UPDATE: The full official trailer can now be viewed online. Check it out!
Entertainment Tonight recently showed the first moving shots of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie. Hard to tell anything from these 12 seconds, but at least it reminds me of how cool Snake Eyes was in the cartoon when I was a kid. Embedding was disabled for this video, so you’ll have to watch it at YouTube.
Also, if you missed them, the studio premiered a bunch of one-sheets highlighting six different characters in the film. You can view them all by clicking Snake Eyes below.
Terribly sorry for the lack of posts lately. We’ve been busy, as you can imagine.
We’re coming up on the Week 39 mark. That means Maryalice could pop at any moment. I’m watching her like a hawk and jumping at any indication that my crazy, detail-laden brain could perceive as the start of labor. The bags are packed and loaded in the car. The car seat is locked and loaded in the back seat. A bag of P90X-friendly groceries are gathered and sitting on the kitchen counter. We’re ready to hit the hospital.
Friends and family, we’ll call or email as many of you as we can when we have news to report. I’m sure I’m missing some email addresses, though, so be sure to keep an eye on this site. I’ll update it with a picture of a beautiful girl someday very, very soon!
I changed the way my photos and videos are posted. The way I had the photo gallery set up didn’t seem to scale well, and I want to be sure we have plenty of room for all the pictures of our beautiful baby when she finally decides to enter the world.
Now, when you click the Photo link above, you’ll go to a full-screen view of my online photo galleries. You can still view all the pics, download most of them, and even upload your own pics into our public gallery for all to see. The change should enable for easier viewing and should work better with a variety of web browsers.
Also, I gave Videos its own page. I’ll just use YouTube embedded videos to share the cute and wonderful things that Abigail will do.
Thanks for your prayers! We’re doing great, but we are seriously ready to get this show on the road!
So, have you ever met someone who has never seen Star Wars, or at least has only seen parts of it, and yet still think he knows the whole story? Yeah, those people bug me, too.
This is a beautiful Star Wars retelling from a girl who has never seen it.
Sadly, it’s time to say a fond farewell to Mr. Rourke of Fantasy Island and Khan, the nemesis of Captain James T. Kirk. Actor Ricardo Montalban died today at 88.
Every child born in the 70’s will hear Montalban’s voice echoing through their heads for the rest of their lives. Whether it was telling the Fantasy Island greeters, “Smiles! Smiles, everyone!” as the plan approached, or giving drooling car buyers an unhealthy yearning for “soft Corinthian leather,” Montalban made his mark on my generation.
We’re about three and a half weeks until the due date, and Abby is kicking and moving and stretching and reaching and punching and dancing like crazy. I just spent five minutes watching Maryalice’s stomach move around. It looks like one of our cats stuck under a blanket. This is one happy and frolicking baby.
In other pre-baby news, the nursery is about done. I’ve assembled the crib, toy box, armoir, pack ‘n play, swing, bookcase, and more. This weekend, I’ll attack the car seat, slider rocker, and a few other odds and ends.
Maryalice has been a champ this whole time, but she’s about over being pregnant. We’re totally ready to meet this kid.
We’re getting our hospital plan together. Maryalice has her bag all packed and ready to go, so the least I can do is get my hospital geek bag in order. I know we’ll need a laptop and camera for the initial pics and email access from the hospital. We’ll need our phones, and maybe Maryalice’s iPod. All that’s great, but it also means we’ll need power. And hospitals typically have important life-saving equipment plugged in to al of their outlets.
That’s right. I’m about to be a father, but I stopped to think about the shortage of power outlets we’re sure to face in the hospital room. Uh, hello? GEEKY dad, remember? I wouldn’t be much of a geek if I didn’t consider the power source for our must-have gadgets, right?
That’s why I picked up a great little product called the Monster Outlets to Go Power Strip. It’s just a basic four-outlet power strip, but it is light, compact, and made to travel. The cord wraps around the strip for compact packing, and it’s ready to pull out of your bag at a moment’s notice to turn a single wall outlet into four power sources. No lines. No waiting.
