Month: July 2006

12 on the 12th for July!

Jeromey Balderrama

Well, it’s definitely been a long day, but also pretty uneventful as well.  Here is my day captured in 12 pictures!  As always, you can view these on Flickr as well!

This morning I had an early teleconference (at 7:30am), so I was sleeping right up to the minute I had to join. I didn’t want to get up…

Bright & chipper on my early-morning phone conference. I’ll eventually make it into the office.

I went out to lunch with a few members from my department. This is us walking out of Red Robin – mmm Freckled Lemonade!

I’m ready to go home! This is the view right before I get in my car to leave.

Making the drive home (along Harmony & Lemay in Fort Collins)

I dropped off my movie rentals on the way home…

For dinner we were making salmon! I came home and prepared the herbs & seasonings before my next phone conference (this time a 5:30pm)

Bethany’s over now and we’re finishing our cooking. I’m having too much fun making salad.

After dinner we played some video games. Bethany was beating me pretty badly and I was starting to get frustrated.

I did win a few rounds, but Bethany eventually kicked my butt. This was me before my defeat…

Because it was too dark to bike, I took Bethany home. On the way back my car hit 50,000 miles. This is a horrible picture from my camera phone, but if you look closely you’ll see that my car is at 49,999.9 miles!

I get home and continue to work. Things are really busy right now. I’m trying to figure out a solution to a bug in our application.

Also be sure to check out my friend Matt’s 12 on 12, and my girlfriend Bethany, did a 12 on 12 too!  I hope you enjoyed it, and I look forward to new month’s 12 on the 12th!

Pandora – A box you really want to open!

Jeromey Balderrama

Bethany directed me to an awesome music web site – Pandora! I vaguely heard about this a few weeks back, but it wasn’t until I actually visited tonight when I was blown away! This is an amazing web site, especially if you’ve grown tired of your music collection or simply would like a new playlist. You go in and type the name of a band (or a song), and it’ll evaluate the song for specific attributes like "pop rock qualities", "subtle use of vocal harmony", "major key tonality" – as well as many other attributes. Then here’s the cool part: it’ll then go through and find artists/songs that share similar attributes, then basically create a radio station for you to listen to.

I was really blown away by the complexity of this service, but it’s really worked great!

For example, I typed in my favorite band, Dave Matthews Band. Then here’s what I got: "In My Life" by Ron Dibuccio, "I Believe in Ghosts" – John Raiston, "Chocolate" – Snow Patrol, "Mr. Rebound" by Richard Thompson.

I particularly enjoyed it when I typed in Michael Franti & Spearhead: The Roots – "Guns Are Drawn", Kanye West – "Hey Mama", Talib Kweli – "The Beautiful Struggle", Notorious BIG – "Nasty Girl", Nas – "No One Else in The Room".

The only bad part about this site is that it’ll get really addictive and you realize just how much time you spent listening to music. Freakin awesome though 🙂

July’s “12th” coming Wednesday – get your cameras ready!

Jeromey Balderrama

The 12th is quickly approaching and with it another opportunity to share your day in pictures!  The concept is simple: Throughout the 12th of the month, take your camera with you and snap 12 pictures during the day.  At the end of the day, take the pictures and post them onto your Flickr account, blog, MySpace or web site! The hope is that you’ll give others a glimpse of your typical day through the pictures you take.

Please consider taking part and sharing your pictures!  Getting a Flickr! account is free, and probably the easiest way to  do this.  When you’ve posted your pictures, here are a few places you could share the link:

  • The Daily Breakfast podcast forum
  • A 12 on the 12th Flickr group
  • Make a Bulletin posting on MySpace for your friends to see!

To get an idea of how it works, check out my 12 on the 12th for June, May & April. I hope to see your pictures on Wednesday the 12th!

Was “Pirates” disappointing? Y’AARRR :-(

Jeromey Balderrama

Friday night a few friends and I went to go see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie at the drive-in. Out of all of the movies out so far, this was definitely the one for which I was most excited. I was looking forward to X-men III and Superman Returns, but Pirates was the movie I was anticipating for weeks. Unfortunately the hype turned out to be bigger than the actual movie, and I left disappointed.

First off, don’t take my word for it – check out this review by AskANinja. This video is freakin’ hilarious, especially if you’ve seen the movie. Of course, you have to take his word with a grain of salt, as there is the big Ninja vs. Pirates feud. However, many of the points that he brought up were true:

There are far too many plot-lines in this movie. The ninja’s not joking when he says that the dog, ship, ocean and body parts all have plots – and none of them get resolved! The story was extremely complicated, and without giving away too much information – the movie ended with absolutely nothing happening. At the end of the movie, I felt like I just paid money to watch a 2-hour preview of the third Pirates movie. The Ninja was right that everyone was pretty much a pirate in this movie. Elizabeth especially bugged me, because she basically got mad pirate skills overnight.

Johnny Depp gave a pretty decent performance, but it had nowhere near the impact that his character had in the first movie. I firmly believe that Depp’s portrayal of Jack Sparrow single-handedly made the first movie a classic (I thought he should have taken the Oscar for Best Actor that year). Unfortunately he raised the bar so high that there was no way to meet our expectations in Dead Man’s Chest. I think that Depp was a victim of his own success – but he didn’t drag the movie down by any means as well.

The movie just seemed over the top. They took what were potentially very cool scenes and blew them completely out of proportion. The 3-person sword fight was pretty cool – the first 10 minutes. As soon as they got the wheel involved and took another 15, you knew things were out of control.

I’m anxious to see the next Pirates movie, but this movie didn’t leave me dying to see it. The problem was that they took what was supposed to be a one-shot deal in Curse of the Black Pearl and made this "the trilogy that never should have been". Comparing this to other trilogies (Star Wars and the Matrix come to mind), I have nowhere near the desire to see the final movie. I feel like I’m going to go see the third one so I won’t be so pissed about the second one anymore.