New Carpet

Catherine's having some problems today. Her big toe is really hurting. We think it might be an ingrown toenail, but we don't know. When I got home the kids were watching some TV so Catherine could soak her toe in warm water. Ginger tried to do some minor operating on it, but Catherine wouldn't let her do anything serious. Looks like they might be heading to the doctor's office tomorrow. I hope they don't have to operate or anything. I know when they operated on my foot about a year ago the pain killer shots hurt worse than the splinter I had lodged all the way through my toe. They actually give you shots in the webbed area between your toes. And it's not just one shot, but like four, two on either side of the toe in question.. If I never have to get one of those shots again, that would be good. Anyway, her toe doesn't look particularly good. It's really red next to the nail and it seems to have a bit of white under the skin there at the edge also.


Ginger bought a new carpet for the family room (part of our ongoing quest to continually update that room recently) and tonight we got to put the carpet down. My personal opinion is that this is a mistake and we don't actually need new carpet. Sure the cats had peed on the old one and it smelled absolutely horrible, but we still have the cats. I don't see the rationale for buying new stuff like this knowing we still have the cats, but Ginger sees things differently.




Since this was only a rug, putting it down ourselves doesn't break my previous promise to never lay carpet on my own again. That said, I still screwed it up a bit. The rug keeps creeping closer to the wall along the edge until in the corner it actually rides up the wall a bit. Even so, I think we did pretty good getting it as straight as we did. I gotta tell you though, laying the carpet without being able to move the big screen television out of the room and not unplugging the wires so the TiVo would still be recording made for quite a trick.

Wild Bill Quinn

Last night when we were out the kids heard the song "I wanna be like you" (from Disney's "The Jungle Book") on Ginger's iPod. I felt it was my responsibility as the only resident cartoon watching adult to explain to them what was going on in the song since they've never seen the movie and they were digging the song. Once I explained it had dancing monkeys and bear in disguise in it they really wanted to see it. So I told them we could watch it today when I got home. Evidently we're well past the stage where you can mention something to them and they forget within a couple hours. I basically got accosted when I arrived home tonight with the kids demanding we watch the dancing monkeys. So I broke out the DVD, pulled off the shrinkwrap and popped it in. And then was disgusted that it was full screen (to be fair, Ginger is the one that first noticed). I checked the DVD and it states it is presented in the original theater aspect ratio of 1.33:1, so my question is this: Is what used to be considered theater aspect ratio basically full screen today? And to finish it out, the kids loved watching the song, but I was pretty sure they would.

Tonight's dinner battle was brought to you by Papa Johns. Yep, a tiny bit of cheese pizza was what we fought over tonight. I think it was about the size of a peanut M&M. Luckily tonight didn't go as long as some previous nights. He kept complaining about the fact that it had sauce on it. I think we were only there for about 20 minutes extra tonight, but he did eventually eat the Pizza. And while he made a face when he ate it, he didn't go into gag reflexes like he has in past with other stuff. So we're slowly getting there (very slowly). So that's two new food items down out his seven needed for the toy.


After dinner I let the kids horse around on the sofa by removing the cushions and letting them make a fort out of it and jump around on it. They love doing that. In fact, they love doing it almost as much as Ginger hates for them to do it. I suspect there's some sort of inverse relationship there as to why they like it so much.

There were a lot of 'fun' new items today. From Radio Shack telling 400 people they were fired via email (I wonder if any of them thought it was spam and never read it). To the Katie Couric fiasco with them digitally altering her publicity photo. Gives all new meaning to those lose weight now spam ads. I wonder if they're planning on slimming her down every night in the news also? Also, there was a report today about how obesity in adults has increased in 31 states. I went ahead and checked to see where the state of Virginia faired and we rank almost right in the middle at rank 25 (out of 51, D.C. was included). Unfortunately I don't think it's ranked from slim to obese, so we're somewhere between healthy and not so healthy here. On the positive side, we were not one of the states singled out as having a significant increase from the last survey (meaning we stayed about where we were). In light of that, I would like to thank those other people in Virginia that lost weight between the last survey and this one that made up for me gaining it.

Finally tonight. Let's play a game from the old Highlights magazine. See if you can spot the major difference in the follow two pictures.




We moved these monstrosities down into the basement. Did one each night (one last night and one tonight). These things in addition to being huge are pretty darn heavy. Being the guy holding the entire thing from the bottom as we went down the stairs I was pretty sure I was going to be crushed and Ginger would be getting a ton of extra cash from life insurance. But in the end, I made it through it and we got the things moved. The reason for moving them is we have to make room for the new furniture that will eventually be showing up.

Cheese!

First, a hearty thanks to everyone that offered some advice on ways of getting Quinn to try new foods. The conversations were definitely enlightening to me. For tonight's dinner battle he did not try the piece of chicken that was on his plate, but he did eat a couple of crackers with cheese on them, and knew that it was cheese. Prior to this we had been getting cheese sticks from Papa Johns and telling him they were simply breadsticks and he would eat those. From that point of view, cheese crackers doesn't seem like a huge accomplishment, but having him *know* that it's cheese and still eat it is a huge thing around here. Since he was eating the cheese though, I let him slide on not having to eat the piece of chicken.

Having him eat that for dinner was great, but he had already eaten two cheese crackers at lunch. In fact, when I got home he was very excited and told me all about the cheese crackers he ate, and how they tasted kind of like Cheetos. Now you may be wondering what happened at lunch that caused the change. Evidently we were bribing him with the wrong stuff. Deserts, nope. Video games, tempting, but still no. Ginger apparently had an idea to let him pick out a game at the toy store. She the bought it and let him know she bought it, but didn't give it to him. And now he knows that once he tries 7 new things, he'll get the game. Of course, there was evidently some miscommunication about what constitutes seven 'new' things. For dinner he actually asked for five cheese crackers. At first we couldn't figure out why in the world he would want five cheese crackers (maybe he really did like them), but then during dinner he explained to us that once he ate all of those, he would have eaten seven new things (two for lunch and five for dinner, smart kid interpreting the requirements that way, he has a future as a project manager I suspect). I actually felt a little bad bursting his bubble and explaining that he was going to have to try seven different things to get the game. But he seemed okay with that once we explained it to him. He still wasn't motivated enough try a piece of the chicken at dinner though (I should explain that the child eats chicken nuggets with no problem, but any chicken that isn't breaded is basically a problem at this point). Still, it's the small victories that count and the cheese cracker is at least a step in the right direction.

