AppleTV

Got an AppleTV the other day. Pretty impressed with it on the whole. In the process of ripping a good portion of my TV series from DVD to an AppleTV compatible format. Will probably rip most or all of the TV stuff over time, except for the stuff lacking subtitles.

Far as the iTunes movie and TV selections go, I’m not really that impressed. At least the movies section lets you search for all 90+ movies that have captions. If universal captions appear, or if they merely caption the shows/movies I’m interested in, I may purchase/rent, but otherwise, no sale.

I have not considered hacking the AppleTV all that seriously so far. I can see the virtue of doing so, but, so long as I am hearing impaired and require subtitles/captions, I don’t see the need to mess with it unless I decide I must have real closed caption support.

Gets a vote of support from me overall.

Iron Man

Watched Iron Man the other day.

Short review: good, not great. Needed more time for the bad guy to flesh the role out and really just needed more time for Iron Man being Iron Man. Otherwise, no glaring flaws. The movie is well made and comes off well. Just feels a little flat with the ultimate conflict being left to just a clichéd, stereotypical sort of “evil uncle decides to take over the company/fortune/etc” gimmick. Needed a bit more meat to that part of the story.

Memes!

Lifted from The-Wynk

 

Look at the list and:

1) Bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you own.

3) Underline the books you have seen a movie or TV production of. (I didn’t actually do this part. Assume I probably saw some movie version of most of them that are older.)

4) Reprint this list in your own blog

 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible 

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Vroom Vroom

Couple weeks ago, got in an accident and wrecked my 2005 Jeep Liberty1. Upshot of it all, declared a total loss and I started looking for a new car.

With regard to the insurance process, I have to say, Progressive was stellar. They were fast, responsive, and flexible to my needs.

So, shopped around for a couple days. Did a lot of comparisons and stuff. Cars.com was pretty handy. I’d narrowed it down to wanting to take a look at a couple VW models and the Hyundai Sonata and Tiburon. Went to the Hyundai dealership, sat in a dark red Tiburon GS and decided, “This is the car I want.”

So I bought a Hyundai Tiburon. Loving it immensely. Vroom Vroom.


  1. Full story on that to come in a later post. 

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