The World of Joel

For the first time in my life, I feel like I am jumping on a bandwagon. If you ask me my favorite football team it would be the 49ers, baseball, The Angels, Golf Player Tiger Woods, Tennis Player James Blake, but when it comes to basketball I just don’t have a team, probably because I have never been a huge fan. However this season, before the Pao Gasul trade for the Lakers, I began to show signs of interest. Now I have been watching most of their games and have been enjoying it. Last night was one of the more exciting basketball games I have watched in a while, and seeing the Lakers head to the NBA finals is fantastic news, it means more basketball in the weeks to come. How great would a LA vs. Boston match-up be? I for one am hoping for that, and hoping that the Lakers take home another ring.

So for those of you who use Mac OSX Leopard, you know how great and useful Time Machine can be. For those who don’t know what Time Machine is, it is a built in backup system for OSX which synchronizes your data at specific intervals to an external drive. It’s great for someone like me who does a lot of writing, and e-mails and doesn’t want it all to go away with one bad save or trashing of a document. When I first upgraded to Leopard I had no issues running Time Machine, I bought an Iomega 500GB External Drive from Apple, and felt as though I was not going to have to worry about my backup any longer. Well I reinstalled OSX a few months back because I was feeling the clutter of a year old notebook, and I had my data backed up and when I reinstalled OSX I recovered all of my data and began to use Time Machine like nothing had happened.

One day out of no where I got an error message saying that Time Machine failed to complete my backup, I thought it might be a fluke so I tried it a few more times with the same results. I read online that people were having similar issues so I followed their advice and reformatted the hard drive. Two months later and 30 different methods later I am still not able to use Time Machine. If anyone has any idea why I can get only 50% or so of my backup done followed by an error message that would be great. All I know is that its frustrating as heck. I am trying to be good, I want to backup, I have been foolish in the past, and even when I want to be good Time Machine won’t let me!

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this my next stop was at Digg.com, and low and behold there is a Mac 10.5.3 update that was released today that was suppose to help reliability on Time Machine! When I get home today I will test out the new update (which I have already installed) and see if that helps my Time Machine predicament.

UPDATE #2: After installing 10.5.3 which was to fix some areas of Time Machine I am still having the same issue, it is still telling me that it unable to complete my backup. Back to the drawing board.

For those with a keen eye, you may have noticed that my link to my Europe Trip page has changed from Europe Trip 2006 to Europe Trip 2008. That is because Jenn and I are heading back over the pond, this time for three weeks going through London and Europe and enjoying every minute of it. The trip started as a 12 day cruise through the Mediterranean, but Jenn and I decided that if we are making a trip over there we better get the most out of it, and thus added the first 7 days of London and Paris. Jenn and I have both been to London and love it, so we are spending a day seeing anything we may have missed, and then heading to Paris where Jenn has been once and this will be my first time. From Paris we head to Rome for a day their and our Cruise departs and concludes in Rome. For the full itinerary you can head over to the Europe Trip 2008 page, right now it is a pretty brief itinerary, however as we get closer we will have more details and updates on the trip and our plans. It really should be the trip to remember.

There is no doubt that Saturday Night Live has seen better days, it has been a long time since I sat down and watched anything to do with SNL. However I remembered that Steve Carell was going to be on this week so I caught some of the skits on Hulu. If you don’t know Hulu is a great video service that plays full episodes for a lot of the shows on NBC and a few other networks. The three skits are in the following order. The Office in Japan, Obama vs. Clinton, and Graduation Commencement Speech. All three I found to be a real pleasure to watch and some good laughs. I especially love the names in the last video of the Commencement Speech, pretty clever. Enjoy them!
1) The Office in Japan

2) Obama vs. Clinton (NBA Playoffs Style)

3) Graduation Commencement Speech

So I have never been one to study. I am a procrastinator to the fullest extent, especially when it comes to things like studying. As many of you know I am graduating from UC Irvine here in a few weeks, but I have never really done the full blown “study day”. UC Irvine is one of the tougher schools around, but somehow my poor study habits have allowed me to get by with somewhat decent grades. Unfortunately my last quarter is proving to be quite the challenge, and I have had to log some serious hours to get through.

So today I had 8 hours in the library from 10:35am to 7:00pm I was in the Science Library at UC Irvine studying for my midterm exam tomorrow, which if all goes well, will prove to be my last midterm as an undergraduate student. When studying a lot you tend to get hungry/thirsty and so college students tend not to choose the healthiest snacks. Take for example today, granted my lunch was a Subway sandwich, my 3:00pm snack was a good old fashion Snickers Bar and an Energy drink. Sure there may be one or two things that could make a less healthy combo, but I found it hilarious that college students at a top-50 University in the country are not smart enough (myself included) to pick something as unhealthy as this, and yet it tastes great. I have never been a huge fan of energy drinks but today it tasted fantastic, and there is nothing like a good snickers bar. All in all, if there was one thing I missed in the college experience it must have been the great study snacks.

So I started this year’s TV Season with high hopes. I had about 8-10 TV Blogs I was producing, a few returning shows I was excited to get back into. The blogs went really well, I did sell them in hopes of making profit which I did, and things worked out. I am starting some new blogs which I will get into later, but for now as the finale’s begin to roll and we see the effects of the writers strike with the shortened seasons, we look back on what I watched in 2007-2008.

