It’s hard to believe that the Giants are actually going to the Super Bowl this year. In some ways, though, this is typical Giants luck: the one year they actually make it, they’re going to be up against possibly the best team in football history. Oh well, at least they made it this far!
Author: Andrew Huey
too many comics
I just cross-filed the last two months worth of my Westfield shipments into my “to be read” pile. I’m embarrassed to say that, if I were to make one big pile of comics I’m waiting to read, that pile would be three and a half feet tall. (I’ve actually got all this filed into a foot-long box, a two-foot pile, and a six-inch pile. A 3.5 ft pile would be kind of dangerous.) I’m gradually cutting back on my Westfield orders. I’ve got 21 books total on this month’s order, which is a bit less than what I was getting a year ago (28 books on my January 07 order), for instance. And I’m pretty sure I’m not signing up for any weekly books after Countdown is finished, though I don’t know if DC is planning a new weekly book anyway. Either way, that’ll knock 4 books a month off the total.
Meanwhile, I picked up four trades at Waldenbooks today, since the store in the Bridgewater Commons is closing (as, apparently, are most Waldenbooks) and they had everything on sale for 40% off. I’ve got a pretty big stack of trades to read through too, so I didn’t really need four more, but hey, 40% off is pretty good, right? I picked up Black Dossier, which looks to be pretty deep and fairly strange, just judging it based on a quick look. And I picked up Buffy Omnibus 1 and the season eight Long Way Home trade. Mind you, I haven’t actually watched the season 7 DVDs, so I won’t bother reading the season 8 stuff until after I’ve done that, which probably won’t be for another year or two.
The fourth book I picked up was the first Moon Knight trade from the Charlie Huston run. I’ve been curious about that, but just hadn’t gotten around to picking it up. (I was a big fan of Doug Moench’s run on Moon Knight from back in the eighties.)
So, to sum up, I still have quite a lot of comics and graphic novels to read! I think I need to be careful about what I buy at WonderCon next month.
MacHeist and other Mac stuff
Well, after deciding not to buy this year’s MacHeist, I changed my mind and gave them my $49 today. They’ve added enough stuff to the bundle to make it worthwhile for me. Even if I don’t use anything else I’ll probably get my money’s worth out of the two games they added.
And I gave Apple $20 for the new iPod Touch apps. The Touch still isn’t where I think it should be, in terms of functionality, but I’m hoping third-party software will fill the remaining holes after the API comes out next month. If I could just get contact, calendar, and note-taking apps that all sync back to my computer, and can be updated on either the Touch or the MacBook, I’ll be happy. I’m basically just looking for the same stuff I’ve got on my Palm.
WSJ.com – Commentary: Me, Myself and I
“For all the rhetorical flourish on display, many of the presidential candidates still don’t have a grip on the King’s English. That great American personal pronoun, the first person singular, which adorns nearly every sentence of candidate discourse, is still too slippery for many of this year’s White House aspirants.” – from the WSJ.
Chris Dodd?
I took this online quiz, and apparently, the presidential candidate most in tune with my opinions is Chris Dodd. That was kind of surprising, since I don’t think I’d ever even heard of him, and kind of disappointing, since he seems to have dropped out of the race already.
The second guy on my list is Dennis Kucinich, which isn’t all that surprising. I don’t really think he’s likely to win the nomination, though, and I haven’t really been following his campaign.
Of course, the quiz wasn’t terribly granular, and I can’t say that the multiple-choice options always provided an option that matched up with my sometimes convoluted and contrary opinions.
(The guy I’m least in tune with is Mike Huckabee, which isn’t terribly surprising.)
Baby Cruising Love – Perfume
I don’t know why I like this song so much, but I do. I may even pick up the CD/DVD!
Newtype USA to be replaced by PiQ magazine in March
I let my subscription to Newtype expire about a year ago, but that was just because I was falling so far behind with my reading. It was a pretty cool magazine, with some great graphics. And I liked the job Gary Steinman was doing as editor. I can’t say that I always trusted the reviews, but the magazine wasn’t merely an ADV house organ or anything like that. Hopefully the replacement magazine they mention will be as good as Newtype!
Mac software
MacHeist has another bundle of Mac software on sale right now. It’s a good deal, if you need more than one or two of the included applications. I bought the bundle that they were selling about a year ago. About the only app from that bundle that I’m using regularly is DevonThink, which is pretty useful. I’m not really seeing anything in the current bundle that I’d be likely to use, though, so I guess I’ll skip this one.
I have pretty much everything working the way I want it on my new MacBook now. I’ve got FolderShare working fine now. I’ve replaced MacStumbler, which doesn’t seem to work on Intel Macs, with iStumbler, which works fine. And I found out that my old version of the Transmission BitTorrent client didn’t work, so I upgraded to the newest version, which is working fine.
Office 2008 looks interesting, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. I hardly ever do any word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac. I do all of that stuff on the PC.
I also paid for VMWare Fusion a couple of weeks ago. (I’d been using the trial version.) I’ve got a Windows XP virtual machine set up, and it’s working reasonably well. I’m mostly just using it when I need remote access to some stuff at work. (I still use pcAnywhere for that, most of the time.)
Warner Bros. Plans to Sell Movies Only on Blu-ray
Of course, this happens right after I pick up an HD-DVD player! One of the quotes in this article is pretty dire: “We expect HD DVD to ‘die’ a quick death.” I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I think a lot of people picked up HD-DVD players for Christmas, and I don’t think they’ll be looking to throw them out just yet. At least, I’m not looking to throw mine out! There are still a fair number of titles out on HD-DVD, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get a bit of use out of my player over the next couple of years. I guess it may go the way of my laser disc player by, say, 2010, though, huh?
Spider-Man
I dropped Amazing Spider-Man a year or two ago, so I haven’t been following all the stuff leading up to the “One More Day” story. I’ve read a bunch of the online reaction to the conclusion to this story though. This article at Newsarama sums up some of the conflict between JMS and Joe Quesada on the matter. I don’t think that I’d be happy with either of their approaches to this story. It doesn’t really seem like a story they needed to tell at all. I do agree with JMS that Joe Q genuinely cares about the character, and is doing what he thinks is right. I’m actually wondering if they’re going to undo this whole thing at some point and just go back to Peter and MJ being married. The whole point of the story might be to set up an arc that ends with the whole retcon being undone. That might be interesting.
Either way, I have to admit that I’m not really much interested in the Marvel Universe right now. I did enjoy Civil War, for the most part, but I wasn’t too happy with some of the character changes made during the course of that event.