A most relaxing Thanksgiving weekend in 2013

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Joel
Dinner at Fujiyama Mama with John and Barbara

Dinner at Fujiyama Mama with John and Barbara

I wouldn’t say this has been the most stressful year of my life. 2005 and 2008 were both ridiculous in my opinion. However, I’m confident in saying it was stressful in its own right. On the few weekends where we had nothing to do and nowhere to run to, I found it to be a wonderful breath of fresh air. This past Thanksgiving weekend, we found ourselves without too much to do. Much earlier, we decided to hold off on trips to far away Thanksgiving dinners, or other travels to far off lands. We had plans for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s, take the kids to the movie theater, and a Thanksgiving-themed dinner with friends. Although we weren’t able to make it to our annual “Friendsgiving” dinner tradition this year, we kept the running around to a minimum this weekend. Sounds less exciting, but ultimately more relaxing.

  1. Thursday – Gym in the morning, and Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s in the evening.
  2. Friday – Took our family portrait photos, went to see Frozen, and hibachi dinner at Fujiyama Mama with friends in Westfield, NJ. Also, played some PS3, saved Gotham as Batman.
  3. Saturday – Spent a lot of time in the house, hit the gym again, saved Gotham again.
  4. Sunday – Puttered around.

Very relaxing weekend, and it was oh so good.

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The Bunyans came to visit

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Joel

Num’s uncle and aunt (from Bangalore) were here in the States to visit and go sightseeing for a few weeks. We were able to meet with them at least once before Thanksgiving. It was nice to see them again.

Family photo with the Bunyans

Family photo with the Bunyans

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Frozen (2013)

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Joel

When you have a four day weekend and some free time, wouldn’t you take the opportunity to see a movie in the theater? In the past few years, we’ve gone as a family to see some sort of family film on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I’m not saying we’re unique in this tradition — only that we like to do it. Last year, for example, we saw Wreck-It Ralph. The year before that? The Muppets. Wow, that film came out two years ago?

Anyway, we decided to see Frozen this year, Disney’s latest animated film. It’s a beautifully animated film with a lot of singing. I mean, a lot of singing. I’m generally not big on musicals, but the rest of the family enjoyed it. The film is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen. The film stars the voices of Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel (a Broadway star) as the two sister princesses at the heart of the story. Without revealing too much of plot, one sister has the magical ability to conjure and control the cold. Drama ensues, and their kingdom of Arendelle is trapped in snow and ice. The other sister has to enlist the help of a slightly oafish ice cutter, and Olaf the magical snowman.

Olaf the snowman is probably worth the cost of admission alone — he’s probably the best comic relief that I’ve seen in a children’s animated film in a long time.

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Argo (2012)

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Joel

I was at our local library last Sunday afternoon, perusing the DVD / Movies section, and found the Argo on Blu-ray. Ooooh, that’s interesting. When this film came out last year, there was a lot of good buzz around the film. Yes, despite being directed by, and starring, Ben Affleck, an actor who has received a lot of critical ribbing in the past few years since Daredevil and Gigli. I don’t have strong opinions about Ben Affleck, so I could care less.

The movie Argo is either based on, or inspired by, true events surrounding the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the later storming of the U.S Embassy in Tehran. Not all of the Embassy employees/staff were taken hostage — six managed to escape undetected during the siege, and took residence up with the Canadian ambassador. With time running out before their likely discovery before long, an “exfiltration expert” Tony Mendez (portrayed by Ben Affleck) devised a crazy but daring plan: to create a phony Canadian film project looking to shoot in Iran and smuggle the Americans out as its production crew. Mendez contacts some trusted Hollywood types that he’s used in the past to help with his plan. Mendez also heads to Iran as the film’s associate producer, but to also make contact with the six U.S. citizens. While all this is happening, Iranian security forces begin closing in on the six.

The film is pretty good, I have to say. Good pacing, and the story doesn’t  get too schmaltzy or anything. Affleck’s acting was fine, as was the acting by John Goodman and the other actors. You do get a sense of how crazy Iran was during in the midst of the revolution. We watched it on Blu-ray, so we watched it in the highest quality presentation: the video was pretty flawless in 1080p, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 helped to set the mood of the riots, the crowds, and the background chaos.

Argo (2012)

Argo (2012)

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Took the kids to see Disney On Ice – “Let’s Celebrate!”

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Joel

It was a last minute decision this week, but I found out late Wednesday that there were still some remaining Prudential Suite tickets for the latest Disney On Ice show. With a little hustle, I was able get tickets and suite passes for myself and the kids. As luck would have it, I had to work only 30 mins away from home on Friday, so I was able to navigate through rush hour traffic in time to pick the kids up, make a quick pit stop at home, and then make our way back up to Newark for the show at 7pm. As always, dinner and refreshments were nice, and good seats. The kids had a good time, and so did I.

Watching the latest Disney On Ice show at the Pru Center

Watching the latest Disney On Ice show at the Pru Center

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Lack of updates this month, but not because it’s quiet

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Joel

I have to admit that there has been a serious lack of updates here this month. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s been a rather busy month in a rather busy year for me. Between work, home, kids’ activities, packing lunches, making dinners, monitoring kids’ showers, cleaning up, the constant washing and folding of laundry, it’s a miracle we don’t fall asleep in our mashed potatoes.

Things are starting to wind down, which I’m very glad about. This week, I have actually had some free time to unwind, and didn’t have to boot up the laptop in order to catch up on work. I have plans to take the last two weeks of December off, and I am seriously looking forward to that time off. January 2014 is the start of a new year, a fresh start, and new challenges and opportunities. Time to unwind and recharge beforehand will be a good thing.

