bennybox

There’s a tornado advisory in Waterloo. The thunder is very loud. The lightning is blinding. I haven’t seen any airborn cows yet.

Here’s hoping!

The Justice League is my favorite show on television right now. With season three 24 coming to a close on Tuesday, and While You Were Out/What not to Wear overload, Justice League is proving to satisfy almost all my entertainment desires in the form of Korean animation.

A kids cartoon with a sense of continuity is a tough thing to find nowadays. The sporadic storytelling in Samurai Jack doesn’t even make sense when I watch 10 episodes in a row back to back! DC has always been tops in the cartoon department. Teen Titans isn’t awful, and the Batman and Superman toons are still some of my favorites. Marvel’s Spiderman and X-Men shows great to watch if you have the background understanding from the various comic story arcs, but I always felt the visuals were weak and were never really stylistically appealing and usually quite ugly.

I think that Marvel’s foray into better cartoons have come up a little short. The new Mainframe CGI animated Spiderman has awful writing and XMen Evolution stretches the universe mythos a little too far for a fan of the books, not to mention the unsatisfying attempts at story and voice acting.

Marvel’s been doing well at the theatres and I’ll stick with their movies for a while from the outlook. DC has some hot property and some interesting movie projects in the works, and I’m hoping they can turn around the Bats and Supes movie franchises.

Back to tv! Smallville is the world’s longest origin story ever told, but the formula is getting a little weak the past two seasons. Birds of Prey, a show about the daughter of Catwoman and Bats, attemped a Buffy style show in a not dark enough Gotham, but flopped for trying too hard.

Still gotta watch the Punisher (weary!). All I need now is someone to pay me to make a live action Alpha Flight movie. I actually think that would be worth watching.

Oh… my… goodness…

My most favorite show on television is back with re-runs!

Check out Wok with Yan at 1130 PM on Omni 2. Consider yourselves all blessed.

I am in heaven.

If we consider stress such a pain, so difficult to deal with, it’s totally confusing to see someone who’s activing looking for stressful situations, be it social, in school or at work.

It’s extra tasty mind-warping when I find myself purposely placing myself in stressful situations, for long extended periods of time. What would possess me to volunteer time I don’t have to pile more work on a plate that’s already overflowing?

I’m not quite sure what to make of it, but I think it may have something to do with some complex I may have. Sometimes I feel like I have a lot of skills which never get the spotlight, because I spend so much time vegetating at home. It’s been a rush the past year or so. I’ve been too lazy, for too long, that I’m trying to satisfy myself by doing all the things now that I should have been doing my entire life, through high school, and the first few years of university.

I’ve been much more active socially, met more people in five months that I had the entire rest of my university career. I’ve joined half a dozen clubs/organizations/volunteer events after not having done much of anything else prior. I’ve actually been working hard at my studies recently, something I’m totally not used to and still trying to learn how to do. More than that, I’ve been trying to figure out my career, and what I’m actually going to do with a not that useful engineering degree.

All this has sort of caught up to me, and the stress the past few weeks has sort of been difficult to deal with, and I’ve been antipating much more over the next few months. It’s definately not enjoyable, and has been making me relatively sour. Although I don’t love this feeling, I can’t quite say I hate it either. I probably subconsciously think I’m growing through the process somehow, and I’m in way too deep to quit now anyways.

If only I had some positive role models integrated into my life, that would tell me if I’m even on the right track. It would definately take away some of the strain of trying to figure out and do everything myself.

I’m not sure what it is about me and gizmos. I love ‘em. I can’t get enough of them. And it’s not enough to just buy them. I gotta read and think about them. Whether it’s news about prototypes, speculated features on future upgrades of existing products, or simply the latest and greatest hardware that I just will never be able to afford, I eat, live and breathe my obsession.

I can spend days comparing specifications for similar products, or reading user reviews either when shopping around for the best alternative or just wanting to know what kinds of things to look for should I ever want to buy something from the seven different genres of MP3 player.

I’d like to know how much of my personal electronics I’ll be using a year from now. I don’t think I’ve used anything I’m using now a year ago (two exceptions), but I’ve aquired a worthy collection that should at least last me until I finish university.

Dell Inspiron 5100
This was a gift laptop, and it’s become my desktop replacement. Since it was a gift, it’s no where near the feature set collection of my dreams. I’d liked to have had a more portable unit; a 10 lbs chunk isn’t the easiest thing to lug around campus. It’s also lacking DVD playback, and more USB ports, but otherwise, it’s a damn fine machine. The integrated wireless is key, so that I can pretend to work in the library study carrol when I’m actually surfing the web. And the battery life is pretty respectable. I recommend the current generation Dell 5150.

