Bones (the TV Show)

A friend of mine told me about Bones and so I watched the first 3 seasons on DVD over the past few weeks. I really liked the show until I got to the last episode of Season 3, "The Pain in the Heart"

First, the whole opening with Booth's funeral and him faking his death to catch some bad guy we'd never seen before? I wanted to see more of what happened between the end of the last episode where he got shot and him "dying" - wouldn't Brennan have been with him at the hospital? How long was he in the hospital before he "died" - how bad was the actual gun shot? He seemed pretty well healed.

Then, with Zach turning out to be Gormagon's apprentice. That in and of itself didn't bother me too much, but what did bother me was, since Zach blew off his hands, who stole the silver skeleton? In a previous episode where Booth is chasing the person who initially came after the politician we see that person take the motorcycle helmet off and its a woman - not Zach and not the creepy guy the find / kill at the end. So what about her? And the whole way that episode ended with Zach "knowing" how to find the guy, etc. I found very hard to believe although I can understand they just wanted to wrap up that story line. However, another question I have is - why did Hodgins pump up Zachs pain meds when Zach was, in theory, about to reveal some clue? I know it was to make Hodgins look guilty at the time but since he wasn't the bad guy, why did Hodgins do it? Are they trying to set up that Hodgins was also the Gormagon's apprentice - he stole the skeleton and Zach was going to give him up? Is Zach covering for Hodgins who really is the apprentice?

I'm really torn about the show and whether I should continue watching it. Does the show recover from this episode? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Pandigital Novel - Revisited

I stopped at a Bed, Bath and Beyond near my office yesterday to check out the Pandigital Novel. It turns out they had it in stock and it was only $169 minus a $50 mail in rebate so I bought it. The device is pretty neat - although its smaller than I thought it would be, and a little bit heavy for its size. But overall, I like it (so far). Tonight I'm planning to follow the instructions to change the home screen so I can run other apps that I install on the device. What I really want to figure out how to do is install Android Market on the device so I can more easily download apps for it.At some point I may also try to "root" the device and put a clean install of Android 2.2 on it so I'll keep you posted as I do that.

Android Goodness

I finally got a new cell phone. The HTV EVO 4G from Sprint and I LOVE IT. I had been an AT&T customer since 2001 but they don't have any good Android phones available. I'm sure this is because of their relationship with Apple. AT&T most likely doesn't want to compete with itself / Apple by selling robust Android phones.

This phone is the coolest "toy" I've ever owned. Sure, it works as a phone, which is, I guess, why I bought it. But with the Android OS I can download various apps to occupy myself when I'm commuting to and from work (about 30 mins on the subway each way.) Right now I'm addicted to a crossword puzzle app.

I also learned that Pandigital finally released the Novel eReader and someone has hacked it to run a different "Welcome" screen so you can install all the apps from the Android market onto the device. I'm thinking about checking that out since its only $150. My crossword puzzle apple on a bigger screen would be great.

Inter-League Play

The second week of baseball's inter-league play is about to begin and I wanted to take some time to discuss the problems I have with it. Although I'm sure that many people enjoy the annual Mets/Yankees series and I understand, on some level, baseball's hope of driving up interest in the sports  through cross town rivalries where applicable,. However, by insisting that the Yanks and the Mets play every year, (or the Cubs and Whitesox, etc.) baseball is doing a disservice to both fans and teams.

I think the best approach to inter-league play would be to have it go on all year round - just schedule inter-league games as part of the regular schedule. Since there are an uneven number of teams in the NL vs the AL some teams play non inter-league games while everyone else is playing inter-league. Along with the change of when the games are scheduled, stop with some teams playing each other every year. Simplify the process by saying that in "year 1", the NL East plays the AL East, NL Central plays the AL Central and the NL West plays the AL West. In year 2 thigns rotate, NL E vs AL C,  NL C vs AL W, NL W vs AL E, year 3 the NL E plays NL W, NL C plays AL E and NL W plays AL C. That way, the "intercity" rivalries would only take place once every three years and that would give fans time to trash talk and build excitement and anticipation.

This configuration would also take away the inequity of certain teams always playing generally better teams (such as the Mets vs the Yanks).

Pandigital Novel - Color eReader.. FAIL

I first read about the Pandigital Novel a few weeks ago and was very excited about it as a potential "all in one" (minus the cell phone) device that I would be interested in. However, the product has so far been a big bust on multiple levels.