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We have a lot of popcorn in the house

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Joel

As I may have mentioned earlier, I’m currently running the popcorn fundraiser this year for our Cub Scout pack. A few weeks ago, we had a key fundraising weekend event at our local Wawa. On October 29th, I received, tabulated, and submitted the popcorn orders for the entire Pack. The good news is that popcorn fundraising is just about over. This morning, I and two other volunteers drove to the warehouse to pick up our entire order. We drove it back to our house, and dropped it all off in our living room. For the next few hours, the four of us sorted the entire order by den. This afternoon, about half of the popcorn has been picked up, and the other half is supposed to be picked up tomorrow.

Fundraising is over! Now I can have some free time again.

That’s a whole lotta popcorn in our living room
I had to sort the popcorn by den, so it was good to have helpers
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Rebuilding the home PC

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Joel

Good news on the hard drive replacement project — I got Windows 7 installed on the new SSD, and most of the applications installed. I was conscious this time around to make a checklist of every app that I needed to reinstall, plus saved files, exported profiles and settings, and wrote down the registration / product keys that I would need. There are a few games that I have not reinstalled yet, but that’s okay. I rarely ever have time to play the few PC games that I have. It wasn’t an easy set up, but I learned quite a few things.

  1. You can use IDE, RAID, or ACHI interface, but all the so-called experts on Tom’s Hardware firmly believe ACHI is the way to go. It’s a newer interface standard. Friends of mine, however, swear that they’ve never switched to AHCI, and are fine with IDE. The jury is still out. This has to be selected prior to Windows OS installation — you can’t switch it later.
  2. Although your motherboards may have SATA, you can have SATA2 (3 Gbps throughput) and SATA3 (6 Gbps throughput.) If you don’t connect your drive to the appropriate SATA port on the motherboard, you may not benefit from the right speeds. I have two SATA3 drives, and I had initially connected the new SSD drive to more accessible SATA port, but it was SATA3. I had to do some finagling and use some fancy footwork to reach an available  SATA3 port.
  3. A number of old Windows utilities and tools, such as disk defragmenters, are not useful to an SSD, and may actually reduce the lifetime usefulness of the drive. As a matter of fact, repeated writes (writing, deleting) will reduce life of the drive, so I’m doing my best to limit installing and uninstalling software.
  4. On an unrelated note, a lot of software installations now try to sneak in bloatware during the installation process. My advice? Always select the Custom Installation route, and read each screen. At any time, you may see a hard-to-notice option that some new toolbar, software, or other crap, is about to install by default, unless you uncheck the option. Very annoying. Be careful.

So what’s the verdict on the SSD? I purchased it for the extra storage space, but I also wanted the benefits of the potential or presumed performance increase. I didn’t buy any low-end SSD. I bought a drive that has really good performance read and write specs. Are there flames spitting out of the PC case, because of the high speeds? Blinding light? The songs of angels singing during the POST boot up process?

Um, no.

Boot-up is faster. It now takes about 30 seconds the beginning of the POST test to the Windows login screen. My applications open almost instantaneously, especially MS Office. I believe that writing lots of data to my SSD would be very fast, but I save my data to my original HDD. Also, I don’t want to do this and reduce the life of the drive. I’ll give it a few more weeks to really judge it. As for reclaiming storage space, I haven’t blown away the old Windows OS partition. If I have an issue, I want to have a backup plan. In a few weeks, if everything is good, I’ll wipe it out.

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Hibachi dinner with the kids after Thor: The Dark World

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Joel

After visiting a hobby store in our area to pick up a model rocket and plane, the kids and I went to see Thor: The Dark World. We also had some errands to run, but with a big gap in time between the movie and the errands. What to do? I decided to take the kids for a quick dinner at our local Japanese restaurant for some sushi and hibachi. Dinner was good!

Hibachi dinner with the kids

Hibachi dinner with the kids

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Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Joel

I have to say that I’m generally this series of films in the Marvel universe that started with Iron Man five years ago. I, like many people, liked that film, but the nerds (like me) liked the shout outs and hints about a larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Followed by The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel’s The Avengers, Iron Man 3, audiences have been introduced to something new — a series of interconnected superhero films with plots and connections to previous films. Nerdgasms galore. Don’t get me wrong — they haven’t been a tour de force. I still don’t like Iron Man 2, and the jury in my mind is still out on Iron Man 3.  The original 2011 Thor film wasn’t bad, but I found the Earthbound portion of that film to be a little boring, but I liked the scenes in Asgard. The other films have been pretty good.

Have you watched the commercials and trailers about Thor: The Dark World? Thor fighting generic bad elves. Scenes of destruction.  as Loki doing his smarmy thing. The stakes never higher. That is pretty much what the entire movie is all about. Let me tell you — this film isn’t some deep film. The villains are truly one note. The leader of the Dark Elves is Malekith, played by Christopher Eccleston. He’s a British actor who primarily has to growl the entire film — there is no characterization whatsoever, except these Dark Elves want to end the universe as we know it. The plot that I mentioned? Yup, that’s it. The Dark Elves want to simply end the universe, pitch it in blackness, somehow remove the light. I don’t know what that means, or one would actually do that, or why they would necessarily want to do that. It didn’t really matter, apparently.

So good movie, or bad movie? Actually, accepting the fact that this film is more of the dumb action variety, you can still enjoy it. There’s a lot of action, but there’s a lot of humor as well. On that level, I think you can sit and enjoy this film with that mindset. Chris Hemsworth is fine in the film, as was Natalie Portman. Kat Dennings has a larger role in the film, and her lines were funny.

BTW, two bonus scenes during the credits of the film, so hang around.

 

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

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