My ‘Vacation’ at 11:25 AM

While my Mom and Dad went on a Carnival Cruise down the Baja Peninsula, Jonny and I got to stay at Matt B’s house. We did some work around their house with Matt; picking up branches, cleaning up the basement, and even some dry walling and mudding. Also on Thursday we went to the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport. After the Museum we drove to Fort Flagler. It’s an old WWII base with several gun batteries. Now it’s a state park and a lot of fun to run around in!

 

Say hello to my first Picasa Web album. I’ve never been able to figure this out until now.

 

-Graydon

MRM – Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa at 2:55 PM

I just got back from the theater, here’s my take on Madagascar 2:

 

MRM – Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

Directed by: Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath

 

Written by: Etan Cohen

 

Starring cast: Ben Stiller (Alex the Lion), Chris Rock (Marty the Zebra, and other zebras), David Schwimmer (Melman the Giraffe), Jada Pinckett Smith (Gloria the Hippo)

 

Supporting cast: Sacha Baron Cohen (King Julian), Cedric the Entertainer (Mourice), Bernie Mac (Zuba), Alec Baldwin (Makunga)

 

What’s it rated?: PG for some mild crude humor ( I’d put it closer to PG-13 for gay and crude ‘humor’, sensual references)

 

Genre: Animated, Comedy

 

Synopsis: After taking off from Madagascar in a salvaged plane, Alex, Marty, Melman and Gloria crash-land on mainland Africa and experience what life is like in the true wild.

 

My Take: I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing a definite trend in animated movies; more and more crude humor. I could put up with a little, but the blatant and disgusting ‘jokes’ in Madagascar 2 made me cringe. Sure, there are other funny gags that are fine, but I just cant get past what they put in something labeled as a ‘family film’.

 

The animation is great, as usual, but as I said before, the crude humor is a definite turn-off for me. I also noticed something that I’ve never particularly noticed before in animated films before (aside from the obvious Ice Age); verbalized evolutionism. At one point, the leader of the penguins yells at a monkey, calling him a ‘higher mammal’ while one of the other penguins drops a screwdriver because he doesn’t have thumbs and shouts “curse you, Darwin!”.

 

Overall, It’s your typical sequel, and I wouldn’t recommend this to any family I know.

 

Story: kinda usual and bland so I give it 5 out of 10

 

Humor: (the clean stuff) 8 out of 10

 

Action/Suspense: 6 out of 10

 

Overall: 4 out of 10

 

-Graydon :-)

More Adoration of our President Elect at 11:20 AM

As you all may have heard already, President Elect Barack Obama’s Old Chrysler 300 series sedan is up for sale on eBay… for a million bucks “buy it now” and 22 bids placing it at $110,100.

 

Now a used car of this make and year aught to be selling for about 15 grand… and a new one would have sold for about 40 grand in the year it was made. But all of a sudden, when one man (who, I might add, isn’t really any different from anyone else) has owned that car for three years, it’s value is multiplied by more than 66 times!

 

This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy! People aren’t following Barack Obama because he’s a great guy, or because they like his stand on political issues, they’re following him because… because… Oh, gee, I don’t know why.

 

Sorry to any Barack Obama fans out there, but I’ve only met two people who liked Obama because of his political standpoints, and one of them liked Barack Obama for the same reasons I like Ron Paul; the Iraq war.

 

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that this blind following of one man, “just because” is ludicrous and very, very dangerous.

 

If you want to watch a video about it on Yahoo, click here.

If you want to see the eBay Motors listing, click here.

Another Computer Update at 6:01 PM

Today was another computer setup kind of day; I moved my computer’s tower below my desk so the “fall-off-the-desk-and-get-smashed” risk was reduced. I also attempted to set up a network so I could print stuff without actually buying a printer.

 

At first I thought that setting up a network would be pretty straightforward, a couple of boxes to check, a couple to un-check, a few areas of my computer to explore, you know, basic stuff.

 

boy was I wrong.

