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.

Flirting with Ubutnu

Jeromey Balderrama

Given some of the recent commotion about Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage, and my ever-growing curiosity, I decided to dabble in the world of Linux using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of the operating system.

When I got my new desktop a few months back, I played with a Windows Vista beta by partitioning my hard drive into 2 equal partitions: one booting into Windows XP, one booting into Vista.  I figured I’d send the OS’ head-to-head, the winner gets the other’s partition.  Not even one day later, I was blowing the Vista partition away, as it wasn’t working with my critical hardware (the music hard drive is really important to me!).  Granted it is unfair to compare a production OS to a beta, but the early adopter in me wanted to toy with it.

Side note: This wasn’t the last time I got bit by Vista.  Two weeks ago I tried installing the latest public beta on my laptop.  It wasn’t even 4 hours later when I ditched that attempt – due to Vista not being able to access the network/Internet (both wired and wireless!).  I ended up having to rebuild my laptop, which was a painful blessing.

Realizing that I’m done with Vista for anytime soon, I still have the curiosity bug that needed attention.  I decided to let curiosity get the better of me and use my old Vista partition for Ubuntu.  24 hours later, I have been mostly pleased with my experience. The installation went off without any issues.  I followed some great video instructions on how to dual boot a machine with Win XP & Ubuntu, and  that’s been working great.

The process hasn’t been painless, and I’ve run into a few snags.  I went to bed Wednesday night without being able to enable my dual monitors.  I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out how to mount my music drive into Linux.  That said, the problems have more to do with my (lack of) understanding in Linux, rather than the OS itself.  I would consider myself an intermediate to expert Windows user, and with the trouble I went through with Vista had everything to do with the OS limitations.  It’s probably not fair to compare a production-level Linux OS with a beta Windows OS, but for the curiosity’s sake, I’d definitely recommend Ubuntu.

Some web sites that helped my in my Ubuntu quest thus far:

“Evil” eBay, anyone?

Jeromey Balderrama

It looks like eBay may be the lastest company that should have an "Evil" branding right on their butts! Last week Google released their competitor to PayPal, called Google Checkout. As of this morning, eBay is now banning sellers from requesting payment through Google Checkout. The online auction giant updated its Safe Payments policy this week to add Google’s new payment service, Google Checkout to its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay.

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Where the heck have I been?

Jeromey Balderrama

Well, it’s definitely been a while since I’ve found time to blog.  I’m sorry for that. There has been so much going on, and I’ve had every intention on giving updates as to my whereabouts.  Unfortunately my lack of computer/internet use preventing me from doing so.  Before Wednesday (and not counting work on Friday) I’ve probably spent a grand total of an hour in front of the computer.  I’ve enjoyed my break and time away, but I’m anxious to get back in the saddle and find some kind of routine again.
In my time away, I celebrated my 25th birthday with a BBQ and Poker tournament with great friends. It was great to see friends I haven’t seen in a while, as well as eat, drink and be merry.  Last year the party lasted until 6am.  This year we did a little better with most people going home around 1.
I had a great 4th, going up to Red Rocks with friends and family to see the Blues Traveler concert.  This is the first July 4th I’ve spent away from Loveland for as long as I can remember.  It was a great celebration, although I was disappointed with the (lack of) fireworks at the show.  We saw fireworks there, but they seemed at a bad angle and far away, leading us to believe that it was a neighboring city’s fireworks.  However, as the night grew later, we were convinced we weren’t going to see any close Red Rock fireworks.  Still, any day spent at Red Rocks is a good day.  I have pictures from the concert, and I’ll get them on Flickr in the next day or so.