Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

And now, on to Vegas.

This morning (after I sleep) my sister, Angela, and I will be leaving for Las Vegas. We are taking a 5-day, 4-night vacation in Las Vegas, and we are staying in a very nice place that my sister arranged for us at a very nice price (thank you, Angela). Do not ask me why we are going to Las Vegas. If you have to ask, you do not understand. Know though, that we will have a good time and enjoy ourselves and relax.

So right now, tonight, for part of today, I am in Phoenix. I have just seen The Last Samurai, which has helped get me to relax and feel good already; I sure do like watching movies. Until I get home next Wednesday afternoon/evening, I will not work on my website. I will not work on my paintings. I will not work on comics of any kind. I will not work on drawing, sculpting, carving, welding, or casting. I will not write a novel or a screenplay or a short story or an essay or a treatment. I will not do character sketches or other designs. I will not do construction, I will not do plumbing, I will not do electrical or paneling or insulation. I will not shovel snow. I will not carry firewood, and I will not build any fires. I will not work retail. I will not help anyone with their templates, I will not make any new blogs, I will not add any new users, I will not troubleshoot any problems, and even if the site goes completely down, I will not worry about it until I am back.

I do not believe I will have internet access while I am in Las Vegas. So I probably will not even look at the site or read my email. If I do read my email, I will probably not respond until I get back. If I do get online, I will probably not post here.

Unless I win some big prize. I’ll probably post about that.

If you want to get ahold of me, I would love to hear from you. You have my phone number. If you don’t have it, here it is in binary: 0110 0000 0010-1001 1001 1001-0110 0100 0100 0110 Call me.

I will be back Wednesday, but Thursday morning I will be watching LotR:RotK and Thursday afternoon, apparently, I have a dental appointment. I would love to do something Thursday night, as Friday morning I seem to be heading back to Pine. I have been invited to a graduation Friday evening and a party next Sunday night, so I am looking into trying to make those happen, but … we’ll have to see.

Anyway, I’m going to go take a shower, the first in weeks, and then go to sleep for a few hours before I journey out into the wide world of vacation. Take care.

XBox != Good DVD Player

This post is in relation to an item I am adding to my “What Do You Want” list on the sidebar.

I do not currently have a DVD Player. I do have an XBox. When I bought the XBox, it was a combination replacement for my that-day-dead DVD Player and fulfilment of my desire to play a few XBox games. So, when I bought it ($300), I also bought the DVD Player kit ($40) (and an extended warranty, which with tax brought my XBox to just over $400; you can go buy one now for $179 with the DVD kit and two games included). For a time, it played DVDs adequately, but now … now… Sigh.

I like to pop a DVD into the XBox and let it run on the TV behind me while I work on the computer. While my computer can play DVDs (more on that in just a sec), running it on the TV is a bigger picture, and doesn’t take up any screen “real-estate” on my computer, and doesn’t take up any CPU resources, which is often more important to me (not that my computer is particularly underpowered, but that all but the top five supercomputers on Earth are seriously underpowered for me). But there’s a problem. My XBox, since I got it back this year from my family, has a problem playing movies. If there is the slightest fingerprint anywhere on the disc, it will skip and freeze and sometimes lock up completely. If there is the tiniest scratch, it will never make it through the disc. But worse, even with a perfectly clean, unscratched DVD, the XBox … when it gets about an hour into any disc, begins to skip and jump and lock up. In the last couple of months, I’m not sure I’ve had a single disc get past 1:15 before the whole XBox was frozen and needed to be shut down. Sometimes restarting the XBox helps, but usually not.

So then I move the disc to my iMac, and no matter whether it was the time or a scratch (or a lot of scratches) or fingerprints or whatever, the Apple DVD Player plays it fine. I have never seen the sort of trouble my XBox gives me on my iMac. It plays it fine, 1/4 size (what I usually do if I’m doing other things on the computer), 1/2 size (when I’m waiting for a page to load or a file to upload or such, but want a better look at the movie), or full screen. The only time I ever see any disturbance is sometimes when I’m running a dozen other applications at once and using a ridiculous amount of bandwidth, it drops a few frames. So, it works, and while frustrating, I get to see the end of the movies.

Which gets me finally to my point. I do not have an effective DVD player. I would like one. When I can afford one, I will buy one. If you happen to come across an extra DVD player, hey, keep me in mind.

(I love the idea of an “extra” DVD player.)

Lost and Not Found – Audio Experiment

Okay, I’ve been having second thoughts about the audio-book version of Lost and Not Found. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

I’m going to make the first four “sections” of the audio-book available for purchase via BitPass right now, each for a quarter. If at least ten people buy at least the first section, and at least 50% of those buyers also buy each of the remaining three sections, I will consider that a public vote for me to go forward. If fewer than ten total people buy any section and/or fewer than half of those who listen to the first section buy the others, I will not go forward, and I will only release the paperback and PDF versions at this time.

Okay. Here are the links to the audio files. I will also put them in the side-bar here on FYTH, so you can easily find them. The first four links are AAC files; you will need iTunes to hear them, but they are a higher sound quality for their size. The next four links are MP3 files. Enjoy:

Update, 3/10/2009: I have removed the broken BitPass code, and will add links to the original audio files soon.

Chicago – movie review

Okay, so, I checked out Chicago from the library this week on DVD. I’d never seen it before, on stage or in this critically acclaimed movie. I have to say that I am disappointed. I didn’t have high expectations for it, but … now I have to wonder about all the people who thought it was great.

It isn’t great.

Good, maybe, if you like that sort of thing, but … I don’t know, the whole thing was just ….

Here’s perhaps the best way I can put it: Less than an hour in, I wanted to just turn it off.

I thought perhaps there must be some wonderful, redeeming end, and I stuck it out, but … even that was disappointing.

Yes, celebrities singing and dancing is something … but I didn’t care about the characters (save one, but more on that in a moment), or the outcome, and most of the time I felt that their breaking into song and dance (and flashy costumes) didn’t fit particularly well with the story. Nearly the entire thing was just the sort of empty “razzle-dazzle” that was so clearly painted as being there to distract the audience from the fact that there’s no talent or real content beyond the “glitter and feathers” of the production. I guess that’s it, though; if you tell someone you’re cheating them, at least you’re honest, and they’ll let you get away with it.

Well, I won’t. Chicago … I may be able to appreciate it … some other time, but on first impressions, it’s … empty. “Good” but not “great”, and in my opinion not the best casting.

Except…

Except in two key roles: John C. Reily created the only character I cared about in the entire piece, and his song and dance number, while still out of sync with the story, was one of the most meaningful. Richard Geere was excellently cast, and excellently played.

The rest of the major characters were … adequate at best. (Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs shined, though were not given the chance to do more than play their small roles excellently.)

And that’s what I have to say about that, for now.