Here and There Blog

This has just been the busiest office day ever! It all started with my paranoia of flat tires. I get a lot of them which is why I'm paranoid. In Yucca Valley there was all this debris in the road that unless you wanted to get smashed by oncoming traffic, the car was going to run over the construction mishap. This was on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning I was so worried that of course the tires looked flat and I was getting myself all dirty by checking the pressure over and over. Being in a hotel parking lot and on my last change of clothes, I didn't look to professional for the rest of the day. But no flat tires. Then this morning I couldn't take it any more. I was at Chevron and I really thought the darn things were low. I ended up taking it to Firestone as it was due for the 55k service anyhow and then I had to walk the 2.25 miles home. (all uphill) While I actually had lots of office work to do, I was distracted by the fact that I still had no fax line and ...

This is my friend Reeses. He belongs to Roy and is a good pet. 

48 hours and 500 miles later I'm back home. So much has happened in the last two days. SpaceShipOne made it's second successful flight, there was a 6.0 earthquake in Central CA, followed by plenty of aftershocks, Mt. St. Helens is probably going to erupt, and I held a small child's pet rat! It just goes to prove that anything can happen. Aussie Mac has returned from Australia so we had a reunion in Temecula tonight (home of earlier mentioned rat) and of course we drank some fine Aussie wine. While I was out I see that FedEx, SBC, and SBC specialty services all stopped by so I have a lot to do tomorrow. If only the phone company would replace the slowly disintegrating phone lines then they wouldn't have to stop by every month! So go figure both the Dodgers and Angels did well last night while the Padres are still struggling for that Wild Card spot. Enough for now, it's time to sleep.

I'm off for a "desert run" my bi-weekly trip to the greater Palm Springs/Desert area so I'll be out of touch for a couple of days. I'll leave you with baseball thoughts: #1 - Go Red Sox! #2 - Padres are still 3 games back in the NL West and need to win the next four to get the Wild Card. Possible, but improbable but Go Padres!

Now that I've had time to watch the trilogy on DVD I have to say I'm glad I have them but.... The digital clarity of the prints are excellent and the sound has been enhanced so I can understand all the conversation now. All the background noise is very clear but at the expense of the music. John Williams' score for SW was one of the finest pieces of movie music and adds so much to the movies but now it's an afterthought. I liked some of the color changes and disliked others. Why did it get so dark and stormy on Bespin for no reason? I don't like Greedo shooting first and the newer, fatter Jabba is just as annoying. Get rid of that scene! I was okay with the added dialouge in Empire although many people hated it. As far as the end of Jedi, it's only a very small Jar Jar and if you blink you miss him. It's hard to make Jedi worse so I'll consider it a draw. As far as the newer, younger Anakin at the end of Jedi, well Lucas has a lot of storyte...

If you're a fan of the romantic comedy zombie genre, then "Shaun of the Dead" is for you! It's quite possibly one of the finest zombie movies ever made or at least in the top 5! Shaun is a slacker Brit who just can't get out of the pub and take his girl out for a nice dinner. He's a disappointment to his Mum but he means well. When the zombies arrive, Shaun sets out to rescue his Mum and his girl. The story is well written and has heart, sad moments and laugh out loud moments. The zombies are neighbors and friends but even as they're killed the humor is there. At the end we even have a measure of resolution which is uncommon in zombie movies. Let's face it - this was a sucky weekend for new releases. If you like horror, SF, or the genre in general do yourself a favor and seek out "Shaun of the Dead."

Finally a relaxing day! Wonderful Saturday has arrived! Mondo, Ms. Kitty and I did the morning beach walk and got our daily exercise. The key point of exercise is to be able to eat more, so for today's lunch we decided to try the new Portuguese restaurant in OB. We wandered in and found the lunch prices reasonable, the decor inviting and the crowd non-existent. So far, so good. The waitress recommended the tuna steak or cod sandwiches. Mondo as usual stuck with beef, (good call) and I tried the tuna. I took a bite and yuck! I had to spit it out! It was a really poor quality probably old piece of tuna. The waitress seemed confused as to what to do or say, so I assume that my comments were disregarded. The owner didn't come over and they all just sort of stared at my plate of uneaten food as we left. Strange. Well in fairness the other two sandwiches weres good and the other diners appeared happy. Still, you just never know when you're serving someone food safe...

