I realized I have yet to say anything about the series we've been collectively watching for over a year now. (EDIT: I found I actually posted about it back in January, but hey, I've slept since then. This is a different post than that one.) I introduce it that way, because I remembered watching Doctor Who on PBS Saturday nights when I was younger, and I discovered the 2005 revived series on Netflix, and I talked everyone into sitting down to watch it to see how it would go. I knew nothing about the revival until I found it on Netflix. I figured if everyone would have a chance of getting into the series, starting with today's version would be it.
Well, the princesses and the Queen completely loved it. We ripped through the 5 seasons that were on Netflix at the time, watched the DVDs for the first half of series 6, and then watched the second half of series 6 weekly as they came out. But what to do after we had gotten all caught up with the series as it stood? After all, we learned that the 2005 Doctor was the ninth incarnation. I watched Doctors 3-6 when I was growing up.
Well, Doctor Who started in 1963, so the logical conclusion was for me to get ahold of every existing episode of Doctor Who and we started at episode 1. I had not seen most of the first Doctor episodes and none of the second, so I was honestly really looking forward to this. We watched An Unearthly Child last July or August, I believe, and we've been steadily plugging along ever since. Series 7 finally started for Doctor number 11, and we've reached the end of the classic series' season 20 with the fifth Doctor in our other watching. That's right. We've been watching Doctor Who steadily for over a year now, and we've yet to repeat an episode. I'm thoroughly enjoying though, since I saw any of these episodes only once when I was young, so I'm getting a lot more out of them now. Once we finish them all, I'll feel free to watch whichever whenever, but for now, I'm patiently watching with everyone else. I'm really chomping at the bit for Doctors 7 & 8 which I've also never seen.
The plan for our TV series watching is to watch all of Doctor Who all the way through to whichever episode is the most recent so the Queen and Princesses can rewatch the new series (which they like far more than the classic, anyway) in the context of the adventures of the 8 Doctors that came before it. Many of those episodes will take on entirely new meanings when you know what came before. The episode entitled 'Dalek', for example, I noted had a completely different meaning for me than the girls. After all, I knew the Daleks before we started. I knew who they were to the Doctor. I knew how he reacted to them. The girls had never seen a Dalek before (I'm so sorry - don't judge me). To them, this was just another story. So watching that episode, in particular, in the context of 7 Doctors worth of Dalek stories (the 8th Doctor only had one on-screen story, and that did not involve the Daleks) will mean something different. The Master also makes an appearance in the new series, and the girls didn't know him either. Well, they do now.
Anyway, once we finish with Doctor Who in its entirety, we will move on to Star Trek, which they also have not seen. The plan there is to watch 38 specific episodes of the original series, movies 2, 3, 4, and 6 and the all of the Next Generation along with its movies. I never got much into the other series, but they're all on Netflix if the girls feel the need.
I am happy they like Doctor Who so much, though. I enjoyed it thoroughly growing up, and often pretended that our tire gauge was a sonic screwdriver. It looked just like the third and fourth Doctor's version of it. They play Doctor Who with their Barbies. At least one Ken doll is the Doctor and the others play the various companions. Oh, and they love the Daleks. Go figure.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Rehearsal and Google
Two things come to mind for today. Google and last night's rehearsal.
What's up with Google? Well, they've been doing this thing where they're taking over various websites and implementing this sort of standardization of the logins across all of them. This login standardization is wreaking havoc with my logins because I had accounts on all these different sites before Google got to be a part of them. I did not always use the same email address when setting them up, so passing between these sites is nothing short of a chore. For instance, blogspot was not always a Google property, but Google adsense was. So I had a Google adsense account under my home email address, but this blog is actually setup under a completely separate email address to preserve its rather transparent anonymity. Then Google acquired blogspot. Adsense is an actual deal you can put on the blog, but since this blog is under a different email address than my adsense, I can't do that.
Even worse than that, though, Google acquired Youtube, and recently killed all the old logins to favor the email address it was setup under. It linked this email address to any other Google properties that also use that address. YouTube had my home address as the contact, so it linked that to the adsense stuff along wth the other Google stuff there. Where it gets really complicated is the Queen uses the home address for her Facebook login where I use yet another email address for mine. When Google came up with +, I figured it would be good to just use the same email addresses for that (not that we ever use it). Oh, and did I mention that I had used that home address on a completely different blogspot account to write some stuff up once?
