to store your music library online. So I know have a backup of just about every song in my library. Since it's a free account, I had to wait a few months for them to tell me I could upload more than a small amount of songs, so I waited. I actually had forgotten about it until last week when they e-mailed me about having unlimited storage now. So it took about 4 days to upload a total of 23 GB of music. Now I don't know what didn't upload since iTunes tells me I have 31GB and 5969 items in my Library. mp3Tunes has my "Locker" at 23.11GB and 4952 files and a ranking of 1341 of 82071 (Rockstar) in their Locker Envy ranking. But the coolest thing is that I can be anywhere with a web browser and listen to MY music library instead of some music service's. I normally use Pandora at http://www.pandora.com/ but it's a bit limited by what I tell it to play. Very cool concept. That's a lot for now. Think I'll stop here. L8r, Marz Posted: Monday - July 09, 2007 at 04:44 PM |
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Total entries in this category: Published On: Aug 06, 2007 08:06 PM |