Archive for December, 2007
Trans-Siberian Orchestra 2007
Last night was the long anticipated Trans-Siberian Orchestra show. This was my second time seeing them, but they managed to exceed my already high expectations for the show. It also helped that we got pretty good seats too. My parents and I ended up sitting on the floor, about 10 or so rows back. I was concerned that our seats were pushed off to the right a bit, but that ended up not being a problem for enjoying the light show (which we were basically sitting in because stretched out directly above us was a bunch more lights). They didn't seem to care about camera phone usage for taking pictures, so I managed to snag some. Crappy camera phone picture disclaimer applies, as usual.
If you've never been to a TSO show, you need to go. It doesn't matter what kind of music you like, if you like christmas or hate it…just go. TSO has the best stage show out there right now. Period. Their main lighting rig for this show consisted of 10 square frames suspended above the sage. with all sorts of lights on them, along with some towers in the back of the stage with additional lights as well as the lights that extended above the audience. The square frames were movable, so they reconfigured themselves during the songs or even danced around, performing waves and such during certain sections. And, as always, there were lasers and pyrotechnics.
They started out playing a song I didn't recognize but them moved into playing their first album Christmas Eve and Other Stories in its entirety, complete with a narrator and everything. During First Snow, we were sitting close enough where we got fake snowed on. That song is cool because they make it "snow" from the ceiling on the first few rows. And then…when the lasers come in, it makes all the snow in the air sparkle when the lasers hit it. During this song, I realized that our seats were going to actually end up being pretty cool because the lasers and everything were still very visible where we were at.
The other highlight was the rendition of Promises To Keep. Since they don't have a children's choir hanging around, they play a rocked out version an incredible woman on vocals. I just love her voice and I'm glad she's still on the tour since we saw it 2 years ago. That was one of the things that I was looking forward to hearing again. I'm having trouble remembering her name right now though. Bah…anyway, she's incredibly good and very powerful. I sorta wish that version of the song appeared on the album. Or was released at all.
During then during the second half of the show, they pulled out some of my favorite songs that I wasn't expecting to hear.. Christmas Nights In Blue was played (with the vocalist that appears on the CD which is always a plus). Christmas Cannon Rock was also played which was the big surprise for me. I wasn't expecting that one at all.
They also did a lot of non christmasy songs, including a couple from their new upcoming album ("Ok guys, what do you think will happen first? A McDonalds on Mars…or…the release of the long awaited new TSO album Nightcasle?") and a lot of classical inspired pieces from their Beethoven's Last Night CD. There was also a really cool version of
Flight of the Bumblebee with a franticly paced laser light show.All in all, it was an excellent show, lasting around 3 hours long.
We got home pretty late (around 1:30) so I basically just synced my phone to check out if my pictures turned out ok and then plop into bed. I'm definitely going to try to go next year. Maybe they'll have a new album out. Yeah right! They were promoting the new album coming out the last time I went 2 years ago. Hah!
Another First Day Back Post
The first day back from vacation is always horrible. No exceptions. Which is why yesterday I had such a hard time concentrating at work. It was extremely hard for me to keep my mind on one task at a time which wasn't good yesterday because of the fact that I was working on something that was a little complex and I kept losing my place and having to start over from the beginning again. Sigh. I hope today is going to be better.
After work though, things went a bit better. I did my exercising while starting to watch Cowboy Bebop which has potential right now, but it's hard to tell so early into it. Then I sat down and played Xenogears, which I've come to realize again, is probably my favorite game ever. Such a cool story, and you can always pull something different out of it each time you play it. I'm about 1/3 of the way though the game (20 hours in or so) and things are just starting to get really really good.
On the school front, I was still unable to contact who I needed to contact. On my Rogues airbags front, I haven't heard anything about the parts being in. I'm probably going to call up this morning since my work phone was acting wonky for a couple days and may not have recorded the message if they left one. I'd like to have airbags at some point here.
All Christmas-ed Out
Yesterday I went over to my parents house in the morning and hung out there pretty much all day, playing various Wii games. We started with NBA Live 08 for the Wii (without looking at the instructions, so we were lobbing shots at the basket from the other side of the court) which was…fun. Like the reviews said, it wasn't a really great game but it was entertaining enough that it was interesting. Probably not in the ways the game designer intended though.