Lastly tonight, I'll put up some pictures of some of the cards Ginger made for her stamping club thing she attended a couple weekends ago. I mentioned back when she attended I would put up pictures, but then forgot about it until now. Better late than never I suppose (depending on who you talk to anyway). The cards on the left are the ones that she made at the stamping party. The ones on the right are the ones she made at home and took to give out to other people.




I did blow ups of the ones she made and took to the party. They actually can be used as bookmarks by pulling out the middle. I did get into a bit of trouble for questioning at one point why the "snowman" had semi exposed boobies. I was later corrected (and I can see it now that it has been pointed out) that those are the snowman's arms. And let's not start in on the psychoanalysis of why I would see boobs on a Snowman. In my defense, there aren't many guys that could pull off that color combination.

Just Gimme The Cash

Today Ginger took the kids by the library to get some new books. I heard they also went by the grocery store (Giant) and had a horrible time checking out and eventually had to do the 'check yourself out' even though they had a ton of groceries since only one register was open and the line was really long (we've been getting spoiled by how good Wegman's is about stuff like that I guess). Seemed like everyone had a fun time. Which is really good, because once I got home tonight was a nightmare from dinner onward.

Since we've been basically making Quinn at least try something new at dinner, dinners have turned into the worst part of the day. The kid is stubborn, I'll give him that. He can sit at the dinner table for a full hour and a half refusing to eat something. Tonight's terrible new item, one spaghetti noodle. One! It's not like we rolled up a bunch on a fork, it was one noodle. You can't even taste one noodle. Dinner has turned into this maddening experience. It's like watching the six stages of grief as Quinn doesn't eat it (I say six and not seven because he won't always gets to that seventh stage of acceptance). Although he does them a bit out of order. Initially he starts with disbelief that we want him to try something new. This is before he's even sat down and he can just see the spaghetti noodle on his plate. Then he skips ahead to being angry about it. Once he's sitting down he's in denial that he's going to eat it (although since sometimes he never gets to that seventh stage and doesn't eat it after all that, is it really denial or simply determination and fortitude?). Next comes the guilt about how he's doesn't want to eat the spaghetti and he ate something new last week already. About 45 minutes later we start in on bargaining. He'll eat it tomorrow, he promises (yeah right). Or he'll eat the carrot stick instead (until you call his bluff, then it's "No, I don't want to eat the carrot stick"). From there we pick up speed and go straight downhill into full blown depression with him crying and trying anything to get out it.

This is really not fun. I'm hoping that since tonight he sat there the entire time until bedtime and didn't get to play or read books will help with later nights. He seemed more upset about missing out on playtime and books than he was about actually eating the spaghetti noodle (which he never ate, although strangely enough he did take a minuscule bite of the carrot stick eventually).

For my sake I hope he starts actually eating his new item each night soon. I would hate to think the only time I get to see him from here on out is dinner and we have to go through this every night. Just think Buddy, you have this to look forward to, hit the link and offer up some congratulations and let Buddy know what he's getting himself into.

But enough about Quinn not eating. Let's see, the motivational posters started a pretty fun game of everyone posting one. This may end up doing the same. I don't know all the details about how it arrives at it's number though. I suspect since it's using the Technorati's API it probably has something to do with how many links they know about to your blog from different sources. Anyway, it's amusing to me (and yes Curt, I know your blog and John's are both valued higher than mine). That said, where exactly do I go to cash this blog out and just get the cash?

My blog is worth $4,516.32.
How much is your blog worth?

Deep Thoughts On Supervising

The kids got up late today, and I got up even later. Ginger came in and told me we had 30 minutes before we had to leave for church, and I needed to get ready and no lollygagging. I rose in my half dead form from the bed, my eyes still adjusting and stumbled to the bathroom and thought to myself, why doesn't she want me to visit Buddy's blog?

For church Catherine wore her new dress. This is a dress that she picked out all by herself. When I asked who bought it she told me she did, with her own monies (and here I was unaware the child had the "monies"). In case you're wondering what's all over her arm, unfortunately that's her eczema (it's been pretty bad lately). After church we went to the mall briefly for Ginger to check out a piece of furniture at a store that's going out of business. I watched the kids in the play area while she went to check it out. I could kick myself, I left my camera out in the car. I could have gotten some nice shots of the kids playing (and bullying some of the other kids).

The rest of the day was non-eventful. We went home, Quinn and I played outside some, kids napped, Quinn and I played outside some more. Etc, etc. We had dinner out at Red Robin again tonight. That's our standard "no one feels like cooking let's go out" destination these days.

There was one amusing quote that Quinn provided me with today when we were outside. I was making him take the trash out to the curb (even though now he no longer likes doing it, I knew the fascination with that wouldn't last). As he was pulling the trash up the driveway he looked over at me and said "You're suppose to be helping."

I looked back at him and said "I'm supervising."

Without missing a beat, Quinn replied "Supervising is not helping!" Truer words were never spoken.

Lastly, I know this has been out there for a while now, but I've just gotten around to playing with it. Someone call off the alien invasion! I resisted the urge to link to Buddy and KennyG's pages with the dog choice.

The Day The Pool Post Died

So endeth the weekly pool posts. We didn't make it to the pool today. Sad sad news. Wish I could say we did something exciting today instead, but we really didn't. This afternoon I did take Quinn to the toy store while Ginger and Catherine were napping. He's convinced now after driving around in the battery powered car last weekend at Rob's that he needs to have one of those. Because of that, he spent like half an hour in the section with the battery powered cars (for some reason he spent most of his time in the corvette that had product placement stickers all over it so that it resembled something from NASCAR). He also has decided he wants a batting helmet. I managed to let him wander around the store for a while and escaped without actually buying anything. After that we went to the pet store and bought an irridescent shark (which is really just a catfish).

