Books read Sept/Oct - Dec 2007

One of the girls at work posted the books she had read so I started keeping track of mine.
From about the end of September/October or so, while working on other projects I read:
Peter Jackson – A film-makers journey by Brian Sibley
The Rants by Dennis Miller
Ranting Again by Dennis Miller
The Rant Zone by Dennis Miller
I Rant therefore I am by Dennis Miller
Napalm and Silly Putty by George Carlin
Comic Book Nation – The Transformation of Youth Culture in America by Bradford W Wright
The Art of Animation Drawing by Don Bluth
Behind the Mask of Spider-Man: The Secrets of the Movie by Mark Cotta Vaz

In November, I had read:
Monster Kid Memories by Bob Burns and Tom Weaver
Bring Me That Horizon: The Making of Pirates of the Caribbean by Michael Singer
How to Tell a Secret by P.J. Huff and J.G. Lewin

Finally in December, I read:
The Art of Demotivation by E.L. Kersten, Ph.D
The Starbucks Experience by Joseph A. Michelli
Making Great Boxes by Wood Magazine
Basic Model Railroading! Getting started in the Hobby – edited by Kent J. Johnson
Project Railroads You Can Build – selected by Kent J. Johnson
Ship Models from Kits by Colin Riches
No Plot? No Problem! By Chris Baty
Freight Car Projects and Ideas – selected by Kent Johnson
Give our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics – edited by Sean Howe
Scale Model Buildings by Michael Andress
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing for Young Adults by Deborah Perlberg
The Usborne Introduction to the First World War – by Ruth Brocklehurst & Henry Brook
Writing Handbooks: Writing Sitcoms by John Byrne & Marcus Powell
The DC Comics Guide to Pencilling Comics by Klaus Janson

My bedside book was JRR Tolkien by Katharyn W Crabbe. I don't get to read as much in bed as I used to back in the day so this was one that I worked away at for several months.

Currently, I'm halfway through Warships in Miniature by Michael Ainsworth and should finish it over the next day or so.

Prior to this list, I had read a bunch of World War One books for the Canvas Eagles at Wincon. Some I will reread in the new year when I get back to finishing the model planes. My tastes seem to be heavy into whatever bright light has caught my eye at the moment. This doesn't include the graphic novels or kids books that we read to the kids.
Magazine wise, I normally read White Dwarf, Star Wars Insider, and Robot magazine each month, and Reader's Digest, People, Macleans, and Comic and Games Retailer magazine in batches when the wife finishes with them.

post X-mas wrap - up (unwrap-up?)

I saw a lot of family on my mom’s side over the holidays – all the aunts and uncles were over for chicken noodle soup on boxing day. As well, on Christmas eve we had my whole family except for my younger sister and her brood (BC’s a bit of a journey to make it over for dinner). It was good to see my nieces again – they don’t visit enough now that they are in that fun age.

I now have 4 Star Wars Miniatures AT-ATs, 3 AT-STs (and a 4th one with different armament), and 8 snowspeeders. Except for the 6 towers (1 en route already) and people, I now have enough to play Assault on Hoth super upsized. I could still use 1 extra AT-AT though – there is an event card that gives a bonus AT-AT to the Empire side. That’s going to be hard to swing by the wife though, she already feels that four is pushing it. I already have the extra three snowpeeders for the Rebel Reinforcements event card.

We also got a load of movies – including White Christmas, Red Dawn, Sean of the Dead. We did finally get Serenity in fullscreen – so I can still justify getting the newer version on widescreen. With the boxing day sales, I finally picked up a set of the Matrix trilogy, Beetlejuice, and League of Extrordinary Gentlemen. So I’m good for late night work again with extra features galore.

I finally got a quality digital camera, so I should be able to update more often with pictures instead of just words. As long as I can upload directly, I won’t have to wait for the films to get developed onto a CD for the images.

Now to see if I can still get a Alive Chimpanzee at Walmart.
http://www.wowweealiveonline.com/chimp_index.html

the night before Christmas

We went out to Pinawa for the weekend for a quiet Christmas with Shan’s folks. Shan’s mom had a stroke about 6 weeks ago and is still recovering from it. She seems fine – a bit more frail than normal – but gets tired quickly and often takes naps. The prognosis is good, and she is expected to make a full recovery, but it will take some time.
The drive out Friday night was slow as the snow was blowing but the traffic was light and we made it there without any mishaps. The kids were quite wound up and ended up opening their gifts on the Saturday. Shan had made the ham on Saturday and the turkey on Sunday and both were wonderful.

They are all home together today while I am at work so we’ll see how high the excitement levels will get. The kids aren’t ones for getting up early on Christmas Day though. Often, Shan and I will have to wake them by 9am to get the day started.
D3’s having a crisis of faith this year. About half of the kids in his class don’t believe in Santa Claus. He has asked for coal for his stocking – not that he feels that he has been bad but more to help prove Santa’s existence.

Shan doesn’t put out my gifts until the last moment. I’m usually very good about being about to guess my gifts by weight and package size. I remember our early years together. She had said that I could shake my gifts but then was appalled as I slowly tipped the box back and forth. This I had learned from science class where you have to determine what was in a sealed box by observing whether objects rolled or slid when the box was tipped in various ways. Since then, I’m not allowed to shake my gifts or even look too closely at them.

A very merry Christmas to you and yours from me and mine. Happy holidays to the more secular of you. A happy Christmaka to those who understand it and a happy Festivus for the rest of us.

Birchwood - bad dealership?

