Category: Favourites

On the spur of the moment, I decided to haul my ass downtown and check out the new Georgia Aquarium which is billed as the largest aquarium in the World, quite a bold statement for sure and it’s not often Atlanta can stake a claim to World’s biggest anything, Turner Field (World’s biggest HDTV screen) and Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (World’s busiest airport) aside, so it’s definately worth a visit for that alone…

Anyways, it’s claim to fame is it was built off of a $200m donation by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus (he builds a huge fishtank while Arthur Blank buys the Falcons, go figure) and, as previously mentioned, it’s the World’s largest aquarium, featuring over 100,000 specimens in tanks holding approximately 8 million US gallons of water.

Amongst those specimens are the stars of the show, the two Whale Sharks, Ralph and Norton. These are the first whale sharks that have been kept in captivity outside of Japan and they reside in a tank that holds 6 million US gallons.

OK, enough shilling, I was just planning to do a quick visit, mostly based on Scott Thigpen’s bad experience with the Aquarium management the night before, they apparently closed the doors at 4:30 (even though it was advertised as 6pm) stating “who would want to see an hour and 15 minutes of the Georgia Aquarium?” So after the super stringent security search and subsequent pat down (I must remember not to wear my knee brace when a metal detector is involved) and after I paid my $23 (OUCH!) I entered the building around 3:15pm.

Once inside you have 5 different sections you can visit, the Whale Shark tank is easily the most popular, and the most awesome… It has the transparent tunnel under the tank that offers a fantastic view as well as a huge viewing window on one side, after dashing around that, taking pictures as I went it was over to the next most popular section, the Beluga Whales… I did the same for most of the aquarium, dashing around, stopping to take pictures, ask some silly questions to the uber-friendly staff and move on the the next place. I didn’t do any detail as I plan on going back with Robyn to soak it up fully…

I checked my watch when I left, 3:53pm…

Who would want to see an hour and 15 minutes of the Georgia Aquarium?

I saw it all in 40 minutes, had I spent the extra half hour I would have had no reason to go back… That’s not a bad thing though, I do want to go back, and as I was on my own, I had no one holding me back or dragging me here, there and everywhere.

If you havent been already, I highly recommend it, but I do advise you go during the work day, the place was very quiet when I arrived which also aided my speedy tour.

Georgia Aquarium

Originally uploaded by FLC.

After watching Lost, we were channel hopping for a few minutes when we came across CSI:NY, now I like CSI (I refuse to call it CSI:Las Vegas, It’s just CSI people!) and CSI:Miami is tolerable at times, but CSI:NY really bugs me, I don’t know why but it just does… Maybe it’s just like CSI:Miami in that David Caruso isn’t playing Horatio Caine, he’ll always be John Kelly from NYPD Blue, Gary Sinise isn’t Mac Taylor, he’s freaking Lieutenant Dan! He will always be Lieutenant Dan…

Anyways, during the aforementioned episode of CSI:NY, one of the investigators cell phones rings, well Blackberry really but moot point, and it’s the new Coldplay single “Talk” as the ringtone… No biggie I thought, until the actors actually mention it on screen, it went something like this:

Sheldon Hawkes: New ringtone there?
Danny Messer: Yeah, it’s the new Coldplay single, the girl picked it out.

GAH! FUCKING GAH!!!

OK, that’s bad enough, thanks to sell out actors Coldplay (one of the biggest bands in the world (arguabley)) has managed to get some serious pimpage… But wait, it was not over…

During the ad break, what appears but an ad that went as follows:

You saw it on CSI: NY, and now you can get it for your own phone. Download this ring tone from Coldplay’s “Talk,” the hit single from their double platinum album X&Y by texting “Tone” to 22788

TWICE!

Now I can take the product placement like the HP printer in the show and what not, but to forceably stuff this down our throats twice was taking it too far… It’s not even the best choice for a single off of “X&Y”, but screw paying $2.49 plus tax, I’ll give you it for free…

As a side note, I just love HDTV now, I’ll watch anything as long as it’s broadcast in HDTV… CSI:NY, Good Morning America, you name it…

As I have gained a new family, I was invited to spend my first family Thanksgiving at Jill and Ryan’s home outside Charlotte, NC.

