ben posted this on twitter and i didn’t realize the funny until i started to ask him:

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oh man, that was fun. taka and i watched an episode or two almost every night, and season 2 should be here tomorrow or friday. taka’s completely hooked, and the ending was so good! is seth sailing to tahiti? is marissa becoming an alcoholic? is theresa’s baby really ryan’s? are they really gonna live and raise the kid in chino? is caleb really going broke? is julie then going to have a broke husband now that she’s married caleb? isn’t it ironic that jimmy is rich again? and it’s awesome that julie and caleb got married at the wayferers chappel since that’s where eric and tina got married.

i also finished my episode guide. i’m not sure if i’m going to bother with seasons 2-4, since it was a lot of damn work, takes away from me just watching and enjoying the show, and tv.com has a great episode guide that’s pretty complete. i’ll see what kind of traffic the episode 1 guide picks up before i start work on episode 2. in the meanwhile, you can read the episode 1 guide here:

shali, i put the season 1 dvds in the mail for you today :)

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The rear tires on the s wear out pretty damn quickly. I do drive the hell out of that car, and i had been doing a lot of power sliding as the tires wore down. After reading various message boards, i decided to replace the stock RE-050 tires with Hankook R-S2’s. The tires have a break-in period of a couple hundred miles, so I’m not going to push them yet, but I’ll do a full write up on the s2kblog once i start giving them hell.

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on saturday after an early workout, eric and i drove (i drove, stupid rock/paper/scissors) to pasadena to see the end of stage 7 of the amgen tour of california. last year the same race was in shorline village and the year before that in redondo beach. the main attraction this year of course was that lance armstrong now racing for team astana is out of retirement and was racing the event.

the last part of stage 7 was a 5 lap, 10 mile loop around the rosebowl, so we watched from the 500m to the finish mark, and got to see them pass a total of 5 times. that was actually the first time that i had ever seen lance armstrong in person, and even though it was 5 times it was less than 5 seconds each time.

i brought my sony cm1 hd video camera, which the more i use, the more i fall out of love with. it’s actually pretty good for what it’s marketed as, capturing quick, short hd video that looks pretty decent. it really isn’t a replacement for a video camera though. my new main gripe with it is that it seems that instead of taking photo-photo-photo and making it a movie, that the sensor “scans” the picture. When things are moving really fast, the “scan” is different from start to finish. So my R/C helicopter’s blades look like they’re bending in flight, and these cyclists look like they’re bikes are shorter than they are. i’ll probably hang on to it because like i said, it’s great for some things… but i’ll probably end up buying another hd camcorder for higher quality stuff down the line.

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so we’re at t minus 3 months before our due date of may 21st and we’ve finally started to think about baby shower registries and baby room stuff. last weekend i painted one wall of the bedroom that will be the baby room, a lime/mint green and today i touched it up where i had missed some spots. we’re also going to paint the opposing wall the same color and leave the other two walls an off-white.

we also starting thinking about the registry and just getting an idea of the stuff we want and need and how much they cost. turns out baby stuff is expensive. we spent about 2 hours trying to find a stroller and a car seat, and we’re still not entirely decided. of course if money were no object, i’d go for the recaro seat, but at babies r us it was $300 :( there’s also just so many damn options. like there’s the complete modular option where you buy a baby carrier, that doubles as a car seat and can then be put into a stroller. the problem is that the carrier/car seat portion is only good until about 20lbs so after what, a year or so? we’d have to get another car seat. the way we’re thinking about going is to just get a nice car seat (which we can use from 5-50lbs or something) and a nice stroller.

as exhausting as the shopping and planning is, it’s exciting, because it’s making this all seem that much more real.

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gah! so this year for various reasons i owe money on my federal return, but am supposed to get back about $500 from the state. the state refund was supposed to cover some of the federal money and the federal payment wouldn’t end up being too bad.

having filed my returns about 2 weeks ago, i go onto the ftb.ca.gov site to find out where my money is, and i get this message:

your return has been received and processed, however, your refund cannot be issued at this time

apparently because of the state budget crisis, they’re holding all state refunds for at least 30 days and they don’t have to pay interest on my refund until 45 days after april 15th! stupid government. now that the budget has passed, hopefully it will only be 30 days delayed.

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fieldrunners is my favorite game on the iphone. it’s fun all by itself, but when you have a couple of friends that are constantly sending high score screen shots back and forth it makes it a lot more fun. we pretty much maxed out the first two maps and over the last couple of days i’ve been working on the new drylands map.

the highest level i’ve been able to reach (playing on hard of course) is 125. i really think that might be the best i can do, because i actually came into that level with 10 lives and the helicopters on that level just ran through my defenses like they weren’t even there. my strategy is to create a “U” shaped maze so that you can reroute the ground troops through your heavy defenses which are in the center sides to combat airships that come through vertically. i also found that i needed at least 1 extra tesla and googun in the center of the map to be able to beat all 3 blimps on level 100.

