Justin

My fiance is cute sometimes. Tonight, he went to the gym, and when he got out of the shower, he put on the new watch I got him for his birthday. He asked if he could see his wedding ring for a moment because he likes how it looks with his new watch.

Well, the ring got stuck. So, I put mine on, and we went to dinner. He spent the evening coming up with wild excuses for why he was wearing his ring, just in case he couldn’t get it off tomorrow morning. Fortunately, the ring slipped off easily after dinner, so he will not need to use any of them.

I think neither of us can wait to get married next Saturday!

The Drama with the Car

As some of you already know, I recently bought a new car. It’s a new 2008 Nissan Versa hatchback with some really nifty features. You never have to take the key out of your pocket because the car “knows” when you have it on you. Push a button on the door, and it unlocks! Turn the ignition switch, and it starts! Pretty cool stuff. I’ll post some pics.

The next step was to sell my old car. It was an older Camry in very good condition, but we listed it about two weeks ago and hadn’t had as much response as I expected. Well, on Saturday night we lowered the asking price from $7500 to $6800, and the car had sold by 4:00 PM on Sunday.

We showed the car to four different people yesterday, and it ended in a rather amusing bidding war between two parties. What did the car sell for in the end? $6900 — more than we were asking. We had to pull both the Craig’s List and Auto Trader ads immediately after the sale, so the phone would stop ringing!

So, the next time someone tells you to list a car for a lot more than it’s worth, so you’ll have “negotiating” room, just laugh. Listing a car at a good price creates more interest, and that’s to your benefit!

San Francisco FTW

Justin and I have decided to stop listening to everyone else’s advice about our honeymoon. We’re not flying to San Diego just because Justin’s co-worker has a time share. We’re not going to the coast just to save money. And even though we like Seattle, it is close enough that we can go there on the weekends any time we like.

There is only one place we both really want to go on our honeymoon. It was our first choice honeymoon spot, but for some reason we started letting money concerns get in the way. Well, we have decided to stop making excuses and start making it a reality. We found an awesome hotel on Hotwire, and our new Nissan Versa should get us down there on about 20 gallons of fuel.

San Francisco, here we come!

Wanted

Okay, I am going to do an official review of this movie. It was a badass action flick. The characters pulled you in immediately, and the dark humor of the protagonist was superb. It kept a quick-but-smooth pace from beginning to end, and there were a couple of good plot twists along the way. Unlike many action movies, you don’t see the final twist coming, which is cool.

Now, in regards to those who have difficulty accepting the fact that they can “curve” bullets. That is 1% as unrealistic as everything else in the movie. It simply doesn’t take place in our reality, so you will either accept or dismiss the reality of this movie.

If you do not easily suspend disbelief, you will not enjoy anything about the movie, and you might as well read the following spoiler.

The “fraternity” of assassins started a thousand years ago as a group of weavers who still take orders from a LOOM OF FATE. Yeah, seriously. It weaves a pattern in binary code that gives them the names of people to kill. And at the end, one of the assassins not only curves a bullet, but kills about a dozen people standing in a circle with that one curved bullet.

Not kidding.

Oil on Mars?

Sometimes my beloved fiance just pulls these little gems of wisdom out of nowhere. For example, this one.

“Wouldn’t it be crazy if they found oil on Mars?”

I laughed so hard! I’m pretty sure he thought something was wrong with me. Now, I am not even going to get started on how unlikely it is that oil is on mars, much less our likelihood of finding it or how impractical it would be for us to even utilize it if we did.

I am always amazed at how Justin’s mind works!

Six Hours

That’s how long it took to restore an HP laptop using HP discs.

Mind you, that’s after ordering the discs and waiting two weeks. Then, of course, those discs didn’t work, so I had to call HP, who had apparenlty sent me the wrong discs. So, they “rushed” me the right discs, which took another week. They finally came today, and the lovely six-hour restoration process could finally commence.

Now, how long will it take me to uninstall all the trial software and bloat on this thing?

P.S. Yeah, I know I should have done a clean install, and I certainly had the means to do so. I guess I just had to go through this painful restore process once in my life, so I would be absolutely confident that it’s not worth it.

P.P.S. The HP laptop is one that I am giving to a friend. It used to be Justin’s, before he got his new tablet.

The Desktop Lives!

I finally broke down and purchased a new video card for my desktop — an Asus 8800GT. Man, I really missed having a desktop! Don’t get me wrong, I love having a fast laptop with good graphics, but it just doesn’t replace a real desktop for me.

I have never been much of a PC gamer, but I plan to try out a few PC games this summer. My video card came with Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, which is apparently a stand-alone expansion pack for the original game. I am going to give that a try, followed by Crysis, which my fiance owns, but never really got into. Anyone have other recommendations for good PC games?

Another good thing about having a working desktop is that I can finally experiment properly with Ubuntu Hardy! Linux really seems to be cooking in a lot of new markets these days. Not only is it maturing on the desktop, but its mobile applications are expanding quickly.

I guess I’m not surprised by this, since no matter what kind of device you’re talking about, someone will tell you that you should put Linux on it. Anybody else run Linux?

Sex and the City

No worries, this review is spoiler-free. I saw the movie with my mother on Monday, and liked it quite a lot. I think they did a great job of converting the beloved TV series into movie form. I have even heard from friends who had not followed the series that they were perfectly able to identify with the characters and follow the story.

For die-hard fans like me, I got what I wanted — another season of my favorite show, neatly packaged in movie form. All of the characters behaved in expected fashion, creating the appropriate amount of humor and drama. But in the end, everything worked out for the best.

I will say one thing about this, though. When the lights came up, I was completely exhausted. Now, I own the entire series on DVD, and I think there is a reason why a full season of Sex and the City takes nine or ten hours to watch. Cramming all of that into two hours and fifteen minutes is one crazy emotional roller coaster! (Not that the movie was short by any stretch of the imagination.)

Overall, I give the movie two enthusiastic thumbs up. Whether you’re a long time fan of the show, or you just want to see a good romantic comedy, definitely see Sex and the City.

Microsoft, Are You Serious!?

Okay, so Microsoft really has designed a nice home theater interface with Vista Media Center. I run it on my HTPC, and was happily watching a recorded episode of NCIS a few minutes ago. (Incidentally, the newer episodes are much better than the old ones.)

Near the end of the episode, a dialog box pops up, informing me that updates are ready to install, and would I like to reboot? I politely tell it that I will manually reboot later.

A few minutes later, with no further warning and no option to cancel it, the computer reboots.

RIGHT AT THE CLIMAX OF THE EPISODE

Microsoft, you have been angling for space in my living room for the better part of this decade. If you want to keep it, you will not reboot my computer against my will while I’m watching TV ever again. Do we have an understanding?

Seriously.

The Accident

For those who don’t know, I was rear-ended yesterday afternoon, but the police and paramedics were all over it. The accident happened right by the high school where I substitute teach, so there is always an officer on site. They had to pull me from the car on one of those boards, and they strapped me down! I got to take a fun ride in an ambulance, and of course the visit to the hospital took forever.

The doctors were initially worried about neck and spine trauma, but the x-rays came out clean. Fortunately, our chiropractor is also a whiplash specialist, so Justin took me to see him this morning. I have some ligament damage and tearing in my neck and back, but nothing else major. I have to wear a goofy neck brace and see the chiropractor regularly for a few weeks, but I should be good as new.

Sadly, my car did not fare quite as well. It sitting at the body shop, in critical condition. We’re hoping it pulls through.