DarqByte

Apparently Paul and Storm think that Wil Wheaton is the best choice for Secretary of Geek Affairs. But they never considered “Weird” Al Yankovic for the position! Help me in supporting Weird Al by signing this online petition asking for a new election with his consideration!

Your support is appreciated! Get the word out and let’s get a new election for Weird Al!

[Update 1]

So yeah, awhile back someone informed me that there was a vote. Oh well… Sorry Al!

Wow, what a weekend I had! It was absolutely totally awesome!

So yeah, as I said before, Laura and Randy colluded in secret to give me Friday off. I had no idea, so I woke up at 6am like I always do and started my morning routine. Put my contacts in, flossed my teeth, started brushing my teeth… Then Laura comes in the bathroom earlier than she normally does in the morning. She says “You have the day off today.”

Through my toothpaste froth I say “Huh?” “You have the day off today. You don’t have to go to work.” “What do you mean?” Thus, I get the explanation that Laura has coordinated with Randy to give me the day off to start my birthday weekend. And that she let me wake up so that we could get an early start…

And then she starts packing. Apparently we’re headed out of town and I need to pack through Sunday. Thus began our road trip. At one point, Laura admitted to me that we were headed to California via the I15, since I’d figure it out relatively quickly once we hit the 15. When we got to her parents’ house, I thought that perhaps we were headed to Disneyland because they allow you in for free on your birthday…

Not much else to report until we hit the 15-215 split in California. Usually, if I remember correctly the 215 is used to go to San Diego. And we didn’t take it. Further fuel for L.A. and perhaps Disneyland. Eventually she had to give me the directions because we were approaching some quick turns in succession so she couldn’t handle looking at the directions and driving. Destination was Anaheim, and I couldn’t figure out why we were going there.

Eventually we ended up damn close to Disneyland, so I figured it out. I’d forgotten that Disneyland was in Anaheim, haha.

We did some shopping around in a couple of malls. We each got a new book to read and I made sure to get a copy of Watchmen. that was such a gook book and movie. We headed back to the hotel and read for a bit, then we scooted on off to Morton’s for my official birthday dinner. Man, that place is so good, so yummy. I know I totally annihilated my diet that day.

So Saturday was Disneyland! We got park hopper tickets so we could head on over to California Adventure as well, and they have some good rides there too. The Tower of Terror was pretty nifty, as was California Screamin’ and Soaring over California.

Andrew & Amber also ended up meeting us there. It was pretty neat to see them, I wasn’t really expecting it. Grabbed lunch with them and hit a few rides with them while we were there.

For dinner, we headed out to this jazz restaurant in Downtown Disney. They had some really good food and their Bananas Foster was great. They had this jazz quartet there that was really good. Played their own stuff as well as some well-known stuff. We wrapped up by hitting up the Lego store and I got another Star Wars set. Good times!

Sunday was pretty much just wake up, hit up Ikea with Andrew & Amber, and drive home. We got a few things at Ikea that we’ve wanted, like some picture frames for Laura’s 365 pictures to put up on the walls.

It was a great weekend, had tons of fun! And now I’m old. A quarter of a century. Mid-20s… Wow.

Oddly enough, despite my recent posts about Need for Speed Undercover, this post really has nothing to do with it. Well, now it does since I mentioned it. And since I mentioned it, I’ll also mention that I’ve stopped playing it. Couldn’t keep my attention and some of the races were frustrating.

In any case, the real reason for speed is that we upped our Internet speed with our ISP, Embarq. Previously, we were at 3.0 mbps (Well, 1.5 but I’ll get to that), and now we’re at 5.0 mbps. Faster is gooder, yes?

So why did we up the speed? Do I need it for what I work on at home? No, not really. Do I need it for online gaming? No, not really, that’s still pretty quick and I don’t have much lag there. So why?

Netflix!

Laura and I recently signed up for Netflix, and it’s pretty cool. We have the 2 DVDs out at a time thing and they offer online streaming for free. Since we have an XBox 360, we can stream movies from Netflix over it.

When we first got the Netflix account, we were running on a slower speed, and I could never get anything above 2 bars (out of 4, kinda like a cellphone) for the picture quality. You’ve got to get to 3 or 4 bars to hit HD quality. Needless to say, this made The Office look a little less clear, and No Country For Old Men was obviously “blurry” in some spots.

So we increased the speed and watched some episodes of The Office last night. The conclusion? HD Netflix streaming totally rocks. Absolutely great. I really think online streaming is the way the future should go. No more discs, just streaming. Hopefully this happens, but we’ll have to have the Internet infrastructure for it to work.

So, what was our old speed? I ran by SpeedTest before the upgrade to see what it would register. It basically came up at 1.5 mbps download, where as we were paying for 3.0 mbps. I thought that maybe the site had a fluke or something, so I decided to wait for the 5.0 mbps to see what it would say about our connection then.

I figured if it came in at 5.0 mbps then Embarq had our account incorrectly configured. If it came in at 3.0 mbps then I would ask Embarq if they could verify we were indeed getting 5.0 mbps. And if it came in on some other odd number, like 2.5 mbps, then I would disregard its results entirely. It came in at 5.0 mbps.

So I’ve got to get ahold of Embarq and yell at them because we were probably running 1.5 mbps for quite some time, the entire life of the account since we’ve been in the new house. That may net us a decent refund.

