The week before the move I went to the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. It was a fun week, I learned new stuff and reinforced other stuff I already knew.
The missus did some packing while I was gone. After I got back, we boxed and boxed and boxed. We had most of it done but the last odds and ends always take longer than expected and we didn't finish until the wee hours of the morning before the movers came. The movers arrived a bit early (which is nice) and they did a good job - I would recommend them. They must have used a CASE of packing tape - those guys go crazy with packing tape and moving pads (which is great). We now have a cube of boxes in the living room ready to be unpacked but the furniture is in place, which is nice.
Our new place is considerably larger than the previous three places we loved, which we love. The train is much closer and noisier and will take some time to get used to, be it is already fading into the background for us. I didn't even notice the trains the last two nights, for the most part.
Saturday night the missus and I went and finished cleaning the old apartment. She is shampooing the carpets this morning (thank you, missus!). By mid-day everything should be done at the old place.
The FIOS guy came on Sunday and installed my super-duper-fast Internet (about 20 megabit). I had FIOS a couple years ago and have missed it. The FIOS TV seems as good or better than Cablevision and the channel layout (SD vs HD) is more logical, I think. I'm happy with it so far. I tried to just use an antenna to get over-the-air HD channels, but it wasn't stable enough for our TiVo habits.
So, the road ahead is clear - unpack, unpack, unpack and wedding, wedding, wedding (three more weddings in three different states this summer). Maybe sometime in there we'll get a couch or love seat for our new larger living room -I'm looking forward to that!
I am a Star Trek fan since, well, forever I guess. My formative years were the seventies and eighties and I remember watching Star Trek the original series (ST:TOS, as re-runs) all through elementary school and junior high. I have always enjoyed Science Fiction but ST:TOS holds a special place in my heart. Even as campy as Shatner was as Kirk, you have to love the character - heck, in ST:TOS there was not a bad character in the bunch (except those darn red-shirters - kill 'em all!).
Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) came along during my high school and college years. While the show started somewhat weak, after a season or two it really got surprisingly good. Many people would say ST:TNG is better than ST:TOS but I consider them equals in most ways. ST:TNG is generally less campy and Picard is a great captain, but hey, Kirk was a bad-ass and a ladies man to boot.
In my post-college years I watched some of the other Star Trek series on and off, but they never held a candle to other sci-fi like Firefly. Sorry ST:DS9, ST:V, and Enterprise, you just didn't do enough to capture my love (or maybe I didn't give you a fair enough chance).
When it comes to Star Trek movies, everyone knows that the "Odd / Even" rule strangely applies... odd numbered movies are pretty bad and even numbered movies are pretty good. Or it did until now! I saw Star Trek (J.J. Abrams reboot on the series) on IMAX on Saturday morning and for the 11th film (odd) it was amazingly good. Heck, I think even non-Trek fans will have to agree it is a really amazingly well done movie. I won't tell you much about the movie (go see it! it is a big-screen movie if ever there was one) but I think the character casting was spot on perfect (especially Kirk and Spock). My only character complaint was casting Anton Yelchin as Chekov. I generally like Yelchin but the character didn't seem as smooth as the others. Oh well. Did I mention you should go see it? Close the browser, go see it!
If you are still reading, I guess you've already seen it or your back from the theater. Welcome back.
The other thing that consumed my weekend was a game called Gun. Gun came out in late 2005 for every gaming system imaginable, although I played it on the Xbox 360 (because I love achievements). Gun is a "western" game set in the 1880's. The style of game is Grand Theft Auto with Horses (Grand Theft Horse?). It is an open world game with a main story and lots of side things to do which you can do in whatever order you like (or skip them all together). It is a somewhat short game - I probably finished the main story and all side missions in less than 15 hours - but it does nearly everything right. The graphics are nice, although a little dated. The control is spot on and the story is well developed. All of the actors that do the voices are top level talent, almost all voice you will recognize. Unlike the GTA games, they even have mid-mission checkpoints so playing the game never gets frustrating. If you enjoy GTA-like games, I can recommend it very highly. You can easily find a used copy for $15 or less.
We spent part of our weekend packing. We aren't moving for over a month, but we are hoping to have most of it done early so the move is less stressful. We are going to hire movers to do the actual loading and unloading, but we'll do all the boxing ourselves.
