Caught In The Whirlwind
Archive for August, 2010
Book 23: Just A Geek
Aug 30th 2010
Title: Just A Geek
Author: Wil Wheaton
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 296
Summary
An actor from early childhood, Wil Wheaton is best known for his roles in the movie Stand By Me and his recurring appearances on Star Trek. However, faced with the prospect of Star Trek becoming his entire life and after an experience of seeing the cast of the original series on a Star Trek cruise, a teenaged Wheaton made the decision to quit the show and concentrate on his movie career.
This self described “worst decision” of his entire life set Wil on a path to self discovery and transition from a famous actor to a person who’s famous because he used to be famous to his current status as a writer.
Notes
I picked this book up after a friend linked me to one of Wil’s appearances on the TV show Big Bang Theory. I was compelled to search the internet to see what he thought of his portrayal of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG now that he’s older and stumbled onto the fact that he wrote this book.
I knew he had a website and a popular blog and all that but never really followed what he wrote there. So I picked up this book and read half of it the same day. The rest would have been done this weekend if I wasn’t so busy.
The blurb on the front of the book is 100% correct. What this book contains is a very personal, unflinchingly honest (yes I stole that from the book cover) account of what Wil went through in his struggles to distance himself from Star Trek and live his own life. It consists of about 50% blog entries from his website and the rest of it is commentary on those entries. He points out where he was full of crap and just trying to put up a front to make people think he was on the verge of success when, in reality, he was in the clutches of depression and near financial ruin.
In the end though, I think he found the right place. He’s a fantastic writer and his story is told in an extremely gripping way.
Next Book
I’m still reading The Lies of Locke Lamora. I’m about halfway through now, but I got unexpectedly interrupted by this book.
Busy Weekend Recap
Aug 30th 2010
So I’ve survived my busy, busy weekend. Here’s a little recap. As the title says:
Saturday was the 3 concert in Bearsville. We left at around 3pm for the show and arrived around 5:30-6pm. It was at this time I found out that I was an idiot who misremembered the time the doors opened, meaning we were by far the first people there and we had to wait an additional hour before we could get in. Ah well…it was annoying but we brought books and eventually ended up sitting outside by one of the fountains for a while. By the way, driving through Woodstock is a strange experience. You’re on this small, windy road through a forest when suddenly it opens up and there’s this town with people everywhere. This time we saw a streetside harp player, for example. Lots of people hanging out along the road and playing music and drawing/painting.
If you’re not familiar with the Bearsville Theater, it’s a very tiny venue with a open floor area on the bottom (with some seats in one corner of the room) and a small balcony on the back wall with chairs. We headed straight for the balcony area as we didn’t want to stand on the floor the entire time for this show (which is why we got there so early so we could sit up there)
The opening band was all right (Ricochet I believe). Then the wait for 3 to come on. They are the absolute slowest band ever for setting up. The opener started at 9, played about…15-20 minutes. 3′s set started at 10:30. In between Joey Eppard’s uncle John the Baker played some acoustic songs. He’s…an odd character. I’m not quite sure what to make of what he did on stage. He had a song about crack babies for example.
Anyway, 3 came on finally and the show rocked. The first couple songs were rocky as Billy Riker’s guitar amp was malfunctioning and he was having a heck of a time trying to fix it. Eventually Joey ended up doing an acoustic version of his solo song The Game during which the guitar got fixed and the concert went off as planned. They played a bunch of new songs which sounded really good along with some older stuff. This the first time for me seeing them without their former percusionist Joe Stote (Wow, can’t believe I spelled his last name wrong. I blame lack of sleep) who was simply awesome in his quirkyness, but they managed to do the old stuff really well without him being there. I miss his stage presence, but the band plays on.
After the show we wanted to find someplace to eat that was open 24 hours just so we could grab something to help on the 2.5-3 hour drive back. I found a Denny’s in Albany near our route of travelon my GPS so we headed that direction, only to find that what the GPS said was a Denny’s was really a Lutheran church and seemed like it always had been. There was a McDonalds nearby as well but it happened to be one without a 24 hour drive thru. Foiled! We ended up getting back on the thruway and stopping at the next rest stop for something to eat and drink and arrived home a about 3:30am.
My weekend fun didn’t stop there though. I woke up and wandered off to Whetstone Gulf State Park to hang out with my family at our annual reunion there. It was a good time. Although I said I never would again, I broke my promise to myself and ended up doing the 5 mile trail around the edge of the Gorge with my sister. We walked it in 3.5 hours with me stopping along the way to take photos for my photography course. I haven’t gotten a chance to see what I took, but I’m not sure if it was what I needed for the assignment. Ah well.
