Sorry there is no Sunday Night Movie this week, life got in the way and I simply couldn’t find the time for my weekly film. (Damn shame as I really love watching movies, but life isn’t always skittles and beer.)
Life’s been hectic lately and a bit stressful. It didn’t help today that San Diego got pounded by storms. Record breaking rainfall meant that our highways were locked and crashes were more plentiful than a politician’s lies.
I hope to have more to say tomorrow.
So I spent today setting up my christmas present from my sweetie-wife.
My wife and id usually do not engage in trying to figure out the perfect gift for each other and instead buy gifts from each other’s wish lists.
A few months ago I had commented in the $99 walmart special audio system I owned couldn’t keep up with the high end data and audio coming off the PS# when it played blu-rays. My sweetie-wife offered to buy em a new sound system for Christmas. I did the research, found an affordable system that met my needs, and gave her the information.
This week Fry’s had it on sale for a very good price so my sweetie bought it and I set it up today.
It is a Sony STR Dh 700. I am very happy with the sound I am getting out of this system. (I also had two speakers that some former owner of the condo left behind when he moved out.)
The most frustrating aspect of the set-up was the speaker connections for the front speakers. I had never seen anything like these and my sweetie-wife and I puzzled over it for a few moments before figuring out how to connect the wires in.
Then I allowed the systems to self balance itself. (It has a very nice auto-diagnostic routine to figure out where the speakers are and how to balance them.) After that I went through each component of our entertainment system and made sure all the outputs were the highest quality.
Man this sounds great. I put in blu-rays and got blown away by the quality, but even older DVD with mono soundtracks – like Destination Moon — sounded great.
So I am still sick, but not as bad as yesterday.
Hopefully I will be even better tomorrow.
So either from my sweetie-wife or from the convention I have caught a cold/flu of sometype. I made it to work today, but had to cut it short by an hour.
I feel like someone has sandblasted my throat.
Lovely.
So it is Sunday morning and day two of Loscon 36 is not but a memory. It is a happy memory.
Many of the panels I attended were aimed towards writers and I found them at least entertaining and mildly informative. (The truth of the matter is that much of was geared toward the novice writer and I have advanced beyond much of that advice.)
I did attend a presentation on a book called “Keep Watching The Skies! American SF films of the 50’s.” Man, I want that book.
It big and heavy, so heavy it hurt my poor arthritic fingers, but for a classic SF film nut like your humble host it is the perfect reference material.
Sadly it runs $99 and that is just beyond what I can afford to pay for a book.
Plenty of parties in the evening and there were fun. (Though I did miss my sweetie-wife. She stayed in the room still under the weather from a flu she has been fighting.) I did make a connected with an editor of an SF podcast, so I might be getting a story online that way soon.
So this weekend is LosCon 36, the annual L.A. area science-fiction and fantasy convention. Time is short for me this morning so this will be a brief report on the first day of the convention. (Which was Friday, yesterday.)
We left San Diego about 9 am and got to the hotel about 11 am. It was a pleasant drive we passed the time with conversation and a few thorny problems in firearms and armor in an SF environment.
The first panel was SF Horror films, but it really turned into a conversation on SF films in general. Still it was entertaining.
After lunch I was at SF Economics with the Kolin brothers on the panel. They wrote ‘The Unincorporated Man’ something I need to read after I write Cawdor.
We ended the day with Bridget Landry of JPL and her Cassini probe presentation. Always worth seeing.
Sweetie-wife and I walked several blocks for dinner at a little Greek place. It was decent. Then we came back and hit a couple of parties.
About 9pm I stopped by something called MEN INTO SPACE 50 years later. Turns out it was about a TV program that tried very hard to do stories about a US space program. It was really not bad at all.
I ended the night with a Zombie movie premier, Bled White. Not bad, it was about student film school level in quality but I watched the whole thing, and then was off to bed.
I’m not a religious person so this is not a time for me to give thanks and praise to an anthropomorphic deity; however we can still be thankful for the good thing and fortunes that have come our way.
First and foremost of course is my sweetie-wife. Meeting her in Boston September 2004 was truly one of life’s more fortunate turns. I have been and continue to be very happy with her in my life.
I am thankful for the good and loyal friends I have. They make up my west coast family and truly make life more enjoyable.
I have a good job with good pay and I work with good people. Few can truly say all of that, plus I help people at work. I know that right now I am making some people’s live truly better.
I sold a second story, proving that the first was not a fluke.
I thankful to have watched a good friend, Gail Carriger, publish her first novel. One that came up and out of the slush pile. I am so very happy for her.
Aside from a few minor problems under control with modern medication, I am in good health and in good spirits.
I have more and more visitors to this site and I am thankful for each and every return visit.
I hope your lives are going as well and as happily.
So last weekend I was playing around with the Garage Band software that comes with my apple computer.
Now understand that I have absolutely no training or education in the fields of music or musical composition. Anyway Garage Band has loops of music pieces that you can lay down as track. You can mix the tracks and do all sorts of interesting things with them I had laid down a drumbeat and was playing around with other pre-recorded instrumental tracks.
The results were apparently not to my sweetie-wife’s ear. Her comment was that I should leave music to ‘professionals.’
I take it as a consolation that she has never said a similar thing about my prose.
For the last year or so one of my sweetie-wife’s lovebirds has been acting strangely. He will tilt his head back until it’s laying flat along his spine. Lately his balance has gotten bad and he become quite unsteady. Today my sweetie-wife learned that this condition is called’stargazing’ and where we had assumed it was because the bird was aged it could be from other factors.
Tomorrow she is taking the bird to an avian vet and maybe, if the stars align just right, we make the little fellow well again.
The plans I had for tonight were destroyed by a pizzeria.
I had a two hour long training session at my day-job today. It was pretty interesting but the room it was held in was very frigid. An hour later my toes still were numb from the cold. I decided I wanted something hotter than microwave meal for lunch. Next door there is a pizza place, Regent’s Pizza. I studied their menu carefully and selected a couple of slices from a pizza that had no mushroom and plenty of meat. (Deep dish — which I am going to have to avoid from now on.)
After eating the pizza I found a slice of mushroom in the box. I was, as Prince Humperdink put it ‘most put out.’ I called and complained. They agreed that no mushrooms should have been in the pizza.
My stomach has informed me that there were indeed mushrooms present. I have spent this evening cramped and unhappy. Luckily I have not vomited, but that just means tomorrow will be my special bathroom day.
Joy oh joy