Palm Zire 21
This is the replacement model of the extremely low-end Palm, but upgrades it in two of the most important areas: internal memory and processor speed. This would have been the perfect budget handheld, if only there was a backlight of some sort. Battery life is great, and the whole unit is lighter than the batteries of most high-end Pocket PCs, which means you can actually carry it in your pocket. Organizing your life in a Palm takes some getting used to, and I’m still working out the kinks. The new Palm Zire 31 adds a backlit colour screen, and an expansion slot for more memory and MP3 playback, at the cost of added size and weight and doubling the MSRP sticker. If you’re a feature heavy user, you might as well just get a smart phone handheld/cellular phone hybrid like the Treo 600. I think I prefer having dedicated use electronics, though I definately see the benefit of having a Palm/phone/mp3/camera/blackberry/internet browser all in one.

Sony Ericsson T237
My first stint with a cell phone didn’t go too well. I got a cheapo phone on a cheapo plan and got an understandably crappy experience in return. My old phone was about as terrible as phones got back then and soured me on cell phones on the whole. But lifestyles change, and some self relection made is pretty certain that my life would be much easier of the next couple years if I could tie a phone number to my name. I got a new colour phone for cheap by signing a two year plan with Fido, and I have no complaints so far. My phone is very pretty, small, with more than decent battery life, and does a lot more than you’d expect from a basic budget phone. Heck, I’m even getting a free detachable camera phone with it. If I replaced this phone with all the cell phones that my friends have currently been using, I don’t think I’d get any complaints. Except from those ‘flip-phone’ nuts. But they were crazy to begin with. My new one is much nicer.

Sony MZR-900
Ah, the Minidisc. I proprietary music format that has a cult following, but is getting very quickly outdated by the current generation of MP3 player. At the low-end, MDs are very comparable to similarly priced MP3 players, but why get a feature packed MD when the same cash will get you a slicked up iPod, and many times the music storage capacity? But I love my little recorder, and it’s still getting good use after three years of ownership, which is damn good for me. I’ve had to invest in a new-age USB capable recorder to make the MD production process a little more managable, and my MD is about twice as heavy as I think it should be, but I’ve committed to the minidisc format on a number of occasions, and I’m sticking to it through the long run.

Minolta Dimage X
This was my very first portable personal electronics item I bought myself, and it was exactly what I wanted at the time, as I spent several months weighing alternatives. It’s a fast ultra portable camera, with slightly above average picture quality and resolution. Stick in some decent memory, and you get shutterbug Chris. The current line of Dimage X cameras are still the best in the ultracompact genre, and they outperform my camera on quite a few levels. I love it, because I really can take the camera everywhere. There’s basically no where my camera can’t go. I acknowledge that it sucks in low-lit locations.

Apple iPod (Second Generation 20 GB)
The worst part about committing to a portable digital audio format? You gotta shelf any used iPod that comes along your way. As painful and stupid as that sounds, I’ve found a good home for Apple’s amazing mp3 player. Chock it full of every MP3 and CD you own, along with every MP3 and CD of the girlfriend, accessorize it with an FM transmitter, and you got the perfect companion for those long car rides, and the girlfriend who’s decided to abandon the MD format for something that can fit more than a couple hours of song.

SanDisk Mini Cruzer 2.0 256 mb
Having a portable flash drive saved me many times at my work, where I had to transfer large files between non-networked computers several dozen times. It’s simply more versitile than writing CDs. But now that my work application is more or less done with, I’m finding it the best way to backup my personal documents. With the drive safely tucked into my pencil case, I have all my important files available anywhere. It’s plug and play firmware lets me use it on any computer with USB, and it’s also pretty handy to be able to run all my instant messengers off it, with no installation required.

Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP
My eternal love for the GBASP and all things Nintendo probably don’t need to be repeated here. My favorite memory about my GBA: waking up on a weekend, tiredly reaching for a game cartridge and playing Mario and Luigi for a few hours before getting out of my bed. I actually kind of hope I can find a job next term in the downtown core, so that I’ll have more chances to play my GBA when I’m on the subway.

My Gadget Bags
I’m a portabilty nut. If I can’t fit any of my electronics in my pant pocket, it’s not worth my time. Though when I need some combination of my gear with me, I’ll require the assistance of my jacket pockets or even a backpack.

It makes me sort of sad that I can emulate most the functionality of all my gadgets, even the laptop, with a Palm Treo 600 smartphone decked out with a large memory card. But I love my collection of entry-level gadgets and I won’t be trading any of them in for a while.