Pandigital inexplicably decided to sell the unit exclusively at Kohls for the first 30 days of the products release. Kohls?!? Isn't that a clothing store? Although it turns out that Kohls does offer electronics on their website, I am very much a touch and feel kind of guy who wants to experience the device before making a purchasing decision. I was originally told by Pandigital (via e-mail) that the release date for the device was Friday, June 4, 2010 so on Saturday the 5th I excitedly called the two Kohls that were within reasonable distance to my house to inquire about the availability of the device. The people with whom I spoke at both stores were utterly clueless -- they had no idea what I was talking about. In fact, one employee said to me "we don't really sell those kind of things." and so I thought, ok, perhaps that particular store doesn't have an electronics sections, so I asked the employee if they knew of another Kohls that did, in fact, sell electronics, to which, after a short pause, I recieved the reply "we don't really sell those kind of things." There is a Kohls about 20 miles from my house and so I convinced my wife to take a short drive with me to the store to check out if they had the device. Predictably, they didn't.

Earlier this week, as I continued to scour the web for information about the device I saw it appear and disappear from Kohls website. Originally it was listed at $259 even though all the press releases indicated the MSRP on the device was $199. Eventually it was listed on Kohls site for $179, however, with a message "This device is no longer available." JC Penny also had the device listed, at $249, but not available until 6/23/2010. Further daily research allowed me to learn that the device, having not even been made available, had been RECALLED due to a software glitch. I did find a firmware upgrade for the device available on Pandigital's website and apparently Pandigital has dispatched a crew of techs to their nearest Kohls to perform the software upgrade on the devices so they can be put back on the shelves. (Or perhaps, just put on the shelves to begin with.)

Anyway, all of this has strongly decreased my interest in this device as it appears to be of limited availability and it has issues from the get go. The only possible reason to purchase one right now would be to take advantage of a 30% discount offer that Kohls has along with the low price of $179 meaning I could get it for about $125 plus tax.

The Big Smoke, Foxwoods

I went to Foxwoods in Connecticut this weekend for the Big Smoke. I had a blast. The venue at Foxwoods was a huge ball room and there were nearly 30 cigar makers represented as well as at least another dozen (if not more) liquor vendors. They had every kind of cigar you could imagine and a variety of beverages -- vodka, whiskey, tequilla, rum and brandy. Needless to say, I drank too much but I didn't have to drive anywhere (thanks to my wife!) and so it was all good. There were probably about 800 people and the nice thing about a show like this is the built in camaraderie --  everyone there is a cigar smoker and so you now you have something to talk about while you are waiting online for a cigar or sitting at a table enjoying some food. And of course, on top of the common ground of cigars you usually find other things in common to talk about.

The show is a little pricey -- $240 -- but I came home with 24 cigars (including the 3 I smoked on that night) and those cigars are probably worth something between $100 - $120 and I drank a lot of the "free" liquor so I feel confident I enjoyed another $100 worth of alcohol.

As I smoke the cigars from the show I will post to the blog about the cigar and my thoughts on how it tasted, smoked, etc.

Late Thoughts on My Wedding

A friend of mine recently got married and I was speaking with her about her experience with her wedding and it prompted me to write this blog post.

When my wife and I first got engaged we originally thought we could pull off planning the wedding in about four months and then felt that was totally overwhelming and so we pushed it out a year from our original date so we had 16 months. That was much less stressful! Although I think the "perfect" amount of time would have been around 9 - 10 months.

We originally planned to invite about 50 people but that number slowly grew closer to 75. We ended up with about 70 people attending because the invite listed was tweaked and some people RSVP'ed "+1" even though we didn't invite them with a guest. Fortunately no one showed up with a guest (or multiple guests!) that we did not know about ahead of time. We also sent out "backup" invites to people we didn't originally invite but decided we could once we had a certain number of "No"s from our first set of invites.

On some level I wish we had invited fewer people - but I think in the end we wouldn't have gotten to spend any more time with our guests; the wedding was no stop movement from one thing to the next including a pass through the dining room to say hello to everyone.

Although we didn't have any issues with family fights, we did know there were people coming to the wedding whose point of views on life (politics, religion, etc.) wouldn't mesh and so we made sure to seat them as far away from each other as possible.

Finally, we knew going in we wouldn't be able to control everything on the big day and there were things that went wrong, like the programs arriving to the ceremony late and so everyone was sitting around wondering why we hadn't started. Or our dog being fixated on the horses and not wanting to walk down the isle! But all in all it was a great day and we had lots of fun both planning and participating in the wedding.