Need To Update

Friday, 7/15: Did I really not post any post-HP thoughts here?!

From about a week ago: I think I truly now understand why cutters cut. No worries; I don't expect to do anything more than empathise. Also, turns out I'm a bonehead. Made a major miscalculation with regard to the family budget.

Wednesday 7/27: I took the plunge and rooted Mjollnir using adb on Linux. Couldn't have been easier and I love having total control. Between downloads of roms and explots, setting up adb itself and running the marathon of CL steps, I was at it for about 4 hours.

But I never had any problems and it was really easy. The actual terminal work was pretty painless, and as a bit of a shell scripter I can see how "one click" scripts could really do the job if coded right.

Spent maybe 2 more hours playing with settings, cleaning up bloat, looking for apps like a startup manager and BT keyboard interface. I grabbed three ROMs but I haven't tried them out yet.

Notes: Backup Master doesn't back up contacts (aaargh) and MMS restore doesn't seem to work. SMS to Gmail works great though, so I have all my pics there. Lost Llama's settings (double-aaargh) because I didn't know it saved its settings internally.

Friday, 7/29: Ape is *really* struggling with the finances (as drained by the addition) and possibly having to leave Katie and go back to work. I'm trying so hard to sympathize but it's not easy for me in the sense that I told her this was a likely outcome and that it was her idea in the first place! I *definitely* understand her not wanting to leave Kate. I don't want her working at all if possible.

Aerin the Plumber

Our house phone rang just after 11pm. It was a friend of ours calling frantically for help with a leaking icemaker water supply. A little unexpected ^^

So I grabbed a few tools, ran over to her place, got the supply knob unfrozen using a pair of pliers and asked her if she had a wet-dry vac to clean up the pool developing in her kitchen. I suspect that supply knob hadn't been turned since the fridge was installed who knows how many years ago. She could have fixed it herself but the little enclosure they put it in didn't really have room for a hand to grip the entire knob.

Hopefully she can get all the water up and avoid damage to her cabinets or floor.

Stop the Insanity

I can't beieve Sony is trying something so bone-headed so soon after the PSN hackathon.

Their PSN Pass is primed to kill the PS3 rental market and stop legitimate game sharing (think multi-gamer household to see why I'm so irate!) with a one-time code that links the disc to a single PSN account. Future users (through sale, trade or share) have to pony up an unspecified amount to gain access to PSN.

Whether Sony will bend a little and allow single PS3-sharing or x number of activations the way they do now for downloads is unclear.

This just days after I found out I lost all my "Welcome Back" goodies because I was too busy to free up 10 gigs of space prior to getting Infamous and Dead Nation and the two PSP titles. Bite me!

I am so ready to grab a used backwards-compatible PS3, the Cobra USB dongle, and a huge drive and:

* Recreate "The Fun Machine", with access to PS1, PS2 and PS3 titles, plus possibly DVDs if there's room
* Pirate at least the 4 titles I am entitled to. Maybe more. They just keep ticking me off!

Pink Floyd the Droid

50 points to whoever gets /that/ reference!

Tonight was Date Night plus Family Movie Night. This doesn't normally happen this way, but Transformers 3 was out and we all wanted to see it. Grandma was going to take the boys but a late plan change meant that we dropped the three kids off as normal and ate by ourselves, then picked the boys up for the movie, then dropped them back off again for the night. Confused yet?

About the movie. As I recall, 2 sucked. So badly that the head writers *apologized* for it. I think even Michael Bay (action auteur and Kyle's nemesis) apologized for it. And 3's trailers seemed good but inconclusive.

Go. See. It.

It's 2 and a half hours long, and after it ends, you'll feel like you've been riding thrill rides for that long. It's well-paced, often funny, and full of great action set-pieces that (with one exception) don't frustrate.

Also, Buzz Aldrin.

Buzz Freaking Aldrin.

You may not know this, but this Mithran is old enough to remember the end of the Space Race as recent history, and also to have lived through every moment of the Shuttle program, including the Enterprise. I even have an ancient NASA Shuttle t-shirt from waaay back. Elder has it now ^^

I don't normally go in for the "real men" thing, but the astronauts were indeed /real/ men (and later women) who braved the unknown, dodgy tech, and physics to go someplace I'd nearly kill to see firsthand. T3 opens with an awful lot of actual (and some doctored) space program footage and Kennedy/Nixon bits too. Later, Buzz himself makes a great cameo. I had to resist the urge to cheer!

But that was just the first bit of awesome. I won't spoil Number 2 outright. But he gets a "double" cameo and one of the best lines in the whole thing.

Also, Patrick Dempsey. As a high-powered playboy exec who just happens to be a pro racer. In real life, Mr. Dempsey has been racing in the Rolex GT series for three or four years now, in an RX-8. Yup. *My* car.

Also also, Datsun 510 aka Bluebird. I wouldn't mind having one of these in RHD trim if I couldn't collect an AE86 Trueno...

All four of us really really enjoyed it. Heck, Soundwave's in it, although they changed his voice too much for my liking, and Ravage doesn't appear. I'm pretty sure his Ravage is where I got my last name from.

Also, I spent most of the movie thinking of Shockwave's "worm-bot" as a hydra when I should have just called it a shai-hulud. But more cybery.

Oh, that one disappointing set-piece? The building that shai-hulud bends in half. When will movies stop showing ordinary humans stopping a free-fall by grabbing onto something one-handed, or catching another falling human, without including dislocated shoulders?

Yes, I'm nitpicking human abilities in a movie quite literally crawling with intelligent, shapeshifting robots.