Now I have spent a Thanksgiving in this country before, but that was at a friend of a friend’s and to be honest, I felt like a bit of an outsider at that family affair, though it was a hugely enjoyable day, but this time it would be a weekend…

We left Atlanta around 3:30pm Wednesday afternoon and as soon as we hit I-285 it was bumper to bumper traffic, but at least it was moving decently, and for some inexplicable reason when I-85 goes past the Mall of Georgia, even though it’s down to two lanes, traffic vanishes and it’s clear sailing all the way up through South Carolina and North Carolina into Charlotte. We arrived just in time to see Lost so it took about 5 and a quarter hours to get there, Robyn says it usually takes closer to 4…

So along came Turkey Day, Frank and Ryan worked a miracle to hook up an antenna to Ryan’s satellite dish to recieve local HDTV over the air without paying extra on the satellite provider… And it worked brilliantly, so while the Turkey’s (yes two turkeys) were being prepared, we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in HD, and it was awesome!

I’d like to say I helped in the preperation of the turkeys, but alas that would be a lie, I watched and drank beer with Frank as Ryan filled up a huge stock pot full of peanut oil and deep fried the turkeys. This is the first time I had seen such a thing, but according to Frank it was the most popular way of cooking them down south, and they came out great. Nice and moist after 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F, as opposed to the dry turkey you get from blasting it in an oven for hours on end…

Well, I was stuffed after the meal and everyone eventually took a nap of some sort, we were then treated with the trail end of the Atlanta Falcons/Detroit Lions game (in HD) then the Denver Broncos/Dallas Cowboys games (also in HD) before relaxing with Survivor (yep, also in HD) and then a game of Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture 2 where I impressed with my knowledge of random pop culture, including but not limited to Charmed and Roger Corman but in the end the team of Frank and Jill won…

The following day was Black Friday, so Robyn and I went to the local Costco to buy a new flat screen TV, and then to Best Buy to get appropriate accessories, as well as window shopping in the villiage beside Jill and Ryans house. Then we just relaxed before heading home Saturday lunchtime.

All in all a great time, and now I’ll say one thing, HDTV rocks! So me + our new TV from Philips + Free HD programming from Comcast = Sweeeeeet!

Table Setting

Originally uploaded by FLC.

Let me tell y’all what it’s like, being male, middle class and white.

Ahhh, the opening line on the title track of Ben Folds debut solo (officially, Fear of Pop aside), and it was pretty much the vibe of the show at The Tabernacle last night…

Yes, it was a mightily excellent show, and it was nice to have a 20 minute MARTA ride to the show compared to a 5 hour drive to Nashville like last time, and it was also a packed Tabernacle, standing room only in the baconies. Ben and the band didn’t disappoint by playing old, new and even an improvised “radio friendly” rockier version of “Jesusland” but if you’ve been to a Ben Folds show you knew what to expect, like splitting the crowd into horns and trumpets for “Army” and the three part harmony for “Not The Same” and such likes…

I personally thought it was weird to listen to old Ben Folds Five song being played without Darren Jessee and Robert Sledge on drums and bass respectively, especially when they played “Where’s Summer B?” which was co-written by Jessee and includes the lines:

There goes Joe Caparo again
Hey, that’s Darren’s girlfriend!
Frank and Ross are holding hands
They been asking where ya been
Hey Summer, where ya been?

Alas I have no pictures thanks to my small venue/no camera policy, which I think I should alter to Nashville/no camera as with this and the Our Lady Peace concert last month proved that getting cameras into these small venues (and indeed with Coldplay at Philips Arena) is a piece of pie! I wouldn’t have gotten many decent shots anyways as we were sat in the 3rd row of the upper balcony and were promptly blinded by a light pointed directly at us that shone as bright as a thousand suns which they like to illuminate between each song… Seriously, I’m seeing spots today and I think I have eyeshock!

After the hectic wedding weekend we flew down to Orlando to spend 5 days at the Walt Disney World Resort, and despite a few hiccups along the way we had a great, but tiring, time…

We took MARTA down to the airport with the remains of my family after dropping off the rental car and after lunch in the airport, we flew down to Orlando (first class I should add) and there we got picked up by Disney representatives and were promptly whisked off to the Walt Disney World Resort to check in at our first hotel… We were originally supposed to be going on the Tuesday but Delta had no available flights so we moved it to Monday and had to add an extra night at a different hotel as the hotel we were booked in was full… So when we checked in at the Pop Century we were told that we couldn’t actually enter the parks until we checked in to the Boardwalk the following day, and to make things worse, the dining plan we were on wouldnt start til the following day also. So Robyn protested all this as she was the one who booked it and they said they would look into it as we went and bought dinner, an hour later we were told we could, infact, go to one of the parks that night… So off to Magic Kingdom we went, and managed to ride 6 rides in the space of 2 hours, those being Stitch’s Great Escape, Space Mountain, The Tea Cup Ride, Mickey’s PhilharMagic, Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, I now really dislike Big Thunder Mountain Railroad as it has taken from me on two too many occassions… Firstly 11 years ago (my only other visit) it stole a hat from me and now it stole my cellphone, my new cell phone at that.