And I simply have to respond to Matt's comment from yesterday. I still can't believe he wrote all of that in a comment.

(probably biting off more than i can chew, given the author's creds)

I'm surprised you don't think Iron Man, Silver Surfer, and Namor aren't household names. The Silver Surfer was popular/obscure enough reference to use as spice in Crimson Tide and Ozzie used to sing about Iron Man.

... he's the personification of all that makes the American Dream something great.

That whole Truth: Red, White and Black thing put a stink on the American Dream part of Capt.

Heck, I'm really happy (and quite frankly surprised) they didn't choose Doctor Strange. I never understood why he seemed so popular (so long ago...)

I too would have selected Storm and/or Rogue rather than either of those two, although both of them being X-Men probably is pretty biased. Sue would have been a good choice also.

If it's really people from the Marvel world, I think it would have been cool had they used some choice villains, like the Red Skull, (you already mentioned) Galactus, Venom, or Doctor Doom.

It doesn't seem to me they're too driven by upcoming marketing, otherwise Johnny Blaze would have been a natural choice.

That's what I'm talking about! Someone else that gets it.

Awesome Matt.

In regards to Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Namor. I think they're ranked in that order as far as popularity. And Namor has never had what I would call a large following, even though he may be well known, he's not what I would call popular. I use my Mom as my benchmark of namebrand popularity. Ask my Mom who Spider-Man is, she would know. Ask her who Namor is, and I highly doubt she would know. Ask her about Silver Surfer and Iron Man, then you're getting into the maybe range.

Rogue would have made my list. But my list isn't normal. Rogue from back in the day when she had Ms Marvel's powers and memory was great. That crap that showed up in the X-Men films, which they eventually changed the comic character to mimic the films (because we wouldn't want new readers of the comic to get confused even though the comic is responsible for the movie), is crap though. So in her present form, Rogue doesn't get my vote. Rogue from the Claremont Golden years though, she's definitely in.

I still stand by my belief that Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) is the personification of the American Dream. Yea, the whole Red White and Blue makes the super soldier program look bad, but that was a program run by the government. Steve has never been a government lackey and does what he feels to be right. And I never got the impression that he knew about the previous experiments before they recently came to light (since they were retconned * in there for the rest of us also).

And I agree with your spot on assessment of Dr Strange. I mean what's up with all the fan service this guy gets? He had a couple of crappy TV movies in the 70s and I think has guest starred in Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends and in the newer Spider-Man animated series also. But why does he have such a following. He's got to be the hardest character to write. What problem is there that he can't solve by with the "Crimson Bands of Cyttorak". And let's not forget his awesome catch phrase: "By the hoary hosts of Haggoth". Trust me, that line kills with the ladies.

As for Blaze, I got the impression that Marvel choose their character by taking a popularity / power combination and whoever scored highest got in. Which would be why I think Thor isn't there (although it could be that Thor isn't exclusive to Marvel and the concept of Thor can be in any comic, but Marvel only owns a version of the likeness of the character). Along those same lines, Daredevil didn't get a stamp, and yet Elektra, which spins out of his story did.

Man, it's a good thing not a lot of people read the weekend posts. This is probably some boring stuff for 95% of you).

* Retcon stands for Retroactive Continuity, where the writer with a story in the present will introduce elements to change or rewrite the backstory from the past, there are small offenses (adding in a character responsible for the 'accident' that caused someone to get their powers) to large (we rewrote the history of the universe, all the old issues no longer apply).

This post probably won't be showing up when I wrote it. That would be because my garrulous post apparently filled up the server on blogger since I got this gem of an error message when I tried to post.

There were errors. (Hide details ...)
001 java.io.IOException: No space left on deviceblog/[snipped]/thefitzclan_archive.html

Marvel At The Newly Proposed Stamps

Remember a while back when we learned DC was going to have stamps come out with their heroes on them (I still never acquired a sheet of these, got to try and remember to do that at some point)? Well, turns out Marvel has decided they want in on some of that publicity action. So next year there will be a sheet of Marvel characters. What I found interesting was the list of characters that made the cut, and more importantly, the ones that didn't.

• Spider-Man
• The Incredible Hulk
• Captain America
• The Thing
• Iron Man
• Wolverine
• Silver Surfer
• Sub-Mariner
• Spider-Woman
• Elektra

Ok, Spider-Man is a no brainer. Arguably the most recognized hero on the planet, he makes sense. Almost the same deal for the Hulk (cue sappy sad music as you're walking away from the camera trying to hitch a ride). He's had a TV Show, a movie and a couple of animated cartoons as well as a video game or two. Captain America is an American icon, how could you not include him? The guy was fighting the Nazis in the 40s, he's the personification of all that makes the American Dream something great.

Now after that some of choices seem a little odd. The Thing? Sure, he's probably the most famous member of the Fantastic Four, but I would argue the Fantastic Four as a team is more popular. It would be like having a tribute to Davy Jones versus The Monkees (and here's where half the people reading this suddenly say "Who?" to both of those). Then we have Iron Man. Not exactly a house hold name, but he does have a movie in the works, so maybe they're trying to drum up support for that by making him appear to be a player. As for heroic, he's the billionare CEO of a corporation that makes military weapons. Next up there's Wolverine. Easily one of the most popular characters Marvel has, so you can see why he's there, but at the same time, not the best role model. This guy has probably killed more people than some of the so called supervillians he tries to stop.

From here the list gets even weirder and more obscure. There's the Silver Surfer. Sure, he appeared in an animated episode of the Fantastic Four back in the 60s, and he had an incredibly short lived animated show in the late nineties. However, he's not exactly a mainstream name. And let's see his backstory. Before he showed up on Earth he was the lackey of Galactus. You know Galactus, he's the guy nicknamed the "Devourer of Worlds" and "Eater of Planets". Norrin Radd used to guide Galactus to planets so Galactus could eat them. He's single handedly responsible for the destruction of literally billions upon billions of lives. But he's better now, really! Again, this could be movie related since the Surfer will be appearing in the next Fantastic Four movie.

