So hot its praciticly on fire

Ahh the swapmeat what an interesting place. Even though I don't really enjoy waking up to beat the crowds I must admit that the prices can't be beat. To the point that I wonder exactly where they received there goods. But when I can get items that I want on the cheap I don't care
to much.

The atmosphere there is as you would imagine a bazaar to be. Just rows and rows of merchants eager to sale there wares. All the while shouting things in Spanish which I can only assume means sale, low price, or something of that nature.

One thing I have noticed about the swapmeat is that I can never find something that I specifically am looking for. I guess it is my own fault for having taste for the newer gadgets. So for me it always ends up just going in with nothing particular in mind to buy.

Well actually today I just happen to be looking for a few specific items. I was looking for an air purifier, iPod nano, and the Nike+ running kit. I ended up finding the air purifier for 5 dollars so that was good. But I was pretty sure I wasn't going to find the other two.

Well I never did find the Nike+ running kit (no surprise because looking at most the people there exersizing didn't seem like a priority). But I did find a few places selling "iPod nanos". Although
they all basically sold the same knock off. I guess normally I wouldn't mind but I need the real deal to use with the running kit.

So all in all the swapmeat is a good place to get things as long as you don't mind how it was originally procured.

Sent from my iPhone

What's up Doc

I know the title is cliche but it pretty much sums up my recent trip to the doctor. It was basically just an appointment so we could meet each other and see just how bad off I really was generally speaking.

I had two reasons for finally seeing a doctor. One, I have recently been experiencing chest pains. Not horrible OMG I'M GOING TO DIE pains but just annoying pains. And it was happening everyday so I was a bit worried. Two, since I got hired I now have medical coverage so the visit didn't cost me. An arm and three legs.

So the visit was a few light checks the standard what seems to be the problem situation. After telling her about my problem she checked my chest and had me do an EKG and said it was probably just some sort of inflammation and gave me a prescription for ibuprofen.

Thats fine and all except I cannot swallow pills. As long as I can remember I've always had the problem. I told her this and after the usual look of disbelief I tend to receive she did a few calculations and figured I'd have to drink about a liter of what ever the substitute was. So I decided to just suck it up and give swallowing pills another try.

And the I saw the pills. Let's just say for someone adverse to taking pills such as I they looked like they were as big as my fist. Of course I'm exaggerating but seriously it was pretty big. So later on I gave it the old college try and tried to get that sucker down. But it was the same old story the second I would try to swallow my throat would close up like a time lock at the bank. So finally I gave up and have been taking it with yogurt while chewing it to a more manageable size. And for those that don't know ibuprofen has a wonderfully awful after taste when its chewed. Thankfully the yogurt covers most of it up.

So it looks like I'm not dying yet but I have a full exam coming up next week so I'm not out of the woods yet. And also my chest is still
bothering me and the appointment was 3 days ago.

Is it heartburn or death knocking on your chest?

I haven't been posting lately because redoing my entire itunes library onto my Laptop is proving to be quite a daunting task. Its pretty much taken me about a week to get to this point. Write now im working on editing the titles for all the songs. Right now most of the songs have extra information I don't want in the title. After this I still have to find all the album art for the songs. So I'm probably going to be working on that for the weekend.

As you may be able to tell something else has been bothering me lately. Sometime earlier this week I started feeling pains in my chest. It wasn't so much of a sharp pain more like pressure on the middle of my chest. Its been more annoying then anything else. When it started it only seemed to happen when I was sitting in my chair at work. When I would get up and walk around it would go away. Also when I ate something it would also go away for a little while.

But lately its been appearing more often. So I have set up an appointment with my new doctor next Tuesday. Its been awhile since I've gone in for a check up. And by awhile I mean I can even remember the last time I had one. So I'm not exactly looking forward to find out exactly how destroyed my body actually is. Ignorance has been very bliss for me so far. But I guess I will no longer to be able to enjoy that bliss anymore.

Now that this has become such a problem I decided to use the internets to try and see if I was making this mole hill into a mountain. That was not a good idea after coming from such bliss. Pretty much every link I saw with my search basically said heart disease or heart attack. Not exactly what I was hoping for. But then again I'm not exactly surprised at all. However, now I'm extra worried to the point that this weekend is probably not going to be as relaxing as I originally hoped.

I hope the results from any testing I have done on Tuesday are not to bad. But if they are I may just have to rush my Memento Mori list.