Surprisngly, after doing the hike I’m feeling pretty good right now. The problem is my back and arm due to the long game of horseshoes I played after the hike. Owww. But it was a fun time. Hung out by the fire for a while, enjoyed talking with family. Very fun day.
Next up on the fun events schedule: Rush at the state fair on thursday! Wooo!
Class
Aug 26th 2010
Well, another semester of college has started, and yet again I’m taking another course. This time it’s a Basic Photography course that’s web based, so I’m not going to actually have to visit campus much this semester. I’m still trying to figure out a way to go to school more but…it is what it is at this point.
I’ve been excited to take this course for a while now because, if you remember, I went off and got myself a Nikon D3000 earlier this year and, while I’ve played around with it some, I haven’t really gotten used to all of the manual mode settings and such how I wanted to. So now I’ll get to learn about proper technique and how to meter properly and all that good stuff.
Expect to see some more photographic output from me in the near future as I go through the class. The first assignment is light and shadow.
Busy Weekend (But Not As Busy As Next)
Aug 23rd 2010
So this weekend was an unexpectedly busy weekend for me.
Saturday evening we went to my roommate’s sister’s engagement celebration get together. I was figuring we’d stay for a couple hours, have a good time and then go home but we ended up staying past midnight and having a very fun time hanging out, eating, drinking and chatting with various people.
Sunday saw me going along with my roommates as they went to some open houses. They’re looking at buying a house as soon as humanly possible (for a lot of various reasons that I don’t feel like getting into. Basically the situation in the apartment is kinda awful between our neighbors and the building management not doing anything. I don’t really want to go into it because I’m tired of talking about it.) so they went to some open houses to see what’s what. The two we went to yesterday weren’t really great prospects. One had an awesome lot but the house itself was really old and needed a TON of work, in addition to the rooms being tiny and the floorplan being pretty…bad. The second’s downstairs was good but the upstairs suffered from the same “tiny room” syndrome and it needed waaaay more work to get going. But it had potential for future improvements. Neither seemed to be a potential leading contender in the search though.
However, that was nothing compared to my activities next weekend:
- Saturday 3 concert at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, NY. Going with Wassy and driving back after (probably won’t get home until around 2am-ish)
- Sunday Family Reunion gathering at Wetstone Gulf State Park, probably going a little more in the afternoon so I can sleep in after the late night driving.
And then, not the weekend but, September 2nd I’m going to see Rush at the State Fair. Woo!
Book 22: Lord of Chaos
Aug 17th 2010
Title: Lord Of Chaos
Author: Robert Jordan
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
Pages: 720
Summary
The adventures of Rand and friends continues in the 6th volume of the Wheel of Time. Rand as the Dragon Reborn consolidates his strength while fighting of enemies from within and without, while the female leads of the series begin their search for a powerful object that will possibly fix the weather.
Notes
Yet again, my standard Wheel of Time complaints apply here, so if you want to hear about how he writes women, or his tendancy towards gross over-description of dresses, you can read one of my past wheel of time note sections.
This book is all about political wrangling. There’s very little real action until just at the end and what’s there isn’t a huge main plot point as it has been in the previous 5 books, but rather what seems like something that’s there just because the book needed a big action sequence climax.
The story is still interesting once you get to it. This is the part of most series where the pace slows down and the situation is set up for the big climax at the end, so it’s not surprising most of the book is political wrangling with very little progress forward in events. I expect it to be the same for the next several books as there’s a lot of setup that has to get done.
I should also note this is the last book of the wheel of time that I’ve read, so moving on from here I’ll be reading them fresh, for the first time.
Next Book
I’m taking another Wheel of time break, this time with The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, the first book in the Gentlemen Bastard’s series which was recommended to me by my friend Kris.
Time To Jinx It
Aug 17th 2010
Nearly every time I’ve mentioned that I’m trying to lose weight again on my blog, it ends in miserable failure. So this time I’ve waited about a month’s worth of progress to actually say anthing.
So yeah, I’m trying to lose weight again. Last time I did this (successfully) I was down to under 250 before I fell off the bandwagon, but since then I’ve gained back the 25-30 pounds I lost and put on another 25 to boot. I’m tired of this and at the urging of a friend of mine (Kris) I’ve joined him in his attempt to lose weight as well (strength in numbers!) and so far I’ve dropped about 5 pounds, just with modifying my diet. So yay! Once I start evening off I plan on reintroducing exercise to help break through the plateau situation.
So…so far so good. Hopefully I can keep this up. I’ve seen the first visible progress of things so far because I was able to tighten my belt another notch. Seeing the numbers go down on the scale is one thing, but noticing that you need to tighten your belt or your pants are going to fall off is a much cooler sign.