When they upgraded the line in the DSL box outside my house, they left a connection loose too, so I had to figure out why the phones and Internet were all out… Bastards. But I fixed it because I’m The Man. Haha.

I’m having trouble figuring out what to talk about today for my blog post. There’s not a whole lot on my mind right now that I feel like posting about.

I already talked about Watchmen… And it’s sticking with me. Sometimes media will stick with me after I’ve “consumed” it, be it movies, books, music or video games. When I say sticking with me, I mean it kind-of takes up a temporary residence in my memory. Spoiler Alert Like the scene in Gears of War 2 where Dom finds his wife and basically has to kill her because she’s been broken by torture, that stuck with me for about a day End Spoiler Alert. So Watchmen has stuck with me for a bunch of reasons, be it the story, the romance between two characters… Even the graphic novel stuck with me.

I can’t talk yet about the photo shoot that Laura and I did last night for Project: FH – March 2009. Although you can preview it a little with this post on her blog. The final result of that shoot will be awesome.

I did see No Country For Old Men the other day on my XBox 360 via Netflix. It was a good movie, but the ending wasn’t quite what I was looking for. But oh well, it’s a Cohen brothers’ movie.

Let’s see, what to talk about… I think I’m going to get a wireless bridge for the entertainment center downstairs, that way I can network all of the devices there to our wireless network. Our wireless router sits upstairs and I’m not running cable all the way down to network, so a bridge will suffice. Want to get coach lights and bar lights for the house sometime soon… Blu-Ray player and home theater PC eventually…

I wouldn’t mind getting Street Fighter IV either, as well as The Lost and the Damned expansion for GTA IV. I’ve chewed through a good deal of my Christmas video game haul thusly:

1. Beat Fallout 3
2. Guitar Hero: World Tour play continues on
3. I’m done with Need for Speed Undercover
4. Not done with Dead Space, but it’s intermittent when I play for various reasons (creepiness indeed!)
5. Defeated Gears of War 2 campaign and have moved on to online play (Horde mode FTW)

I’ve got some other XBox Live Arcade games I’m in the middle of a bit too:

1. Braid, I’m a few worlds in on this one
2. Portal, I want to start doing some of the challenges

Well, there’s a recap for you.

Oh, and I tried to make an artistic look at my Zoolander photo from Project: FH – February 2009. I couldn’t make one work very well, there’s too much detail that needs to be kept from the original photo to make it work. Sorry Katie & Sarah!

I think a movie called Watchwomen would have gotten even more men in to see it than a movie called Watchmen. I mean, what guys would want to watch men, seriously? I guess it all depends on what the men are doing, I guess.

Which in Watchmen’s case, they’re kicking ass!

I actually thought the movie was pretty damn good. I read the graphical novel late last year when I started seeing the Watchmen ads on TV, and I thought the graphic novel was great. The movie was pretty great I thought too.

Aside from one point in particular, the movie was almost spot-on in adherence to the original. The styling of the movie mostly matched that of the original, and even the nakedness of Dr. Manhattan is recreated. Yes folks, that is a giant blue penis. Yes folks, that is a set of 4 giant blue penises in one scene.

Big blue schlongs aside, the action was good, but too gory for Laura. The story, since it was largely kept from the original, was also spectacular.

It was a very rated-R movie and I was surprised to see so many kids there. I mean, there’s a lot of nudity in it by way of Dr. Manhattan, so I wasn’t so concerned about that. We shouldn’t be attaching such a negative stigma to the human body. But there is a lot of gory action and language in that movie, which even I think is inappropriate for small children. This movie was probably relatively close to an NC-17 rating, so… Leave the kids at home, ‘eh?

Came across an article on TechRepublic listing some “geek” moving coming out this year. I think I want to see these in theaters (going from top-to-bottom as listed in the article):

1. Coraline (Already saw it, it was good! In 3D even)
2. Fanboys (Maybe rent it instead)
3. Franklyn
4. Watchmen
5. Knowing (Maybe not in theaters, though)
6. Monsters vs Aliens (Again, maybe not in theaters)
7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
8. Star Trek
9. Angels & Demons
10. Terminator: Salvation
11. Up
12. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
13. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
14. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
15. Pandorum (Maybe rent)
16. 9
17. The Box (Always thought that concept was… interesting… maybe rent instead)
18. Sherlock Holmes
19. Avatar
20. Nottingham
21. The Road (Looks like it might be like Children of Men, and that was a good flick)

Mmm… Some hopefully good action flicks this year.

So the other day I watched Alien. Tuesday evening, to be exact. I hadn’t really watched it in a long time, so I decided to load it up on TV.

Actually, a quick diversion here before I get to my main point. I haven’t really watched all of the Alien movies very much. I’ve seen them all at least once, and probably all of them in bits and pieces too, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen them and it’s been so staggered that I barely remember much. There are parts that just blend into other movies and I have no idea what to expect.

In any case, man… Sigourney Weaver was pretty hot in that movie! I mean, I’ve always liked her as an actress and thought she had a great sense of humor (see Galaxy Quest). I’ve always thought she wasn’t bad to look at, but her short hair never appealed to me… But man, I tell you what, she wasn’t that bad at the end of that movie!

I’m sure Laura will flog me later, but that’s ok, because she’s hotter anyway.

Now I’m curious, did I lose or gain husband points with this post?