Who do we have next? Sub-Mariner, a.k.a. the speedo king. This is a tough one, because like Captain America, he did help fight the Nazis. In fact, he even teamed up with Captain America (and the Human Torch, no not that Human Torch, the other one). But unlike Captain America, he wasn't doing it because it was the right thing to do, but the Nazis had pissed him off. Since then there have been numerous times where he has tried to invade and conquer the surface-dwellers (that's right, he looks down on us surface-dwellers, the guy's a total racist). Of course when he does invade, he is leading an army of water breathing people onto land to fight a ground war (not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed).

On to the tokens. Our first token character is Spider-Woman. Which Spider-Woman you say? Why the first (and once again current) one, of course. Other than she has breasts, I'm not exactly sure why Spider-Woman is in the list. Ok, granted, she had an animated TV series waaaay back in the day (which was only popular because practically half the episodes guest starred Spider-Man), but if anyone other than me remembers that, I would be amazed. Oh yea, let's not forget she was originally created by and was once a proud card carrying member of HYDRA (a Nazi type organization that gives you an organization you can still hate today and someone for the bad guys to fight). So to recap. Hero: Former terrorist turned hero. Obscure: Very much yes. Breasts: She's in. Seriously, I get the feeling they were hurting for female characters at this point.

And last, and I would say least, we have Elektra. Again, probably only here because 1) she's female and 2) starred in a movie. Other than that, not really the heroic type (she's a trained assassin for pete sake). She's another one of those characters that straddles the good guy / bad guy line. First she was bad, then good, then bad, etc. etc. Currently she's the head of "The Hand" (think HYDRA, but NINJAS!). Again, possibly not the most positive role model you could choose.

Notice anything about all these characters? They're all white (okay, okay, Surfer is shiny, but before he was the Surfer, he was a white alien guy). Where's the diversity? Where's the Power Man loving (wow, that sounds incredibly wrong when you read it)? Ok, they threw in a whopping two female characters. But seriously, for the female characters why couldn't they have gone with Storm and Invisible Woman? Both of those I believe have more mainstream recognition than Spider-Woman and Elektra. Plus if you have Storm, then you get the bonus of her being a minority also. Even She-Hulk would have been preferable to the choices they made. Heck I would have preferred Marvel Girl / Phoenix (although Phoenix did destroy a couple of suns instantly wiping out planets full of life, but hey, Silver Surfer made the list, so why not her). I could on, but I'll spare you. Actually, I can't go one for too much longer, Marvel doesn't really have a lot of mainstream female characters.

Hmmm, I appear to have gone on for quite a bit longer than I intended. And this isn't going to do anything towards getting rid of my image as being the comic book guy either.

Google Video Is Back Online

Seems like Google has their video upload service back online and was able to remove whatever gremlins were causing it problems. Google even processed the Barbie Brick video from a couple of nights ago, so now you can view it on YouTube or Google Video, your choice.

And here's a little Music Jam with Ginger and the kids. It's about two minutes long, but you're not going to see really anything new after the first 30 seconds or so.



Speaking of Ginger and the kids, they come back tomorrow, so that should be fun. I wonder if they'll nap on the way back? Hard to believe the kids start school in another couple of weeks. It really doesn't seem like they've been out that long. I can say that because I'm not the one that has to take care of them every single day while I go off to work. So I'm sure Ginger has a different opinion on the subject. I probably should try and take a day off and hang out with them before they head back.

One last question. Does anyone know of free software that will ghost an XP drive. I found a freeware tool that might work, but I can't tell if it only does sector copies (it does say byte-for-byte in addition to sector-for-sector, but I can tell if it would keep things bootability of the drive intact after a copy). The drive I want to copy from is 200 Gig and the drive I want to copy to is 250 Gig, so I doubt the sector / cylinder sizes are identical. This DrvClone looks good, but I was hoping someone else out there had used something and could point me to a tool they know is simple and robust.

Brick Background And Movies

First off a big shout out to my new stalker visitor. She's Trouble (seriously, that's her nickname). But after talking with her a bit yesterday, it occurred to me that people relatively new to the blog probably had no idea what was going on in the video from yesterday. So I figure a bit of background is in order.

At our house there was a brick in the backyard. Quinn would often run around to the back to check on the brick and see that it was still there. Scott made a comment about what a nice picture of the brick it was. So a couple days later when everyone but me went to Richmond, I posted a picture of the brick for Quinn. This elicited another comment, this time from John about how he was glad the brick was still there. Well, from there I decided to do a brick adventure with photos. I think around that time I also posted comments on Scott and Barry's blogs as if they came from the brick.

From there the next time everyone went to Richmond I realized I needed to do something with the brick, and decided to take it to the next level and have him star in a film. So to be honest, this time I was kind of hurting for something to do with the brick since where do you take it after the movie? So I decided to do another movie, and this time have some Barbies surrounding brick to show everyone he's a player. After emailing with Barry, I realized I really should have put some bling bling on the brick instead of just having him there in the middle of the screen. Bling would have been a good touch I think (hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz). Just having the brick and the dancing Barbies wouldn't have made much of a video, hence the addition of a new character at the end (one could say he was the break out character on the blog for this past month). And props to KennyG, since he provided me with the Barry White music (which I hear was in his CD player upstairs, hmmmm). And that pretty much brings us up to date. Now I have to start thinking about what I'm going to do the next time or whether I should just have the tradition end on this one.

I did hear from Ginger that Catherine apparently absolutely loved the latest brick video due to the inclusion of the Barbie / Princess dolls (evidently she watched it 28 times according to Ginger). So from that point of view, I'm glad it worked out since I think I managed to entertain the kids and everyone else. Oh yea, while I'm mentioning the people in Richmond, I'll send Happy Birthday wishes out to Grammy from everyone up here (that's just the brick and me at this point).

Since Ginger and the kids have been in Richmond, aside from the video, I haven't really accomplished much except watching TV / movies. I think I have less than 1 week of Daily Show / Colbert Reports now. And I'm current on all my other shows, and I've watched a ton of movies recently. Reviews of movies I've recently watched below, I will avoid spoilers or providing information about the movie where possible.

