Office Space - A New Drama

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Very well done drama-like trailer for Office Space.

Titanic Two - Jack's Back!

Thought I posted this a while back, turns out I didn't.
A very well done trailer spoof! And very funny!!

Titanic: Two The Surface

Kirkland, Fully Illuminated At Last!

Looks like overnight, PSE was finally able to connect all the dots required to bring Kirkland fully up and energized! I was so excited that I went to McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin! But, to my dismay, there was a sign on the door stating they won't open until tomorrow. :( I've never had many good experiences with that particular Mikey D's, the management there is horrible. If Carrilon Point's Starbucks can get up and running over night, they should too! But oh, well! I'm sure there's a good reason. I was able to get my grande reduced-fat eggnog latte! :-) (gotta be reduced to delude the nog a tad. I love the nog, but but it's quite overwhelming at full strength! lol)

Anyway, some how or another, I was in the lucky bunch in Moss Bay that got power back after only 12 hours. So I can't fully comment on just how terrible it must have been for the homes that were without power since Thursday night and Friday morning. But I did read this blog post from a local Kirkland blogger:

It feels SO good to be WARM again!
We've been in the dark since Thursday night just like much of the million other people around the Seattle area. It makes me realize how much we take for granted. It took me two days of flicking on light switches before I remembered they weren't going to work. For the first day and a half it was kind of fun- roughing it- sharing meals (ie emptying the rotting food from the fridge) with neighbors that we never get to spend enough time with normally. By the third night we couldn't take the flashlights and shivering anymore and sacked out at my sister's toasty condo in Totem Lake, which oddly/luckily had power restored.

I know there are many people out there that still don't have power. Our friends in Woodinville aren't expecting service until at least Thursday! But then I think-- how must the Katrina victims have felt when their desperately needed help didn't arrive? Huh. Reality.

Other fleeing thoughts: How come when it was so cold I could sleep so much? I wonder if this is some type of bear hibernation phenomenon or just the fact that there wasn't much else to do. Speaking of not much to do- here's an up-side: our neighbor's teenage son had a bunch of friends over that were all playing the board game "Risk" at their kitchen table. His mom told me there was quite a bit of dust on that game before the power (and Xbox) went out last week. Oh, and why was MY mom calling me 6 times a day with her survival techniques? "Remember when you were a Girl Scout..." UGH.

Then there is the grocery store- we had to throw out everything from our fridge and freezer which was a much needed exercise. There were bags of vegetables from 2005 in there, and under the bottom-most drawer was a delightful surprise of 12 french fries and 3 Otter Pops that my kids have been asking for since July. The re-entry to the world of power is quick, though. Once it's back- wham!- we're all racing again in our scurried little lives. Sent Steve to QFC on Sunday to re-stock the fridge for my 3 little Hoovers. He was feeling guilty as his heeping cart filled with brown sugar and marshmallows for holiday baking later in the week was in front of a woman in line with batteries and fresh (finally!) milk and some beef jerky.

And this brings me back to Kirkland. Look at all of our retail businesses that were shut for days the week before Christmas! This is their busiest time of year, so the timing couldn't be worse for them to be losing sales. The Nordstroms of the world will survive this, but losing 3 days of pre-holiday shoppers has a big impact on the small shops of Kirkland. So, if you're behind on your shopping like I am, be sure to stay close to home and support your local businesses. We want to make sure they're here next Christmas!

And for those of you still waiting for the power to come on- hang in there and accept the warmth and generosity of others that seems to abound in situations like these. And whatever you do, don't bring your generator or gas grill inside. And if you need any other tips, you can call my mom. ~Janis

SOURCE:
http://kirklandweblog.typepad.com/kirkland_weblog/2006/12/it_feels_so_goo.html

Four die in storm; one million without power

We never lost power here at the office, but my grandparents (where I stayed last night in case 520 were to close, and it did!) lost power at 10:45p last night. And, from what I understand, most if not all of Kirkland is in darkness as well. 1 Million WA state residents without power! 700,000 of those effected are customers of PSE. And power could be out for days, even up to a week in some areas. The worst power outage I've seen since 1995, when living in South Everett, we were out of power and no school for almost a week.

