Transformers

Today for the fourth Harry and I went out to Burbank to have lunch and see a movie. We wanted to see Transformers and got to the theater about noon. It was a mad house and every showing of Transformers was sold out, luckily the 4:05 showing had some tickets because that is the one we wanted to see, so we got our tickets. We had lunch at one of our favorite places Island. And then walked back to the theater and saw a line starting for Transformers already.. we still had a little over 2 1/2 hours. It was the hottest it's been all well in the 100's and we didn't want to sit there so we went to the mall for a half hour to stay cool. We walked back and saw the line was getting longer so we got into and roasted for an hour and a half before they let us in.

Now for the movie... it was a very fun movie, alot of action, alot of fighting, alot of explosions. The SFX were top notch, which we expected and the story though simple was complete and really explained who and what the Autobots and Decepticans are. The actors were good especially Shia Labeouf. If I had a complaint about the movie is that at times when robot is fighting robot it's hard to tell who is who. But other than that this is a fun roller coaster ride of a movie.

Happy Fourth of July

I hope everyone has a great 4th...

Back to Work

Well today I went back to work after giving my two weeks notice. I started to tell my co-workers and it was nice because they were upset that I was leaving and I got to hear what a good boss I am and it was a good confident builder. Most of them totally understand where I was coming from.. which was nice meaning it wasn't just me. My boss came in my office and asked if we needed to talk.. to said "NO" and she continued to go on and tell me how I need to be more communicative and she wish I would have talked to her before I quit.. blah blah blah.. I told her I liked her as a person, she said.. well not according to my letter. I corrected her and said.. I think you are a good person just a horrible boss. She didn't like that much but oh well. She was very nice the rest of the day. Telling what's going on in post, asking me to do stuff and saying please and if you have time. It was kind of odd. Then I went upstairs to my line producers office and we chatted. He understood why I quit, he did say he didn't know how bad things were for me, I did talk to him a month earlier about quitting. He said they would keep me on only for a week, which was fine with me.. so at the end of this week I will be unemployed... but you know what.. I DON'T CARE!!!!

I plan on taking the rest of the month of July off and start a new job in August.

Two Week Notice

Well I did it... I gave my two weeks notice. I wrote out a very long and detailed letter on why I felt this was the right choice. This will be the first time I have ever quit a job but man my sanity and stress level is more important to me then the job. I finally was able to put my wants infront of others needs. Now I have to wait and see how they will react. I already got a call from my boss, she left a message on my cell phone a few hours later. Saying that she is sorry and didn't know I was that unhappy.. she wanted me to call her back.. but I didn't feel like it. I did give them the option for me to work two more weeks.. I didn't want to leave them with no one but will see if they want me to continue or not.

I AM SO HAPPY... this is the happiest I have been in the past few months. It's like the elephant on my shoulder has been taken off. I'll keep you posted.

Meltdown at Work

Some of you may or may not know but I haven't been too happy with my current job. My executive producer is a very difficult person to work for. She can't seem to handle her stress so I become her whipping boy. She complains about the computer hard drives humming to loud and not being able to work, she blames me for every little thing that happens in post but at the same time she won't allow me to do my job in post. I have no idea what the editors are doing since she won't allow them to follow my schedule. The list goes on and on but the thing that led to my meltdown today was when she called me to her office to complain about lunch again. First let me say that she wants lunch by 12:30 everyday. So she picked Bossa Nova for lunch today, we called it in at Noon and planed on picking it up and back by 12:30pm. Well they were super busy and told us it would be an hour. We told my boss it would be an hour but she seemed okay with that... well like I said she called me to her office and gave me a talken too. Since she didn't get her lunch at 12:30pm she has low blood sugar and wasn't able to concentrate and lost valuable time in the edit bay.. and guess what.. it was my fault. I told her that we did tell her that food was going to be late.. she then went on to tell me that I as post super need to be able to foretell the future and know if a restaurant is going to take longer to do our order so we can call earlier. Well that did it.. that was the final stupid thing she was going to say to me.. I stood up told her that I needed to leave her office and exited. I stopped by the line producers office and told him that I'm going to take this weekend and really think about my job and weather I want to work here or not. I went down stairs back to my desk for about an hour until the line producer, who understands my issues with my boss.. told me I could go home.... so I did.

I have never been so angry before. I was near tears and shaking from head to toe. It took me hours to fall asleep that night.

Re-Building My Computer

Well slowly but surely I have been re-building my PC. It's taken a few weeks but it's all coming back together. If you read previous blogs you know I lost about 10% of my media.. but I did manage to find back up DVD's from 2005 that I had forgotten about with all our Home Videos that we had digitized. So some good news there. I'm still uploading programs and media that has disappeared off my computer. My big thing will be doing my Itunes again. I'm a huge Itunes person and lost everything, music, videos, podcasts... all this stuff will need to be re-uploaded which will take a while. So it will be about a month before my computer is back to where it will be... actually it will never be what it was since I'll never have everything back.. but I got my important stuff.. pictures and home videos.. everything else is extra.

