2005. Okay. Here we go again. Anyway, holidays went well. Flew out to LA at our scheduled time on Christmas Eve, just in time for Midnight Mass at the LA Cathedral, which is always good because of the Plenary Indulgence granted by the cardinal. Sweet. Some snacking and present opening, then sleep before heading out to Vegas on Christmas Day. Carl's Jr. was the only restaurant open that we found along the way, so that was the Christmas breakfast. They didn't even have breakfast foods. Anyway, stayed at the Venetian, fabulous suites, split level, 2 TV's, pull out sofa bed, enormous bathroom with 2 sinks, marble all around, giant tub. Oh, before that got to spend some time with the extended Basa's, my brother's in-laws, which was cool. Al's nephews, Ben, Sebby, and Thomas were all little bundles of fun and excitement, especially Sebby's Hot Wheels. But did a little gambling, ate some dim sum at Jasmine again, great stuff. Akira came out Wednesday, and we tagged along with my family for the next 40 or so hours he was here. Also made it out to see the Welshes, since Sarah was in town, and Akira wanted to see Cash. That's a big family. Learned how to play craps, did well thanks to rolls by Al and Nicole. Managed to get a peek at the new Forum Shops at Ceasar's Palace, very nice. Also got a peek at the Sony Style store there, and the Qualia section. Wow. That projector, the 004? Drop dead amazing. Absolutely amazing. They were using a Blu-Ray HD source for it too. Wish I could have spent a little more time there. Travel back was easy, no problems. New Year's at the Russell's. Good times. Made Potatoes Deluxe and some stuffed Chicken breasts for the potluck. And now it's the new year. Huh, 2005? Bring it on.

So I guess I started mine early, swimming and all. But I'm gonna take it to the next level. Nice and cliched. I was surprised at the relatively lack of resoluters at the gym this morning. I was expecting it to be packed. Made it out to pickup yesterday. Not so good. I'm much slower than I used to be, which is a sad realization. Kind of takes away my game. Otherwise, lots of napping. Watched What Women Want and Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Eating a lot of empanadas from Valerio's bakery in LA. Best ones I've ever had. New Veronica Mars, Lost, and Alias returns this week. But since the Roku HD1000 had a new firmware beta out, I can get rid of the 2GB or smaller chunks of the TV shows that used to be required. It frees up some space, but might not be enough. We'll see. And to think I'm trying to save money.

Watched The Family Man last night, when I should have been sleeping. But that and What Women Want, those two are associated for me, I think because I saw them both, on the plane to Paganello one year. Crazy, you know. I noticed this morning that in my cowlick I have 3-4 gray hairs. Weird place for them. And another strange thing, the streetlights were out between Broadway and Lake Shore on Addison. Definitely looked a bit strange. I actually did some grocery shopping, and I actually plan on making myself dinner tonight, easy, Italian chicken tenders. Simple, but good. Just need to pick up some tomato sauce. Oh, and I also picked up some swimmer's shampoo, Ultraswim, which works pretty well. I think I'd like to try the conditioner as well.

Tired. Working out a lot. More than before. Swim in the morning, abs and push-ups and a run at night. It's way more than I'm used to. But it's good. I think. We'll see. I've stopped carrying a backpack to and from work. No need, since I come and go straight from home. That also means I've stopped reading on the el. Mostly staring out the window. Good down time. I've got a kitchen sink and a shower drain that aren't draining very well. Beautiful Girls is such a good movie. It's starting to be very applicable right now as well, as I'm either approaching or at the age of the characters in the movie. Sweet. Still don't have a Christopher to my Pooh though. But it still is a brotherhood, no doubt about that. The Consumer Electronics Show starts up in Vegas. Macworld next week. LA Auto Show also started up. Lots of new stuff coming out right now. Good for a technophile like myself.

Snow. Lots of it. Looks like good packing snow, good for a snowball fight, except I haven't touched any yet. Wasn't snowing when I went to the gym this morning, but snowing when I went to work. Odd feeling, like it was two completely different days. I don't think it was. Watched Buying the Cow last night. I keep forgetting why I got it, but watching it I'm reminded. Yet another sappy romantic comedy, but with Ryan Reynolds too. Managed to do some laundry last night, much needed. Really think I'm just about to hit the wall with my conditioning. Well, either that or the lack of sleep.

