The Blog of Truant

So, in the beginning, we looked at all of the signs, did the research and tried to make the best decision possible.  But, it’s strange how the best laid plans go awry.  All the signs pointed towards HD-DVD’s being the next format winner.  A past hatred of sony’s root kits and bugs with the PS3 mixed with the lower cost of HD-DVD players and a decent amount of companies providing content, it seemed easy to think HD-DVD would win out over Blu-ray.  So, we bought an HD-DVD player and started buying movies for it.  I’m not sure how many we have now, but it’s a fair amount.  Then, slowly, the PS3 started to suck less and the typical American memory started to forget past transgressions such as the UMD and mini-disc and beta and blu-ray fought it’s way back.  Once a majority of studios signed onto blu-ray only deals, we didn’t want to get left behind and I wanted to spend something to make all the OT feel a little less asstastic.  So, the PS3 is sitting next to our 360, and while it’s ugly as hell, it is actually a nice machine.  When I watch an HD-DVD movie on the xbox, I have to turn the stereo up to hear over the roar of the fans trying to keep the cpu from flying off the motherboard in the xbox.  While, the PS3 is relatively silent and I can enjoy quiet points in movies much, much more.  One the first movies we watched on it was “Sunshine”.  While it had a few points I didn’t quite agree with, I thought this was an amazing movie.  The visuals in it were brilliant in 1080p with 5.1 stereo and I’m a sucker for space movies.  Jen didn’t like it as it doesn’t really have that happy of an ending but she still appreciated the high def’ness of it.  Since Pixar is releasing their movies in Blu-ray, that was another reason why I could justify the purchase.  I also picked up Rat and watched about an hour of it before I had to go to work.  In HD, I can finally see what the guys who worked on the movie saw and I can compare it to what I’m working on.  While we have some good looking stuff, the amount of detail pixar puts into its film is unmatched.  I’m looking forward to Wal-e even though I’ve heard they’ve had some story issues as well.

 Well, my OT has finally seemed to have come to an unceremoneous end.  No trumpets, no champange, nothing.  Just me going home at 6.  It’s strange, we got home, ate some dinner, watched a movie and then some cable and it’s now only 10:15!  It’s going to be strange getting used to this again.  Good thing I have so many video games to play.

 Oh, one other thing that sorta incited this post was Trygve emailed me :)  I want to try and keep in touch with all my old friends because it’s sad that I’ve lost track of people that were so close not even that long ago.  I sent an email to 3 friends from school a couple days ago just to see what was up and how everyone was doing but I haven’t heard anything back at all.  Guess I’ll have to fly out to CA to get some face time or something…  Oh, tried to write my old frind Hunter (who’s now in Florida) but we are both pretty busy.  And, also, trying to keep up with my bro.  It was his birthday last week and he got himself an iPod touch.  I got him some best buy gift cards but holy crap!  The site said it would take 1 day to get there and I believed it.  I mean, they’re basically postcards, how long could it take?  2 frikkin weeks!  So, my poor bro couldn’t wait any longer for the cards and went ahead and got the ipod before they arrived.  Well, I guess he can use them to buy Apple giftcards and then get some tunes/videos to put on it!

Hello again.  In keeping with tradition, it’s been another 4 months since I last posted and a lot has happened in the meantime.  Probably the biggest thing that’s been keeping me from posting is work.  We’ve been on OT duty trying to play catchup for quite some time now.  I’m not sure what events transpired to bring the production to where it is today, but whatever they were, I hope they get fixed.  It seems each movie is getting progressively worse in terms of our schedule.  Robots was pretty good, IA2 was bad but they told us that it would be and it was expected (we were also given a month off as a benefit for working on a tight schedule)  And now we are at Horton.  We supposedly had a long 2-3 year schedule and it was going to be great, but somehow that schedule got whittled down to about 5-6 months.  Now, our schedule is worse than IA2 and we don’t get any time off even though it is of no fault of ours that we are behind schedule.  Oh well, I guess this should be expected in the movie biz and I’m betting most if not all studios go through the same thing.