 

Getting our three computers “network compatible” was pretty easy, and of course, the file sharing features came with that. But had no idea how hard it is to set up a network printer when the computer with the printer has XP and the computer trying to use the printer has Vista!

 

My problem wasn’t with establishing the network, as I said, that was easy. Basically, my Vista computer wasn’t being allowed to install the drivers for the network printer, which was plugged into Jonny’s computer. Every time I went to install the driver for the printer I got an error message that said “Windows cannot connect to the printer. Access is denied”. So, I did what everyone does when they have a computer problem… I hit the internet.

 

Several forums, help sites, and temper tantrums later, I finally figured out that I was doing the logical thing and telling the computer that I wanted to set up a network printer. Turns out, with the Vista/XP clash of systems, I needed to tell my computer that I wanted to set up local printer. Local meaning it’s plugged my computer… even though I don’t have a printer plugged into my computer.

 

If all  this sounds really confusing, don’t feel bad, it is.

 

-Graydon :-)

 

PS I've gotten to know Windows Live Writer really well and I am really liking it. I highly recommend it. you can download it here.

My Acer Aspire AM3100! at 3:54 PM

As I said in my earlier post, my new computer (which I have name Percy) arrived last night, and I gotta thank that UPS guy for braving the floods to get it here a whole day early!!!! I’m extremely happy with it, and Vista even it’s all that bad.

There actually a few things that are pretty cool about Vista. the side bar where you can display various gadgets it very cool, I’ve got mine set to display time/date etc., as well as a currency converter (set to the difference between the Canadian dollar and the American) and a Weather Bug local weather gadget. But my favorite gadget is the Notepad:

 

 

                                   

You can have multiple notes at once and they can be as long as you want! NO MORE STICKY TABS ALL OVER THE MONITER!!!! WHOOOHOOOOOOO!!! sorry, I just had to do that.

anyway, on with the pictures:

 

 

Here’s Percy parked right next to my (puny) Dell monitor and Acer mouse.

 

 

Acer really thought this one through, most people put their towers on the floor, so they put the USB 2.0 and headphone jacks on the top of the unit! Smart! I don’t have Percy on the floor right now, but that’s just because I’m using a camp table as a desk until I can find one on Craigslist for cheap, even even then, the ports on top are kinda handy.

 

 

Another look at my camp table festooned with $700 plus worth of equipment :-)

 

I’ve been on the computer practically all day now, transferring over files, downloading my favorite software, uninstalling all the junk programs Percy came with, and figuring out how Vista works. I found this AWSOME program that Windows has out called Windows Live Writer. It’s like a word processing program, but it’s liked to your blog! you can do waaaaay more stuff with your posts that Blogger lets you do, and it doesn’t have weird layout errors either. Bonus: a real spell/grammar checker!!!!! you can download it here.

 

Well that’s all for now, I have some more school work to get to, see y’all on Sunday!

My New Computer Is Here!!! at 10:17 PM

After a long period of waiting, it's finaly here! I've scraped and scratched and I pulled up enought money to buy my own computer and it's finally here. I'll be transfering over all my files from my old computer tommorrow as well as posting pictures! 

Unfortunately it came with Windows Vista, so I'll have a bit of a learning curve :-P

-Graydon L

Happy New Year! at 8:56 AM

Well it's been an... interesting year between the election, the attacks in Mumbai, and various insulting SNL skits, there's been a lot of crazy news out there.

At least I have a real reason to look forward to '09; my new computer! UPS says it's going to be here on the 8th of January. I can barely wait!

Naturally we stayed up till midnight last night. We watched some movies, had some sparkly apple juice, and then... my favorite part... I finally got to go to bed. I've been hitting the sack at past midnight a lot recently so I was looking forward to getting some real rest. Unfortunately, most firecracker wielding party animals don't hold the same priorities I do ;-)

Anyway, enough spouting from my grouchy-early-morning-self, I have some school work to get to.

Happy new year!

-Graydon L