I so can't wait to sleep in tomorrow. And by sleep in I mean sometime later than 6am. Oh, can't wait. Put up some more Holiday pictures, didn't take too many over the actual Christmas and New Year's events though. Watched Eurotrip last night. I probably should get Roadtrip, someday maybe. I have a hankering to watch On the Line, so I'll probably pop that in tonight. No big plans for the weekends, just poker on Sunday. Parents might be coming out to the city. Just looking forward to sleeping mostly.

Thanks to those who let me know that this website was having issues. Next time, shoot me an email, and I'll get to it sooner than I did. Basically, something's wrong with the musings table. It's in the older ISAM format, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. But it's still got some issues. At least I'm catching the error now. If I end up losing it, it's got about 1 1/2 years worth of sporadic musings. Not too bad, but still pretty annoying. Definitely means I should craft some sort of remote DB backup script or something. Otherwise, Friday night was nice and quiet. Finished up my workout, watched On the Line, got to sleep. Watched Return to Me on Saturday, lounged about, cleaned up since my parents came in to town. Had a nice turkey dinner with them, and called it an early night after catching Rookie of the Year on Fox Family. Lots of Chicago filmed movies recently. Sunday, more lounging, and friends came over for early poker. Good times. I don't seem to be getting better conditioned with swimming yet, so that's a little disappointing. Macworld starts tomorrow, and the rumormill keeps churning away. Should have something exciting, I'll try and get updated via IRC, but we'll see.

Quite tamer than you'd expect. Another window open with IRC at macrumors, awaiting the MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs. It's gotten so big, I heard something about it on CBS Channel 2 last night. That's kind of crazy, I think anyway. But should know soon enough. Slacked off last night, didn't go running, didn't work out, just sat around, watched TV, cooked 3 lbs. of Sesame Chicken and watched Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Kinda hits a little close to home, you know? At least in some strike zones. I think I'll try and sneak a viewing in of Swingers before heading out to LA this weekend. Didn't go swimming this morning either, just go running tonight, I think.

So, my reaction? Pretty much everything as leaked. The only thing I was hoping for, and this was right away, when Jobs said something about it being an HD presentation, there was a rumor last year I think of Apple working on a HD projector. But nothing came of it. And then I got excited again when Jobs got the Sony guy up there, thinking maybe a joint project with a Sony-Apple HD something, but no luck there either. Maybe next time. So in order, Tiger, blah blah, sounds good. Final Cut Express HD? Sounds nice. iLife '05? Good stuff. iMovie supports HD. iPhoto adds RAW support, should make some people happy. Garage Band, no idea, doesn't interest me. iTunes, same old same old. iWorks? Looks good, Pages looks sweet. Probably going to be some sweet integration with .Mac. MacMini? Wow. Cheap and tiny. I don't think it'd be good for a Home Theater Mac though, vid card and processor not up to speed, I think. Also, just a G4. But I've got a spare monitor, so it'd be really easy, except that I have no need for one. iPod? Factory interfaces from Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo...? Also from Ferrari and Alfa Romeo? Wow. Talk about an emerging standard. Talk about an emerging standard on the high end. And the shuffle? I don't get it. I do remember paying through the nose for an old Nomad II MG with 512MB, which I could now replace with $99 iPod Shuffle. That's crazy, and about 3 years removed. Overall? Apple's swinging low, consumer show and all that. Cheap cheap cheap. Guess I'll have to wait for the pricey stuff later. Also, macrumors IRC was solid. Macnn went down for a little bit, engadget went down, macrumors went down, but Gizmodo stayed up for the duration. Overall, not too shabby. On the list, at least iLife and maybe iWork.