New Toy: Palm Pre Plus
Aug 16th 2010
I’ve been thinking about getting back to long form blogging more as something about twitter isn’t nearly as satisfying. So I figured I’d post up some thoughts about my new phone, a Palm Pre Plus.
The first question I get usually is “why didn’t you get an iPhone or an Android phone?” I’ve gotta say that both platforms were tempting for various reasons (mostly because they have a gazillion apps available for them). I have 2 major problems with iPhone, one practical and one philosophical. The practical issue is that it would require me to get a voice plan that’s $10 more per month than the old one that I’m clinging to for dear life. The philosophical issue is that I’m really not happy with the way Apple handles application approvals. It’s very black-box-y and they’re just not open enough for my tastes. As somebody who’s looking to maybe get into the app development game a little down the line it’s not a very attractive ecosystem.
Android has the apps and the open development philosophy but after playing around with some Android phones I found the way the OS operated to be pretty clunky. Seemed way more complicated to do things than it should be. And honestly, AT&T’s android offerings right now are a little lackluster. Getting better, sure, but not as good as Verizon.
Card View
After something a month or so ago made me check out the pre again after largely ignoring it for so long, I found I REALLY liked what I saw. And so after agonizing a bit on if I was going to go Android or not, I settled on the path less chosen and went with the pre.
One week in, I’m not regretting my purchase one bit. WebOS is my favorite mobile operating system hands down. I don’t know if I can describe it any other way aside from intuitive. I pretty much didn’t have to spend any time figuring out how to work it as everything worked exactly like I had expected it to. The multi-tasking is just natural. You do a single swipe up from the gesture area at the bottom of the screen and the app you’re in shrinks to what looks like a playing card. All the running apps are displayed and you can swipe through them and pick which one you want which then gets zoomed in to full screen again.
The built in apps are nice as well. The web browser works well and supports a lot of the same gestures as the iPhone has standardized as far as things like pinch to zoom. It’s nice being able to support full websites but it also handles the mobile versions of sites that were designed with touch screen interfaces in mind.
Speaking of the web, Universal Search rocks as well. Any time you’re in the card view or there’s no app open you can just start typing and it’ll search through contacts and such on your phone, or you can chose to send your search query to google, wikipedia, twitter or google maps.
Speaking of typing…a word about the keyboard. It’s a slide out keyboard that I’m enjoying a lot. Good feel to it and I’m getting pretty quick. I dislike virtual on screen keyboards because I find my accuracy is really awful with them, so I’m happy with the inclusion of a full keyboard.
WebOS Notifications
Also, the way WebOS handles notifications is awesome. Almost nothing will interrupt you if you’re using the phone. When you get a new e-mail or new tweets come in or whatever, an alert pops up at the bottom of the screen which then quickly minimizes into a little notification area displaying a queue of all notifications that you can scroll through. It’s very slick (as you can see from my shamelessly stolen image on the right)
Aside from the built in apps, there is actually a surprising amount of activity going on in the WebOS app development landscape. I think people tend to assume that it’s rep for not having apps (because the SDK was really late in coming to be fair) is the same as it was a year ago when the phone was released. And they’ve just ignored it since…but the apps are there for pretty much anything you’d like to do. The signal to noise ratio is also a lot better. Less fart apps and sound boards and more apps that actually do stuff.
The development process is actually really easy as well. The phone is extremely open. No need to jailbrake or root the device. All you basically need to do is flip a switch in the OS to put it into developer mode, hook it up to your computer and using WebOS Quick Install, put an app called Preware on there and off you go (flipping the switch back off for security purposes). There’s a vibrant homebrew community which not only does applications (many of which end up in the official app store as time goes on) but there’s also a ton of patches for various OS components. You can tweak out the OS and how the built in apps function and even replace the OS kernal with one that can overclock if you desire (I haven’t quite gone that far).
There are a couple downsides though…first of all, yes. The hardware is over a year old at this point and it shows. The processor is a smidge slow (but not too bad), the camera is only 3 megapixels which also isn’t a huge deal for me because, MP doesn’t equal quality in any way. Also the game selection is a little hairy until AT&T gets around to approving the 1.4.5 update which will unlock a ton of game possibilities including ports from the iPhone. I am also having a smidgen of trouble getting the mail application to sync read item status with my work exchange account if I read something on my work laptop in outlook. But that’s mostly just annoying and not a huge problem.
But I think, these days, hardware is way overvalued. Sure it doesn’t stand up to the Verizon Droid phones in the specs department, but as a full package, the Pre, to me, is much more complete and unified.
So yeah. I’m happy.
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