Archive for April 16th, 2006
Panasonic makes the best plasma tvs, bar none. There is no doubt in my mind about that. I had bought myself a Panasonic TH42PWD8UK plasma tv back in september of 2005. I timed it to coinicide with the start of the NFL season. Anyways; its a Panasonic 42inch Enhanced Definition (ED) plasma tv. These are different from a High Definition (HD) TV since they support 480p as opposed to the full 720p (and 1080p nowadays) of a HDTV. When I bought it; there was about a $800 difference between the comparable ED and HD tv by plasma. I went to the local circuit city and best buy to compare the two tvs side by side. Ofcourse the HD looked better, but not $800 better. Plus; majority of my viewing was going to be dvds (which are 480p); so ED was the best choice for me.
Anyways; I am getting off topic. This post is not about which tv to buy or how to buy a plasma; that will be covered next time. This post is just to share how happy I am with my Panasonic EDTV. I was taking a little break from working and decided to see the Lakers vs Suns NBA game. It was broadcasted in high definition by the local ABC channel. The picture quality was just so awesome. I can’t wait for the NBA playoffs to start now. I get TNT in HD from Dish Network. It is going to be an awesome playoffs in High Definition now. Go Lakers! I want them to get the #7 seed so they can knock off the suns. Boy, this post went all over the place didn’t it? Anyways, back to work so I can atleast enjoy the sunday evening of my weekend.
LOL, I just saw a google ad on this page that said: We will ship you a free Panasonic plasma if you complete our online survey. Man these google ads are good. Its funny how relevant these ads can get to the posts. Google rocks!
April 16th, 2006
As I mentioned in the last post; I decided to end the day with a movie. I chose to see Peter Jackson’s King Kong . I really enjoyed his Lord Of The Rings trilogy (who didn’t) and had high expectations for this movie. I had always wanted to see it in the movie theatres but just never got the chance. Oh well, watching it on my plasma TV wont be that bad. 
So it was already 10pm by the time I decided on a movie; and I almost wasn’t sure that I wanted to see King Kong due to its length. It is a little longer than 3 hours. But I figured that it would be a pretty entertaining movie so the time would just fly by. Boy was I wrong. The first hour put me to sleep. What the hell was that! How can we not have a Kong sighting in the first hour when the whole movie is about him. I did not need to know about every single crew member on that ship. I could have cared less about that. Just get to the fricking island already and lets see some Kong action. As it turns out, I did not know what I was asking for.
Once they got on that ‘god forsaken Skull Island’; I was waiting for them to get off. The next 30 minutes were all Kong; and I had had enough of it. The whole dinosaur ‘running for their life’ scene was so overdone. I mean I could only do so much of: ‘Oh WOW COOL COMPUTAR EFFECTZ!!!!!!’. By the way, how dumb were those big dinosaurs as they were pushing each other out of the way to run for their lives. I mean could they have not picked a better ‘escape route’? I thought OK, Peter Jackson wanted to show off his CGI skills and we have had enough dinosaurs for now. Boy was I wrong. Then came a, what felt like an hour long, fight scene between Kong and 2 big . Oh man that scene was enough! I promptly turned off the TV and decided to go to sleep enough.
So maybe this is not a object movie review since I have only seen about 1 .5 hours of the movie. I don’t know when, or if, I will see the second half. It was a huge disappointment. I still keep hoping that when Kong gets to America, the movie will get better. But if the first hour and half is any indication; it explains how the movie barely managed to make its ‘budget’ from the US box office. I hate to say it; but the movie felt like that ‘Godzilla’ movie that came out in 1998. You know the one where Godzilla attacks New York. I mean sure the CGI was better; but movie sucked. Maybe I will watch the second half sometime and then I can officially say that it sucked. But I do hope to be wrong.
April 16th, 2006
Its Sunday morning now and I am sitting next to the window looking at the nice rain outside. Mrs is making the tea and I can already smell it. Smells pretty darn good. This is one of my 2 daily cups of tea, the other one will happen this evening around 4-5pm. So I was just thinking about the blog and the direction it is going. For being ‘Navdeep’s blog’; it does not really contain any personal information about Navdeep at all. So I wanted to change that. Lets talk about what I did on Saturday (yesterday).
I got up around 9am, and the first thing I did was curse myself for getting up that late. I always try to get up early on weekends and then take a nap later on in the afternoon. I have realized that the later I wake up, the faster the weekend goes by. Pretty amazing revelation eh? Anyways: had my cup of tea, read the local newspaper (Sacramento bee) and watched some TV. It was about 11am now and I decided to do some work.
I had some work that was lagging behind. Without going into too much details; it had to do with dynamically loading Dll (shared libraries) and template classes in C++. I struggled with that for an couple of hours (11am-1pm) and decided to take a break. While having lunch, I decided to turn on the TV. This is where it gets embarrassing; I tuned it to MTV. No, thats not the embarrassing part. I watched 2 episodes of Super Sweet Sixteen . Its basically a show that follows around rich, spoiled kids who are turning 16 and ‘chronicles’ their life as they plan their turning 16 party. That show is addictive. Its not so much that I love the show, its the hatred I have for the people in the show. These kids are just so sheltered that its not even funny. For them, spending $200k of their parents money on this party is not a big deal at all. ugh!
Anyways, enough of that. I was back to doing some more work at 3pm. Did that until I basically gave myself an headache. This just wasn’t working. Then I took a nap from 4:30-6pm. It was so weird. Every time I would close my eyes; all I would see was C++ code. I don’t know how to explain it; but its like I could see the code before my eyes. It has happened in the past, but lets not dwell on that. I had a nice nap. Woke up refreshed and ready to tackle this work problem. Worked for about 2 hours and I had it 90% working. What is 90% working you may ask? Well, all the code is there and it looks right. The only problem is that I was having some problems exporting DLLs under Visual Studio so I decided to wait until Monday and talk to an expert at work.
I had some dinner then and decided to unwind a frustrating day with a movie. Thats a whole another post in itself. Anyways; lets see how many visitors I lose due to this post.
April 16th, 2006