Kinda sucked…

Anyways, it would not spoil our fun as the following day we went to pretty much every park going, starting at Disney/MGM Studios where we rode the Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster (we would eventually go on it twice, which is something as I hate fast rollercoasters) and Robyn rode the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (I would not go on that for love nor money) before we left to check in to the Boardwalk, we then walked through Epcot to get the monorail to the Magic Kingdom so we could see if lost and found had my phone, which they didnt… THEN we went to Animal Kingdom for the afternoon to get it out of the way… There we rode Dinosaur, the Primeval Whirl and It’s Tough To Be A Bug, but we missed out on the Kali River Rapids as the line was over an hour long, we would go back on Thursday morning for these and we ended up going round the rapids 3 times in a row as there was no line, which was pretty sweet…

By the evening time we were pretty tired and went to Downtown Disney to eat and do some shopping before crashing in the hotel.

We hit up the main rides in Epcot on Wednesday, those being the new ride Soarin’ (which ran out of FastPasses by 10am on Friday and had a 2 hour line, that was insane), Mission:SPACE and Test Track before we had a nap in the afternoon.

Now comes the pinnacle of the honeymoon, we went to Disney/MGM Studios for the Fantasmic! show and after walking around Epcot all day my knee was playing up, so Robyn had the idea of getting a wheelchair, so we did and she (to her credit) pushed me around to Star Tours then the Fantasmic! We got on Star Tours via the disabled entrance (hehehe!) and at Fantasmic! there were two old ladies sitting in the disabled section and when a cast member saw us coming she promptly kicked them out (it was standing room only at this point) to make way for us, we did feel bad about it but hey, we got sweet seats… And we got all kinds of help on the way out, of course once I was out of the chair I had to really play up my knee pain.

After this we spent the last 2 days going back to rides we realy wanted to ride again, like the Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster and Space Mountain, we would have went on Soarin’ again, but as I said, it was madness on Friday in Epcot, I guess thats when the new weekend people arrive…

Overall it was a great, but very tiring time, and it’s great to be back home, we pretty much slept all day yesterday as it all finally caught up with us.

And now we have the idea to go back next year to celebrate our anniversary…

In Front of the Castle

Originally uploaded by FLC.

Well, after all the months of preperation, the months of stress and last few weeks of panic, the big day arrived…

And it all went so smoothly it was almost surreal.

Anyways, We’d like to thank everyone who could make it to our special day, especially Robyn’s family who helped organise the event and helped the weekend run like clockwork and my family who flew 4,000 to be here on such short notice.

Now we depart for our honeymoon in DisneyWorld tomorrow afternoon so you’re probably best checking on the Moblog for updates on that side.

The Happily Married Couple

Originally uploaded by FLC.

Seeing as I have nothing better to do with my time at 7am I though I’d just throw up a few of my thoughts about the new iPod, seeing as I’ve been abusing it for just over a week now…

Firstly, for a 60gb model, it’s so thin, which also makes it feel like it might break easily, though not as easily as the nano. And the screen is frickin’ huge, or at least seems to be, seriously, the first night we had it, we watched the latest Lost episode and could see everything including being able to read the subtitles during Jin and Sun’s flashback sequences, even at a distance…

Secondly, the battery life is great, or maybe I’m just used to the relatively low life of my old 3G battery, either way, this thing will pretty much run all day without worrying about having to recharge it, unless your watching videos, then you can watch one of the Lord of the Rings (theatrical only mind) movies uninterrupted… Oh yeah, we’ve figured out how to rip DVD’s and put them on the iPod, cool or what? Yeah, it’s not widescreen but it does the job full screen or you can have letterbox format.

Now the gripes, and there are only a few, mostly to do with the packaging… The box is much, much thinner than the iPod boxes of old, mainly because Apple are now taking the cash cow as far as possible. When I got my 3G 2 years ago it came packaged with so many extras, now you don’t get a dock or even an AC mains adapter, what is up with that? They expect you to shell out around $60 for those items, thats kinda shitty in my opinion. Plus the idea of only using USB2 over FireWire is another bad one, sure, most PC users don’t have a FireWire port, but you could get a USB cable to accomodate them, plus USB2 sucks ass compared to FireWire when it comes to transferring 5,000+ songs onto a virgin iPod.