Completely skipped out on working out yesterday, no swimming in the morning, no running at night. Instead, went to dinner at Darwin's with Sally and Bryan and KK and then played Ticket to Ride. Fun game, but as usual, my attitude was less than stellar. I'd like to think it's my non-competitive nature, but I went small ball in tactics, which didn't pay out at all. Next time, and I'm sure there will be a next time, there's other playing styles I'd be willing to try out. I did go swimming this morning though. There's this one swimmer who I see occasionally in the mornings, maybe every Wednesday, but she looks like she was/is a synchronized swimmer. That's just pretty cool. Try and go running tonight, do laundry tomorrow night. I did order up iLife '05 last night. I also had to Autotune the eyeTV again last night, since ABC-WLS did something with their OTA HD signal since the last Wednesday.

Didn't go running last night either. Slacking, big time. Well, that and there was a flood warning, and my legs hurt for some reason, which probably means I'll stop running and just swim from here on out, and I was really tired. But who wants to read about me whining? Right, moving on. Watched Swingers last night instead. I might have to get the version with the anamorphic transfer, cause the one I have just doesn't cut it. Got my additional Airport Express properly set up as a Wireless Distribution System (WDS) Remote Base, which means no ethernet cable to stream music to it for future poker games. Good thing. I did do my handstand pushups and some inverted situps, good stuff too. Don't think I have to do laundry tonight, I can get by with what I've got for L.A., that's right, headed to L.A. tomorrow for Lei-Out. Should be fun. 60's and Sunny. Good to get away from this crazy weather, that's for sure. Taking the redeye back in Monday morning.

"All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go...". Beach tourneys are great, packing light it easy. I'm also, get ready for it, not bringing a single piece of Underarmour outerwear. I'm going old school with cotton t-shirts and board shorts. I spent too much time trying to setup a Lei-out 2005 playlist in iTunes instead of say, sleeping. Just have to try and get a rental Taurus with a tape deck instead of a CD Player. I did manage to catch Tilt. And I'm hooked. It's like any other hour long scripted drama, but set in the poker world in Vegas. So much Vegas recently. But I find the snippets of backstory intriguing, like Lost, and Vegas is Vegas. So I'll be watching every week. Now I only wish RCN would get around to HDTV so I can get ESPN HD to watch a poker drama in high definition, you know, to see the grain on the cards, or something.

And tired. Lei-out was fun, once again, great group of people to play with. I was reminded of what is good about ultimate again. So maybe I did just need a break. So I guess I'm out of retirement, but just for beach tourneys. The team I played on, Naughty by Nurture, did alright, 3-1 on the first day, lost first game, won second game, lost third game on Sunday, which I think puts us somewhere between 17-24th place. Got to see some San Fran players I'd played with last summer. So besides having a good time, had some good food, Korean BBQ Saturday night and In-and-Out Sunday afternoon. Tired and sore now. Good sore. Feels good to be sore. And the Chicago/Jam team represented, winning it all, which gives them a free entry to Chicago's very own Sandblast beach tourney this summer. Nice. Remind me to never fly a red-eye again; I arrived this morning early enough to take a nap before work, but still, I should have just taken a vacation day. Also, GPS nav systems in rental cars? Genius. Absolute Genius. Got some Merrell Primos in black before heading out to pull double duty as beach shoes and everywhere else shoes. Working out well. Otherwise, not much else on the calendar for this week.

Plenty of sleep last night. And slept in this morning, well, to 7:30am. Probably start swimming again tomorrow. Maybe go for a run tonight. I'm thinking laundry on Thursday. Given my current obsession with Vegas, I'm adding Las Vegas to my HD recording set. And look into getting the first season on DVD. Except for that whole cutting back on DVD purchases. Veronica Mars pilot on tonight. Hopefully they'll show the first 6 or so episodes so I can grab them in HD. This is definitely cheaper and quicker than waiting for and buying DVD season sets. And it looks better. Now if only I could get ESPN HD. As the cold Chicago winter finally settled in, so did the static electricity. Might be time to bring out the humidifiers to take care of that.

Got some great news yesterday, a letter arrived in the mail from RCN saying that by February 2005, next month, my building gets HDTV, I'm guessing at least broadcast in QUAM. Which means, I'll finally get to see CBS HD, possibly get ESPN HD, and won't have to deal with antennas anymore. Also means I'll probably finally step up and get a digital set top box from RCN, so I'll be able to watch HD real time, instead of recording and watching it later. Very good things. Awesome things. Been waiting for a year or two on this one. I'm also working on getting more drive space, but not quite there yet. I've decided to switch to Firefox on Mac OS X, to make my browsing experience the same cross platform. It also helps that I've started to use del.icio.us for my bookmarks and found Foxylicious, a nifty firefox extension that integrates del.icio.us into the bookmarks menu of firefox. So tech stuff definitely coming together.