I started playing Bully: Scholarship Edition about two weeks ago and finished it up this weekend. It is made by the same folks (Rockstar) that make the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series and the game style is the same - it is an "open world" where there is a story backbone to the game, but much of the order in which you do things is up to you. To a degree, this is an illusion as new tasks don't open up until you complete certain tasks (to keep the story flowing) but there is lots of "extra" stuff that you can do (or avoid) at your own pace. The GTA games are all M (mature) rated, and deservedly so. Bully is a T rated game and you can tell they carefully crafted it for a younger audience. It isn't a "kiddy" game by any means, but the violence is much less brutal, nobody is killed, there is no blood. Even when you beat somebody up, they will be up and walking around in no time. You might think from the title that your character is the bully, but it is actually quite the opposite. Your goal in the game is to stop the other bullies and bring unity to the school. It isn't all just peace and flowers, thought - you always tend to beat the bad guys into submission. Bully was originally a PS2 title and while it uses a newer "game engine" on the Xbox 360, you can definitely see the PS2 roots showing throw. The graphics are good but not spectacular. The voice work, music, and story are all top notch. If you enjoy the GTA series I can absolutely give this a recommendation. It is a much smaller, tighter world and story than Grand Theft Auto, but there is enough variety to keep the player interested and amused. I "completed" the game (getting 1000 gamerscore including the 100% "Perfectionist" achievement) in about 30 hours which is probably pretty normal. If you just powered through the game and weren't worrying about the Perfectionist achievement, you could probably do it in more like 20 hours or possibly even less, I would imagine.
I re-watched True Romance and it was as good as I remembered (I first saw it in the theater in college). If you want a high powered action / shoot-out fest, it is a must watch.
The missus and I have iPhones and we love them. Our "family" plan has the minimum number of shared minutes possible which we never reach - our "rollover minutes" pile grows every month. With our plan we get "unlimited" calls to each other and "unlimited" calls to anyone during night and on weekends. AT&T requires iPhone owners to carry an "unlimited data" plan as well - we can transfer many megabytes of data every month via web surfing and email for no additional cost. It's fun to be able to watch YouTube videos on the train.
Apparently, though, AT&T doesn't consider SMS ("text messages") to be "data". SMS messages are tiny little messages (up to 160 characters). SMS messages have the advantage that they (generally) appear quickly, often just seconds after being sent, but one pays 20 cents per message to send and 20 cents per message to receive them (or you can pay $5 for 200 messages (sent or received) per month, $15 for 1500 messages, or $20 for an "unlimited" number of messages per month). I can call the missus and have a 15 minute phone conversation on my way home for no extra charge ("unlimited mobile to mobile") or I can send her an email for no extra charge ("unlimited data"). If I sent here even a short SMS (such as "518", indicating I am my way home on the 5:18pm train) they will charge me 20 cents to send it and charge her 20 cents to receive it even though we are on the same "family plan".
After we each went over our 200 messages last month, mostly because we sometimes were using SMS like IM (having back and forth conversations during which you can chew through 200 messages quickly, one per each message you send one for and each message you receive), I considered getting us larger SMS plans, but the next step is $15 each for 1500 messages which seemed like quite a jump. I did some searching and discovered an iPhone (and iPod Touch) app called TextFree. TextFree is free for 15 messages per day and $6 for "unlimited messages" (not $6 per month, $6 one time). I went ahead and paid the $6 (which lets us run TextFree on both phones).
TextFree is sort of an odd mix of IM and SMS. I can use it to send an SMS message without the AT&T charge to anyone, even people with non-iPhone phones, even non-AT&T people (probably USA only, though). If the "other person" is a TextFree user (even the free version) it will go directly to their TextFree application instead of being delivered as a normal SMS message. Right now, this means they either have to have TextFree running otherwise it will send a notification of the message to their email which will contain the message but will also prompt them to run TextFree to get the message. I am hoping this summer with the iPhone OS 3.0 TextFree will support "Push" so I will get "instant notification" of an incoming TextFree message much like what I get with SMS today.
I would say TextFree has (for a one time $6 fee) solved the majority of our SMS issues. The missus has elected to keep the 200 message SMS plan for now, as there are other people she exchanges SMS messages with, but without our long conversations she should come well under the 200 message allotment. We can still have those conversations, we just use TextFree for them (or heck, we could use our "unlimited moibile to mobile" and actually talk to each other).
We knew we had to decide about our lease renewal at our current apartment by the middle of this week, so we've been calling and visiting apartments in the area that are convenient to appropriate transportation. We had a goal of gaining space and/or saving money and preferably both. We had decided if we couldn't do either, it wasn't worth moving.
We'd largely ruled out New York City because we don't generally like the neighborhoods (that we can afford), NYC parking is difficult, and NYC taxes are very high. We had also ruled out Yonkers because they also have additional city taxes. Long Island and New Jersey were ruled out because commuting into Penn Station is far less convenient than commuting into Grand Central Station since I work on the east side of Manhattan.
