Dr. House Won Jeopardy!!!!

Big congrats to Dr. House!!!!  Worthy of an update to this silly blog!!!  Best of luck for tomorrow too!

-Bob

Harry Potter Madness!

A little late to the game, but why not… like most of the free world, I’ve been crazy for Harry Potter the last couple of weeks. The Kate and I started our Potter journey by watching a movie a night leading up to the release of the 5th movie.

We saw the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Imax 3D and enjoyed it immensely – the film that is… the IMAX presentation left surprisingly much to be desired. It was clear that the movie was shot in 35mm as the larger 70mm IMAX presentation exhibited a LOT of grain, especially during the darker scenes. The 3D presentation was simply atrocious for a $13 entrance fee. The projectors used perpendicular linear polarized light, which means you could not tilt your head without seeing cross talk between the two images. With this level of presentation, they really should have used circularly polarized light like most of the new 3D digital projectors use. Also, the 3D content itself was very disappointing. It was clear from the flat characters at different depths that the movie was shot in standard 2D and converted to 3D using some algorithms. Not terribly effective. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t bother seeing it in IMAX. Tons of fun for the Potter fan, but lame in IMAX. Boo.

We caught up with the 6th book by reading Wikipedia. Yay, Wikipedia… only spoilers from the 7th book had already made their way onto the pages, so we got a bit more spoiled than we would have liked. There was an awful lot that I didn’t remember from the 6th book as it was released on my wedding day two years ago. Kate and I read it while traveling back to Boston then but the cramped 90 square foot dorm room we were sharing was not conductive to long term Harry Potter memory retention.

We got to the 7th book the day it was released and *boys turn off eyes for silly cuteness description* took turns reading the book to each other. I’ve been working on voices reading Kate some comics at night so it was lots of fun. Kate took a few voices as well – boy, that girl does a mean Kreacher! *boys, it’s safe again* We finally finished the book a couple days ago and I heartily enjoyed it. There were lots of small twists to characters that exceeded my expectations with what Rowling would do. The first half of the book dragged a little bit, but otherwise we were completely hooked the entire way through. It was a great book and a really nice way to end the series. Kudos all around.

That’s it for now. Kate’s home in Iowa for the week, so I’ll be making me some more frequent blog posts to stem my loneliness Hope the week is starting off well for everybody,

-Mr. Bobbo J. Bobberson III, esquire

The Real Liz Lemon

Anyone watching the “Next Food Network Star” reality competition show on the… Food Network… ?  One of the competitors, Amy, looks, talks, and acts totally like Liz Lemon from 30 Rock.  Not just Tina Fey, but Liz Lemmon.

It’s awesome.

-Bob

45 minutes

Kate is home in Iowa for the weekend to go our friend Jordan’s wedding and I’m here in Watertown typing.  Some good news happened last week – Kate got offered a full 4th grade teaching position at Newman Elementary in Needham.  This is the school she’s been working at for the past two years as a 5th grade teaching assistant.  She had gone through an extensive interview process and just a few weeks ago was told that she didn’t get the job.  After that, she was pretty bummed out about the school and we were ready to head further west in MA so I could be closer to grad school in Storrs.  After some consideration, Kate decided to take the job as her cousin Shelly is also a 4th grade teacher there and she would really like to work with her.  I’m really excited for her about the job as it’s a great school with a lot of great people and there aren’t too many times in life when you can work with a family member.

This is all great, but it changes our plans considerably about moving.  We want to be closer to the city now so Kate won’t have a huge drive but also far enough out so my UConn commute isn’t too terrible.  We’ve settled on the Auburn/Oxford area as it’s right on the Mass. Turnpike and is centrally located… only a 45 minute commute for her to Needham, 45 minutes for me to school in Storrs, and 45 minutes for me to work in Lexington.  I think I’m going to hate the 45 minute time interval (is it possible to hate an amount of time?).

While Kate’s in Iowa for the weekend, I’m scoping out apartments.  The first one up tomorrow is a townhouse in North Oxford located on a golf course.  The description sounds great and the rent’s cheaper than we’re paying here so I’m really looking forward to the trip.  Of course, North Oxford is 45 minutes away from here.  Stupid 45 minutes.

-Bob

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Apple – DRM = More money?

Apple announced that they are now selling Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free music on iTunes for $1.29 a song, as opposed to $0.99 for DRM songs.  Currently, the DRM songs can only be listened to on computers that you have activated on your iTunes account – you are limited to five active computers at any one time.  On a positive note, the new “iTunes Plus” songs will have twice the bitrate as old iTunes songs – 256kb/s vs. 128kb/s.  You can upgrade your old iTunes songs to new iTunes Plus songs for $0.30.  Apple will still offer $0.99 standard songs.

Yeah, this is a move in the right direction… but it’s silly to make people pay to get rid of the arbitrary copy-protection scheme Apple put on their songs, especially when you can get rid of the copy-protection yourself by burning the tracks to a CD and ripping the CD to MP3s.  Apple should have offered DRM-free music from the get-go but I’m glad they are offering it now – especially with higher resolution recordings (ahem… which is another thing they should have done from the start).