Shows I Watched:
Amazing Race
Bionic Woman
Carpoolers
Chuck
Friday Night Lights
Grey’s Anatomy
Heroes
Jericho
Journeyman
The Big Bang Theory
The Office

Favorite New Show of 2007-2008 Season: The Big Bang Theory on CBS

Most Dissapointed About Cancellation: Journeyman on NBC (followed by a close second in Jericho)

Most Disappointing Series of 2007-2008 Season: Heroes on NBC

Favorite Show Overall: The Office

So I am usually on my own on Tuesdays. I have a study session on Tuesday mornings and usually I head back home to study. However today I have a study session in about an hour for a midterm on Friday and Jenn had to stay around to talk to a professor. Instead of studying which I really should have Jenn and I went house and furniture shopping. We are not looking for an immediate buy but checking out our options none the less.

So first we were off to Ikea in Costa Mesa about 15 mins from UC Irvine. The Ikea was gigantic, its been a long, long time since I have been in an Ikea and I have to say I had fun. There is just so much to look at, it would take two or three go throughs to see everything. Of course I am looking for a great place to put a nice size plasma and my three game consoles and Jenn is looking at throws for a couch and art work.

So there wasn’t much in the way of “technology” but I would say that we did see a few things we liked. We learned we both are a fan of modern, both a fan of dark wood and black frames. We are also a big fan of black and white photography as you can see below in a photo of the Eiffel Tower that we should have bought for like 7.99 or 24.99 including frame. We would have went with a black frame however.

I wasn’t as big of a fan of the art work, but there was this one piece that we both liked and thought it would be good for a dining room. I wonder if Ikea minded me taking pictures in there store. Either way these were all taken with my iPhone, not bad right? Once again dark black frame.

So I didn’t take more pictures of Ikea, I decided to take pictures late in the long maze that is Ikea. However for whatever reason instead of studying, we went to Portola Spring which is one of the nicest new developments I have ever seen. We went through a ton of developments, the place a few years back would have been sold out in weeks, but this new development seems to have been stalled by the economy. Needless to say it is just really quite the community with tons of tennis and basketball courts, and a nice Olympic pool in the middle. The picture below is from the official website.

The one that Jenn liked the best and for me was tied for first with another was a 3 story town house called San Carlos that ran for the mid-400’s, which is a ton for a 3 story town house however in the OC its a lot less then a year or two ago where the same house would have gone for 500,000. Not to mention the fact that we could probably knock it down to the low 4’s or high 3’s which would be much more affordable. Needless to say the townhouse was great. At first three floors seemed intimidating but if you walk this house it really helps make a little over 1,000 square footage feel much larger.

I am going to throw the rest of the pictures from the adventure on Flickr later, so you can see all of my iPhone goodness and our great adventure in Portola springs. If our plans stay the same for a wedding in the next year then that would mean this may be somewhere we look outside of renting an apartment to buy a home. How crazy would that be, to be a homeowner in a years time? I guess we can only pray on it and take things as they come. Whatever the case looking at houses and the future
is always a lot of fun.

UPDATE: I did post the pictures on Flickr. Go here to check out all the model home goodness.

Haven’t there been a ton of natural disasters lately? I got online after class today and I hear that China has a magnitude 7.8-7.9 earthquake. From what I remember from my Geology course things like that are not only rare but extremely intense and highly dangerous. The largest earthquake since 1900 was in Chile at a magnitude 9.5, so your not talking about to far off of that.

With that cyclone in Myanmar (which I can honestly say I had never heard of before this disaster) with over 100,000 dead. That is no small number to be just thrown around. I put it into perspective, I live in Riverside, CA where in 2000 the population they believed to be 255,166. That means that 1/2 of the population is dead from one disaster, that is an insane idea to comprehend. It is just such a hard concept to try to grasp your hand around to understand, and all you can really do is pray for those in these areas.

There are very few videos these days on Youtube that I find interesting. I really don’t surf the site all that often, and so when I come across something interesting I try to post it up for you. I have to admit this video I found on Joystiq.com, and I have to say that I would love to have this coffee table! How fun would this be not only for Mario but all the great NES titles!

I have read now my fair share of audio books, in fact Jenn and I are currently running through another one right now. With our big trip this summer coming up, and school wrapping up I did stop my Audible account at least for now. With that being said the last book I bought with my Audible subscription is Playing for Pizza a book by John Grisham. I read The Broker by Grisham a few months ago and loved it. The Broker was set mostly in Italy, and after reading online it seems as though the country had a big place in the heart of the author as Playing for Pizza also sets itself into this location, this time in Parma, Italy. The book was about an NFL Quarterback who had some pretty bad stints in the league, and was hated so much that they really through him out of the country, and he ended up playing in the Italian NFL.

What was so interesting was that the main character Rick was one of the few paid athletes on the Parma Football team and in fact the majority of the Italian Football players literally played for the fun of the game which is why this book was so entertaining, it was refreshing to hear people playing for the love of the game. The book was a quick read, short and sweet, nothing to deep, nothing to jaw-dropping, just a good story and a good read. If you need a quick book this isn’t a bad choice by any means.