This left us with Westchester and possibly Connecticut. On Friday, we spent the most of the day in CT. We ruled out one of the complexes we really liked in Norwalk, CT because transportation was going to be too large of an issue (too far from the train station, too few trains). We found a place we thought would be perfect in Stamford, but they didn't take cats (oh well!). Then we found a couple other places in downtown Stamford which we were really hopeful about - we absolutely loved downtown Stamford. We were close to actually signing a lease at two different places, but ultimately decided that the commute just wasn't worth it (but we were SO tempted!)... But ultimately, spending an extra 60 - 90 minutes a day travelling just wasn't worth the great neighborhood.
Friday night I did some more looking and found a place in Yonkers that looked appealing. I re-ran our 2008 taxes as if we lived in both NYC and in Yonkers for the year and learned that while NYC does have incredibly high taxes, Yonkers aren't that much higher. On Saturday, we got an early start and visited the complex in Yonkers. The apartments were really nice and the immediate neighborhood is fantastic. The train is very close and it is right on the Hudson river. I looked at a few more places, but ultimately we decided it was where we would next call home. We returned on Sunday and put in the application. Assuming all goes smoothly, we'll be signing the lease this week and moving in mid-June.
Lately we've been having duck on special occasions. We had it this last Thanksgiving and Christmas. We get it from the Grand Central Market. It is a very tasty "marinated duck breast". The missus picked up a couple for our Easter dinner.
Previously I had been grilling it, which came out nicely, but I decided to try something different. I took the duck breasts and scored the skin / fat both directions at about half in spacings. I placed the meat, fatty side down, in our cast iron skillet and turned the stove on medium low (actually quite low since we have an electric stove - like 2 or maybe 3). The goal here was to render off almost all of the fat without actually cooking the meat. I periodically spooned out the extra fat (duck has an amazing quantity of fat in that fat layer). This process was somewhat time consuming (taking 30 minutes or more). I probably could have done this more quickly, but I was being careful to not cook the meat. After the fat had suitably cooked off, I transferred the meat, again fatty side down, to a broiler pan and cooked the meat in the oven for 10 minutes at 350 degrees (internal temperature of 165F) using the oven's broiler element (but I don't think that really made any difference vs just normal baking).
The duck came out very nicely and I think I will repeat the same method next time we have duck. The slow fat rendering took a fair bit of extra time, but it really was worth it. When I grilled the duck before the fat caused frequent "flame ups" and not nearly enough of the fat rendered off during cooking.
We discussed that we'll get marinated rabbit next time.
I run several websites. About a year ago I setup a backup scheme to make sure my websites were backed up to my local computer once a day. This backup includes the databases and files on the hosting provider's server. I use rsync (SSH) to reduce the amount of data that I have to copy. I then keep two copies of this data on my local system here. I felt pretty good about this scheme and have proven that I have enough data in my backup to ensure I can recover after hosting crashes, moving to new hosting providers, etc. but what I didn't anticipate was what I would do if a hacker defaced my site and I didn't catch it quickly enough. The answer is the modified files would be sent to my local backup overwriting the good data. I wasn't keeping any sort of history - what I was storing locally was always the latest. I know this isn't a terribly good practice, but I have yet to find a backup system that does incremental backups how I would like them keeping history without consuming a ton of space and still being "quick" to backup.
Recently, a friend's website got defaced and fortunately they had "enough" data backed up and the defacement was simple enough that recovery was not a major issue, but it easily could have been if the hacker had been more malicious. This made me start to really think about what I need to be doing for website backups.
For version control at work, we use Subversion - which is really nice. I decided to try to implement something like Subversion at home for my website files / database backups. I started to setup Subversion until I discovered Git. In its simplest form, you can create a Git repository on a single directory and it can very easily and quickly handle the version control (much to the level of Subversion) on the files and directories within that directory. For my situation, I believe Git is the best choice. With just a few commands I created the repository and added the existing files to that repository and by adding two commands to my rsync backup script all new files are now automatically added to the repository (and deleted files are removed form the depository -- but they can be recovered if need be). I plan to setup daily "tags" for the data so if the worst happened I could easily obtain the site as it was on any particular day with very little effort.
Before the next wave of new games that interest me come out, I decided to spend a few months working on my "pile of shame" -- games that I purchased some time in the past but never got around to finishing (or even starting in some cases). The current game is Call of Duty 2 (COD2). I think I got this one a couple months before Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (COD4, which is a phenomenal game!!). I was initially a little turned off with COD2 because it is a World War 2 (WWII) shooter which means it lacks snazzy weapons and such, but I will admit it is a very solid, polished, fun game. While I am not adept enough to play the game on anything but the "Regular" difficulty (the game's "hardened" and "veteran" difficulty levels are well beyond my skills), I am now about 80% through COD2 and I am really enjoying it. Honestly, this is the first WWII game I have played and I am glad I waited to play this one. Heck, I might even consider playing Call of Duty: World At War at some time in the future (another, newer WWII shooter). While COD2 doesn't have COD4's fancy weapons (or graphics), it does look pretty nice, especially considering it was an Xbox 360 launch title. The one thing COD2 and COD4 both do right is they really make you feel like you are in the middle of a war. All in all, I can heartily recommend it to fans of the shooter genre.