I watched Signs last week. It's another movie by M. Night Shyamalan. I'm conflicted about this movie. I don't want to spoil it, but there are aspects of the overall plot that just don't feel realistic. However, having said that, I did like the characters and the actual filming. The one thing I found refreshing about this was since it was a Shyamalan movie, I kept expecting the elephant in the room to not be an elephant in the room (let's face it, a lot of his movies rely on a twist ending). So from that point of view, I kept expecting a twist thinking the movie couldn't possibly go where it appeared to be heading, but then there it went. The ending / resolution of the 'crisis' is incredibly contrived and completely unrealistic (although there's not much about the crisis that really seemed realistic except for perhaps the media aspect of it). Discounting the plot point aspect, I actually liked the movie. And there were a lot of little comedy relief type scenes that helped the movie (which I'm not positive those scenes were intended as comic relief scenes, but they work).

Next up, Ultraviolet. My feeling after watching this was "I was robbed." The trailers make it look like this cool Matrix type movie. There are a lot of attempts at Matrix type scenes, but they never seem to come across as being well done. From the intro they really want you to believe that this was somehow inspired from a manga or comic book, but to my knowledge it isn't based on anything of the sort (and I would know). It feels like a futuristic Sin City since it's obvious just about everything is green screened. Colors are over accentuated and soft focus on up close shots seem to be used a lot. However, unlike Sin City, this movie isn't good. It's just bad. The movie tries to live on special effects alone, but they're not well done or just plain stupid. You can't even get a feel for suspense since in the movie since every time we think there's a problem they introduce a new technology that you've never heard of (flat space, gravity leveler) to allow an escape. And the scene that wins for sheer stupidity is where they surround a person inside of a circle with everyone in the circle pointing a gun at the center. That's just tactical incompetence in action. These are just my opinions, but before you watch this, think of the children.

After that I watched a movie with Ginger (one from her Netflix queue) called Rumor Has It.... In this movie Jennifer Aniston plays a character who learns her family may have been the inspiration for The Graduate. To be honest, I'm not sure how to classify this movie. Comedy? Maybe, the majority of the laugh out loud lines were uttered by the character playing Jennifer's fiance in the movie. Possibly it's a drama? I don't know. It's a Rob Reiner film, so it's executed well and the dialogue is crisp and sharp. I really liked the first 45 minutes, then for the next half hour the movie went off into la la land for a while. It eventually returns to reality and finishes up with an ending I didn't particularly like. Overall, a fun movie though despite the fact that it has Kevin Costner in it.

At this point I needed to whet my animated appetite and I got Steamboy. I got this based on a recommendation by a friend at work (who, in their defense, hadn't seen it, but thought it looked good). It's suppose to have occurred in the 1860s, so all the technology is ancient in today's terms, but way too advanced for anything that from that timeframe. Didn't really like this movie. I can't fault the art. The art is very nice and well done. The story, well, that I didn't care for as much. It feels like ultimately the message for the movie is 'technology is a tool and whether it's good or bad depends on how it gets used'. This is underscored by they fact that there are two factions competing to show one another up using technology which eventually just devolves into all out war with the city they're in paying the price for their hubris.

Finally, tonight I watched MirrorMask. Now this was a fun movie. In the first fifteen minutes or so I didn't think I was going to like it due to the obvious low production budget, but that changes pretty quick. I shouldn't be surprised I liked it. The story and screenplay were written by Neil Gaiman, who is a fairly famous author and has written one of the better received literary comic books called Sandman (a book about Dream, one of the seven Endless). This is the story of a teenage girl (Helena) on a trip through a fantasy realm. To elaborate, this fantasy realm doesn't have Elves and Orcs, but rather flying books, cats with human faces and flying fish. I can't really describe much more of it without giving away some plot points, so I won't. I will say this movie (in my opinion) is worth watching. In fact, I may even try and buy it at some point in the future. This movie is obviously a green screen movie, but here the plot, dialogue and characters drive the movie instead of the special effects, and the CGI is there to augment the story and provide a look at the bizarre land in which Helena finds herself.

You Know You Love Him

This would have been posted sooner, but Google's instant upload wasn't so instant last night. After I uploaded it I got told further processing needed to be done before it would go live (and that it could be a while). I did some more investigating and found Google Video appears to be having upload problems on their backend:

There's going to be some scheduled maintenance starting Wednesday morning at 4 AM PST. New uploads and updates to the index will be disabled during this time. This means deletions and metadata changes won't be happening.

You'll also probably notice that the web-based uploader will not give a "live" page right away starting about now. We're doing our best to ensure that any videos already uploaded will go live, but you might have to wait a few days.

The homepage will still be live, and you can still watch your favorite videos in the meantime. We anticipate that everything will be back up and running by Thursday morning.

I'll post here again when things are back to normal, or if there are any more updates. Thanks for your patience everyone!

Well, something must be seriously wrong, because it was well before 4 AM PST when I tried to upload my video and it didn't go live. After searching some more I found this new gem had been posted on top of the "How long does video processing take" page.

Hello Google Video enthusiasts! Google Video will have scheduled maintenance starting Tuesday night, August 22nd, at 5 PM PST. During this time, it won't be possible to upload or delete videos or change metadata. You should be able to upload, delete and edit again by Thursday morning, August 24th. We apologize for any inconvenience.

YouTube is starting to look good in the meantime. So after a lot longer than I would have liked we're here! Finally! Brick is back! Plus there's a surprise guest appearance near the end.

Deer JamesF...

Ginger and the kids took off today and went to visit in Richmond for a few days, so I'm flying solo here. If nothing else this should allow me to catch up on the three weeks of Daily Show / Colbert Reports I have on the TiVo that I need to watch.

The deer in the backyard were back again tonight. So I went out and tried to get pictures. If you'll remember this is basically the same area where I tried taking pictures of Quinn not too long ago and couldn't get the lighting right. And no real surprise, but nothing seems to have changed since that attempt at taking pictures of Quinn and now. My big telephoto lens blows complete and utter chunks in low light situations.