I managed to get my dad to play a game of Mario Party 8 which I thought was fairly good but he didn't enjoy it as much. My mom ended up winning the game. After that my parents played some tennis and I ended up falling asleep for a little while on their couch. After I woke up, we played some Wario Ware Smooth Moves which my mom really enjoyed and my dad, predictably didn't.
My grandparents (mothers side) came over for dinner and to play some Wii sports after, which was cool, and they looked like they enjoyed themselves.
But, as a result of all this activity, I'm totally Christmas-ed out. I need to take today to clean up my living room a bit, call school to get my registration for my capstone project fixed up and generally relax.
It’s A Penguin Christmas
Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.
I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.
Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)
It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.
In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.
Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.
And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.
My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so…it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.
We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.
Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.
Vox Hunt: Singing A Holiday Tune
Share your favorite holiday song.
My favorite song of the season probably has to be First Snow by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It's not really "holiday" exactly, but it's got a winter theme to it. And it's got a killer light show
It’s A Rock Band Holiday
I just got back from the christmas party thrown by my dad's side of the family. As I've said before, sometimes this party can be a little…less than entertaining. Mostly due to the people there I don't really know and/or get along with. This year though, it was pretty fun. Everybody was cool, lots of good conversation and food and stuff. We walked in to the spectacle of one of the dogs (there's usually a TON of dogs at this party) wearing a reindeer costume and looking very pathetic. All the other dogs were picking on him and it kept flopping in front of his face so he couldn't really see all that well. Pretty entertaining for a bit, but they took it off him quickly.
The highlight of the event though, was Rock Band. One of my cousins (her husband actually) has Rock Band and he brought it over so we could play it at the party. We played for a couple hours, with various people rotating in and out. I managed to play all of the instruments and sing some as well. I started out at guitar and played that. I was going to play drums after that, but my sister accidently bumped the difficulty on her bass part to Expert so I swapped with her quickly.
Then I got talked into singing. I picked War Pigs as the song and apparently I knocked it out of the park because people were commenting about it for the rest of the night. It's probably because I'm known as the quiet guy who doesn't talk much. Of course, I can also sing pretty decently (if the song is in my range) so I probably ended up surprising some people. I also ended up doing vocals on Tom Sawyer and Enter Sandman.
Just a mini Rock Band review. Pretty fun game for parties. I like the way Guitar Hero handles the guitar parts more than how Rock Band does it, and I also like the feel of the Guitar Hero controller. The drums were pretty fun, but hard to get used to because of all of the stuff you had to do at once when playing them. Overall, two thumbs up, but I probably wouldn't want to pay the full price for the set unless I was going in on it with other people.
All in all, a good way to kick off the Christmas party season. It finally feels like Christmas time to me.
The Longest Day Of The Week…
…is the day before a 5 day weekend. I was figuring out how much vacation I had left to take and as it turns out, it's enough to take Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas off, so now I've got a 5 day weekend for myself. Handy.
Today is crawliing along like the day before a vacation normally does. I'm just looking forward to all of the festivities of this weekend. Tomorrow is my dad's side of the family, Sunday I'm going over to my friends to operate on people, Monday is the small family gathering and then my mom's side of the family in the evening. Then a day to recover.
I'm finally starting to get into the realization that it's really Christmas time and the year is ending very soon. Good riddance to 2007 I say. Since 2007 is the first full year that I've been blogging, I decided to do a summary post towards the end of the year. I've been going through all of my blog posts from the last year, picking out the big things that happened and I'll be constructing a 2007 in review post which should be up sometime before 2008 rolls in.
It Must Be The Middle Of The Week
I'm experiencing a feeling of general blah and disinterest today, for unknown reasons. Not sure why, I just don't feel like getting anything accomplished.
