The World of Joel

So yesterday both on my drive into school and on the way home every station I turned to was talking about Kobe Bryant and his desire to get out of LA. I get the feeling that a lot of this has to do with me living in Southern CA is probably part of the cause of the added exposure but the entire story is ridiculous. Kobe Bryant is one of the highest paid athletes, he is part of arguably the most notable sports teams in the country and yet all he seems to do is complain. We all know that he was the reason for Shaq’s departure a few years ago, and the whole Colorado situation a few years back doesn’t help his case. And yet it seems like everyone is feeling bad for Kobe Bryant. My feelings are that Kobe will not leave LA, they will make a pickup, and there will be some sense of harmony in the Lakers franchise.

I am not a big basketball fan but listening to these athletes who are paid multi-million dollars for just picking up a basketball and they all seem to complain. It should be interesting to see what happens with the Lakers in the coming weeks.

It was around three to four months ago I opened up Movie-Stop a website that I had in development for a few months before hand, and had it in mind for years now. The site started out well increasing in visitors daily and even reviewing a few movies from some small indie studios. However I have come to the conclusion that maintaining that large of a score of a website with any degree of success with only two people on staff was just not going to happen, it was just far to much upkeep and not enough momentum going forward. Its a shame to have to come to this but with the growing time constraints of school and my job maintaining that vast of a scope of a website just doesn’t seem possible. So in the coming weeks I will be working on ways to shrink down the site a bit without taking away its flavor and its appeal. Any ideas or feedback would be great, but if not get ready to enjoy a much more efficent Movie-Stop.net!

Its not often enough we bring up the fact that we have thousands of our men over in Iraq and around the world fighting for our country. I wish I would bring it up more on this blog how blessed we are to live in a country such as this. I have a few buddies over in Iraq right now, with a few others in the service and it is just crazy to think some of my high school friends or teammates from both sports teams are over there fighting while I am living over here in freedom and peace. So lets remember those who have served and pray for those who are serving that they may all find peace and safety in there duty. Thank you armed forces, thank you.

So today as I was hanging around my girlfriend Jenn’s house we were checking out our expanding DVD collection which we have building for a year or so. I believe it was a year ago now we decided to buy two DVD’s each a month, these DVD’s would be taken from our list and tht way we could really have something to look forward to each month and have a nice collection. Well that trend stopped at the end of 2006 and I haven’t bought many movies recently. So I decided it was time to expand a bit and get a few of my favorites that I haven’t gotten around to buying. The total for all four was like $20 on Half.com which were either Brand New or Like New. Here is the list:

- Antitrust
- Spider-Man
- Batman Begins
- Oceans Twelve (Order Got Canceled)

I am not a big basketball viewer, I will occasionally turn a game on and watch, and usually during the playoffs I stay informed. I do know right now that the Cleavland Cavaliers are down two games to the Detroit Pistons after two blown game winning opportunities by the man they call “The King”, Lebron James. I write this post because part of me really feels for the guy, we are relatively the same age and the amount of pressure this game has faced since high school is unbelievable. At the end of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals, Lebron had the ball in his hands and had the chance to win the game but chose instead to pass up the ball and they ended up losing. The sports media blew up on the guy for not taking a double teamed shot and so he passed it to a wide open player. Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals the same situation with Lebron having the ball in his hands with the chance to win, this time Lebron takes the shot in triple coverage and mises, Cavs lose again. The guy has been compared to Jordan and Magic names that I truly believe are thrown around to loosely in the sports arena. Jordon, Magic, Bird, these guys were there own unique players and Lebron is his own people. I wish the media would get off this back, because without him the Cavs could have been one of the top draft picks in this year’s draft.