There was a male and female that I could see. The male stayed very deep in the woods and seemed really skittish, but the female wasn't as paranoid and got pretty close. Didn't matter. The camera just did not want to take a decent shot with the low level light conditions in the woods. I'm thinking the problem is I used the my biggest telephoto lens at maximum zoom (max zoom is 200mm, so 300mm with the digital crop factor). That lens also just happens to have the worst F-Stop range on it (and the F-Stop gets worse as the zoom increases). I tried everything I could think of with it though. I dialed the film speed up to 1600, but even then the shutter was staying open way too long to get even a remotely decent hand held shot. So finally I manually set the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second. The picture took, but it was a really dark shot and you could only barely see outlines of stuff. I tried using Picasa to fill in the light, and what I got from that is what you see below. Nothing good, that's for sure. I can't tell if the graniness comes from the high film speed or the amount of filled in lighting though Picasa. Next time I'm going to take the 50mm lens out since it can go down to an F-Stop of 1.4, and I'll just have to crop the heck out of the shot.

Away Game

The kids were up and going by eight thirty this morning. We just barely got everyone ready in time for church. After that we came home and had some lunch. At this point the kids seemed to be on edge as little things were setting them both off. We decided that they would both go and nap immediately after lunch, but then not ten minutes later the phone rang and it was Rob inviting the kids to come over and play for the afternoon. So we decided, what the heck, we would go even though the kids were exhausted. They were pretty excited about being able to go to someone else's house, so based on that I figured they would get their second wind. And that's more or less exactly what happened.

They both were well behaved (mostly) while they were there and they seemed to have a really fun time. Quinn and Catherine both enjoyed the playset they have in their backyard, but they didn't play on that for too long. Soon Catherine decided she wanted to go inside and play, but Quinn just wanted to stay outside and drive the mini electric car they have (hot pink I might add, with the license plate "Pretty Girl" also). It probably goes somewhere between two to four miles per hour, but Quinn just loved driving it up and down the driveway. Ignore the fact that technically it was too small for him, that didn't stop him in the slightest. I think he just about drained the battery in it from driving it so much before we left. And if he wasn't driving it, he was directing whoever was driving it, while pretending to be their pit crew.

Night Of The Living Pool Post

It's Saturday, and you know what that means! Nope, not cartoons (although good guess, but really there hasn't been a decent Saturday morning cartoon since X-Men: Evolution went off the air). Around these parts Saturday means it's pool post day.

Ginger had a stamping party to attend today, so I took the kids to the pool. I'm sorry to report there will be no noodle pictures today (I know, you're heartbroken, and after they were so popular last week too). Since I was soloing with the kids, it was inevitable that I botched a couple of things. Last week when we went, we didn't put suntan lotion on Quinn since he's already so tan, and I thought that applied to this week also. The reason we didn't do it last week though was we didn't go to the pool until much later in the day. So Quinn got a little red. Along those same lines, I only put lotion on Catherine's face and shoulders and she ended up getting a bit red on her arms. I can't tell if they're actually burned, but if they are, it's my fault. Anyway, on to the pictures. Since I was the only parental unit there today, there aren't a lot of pictures (I can hear the sighs of relief from the crowd).








Quinn has continued to use his camera. Today he's found the video setting. He's been making videos all day long (already filled the memory card twice). The camera he has uses two AA batteries, and the LCD must just suck the juice right out of them. Since Quinn uses the LCD as he takes the video, and again when he watches them (multiple times I might add), he has been burning through batteries. Between his photos last night and the videos today he's on his third set of batteries. If we're going to have him continue this hobby, we may need to reinvest in some rechargable batteries. To give you a sense of a Quinn movie, I uploaded one of his clearer ones (trust me, several seconds focused on one subject for him is as laid back as he gets).



From the sound of things Ginger had a pretty good time at the stamping event. She won a hostess prize or something and got a ton of free stuff (and most people know my philosophy, free is good). I'll try and include pictures of the cards she made for the event tomorrow. Once Ginger got back home we had the kids nap for a bit. For dinner we went out to eat at Red Robin. The kids were a bit disappointed. Usually when we go to Red Robin, they have the Cartoon Network on the TVs and Tom & Jerry is playing. Tonight though they were showing a Redskins game on almost all the TVs (I had no idea Football season had started already, as you can tell, I follow this stuff closely).

The World According To Quinn

Quinn has decided he wants to have pictures he took up on the blog. He also has decided he wants one of the 'buttons' that lets you take the pictures for his camera. After he talked a little more it soon became obvious he was talking about a remote like I have for my camera. I explained that I didn't know if his camera even had the remote as an option, but that he could use the timer mode. After showing him how to set the camera in timer mode (apparently with his camera you have to reset the mode after every picture) he was off and taking pictures around the house (hardest problem he had was where he was going to set the camera, oh, did I mention he decided he wants a tripod also?). Believe or not, the timer mode has actually improved his picture taking since now he's not shaking the camera around as he's taking the picture (his camera has one of those long delays between taking pressing the button and taking the picture, so I think that's been hampering him some). The only problem so far has been the focus. I'm not sure when his camera decides to focus, whether it's when the button is pressed or when the picture is taken. Since he's posing himself and others in the picture, if it's when the button is pressed, sometimes no one is in the shot at that point and that might account for some of the blurring (or it could be his camera since it was really cheap and only cost $50 (but he loves it). Guess I could have fixed the red eye in some of the shots, but I didn't think of that till I had already uploaded the pictures.

The Cotton Candy's Gone!

I had lunch with KennyG today. We ate the Mongolian place up near where he works. His new and our former co-worker Ken joined him as well. For me, any excuse to go there is a good one.

