Category Archives: Movies

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Life in 2011

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2011 was a lot of fun and I consumed a lot.  Food, drinks, music, movies and media in general.  Thanks to social things like Spotify, Goodreads, Foursquare and Google here is what I enjoyed the most this past year.

News

reeder

I read 58,776 articles via Reeder, twice the amount that I did the year before.  I can’t recommend the app Reeder enough for reading RSS feeds, it is available for Mac, iPad and iPhone and I wouldn’t be able to keep up with everything without it. Probably 90%+ of those 58,000 articles are just skimming headlines but Reeder’s interface makes consuming a fire hose of news easy.

I read WSJ on my iPad weekdays on the morning subway ride, The Economist rounds out the week when I usually take the magazine with me on the way to a bar Friday or Saturday night.  Saturday and Sunday mornings are spent with coffee, the NY Times and my couch. The best new blogs I’ve gotten in to this past year have been The Verge, which has replaced Engadget and Gizmodo for all my tech news and WSJ Metropolis for hyper-local New York news.

Music

M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

This has been one of the best years for music in recent memory.  Pearl Jam had their 20-year anniversary which included re-releases of their first 3 albums and a festival-concert near where I grew up in Wisconsin.  Spotify and the launch of iTunes Match + iCloud even pushed music forward ahead from a consumption stand point.  A lot of albums that made my top 10 list were to be expected – M83, Jetpacks, Pearl Jam.  But St. Vincent and The Black Keys were my favorite new bands (well, new to me at least).  My top 10 albums for 2011 (click to listen in Spotify):

  1. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
  2. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
  3. Eddie Vedder – Ukulele Songs
  4. The Black Keys – El Camino – not available on Spotify :(
  5. We Were Promised Jetpacks – In the Pit of the Stomach
  6. The Naked and Famous – Passive Me, Aggressive You
  7. Holy Ghost! – Holy Ghost!
  8. Pearl Jam – Vitalogy Re-release
  9. Radiohead – King of Limbs
  10. Pearl Jam – Live on Ten Legs

Books

Jon Krakhauer - Into Thin Air

This was the year I finally got around to a few books I’ve been meaning to read for several years.  I finished Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer which was one of the most inspiring books I’ve read in a while.  My friend, Wipert, gave me a copy of The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant which was also life changing.  I’m probably much more unbearable to be around now that I know which philosophical beliefs I adhere to (Plato and Aristotle) but it made me appreciate philosophy in a whole new way.  Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present was dense but taught me a lot I didn’t know and should be required teaching in public schools at some point.  While they don’t qualify as books, I spent a good amount of my reading time going back to read some of the all-time classic comic series such as Batman Knightfall and the X-Men Dark Phoenix Saga.

Food

The Meatball Shop

There is a lot of great food in New York but I can keep it short.  The Meatball Shop is the greatest place that has ever served food.  Period.  I had a whole long list of other places I was going to through but it really doesn’t matter when you can go to the Lower East Side and get 4 naked balls and spicy sauce for $7.

Movies / TV

Marathon Man

I didn’t see nearly as many movies as I wanted to in 2011 but I did very well on the TV front.  This year consisted of me watching and loving the TV shows:

  1. The Walking Dead
  2. Breaking Bad
  3. Party Down
  4. The Pacific
  5. Sports Night
  6. The Kennedy’s
  7. Californication
  8. Battlestar Galactica

And for older movies:

  1. Carlos
  2. Marathon Man
  3. Exit Through the Gift Shop
I’ll be putting together a separate new movie list leading up to the Oscar’s since I need a few more weeks to sort that one out.

 

2012 should be even a better year.  There’s a whole list of food I want to eat, movies I want to see and books to read.  Looking forward to having lots to do with great people. My first adventure will be Japan and Singapore in about a month.  Can’t wait.

I’m Back, and with Video

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Summer 2001 VideoAs I took a hiatus from blogging I managed to pick up a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements and finish putting together the various footage Dave shot and edited the summer before we all left for college. It is now a feature full length movie: Summer 2001. It’s been added to the Video section and you can download a big Divx version or a smaller iPod friendly one. Premiere Elements was awesome to use and ran fine on my older laptop. I’d highly recommend it along with Photoshop Elements if you just need something that can do quick photo/video editing for personal stuff. The full Photoshop is great but usually overkill for touching up vacation photos and Premiere is way over my head.

Work

Not much new has happened in the last month. Work has been really busy and I keep working more and more hours. So last week I decided no more ridiculous overtime. I’ve kept to 40 hours this week (so long as I don’t stay late tomorrow) and it’s refreshing to have more free time at home. I started running again and becomming more active with Now Like Photographs. If you don’t already subscribe to our podcast, you really should. It’s a free song every week.

Poker Nights

I went to two power nights now with Jim from work. It’s been a good time since the buy-in pays for beer. I’m yet to win but I stay in for a bit. Going from playing it at drunk parties to people with actual chips that follow all the rules is much different.