First off, an update about my car. Took it into the dealer on Tuesday and they said that the airbag control computer is busted, so they had to overnight a new one in. Apparently overnight in car mechanic speak means something different from what it means in other circles. They called me yesterday and left a message on my cell phone to call them back, but I guess it was just a survey to see how my visit went and not the fact that the parts were in. I only discovered this after calling back the service department (because nobody was ever at the number they left on my voice mail) and asking. Really hoping I didn't annoy the guy. I can understand parts taking longer due to the fact it's a brand new car and things aren't quite as widely available yet.
Then onwards to school talk. I'm trying to coordinate my final project with my professor/sponsor guy and he seems to be as clueless about the whole process as I am. I need to get his authorization to sign up for the course and I asked him about it and he basically told me to ask the department secretary (???) without actually telling me how to contact her. I'm not terribly surprised since this guy was (still is actually although I try to avoid him if at all possible) my advisor and, in the words of ratemyprofessors.com, "It's obvious he has tenure"
Added to that, things didn't go terribly well with my planned activities last night (and I'll refer you to Wassy's blog post here on that) and I'm just feeling exhausted again.
Hopefully the long weekend will offer some recharging potential.
The Step Conspiracy Continues!
So…if you will recall, my steps are out to get me. This isn't anything new. I've known for a while now that they don't appreciate me.
However, I think they've enlisted a new ally in the fight….my front door.
I returned home from work today to find that my front door was locked. Not the actual door door, but the screen door. It has a little sliding lock thing that can push down to prevent the latch from moving. There's no way to open this from the outside. This happened to me last winter, I had accidentally locked the door and we had to kinda pry it to get it open again.
My neighbors/landlords weren't home at the time, so I went over to my parents and hung out for a while until they returned. That took about an hour and a half. When they came back, I went back over to my place to assist with the breaking in process.
It was dark out so I held the flashlight mostly. First we tried attacking it with a knife, trying to trip the latch that way with limited results. Then we attacked it with a hammer, trying to pull it open. It was at this point, I realized that we were two guys, standing in the dark one with a flashlight, the other with a hammer, trying to pry the front door off of a residence. I hoped that none of the neighbors would call the cops on us.
The hammer method didn't work, so we had to take the door off it's hinges. We did that, unlocked it and tried to stick it back on, but then I tried the handle and it was locked again. Apparently the lock was broken and it kept sliding down. Well, we fixed that up (after reattaching the door with me holding it open still) so now it won't lock at all.
I never liked the idea of that stupid lock anyway.
Revel in your victory stairs, however short lived. It will be your last.
I Didn’t Fail!! (With Bonus Car Related Item)
Today was the day I got my grades back for this semester of school. My horrible, horrible software engineering course (which I've complained about before) resulted in a C- which I'm happy to take since I won't need to take the stupid course ever again. I got a B+ in world religions which is about how I expected to do.
I actually contacted the dean of the school about Software Engineering because of how the course was taught. Mostly because of the fact that with roughly 4 hours of class scheduled per week, we only met about an hour and a half of that. The instructor pretty much gave off a vibe that he didn't want to be there. He'd give his lecture, mumble something about seeing us next week and then rush out of the room in 40-50 minutes. It was getting totally ridiculous.
The dean actually called me back and told me that something was going to be done about it after final grades because 2-3 people had complained about it. I also complained that I thought the course was much too centered on Java, to the point where it felt like it was a Java programming language course. That one didn't go over quite so well, but…we'll have to see I guess. Hopefully future students don't find the course as much of a waste of time as I found it to be.
Moving onward to next semester, I found out I need to take one more course just so I have enough credits to graduate in addition to my project. So when school starts up again I'll be taking a Statistics course, plus doing my final project which is all set up and squared away as far as having an instructor and a project. I just need to do it now.
I'm almost free…
As far as the bonus item goes, my new car has developed a severe case of non-working-airbag syndrome. I was driving home from my friends house on Saturday and my airbag warning light started flashing. I called the dealer up today and it's being brought in tomorrow for service. Hopefully it's just a little kink and won't develop into a major long term issue. That would be…annoying. I'm also having them check out a squeak that's developed from the center console area that occurs when I'm going through corners. Sounds like the little silver trim around the gear shifter is loose, so it rubs against the plastic and causes it to make a noise. So hopefully I can take care of both things.
Cultivated Nonsense 