Right ... so this makes more sense to me as a way to display art on the site. I'll post it as it gets done and as you come around you'll see it posted. There's not much of a reason yet, but when there is I will flush out the archives page and provide links to the archives by category.

lovely ... i think i'll go play soccer now :)

I ditched the basically useless navbar that was left and now there is nothing but the blog. The site in its current incarnation doesn't cover everything that I want, but I will add as I can. My basic game plan is to provide everything through the blog and made the archives cover the functionality that would have existed in different places otherwise. This way I can remove say the movie section and instead just post my thoughts in the blog and let people use the archive to look at old posts.

I am also feeling more and more inspired artistically, so I'm sure it won't be too much longer before I start posting art to the blog ... that ought to make things more colorful eh? I have some vacation time coming up next week when I'll be in Cape Cod ... I hope to get some art done then =)

happy days!

So friday night was Hulk night, and pretty much everyone hated except for a couple of us ... punks! The film itself was a bit odd now that I am thinking about it. I liked it, but nothing in the film seems all that memorable. I think part of the problem was that we didn't eat until after the movie, and I was starving the whole time! Coco's fish and chips ... eh ... and damnit I want more chips! I hate it when you get 6 fries on the side ... fuck that ... I want a mountain of food. Anways ... dissatisfying meal after the movie.

Saturday was fanime, and I was a bit worried that this was going to turn out like wondercon and be totally lame ... you know, just a bunch of geeky comic/anime lovers dressed up obsessing about how totally hot so and so character is while drewling over issue blah blah of some crapy book. There certainly were a lot of terrifyingly dedicated anime fans, but this had a much more enjoyable atmosphere than wondercon. There were tons of people around, which was kewl, and I was totally overwhelmed by the number of people dressed up ... serious cosplayers there. The music videos were sweet, and there was kewl artwork all around. I was especially excited that the dealer room wasn't so lame and I actually picked up the FLCL disc 3 w/ box over a month before its due to be released! yay! Not to mention that I got a free shot glass with it. I also managed to catch a few of the live sessions, some were interesting, some not. Next year my goal is to have some artwork that I can try to sell there.

Sunday was prime because all I did was draw all day and go to my soccer game. Sun 6, Spaniards 3. This was a good game for us though because we had our defense challenged quite a bit more, and that was a good learning experience for us. After this week we will lose some of our really good players until the tournament, which is a bummer.

There is other stuff to post, but those'll get their own topics.

I love finding great new sites to visit. Especially when they are forums that get serious action and have bounties of information. Check out all the great art work on this forum I just found ... appropriately named The Drawing Board

So late into last night I finally got mythtv running properly on my xbox ... oh the joy! This is one headache that I am very glad to finally be rid of. Its not totally setup yet as I have some minor issues to address like getting the remote control working, but at least the videos playback fine. Now the final piece of the puzzle will be to drop my PVR-250 hardware mpeg2 encoding card into an old pII-400 system and just let that do the recordings. What a happy day =)

Well ... the soccer team had its second scrimmage today and it was unfortunately not all that competative. Despite the lack of competition it was a fun game and we continued to learn more about how we play as a team. I am really excited about the tournament because I am starting to feel like we certainly have a chance of winning, especially if we play consitently well.

Viewed:	June 13, 2003 @ 8:00 PM
Theater:	Camera 7
Algee Says:	Bit childish, but fun. Definitely worth seeing.

Pixar is just one of those movie studios that isn't afraid to take the time to do things right and it really shows. They do an excellent job in breathing the utmost life into all of their characters, whether they be fish, bugs, monsters, or toys.

Of course this film has great animation, but what is even more noticable is how much time and effort was put in to the charater of the film. The great thing about animation is that everything must serve a purpose, because you have to manually put every single item into each frame.

Anways ... above all else this is just great filmmaking.

I decided to simplify this whole website thing and cut back down to just doing the blog. I'll still be doing a lot of the same stuff as before, but just through the interface of the blog rather than trying to organize it as a bigger website.

Cheers.

Viewed:	June 8, 2003 @ 5:20 PM
Theater:	Camera 7
Algee Says:	Eh. Good comedy, but South Park is funnier.

Bruce Almighty certainly brings back the good 'ol slap-stick Jim Carrey that we all know and love, but it still seems a bit too tentative and reserved to be "rolling on the floor" hilarious. I found myself laughy regularly throughout the film at some really great scenes, but there could have been a lot more.

I think this film just suffered from a bit too much seriousness weighing down the comedic moments. The serious bits are great and probably would have been perfect in a separate movie with someone besides Carrey, but what we really want to see is nonstop goofball jokes and we don't quite get there.

This is still certainly a good time out and worth seeing, but still doesn't come near the comedic legacies of Dumb and Dumber or Ace Ventura.

mmm ... lotsa stuff going on this past weekend. Lets see ... Friday I finally got some new soccer gear including a brand spankin' new ball, very nice! That night was just me and dad chillin' and relaxing. We had an enormous Thai dinner and then kicked back to watch a dvd.

