Ryan’s Ramblin’

Ok, it’s been a little while since my last post about books… Just over 2 weeks, in fact! And in that time, I’ve read a couple.

First up was, as I mentioned in my last post, We Need To Talk About Kevin. A fantastically gripping book. However, I hated every single person in it. The main character/narrator was a pretentious 80’s boomer, constantly droning on and on. Her husband, just as bad. Her son, well let’s just say that they definitely needed to have a talk about him. It’s definitely a book worth reading, if you can get past the fact that just about everyone in it is unlikeable in some way. It’s a testament to Shriver’s writing ability that I could still not put the book down. Wow.

Next up was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. A fantastic book that starts with the author being dropped off in rehab, and finishes with him stepping out the door a cured man. Incredibly fast paced, the book gets a grip on you and never lets go. One scene where he is trying to calm his Fury, I had to skip a paragraph or 2, because it was just too graphic, but all in all an absolutely phenomenal book. Sad and touching and addictive.

Hrmm, it would appear that I’ve only read 2 books in the last 2 weeks. Odd. I thought I had read more. Well, I’m almost done reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter, which is just AWESOME. I found it, actually, via What Should I Read Next, an astounding little site that will give you tons of great suggestions for books to read if you give it just a few books that you’ve read previously.

Sorry for the sparse posting lately. I tend to have the problem where I know I want to blog about something in particular, and if that thing ends up being big, then it blocks all other blogging.

Having said that, here’s what’s been blocking me this week: London baby! Liz and I headed off to London for a 3 day weekend last weekend, and had a BLAST. The pictures are here, but I’ll break the trip down into days, in order to make it a bit easier on myself:

Friday:
Liz and I were flying out at 9:50, meaning that we had to aim to get to the airport around 7:50. Which meant leaving the house at 7:00. AM. Ooog. Traffic was pretty nasty, due to it being rainy (you’d think that people in Ireland would know how to drive in the rain. It’s the default weather for this country, dammit! Any way, arrived at the long term parking lot sometime around 8:15. No worries, Aer Lingus has a lovely self-check-in system that worked like a charm. Pretty uneventful flight, a bit bumpy on landing cuz it was quite windy out, but otherwise no worries. Hopped on the tube, and made our way to the Kensington Close Hotel, where we would be staying for the weekend. A GORGEOUS hotel, so close to the High Street Kensington stop, I would definitely stay there again. The room was miniscule by North American standards, but realistically we didn’t need anything more than a bed and a bathroom. From there it was onto the tube again for a trip to the Big Bus, to pick up our tickets. We hopped on the bus, took the red route all around London. This bus tour is a FANTASTIC value. You get a great tour, see TONS of London, and it was a GREAT value. After that, we headed back to the hotel cuz Liz had to get ready for the Backstreet Boys concert. That’s right, we went to London to see the Backstreet Boys, big whoop, wanna fight about it? The concert was in Wembley - and incidentally, I had no idea that Wembley was THE GHETTO. What the hell?!? I have to admit that I didn’t *hate* it. I didn’t *love* it either, but some of the songs were at least enjoyable. I could have done without the 3 teenaged girls behind me who screeched at jet-plane-volume levels every time AJ came up on the screen. Jesus. From there we made our way home, and pretty much passed out. Oh, and Liz absolutely LOVED the concert.