Due to the late arrival time back home I won't be making it to the San Diego Beer Fest tonight. I guess it's just as well since the Padres are playing and the trolley parking lots are full. I survived the training and passed the test and I can relax again. I did swing by Wal-Mart and I have the SW Trilogy at last! Tonight I'll start on ANH. Movie reminder for you all: "Shaun of the Dead" opened today so Zombie lovers rejoice! That seems like a good Sunday movie to me.

I made a brief escape from the training to attend the Anaheim/Seattle game!  My hotel is across the street from the ballpark and I had tickets waiting at will call.  My intended partners in crime ditched me because they wanted to study!  How unacceptable!  Luckily I convinced another trainee/prisoner to join me and we made a run for it.  As we walked to the stadium we took a wrong turn and found ourselves faced with a minor wall to jump.  We saw a couple with an infant jumping the fence so we decided to go for it ourselves.  It turns out that Andy and Kate were on vacation from Australia and had never been to an American baseball game.  They asked about ticket prices and where to sit.  What luck!  I still had two tickets to spare so I brought them along.  It turned out to be fun and they fit in just fine with the group that was waiting for us.  Too bad the Angels sucked so badly.  At 7-1 Seattle, I'm just waiting for the...

It is a sad day today. I am in an intensive training class all week, basically in hotel lock-down and not able to get to Wal-Mart to buy the SW Trilogy DVD set today! I can't even watch the end of Amish in the City or TAR but I have those TiVo'd. Mondo - we'll update TAR on Saturday after I have a chance to watch it and read the boards!

This is a tough review to write because by all means, I should have loved "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." After all, I'm a huge SF fan, love sytlized work, and Jude Law. The movie just didn't live up to my expectations. I understand what they were going for - a tribute to the old Buck Rogers serials where the good guys win, bad guys lose, and all the good guys are wonderful citizens of Earth. The problem was, there was no suspense. The outcome of the movie is predetermined so the story is in the telling. This is where the movie didn't work. Jude Law was great as Sky Captain but Gwenyth Paltrow jsut sort of stood there and recited her lines. There was no chemistry and they were a worthless couple. Call it petty bickering or clever bantering, it was just annoying. Angelina Jolie was great but hardly in the movie. In fact, I think the two female leads should have been reversed. Anyhow, the CGI and the look of the movie is beautiful. The ro...

I've just returned from a weekend stay in the Palm Springs area and I'm so happy to be back to beach weather! As usual it was hot and dry out in the desert. I was at the Miramonte Resort with a group of friends for a weekend of fun and scrapbooking! I finally put my Australia photos in an album, did major swimming in the pool, and generally relaxed the entire time. There was even time for beer! The sacrifice was that I still haven't seen Sky Captain and I need to head on over to the secret theater in about 75 minutes. It was such a good weekend I'm already looking forward to Friday. After all - "Shaun of the Dead" opens on the 24th. The SD Festival of Beers is also on the 24th. Another great weekend awaits!

On Oct. 9th we'll all have to watch Zero Gravity Corps' inaugural commercial flight to see my friend Mark deal with space sickness in front of the world! Mark is lucky enough to be one of 27 people chosen to participate in the first simulated space flight on a modified Boeing 727. During the 90 minute flight there will periods of weightlessness induced by steep dives and climbs in altitude. Read here for more of Mark's 15 minutes: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/bell/20040916-9999-7m16bell.html

This one's for the Heavy Metal fans. Today I met the bassist of Modessa, a local metal band here in San Diego. Sal is extremely enthusiastic about the band and gave me a copy of their 6 song ep - "Of Gods And Monsters." While I'm not a huge metal fan I do like movies and since two other songs titles were "Frankenstein" and "The Bride of Frankenstein" I knew I had to give the cd a try. I was happy to discover that this band is quite talented and has plenty of potential. The music slightly reminds me of Metallica (that's a good thing) but the lyrics all belong to Modessa. (also a good thing) Metal fans in San Diego are probably well acquainted with Dream Street in OB and that's where Modessa's next gig will be. You can check them out live on Thursday, Sept. 20th. For more information go to: http://www.geocities.com/modessa666/home.html In addition to good music, they have a darn good web page. Enjoy. Parental warnings ...