I see over on Scott's page that Blogger has some new interface out. Like everything associated with Google (Google owns blogger) it's currently in beta. Took me a long time to figure out what was going on since I never saw the option to try out the beta interface. So I fired up GTalk and asked Barry what was going on. After we swapped screenshots back and forth for a bit (which let me just interject that the new feature in GTalk for image / file passing that they just recently added is so very very cool) I finally figured out I'm apparently not eligible. Seems you can't test out the beta interface if you are a member of a team blog. And since I'm on the team that does the Stranger's blog I don't qualify. And they've got special code that doesn't even display the beta option if they can determine you're not eligible. Now that I think about it I've been pretty negligent about posting anything new to the Strangers blog recently, maybe I'll scan through my stuff and see if I have anything I can put up. As for the new Blogger interface I'm guessing it has something to do with switching the underlying format of the blog and since not all team members may switch at the same time, they just disallowed anyone on a team from switching. Basically it sounds as if the server and client pieces need to change in lockstep, which makes me wonder how they're ever going to switch the rest of us over eventually (my guess is things will go down at some point and time in the future for maintenance and when it comes back up, everyone will be using the new interface by default).

Today continued the streak of us trying to get Quinn to eat something new. He apparently picked out a frozen dinner he wanted to try at the store. He picked a corn dog meal and Catherine picked out a chicken meal with a drumstick. After Quinn didn't eat anything except for the bread around the hot dog it evidently turned into a stand-off between him and Ginger. I hear it lasted almost two hours before he finally tried it and then threw up. Later after I got home I was able to get him to at least bite into an orange slice tonight. For those that wonder how Catherine did, she evidently ate most of her's (eating fried chicken is a new thing for her).

Oh, one other piece of news. Quinn has decided he doesn't want to be called Quinn anymore and wants to start going by a different name. He even told the cashier at the grocery store today. It'll be interesting to see how long that one lasts. Thing is, I think I did the same thing when I was close to his age (a couple years older actually). Back then everyone was calling me Jamie, but I think I decided around that time frame that I wanted to be called James instead. If you're wondering why I decided on the name change, I would love to be able to say it's because I was asserting my independence, but really it was in large part because of all the teasing I took due to the Bionic Woman having the name Jamie also.

And to round out the evening tonight I've got a mini movie of Catherine from dinner a couple of weeks ago. This was filmed when Quinn was down in Richmond, so it was just the three of us here. Catherine had just finished her dinner and was having some cotton candy as a treat. Not much here since it's straight film with no scene switches or any special effects. This was more to show how trusting my little girl can be. Clocks in a little over two minutes.

Let's All Go To The Movies...

Before I start in on the movie reviews. I wanted to let people know that last week's episode of Blade (which was a semi flashback episode to Blade's childhood and was really well done) has been made available for free on iTunes. So grab it if you are so inclined and have the time to check it out. From what I've heard Spike is interested in another 13 episodes of the series, so it sounds like there will probably be a season 2. And with that let's move on to the movie reviews. As always, I will do my best to judge the movies without giving away too much about the movie itself in the way of spoilers.

Yours Mine and Ours: We are initially introduced to two families of 8 and 10 kids respectively each being raised by single parents. It just so happens these parents used to be high school sweethearts and after seeing each other again for the first time in years at a high school reunion decided to get hitched and crazy hijinks ensue. Don't worry, there's too much potential fun of 18 kids living together to be bothered with courting and an actual wedding. That all apparently takes place in two hours off screen. This movie was terrible. I hated it. It was corny, predictable, formulaic and the kids acting in it were pretty bad too. Watching it was horrible. The only thing that remotely redeemed the experience was I was watching it with Ginger. So of course my Mom and Ginger both thought the movie okay.

Appleseed: This anime was pretty good. The initial 8 minutes makes it worth the cost of admission. The art is a combination of CGI and animation with cell shading. The story is entertaining enough and the plot takes some unique turns. Unfortunately the ending doesn't end so much as wrap up. And then there is a critical action scene at the end left completely unexplained. All in all a better than average anime film if you can get past everyone saying the main character's name all the time (although that's a 'feature' in just about any anime I've seen).

The 40 Year Old Virgin: I thought this was an extremely funny movie. I laughed more during this than I have watching any movie I can think of in the past couple of years (I should note though that I don't go see a lot of comedies these days, so that could be the reason). Much like the above movie though, Ginger and I had different opinions on this one also. While I was laughing throughout the movie I think she barely cracked a smile throughout the whole movie. The only thing I think she did find amusing was the number of similarities between the main character and myself (since there were numerous comic book references, action figure collections and video games). We got the extended edition, and I can see how even though it was all amusing, it did run a tad long at two hours and fifteen minutes. It's definitely a guy comedy movie and can be a bit raw in places (at least it seemed that way at our house).

King Kong: This would be the newer one by Peter Jackson. Even after watching this one I'm unsure about it. It's long. I mean really long. It clocks in at three hours and fifteen minutes. And it's well done visually and there are a lot of action sequences. The movie isn't without it's issues though. The biggest problem I think the movie has to overcome is the story. And you may be saying the story is a classic. And that's true, but that's also part of the problem. You know the story going in. There may be a tweak here and there with a character, but for the most part it's the same story you know which I think detracts from the viewing. And that's not to say the updated story itself doesn't have problems. Like how exactly did they get Kong from the island to the boat? And where on the boat exactly did they put him once they got him to the boat (don't worry, those 'details' are left out and you need not concern yourself with these issues)? Then near the end when Kong is loose in NY the military decides to go to defcon 5 with no concern for any civilians as they're firing mortars throughout the city (I guess caring about civilian casualties is only a recent thing with the military). Overall I didn't like it that much simply because it was too much. It would fall into my "Meh" Netflix rating if such a thing existed. I'm not disappointed I watched it, but I won't be watching it again (nor is it a movie that I would stop and watch were I to find it on TV).


And now for no reason at all, a picture of Catherine wearing a hat.

I'm Flattered

Ginger apparently really liked some of the photos I've taken and has ordered 11x14 versions of them to hang up in the house. I must say it's very flattering. They're the ones sitting on the mantle (not the one that's hanging though). I'm fairly certain I've posted all those pictures on the blog at some point in the past.