Saturday:
Sleep, wonderful sleep! Liz and I slept in till about 9:30. Not as late as I would have liked, but we wanted to have breakfast before we went to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. We went up to Notting Hill to get breakfast, but had NO IDEA where we were so we ended up going to a bagel place for breakfast and hopped back on the tube. Got off at Victoria Station and watched most of the changing of the guard, then got bored. Walked down to St James’ tube station, hopped on the train over to the Tower of London. I had no idea that the “Tower” is really more of a fort/palace. How about that. (Other things I thought I knew about London that are wrong: The big fancy drawbridge in London is Tower Bridge, not London Bridge; Big Ben is just the name of the bell in the Parliament Clock Tower). Toured around the Tower, saw the Crown Jewels (pretty impressive, if a bit repetitive), saw some giant ass ravens, and left. Next up was our cruise on the Thames, which was included free with our Big Bus ticket. However, nobody even checked our tickets as we went onto the boat, so realistically we probably could have done it for free. This was probably my favourite part of the trip - the guide was HILARIOUS. And they’re not actually paid as tour guides, they’re just crew on the boat who do guide duty because the tour company is too cheap to hire real guides. So I tipped him a pound because he cracked me up. From there we did a fair bit of wandering… From the Parliament buildings up to Trafalgar Square, up through Leicester Square to Soho and Chinatown, across to Oxford Circus, down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus. We checked out Lillywhites in Piccadilly Circus, cuz they had a HUGE sale going on, but couldn’t find anything. Then we took the tube over to Covent Garden, where we had dinner at the Covent Garden Grill. Lovely dinner, SO yummy. From there we took a bit of a walk over to Leicester (pronounced “Lester”, incidentally, just like Gloucester is pronounced “Gloster”) Square and had a hot chocolate, then hit the tube again to head to the London Eye. London is GORGEOUS at night, especially St Paul’s Cathedral and Parliament. Didn’t get any really decent pictures though, because the Eye is constantly moving, and it’s enclosed in glass, so if you want a good picture you have to turn off your flash, which then requires a long shutter speed, which results in blurry blurry because you’re moving. Oh well, I have pictures in my BRAIN. Then we went home, and passed out early again.

Sunday:
Sleeep! Got to sleep in finally, and didn’t really accomplish much. Had a lovely breakfast at the Muffin Man near the hotel, which was YUMMY. Then walked through the Kensington Palace Gardens and Hyde Park to the tube, because we had to catch our flight at 3:50. Only, it turns out, the tube was all buggered along the District line, so we ended up having to take a seriously roundabout route to get to Paddington station, and there we caught the express train to the airport (normally like 16 pounds, but because there was some issue with the tube we could use a 6 pound daily travelcard… yay!). Flew home on another uneventful flight (incidentally, from now on I am always flying emergency door row if I can. The LEG room! Wow!), bus to the car, and drove Liz into town (she was going to the DUBLIN Backstreet Boys concert). Drove home and veged out for a couple hours. Sweet sweet vegetation. Yay!

So that was my trip. In case you’ve forgotten, pictures are in this Flickr Gallery. Enjoy!

TV Cream (never heard of them, though their site has a vaguely dirty name which amuses me some) has a list of the top 100 toys of the 70’s and 80’s. I recognize a whole wack of them, though I really can’t say I agree with Transformers being dropped in at #92. WTF! Though, they appear to be a British site, with their use of words like “lorries” and “aeroplanes”, so maybe they weren’t as big over here as they were at home. Serious flashback potential, though the site is a bit hard on the eyes (yellow text on black background… oofah!)

(via BoingBoing)

Camera toss. Throw your camera in the air while taking a picture. That takes some serious cojones, my friend. Wow. I’ll pass.

There are tons of sites out there with humourous out-of-context comic pages… The biggest one, of course, is the one that started it all - Superdickery - if you do a search on the web for “Superman is a dick” you’re sure to find it high in the search results. Matt pointed me towards the seduction page on Superdickery, and it is just friggin hilarious. I had to stop reading because it was too damn funny!

PS - Matt, when are you going to start blogging again?

The American Society of Magazine Editors has picked their Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years. Pretty interesting… oh, and here’s the actual descriptions of the covers, which lists (at least for a couple of them) reasons why they were picked…

(via BoingBoing)

Seriously here - uhh Google? Any message with MXON about 4000 times in it is SPAM! Holy crap, I must have gotten like 200 of these in the last couple days. And no matter how many I report as spam, GMail ain’t catchin em. My spam statistics were actually doing pretty good - we were up into themid-80’s, percentage wise. Now I’m back down into the mid-70’s. Bah. Google is going to have to play catch up to these spammers!

Liz and I went to see Serenity last night. And I just have to say, WOW. What a fantastic movie. All of the glowing reviews out there were spot on. If you even remotely liked Firefly, you most likely already went to see it. But if you haven’t, GO! Hell, even LIZ liked it, and she’s not all that keen on science fiction. Worth every penny. Of course, it will be much better for you if you’ve watched the DVDs first, but it’s still enjoyable without having seen it. I have to watch the series again now!

