So much to see!

With the fall semester drawing to a close and the only two shows I watch regularly (Smallville and Heroes) going on hiatus, I'm going to be missing my regularly-scheduled entertainment fix over the Christmas break. I've been hearing a lot about Joss Whedon's ill-fated Firefly series and its acompanying film Serenity. Friends have told me I need to see it, but I lacked the interest and - more importantly - the time required to watch it. That's where the internet steps in. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog formally introduced me to the mind of Joss Whedon. After enjoying that as much as I did I decided I'd add Firefly and Serenity to my mental "To Be Watched" list. Then Aaron and Will over at the Axed podcast did an entire episode on Firefly/Serenity this week. Also, as most of you know, I've been addicted to Twitter for over a month now. It's an amazing site that you need to check out if you haven't already. I've been talking to lots of very cool people there. Late last week, I started talking to the hosts of the Chic Geek Podcast. I listened to all of their episodes in a matter of three days and enjoyed them immensely. Faith and Ky are really funny and made me genuinely interested in checking out a few things I've been holding off on. I think I'm going to do a full review of their show as part of my all-but-abandoned "Podcastin' " ongoing blog post series, so be on the lookout for that. Aside from giving me the final push towards watching Firefly/Serenity, the Chic Geek girls have convinced me to look into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its popular spin-off Angel, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:SCC), which is supposed to be the best show on television right now, according to Faith, as well as Steve and Derek of SHoE (who also run a Sarah Connor Chronicles podcast called SkyNext).

So I'll be keeping quite busy over this break. Of course I hope to be working; in fact I need to remember to call my place of summer employ tomorrow to make sure they still need me over Christmas. However, if that goes through, I usually work early in the day, from 7am-3pm. That leaves plenty of time each day for catching up on good TV. Of course to watch T:SCC, I need to see the Terminator films, which I'm ashamed to say I've never seen. I know. Go on, ostracize me. But before you do, know that I watched The Terminator mere moments before writing this post and LOVED it. I'm going to get started on Terminator 2 in just a few minutes. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines isn't directly related to T:SCC, so I'll probably put off watching that until after I'm all caught up with everything else. I've only got a month of freedom to watch 7+ years' worth of TV and movies, so I don't want to waste my time.

Here's the order in which I plan to watch all this stuff. If you have any suggestions for how I might amend it, feel free to comment.

• Terminator -- DONE
• Terminator 2 -- DONE
  
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles --SEASON 1 DONE, S2 IN PROGRESS
  
• Firefly
• Serenity
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Angel
  

NOTE: Edited to reflect the completion of items on the To-Watch list.

Windows Vista: Not That Bad!

I took the plunge. I installed Windows Vista yesterday. Not as my primary OS; that would be madness. I'm dual-booting XP and Vista. For those not familiar with the term, it means that when I turn my computer on, I get a choice of which OS I want to use. I've been trying out Vista since yesterday afternoon and I must say it's really a pretty good system. Great, actually. I have no major complaints. My only issue so far was that Vista asked me to confirm almost every action. When I installed or ran a program for the first time, I had to confirm that I trusted the software. Got annoying. But it was pretty easy to disable that through Control Panel. Since then, it's been smooth sailing. I'm actually considering switching over to Vista permanently. I won't make that decision until I've been able to fully try it out and decide that I'm absolutely certain it's a good move.

The main complaint one hears about Vista is that it hogs system resources. Admittedly, I haven't been able to test that out to its fullest yet because I don't have much room on my Vista partition to install lots of software. Thus far I've only installed Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, and AIM. The basics. Plus any Windows Updates, because this copy of Vista is a little old, so it needs to be made current. At some point today I might install Photoshop or another program that requires a lot of system resources and then we'll see how Vista fares. But so far, it's actually consistently faster than my XP partition. Plus, because of the way I have things set up, I actually have access to all of the documents and files that are in my XP partition even when I'm running Vista, so I'm not really handicapping myself. The only problem is that I can't run programs off of my XP partition for use in Vista, and there isn't enough room on my hard drive to install everything in both XP and Vista. Maybe I'll try and use my external hard drive for that.

Anyway, overall I'm enjoying Vista very much. I'm inclined to agree with my good friend Shannon, a full-time Vista user and the only person I know who is totally fine with it. I'll keep you posted as things develop. Before you go, a screenshot:

(Click to Enlarge)

I know, only 1GB of RAM. It's disgraceful. But by Christmas (if not earlier) that will be expanded to my motherboard's maximum of 4GB. And it will be glorious. That's when I'll REALLY know if Vista is worth my time. If I like it enough with 4GB of RAM, I might start uninstalling stuff from my XP partition and switch to Vista as my primary OS.