So tonight when I got home I decided to put my theory of being able to take pictures as good as the ones from the Picture People to the test. I grabbed Quinn (Catherine was still asleep when I got home) and headed out into the backyard. And here's what I've learned. I may be able to take pictures that good under the correct conditions. Sadly, it would appear I lack the proper lighting equipment to take photos in a wooded area. If I used the flash (even with the diffuser) it would over accentuate the subject and the background would be thrown into almost complete darkness. The flash would also create some pretty harsh shadows on the subject that I didn't really like. And since I was outside, I wasn't able to bounce the light from the flash off a wall or the ceiling. And if I didn't use the flash there just wasn't enough light to take a decent photo. I mucked with a couple of the photos in Picasa and went heavy on the "Fill Light" option and got a couple that look okay, but nothing spectacular. Anyway, looks like I'm not giving up my day job anytime soon.



I've finished watching season three of 24. What a complete load of crap. I can't believe how bad season three was compared to how good the previous seasons were. I was just going to give up on the whole series at this point, but Barry has convinced me that season four is better than three. I'm guessing that three may have been okay to watch over the course of a year, but when you watch it all in one sitting you can see the utter chaos that was going on. Plot lines would come in, play for maybe 4 to 6 episodes and then they would be gone, never to be heard from again. And the whole sidebar plot line with the President was complete crap. I mean, that whole plot line had absolutely nothing to do with the 'threat'. It was like that whole aspect of it was just filler. At least in season two all the plot lines were connected. I take that back, I had forgotten that in season two the scenes with Kim in them were worthless (oh look, she's running again). So is Barry right? Does season 4 get better? I'm going to take a break from the series for a while no matter what and just crank through some movies that are in my Netflix queue since that's been filling up lately. Mind you, the standard for what constitutes a full queue apparently varies. I think mine if getting full and I only have like 30 things in my queue. It's nothing like Curt's (Cheryl's?) queue with 209 movies.

Like Rain On Your Wedding Day

So I had a mini milestone over the weekend on Google Video. I had a video that actually broke 1000 views. What I don't understand is why. It's not even one I posted here (at least I don't think I did). It's a video of Quinn dancing to some video game music when he was like one and a half. I mean, I know it's bad. I've even had some people give it the 1 star rating. And yet, people apparently keep clicking on it.

Not much to report from the homestead tonight. Catherine is eating oranges again. That's kind of new. Last year there was one day at school that Catherine tried some orange slices and liked them. Then after that day whenever we tried to give her orange slices, she wouldn't eat them. And now we've come full circle and after this past weekend she's eating them again (and I mean really eating them, to the point where she's asking for them at every meal). I even managed to get Quinn to drink a bit of the juice from one. It wasn't much, maybe a quarter of a teaspoon worth of liquid, but it felt like a big accomplishment.


So I don't really want to get too political on this blog since I know I have some people reading that are pretty far to the right (Hi Mom) and some people on the other side as well. But as I was driving home tonight listening to the news I heard some excerpts from Bush talking about the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbolla in light of the recently UN brokered cease fire. And it just floors me to hear him say some of the stuff he does. In this case, I actually agreed with what he said. The problem being that coming from him it sounded so hypocritical. Anyway, I decided to make a motivational poster about it. But I wasn't able to find a high rez photo of the image I wanted, so it ended up looking like crap. That of course didn't prevent me from putting it up anyway.


Technically I don't even think that falls under the strict definition for the word irony. I'm guessing it probably doesn't and I should have gone with "hypocritical" instead, but for some reason that seemed to be making more of a statement than trying to show something humorous.

Picture Sitting

Today after church we had an appointment at the Picture People to have photos of the kids taken. It could have gone better. We got there and Quinn didn't have a pair of shoes except for his flip-flops (why that was the case is a long story all by itself). And let me just say, in semi formal pictures, flip-flops isn't what you want to see. So we had him lose the shoes, but then the barefoot look for him and shoes for Catherine look really contrasted.

The person doing the pictures lacked something (let's call it enthusiasm). In her defense she was having to work with our two children, both of whom have minds of their own and don't like doing what they're told. As the picture sitting went on, the kids were less and less cooperative. Eventually we did get through it, and we got some pictures that aren't too bad. I might be cocky, but I think I've taken some pictures that were at least as good as some of the ones I saw from them. With the proper backgrounds, and some fancy multiple diffuser / flashes, and I think I could do this stuff. Also, at the end of the session, I actually suggested taking a couple more shots and suggested a pose. One of the shots with the pose I picked I think turned out to be a pretty good shot (number 22). However, the other one ended up looking like Quinn is groping Catherine (number 23), so I'm not perfect at this. I've included some of the shots below. We don't have access to the bigger versions obviously. Aside: I tried laying out the pics within the post, but the layout just nuts. So I just moved all the pictures to the end. Aside 2: Okay, I tried, I really did. I tried using the left and right alignment and getting more than 1 pic per line, but in IE the layout was completely hosed and would end up pushing the right hand links off to the bottom of the page. So I apologize in advance, but all the pics are centered now and in a line down the middle at the end of the post. I suck at this blogging stuff. How the heck does Scott manage to get three and four pics on a row sometimes.

We now return the regularly scheduled blog entry already in progress: After that we went by Jacque Pené and got some bath stuff and while we were there we looked for some clothes for the kids. Man was that ever a mistake. The sale racks are just in chaos, pure and simple. Then once we had stuff we wanted to buy, the checkout area we were at with 2 registers was horrible. Apparently there was some customer questioning the price on some items and they were going through their entire sales receipt item by excruciating item. And then to make matters worse, people at the end of the line decided to leave the one line leading the both registers and basically butted up front and created two lines. The complete rudeness of some people continues to astonish me. I can't even begin to think under what circumstances that type of behavior would be acceptable (ok, dying and checking into a hospital.... maybe). I will take part of the blame for the register fiasco though, since I had suggested going to a different checkout area within the store (which I think would have alleviated the problem), but didn't press the issue hard enough.

Finally after all that we managed to get back home. We let Quinn play outside with Nana some and Ginger and I took Catherine to PetsMart and let her get two new female sailfin mollies for our tank. The female molly we had in there before (remember, she had been sick for a while) was belly up this morning. Hopefully these new ones adjust and last for a while.