Saturday was the bbq get together. I spent all morning making up some salads and getting stuff together before we met up around lunch time. The whole plan was messed up because the park was full and there weren't any grills available, but luckily we could just go to Gun's place and there was a perfect spot there. I thought the barbaque was fab-u-lus and couldn't have been better. We lounged around all day eating and playing in the sun and boy was it relaxing ... just like those great summer days you had when you were 7 years old and got to go to Raging Waters ... the best!

Sunday was sweet too! Met up with the Reids for a Sunday brunch then spent the rest of the day hanging out, playing games, and watching anime. I even got out to see Bruce Almighty ... I'll post about that separately. We pigged out on candy and ice cream then rented some video games and played Fusion Frenzy all night.

To top it all off ... Monday was "Sit on your ass cuz its your day off" day. I pretty much watched anime and played video games ALL day, doesn't get much better than that.

Hmm ... and somehow after all that I was quite happy to be returning to work today :)

-- AG

Wahoo ... all my hard work becomes useful as of late last night. Today was pretty exciting monitoring all the updates we made and trying to get a handle on all the last minute fixes necessary. I am happy to say that so far nothing from my code has gone wrong ... *phew*. I also found out that I get a 3 day weekend ... kewl :D

Happy Days!

Well ... after about a month or more of having my dvdlib out of commission on the site I finally decided to fix it. As it turns out I had put "/movies/dvdlib/" when it really should have been "/movies/dvdlib" ... gah!

Oh the lameness :P

C'mon ... just a book or 5. Its good for you! Fantagraphics.com

Now Go!

A little touch up to the 'ol blog and *poof* ... now I am using categories more effectively. I need to spend a little time setting up the archive pages and then i'll have links to the archive for each category.

In general I've been doing some thinking about the site and I have come to some decisions. Coming not so soon.

came accross a blog called "Ipse Dixit" today. Its actually an expression meaning "An unsupported assertion" ... heh. clever.

to find this out i used a handy new mozilla extension i found called "search this!" It lets you highlight text on a webpage then right click and select "search xxx" where xxx is a variety of websites. Right now its a bit limited because it only includes Amazon.com, Imdb, and Dictionary.com ... but the premise is very sound.

I should have known my xbox would turn out to be a POS since it is Microsoft of course. I fiddled with it a bit more last night trying to get it to just playback mpeg2 recordings with mythtv, but even that didn't go very well, so now I'm about ready to trash the thing. I am getting very tired of this project ... I think Its time to give it a rest for a bit. Bleh.

Okay ... so on friday I was out seeing The Italian Job, which turned out to be a pretty cool caper flick. Anyways, the theater was pretty crowded so unlike some people I don't mind shifting all the way in and sitting directly next to a stranger. I think its an american thing, most americans need a good couple feet of totally free space around them to feel comfortable. I find it amusing to see who you end up sitting next to, for instance the guy I sat next to on this occasion only knew how to say two things ... "Big Time!" and "Definitely." And its not as if he only said it a couple times ... it seemed as if every 10 minutes or so his buddy would make a comment during the film and this guy would always reply "Big Time!" After the fifth time or so I began to start laughing each time he said it, then would start to combo like "Definitely Big Time!" At that point I was practically about to explode.

I think its funny to notice how everyone has such different patterns. I wonder if I have a "Big Time" phrase and what it is?

Well ... it was a fun beach filled weekend. Saturday I was at the beach in Aptos for a meeting with the new soccer team I just joined. I am extremely excited about joining the team and the next few months of practicing and playing together, and then to put the cherry on top of it all, we are going to a tournament in Italy! :) Anways ... so at the the beach we a good time romping about playing a game of about 7v7 beach soccer. Its so nice to finally play with skilled players, which are not so easy to come by here in the U.S. After messing around for a bit we had a meeting about team info and specifics and such, followed by a few rounds at the bar ;) That made for a quite relaxing evening at home.

Sunday morning I returned to the beach for a bit of surfing. Unfortunately I had a pretty piss-poor day of surfing and basically never really found my rythem, but I was happy enough with the final ride of the day and it was such a beautiful day that you certainly didn't hear me complaining. After freezing my ass off for a couple hours, man was the water cold on Sunday, we decided to stop at the good old Ideal Bar and warm up on the deck with some lunch and beer.

Now ... Sunday night I finally saw Matrix Reloaded, and to put it bluntly, I thought it failed miserably. The whole time I was waiting to be wowed by something as unique and creative as the first film, but I regret to say that moment never came. Anways, I'll gather my comments into a review very soon.

The other tragedy of the weekend was my xbox. First off, it doesn't seem to be fast enough to do the mpeg4 playback I want to do ... so that is lame. Then after that it decided to commit suicide or something and now my gentoox linux install seems to be screwed, so i'll have to start that over again :/

anyways ... good times.