In preparation for the November Star Trek cruise, I've decided to re-watch old episodes of Classic Trek. I've really fallen off the wagon when it comes to my geek factor so it's time to get back into it. This is good and bad. It's been a long time since I've watched Trek so it's fun remembering episodes that I like. The bad is that some of the episodes are really horrible ("And the Children Shall Lead") and I've felt obligated to watch them anyhow. It's all random based on what the SciFi channel is showing. TiVo taped 7 episodes for me today, so Trek Fest awaits!

Cross-blogging really does work! Homer, Sandi, and I just linked our blogs and I've already seen an increase in blog surfers to my site. I assume it's the same for them. Thank-you to all new visitors for stopping by! Sadly another work week has begun, just when it finally got nice again at the beach. Luckily we have new Survivor this week (Yea!) and we're almost done with TAR. I guess I should add reality junkie to my profile. A friend said THX 1138 was much better on the big screen and with the new edits. I'll still take a pass on it. Sky Captain starts this week and that should be way cooler!

It was a pretty lazy Sunday here in Carlsbad. I started out with the usual beach walk to get my exercise in before the crowds arrived. Then I meant to watch both the Chargers & Padres games but somehow I ended up working and next thing I knew it was 3:00 pm. Ugh! Wasting a perfectly good day doing actual work! I decided to break up the day by checking out a movie at the Carlsbad Film Fest. Today was documentary day with the main theme on the Middle East, so I decided to watch "No Excuses - A season with the U.S disabled ski team." At least I might see some good skiing with this one. I couldn't find the web site for the movie and no film maker was present for the screening but at 74 minutes, I could deal with anything. It played like part home movie, part wanna-be inspirational, and a tiny part about actual competitive skiing. We followed along with the athletes from the U.S. disabled ski team. Sometimes the movie focused on world competition but most of ...

I've just returned from the "Replay" screening at the Carlsbad Film Fest. First up, we had a 14 minute short "Birdhouses." I'm not a fan of shorts so 14 minutes felt like forever. Enough said, I'm sure it was good as far as shorts go. On to the feature. "Replay" is for people who liked "Memento" or old Perry Mason shows. If you 're fans of crime novels, then this is your movie. Producer David Butler was there to present the movie (always a nice touch) and gave us the background that it was shot in 4.5 days with 17 pages of film script. The rest of the movie was the voice-over of detectives, documenting the evidence of a crime. The big challenge of the movie was setting up the 21 camera angles that the detectives would watch to eventually solve the who-dunnit aspect of the movie. Good techincal film-making but I was bored. Sorry guys. Others in the audience really enjoyed the movie so I might be in the minority. ...

This week I'm passing on Friday night movies. The new releases are slim pickings (contrary to belief, I don't see every piece of crap out there) and even though I know THX has made it back to the big screen I can't find enought Lucas loyalty in my body to go see it. Let's face it, THX really is a boring movie and all the sfx gloss in the world can't change that. It's just more fun to look for the 1138 in Lucas's movies than to watch the original source. It's that time of year again for the Carlsbad Film Fest and on Saturday the plan is to go see "Replay" and just hope it's a good movie. Interested parties can find out more at: http://www.independentfilmsociety.org/index.html#filmfest Cheers. Enjoy your Friday night!

Oh Happy Day! I've learned how to add links to my Blog! Most of you have read Homer's comments. Homer is my brother and you can view his site at Life of Keith. My friend Sandi has a most unusual life and I know you'll be fascinated by her daily adventures. Check out A Family Like Ours. Movie lovers can check out the official site for Binary Film's "The Five Stages of Beer."

At long last I finally have my dates for next year's big trip! Yes, that great Star Trek cruise group is going to the Baltic Sea in 2005 from June 30 to July 10! It will be Happy Day when all the Trekkies are saluting Pavel Chekov in Red Square! Only ten months to go for that trip. Cruise Trek infrequently updates their site but if you want more info on Star Trek cruises you can surf to: http://hometown.aol.com/cruisetrek/ It's like 90 F here in Carlsbad. Cold compared to the rest of So Cal. As I was blogging I heard a funny noise and I thought I was being attacked by birds. No, that sound was big fat raindrops falling down from the sky! Most strange. Enjoy your day. I'm on a Star Trek cruise high!

