Monday Morning Rambling: The Droid Version

Well this past weekend was my 10 year anniversary, and me and the Beloved Wife had a grand time. The festivities (at least the eating portion of them) started with lunch on Friday (sushi! sushi! sushi!) continued throughout dinner Friday night (taampas @ P.F. Chang's) and finalized with standard lunch fare on Saturday afternoon.

Of course, eating at Cheddar's wasn't the only thing that took up my Saturday afternoon. There was also a trip to the Verizon store, in which I came one step closer to becoming a part of the Singularity. Basically, I now carry around the sum total of human knowledge (or ignorance, depending on your POV) in my pocket. In! My! Pocket!

I'm still trying to decide what to call it, currently my choices include, Whistler, SELMA, Ziggy, and Mother Box.

Sadly, not all of the proposed festivities for this weekend went off without a hitch, since neither of us were feeling just 100% yet, we decided to forgo the movie experience and instead focus on getting caught up on our viewing of Sanctuary. Which meant that we watched a good 4 hours of Sanctuary this weekend, but did not get to go see Sherlock Holmes the way my Beloved wished to.

Oh well, it was a great weekend, and as I said, I now get to carry the Internets in my pocket!

Amusingly, that's not the only thing that's happened this past week. I finally received my second Christmas gift (apparently there was some sort of screw-up when my Beloved ordered it or it was on back order or something).

Anyways, I am now the proud owner of a set of of the Stargate coasters. This things are awesome, they have all the chevrons and the glyphs and even the blue puddle.

And for even more geek greatness is the fact that my 3 year old has used it for its intended purpose--that is the power of the Stargate Coaster. Of course he removed my drink from said coaster in order to utilize it for its intended function, but that's okay.

Well, that's all the time I have for this week, join me next week where I wish for more time yet again....

The Holidays Are Over

And I'm regaining time. Well, at least that is the theory.

Of course, with the new anime season starting up, a new video game, and as always more and more books (much to my Beloved Wife's dismay), that theory does not always hold up well under the light of day.

On the book front, I have recently finished American Gods and was thoroughly happy with it, and I've managed to purchase Tobias Buckell's Ragamuffins. Sadly for me, this is the second book in a series, which of course means I must now go and see about acquiring his Crystal Rain novel. Amusingly enough, much like Doctorow's and Scalzi's works, I discovered his writing via a blog.

On the video game thing, I finally broke down and purchased Sins of a Solar Empire. I've been watching this game for a while now, and have never bought it mainly because I did not think that the enjoyment I would find in the game was worth the $50 (then $40 and then $30) price tag. Luckily, they brought said price tag down to $20 and the little economist in my head decided that yeah, $20 for that game is a worthwhile purchase and one should get $20 worth of enjoyment out of it. And I have, and I'm nowhere near finished playing with it.

Finally, over in the anime department, I've been bad. I know I said I was going to try to do episodic blogging last season, and I did watch 11Eyes, but I didn't ever really blog on it. Likewise, I'm wanting to build a nice review of t he series, but there is that whole "lack of time" thing going on.

Anyways, it's now firmly within the winter season, and I have tentatively made up my mind on which shows I'm going to watch this season:

• Durarara!! (for what appears to be an awesome anime)
• Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu (for the amusement)
• Okami Kakushi (for the sick horror of watching car wrecks)

Alas, let us see if I manage to make it through the entire season watching all of them this time.

In manga/comic news, I feel the need to talk about something here that I usually reserve for my programming blog. As indicated by the fact that I have a programming blog, I am, by training and trade, a software engineer. As such, I practice on things. I build software for the sake of building it, much the same way that I write things for the sake of writing them.

One of those things that I have built, is called eComic. It's purpose is to display CBR/CBZ files. For those of you who are unaware, CBR is a file format which is basically a RAR or a ZIP file of a folder of a bunch of images. eComic (and other tools like it) basically display the images within said file in a sequential format.

Basically, it's a digital comic book. It is software that is both free and open-source, therefore have fun with it. My primary reason for building it is to learn new techniques therefore, I release both the compiled version for people to use, as well as the source so others can see what I'm doing within it.

Now, despite all those things I have been doing, I have seen a few movies recently, among them 9 and Astroboy. And as one might expect from previous proclivities that I have espoused upon this blog, I did find both enjoyable (actually Astroboy more so than 9 in a somewhat surprising upset of my expectations).

Oh well, they were both fun movies, now I just have to get the time to go watch Avatar, Holmes and The Book of Eli. Maybe this weekend which happens to be my 10^th wedding anniversary.

Yes, intrepid reader, you read that correctly! A mere 10 years ago, this Friday, I was suckering a beautiful blond into being my wife getting married, and have been happily within that particular state for all those years now.

I am a lucky, lucky man.