So, for some reason tonight my EyeTV 500 didn't tune in ABC correctly, and I missed recording tonight's Lost and Alias. RCN HDTV can't come soon enough. I had to retune the EyeTV to get the stations to come back in. Ugh. Don't know when I'll be able to get the missing episodes back. Don't know if I'll ever be able to get them back. Slightly upsetting. But since I haven't tried watching them yet, it's alright. As long as I snag them sometime. Went for a catchup dinner with AJ at Mas. Good food, well, a little pricey for the serving size, but still pretty good. Dessert was excellent though. On a relatively unrelated note, I've stopped combing my hair, just relying on my hands and a hat to keep it in place. Seems to work alright. Probably helps that I haven't gone swimming in almost a week. Yeah, skipped out on running last night, no swimming this morning, and no running tonight. Slacking. I'll chalk it up to recovering from the weekend.

Probably my fastest commute ever this morning. Out the door, got on the 152 Addison bus. Immediately at the Addison Red Line stop hopped on the Red Line going to Howard. Stepped out at Howard over to the Purple Line to Linden. And off at Davis. I think it might have been my first time that's happened. Definitely have to do some laundry tonight. Other World Computing rocks, and I think I've mentioned it before, but it's awesome. Decent prices, and better yet, it's based in my hometown, and it's owned by one of my brother's classmates from high school. But ordered some stuff Tuesday night, and it arrived this morning. And my iLife '05 shipped. So I guess that means my life should arrive soon enough. New episode of Tilt on tonight. Definitely felt on edge all day. Like too much caffeine or sugar. Hyper even. Not sure why. Might have been the Dunkin' Donuts I had for breakfast, but I think I felt like this on the commute. Interesting.

Headed to the Dells this weekend. Great Wolf Lodge with indoor waterpark. Should be fun. I'm helping Mina move in Madison on Sunday, so probably won't be rolling home till late on Sunday. Another weekend away from home. Didn't get a chance to watch Tilt last night. I did get to see a bartending competition on the Food Channel. That was pretty cool. Of course, made me interested in drink making again. Managed to get the episodes of Lost and Alias that I had missed over BitTorrent. Too bad they don't have torrents for HD transport streams. I'd grab those in a heartbeat. And I'm still really looking forward to finally getting HDTV over RCN. Can't wait. I might even have to go for any and all available HD Channels, including premium ones. Have to make sure I get a set top box with Firewire so I can record them too. Wow, can't wait. Makes me giddy.

Wonderful weekend in the Dells. The Great Wolf Lodge rocks! Drove up Friday night with Bjorn. That big snow storm? Drove right through it. Good times. Got excited when I could see pavement and/or hash marks on the road. Love driving down 2 lane divided highways as if it was only 1 lane. Also, love Puck, my Subaru. Stopped at the A&W on the way up. Took a slight detour and picked up Mina. Rolled into the the Lodge at around 11pm. Drank some beers, played some Ticket to Ride. Strategy of grabbing as many 6 train routes before trying to establish destinations took me to 2nd place. Water park's great. The Howling Tornado is sweet. The giant bucket? Nice. Taking over the kiddie pool to play 4 on 4 water basketball rocked. Arcade's also fun. Ryan and Lisa? Great DDR'ers. Mina? Monster on the token-ledge game to spit out tickets. Dinner at Marley's, playing the movie connections game, Bjorn comes out the winner. Some Catchphrase with the Boys just dominating. More water park action. More sleeping on the floor. 13 crammed into an 8 person room. Good times. And moving Mina on Sunday was easy. 2 hours, tops, including driving times. Watching a Pats game with Akira is an experience everyone should have. And the drive back from Madison took 2:20, door to door, including dropping Akira off and getting gas. So that was a good weekend. On tap for this week? Nothing. Sweet.