Chick flick alert! Guys you can tune out if you want. To get some AC, I went and saw "Vanity Fair" and found it to be an enjoyable movie. Not perfect as it was almost 2.5 hours and lost focus at times, even forgetting to update us on major characters but still fun to watch. It flows on the brain easily enough and everyone could follow the plot. How could we not when the 3 old ladies in the back commented loudly on everything? Look, it's the sister! Look, he came back! Oh, that's not good! The average age of the audience - 60. It was the 10:00 am screening at $4.00 so that had a lot to do with the demographics. 90% women and 10% guys dragged along. The costumes and sets were vibrant and sure to get Oscar nominated. I was disappointed that India was only in the movie for a few moments. The reviews I read had all commented on how the movie got India right. That's simply not a true statement when the country barely exists in the script at all. The reviewers also...

Here and There Blog Yesterday was dedicated to getting caught up on the small things of life. A trip to Wal-Mart for supplies, Ralphs for groceries, and printing out the pictures of Australia. The latter took a long time and I think next time I'll just have Wal-Mart do all my digital develpment. The extra $2 I'll pay them will be worth it for time saved! Even Carlsbad was hot yesterday. I went to the beach at 5:30 pm thinking it would be perfect for a power walk and the place was still hot and full of tourist families. The distracting part is that I walk on the sand and yesterday I had to wander around 100's of pits that people had dug to visit China or to drown their sorrows. I wasn't sure which but I was looking forward to high tide wiping them all away and returning the shoreline to normal! All in all, it was a perfect Sunday.

Part of this post will make no sense. It's all due to yesterday's movie "What The Bleep Do We Know?." While I am far from a Quantum physicist I already knew about the movie's basic concept "we are what we think." The movie just couldn't say it as well as someone who's been teaching that for years on TV - Dr. Phil. This obscure movie was released in April and has been playing for a while in a local theater. I decided to go because as a good SF fan, we support our actors. Armin Shimmerman who played Quark on DS9 was credited as the star and I had met him on one of the Trek cruises which is usually a good reason to see someone's movie. To digress, this was also baseball Saturday and Mondo and I were meeting Kathy & Brian later that day. A pre-game movie seemed a great idea. The official sites synopsis: “WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!” is a new type of film. It is part documentary, part story, and part elaborate and inspiring ...

Friday movie night is here again except I cheated and saw the movie before true night arrived. Which fits since the movie - Napoleon Dynamite defies any expectations about what you'll get from a teen geek high school quirky character movie. Huh. While I watched the movie I was thinking that maybe I had better see it again in case I was missing something obvious. I've been reading the love for ND on fan sites for months and with it's arrival to the "secret theater" I felt it was time to check it out. Our geek anti-hero is Napoleon, a lost guy who has somehow managed to survive life and just keep going as if his world was the true world. You can see where he gets his oddness from his brother, uncle, and even Grandma. The world of his friends, typical lost teens who get beat up by the jocks, create the off-beat posse that takes on the cool kids. You might think you know the outcome but it never happens exactly in the way of usual movie path. At times I tho...

Putting the site meter on may have been a mistake. I now feel guilty that I haven't posted today after I realized that people actually do read this site. However life was boring as I had to go to Santa Barbara for a quick business trip. The weekend beckons with 3 days of luxury ahead. First and most important is the Padre game on Saturday night as the Padres try and get a Wild Card spot for the playoffs. It's also Tony Gywnn weekend so I'll return home with a cool toy of some sort. I thought the zombie movie " Shaun of the Dead" opened this week but it's not till Sept. 24th so movie night will have to be changed to something else. There's still a lot that I haven't seen so who knows where I'll end up? I know THX1138 is playing in theaters but I just never really was in tune with that movie even though it is the work of the Mighty Lucas! On the boring side of things I now have a psycho garage door opener to deal with - it just decided...