My biggest lament is the dropping of the headphone remote jack at the top of the iPod… We can now no longer use the iTrip in the car and I seriously miss having the easy access to the headphones remote while the iPod was stored away in my pocket, who really wants to take the damn thing in and out when you want to skip a track? Not me for one…

Overall it’s a great addition to my digital life, it currently holds 5,535 songs and over 6,000 photos, how can you go wrong with that, plus I have the Family Guy “movie” on it…

Freakin’ Sweet!

As I briefly mentioned yesterday, inbetween swooning over the new iPod, Robyn also got me a new phone to replace my old one where the battery lasted a 5 minute call, and it’s one of them phones with a camera, so I’ve restarted the moblog again…

Kinda…

I’ve just started a new blog and intergrated it with this place, you might have noticed the new tab up top already. I’d like to say it’s a complex operation, but really it’s not, I just email the pictures to Flickr and they, in turn, send the pictures here. Simple really…

As I say over there, don’t be expecting daily updates or multiple daily updates, it’ll be pretty irregular at best, it’s just a little fun place to capture my world in low resolution, actually it’s now in a pretty decent resolution now as the camera in this Sony Ericsson Z500a takes much larger images than the old Sony Ericsson T610 I used to use in the old moblog before I moved over to Atlanta nearly 2 years ago…

Oh yes I do…

She also got me a new phone.

THIS is what I’m marrying folks :)

Though, this is not why I’m marrying her…

Charging…

Originally uploaded by FLC.

This comes via Maigh and it’s quite possibly the bestest news I’ve heard or read all day…

The Muppets are coming back to TV.

The Muppets could come back to primetime television with their own reality show. ABC has ordered a script and five episode outlines for America’s Next Muppet, in which viewers may join in choosing the newest member of the puppet family that includes Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, a network spokeswoman said Tuesday.

*insert approrpiate hand gesture here*

As I mentioned before, Robyn and I went up to Charlotte for the weekend to hang out with Jill and Ryan, Robyn’s sister and brother in law, and all in all it was a lovely time, except for Atlanta traffic…

We left about 5pm on Friday evening having got our marriage license during the afternoon, and as soon as we hit I-285 around GA 400 it was bumper to bumper all the way past the Mall of Georgia, close to 30 or so miles. 5pm on a Friday in Atlanta equals “Get the fuck outta Dodge” for everyone it seems… So that turned what was supposed to be a 4 hour trip into a 6 hour one, we didnt get into Charlotte till around 11pm.

On Saturday we went walking round the Carolina Renaissance Festival which was both humourous and scary at the same time, humourous as people try to adopt phoney olde english accents, scary as it has men in tights, notebaly men who should NEVER wear tights in their life… It was also made worse as I was still limping from my bum hip and knee from the Our Lady Peace concert on Thursday.

That evening we went downtown to Uptown Charlotte and had dinner at Ratcliffe on the Green before taking the trolley through Uptown before heading back to Jill and Ryans to watch the conclusion of the NASCAR race that was talking place in nearby Concord that evening…

Now, seeing as I’m marrying into this family, it has become clear I need to pick a favourite NASCAR driver… I could jump on the Jimmie Johnson bandwagon, but I learned this weekend that I would be hung if I picked Tony Stewart or Jeff Gordon. Infact, I’m risking life and limb just linking to them… Thats something to think about.

On Sunday we walked around the community Jill and Ryan live in, doing some shopping as well as Ryan and I getting a haircut, much needed in my case before heading back down I-85 towards home…

As I said, it was a lovely time, shame it went by so quickly.

Uptown Charlotte

Originally uploaded by FLC.

I met up with Barry last night and we headed on down to The Roxy to see Our Lady Peace, and then I found out how old I really am…

First of all, the show was pretty good, the two (yes two) support acts were ok, the second was actually pretty dire and sounded like a cheap ass knock off of the Counting Crows, I have no idea who they were as the lead singer took no time to even say hello to the audience, sucky… OLP were great, plenty of audience participation and good songs to sing along to, but man, they started late at like 10pm and didnt finish till close to 11:45, and I’m paying for it this morning. Alas it was a small venue so no camera, I try not to risk it nowadays…

Now I’ve been to my fair share of concerts over the years, and untl the Ben Folds/Weezer and Coldplay concerts recently, they have all been general admission (ie standing room only) affairs, which I managed rather well, like the 8 hours straight at Music Midtown, but something last night went horribly wrong. About three songs into the Our Lady Peace set my right knee started to, for lack of a better word, buckle so I shifted my weight over which proved to be a bigger mistake, the knee was still giving me immense pain and now my left hip is aching like a motherfucker. To compound matters, there was a 15 minute walk to the MARTA station afterwards and another long walk to home, all done at a snails pace…

Ahhh, all part of the live music experience though, now excuse me while I hobble off to Charlotte for the weekend…

I thought it would be a good idea to see how this new fangled iTunes video works, and how it compares in different sizes on screen.