I will admit to being a fan of Extreme Makeover Home Edition, mainly because they are always such feel good stories. One of the best parts of the show is the overly charismatic Ty Pennington originally from the TLC show Trading Spaces. Most of you know of Ty, and I always thought of him as being a pretty good guy. Well I don’t know if this is old news or not, but the man got a DUI and has been sentenced to 36 months of probation. I have to admit that I am really tired of hearing about all of these rich and famous actors, athletes, and musicians breaking the law. I get it, we all make mistakes, that is understandable, heck we all fall short of being perfect. But it seems like to many of these celebs believe they are above the law, and its a shame that a such a good guy image that Ty has always carried has to be tainted by a DUI charge. Well we can just pray that he can get that worked out.

In the process of working on revamping a lot of my own websites I have officially opened an account with HostMonster.com a rather reasonable hosting company that should do the trick for my upcoming and current sites. From what I can see thus far I have quite a bit of confidence in them as a host and I hope to see 100% uptime from them, unlike my last hosts. I am planning to move this blog to those servers in the near future, possibly this weekend. I am a little nervous about doing it but it should be good to get on a much faster and more reliable server. I already have my brother Jake’s blog (FullofJake.com) hosted on my server space as well as some of my new TV sites that I will be working on once summer rolls around. So far I have been impressed with HostMonster’s customer support who have already helped me with a few of my own questions. I’ll let you know how it goes, plus I got a free domain with signup, gotta love that!

My biggest problem in developing websites is that I start with an idea, and that idea multiplies in so many different ways that the final product isn’t usually what I had intended, or it is and its to complex. Thus is the problem I am having with Movie-Stop.net right now. The site itself is doing well, but I fear that the site is to complex and to many ideas and not enough follow through. My fear is that what wanted to be a “movie site” has become far to much and thus the initial idea was to broad. I am working on cutting back a bit, focusing on what I enjoy which is more the news and reviews aspect. So I am thinking of switching the site to a more “blog” style format which would leave more room for personalization and reviews. This would take out the need for movie pages for each movie and such which takes up the majority of my time working on the site.

Moving forward that is my concept and idea that I am wrestling with and one that I will be working on in the coming weeks/months. As for new projects, this should come as no secret, I love TV, and thus I have some fan site ideas that are going to be for some of the big TV shows on already and new to this fall. More information will come on that later, but I think these are the type of projects that I will start to undertake, rather then putting in the crazy man hours of more complex websites.

I could just make one long winded recap of tonights season final and final chapter of Volume 1 of Heroes, but I am sure most of you who are reading this post have watched it or still want to watch it. And if you have missed the Heroes bandwagon go buy the first season DVD in a couple months and get yourself caught up. Anyways tonight’s final episode concluded the storyline behind “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World”. What I find most impressive about this show is that it had the potential to be extremely “cheap”, or for lack of better ways of saying it, bad. It took me a few episodes to get into this show, but when you get into the complexity that Heroes has, it truly is one of the most original shows on television. Tonights finale although at times a little long winded (then again what finale isn’t) has an extremely thrilling and puzzling ending that sets us up perfectly for Volume 2 next year. I just want to thank NBC for giving this show a chance, and housing some of the most engaging shows on TV. Good work Heroes, can’t wait for next season!

You ever have a weekend that you were just really looking forward to? Well this past weekend was one that I just could not wait for it to come, because for the first time in months I would have a free weekend to enjoy to myself without any worry of school work coming into play. Well wouldn’t you know it, Saturday morning I woke up sick with a cold and it literally plagued the entire weekend. I can’t say that laying around all day watching movies like Rocky V, American Dreamz, and having a good time with MLB 07 for the PS3 wasn’t all bad but having to back out of a date with Jenn on Saturday night, and losing a lot of productive work hours yesterday has put me in the hole a bit. I have quite a few hardware items to review (2 Logitech Harmony Remotes, an Antec HD Enclosure, Logitech PS3 Keyboard, around 5 games, and plenty of updates to Movie-Stop which I haven’t been as consistent with as I would like.

So here is to Memorial Day weekend becoming my work weekend full of projects, reviews, and homework. Hopefully I can catch a few flicks along the way! Have a great week everyone, and I should say this more often, thanks for reading.