On Saturday I played most of Halo3's (H3) single player campaign. I've been putting off playing it because I had so many other great games to play, but decided I just couldn't put it off any longer. I actually started it a few months ago, but my old save game didn't work properly so I decided to just restart the game. I made it about 75% through the game in one day (it is a short game). Having just finished Gears of War 2 (GOW2) my opinion is that H3 is nice, but GOW2 is a better game in every respect that matters to me. I think the GOW2 cover system is now essential to shooters (and missing in H3), I think GOW2 controls better, and I think GOW2 has better graphics. H3 has an interesting story, but I think GOW2 even did that better. GOW2 multi player is also very well done (I really enjoy Horde mode) but I imagine there is a rabid crowd who would say H3 is the pinnacle of console multiplayer - H3's single player campaign is, in reality, just a tack on and the real H3 game is multiplayer - I am jut not into most multiplayer games. If you can get it for cheap or love multiplayer, get H3. If you can only afford one shooter, get GOW2 (even GOW1). If you are getting a second shooter, honestly, I would recommend Dead Space over H3.
Saturday night we went to a wine bar with a neighbor who is moving out of our apartment complex soon. We hadn't seen a lot of him in a few months, so it was nice to catch up.
On Sunday, we got up pretty early to attend the Beneath the Sea 2009 scuba show (trade show kind of thing). 70% of the show is tourism to entice you to travel to little tropical islands and live-aboard ships for diving, but the other 30% are vendors who make scuba gear (always nice to see what is new in the scuba market) and non-profits who are trying to do things like ocean conservancy, enabled people with disabilities to dive, etc. We've been to the show a few times before and it is always interesting. It was fun to go this year as it is the first year after the missus got certified. The most interesting possibilities are diving the St. Lawrence river (up on the NY / Canada border), Puerto Rico, and Florida. Our normal vacation is probably off this year as we are doing four weddings, but we hope to get in some diving during those trips and maybe some weekend trips for diving. We will definitely take a few trips to Dutch Springs to get the missus back in the water, work in skills, etc. I hope by the end of the summer she can take the Advanced Underwater course. In May, I get to take the missus to Blue Hole (Santa Rosa, NM) so we can dive were I got certified.
The lease on our apartment comes due in about three months. If we plan to move we'll have to notify our current complex 60 days before the end of the lease. While we like our apartment and location, there is always the possibility that we could find a less expensive and larger place (which would be really, really nice). I started feeling out other locations by making a list of apartment complexes and making preliminary calls. Unfortunately, the weekend is not the ideal time to contact leasing agents because most leasing offices are closed on Saturday (which makes no sense to me), but I called about 85 places and weeded out a few places that aren't actually apartment complexes and I've left lots of messages. I was able to talk to four or five candidates, but I suspect it will be during the week that we will have a better picture of the possibilities. We'll see. Changing leases is a chicken and egg problem because your current place wants 60 days notice, but so does everybody else - so if you call a place 90 days ahead of time they generally don't know what they will have available and are often hesitant to discuss the future possibilities. Most places understand that I am making a list of "possibilities" and getting details such as ballpark prices and sizes, but some just don't get it.
A couple weeks ago we started watching (via Netflix streaming) 30 Rock (season one). I'm not quite sure how we missed this show before now, but we are really enjoying it. We've finished season one and are looking forward to starting season two.
Last Thursday we went to see Watchmen and wow! It was really amazing! They did a great job of translating the graphic novel to the big screen. The movie is long at about 2 hours 40 minutes, but I've heard that the DVD is going to be four hours (which is easy to believe). Even at that length, it didn't feel "long". There isn't anything I would have cut from the movie and it kept my attention for the entire span. I'd recommend this movie to everyone, but, it is not for kids - it is very violent, bloody, and contains mature themes. I would strongly recommend reading the graphic novel or watching the "motion comic" before or after - but go see the movie on the big screen. It is such an amazing story and I love that doesn't take the "easy way out" of situations.
I've been playing a lot of Burnout Paradise on the 360 and am having a lot of fun with it. I am five events from having my "Burnout" license. I've found all the billboards, all the super-jumps, and I'm only missing 10 smashes. I have over two thirds of the cars. The races are now getting a fair bit more difficult. I've tried racing "online" but I don't like that -a- I don't have control of the day/night cycle (I don't really like racing at night) and -b- even when I play a "ranked match" the other races are generally far better than I am so I have almost no chance of winning. Oh well. I still highly recommend the game, I just don't enjoy the online races.
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