As you may be aware, the video in the iTunes Video Store (iTVS?) is in 320×240 resolution, but it’s also encoded in high-quality, H.264 QuickTime format with mpeg-4 sound, so it should scale rather well… In theory… Let’s see.

I chose to download the 3rd episode of Lost and the part where Sawyer gets jumped on the beach (for it’s fast moving action) for this experiment, the file was 197.8mb and took about 3 minutes (sweet bandwidth), when it’s done you can go to the Video section in iTunes where it’s available to watch.

A nice little graphical interface, you can change it to be like the usual iTunes list but I like this, if only they displayed albums like this too… Anyways, onto the watching, the default view is in the Album Art section.

As you can see, this is pretty small, so if you double click the Album Art, a window will pop up.

In this original state it’s still very much watchable, but some compression is begining to show, you can enlarge this to any size you want, the default (at least on my PC) enlarged size is like this.

Slowly getting worse as it gets bigger, which is understandable… How does full screen look?

I’d go as far as saying it’s watchable, but dont be expecting to see little things that the producers of Lost hide in each episode, also I couldn’t pause on full screen so this was as close as I could get… Plus pausing it makes it look a lot worse than when it’s in motion.

Overall it’s a pretty nifty addition to the digital world, though I’m not so sure about paying $1.99 for something you can see for free already, maybe if the store expands to, say, Battlestar Galactica and things that I tend to miss on a regular basis then it would be worth while, I do like the fact they have season one of Lost for $35 as opposed to the $50 or so it would be if you bought each episode…

The next test is to see how it looks on the iPod screen… I’ll have to wait a while to see that though…

In response to my last post, barely 30 minutes had passed when my phone rang…

Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!
Robyn: NO!
Me: (makes whining noise) Awwwwwww!

And so on… Though I might be able to get one after the wedding.

Last night Robyn and I went to see the new Joss Whedon movie, Serenity, which is a spin off from his much loved yet short lived TV series Firefly, and I for one couldn’t be happier…

Now I’ll admit to not really knowing much about the show til I got the DVD set back in February of 2004, I remembered seeing previews for it on Fox and things like that while in Boston but back in the UK it didn’t start showing there for almost a year and I only saw maybe half an episode. So when I revisited the entire series, firstly via Netflix then buying the DVD’s outright, I completely fell in love with it and when the movie was announced, well I had to be there opening night, if only to prove my geekdom more than anything.

I’ll try not to give much away, but this is set some six or so months after the last Firefly episode “Objects in Space” and The Alliance is still after River Tam (Summer Glau) and her brother Simon Tam (Sean Maher), but when Serenity’s captain Mal Reynods (Nathan Fillion) takes her on a job and the Reavers show up, Simon sees this as one risk too much and says they will leave the ship at next port of call, meanwhile an unnamed member of The Alliance is tracking the Tams and Serenity in an attempt to return River the a facility known as The Academy. After leaving the ship River finds herself in a bar where an advert on a screen triggers *something* and her conditioning is revealed, as well as something hidden deep inside her subconscious that could threaten The Alliance…

I went in hoping it would be like a 2 hour episode of the show, but it was so much more involving, it now makes me think that it always should have belonged on the big screen, this had enough moments and sweeping visuals to rival anything that came out of LucasFilms in the last 30 years. Usually movies like this involving an ensemble cast (like Star Trek for instance) can get bogged down with far too many sub-plots just so everyone can get screen time, not this one… It’s direct and to the point… River knows a dark secret and The Alliance want to stop that secret getting out, and it’s 2 hours of action and suspence that wraps it all up… Plus it has kickass battle sequences, and enough of the dry wit that made Firefly so endearing, I dont know who gets the best lines, Mal, Jayne or Wash… They are all great.

I hope this is a success so more movies in the franchise can get made, shame they will be a few crew members short, that is the one thing that surprised me… Highly recommended, even if you havent seen the whole of Firefly, but it might help…