Just When You Think It Can't Get Any Worse

Well today while I was at work Harry worked his magic and after hours and hours of trying figure out what was missing from my computer and got the internet to work. Of course when I got home one of the patches that he downloaded kept causing the computer to crash but he quickly resolved that issue.

So as you know I have been trying to transfer media from my old bad drive to the new one via a really old and slow Mac G3. I am almost done. I have one huge music file and all of our home video that we have digitized from tape to MPG for editing left to transfer. I figure tomorrow I would all be done and ready to re-organize and put back on my computer. Well I was getting out of my jeep and sure enough my computer bad split open and both old and new drives fell about a foot to the hard concrete ground. I quickly went inside the apartment and plugged in both drives and guess what.. the new drive seemed fine but the old one was making a weird kind of clicking inside the actually hard drive area and wouldn't mount to the desktop, just my luck.. being so close to finishing up the transfer and permanently destroying the drive. I swear the hard drives just don't like me. So I'm done with the transfer and I managed to save about 80% of my media. Computers are great when the work but man they are a pain in the ass when they don't. Let's hope this is the end of my computer woes for a while.

Fixing my Computer

Okay.. tried last night to rebuild my computer hard drive and couldn't get it to work.. we gave up. Started the day with cleaning the kitchen, dining and living room. After this Harry and I went back to trying to rebuild my RAID system. We tried and failed several times but finally figured out what the problem was and managed to build my new RAID hard drive system. Great.. finally they computer is up and running with two new hard drive for a total of 600 gigabyte of space. Now it's time to upload all the programs. A few of the programs needed to register online so I decided to hold off on uploading more info and opted to try and connect to the internet through the router. Again this be a PC from hell it wouldn't work... we tried and tried but still nothing. After hours of trying I got frustrated and gave up. So as it is now.. my computer has a new bigger hard drive and windows XP is not operating.. but that's as far as we have gone. Gotta work on it some more. Harry is really good with computers so I'm sure he'll figure out what the problem is. BTW.. still transferring media from the bad drive to the new drive... still have a few more days left.

Cleaning / Kyle XY

I spent today cleaning up the back patio, every few months it seems like a tornado goes through it and it requires a few hours to re-organize and clean up. But once done I have a feeling of accomplishment. The back patio looks great now. Not only did I clean the back patio I also replace all four of our kitchen lights that have been out for a few weeks. I had intended on cleaning more but we started to watch the second episode of Kyle XY and the next thing I knew we were watching episode eight and would have gone more but I didn't have the last disc, so we had to stop. So what started as a great full of energy and cleanaloic day ended with a seven hour marathon of Kyle XY... I'm loving this series.

Computers, Computers, Computers

Well if you read my blog earlier you know my computer hard drive crashed and I had just backed up my entire drive to an external drive, which also crashed. Well we tried hooking up the external hard drive to Harry's Mac to see if it was noticed it. The Mac did see it but you could not mount it. I borrowed Disk Warrior from our friend Bruce, if you don't know what that is it's a fantastic program that can rebuild hard drives and almost always works. Well come to find out that now that Mac's use Intel processors the Disk Warrior won't work with them unless you buy (50 bucks) upgrade. I wasn't going to do this just because I wasn't sure this Mac program would work on a PC created drive.

My next plan was to see if my older G3 Mac laptop would see the drive and sure enough it did. I couldn't believe it. So I tired the Disk Warrior on it and found out that it cannot fix non-Mac drives, glad I didn't buy the upgrade. So instead we hooked up Harry's 500 gig external drive and started to copy over the media. It will take about four or five days to bring everything over... I have over 175 gig of info to transfer on a very slow G3. So it seems like everything is okay.. well except OX 9 for some reason has a weird flaw of truncating the names of a file. So all my e-comics say Star Trek #CHGSI$#$%.cbr and all my music have titles like Bonnie Raitt - Let's $#tnm9#$S.mp3. So it's going to take me a while to go though everything and rename it all so it make sense.. but I shouldn't complain at least I have gotten back about 90% of what I lost.

Kyle XY

This is a TV series on ABC Family Channel. It started last year and I wanted to watch it then but missed a few episodes and I knew this was a serial drama and had to watch it from the beginning to make sense so I waited for it to come out on DVD. Well I got season one on DVD and for TV night tonight we watched the first episode. I really enjoyed it, it's sci fi/fantasy with a little teen drama mixed in. The first episode did a good job at establlishing the characters and the mystery of "Who is Kyle XY". I can't wait to see what happens.