Hotels and hospitals NEVER have enough power outlets to provide the juice we need for all the stuff we “have” to carry around with us these days. If you travel at all, or if you’re preparing for some hospital time, I suggest you check out the Outlets to Go.
A while back, I revealed my shock and horror at having a stinkin’ mouse loose in my lovely home. It was a mighty battle that lasted throughout the day and involved me, my wife, an exterminator, and my two cats. It didn’t end well for the mouse.
Well, last week, the builder in the neighborhood cleared the lot across the street from my garage to start a new house. Guess what that means. That’s right: another stinking mouse sought refuge in my home. Much to his dismay, he found no safe sanctuary there.
Once again, the cats dutifully alerted us to an intruder, this time in our fireplace. We heard him squeaking around in there, and Maryalice finally saw him pop out and try to climb up our fireplace screen. With two cats on the other side of the barrier, he apparently decided to drop back down and establish his home in the fireplace.
After an emergency trip to Lowes for more glue traps, I got to work. Now, we have a fireplace with the standard mesh curtain and then a free-standing fireplace screen in front of that. The mouse only had two means of exit: one, up the chimney and out through the roof; or two, out the front of the fireplace and into my living room. So, I put a total of ten glue traps between the fireplace and the fireplace screen. That’s right. Ten. I called it the Patio of Doom. It was a little rodent minefield.
Fortunately, we caught the little critter before bed. He got stuck in one trap and then tried to escape by crawling into a second trap. There was apparently some faulty mouse logic at play. I once again took care of the clean-up duties, but let’s just say it didn’t end to the mouse’s satisfaction.
With the baby due in five weeks, I’m having to deal with the fact that movie outings and date nights are going to go on hiatus for a while. I hear that a new baby kind of necessitates a lot of days and nights at home, rather than kicking around town. So, in an effort to avoid the future house-craziness that my wife so loves in me, I’m looking for alternative entertainment options. Enter streaming TV.
I have a great TV. It’s a 42″ Vizio beauty. And, of course, I have tons of devices attached to it. From my spot on the sofa right now, I can see the AppleTV, Tivo Series 3, upconverting DVD player, and the Wii. Behind the TV, I have an ethernet hub splitting my data line between the Tivo and AppleTV. There’s some magic in that there cable.
First, the Tivo. The day Netflix first came out on the Tivo, I wrote a post expressing my disappointment. Well, that disappointment has vanished. Since then, Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” has worked perfectly through my Tivo, delivering a large catalog of free streaming movies and TV shows to the big screen with no problem. Granted, the selection isn’t that great yet, but I’m sure that’ll come. The technology works; that’s the big deal. And, my wife and I have enjoyed re-watching the first two seasons of The Office already—in gorgeous HD no less—at our convenience and with flawless playback. Cool.
Tonight, I took my streaming media to the next level by hacking my much-loved AppleTV. I love my AppleTV. It is a tragedy that it has not become more widely adopted by the masses. The HD movie rental options on iTunes get better every week, so a movie is always a click away with no trips to Blockbuster and no waiting for movies in the mail from Netflix.
Whereas I loved the AppleTV before, though, I super-all-out-crazy love it now. Why? Because I hacked it with the Boxee media player, which allows me to stream the entire catalog of Hulu movies and TV shows to my TV. (instructions HERE)
What’s Hulu, you ask? That’s the place where NBC/Universal moved all of their streaming content last year. I didn’t think it’d make it, especially since NBC pulled out of iTunes to do it. However, I was wrong. Hulu rocks. It has tons of old classic TV shows to browse and watch and, more importantly, it’s the place to go if you miss a current TV show.
What if my Tivo is already recording the two maximum-allowed shows when I want to watch The Biggest Loser? No worries. I can just watch Loser the next day through Hulu for free. Same sofa. Same remote control. Same TV. Free. Love it.
This is an incredible time to be a geeky fan of TV and movies. Much to Comcast and Charter’s chagrin, cable television is becoming less and less relevant. If they don’t change their models soon, I wonder how they’ll make it. Honestly, I don’t care. The internet loves me, so I’ll never be starved for shows.
Posted by Allen 
Posted by Allen 
Posted by Allen 