So yesterday, Apple announced their new iPod that can play video. This is different from the “video iPod” that Apple flatly denied… somehow. I’m not really sure how. I guess they were talking about a “video ipod” as being a strictly video device, I dunno. ANY way, it is so pretty. If I didn’t already have my Rio Karma, I would totally want one. Likewise if I didn’t already have my iPod shuffle, I would totally want an iPod nano. Oh who am I kidding? I still totally want an iPod nano. Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme!

One thing that I really do like about the announcement, though, is that Apple is now selling TV shows, without ads, via iTunes. That is such a great idea. $1.99 per episode is a bit pricey, though, especially since the episodes are DRM‘d out the ying yang, and you can get the first season of Lost for LESS PER EPISODE, and it is a higher quality DVD with extras that I can lend to my friends if I want! Cut that price in half, at least, and I would consider it. I rarely watch TV on TV now, I almost always bittorrent or newsgroup it - not only because the shows here are behind/not available, but also because I prefer to watch my shows when I want to watch them, not when some TV exec decides that I should be watching them. If every single network let me download their shows for a quarter or even 50 cents a pop, I wouldn’t even think TWICE about doing it. Apple’s announcement is definitely a step in the right direction, though.

Man, it has been a LONG time since I blogged about what I was reading. This could be because I spent like a year+ reading Star Wars Books (I read every book from Truce at Bakura through Vision of the Future, excepting the graphic novels. That’s 32 Star Wars Books! What a nerdo!) and I didn’t really think anybody cared all that much.

Of course I, like everyone else in the WORLD, read the latest Harry Potter book. I’m not really sure what I thought of it. It was satisfying, in that way that ALL the Harry Potter books have been satisfying. And if you haven’t read it yet, and don’t want it spoiled, skip to the next paragraph now. I found it a bit disappointing that after all of these books where in EVERY SINGLE ONE Harry thinks that Snape is evil, now he comes in and actually does something evil. I am holding out hope that he and Dumbledore arranged something to help them defeat Voldemort, and that Snape turns out good in the end. Because otherwise it’s really kind of boring that Snape ended up evil.

Next up was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I’m sure some of you have seen the movie. I had, but SO many years ago. The movie was pretty faithful to the book, from what I can recall. It was a fantastic story, I was so hooked on the stories of all the different characters around Savannah. The court cases that take up pretty much the entire second half of the book left me feeling a bit “meh” but otherwise it was a fantastic read. And knowing that it’s a true story makes it all the more intriguing. This was the first book I had read for Liz’s book club. An interesting sort of set up, getting in on a book club with 7 girls. I had a lot of fun though.

After that was a few Robert Heinlein novels… I can never get enough Heinlein, so whenever I find another book by him that I haven’t read yet (there aren’t many), I snatch it up from the bookstore. After those came The Kite Runner. I read this book cover to cover in about 3 days. It had me SO hooked. Tremendously well written, I was unable to put it down last night, reading about 75 pages in a sitting. The depictions of childhood in the wealthier society of Kabul in the 60’s and 70’s were fascinating, and the intricacies of Afghan society were SO interesting. There’s an incredibly touching story to go along with all of this, of course, but I’d hate to give any of it away. Seriously, read this book. It is GOOD.

That’s it for now… I’m currently starting in on We Need To Talk About Kevin. I’m only about 10 pages in, and I’m finding it a bit hard to get into, but we’ll see how I do. After that, the next book (for book club) will be House of Leaves. Apparently a fantastic book. Another one that will have to wait and see.

So, the Braves get knocked out again. I find that hilarious. However, it sounds like it was a hell of a game, it’s too bad I didn’t get to watch it. This is pretty much the only time of year that I ever watch baseball, but this year, I’m in Ireland, so obviously it’s not quite that easy. Anybody see the game?

No, I haven’t lost my mind. It’s just that, well, I sorta have cars on the brain right now. Because Liz and I bought a new car!! Well, new to us, any way. It’s a 2000 Volkswagen Lupo. 998cc engine, 50 horsepower, 63 ft lbs of torque. And it’s only 3.5m long! Compare that to the 4.4m of my Neon, and we’re talking about a 90cm difference! Jeepers! The best part is, it is SO comfortable. Sitting in the front seat, you hardly even realize how tiny the car is. I’m 6′2″ tall, and I can drive it no problem. Crap pictures taken with my camera phone are available here, here, here and here. I’ll be taking some with my real camera when I get a chance, maybe tomorrow. Of course, being such a small car, it basically has ZERO trunk. But I can live with that, as I rarely will be putting anything big in there. The only big problem will be when Rachel and Matt come to visit. No way in hell will we be able to fit 2 people and a week’s worth of luggage into that bad boy. But realistically, we couldn’t justify buying a bigger car for the once-every-couple-months that people are coming to visit. I love it! Now, if only I could get my full license here (more details to come on THAT fiasco)