This means that Google has managed to make a mess of my online life by trying to make it easier. In order to write this blog, I had to log out of the Queen's Google account (you know, cause it took the Google + account holder's name and made it the primary name) because I had logged into my YouTube account earlier today and login to this one. You could say I did it to myself, but at the same time, we share the home email address. This whole thing was only further complicated by the requirement of setting up a Google account for our Android phones and linking that to everything else.
Anyway, last night, I had my Wednesday night rehearsal for church. These days, I alternate between keyboard and bass, and last night I was on keys. We primarily worked on a single new song, but at the end of the rehearsal, the leader wanted to try playing through the song again on his electric guitar rather than his acoustic. He said anyone who wanted to go could go and anyone who wanted to stay could stay. Naturally, I wanted to stay because I like playing with people. I moved myself to piano to play the missing part since the piano player left as soon as she could get out the door.
It was very fun. It was just fun to just play because that's what it felt like. We decided we needed to get together and just jam, so he figured we'd wait till the first days of school wound down and maybe do something in the fall on a Saturday. I hope we can, because playing together when you're not cramming for a performance is invigorating.
What's up with Google? Well, they've been doing this thing where they're taking over various websites and implementing this sort of standardization of the logins across all of them. This login standardization is wreaking havoc with my logins because I had accounts on all these different sites before Google got to be a part of them. I did not always use the same email address when setting them up, so passing between these sites is nothing short of a chore. For instance, blogspot was not always a Google property, but Google adsense was. So I had a Google adsense account under my home email address, but this blog is actually setup under a completely separate email address to preserve its rather transparent anonymity. Then Google acquired blogspot. Adsense is an actual deal you can put on the blog, but since this blog is under a different email address than my adsense, I can't do that.
Even worse than that, though, Google acquired Youtube, and recently killed all the old logins to favor the email address it was setup under. It linked this email address to any other Google properties that also use that address. YouTube had my home address as the contact, so it linked that to the adsense stuff along wth the other Google stuff there. Where it gets really complicated is the Queen uses the home address for her Facebook login where I use yet another email address for mine. When Google came up with +, I figured it would be good to just use the same email addresses for that (not that we ever use it). Oh, and did I mention that I had used that home address on a completely different blogspot account to write some stuff up once?
This means that Google has managed to make a mess of my online life by trying to make it easier. In order to write this blog, I had to log out of the Queen's Google account (you know, cause it took the Google + account holder's name and made it the primary name) because I had logged into my YouTube account earlier today and login to this one. You could say I did it to myself, but at the same time, we share the home email address. This whole thing was only further complicated by the requirement of setting up a Google account for our Android phones and linking that to everything else.
Anyway, last night, I had my Wednesday night rehearsal for church. These days, I alternate between keyboard and bass, and last night I was on keys. We primarily worked on a single new song, but at the end of the rehearsal, the leader wanted to try playing through the song again on his electric guitar rather than his acoustic. He said anyone who wanted to go could go and anyone who wanted to stay could stay. Naturally, I wanted to stay because I like playing with people. I moved myself to piano to play the missing part since the piano player left as soon as she could get out the door.
It was very fun. It was just fun to just play because that's what it felt like. We decided we needed to get together and just jam, so he figured we'd wait till the first days of school wound down and maybe do something in the fall on a Saturday. I hope we can, because playing together when you're not cramming for a performance is invigorating.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Present Day 2012
My life has gone about as one might expect it to since the last post. Though I get older, I continue to play video games obsessively. I even created a list to ensure I work my way through almost 50 games one at a time without getting too distracted. My present games are Bioshock and Arc Rise Fantasia (along with Final Fantasy IV which I'm playing on my phone). I'm alternating between those two games because they are very different from each other, and I find I need a break from the claustrophobic first person shooter occasionally.
On Bioshock, I'm nearly done. On an 87 page walkthrough, I'm on page 77. I'll be following Bioshock with Gears of War 2. I'm primarily going through the games' storylines along with some basic sidequests for as long as I remain interested. This applied most definitely to Assassin's Creed Revelations and BAtman: Arkham City where the games complete their storylines and then allow you to continue working on sidequests almost indefinitely. With Arc Rise Fantasia, it's a game I borrowed from a friend of mine who insisted it was completely awesome. It's okay. A decent JRPG to offset the pounding from the shooter is nice.
I don't know if I have mentioned my 3 books, but they remain stagnant. No real movement online, nor have I found an agent to help publish them. I have pretty much determined the only reason is because I can't get anyone who can do this for me to read them. Everyone else, almost without exception, has liked them. And some of these are people who don't need to like anything I've done, nor do they need to tell me. But they do.
