One night in the city
This past saturday the wife and I spend the day and evening in The City (as a Jersey boy likes to call it) to see a show, have dinner and go to a movie. My sister watched our daughter for the day, and enjoyed herself too. So we were free of responsibility for a few hours! Kinda nice!
The Show -
"The Pajama Game"Starring
Harry Connick Jr.,
Kelli O'Hara and
Michael McKean.
The show was excellent, and we had seats off to one side, but third row. You know a lot of the songs, and the story was funny to boot. Afterwards we got autographs from Harry and Kelli (only they showed at the stage door) who were efficient but nice to appear after the show. Connick's teeth just glowed, as did Kelli.
One of the actors,
Richard Poe, played a Cardassian in 3 Trek series as
'Gul Evek'.
The whole cast was very funny and the show was visually very fun.
The Dinner
After the show we went to
Niko's, a greek place on 76th that we've been to before and loved - and weren't disappointed! We both ate too much, got to take our time and sat out on the porch to enjoy. Would you like some...
Moussaka??
After dinner we wandered around Lincoln Center, as it's just a block or two away from Niko's. I've never been there, so that was fun. It turned out to be a beautiful night and didn't rain as expected, so we took some pics and sat at the fountain.
MB still thinking about Harry, I suppose. ;-)
The Movie
Right up from Lincoln Center is a theater that plays imports and indy films, so we went to see an
Edward Norton film called
'Down in the Valley'. An interesting story of a cowboy and a San Fernando Vally teen that fall in love. Very good.
After the movie I spotted
Mary Stuart Masterson coming out of the bathroom, but didn't say hi.
Apparently she's
directing a movie, filming in NYC.
After the film, we made our way back to Grand Central, via Rockafeller Center, wishing we had tickets for the season finale of
SNL with Kevin Spacey... but alas we watched it on TiVo later. The Usual Suspects bit was funny! Perp babe? Perp?
It turned out carrying an umbrella was good insurance, as it was a beautiful and cool evening, and both of us were happy to make it back to my sisters. A full day, for sure.
Sis and Charlotte, happy to see us!
Compelling clicks today, other stuff
Wow.A short video describing the discovery of life in a 200 million year old salt crystal. Fascinating stuff!
A Galactica spinoff!The web we know may be
going away soon.
Upcoming/new media releases I'm interested in.
I've been fascinated by CGI for a long time now - from the first time I read about
'The Works' in
Byte magazine, to seeing
Tron, to
Beyond the Minds Eye.
A couple of years ago I bumped into
this short, and had to have the
DVD. There in now a new
Animusic 2 DVD which I must see!
Pet Shop Boys have a new CD due very soon.
This fellow has so much interesting material, I don't know where to begin. I've ordered from him once, and enjoyed everything very much! For some reason
The Plasmatics DVDs were just teriffic!
David Gilmour - On an Island
In a Pink Floyd mood?
Erasure - Union Street
An ACOUSTIC Erasure album?
Venus Hum - Yes and No
Finally something new from this band we saw opening for Blue Man a few years ago! Looks like this is a download only so far.
Jean Michel Jarre has some new live DVD's. I've never gotten to see one of his live shows. Bummer.
And don't forget all the new
Depeche Mode remasters! Ouch! I think Violator IS my favorite record of all time...
Dunno when I'd have the time to listen to all this stuff, but some day...
Back to work I suppose.
Crappy lawns and big TV's
Welcome to spring!
Once again I'm perplexed as to why I should give a damn about my grass. Every year it seems to get worse. I will admit I don't give my 100% all to fixing it, so I suppose it's just my lazy ass fault. A real fix for it would probably entail just ripping it all up and (if I could afford it) putting down sod and a nice built in water system. But, once again, what do I care, REALLY? Keeping up with the Jones'? Beh. Some kind of pride in my appearance? Dunno. It just seems to be something I should care about. Once it's 110 degrees for a month and everyone's lawn is burned to crap I'll be just like everyone else.
Another dismal failure - my Dish Network HD satellite receiver crapped out. I've now learned the lesson of buying such equipment. Don't. I got rid of 'digital' cable because the picture sucked - especially on my 55" TV. Splotchy as all hell. So I jumped in to Dish Network because they had the most HD channels. they also used less compression on their video. BTW, 'digital' is just a nice way of making people think it's 'better'. It's not. It's compressed. It takes up less bandwidth so the cable company or satellite company can cram more channels of crap in the pipe. The term 'digital' I surmise people feel is better because of CD's. CD's are digital and sound great, so 'digital' TV must be great too. Nope. It looks like crap.
But that brings me to the big TV again. I think I just got a too-big TV. I wanted HD and the rear-projection set I selected was relativly inexpensive for HD, and too boot, was BIG. I also like that I could get over the air HDTV with NO compression with the sat receiver. Thing is, the tuner in the Dish Network receiver when switched to over the air caused all kinds of problems with the receiver. IT was crap, too.
I suppose now that I really didn't need that big a set, and would be happier with something slightly smaller (no, not a 13") for more than one reason. It would fit my room better, and I wouldn't notice the splotchy compressed crap channels from cable. We watch TiVo now exclusivly, so compression is a way of life. TiVo was another reason for losing HD, besides my sat receiver dying. The sat receiver would decide to not tune to the right channel all the time. I never got to watch HD anyway, there was always something on TiVo. And now I just need to save some money. So, no more HDTV. I've reduced my Dish to just HBO (mostly for The Sopranos) and that's it. Screw buying the Dish HD DVR. I actually can't spend the $300 it would cost - plus the monthly charges, so screw it.
I guess all this just indicates I should get my fat face away from the TV and do something else with my time. Any suggestions?
Bored at work, new music, something to do....