The Lazy Perfecitonist vs. the iphone

I've come to the realization that I'm a lazy perfectionist. By that I mean I'm basically a pretty lazy person unless I have some specific task that needs to be done. And when that happens my perfectionist side kicks in. It then turns a small 5 minute task into a whole day project.

Case in point as I said before I just bought an iphone. Its still awesome by the way. Well the thing is I already own an ipod touch which is basically the same thing minus the phone and camera. So my plan was just to take the music off the touch and put it on the iphone. Well if any of you have ever tried to transfer the music off an ipod onto another ipod then you would know that it can be an incredibly big pain in the ass. And with the ipod touch and iphone its twice as bad because Apple decided in there infinite wisdom that they should change how the filing system should work. This means that when its connected into a computer the it won't be detected as its own separate drive as it does on older ipods. When the ipod is detected as a disk drive on the computer its easier to move files around.

So now I have an ipod and iphone that are going to be a pain to move music between. I found a few programs that might be able to do it somewhat. I would probably lose my playlist and album art.

Speaking of album art when I originally bought my ipod touch I had to go through this with my ipod nano. At that time I didn't have any album art for my songs because the screen on the nano was so small that it wasn't worth the effort when no one could see it unless they were looking really close and even then you couldn't really see it that well. So when I was transferring the songs over to the ipod touch I decided to find all the album art. Well I didn't expect it to be that bad. It end up taking me about a week to finish.

That brings us to the present and now I'm moving all the mp3 files from my desktop to my laptop. And since the mp3 files themselves are not actually associated with the album art it looks like once again I'll have to take the time to find and match up all the album art work all over again. So what that means is I really don't have time to write this entry. And with that I head back into the depths of mp3/itunes/ipod hell. Good Day

OBJECTION, its time for the testimony

Tomorrow I'm going to give a presentation on a game from one of my favorite series. That game being Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. This presentation is basically a review of the game and highlighting all the things that make this a great game.

It was my idea to give the presentation after seeing other people present other games. For some reason every time I saw a presentation I had a urge to do one myself. So finally one day I email the person in charge of doing these presentation and she said she would get back to me when there was an opening. So I waited for about 2 weeks before I got the go ahead. The problem was that I had finished playing the game about 2 weeks ago and had since moved on to different things. So I had to pull it out and start coming up with the presentation that I would have been much more prepared for had I done it when I was playing the game.

So I found out that I would be doing the presentation next Tuesday (I found out about it last Friday). So I spent the weekend trying to come up with interesting bits to show the people and also give them the general idea on how the game works and why I think its pretty special. One of the problems is that the game only contains 1 save slot and since I had to show a few different things this posed quite a dilemma. I figured out a work around that involves using my laptop to create a few save states of the areas I wanted to present. So I worked out the kinks over the weekend and it seemed to flow as well as could be expected.

The funny thing is I'm somewhat dreading the presentation for some reason. I think part of the reason is that I have somewhat of a small time frame to try and fit in everything I wanted to talk about and I'm worried that people will not be able to see why I think the game is awesome. Also I don't want to take to much time because I know at a certain point its going to get really boring and I don't want to end up there. I should be fine though. Its not a life or death presentation and I'm pretty good at just winging it when I need to. So hopefully everything works out well.

Sleek, sexy, its the iphone

So I just got my iphone and I must say it is quite a looker. I already have an ipod touch which is basically the same thing minus the phone and camera capabilities. While there was nothing wrong with the ipod touch I felt that I should probably try to consolidate some of the gadgets I have into one easy to carry phone. Currently I'm carrying my ipod touch for music, my camera for photos, and a phone that for making phone calls.

Now I know that the iphone is not the greatest camera but the fact that I always have my phone with me means that I will always have my camera handy as well. Also since my phone will also be my mp3 player I can cut down on the amount of things I have to carry with me. Plus like I said before the iphone itself is just plain sexy.

Also the other reason I decided to get an iphone was I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. While I was going through a the gadget blogs I look at I came across a post about AT&T offering the iphone for $249 with no contract. I thought it was to good to be true but I wasn't about to let this go with out looking into it. I used the link they had posted to the site when I got to the site it said that I needed to get a 2 year contract. I thought, "Oh Great" but when I read more about the offer I read that people were able to purchase the phone without doing the 2 year contract. So to make a long story a little shorter I was able to buy the phone without the contract.

I told my girlfriend about it but she was hesitant well actually she took some advice from her father who knows nothing about technology and didn't get it when I told her about it. So when she finally decided she wanted to get it it was to late. They probably had sold out by that time.