More Birthdays

Happy Birthday to my Cousin Robert and my friend Nicola. I wish you both a very Happy Birthday Today.

Happy Birthday Leonhard

Today is Harry's nephew's birthday... the big 4... Happy Birthday Leonhard

Happy Father's Day/Fantastic Four 2

Today Harry and I visited my Dad for Father's Day. We burned him two CD's of his favorite songs and got him Season one of King of Queens. We also took him to lunch and a movie. We saw Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

I really enjoyed the first one. I know some folks didn't like it but it was entertaining to me. I like the effects and really enjoyed seeing how each person dealt with there new powers. I thought the first film also set up the relationships between the characters. So I knew part 2 was going to be action pack and it didn't disappoint. This one also had a more complete story, awesome effects and was very comical at times. The Silver Surfer was pretty cool, we didn't go in great details of his past but just enough to understand why he is doing what he is doing. It was good to see Doom back even though he was more of a minor role until the end. The final battle was great, the Fantatic Car was awesome and I like that Johnny got the spotlight. Both Harry and Dad enjoyed it and it was a fun Father's Day visit.

Computer Woes

My PC has been acting up for months now, but not enough to go through the hassle of re-formatting the hard drives. But today it started to do something worse and I started to get worried so I cleaned off one of my external hard drives and started to back up everything. Took me all day but I managed to back up my entire PC with exception of "My Video" folder which was pretty big. But I got most of it and I was happy. After I backed up everything I checked the external drive to make sure things were okay.. well there were issues. Even though the media was there the drive somehow lost it's format and was no longer a valid drive. I was disappointed but thought.. oh well I'll back it all up again tomorrow.

Well I get up Sunday morning and started my computer and guess what... yep it said that it didn't have a bootable drive and was unable to start. We tried booting from an external CD but it says I don't have any hard drives... then we you do a check on the hard drives and it says the drives are fine and working.

So it seems both my compuer and back up drive have crashed. Luckily I have about 70% of my stuff saved on DVD's but still I hate losing stuff, recent music, audio books, videos and e-comics. I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to retrieve some of my missing media. Here's hoping!!!!

Pirates of the Caribbean III

So after three weeks of it being in theaters Harry and I finally saw Pirates III. First let me say that we watched Pirates II a few nights before since Harry had not seen it so we were in a Pirates mood. The movie opens with some very beautifully haunting images then picks up where the last film left off. This was a fun roller coaster ride of a film. It was more violent then the other two but it was also a "bigger" movie. The special effects were great, the acting was good and the story was fun. My favorite scene was the crew getting back to the land of the living by flipping over their ship. It was a very cool plot point and some very fancy effects. Of course they leave this film open for a sequel and if they make it I'll be there to see it.. if not I'm happy with this great adventurous Trilogy.

Free Hugs

Have you guys seen these You Tube videos called "Free Hugs". It started with a man, Juan Mann down in Australia who was holding up a sign saying "Free Hugs". It was set to music and put on You Tube.. it was instantly a hit and shown all over the world. Then other "Free Hugs" Video started to popping up on You Tube, from China, Peru, Hollywood, New York, Warsaw, Italy and so on.

We live in a very damaged and corrupt world and watching these videos of strangers hugging for no reason other then to hug is inspirational. Whenever I'm feeling down all I have to do is watch one of these and it lifts my sprits and bring me to tears. If you haven't seen this great videos check them out at www.youtube.com and search for "Free Hugs".

No More "Little" Brother

Some of you might be wondering why I haven't posted much about my "little" brother in recent months... well there have been some complications. He has had some anxiety and seperation issues with his mother. We tried to make the visits shorter, three hours is manditory but we cut them down to a little over an hour and we thought it was working. But the past few visits have been cancelled with Nico saying he is sick or not feeling well so his mother and I talked along with the Big Brother sponser and decided that he might be a bit young to be in the program and will have to be taken out for the time being.

So this is two "littles" in one year. I think I'm going to take a break from being a Big Brother for a while. It's tough to get to know a "little" and start to enjoy the time spent together then something comes up and you "lose" them. Both of these happend about four months into the program, and at that point you really start to get emotional attached and then they are gone... it's tough. I think I might wait till this current job is over before starting the program again.

Harry Potter Deluxe Book Cover

Today they released the book cover for the Deluxe edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It shows are Trio on the back of Dragon. Only a little over a month left before the final Harry Potter book is released. I can't wait.. but also can't believe it's almost over.

4 Years!!!!

We started talking via Internet in March but today marks our four-year anniversary of the first time we actually meet in person, I can remember like it was yesterday. I can't believe it's been four great years. We have our hurdles to over come, but LOVE can make you forget all your problems. I loved him from the first moment was started talking and if it's possible I love him even more today. I can't imagine my life without him in it. Happy Anniversary!!!!