It started on Thursday when Stu and Kate picked me up from Physical Therapy and took me to Wasabi in Sleepy Hollow. They got me some very thoughtful presents: a book on “cloud computing”, a book on mountain biking and trails in the NY metro area, and a book on yoga. The yoga book came with an offer from Kate to “go to yoga with me where there are lots of petite limber chicks”. She knew how to sell it! The owner of Wasabi put together an ice cream platter for me and everybody there sang me happy birthday. Yum.

On Friday night my brother took me to James Joyce in White Plains. Dave, Will and Darlene came out for that dinner. The place was a little loud with a Yankee game playing, but the food was good. Afterwards my brother, Dave and I went back to my place to watch Zardoz, which was pretty entertaining. Not necessarily good but wacky and entertaining. My brother got me the graphic novel Ex Machina, Dreamscape on DVD and an album by Arcade Fire.

On Saturday I went to Stu and Kate’s baby shower that John and Jeannie had at their place. It was a Hawaiian themed baby shower with good food and lots of “onesies”. The weather was nice so part of the party was indoors and part of it was outdoors. I couldn’t stop eating the swedish meatballs and some pastries that somebody brought. Fortunately I didn’t have to do any grass skirt dancing in my crutches.

After the shower my friend Andrew picked me up and we went for some Chinese food for yet another birthday dinner. Afterwards we went to Gamestop where I picked up a play and charge kit for my bedroom’s Xbox 360 and Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition.

Today, Sunday, I took it easy. Slept late, did a little cleaning up, played some Oblivion, watched some MythBusters and then cleaned up a little more. The toughest part of the day was bringing the revolving fan up from the basement.

This week will be another relatively busy week: physical therapy twice this week, the first meeting of the New York City Agile Developer Book Club I started with my friend Seth, and another trip back to the ankle doctor for a check up.

When the movie was over we had this quick discussion like this:

Brian: “I though it was interesting.”
Christine: “It makes me never want to use Helvetica again.”
Brian: “Really? ‘Cause I was thinking of going and trying to use it on something.”

Christine did like the film. She just feels like the font is too corporate/mainstream.

I loved the soundtrack after only 3 songs in and was excited to hear some bands I’ve gotten into recently such as The Album Leaf and Battles later on in the film.

We also recently got the cheapest Netflix plans there is which I upgraded to the next lowest today in order to be able to stream movies to our Xbox via the New Xbox Experience (which I got into the preview of this week).  We just watched King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the quality was great.

Hulu.com and NBC.com cost nothing and get us access to a number of current shows and some of their past seasons.  We can use iTunes to purchase anything else we want to watch (nothing currently).  Netflix is $9 a month for the plan we’re on ($118 for the year) and gets us access to any new movies that come out which we can either stream or get the DVD of.  So dumping cable saves us about $840 a year after all the math.

I’ve been thinking about trying a service for video games similar to Netflix.  I recently bought Dead Space and was really disappointed with the game.  I brought it to GameStop to see how much the trade-in value was – $23.  A $60 game will be bought back at $23 and then sold Used for $55.  What a rip-off!  I become less and less of a fan of GameStop every time I go there.  I also wonder about the affect used game sales have on the video game industry.  I know there’s GameFly and GameSwap but I need to get over my need to own video games.  Maybe it’s worth going through my shelf of video games and thinking about which ones I wish I had rented and which ones I’m glad I own.

There are also similar services for programming books, mainly O’Reilly’s Safari site.  I looked into their plans again tonight after seeing an announcement for a Head First Rails book in “rough draft” format.  Unfortunately I found their advertisements and plans very misleading and just ended up canceling the account.  I may just purchase the book/pdf/draft option of the book and skip the whole Safari subscription.

Suburbia Roller Derby – Suburban Slaughter from Brian Kelly on Vimeo.

Suburbia Roller Derby – 2008 Championship from Brian Kelly on Vimeo.

I did some googling and came across the topic iDVD and choppy video in the final product.  It was started at the end of 2006 but there was a recent post mentioning Perian being the cause.  Persian is a “free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats”.  I had originally installed it for Flash video (FLV) support to burn some other derby leagues from YouTube to DVD for the team.  After uninstalling Perian I seem to no longer have the choppy video problem with iDVD.  I’ve only burned a disc image so far, but they had the same problem when I had Perian installed.  I’m going to burn a DVD in a little bit confirm.  If this is the solution I will be very happy.  I’m still annoyed that I need to “Share” my video in iMovie to get it into iDVD (a slow process) and can’t easily create chapters in iDVD (without using a GarageBand hack) but at least the final product won’t mess with your eyes now.

There are also some posts on the Perian support forum, such as perian performance – lags in movies which offers some other suggestions, but since I don’t currently need FLV support anymore I’m going to stick with the “uninstall Perian” solution for now.

Update: Woo!  The Perian-free burn is smooth!

Suburbia Roller Derby – Summer Shovin’ from Brian Kelly on Vimeo.

At the after party I played back the full bout on the projector at the bar, which the roller girls seem to enjoy.

Last month was the “Biohazard Brawl” bout which the Indian Point Sirens against the Botoxic Avengers.  Again, I was videotaping and providing the PA system.  I finally got around tonight to putting a video together.

Suburbia Roller Derby – Biohazard Brawl from Brian Kelly on Vimeo.

Although I recently picked up Final Cut Express 4, I find it easier/quicker to put these quick “action” videos together using iMovie. I’m hoping to eventually do some more impressive stuff using Final Cut Express, but that requires learning how to use it first.

• Your uploaded videos look so much better than YouTube
• Even thought it has improved quality, it doesn’t have the 90 second limit Flickr has
• People can also download the movie in the original format

So I uploaded 3 Suburbia Roller Derby videos on my Vimeo account.  Check them out because they look so much better than YouTube!

• A = Amazing! You need to own/experience this product!
• B = Really Good. Enjoyable, but not exceptional. Money well spent.
• C = Average. I could take it or leave it. Most likely leave it.
• D = Disappointing. This product was a real disappointment. Failed in a number of places. Pretty horrible.
• F = Waste of Time. I can’t believe I bothered with this product. Painful to experience. I might not have even sat through it all.

So originally I was going to give Hot Fuzz an A-, but after settling on the ratings above I’ve decided it’s a B+. The movie was really good but at times the dialog was hard to understand. There isn’t a lot of action until the end of the movie, but the way it’s all set up was very smart. I also really enjoyed style of the transitions between scenes. I highly recommend checking out this movie if you haven’t already.

Oh, and one other thing I enjoyed was recognizing all the british actors from other films that I’ve seen, like Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, and Stephen Merchant. I’m sure Christine loved me pointing out every other actor and shoting “Oooh, he’s that guy… from… that show…”

I would’ve been really freaked out if I had seen a giant rabbit though…