Incidentally, I'm really excited for Windows 7, the next OS from Microsoft. That's set to drop in late 2009 or early 2010. Beta versions have leaked onto BitTorrent and I am more than a little tempted to try them out. The trick is finding a legitimate version that WON'T turn out to be a lovely piece of malware. If Vista doesn't work out for me, I just might have to grab a copy of Windows 7 and dual-boot it along with XP. We shall see. Any good/bad Vista experiences anyone wants to share? Use the comments box!

New Star Trek Trailer Looks SWEET

I saw this before Quantum of Solace a couple of weekends ago and I was totally blown away. While I'm still not down with the idea of the Enterprise being built in the 20th century instead of the 23rd, the awesomeness of this trailer is making it easier to forgive that. It's a re-imagining of Star Trek. I've gotta say Zachary Quinto (Sylar from Heroes) really looks the part of Spock. Very much looking forward to this movie.

Feeling Mildly Important

It's really cool when you get recognized by someone you respect. Lately I've taken to contacting the people at my favorite podcasts to weigh in when they ask for feedback. It started over the summer when the 10th Wonder Podcast read an email used some photos I sent them (Episode 58 "Two Things"). A couple of weeks ago, they also played a voicemail I left them (Episode 66 "Eris Quod Sum"). Around the same time as the voicemail, I emailed the Axed Podcast, and while they didn't read it on the show, they were courteous enough to reply to my email and even check out this blog. In fact, they mentioned my email in passing during their most recent episode, which came out today.

The main reason for this post, though, is that in today's episode of my very favorite podcast, Starkville House of El (Episode 109 "Abyss/Bride"), they read an email I sent them late last week (just a few minutes before they recorded the show, actually). It's pretty cool when stuff like that happens.

Gmail Themes!

According to ZDNet and other sources, including Felicia Day's Twitter, Gmail began offering themes to a limited number of users (Felicia included, apparently) today. I am not yet one of those lucky users. I really hope they make it available for all users very soon, because I really want to try it out. I like the themes they have for iGoogle, so hopefully the Gmail themes will be equally cool. Here's hoping.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/wp-trackback.php?p=1182

So Much To Watch!

I have so much stuff to watch these days. Tons of movies and complete TV series are on my external hard drive waiting for me to come along and click on them. It's just a matter of finding the time to do so. Off the top of my head, I've got Get Smart, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (movie), the Back to the Future trilogy, The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, 1408. And that's just movies. Now granted, I've seen some of those already, but I have been meaning to watch them again. If you wanna look at TV, there's Bill Nye the Science Guy, Legion of Superheroes and Superboy. That's a lot. Bill Nye alone is 100 episodes. It's amazing that I'm ever bored with this huge backlog of viewing material. Oh well. I'll get around to all of it eventually. Of course by the time I watch all of that, I'll have tons more to see. There are just so many movies and shows out there that I really want to see. It's tough to balance that with going to school and work and having a life. Any suggestions as to what I should add to my To Watch list? What are you watching these days?

Posted with LifeCast

The Awesome and the Not-So-Awesome

First, the not-so-awesome:

I have to to work in a minute, so I'll keep this short. I didn't have a great morning. Mostly for one big reason. I turned on my laptop to find that the bottom one-third of the screen was all messed up. The colors were all washed out and there were what I can only describe as rows and rows of seemingly dead pixels. I tried touching the LCD screen or lightly slapping the side and bottom of the computer, and I would get a proper display for a second, but then it would fade back to the way it was. I brought it to the Laptop Shop on campus (thank God for those guys) and the guy who helped me said that they would need to ship it out to IBM because, as he and I both agreed, it appeared that the video card needed to be replaced. So I asked him if there were any loaner laptops available, and he got me one. It's pretty old, maybe 4 or 5 years, and slow. 500mb RAM w/ Intel Centrino. Yeah. That's a bad thing, in case you didn't know. At least this time I have a replacement computer, unlike the time my battery died and my charger broke in the same week. Yeah. And that was finals week. Finals - Laptop = Hell. So I am grateful that they were able to hook me up this time. In theory, I'll be reunited with my Lappy in 7-10 business days, but you never know. I tend to think it'll be at least 2 weeks. We'll see. 

And now for the awesome:

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