The part that puzzles me about this announcement is the $0.30 upgrade for your current songs.  Before, once you purchased a track from iTunes, you were SOL if you deleted the file.  That’s right, you couldn’t redownload a song you purchased.  But you needed to connect to the server to validate your account in order to play the song in the first place.  That’s a lot of back-assery!  Another nice move would be the availability to access your iTunes account and download songs from any activated computer.  Unfortunately, Apple seems to be raking in the cash with their current user-impaired model so it’s unlikely they’ll change anytime soon.

-Bob

UConn here I come!

So it happened again – an e-mail from Dr. Jepsen stating it’ll be another year before she starts her research group and I didn’t get into other research groups at MIT. So I’m very excited to announce that I’m going to be starting my masters degree (probably leading into a PhD) with Dr. Bahram Javidi’s research group at the University of Connecticut! I’ve been down there a couple times and have already decided on a research topic! It’s real-time 3d sensing and identification of microorganisms using holography. I’m really excited to start work (took the last half of last week off to get all read up on holography and microorganism fun stuff)!

Originally, Kate and I were hoping to stay in the Boston area. She’s been a teaching assistant in a school for the last couple years and after finishing her teaching masters degree this summer was hoping to take over her own classroom. Unfortunately, she didn’t get a job there (we’re both bitter towards Boston!) so we’re free to look elsewhere. I only need to take one class at a time at UConn, and the one this fall only meets once a week (on Friday afternoons even!) so the thought was for me to keep my full time job at Lincoln and do a part time masters program, doing research in my spare time.

After my visit down there earlier this week, it’s become very apparent to me that it’ll be VERY VERY difficult to do an intensive research project at the same time as working full time… and there’s also the 80 mile commute between work and school to consider. Right now, I think I’m going to cut back to working half time in the fall, either working two very long days and spending three in lab at UConn or come in on weekends. We’re looking to move to the middle of Massachusetts near the Connecticut border so Kate can actually use the Massachusetts teaching certification she’s worked so hard for! UConn is only about 20 minutes from the CT/MA border so that can easily be worked out on my end. Plus, there are TONS of teaching openings for Kate!! Yay!

So things are a bit up in the air with Kate searching for a job… really hope she can find something good and me trying to figure out what to do about balancing work and school. It’ll probably be tough but we’re both really looking forward to moving as far away from Boston as we can (I’m going to get a stupid thing about Boston column going here soon).

So what else is new? I’ve been spending way more time and money on comic books and related paraphernalia than I really should be I’ve recently started acquiring Original Comic Art, focusing on pages that hold significance from my childhood. If you are interested in experiencing the real nerdy nerdy (and roll your eyes like Kate rolls her eyes), then take a look at my gallery at the Comic Art Fans community website: Linky Yay nerdiness!

I’m also working on a fun little 3d movie using Flash. I started another blog to document the process. Check out my White Rabbit 3d Blog! It’s good for you!

That’s me… I’ve been REALLY self absorbed lately trying to deal with all the crap going on. Will get out and say hi to everyone soon!

Hope the weekend was nice and the weather treated you much better than it did stupid Boston (eh, Boston deserves it, stupid stupid Boston)

-Bob

Things I Hate About Boston: “Journalism”

So not only was it news, but it was the FRONT PAGE TOP STORY of today’s Boston Herald that Patriots QB Tom Brady was caught wearing a *gasp* Yankees hat!

Boston is stupid.

-Bob

We’re Chreasters

So Kate and I went to church for the first time since… Christmas on Sunday. So that makes us dirty Chreasters. It’s been a really hard time finding a church we both like here in Boston so we gave up looking for longer than we should have. The service on Sunday was pretty wacky so the search continues. We’ll be sure to go this Sunday, though!

I’ve been meaning to post these Easter pictures but some serious sinus issues caught up with me and I’ve been sleeping a lot. Anyway, some fun pictures of our Easter feast are below. We decided to avoid lots of left-overs so just bought a single ham “steak.” Nowhere near as fancy or tasty as a full ham, but we’re not floating away in ham.

I needed a wee bit of Boston’s trademark liquid courage before we could begin

Kate just needed her magic apron

Things got out of hand when she got hold of the masher

Mmmm…. ghetto ham steak…

I confiscated the masher so Kate settled down and used the collander properly

And a beautiful Easter dinner… come to think of it, we’re probably Chreaster table eaters

And so ends another Bob + Kate Easter special.

Happy Wednesday!
-Bob

Meet the new addition to the extended clan!

Nope, there’s no BobKate Junior to announce. BUT, I’m excited to share that my cousin Jennifer and her husband Mark are adopting a baby from Guatemala. The process is amazingly long and they are ready to have little Max come and stay with them forever but they have to wait for the paperwork to go through. To hear a tale of the international adopting process and to see some cute baby pictures, check out their website: http://maxyoder.homestead.com/

-Bob

Snow

It snowed yesterday and today in Boston.  It’s interesting to think about how much I loved snow as a kid and how much I fear it now that I have a nine mile commute through the back roads of Belmont.  It’s very difficult to get up and go to work when there’s a warm lump of Kate slumbering through a snowed out day.

Snow ball fights are still fun though!

-Bob

P.S. Yup, this is actually Bob posting.  He’s alive!   His list of things to do: Write more blog posts, communicate with people from his past life, illustrate (!), and write more blog posts.