Woo ooh, yee ooh

Recent Happenings

A few blog-worthy things have happened since the last post, just thought I'd share them.

My wife and I celebrated our one-year anniversary, this was quite a big day for us! We went out to eat at the 112 Eatery in downtown Minneapolis. The food and atmosphere was wonderful. I really enjoyed my meal, she thought her spaghetti was OK. We also drank some fabulous wine a 2006 Montes Malbec, my first time trying the Malbec varietal, very rich and smooth. Following the dinner we drove to our favorite dessert spot, Sebastian Joe's in Uptown, delicious, creamy, homemade ice cream. You can't beat the selection and the taste anywhere else in Minneapolis. All in all it was a romantic and successful anniversary.


Last Saturday my wife and I went to the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota with some friends of ours. It was an amazing experience, the exhibit contained many of the original models, costumes and set pieces from the movies! I was in geek heaven, the first trilogy really was a life-changing set of movies for me. I had an unhealthy obsession with it through my middle school years and have always carried a strong love for the universe that existed "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away". I've posted some photos I took at the exhibit in a Picasa web album if you want to take a look at all the neat stuff they had there.


Finally, I'll just touch on a video game I've been playing recently for the Wii, Boom Blox. This is a physics-based puzzle game where the main objective is to topple large structures through strategically placed throws of baseballs, bowling balls, bombs, etc. It also contains elements of Jenga. The concept of this game was actually Stephen Speilberg's genius. It makes some good use of the motion controls built into the Wii's remote and has some great party mode levels. So get out there and rent/buy the game if you are a Wii owner, it'll certainly entertain all ages.

Good Choice Academy!

The title is regarding the academy's choice of Best Picture for 2007, No Country for Old Men. I finally got around to watching it last night, and I have to say it was downright stunning. The intesity, the graphic violence and the subtle, dark humor all combined into one sinister, beautiful film.

The movie takes place in Texas, we follow the paths of three men, the first being Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) who stumbles across a crap-ton of money from a drug deal gone sour. He is being pursued by one of the the most evil villians I've seen Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). To top it off, Tommy Lee Jones plays the role of the county sheriff who's trying to put a stop to all the killing that's happening under his watch. A neat detail about the film that I didn't catch while watching it (thank you Special Features!) was that the 3 main characters never really have any scenes together. Some chasing occurs, but no direct dialogue other than a small phone call between Llewelyn and Chigurh.

This is a film with plenty of gruesome violence, so please don't watch it unless you feel your stomach can handle it. Other than the squeamish factor, this movie packs a huge punch and is beautifully shot with a haunting story. I highly recommend this film to any one, it's one of the best Coen brother films I've seen. 5/5 cubes of Chigurh!

Rock the Garden

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending Rock the Garden, a four-act concert that was held on the street in between the Walker Art Center and the Sculpture Garden. There were at least 7500 folks in attendance, and it felt quite crowded. I waited a good 30 minutes for a flippin' burger, and didn't even bother with the beer or Chipotle line. Overall, the crowd was quite respectful and carried a good energy. And the music was great!

Photo credit MPR.

First up was a Bon Iver, a folksy singer from Wisconsin. Sadly, I didn't pay much attention to him, we missed the first few songs and spent the first 45 minutes getting acclimated to the area, checking out the merch booth while it was unattended.
Cloud Cult followed Bon Iver with a great set, they also had two band members/artists paint during their set and turn out some pretty sweet paintings.
Third up was The New Pornographers. I really enjoyed hearing them live, they certainly are a polished act. The energy during "Bleeding Hearts Show" was electric! Finally, I worked my way towards the front of the stage for Andrew Bird. He gave us a wall of lush noise... along with some great songs! He also performed a newer song that had some of the best violin pizzicato layering I've heard from him, I'm excited to see if that song will make it onto a live or studio album. It was my fourth time seeing him live and it wasn't the best show, I enjoyed his performance last winter at the Guthrie the best. However, Rock the Garden was the first show where I knew all the songs prior to the concert and that made it much more exciting when he suddenly broke into "Imitosis" or "Firey Crash". All in all, it was a fun show, hopefully the lineup next year will be as good. Thanks for reading.

P.S. Don't even think about seeing The Happening, bad bad bad 1.5/5 killer plants.

163 Days

That number (which is 23 weeks and 2 days) is how long it took me to listen to my entire music library both at work, at home and in the car. I took it upon myself to listen to every song that I had in alphabetical order, in essence, it was a organized shuffle.
I also didn't remain rigidly dedicated to this playlist, I very often listened to albums/songs that I was in the mood for, but whenever I didn't care what was playing, I went back the the A-Z endeavor. If you're searching for a new way to enjoy your music, if shuffle doesn't bug you, and you don't mind listening to the same song twice in a row sometimes (it occasionally ended up having studio and live recordings back-to-back) this is a fun project to take on.
Feel free to let me know if you want more specifics on how I continued the playlist when I went from work to my car, etc. Just leave a comment.

P.S. I've recently watched the following films, only Hitchcock pleased me:
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 2.5/5 fedoras.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian - 3.5/5 Pevensie siblings.
The Birds - 4/5 lovebirds.

Found Photo

Fellow tech-geeks, I share this photo (click to see it larger) of a 1GB storage disk that looks to have been made by IBM (*squints to read the description card*). Oh, look, someone is also holding a same capacity 1GB SD Card in comparison! I'd like to find out when that monster was made. It never ceases to amaze me how far we've come, and how far we're going to go with technology. They now have external hard drives in the Terabyte capacity.

I remember the transition from 5.25" floppy disks to 3.5" floppy disks (which held ~1.47MB) in the 90's. How many of us remember the pains of labeling all the dozens of disks we had, forgetting to flip that "lock" switch, getting the disk read errors, ugh. I find it interesting we still use the image of that 3.5" floppy as the "Save" icon in all programs. Will that icon ever go away, considering we haven't used those in years? Will it be replaced by an image of a CD/DVD?

In this era of personal computing, storage is key, and it's hard to imagine that we used to never keep digital copies of our photos, music, movies on our computers. Where do we go from here? Sound off in the comments if you have any ideas, dreams, etc.

Plan your meals carefully

I just found this image in the NYTimes highlighting how much food is wasted every month by an average 4-person American family. I was initially skeptical in the numbers, but after some thought, it seems accurate. My wife and I find it hard to always eat our produce, also, we can never seem to keep up with our leftovers and they many times end up in the garbage. Knowing of the growing problems with food prices and shortages around the world, this fact is tough to digest...

UPDATE: Well, I didn't read the article carefully enough, it's saying that the food wasted by retailers, food service and consumers amounts to the 122lbs per month, one family doesn't throw away that much. Still quite shocking.