It seems I’m always posting stories that I find humourous or enraging… I figure I might as well post the occasional heartwarming one as well. From Skid Row To Disney Hall - the story of a homeless man who was once a student at Juliard, getting a chance to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic play. He’s schizophrenic… such a sad story, but still makes you feel kinda nice when you read it any way.

(via MeFi)

I love pixel art. I think it’s very unique and kinda fun… so check out Pixelfest - the site allows you to add one pixel per day, and there’s a nifty little animation of it as well (warning, SLOOOOW to load)

(via MeFi)

My buddy Joe, with whom I worked at my previous company (and went to University with, to boot) is a bit of a flight whore. If he can find a cheap flight someplace, he’ll jet off for a weekend. He often regaled us with tales of his weekend in Eugene, Oregon, or Eureka, California, or some other obscure place that doesn’t start with the letters “Eu”. But Joe, I think you’ve met your match! This dude bought an Air Canada 2 month unlimited flight package (for $7000) and is blogging his way to 1,000,000 Aeroplan miles! As of 6 days in, he had flown on 41 flights since Oct 1, translating to approximately 40,000 miles flown which is approximately 120,000 Aeroplan miles. That was an average of 975 miles per flight, 6666 miles and 6.8 flights per day! Jeebus!

Yup, that’s right - Nick and Jessica are splitting. Or, so the latest rumours go. But apparently this one is for real. Maybe. And you’re too late, Brent already called Dibbs. I have to say though, is this REALLY a big surprise? They were constantly irritated with each other. I’m sure the only reason they stayed together THIS long was because they were making retardedly good money with Newlyweds. Well, now they can each get their own show, and call it Newlydivorcees!

I *love* my GMail account. I’ve even started forwarding all my Ryanwaddell.com mail there because it’s just easier than dealing with Outlook. Yeah, I don’t have access to my messages when I’m not online, but who cares? What do I need access to my mail for if I’m not online anyway? And I could always setup GMail as a pop account if I really wanted to do that anyway However, GMail *is* failing me in one pretty bnig way - spam detection. Tons of people have lauded GMail for it’s quality spam catching, even to the point of using GMail to catch spam for your pop accounts. However, I have to say that their spam detection is pretty stinko. It definitely doesn’t come anywhere close to PopFile’s accuracy - I would say it’s somewhere in the 50% range at the moment. Sure, I’ve had no false-positives, but 50% false negatives is a pretty horrendous output. I am daily deleting something like 10-20 spams from my inbox. That’s just ridiculous! And these messages aren’t even REMOTELY looking real… tons of words sp3ll3d w1th numb3r5, ads for v1agra and c14l15? Come on! How can you NOT catch that??? Of course, a google search for gmail spam detection currently brings up a lot of results about how bad their spam detection actually is, so I guess I’m not the first person to realize this.

My solution - though admittedly maybe not the best one - implement individual Bayesian filters. Hell, maybe this is what they ARE doing and mine just hasn’t caught up yet. That way, everyone could mark their own spam and the Bayesian filters could be built up based on their own mail reception patterns. I had Popfile working at something like 99% efficiency, there’s absolutely no reason why GMail couldn’t be that good as well.

That’s right folks… Those of you who thought it was just a publicity stunt to help promote the couple’s pair of movies out this summer can pretty much give up hope now. That’s right. Tom & Katie are expecting. A wee little beautiful scientologist will be brought into the world!

Ok, nuts to Nascar (boring, who wants to watching driving in a circle for hours? The only exciting part is when they crash), nuts even to F1, which I quite enjoy… this one takes the cake: the Rocket Racing League! That’s right - rocket powered planes racing through aerial tracks. So friggin cool. I’ve been back into reading some Robert Heinlein lately, and this stuff would have been right up his alley.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I totally want a nano. However, that’s not all that likely to happen anytime soon, seeing as I already have a 1gb shuffle that more than suffices to meet my needs. Maybe I’ll decide to get one once they make it past the 200 gb benchmark