Fun fact: as I write this, I'm thousands of feet above the ground in a 777 headed towards Hawaii.
Since I wrote that blog post begging you to vote for The Force-Cast's Atom video, a lot has happened. For one thing, that same video won two trophies at the 2008 awards ceremony: Best Animation and Audience Choice. Though the ceremony occurred a few weeks back, Jason and Pete (hosts of The Force-Cast) are still talking about it. And as they mentioned on last Friday's show, their trophies will arrive soon; that means more self-administered back-patting. But as a big fan of the show, I agree that they deserve every last back-pat. They worked hard on the video, and it shows.
I finished my job at my school last Friday. I mostly worked five-hour days, although I did pull a few longer shifts (mostly due to transportation issues). I plan on putting most of the money into my bank account.
This past Saturday, I saw the new Star Wars film, The Clone Wars. While most of the reviews I've read paint a decidedly negative picture of the movie, I for one enjoyed it. It accomplished its two primary goals, at least in my mind: build anticipation for the animated TV series premiering in the Fall; and bring Star Wars back into the public consciousness. The only disappointing factor: small crowds for the early Saturday evening showing I attended. The majority were parents with their children.
As I mentioned above, I'm on vacation in Hawaii right now. This morning we had to wake up at 4:00 AM for a 7:00 AM flight. Luckily, due to my father's frequent travels and his status with United, we were able to wait for our flight to board in United's Red Carpet Club lounge. And when I say flight, I mean flight number one. Once we landed in Chicago, we had a two-hour layover until our second flight boarded. There was much leg-stretching in preparation for this, because the Chicago-Maui flight took approximately eight hours. Technically, as I write this, it's still in progress, but you get the idea.
And finally, what's a blog post without some geek talk? We're looking at HDTVs again; this time for our living room. We only have room for a TV of approximately 30 inches in size. But since TVs jump form 26 to 32 inches, we've basically settled on several options from Sony's 26-inch lines. But even more exciting than the TV purchase is the promise of integrating Skype into our lives for the next year. My uncle and his family are living in Switzerland for the next year, and with phone calls being too expensive -- and too communicatively limiting -- we've turned to Skype. I set up my aunt's parents with Skype on both their Windows and Mac computers, and I even brought my grandma into the fold. It took some explaining and some webcam setup, but we made it work. None of these people profess to be computer geniuses, but they've all used Skype successfully to talk to my uncle's family across the ocean. And they all loved it. My grandma in particular is impressed with the average call quality. Of course, the irony is that the originator of the plan -- myself -- has yet to make use of it. Because of time differences, my family has yet to call my uncle's family on Skype. But what better place from which to do so than our beautiful Hawaii hotel room?