We had gone in to Birchwood to talk about the rust on quarter panels that had come back one month after they were to have fixed it. It turns out that in order to fix it properly, they would have to replace the entire door assembly and they feel that that cost’s too much for them. Even though this was something that they had approved as a condition of us buying the van, and that had delayed us for a week in picking up the car as they sent it off to get fixed, they don’t want to do it. Not that they are saying that they can’t do it, just that they don’t want to.

We explained to them that, one of their managers approved this and if they had an issue with that manager’s decision, they should take it up with them. Also, if they had sent this off to get fixed and the place merely painted over the rust instead of fixing it, that is something that they could take up with the body shop.

They were thinking of just giving us some minor financial compensation. We proposed that, since they had said that they would fix this, but now don’t want to, we could take the amount it would take to get fixed. They explained that this cost was almost what we had paid for the vehicle and that they didn’t think that was fair to them.

Shan also proposed that they could give us another similar vehicle in a straight trade for this one that they sold us under false pretenses. They had two other Windstars on the lot – both newer. They were all excited to show us them and were ready to make the trade because they weren’t listening and thought that we would pay then another $6000 for the difference. When Shan repeated that we would do a straight trade but not pay more, they were less enthused about the idea. You have to wonder at their mentality – “I know that we lied about fixing this vehicle that we sold you, but how about giving us that one back, plus more money again, and we’ll give you a newer vehicle that will be fine this time, we promise”. Isn’t that the whole definition of bait-and-switch?

Andrew wasn’t able to make that kind of decision so he had to get his manager to call Shannon back. When he did the next, he basically offered her the same deal that she had already turned down. So we’ll have to go back and see them after the holidays. At least we have out vehicle back. Since they weren’t fixing it after all, they didn’t see the need to keep paying for a rental.

Christmas cookie scam

Every year some people organize a cookie exchange. The idea is, you bake extra batches of cookies (usually in dozens) and trade them with other people for the extras they’ve made. I can’t ever think why this would be a good idea.

I suppose there is a modicum of time saved in buying various ingredients and mixing different batches for the various cookies when instead you just crank out an assembly line of one type of cookies. My issue is, why would I make extra batches of cookies I do like and trade them away for cookies that I may not like? I suppose there are some Martha Stewarts out there who are lovingly crafting several hundreds of cookies so that they can show off their prowess but if not, and standards are slipping with the larger batches, why would I want those cookies? Our time seems better spent making a few small batches of the cookies that we actually know we like and having those for ourselves. If someone else finds making different batches of cookies boring and a hassle, do I really want to trade my cookies for theirs?

be the guy

When we were last at the local Games Workshop, the clerk mentioned that someone had bought one of the ForgeWorld titans and brings it by from time to time for Apocalypse events. It turns out that we know the guy.

He had been selling games by mail order and had a booth at the weekend flea market for a while. Since I had experience in this, we had been pushing him to go to GAMA.
I had sold games by mail order for several years and had looked into opening a store front for a while but never got enough together to take that step. We had been doing booths at comic shows and conventions but they didn’t have the same permanent flea market set-ups at that time. We had kids and it became more difficult to set up and watch these temporary booths so we let it slide and looked into what we needed to open a storefront.
Those things never materialized so we ended up closing out that venture for now.

The GAMA trade show was a great resource though and we highly recommend it to anyone who is in the retail game business. We were pushing him to take his wife with him so she could see how much of an actual business this can be. With his impending wedding though he wasn’t able to get to it. I just found out he is out for now as well.

I had also been pushing him to go to GAMA and Gencon so he could be ‘the guy’. At both of these venues, you get to meet the game designers, see the new products, and learn about what’s new and coming up soon. You get to be ‘the guy’ that knows these things and has met these people and can talk to others about this. People who visit the store and run into you can seek your opinion and knowledge in these matters because you’re ‘the guy’.
I used to be the guy but, since I haven’t been to Gencon in several years, haven’t done an open Wincon in years, and haven’t been around Keycon as much these last few years, a lot of the new crowd doesn’t know me as the guy anymore.

When I found out that it was him who had bought the titan, I was able to congratulate him on being ‘the guy’ after all. Anyone else who wants to congratulate him or see his titan can pop by the Games Workshop on Dec 29 or Jan 6 (5th?).

I am Legend

Okay, I haven’t read the book. I haven’t seen the entire The Omega Man with Charlton Heston in 1971 and have only seen clips of The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price from 1964. I did see Night of the Comet in the theatre and saw the Australian film The Quiet Earth on Superchannel – both of which I liked.

That said, we did see the Will Smith movie I Am Legend last night at Silver City and I believe that we did like it. It’s being promoted as an action film and it really isn’t. They gloss over the technology of the virus so it doesn’t get caught up on its own pseudo-science like some of the science-based movies do (like The Core). They have some nice topical phrases like “jumped species” that hint of the impending avian flu.

It dealt a bit more with the introspective part of being the only person around and keeping up a routine. I’ve been told it’s part of the book, but the military scientist rings a bit odd. Shan had more issues with the degenerates. We were okay with their look and the CG didn’t cause us any trouble. The only this was the lack of damage they seemed to inflict upon themselves and their robustness after the undetermined time. We can understand that they might be able to do some incredible things in their condition with ignoring pain and damage to themselves but that they seemed a bit invulnerable. The one scene where the leader repeatedly smashes his face into the glass should have smashed his nose and cut up his forehead at the least.

Plus at the end, the girl might want to think about carrying the vial in a container or box in case she slips and drops it.

All in all, it was a good film. It is definitely not an action film, but it does have enough action in it to drive along the otherwise dry story.