This is the first year in a while I haven’t had the chance to do a “year in review” post. Although I love doing them, mostly because there great to read a few years down the road, I hope to get to it at the start of 2008. What a year it has been though, it has had its fair share of ups and downs that for sure, one of the more rocky years in a while. However all in all it was another great year, plenty of great memories, great moments, and all together just great experiences. I am heading up to the mountains for a few days with Jenn and her folks, and then coming back to a grueling Winter quarter. It has been a pleasure folks, I look forward to continue writing to you all in the new year. Happy New Year Everyone.
Merry Christmas Everyone. I am going to make this one of those short and sweet posts. This is a bit of a different Christmas for me, its the first one out of the house, the first one I didn’t watch Christmas in Connecticut at my parents house on Christmas Eve, the first one I am going out of town on Christmas day for. However as much as things changed there are so many things to be thankful for and I have to say without getting any presents I am the luckiest guy in the world for all the great things the lord has blessed me with. Merry Christmas To Everyone, and a Happy New Year!
Things are funny in the way they work out. I haven’t done a radio interview in almost two years, I loved doing them, but its been a while. Yesterday there was a comment on Journeyman Blog from Brian Howe thanking us for our work and support. I e-mailed him up and asked if we could talk. He said he would do his best and asked for my phone number and went from there and I got a call at about 4:30pm this evening. Never heard of Brian Howe? Well I bet you have seen him, several times in fact. He has been in such movies as The Pursuit of Happyness, Catch Me if You Can, Evan Almighty, Deja Vu just to name a few, and a handful of notable TV shows as well Law & Order and CSI.
So I don’t have any radio equipment anymore. In fact I used my iPhone on speaker and my Mac Book to attempt to record the interview and only got the last eight minutes of it. However the talk was about 20-25 minutes long. We talked about the show, his past, his getting the gig on Journeyman, the future of the show, the promotion of the show, and the cast.
If you want to check out more on the interview go to the Journeyman Blog. I loved doing the interview and hopefully I can get some more with the strikes still going around and Journeyman’s fait still in the air. I should have the audio for the interview up soon as well.
I have mixed emotions about the last few weeks of a year. First off it is great time to be out of school, the break is much needed and I am enjoying it immensely. However with this time of year comes some things I am not a huge fan of, first off I don’t love family parties, its just a lot of formalities that I have never been a huge fan of. I love Christmas, not only the meaning behind it, the birth of our savior, but also just a great day for everyone to be happy and home and just relaxing. So that takes a lot of the time I have off for the next few weeks.
With basically all of the TV shows I blog about either canceled, waiting for the strike, or finishing up in the next week or so. I have a lot of games still to review, a few pieces of hardware, and some new projects that are un-announced that I am working on as well. So we shall see how the last few weeks of the year end up.
Before I read The Kite Runner a week or two back I hadn’t even thought about reading, I just never thought time would allow it. But then I heard about Audible, thought I would give it a shot, and was amazed with how much I enjoyed my read through of The Kite Runner. For those that don’t know I make an hour plus commute to Irvine everyday, and some days you need something to help get you through it. Jenn and I drive together for two of the days, and we drive separate (due to work schedules) on the other days. So the days I am not with Jenn I have been starting to listen to audio books. Choosing a second book was really a tough process, I know very little about authors, or even my taste in books, and after such a great run with Kite Runner I wasn’t sure where to go. So I decided to go with a name that I was at least familiar with, John Grisham, and I bought his book from a few years ago, The Broker.
I found out later that this was one of Grisham’s few ventures outside of the courtroom. The book was mostly set in Italy, a country I fell in love with a year ago, and it seems as though Grisham did as well. The way in which the book describes the country is so accurate, and in many ways can be a terrible book to read when your hungry with all of its descriptions of four course meals and a nice glass of wine. It was a bit slow, there was so much build up that the final climax that it did fall a bit flatter then I thought. I read the book in a week’s time (I drove a lot in the past week) it was a ten hour book and you figure 2+ hours a day of driving and you can see how I can get through a book pretty quickly. If you haven’t read it and want to hear about Italy, and a decent thriller its a good book, but from all the praise I have heard given to Grisham I was expecting a bit more.
Most Memorable Part: There was a time in the book where the main character Joel (can you see why I chose the book) is in Italy learning Italian from his tutor, and his tutor talks about her one experience in America. She says something along the lines of that she never understood America, it seemed like everyone is going everywhere so fast, and in fact they really aren’t going anywhere. You can’t get a more accurate interpretation of American lifestyle.
Whatever sort of skill, strategy, or patience it requires to win items on eBay I don’t have it. First off I have been sniped in the last minute of three auctions tonight. I want to buy a bigger memory card for my digital camera, just a simple 4GB memory stick, its like $30 no big deal. Twice i bid in the last 45 seconds of an auction and lost once by a penny and the other time by a dollar. I am not in desperate need of the item but it would be nice to have. I am great at selling things on eBay I have had a lot of success over the years in that, but when it comes to buying I get all panic stricken and always want to bid earlier then necessary. Half the time I think I am getting lousy deals because instead of wanting to get an item I would rather win the auction. Crazy right? Heck you know eBay is loving it. When I finally got a memory card it says:
You won the item in the last few minutes. Congrats, you beat the competition!
That is why I should never be allowed to bid on eBay, I take it more as a game then actually trying to buy a good. Oh well I got my 4GB Memory Stick!
I love Seinfeld. I would say half the nights of the week I watch Seinfeld on TV. The show never gets old and always gives a great laugh before hitting the sack. Here is some Seinfeld stand up that I really enjoyed today while hanging out in the library.
I don’t read much, if ever. However after listening to an episode of TWIT, I heard about the service Audible. They were giving away a 14-day trial where you got a free audio book. I picked the book, downloaded it, put it on my iPhone and listened to it on day’s Jenn and I didn’t drive together to UC Irvine a good hour drive from where I live. I have read books like this before, back in middle school instead of reading assigned reading I would get books on tape. It’s always been a challenge for me to sit down and read a book so when I heard you could get audio books for a reasonable price online I was game to give it a shot.
The book Kite Runner was actually a very fascinating tale, one that started off really slow and really took flight about 1/3 of the way through. For those who keep up on the movie industry you may know that there is a movie based on the book being released in limited showing in two weeks and I can guarantee you I am going to search for it. What I liked about Kite Runner is that it felt oh so real, the stories felt like something that could have easily taken place in Afghanistan and Pakistan two of the more prominent locations in the book. The book also had some really interesting perspectives on US culture from a different point of view. I think what really made this book for me was that the author read his own book, you could see he was definitely from a Middle Eastern country and really gave a great read through of his book.
If you have never tried Audible, I would highly recommend it, its a great service. And as for Kite Runner it wasn’t necessarily my favorite book of all time, but I would say I haven’t been that engrossed in a book in a long, long time.
My favorite quote: “For you a thousand times over” If you have read the book you know what an amazing quote that is.
