Catch-up

What follows is a brain dump of recent Jake issues:

Xbox 360 – I haven’t played it much yet, but I must say that the level of detail in the PGR3 cities is pretty amazing. Las Vegas looks near photorealistic! Unfortunately my HDTV is in storage since we couldn’t fit it in the small apartment we recently moved in to. I’ve been playing it on my crappy 19” TV and just last night the picture started going out (everything was green). So, I’m toying with the idea of buying a 20-something inch 16:9 HDTV CRT... they cost about $500 or so.

WoW – I cancelled my Warcraft subscription a few days ago. The number of hours I was playing steadily decreased the closer I got to level 60. I figure I’ll start back up once the expansion comes out, but I really had no trouble breaking away from the game. It was a lot of fun and WELL worth the money, but I’m done with it for now.

Wisdom teeth – OUCH did that hurt! I got my wisdom teeth pulled a few weeks ago and well... I’m just glad I don’t have a second set that needs to come out! I was awake for the procedure (they had me on NOx) and that was pretty damn disturbing. I was screwed up in the head for the next day or so, it was just really wrong being aware of such a violent mistreatment of your body. I was hopped up on Vicodin for about a week, the pain lasted longer than I expected. Now I’ve got holes where my teeth once were... is that better?

Piano – I stopped practicing piano after my teeth were pulled. That first week, I was in no condition to practice. The second week, I had no excuse... I just wasn’t getting excited about the thought of doing it. It got so serious that I even thought about quitting lessons for a while! But I practiced on Monday night before my lesson and I found myself enjoying it again. And then my lesson went really well, my instructor suggested I stop working on specific songs for a while and just work on fingering exercises. That made everything fresh and new again and I ended up practicing for almost 2 hours that night! I also ordered a book from Amazon called The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises by Hanon which contains exercises to increase finger strength/agility/etc. I got it today, and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Less Than Me – I finally fixed up all the unfinished edges of my site that have been dangling since the move to Dreamhost and MT3.2. The About page is back, the Media Consumption page is back (I love that page, since it came about by accident and it looks pretty neat!), the Archives page is updated, and the sidebars are persistent through all of the archive pages. Also, I changed the monthly and category archive pages so that they’re sorted with ascending chronology, I think it makes more sense that way... but I could be crazy.

Narnia – I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I wasn’t at all excited to see it since I know the story well and never found it all that compelling. But, hey, they made a really entertaining movie out of it! The children actors were believable, the animated animals looked very real, and the Braveheart-esque battle sequence walked a satisfactory line of violent but not bloody. I’m actually looking forward to the next one!

Grizzly Man – This was a pretty weird documentary. I liked it, but only kind of... In case you don’t know, it’s the real life story of a guy (Timothy Treadwell) who spent his summers living among bears in Alaska... until he gets eaten by one. Most of the footage is shot by himself, think the Blair Witch Project but for real and with bears instead of nothing. Treadwell was a pretty eccentric fella, which makes for some entertaining footage. The thing is, you’d think he was just stupid or crazy except that this lifestyle was a replacement for a past drug addition. With that in mind, it seems like he might have been better off with the bears, even if he did get eaten... It was a weird movie.

Harry Potter – I started reading The Half Blood Prince back in freaking November! Man, has this book been a drag. A while back, I thought how neat it would be to read the back-story of Voldemort’s rise to power... Apparently J.K. agreed with me, but then decided to present it more in the form of a school lecture... ugh. Does this book get better? I’m halfway through it, and I’m seriously thinking about stopping.

Well there you have it. The stuff I should have written about throughout the last two weeks, thrown into one long entry. Consider this your early birthday present...