In addition, we've got a sort of summer movie marathon going with the Princesses to watch a bunch of movies they've never seen, and we've opened up the world of PG-13 to them all, as opposed to just Rock Girl, who just turned 13. They're really enjoying them, though the younger pair do occasionally hide their eyes from gross or scary parts.
Work is what it is. I continue to single-handedly support the programming side of several products in the company I work for. The powers that be have promised a few times to get me more help, but so far it has all come to naught. I have another new person to learn one part of my job, and we'll see how long she lasts.
We recently came off a vacation to Oklahoma City. On the way there (and back) we visited a store called Pops (http://route66.com/). Its claim to fame is having 600 varieties of soda pop. Yeah, who knew there were that many forms of liquid candy out there? My bright spot was that I finally got to try Bawls, the geek's choice of caffeinated beverage. The original flavor was really good, the cherry was ok, and I didn't like the sugar free. No aspartame, which was fine, but it used sucralose to try to sweeten it. My first thought was that it was some kind of beer. Another piece they did well was the hamburgers. Sure, burgers are burgers in most cases, but with these, you could actually tell they were hand made from the ground beef. No perfectly machine rounded burgers here. I don't mind rough edges on a burger at all. The restaurant is 90 minutes from home, but we'll have to visit again at some point. Long way to go for a burger and soda, but it was cool.
With the blog, I'm promising nothing, but as always, I would like to keep up with it. I once obsessed over trying to write something clever, but I think it would be better to simply write something. I'm not really promoting anything, nor am I really hoping for anything, so if I can remember to write about anything at all, I think that will be a good start.
So whatever I write might not be clever, insightful, or otherwise worth reading, but if I start somewhere, maybe I'll get somewhere else.
On Bioshock, I'm nearly done. On an 87 page walkthrough, I'm on page 77. I'll be following Bioshock with Gears of War 2. I'm primarily going through the games' storylines along with some basic sidequests for as long as I remain interested. This applied most definitely to Assassin's Creed Revelations and BAtman: Arkham City where the games complete their storylines and then allow you to continue working on sidequests almost indefinitely. With Arc Rise Fantasia, it's a game I borrowed from a friend of mine who insisted it was completely awesome. It's okay. A decent JRPG to offset the pounding from the shooter is nice.
I don't know if I have mentioned my 3 books, but they remain stagnant. No real movement online, nor have I found an agent to help publish them. I have pretty much determined the only reason is because I can't get anyone who can do this for me to read them. Everyone else, almost without exception, has liked them. And some of these are people who don't need to like anything I've done, nor do they need to tell me. But they do.
In addition, we've got a sort of summer movie marathon going with the Princesses to watch a bunch of movies they've never seen, and we've opened up the world of PG-13 to them all, as opposed to just Rock Girl, who just turned 13. They're really enjoying them, though the younger pair do occasionally hide their eyes from gross or scary parts.
Work is what it is. I continue to single-handedly support the programming side of several products in the company I work for. The powers that be have promised a few times to get me more help, but so far it has all come to naught. I have another new person to learn one part of my job, and we'll see how long she lasts.
We recently came off a vacation to Oklahoma City. On the way there (and back) we visited a store called Pops (http://route66.com/). Its claim to fame is having 600 varieties of soda pop. Yeah, who knew there were that many forms of liquid candy out there? My bright spot was that I finally got to try Bawls, the geek's choice of caffeinated beverage. The original flavor was really good, the cherry was ok, and I didn't like the sugar free. No aspartame, which was fine, but it used sucralose to try to sweeten it. My first thought was that it was some kind of beer. Another piece they did well was the hamburgers. Sure, burgers are burgers in most cases, but with these, you could actually tell they were hand made from the ground beef. No perfectly machine rounded burgers here. I don't mind rough edges on a burger at all. The restaurant is 90 minutes from home, but we'll have to visit again at some point. Long way to go for a burger and soda, but it was cool.
With the blog, I'm promising nothing, but as always, I would like to keep up with it. I once obsessed over trying to write something clever, but I think it would be better to simply write something. I'm not really promoting anything, nor am I really hoping for anything, so if I can remember to write about anything at all, I think that will be a good start.
So whatever I write might not be clever, insightful, or otherwise worth reading, but if I start somewhere, maybe I'll get somewhere else.
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