here’s a screenshot of level 125 after being destroyed by the helicopters. notice that the few that you can still see on the screen still have almost full life left:

the best way to start off building this maze is to just build the entire thing with the guns. you should be able to get to about round 20 before you need to start replacing them with heavier weapons. after playing around with the new fire canon and rock throwing weapons, i decided to stay with the good ‘ole googun / tesla combination as they seem to have the best cost to effectiveness ratio, and after all of my time on the first two maps, were just more familiar.

update
here’s my highest score playing the same map on easy up to level 189:

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man, i ended up having a really busy weekend even though i didn’t have much planned. i pretty much got everything in that i wanted to, but it all felt pretty rushed. i never look forward to monday, but at least it should be more restful than the weekend was.

on friday taka and i went to an all you can eat korean bbq restaurant called furusato only a few blocks from our house. it has a big sign that says “$11.99 all you can eat” so i figured it would have to be terrible, but it ended up being really good, and we ate way too much. but the wife wrote it off to being pregnant and i’m trying to make muscle so it worked out. You can read my yelp review here.

on saturday morning taka and i woke up pretty early and went to this park near our place that has a huge pond with an island in the middle. i took my helicopter and crashed it pretty bad when a servo went out. she did manage to take some video of me hovering the trex 450 around before i wrecked it, although she didn’t film the crash. you can read my writeup about the crash and see some footage from my sony mhs-cm1 on my miniheliblog. Be sure to click the “View in HD” tab in the corner to see it in all it’s boring HD glory. So after my short flight we walked around the park and left when the geese started giving taka the stink eye. We had a valentines lunch with my mom in long beach and saw her newly landscaped yards which looked fantastic. Finally we had a quiet/romantic valentine’s dinner at home… we’re getting too old to go out and wait in the restaurant madness on v-day.

then today eric and i had an early gym session and then i went up to see my old buddy ken from elementary school who was in town for a convention. this is the guy that got me into cycling and radio control everything and was/is an all around cool guy. I gotta say a lot of the things I do and even part of the way I act has been influenced by him. He moved up to Reno, nV in the mid-nineties, and i hadn’t seen him for like 7 years so it was great to catch up.

…and on with the week

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this sunday after next will mark the 2nd year anniversary of the end of one of my favorite shows, the o.c. i remember getting together at shali’s house to watch the series finale and actually being kinda sad when it ended. so i figured it’s been long enough that it’s time to watch the series again. i ordered season 1 of the show and when i get close to finishing it, i’ll order up season 2. taka’s also kinda interested in watching it and since we finished watching friends, we need another semi-serialized drama to watch.

i’ve also started an episode guide that i’ll keep updating as i watch through the shows. it’s crazy watching the first episode and seeing how much they changed over 4 years. you can follow my episode guide here:

http://www.kentomatic.com/the-oc-episode-guide

speaking of anniversaries, last Sunday was kentomatic.com’s 4-year anniversary!

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with the battery on my mini-dv camera only lasting about 20 minutes now, and with a baby on the way, i decided to replace my camera with the sony mhs-cm1. I’ve always liked making small little movie clips of us wakeboarding or just goofing around, but the process of uploading the video to my computer from mini-dv is always time consuming and kinda complicated. The video was also pretty low resolution to begin with and by the time it made it to youtube, it never looked very good.

so i got a got a great deal on the newly released CM1. i’m not sure why they market it as a “webbie” camera, because it does 1080p/720p. i mean it is cheap, and i’ve already noticed it’s short comings in the small amount of time i’ve used it, but for the price (retails for $199), i’m still impressed and pleased.

so here are some things i like about it. first of all, it’s small. it’s not much bigger than the point and shoot digital cameras that most people are carrying around. it’s also very fast. as soon as you flip open the screen the camera turns on and is ready to go. it’s all flash media (stupid sony proprietary memory stick) so there’s no tape or dvd to cue up. the form factor and controls feel good, and it feels pretty solid for something so inexpensive. the video quality is good, particularly for the amount of data they’re able to get at that resolution. at 720p and 30fps you get 2 hours of video on a 4gb memory stick.

but this is a $200 HD video camera, so sony had to make compromises somewhere. the main problem is that the focusing is slow. it might have had to do with the fact that most of the video i’ve tried shooting so far has been in doors in low light. when i pan around the room, you can see it focus once you stop. it takes less than a second but i notice it. this isn’t a deal breaker for me, but it’s a bit annoying. i’ll have to play with the settings and try it in other conditions to see what the deal is. taking an annoying cue from apple, the battery is entirely internal, and seems pretty unserviceable, so it means no matter what, i can only get 90mins of recording time in per use (making anything larger than a 4gb memory stick kinda pointless), and eventually the battery will die and this thing will get tossed. i don’t usually keep electronics like this for more than a few years but i always like to imagine that i will.

i made this cool video yesterday that i was going to upload, where i put the camera on the rear deck of my car, looking out my front window and also my speedometer and shifting, and while it was sweet, i realized it showed me exceeding speed limits, so i thought better of uploading it. i’ll find something to shoot and upload soon.

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