Access to the home box seems to be down, so email could be sporadic today. Haven't been to the gym in more than a week, I'd say. Installed the new iLife instead. iPhoto '05 is pretty sweet. Photos from the weekend are coming. Another random note, I've started using honey instead of sugar in my morning tea. Las Vegas is such a good show, combining Vegas with spy stuff? Genius. I think I'm going to stripe my internal hard drives on my desktop to get more space. I was going to wait until Tiger, but hey, might as well do it now. Might do a complete reformat and reinstall to get a clean slate. My version of spring cleaning, even though it's January. Going to see Elektra and Assault on Precinct 13 tonight in a double header at the ghettoplex on cheap movie night. Oh, and I've moved back to using a manbag. Too many things in the pockets.

Yesterday's email sporadiciousness was from my flakey cable modem. It's got issue with the power input the the ethernet cable. Hopefully I'll upgrade when I get digital cable and HDTV. And also hopefully that's the only problem. But we'll see. Otherwise, movies were good last night, entertaining at least. Went swimming this morning, all freestyle. Walked to Belmont to get on the Purple Line instead of my usual Addison Red Line. Didn't save me any time, ended up seeing some regulars at Howard even. Working on trying to get my internal drives striped on my desktop. Might have to jump through a couple hoops to make it work. Otherwise, gonna try and go running tonight, try and get back into the whole sound body sound mind deal.

So I guess I should have done some reading before trying to stripe my internal drives. I guess it's a) not doable without a G5 and b) not advisable because they're on the same channel (which I could change by switching the DVD-R with one of the drives). But I'll try again later. Just takes so long to move stuff around. But I ended up using the Powerbook as a firewire target startup disk to use Carbon Copy Cloner. I did make a Boot CD but couldn't run CCC, I probably could have used ditto or something, but didn't feel like it. Too late. Went running last night. Also watched probably the best new movie I've seen in a long time, Napoleon Dynamite. That movie rocks. It's awesome. Totally cool. I had to see it finally after seeing this over at defamer.

So I now have striped internal drives with more space as my startup disk for my desktop. That's exciting. I think it was repairing permissions using a copy of OS X with the most recent security update applied, which wasn't applied to the internal drives. Anyway, my external firewire 800 enclosure wasn't being recognized last night, and at one point, could have been initialized by me. But it worked this morning. Which is good. But I almost had a good enough reason to try and get a G5. Oh well, just keep plugging along. Didn't do any exercising last night, too tired and lazy. Also made the choice to get my computer back up and running vs. just plain running. Started watching Maverick last night. Jodie Foster is just awesome. John Wesley Harding's playing at Shuba's tomorrow night. I might go, maybe. Otherwise, a nice quiet weekend at home.

A Saturday, err, Sunday post. Odd. I was supposed to go to a surprise dinner party for my parents Friday night, but that fell through, so I got to stay in, finish up Maverick, and get to bed. Today I cleaned up a bit, well, put things away anyway. Watched some more movies, 10 Things I Hate About You since last weekend Akira was talking about Kay Hanley and Letters to Cleo. Then I watched You Got Served just cause I wanted to. Then Josie and the Pussycats, and finished up with Reign of Fire. I'm also doing some work for Tony's work blog, and also trying to get some episodes of Lost on DVD for Tun. I found out how much faster optimized firefox builds are for a G4 and the wonder of wonders that is TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software. It's a great free text editor. I've also gone back to using Mail.app on the desktop, especially after I found out how to sync IMAP folders. So, a fairly productive day, even without going to the John Wesley Harding concert. Just wasn't in the mood for that one.

It was like my own personal Sundance yesterday. Scotland, PA followed later by Garden State. Garden State's such a good movie. Slice of Americana. Like Beautiful Girls. And Natalie Portman is amazing in it. So cute. Finished up working on Tony's work blog, I went old school with tables vs. new school with css positioning. Makes more sense to me at least. Couldn't get Tun's episodes of Lost correctly transcoded for DVD burning. I'm still working on that. Swimming in the morning still hasn't gotten any easier yet. I'm tempted to try a stairmaster this evening. I'm planning on a viewing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but we'll see if my horoscope(s) come true, which will change my plans.