Four die in storm; one million without power
11:20 AM PST on Friday, December 15, 2006

SEATTLE - A deadly wind storm blasting Western Washington has claimed four lives, closed major bridges and knocked out power to 1 million homes and businesses. At 5 a.m. Puget Sound Energy was reporting power out to some 700,000 people. At 6:30 a.m. Seattle City Light said it now has 171,000 customers without power -- that's over half its customers. And half their feeder lines are down. "If it's not the largest outage (in our history), it's close to it," said spokeswoman Suzanne Hartman.

Winds gusted to 74 mph at the Hood Canal floating bridge, which links the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas, 63 mph at the Evergreen Point floating bridge, one of two linking Seattle with the suburbs east of Lake Washington, 70 mph at Westport on the coast and more than 50 mph in downtown Seattle.

SOURCE:
http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_121506WABfri_stormDS.f96a826.html

Last night: Death Cab @ the Key

Awesome concert last night from Death Cab for Cutie at the Key Arena last night! I finally got to see my favorite band live in action! Can't wait till they come back again! And now that the tour is over and they'll be home, I'm sure they'll start hitting up the smaller venues again.

Here's a clip I took of the first song Ben played:

Death Cab for Cutie - 405

Andy from The Office on 'The Daily Show'

Ed Helms, who plays Andy, the new 50%-Dwight-like/50%-Michale-like character on The Office, made his return to 'The Daily Show' as Senior Correspondent the other night...Gave a humorous nod to The Office at the start of the clip, and got a nice crowd reaction!

The wrong Epinions about SACD

I'm sure many people who read my blog could care less about SACD and other audiophile formats or topics, but it's a big part of my life! :-) So here we go:

Came across this Epinions.com article back from 2002 about the downfalls to the consumer of SACD. Most makes sense, yes, from the angle of the author. But, the author is simply coming from the wrong angle.

Don't Believe the SACD Hype
http://www99.epinions.com/content_2514985092

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Believe the SACD Hype!
SACD is an audiophile format. It's not designed for the consumer level. Lets say you, like myself, are an avid audiophile. You have collected have all this great equipment for home theater and music. You have a decent CD player, music sounds beautiful and clean. But due to the scale of your equipment, you begin to notice the imperfections of CDs. Such as the lack of warmth in your music, and the harsh highs and lacking bass. You wish you could drive your system to the max. Enter SACD. SACD brings back the warmth and frequency spectrum lost in CD compression. Think of it as vinyl records in disk form. Vinyl, if played on a decent turntable, blows away CD.

SACD was developed by accident, really. Sony developed DSD (Direct Stream Digital), the technology behind SACD, to losslessly preserve master tapes.

Why is it so expensive? Easy: it's become a niche market. DVD's were expensive before the public jumped on them. So were CD's. Unfortunately, the public isn't jumping on to SACD. Why? Consumers favor connivance over quality. You can't put an SACD on an iPod. You can't download SACDs for free.

The author made one other point that doesn't make sense. The fact that SACD players don't have digital outputs. There's a very good reason why, and it's not because of copy protection, though it happens to help. A digital output would mean an extra DAC step on the SACD player and on the receiver. This means on-the-fly compression and decompression. Defeats the purpose of SACD. And cables aren't $250 for a full set. I got my full set of Monster Cables for about 25 bucks.

Seinfield: The Lost Episode

107.7 The End cans Dick Rossette

So, since early November, I've wondered what happened to Dick and Sarah's show on my drives home from work. For awhile, while he was covering, Jim Keller said Rossette was on vacation. But today, I turned on the radio and found some dink called Lazlo and his show "The Church of Lazlo" in his place. (Which sucks horribly BTW...impossible to listen to, kinda like trying to listen to Ricker on KISW :P)

So I decided to research. Found Dickie Dickie Pie's MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/dickrossette). It turns out, The End fired him back on Nov 11th!! What the hell 'The End'?? You tried this last year when you canned No Name and Jennifer White, got horribly yelled at by his fans (including me) and you were forced to bring him back (Jennifer is now on a radio show in Cali). Now, They've canned Mr. Dick Rossette? Is The End freaking nuts?! What's next, fire Harms? You're killing The End!! No Name, Dick & Harms is The End! Now we gotta wait until 107.7 comes to their senses and re-hires Dick. Either that, or hopefully Dick will find a new home on a different station.

They're in for just as much, if not more so, hate mail from the fans. Dick and Sarah were the best on the radio and the afternoon show was in it's prime.

The End is getting close to it's own end.