Well, it's been too long since I posted something. I shouldn't be surprised I never get any comments! ;-)
Work has been so very slow the past few days - an occasional task that's done in a few minutes time. So I've been surfing a lot, talking with my co-workers, making 'to-do' lists and just plain thinking. Thrilling. I've found a new band I'm quickly starting to love -
She Wants Revenge.
Funny how you find things sometimes. I installed
Pluck a few weeks ago. Pluck is an RSS reader - basically a way of keeping up with blogs and also topics of your choosing. I put in
Depeche Mode of course. Pluck gave me a link to a
review of SWR, and they sounded interesting. So I used
Bittorrent to download the album and an EP, and I was hooked. The album is now on my new list of must purchase CD's.
There was a day when I'd buy 20 CD's from CDNow (now Amazon. Groan.) Not anymore. The process these days is to download a bunch of music, pick out what I like and then purchase, if I ever do. I've also been getting some SACD discs. If I really love something, I'll get the CD or SACD/DVD-A. Mp3 is fine for listening on the PC, but in the car or on the home stereo, I'm still an audiophile and mp3's sound like crap on a good stereo. But I digress.
I was bored, remember? Flow of consciousness huh? That may be a real insight into how my brain has been working lately. 100 different directions, always feeling busy and like I'm not getting anything done! Hmm. what topics have I been thinking about lately...
When I'm at work, I can surf like mad - which I suppose has contributed to my issues.
Gadgets,
movies,
commentary,
gossip,
HDTV,
deals and
DIGG...
Keeping up with all this has been fun. Not that I buy gadgets, see many movies, watch much HD or buy stuff. Guess I do at least get to read all the wonderful things on Digg about computers, astronomy, science and on and on.
Maybe I just need to meditate, try yoga or something.
[to be continued]
It's now 2pm and the long haul to 5 has begun....
Halo2 at lunch today was fun. a full house, too - 8 of us. I might have to bring my xbox in again if we have that many. The new hires are picking it up very quickly.
Wow, that Wendy's burger has me yawning....
I've been re-arranging/cleaning up all my data files at home. I purchased a nice big 320G HD to put all the stuff (mostly music). My goal is to organize things enough to then begin making backups to DVD. Eventually I'd like a blu-ray or HD=dvd drive (30G+ would be nicer than 4G!), but that will be a awhile. The biggest task is cleaning up a bunch of mp3's I received from a friend - all disorganized and mislabelled. I made an attempt a few months ago to use
MusicBrainz but that became a real chore. Almost more work by itself. I could tell it was mislabelling things even more. I like the concept of the tool - it has a database of 'tags' of mp3's to allow you to compare your mp3 against the database - which has all the info of the file, which it can then rename and populate the ID3 tags. Problem is, it appears to me that the method they use to generate the tags isn't specfic enough. There are too many examples of "Is it "Dance to the Music by Sly and the Family Stone" or is it "polka polka polka by Frankie Yankovic". Ok, that decision might be easy, but there are lots more examples. Thing is, wouldn't you expect polka music to be very different from funk? Why would they be even close to the same?? I think it needs more work....
So I have gigs of files to sort thru. I may just bite the bullet for now and keep the unsorted as is - and keep the mp3's I generated personally (and was very careful about) separate. Wow, boring stuff huh? Still reading this far?
Speaking of Sly - did you see him on the Grammy's?
Wow, that's one helluva look. That's Sly on the right, Gremlin on the left. At least Sly made it to the gig.
[to be continued when the urge hits me]
Googling your name....
Yesterday I decided to plug some old names into Google to see what I might find. One of them was Pater Mauzey. I was very surprised to find a
Wikipedia entry about him!
Peter is a good friend that I keep in touch with occasionally, and has been a big influence on my life. I've had an interest in electronics and gadgets as long as I can remember - tearing apart toys when I was little to get the motors for other uses, to now having a career in programming. When I was in high school I joined the Explorers at Bell Labs in Holmdel. Peter was one of the guys running the post that dealt with programming (I was also in another post that was electronics). While there I got to learn Pascal (on punch cards!) as well as a compiled Basic named 'Bas'. Once I got to know Peter a little more, I found out about his background with the
Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center. Another keen interest of mine is music - especially electronic music. Eventually I got to visit the music center and met
Vladimir Ussachevsky, built some new amplifiers for the lab, and got to play with some of the equipment. I can recall the RCA Mark II being quite an ominous bank of equipment I never got very close to. If I can dig up the tape maybe I'll post a sample of some of the noise I made there.
Peter was also quite a pack rat when it came to magazines - the amazing thing was, if you mentioned a topic to him he could reach into a pile of (neatly) stacked issues of Byte or some other tech mag of the era and present you with an artical on the subject! I recall he had a
Merlin, one of the first handheld electronic games.
I can't be certain yet, but it appears the wiki entry about Peter was written by another fellow from the Explorer post - Blaine Garst (Blainster? hmmm). I did some poking around and it appears Blaine works at Apple. I recall Blaine having lots of hair, playing '
Go' and being exceptionally intelligent. He helped me out once with a little heat-paper printer I wanted to hook up to my old
Elf II. Blaine has a
patent or two.
Peter introduced me to Steve Perry, who worked at
K.E.P. and got me my first job in the engineering field, first working during college. It's really been wonderful working at something that was originally my hobby. Thanks, Peter.
Hello and Welcome
Well, I've decided to start a blog.
Here you'll find the following:
- Updates on my daughter Charlotte, and my wife, MB
(Pictures, etc)
- What might be interesting to me at the moment
(Links elsewhere)
- Perhaps some posts on people I've known thru the years
(I'm getting older, and lately my thoughts have gone back to folks I've lost touch with...)
Basically, the usual stuff that really might only be of interest to you if you know me!
Drop me a note if you have suggestions or just want to say hi.
-Ed
