Summer movies

Movies

Ratatouille- Completely awesome. Might be the best animated movie I have ever seen. Leagues better than Pixars last movie, Cars. Everything about it was great. Fantastic story, great characters, fantastic animation with a soundtrack to match.

Transformers- It ruled. It’s a Michael Bay summer movie so you can pretty much guess what it was like. A somewhat sensible story, some goofy characters, dialog that ranges from good to corn ball, a stupid soundtrack and explosions that only American filmmakers can do. It sure had it’s problems, but the awesome far outweighed the bad. The cast was actually pretty damn good, Shia was terrific and Megan Fox is drop dead gorgeous. It’s all about the Transformers though. The CG work is second to none, ILM did some insane work. The animation from robot to car and back was just unbelievable, it really looked like 40 foot robots were really walking around and shit. It was long but whatever, I really liked it.

Next up: Potter up on the IMAX screen.

The big update

Life, Uncategorized

Since it’s been so long I’m just going to make a big list of shit. We’ll see how it turns out together.

Lots of great shit going down in entertainment. Summer is here with some force, I’m going to see Ratatouille and Transformers next week. Potter 4 drops that week and I plan on seeing that in IMAX before Book 7 (!!!) drops the following week. I need to also squeeze in Die Hard 4 somewhere in there. Also, Jimmy Nortons’ book hits next week and he’s doing a signing right by me in Ridgewood so I’m going to go to that for sure.

Korn’s 8th studio album (Untitled) hits at the very end of the month and I’m looking forward to that. Can’t make it to Family Values tour this year though. I’ll try to catch them the next time they come to town.

Verizon Vios sometime? Jonathan is getting it next week, depend on how that goes means we may or may not get it. Could be dope.

E3 is next week. It’s going to be smaller, but the news and media is going to be just as heavy for us gamers, xbox live is going to rule next week. Speaking of xbox 360, MS just expanded the warranty to 3 years from date of purchase and will be refunding those who have paid for service. The red ring of death failure rate is too high to ignore and they have to get back into good graces with customers. They want people talking about their games, not how the console is built like a box of matches. Sony may be dropping the PS3 price by 100 bucks in 2 weeks so expect MS to follow suit. Dope games worth checking out: Forza 2, The Darkness and DiRT. I’m currently making my way through Lost Planet which is both good and frustrating.

Since leaving XM after the Opie and Anthony suspension, I bought a 30 gig Creative Zen Vision (Black) and it’s dope. Easily stands up to what the ipod has to offer and it even has more features for the same price. I got an FM transmitter for my car since my Pioneer head unit doesn’t have an aux jack (damn my non-foresight in 2004). It works alright, but on the Turnpike forget it. It’s like listening to a radio that’s getting a signal from the moon. The audio quality at it’s best is passable, but I’m not all that satisfied with it. So my goal is to change up my car system when I get a new job, get a new Pioneer head unit with an aux jack, take out the busted CD changer, keep the XM tuner (put it under the floor in the back) and rock it like that. I’ll sell the current head unit and the FM tuner for the Zen (may keep it though, it’s good as a car charger too).

So yeah, I’m looking for a new job. My job is totally lame, I’m just not happy. Pay blows, benefits suck and the head management is incompetent and clueless. I know I can do better, I just have to do something about it.

Opie and Anthony in trouble (again)

You know what grinds my gears?

Going on 2 weeks ago, Opie and Anthony had a guest on the show. “Homeless Charlie” told sorid tales from the streets of NYC using colorful language. It was on the XM portion of the show, so it all went over the air like it should of. He turned out to be a great guest, he was really funny and added a great portion to the show. So much so, that he was given an open invite to come back whenever he wanted to.

During the conversation, he said he wanted to have sex with Queen Elizibeth, Condoleeza Rice and one other broad. He used some colorful language and the boys riffed on that for a bit. The show went on as usual. Turns out that XM didn’t like what was said and freaked out. Opie and Anthony made a canned apology at the start of that Fridays show for it. Then on Monday, they talked about it more and said it was pretty much bullshit.

Cue XM freaking out again. They suspended the show for 30 days, taken the program off channel 202 entirely, making it 24/7 Ron and Fez. A tidal wave of cancellations came into XM for it, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-40,000 (me being one of them). This is something that we’d expect from CBS, not XM.

So the big fuss is really over the potential XM/Sirius merger. They don’t want any negative attention, they don’t want regulatory hearings to happen, they want the merger to go through ASAP. O and A were seen by the company as a liability in this regard and made them shut up, it just so happens that it was in the worst way possible. So an XM show was censored. The whole reason for sat radio flew out the window. The whole reason I was paying for radio flew out the window.

Now the boys may be back on XM after the 30 days, but they’re CBS show has taken a noticeable downward shift. Opie and Anthony now aren’t sure what they can even say, would they want to go back to XM? Would they be allowed to say what they want or would they be put on lock down, completely neutering the show? The big rumor is that they will in fact be let go, leaving the 100 million dollar Stern to be the talk “entertainer” on the merged satellite radio company. Just the thought of that makes me sick.

The Red Ring of Death

Games

Thursday night, after playing some Dreamfall, my 360 gave me the ring of death after shutting it off. With no warning, no other errors my box just went up and died on me. Bought it on April 18, 2006 (MFR date was 3-3-06) and thankfully I was smart enough to get a waranty from Best Buy when I bought it.

Good news is, I was able to make a quick swap at best buy for a new one. Bad news was I had to go way the fuck to Secaucus to get to a BB that had one. With the new content for Crackdown hitting the next day and the Halo 3 beta less than a week to go, it was shitty timing. Microsoft says the failure rate is 3-5% but it seriously looks like it’s at 50%. There are stories all over the place a dead 360’s some on their 3rd or 4th one! How you could make something with such a fatal flaw is beyond me. Really sucks because besides that it’s a fantastic machine.

Dads knee surgery

Life

Dad has been bopping along with a bad knee for about 2 months now due to some torn cartilage. He went in for 45 min outpatient procedure today to clean up the damage and it looks like it went quite well. He’ll work from home for the next few days with his knee wrapped up. They have a wacky cooling system for the surgical area now that uses distilled water and some tubes to keep swelling down. He should be much better in a week, he bounced back from his last knee surgery (other knee, same problem) quickly.

It’s been a car maintanence month! After breaking one of the windshield wipers in the last snow storm we had, I got a blown tire. I mentioned that a few posts below so I’ve got my full sized spare on the rear right (never used so it’s brand new) and the new one on the left rear. The tire that was on the left rear is now the spare tire. Since we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately I noticed that my rear wiper blade was shot. It just smeared things around and I think the rubber on the blade was actually coming off of the assembly near the bottom. That was a cheap an easy fix though, I also got the info on how to turn off the maintenance light since I forgot how.

I bought the car 3 years ago today and I’m at about 39,500 miles. Since then I’ve just had regular maintenance done to it, nothing has gone wrong with the car in typical Toyota fashion. I change the oil every 4-5,000 miles, had the tires rotated on schedule (along with the 30k mile tune up), bought one new tire, 3 wiper blades and a cabin air filter (or two). Not bad at all. I have 2 more years of payments to go and I plan on driving this car until it can’t go any further. At the very least I’m going to have it until 2010, probably keep it as a backup car no matter what. I’ll probably stick with Toyota, thinking about getting a hybrid the tech should be really good in another 4 years or so. Out of everything I wish my car got better mileage (23-26).