On the topic of work, we are still unsure about where we will be moving to, or not moving to.  Supposedly, we are down to 2 options, a building north of Greenwhich CT or staying where we are.  CT offers alot of tax incentives to the company and the building seems pretty nice.  The only problem is that it is very difficult to get to for people without a car.  Most of you might be thinking, “Well, who doesn’t have a car?”.  Well, strangely, I think a lot of our employees don’t.  Being that at least a third of the company lives in NYC, most of them take mass transit and have no need for a car.  In fact, it doesn’t really make sense to have one in the city.  It costs a ton to insure one, maintain it and park it that it’s not really worth it.  So, management would have to figure out some way to get the city people to the new building.  We currently do have a shuttle but I hear it’s on time record isn’t so hot…  So, us normal employees sit and wait to hear the decision so we can get on with our lives and perhaps choose a place to live.. which leads me to my next topic.

Jen and I really want to buy a house.  We’ve been in our current apartment for almost 5 years now and we yearn for something bigger/better or at least something that is ours.  The place isn’t too bad given NY apartment standards, but we can finally afford something a bit nicer.  Perhaps something with a washer/dryer in the house and new appliances.  We’ve also been holding back on buying new furniture until we get a house as well.  So, once we do find a house, the amount of money we are going to spend is pretty scarey.  Thus, the wife has bought some personal finance books so we can plan appropriately and figure out how much we can spend per month on a mortgage given our incomes, debts, and tax incentives for owning a house.  Hopefully, if we do move to CT for work, we can get a house in CT as the property taxes there seem lower than they are here in NY (depending on the county)  We are hoping that the housing slump will play in our favor and we can get a house at least at a reasonable price.  Since the next time I post will probably be 4 months from now again, I’ll let you know of any progress there

As for our personal lives we havent really changed much.  I’m playing hockey in an adult league still.  I got some new skates for xmas so I can’t wait for tomorrow to try them out.  Oh crap!  I need to get them sharpened…ugh, I’ll have to do that at lunch since everything is closed on Sunday (today).  The wife is still in school and this is her last year so once we are done with that we’ll get a nice little chunk of money back each month that won’t have to go towards tuition costs :)  We did do our usualy trip back home for xmas but this time spent it in New Bern seeing my brother’s family.  It was short but nice visit.  The weather was great, in the 70’s, and i got to eat some chic-fil-a.  Woot!  The driving was really long but again, we had nice weather so it didn’t drag on and on because of rain or snow.  I also got a fancy new laptop for xmas, which i’m writing this post with right now.  It’s my first laptop so I try to use it whenever I can.  Unfortunately, I think the battery is dying and I’m too lazy to go grab the plug so I think I’ll end this post now.  Once I get up, I’ll plug it in and write some more.  Which shouldn’t be long as we are supposed to go to Matt/Parke’s house today when their little guy wakes up.  See you soon! 

We finally made it down to NC to meet my nephew and also to take a small but well needed vacation.  Drew is an active little fella who really likes Elmo (as you can see in his choice of chairs).  He doesn’t say much at the moment but does understand a lot.  Ask him where the puppy is, or where his nose is, and he’ll point them out to you.  He also gives a cute wave goodbye and a mean high-five :)  While we were there, we went to the Outback for an early dinner which was nice.  Drew had some little hot dogs (have you noticed how baby food tends to smell and taste as bad as dog food, it’s amazing we grow up and still don’t like to eat vegetables considering brocolli tastes a billion times better than baby turkey food)  But Drew threw a little fit and tossed his sippy cup around a little and Mel had to lay some mommy smackdown on him.  Basically, just took him outside so his crying didn’t bother anyone.   After dinner, Jen and I had to make our way back to the hotel since we were about 2 hours away and I don’t like to drive in the dark there.  It gets really really dark and lots of wildlife likes to hang out on the highways. 

The other part of our trip was just having a small vacation.  We basically had three days in NC.  The first day we spent with Jen’s family.  Took a tour of the Battleship NC and got some dinner.  Jen went to the aquarium with them in the morning but I was too pooped out from the drive the previous day.  (Our 9 hour drive turned in 14 hours after tons of traffic in DC and a freak storm once we hit I-40)  The second day was spent at my brother’s visiting Drew and the third was spent on the beach.  I wish we had at least one more day even though I got sunburned on my feet pretty bad.