Brookfield Trip

I’m shooting for a weekend in Brookfield sometime towards the end of September. Bri needs to pick up her new car which is getting repainted in Milwaukee(2000 BMW Z3) and I think I’ll take a Friday off to make a nice 3-day weekend out of it. I’m hoping some Chicago people may be available to come up for a day or two. I also started thinking that we should do a big get together once a year. It was awesome to see everyone for Kris’s wedding last fall and I wish I had something like that to look forward to this fall, and every fall for that matter. So maybe later in October/November we could get everyone together and meetup somewhere in the Midwest. I owe Brayshaw a trip to Indiana so that might be something to think about.

The Penguin Movie

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The Penguin Movie

I finally got around to recoding and uploaded the Penguin Movie in a variety of formats. You can grab a high quality Divx version – good for TV/HD, a medium quality H264 for QuickTime use, and an even smaller version that’s iPod compatible. Check out the Movie section for them all.

My Back Was Broken

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I had grand plans to write a controversial post about my disappointment in the Oscar for best picture going to Crash over Brokeback Mountain. I’m opting for this short writeup instead since a) the Academy doesn’t deserve to waste any more time out of my life then they already have and b) Photoshopping a Ku Klux Klan sheet over a person holding an Oscar feels a little weird.

Why Brokeback Should Have Won

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in awhile. You can say all you want about the great scenery, soundtrack, cinematography, etc but when it comes down to just the story it jumps way ahead of anything else that was nominated. I am a straight middle-class catholic man and I felt a deeper connection to a heart broken gay cowboy than any other character of a love story I’ve ever seen before. Even the fact that I’m a man enjoying a love story should be reason enough to admit this is a special movie.

Why Crash Shouldn’t Have Won

It’s not that I didn’t like Crash…I hated it. I was offended by it. Maybe I didn’t take it the way everyone else did but what I took away was: The less you think about racism the worse off you are. I felt like the movie was telling us that you are forced to think of race every day and you need to make the right decision in order to avoid horrible consequences. For the love of god, it’s not the civil rights movement anymore. If you are still judging and thinking of people based on their race then go back to your plantation and take the Academy with you. You shouldn’t have to do anything if you’re like the young police guy character.

And One More Thing

I will buy lots of DVDs and watch the majority of the movies I see at home on my nice big TV. Maybe I’ll even rip them on to my iPod and watch them when ever I want. If the movie industry is going to have the audacity to tell me that I can’t enjoy a movie when I’m not in the theaters and then continue to churn out crap for $8 I will gladly use that money to pay for my Netflix subscription. Bah.

Weekend Activities

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Thursday night was my first of hopefully many to come Holiday Party’s. It went well thanks to my Mother for showing up at the last minute to help make food. I ended up getting way more food than I needed so that just gives me something to replace Thanksgiving leftovers. I’ll post pictures in the Photo section later this week.

Friday was pretty relaxing. I got a new toy from IBM to play with until the end of the month so I spent most of the day setting it up. To avoid the Chicago/Milwaukee snow my Mom decided to stay and we watched Finding Neverland. Considering I usually hate Johny Dept I was pleasantly surprised at what a good movie it was.

Saturday was spent fighting a virus. I don’t know how Bri got it but her laptop picked up a nasty Spybot32 worm variant. AV had trouble cleaning it since it had replaced a bunch of Windows files. I tracked it down to a replaced version of winlogon.exe that was done at 3:30 last Tuesday. Even more strange was that Chris got the same virus around the same time. I ended up just backing up her data and reinstalling Windows. It’s always quicker to take the easy way out and it makes me feel better that there is no way that thing is on her laptop anymore.

I also got working on a new design for the blog. I took the blogger template that Doug Bowman with StopDesign made and started teaching myself table-less CSS layouts. I never bothered to learn it when I was doing web design work at Radio K and I thought I could use a web refresher. New site will be up sometime in January.

War of the Worlds

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Chris was super nice and brought me along to see War of the Worlds last night before it comes out on Wednesday. Tom Cruise has been really getting on my nerves lately between all his publicity stunts and crazy Scientology beliefs (how can you not believe in psychology?).

The movie wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be though. It’s at least not your typical “find-the-aliens-weakness-and-kill-them” kind of movie despite the aliens looking exactly the same as the ones in Independence Day. I might have read to much into it but I thought there was a pretty strong anti-war political message throughout. Chris brought up some good points that it might not be though. We both enjoyed the Flight of the Navigator eye-search tentacle and the most exciting part for me was about 30min in when the projector went out and the lights came on. It was right as the aliens were coming and for a second I thought that was how the movie ends. What a great idea it would have been, kind of like the original radio address. 30min of building up and then they start coming and…done. I’d be happy to spend $8 for that even if I didn’t get my money’s worth. But alas, there was another hour and a half left in which the plot tools characters ran from big scary things and gave my eyes and ears some stimulus.