That made me wonder if they actually sold other refurb phones like that. Ones without a 2 year contract required. When i went back to the site and looked at the other refurb phones they all require the customer to purchase the plan before sending the phone out. It seems weird to me that they would sell a phone that only they carry without the contract. But I guess they have their own plans. As for me I've already unlocked mine and plan to go with tmobile as the carrier.

Hopefuly I will be able to take pictures and post to my blog on the fly. Thats the plan anyways we shall see how well that works out.

Fear Changes Everything stay out of the Mist

I read this short story in the book Skeleton Crew by Stephen King and I really liked it. I remember reading it and thinking how it would make a great movie someday. But that was a long time ago when I was into Stephen King. So when I heard the movie was coming out I didn't really thinking about it.

So today I finally got around to watching it and I must say its actually pretty good except for the ending. Actually it seems to be even gorier then I remember. I'm not really much of a horror fan but I really enjoy this story except for the ending. I thought I may be the only person that hated the ending but apparently not check out these comments I came across on IMDB. There are a few comments that think its the greatest movie ever (they must be payed off) but the mass majority give it a 1 star rating and every one of them mention the ending as an issue.

I wasn't really going to write about this but in the second half of the movie there are some great lines that really made me think about how fragile our society really is. I picked out one of the quotes that makes this point pretty well:

Amanda Dunfrey: You don't have much faith in humanity, do you?
Dan Miller: None, whatsoever.
Amanda Dunfrey: I can't accept that. People are basically good; decent. My god, David, we're a civilized society.
David Drayton: Sure, as long as the machines are working and you can dial 911. But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them - no more rules.



*SPOILER ALERT*My beef with the ending is that they changed it. Now i wouldn't really mind but I guess its supposed to be twisted in some kinda Twilight Zone way. In the book the main protagonist, his son, and a few other escape the supermaket they are in and drive away in the protagonist SUV. The story ends with them driving but seeing no end to the fog. I don't care for this ending because of the lack of closure but at least theres some kind of hope so thats fine.

However, in the movie it turns out differently. They still escape and its the protagonist, his son, a lady the protagonist has grown close to during the incident, and old lady, and an old man. They drive for awhile and the movie takes this opportunity to show how the mist has effect the town. Everything pretty much destroyed or covered in webbing because of the crazy mutant spider things. So after a few minutes of this driving and looking the car finally runs out of gas and they are still in the mist. In the car with them there is a revolver that only has 4 bullets left. After a long piece of silence and time spent looking at each other the protagonist is seen loading the 4 bullets into the gun. Next thing you see is an outside shot of the car then you see and hear 4 gunshots. Next its inside the car and everyone is dead except our "hero". Then he screams a few times then leaves the car to accept his death. And heres the twist it appears that the army has actually beaten back the mist and there are survivors. So now our "hero" has killed everyone that I have come to care about and the calvary was a few minutes behind. Not only is it a downer but its doesn't make sense for the characters who spend the whole movie doing everything they can to stay alive and not give in to the madness that over takes everyone else to switch on a dime and decide its time to commit suicide.

I read somewhere online that Stephen King likes this ending as do many other people but I can't stand it. You spend all this getting to know and like these characters and then the end of the movie comes to punch you in face, give you the finger, and kick you while your down.

*END SPOILER*

This brings me to another thing I've come to hate about movies that have been coming out lately. What is the deal with all the depressing endings to movies? I'm not paying an outrageous sum of money to go see a movie thats going to leave me more depressed leaving then when I came in. Life is depressing enough without having to pay for the privilege of being more depressed. I know some people like the endings that are not happy but not I. When I spend my hard earned money on anything I expect to be happy with what ever I spent it on. I guess when your the person making the movie it may seem more artsy by putting in an ending thats based in reality. But I don't want to pay for what amounts to a buzzkill.

Anyways shifting away from the ending if I remember correctly in the book there was no real explanation for where the Mist came from but since its an actual movie I guess they had to give a reason. Now if you have ever played Half life then the explanation may seem a bit familiar. And by familiar I mean its like they pretty much took the story behind half life and transplanted it onto this movie. I mean they even put in things that look like striders from half life 2. So I guess if you like half life and half life 2 this movie maybe the closest thing to a real life adaptation for awhile.

So ultimately I would recommend this movie except for the ending. If you feel that you can't watch a movie without watching the ending then I would say skip this movie. The ending is that much of a kick to the nuts. I hear theres an alternate ending on the DVD and as much as I'd like to see it (cause from what I heard its a more pleasant ending) I don't feel like spending money just to see it. I'll just read about it on the internets and image it in my head. Mmmm...imagination