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Movies Pokey

Macs, Bats, and Bugs

Wow, two posts within a week! This might be a new record for me. Well, true to my word, I’m trying to keep this blog fresh and updated. So without further ado, it’s time for something new I’m calling…

We had a busy weekend. With OS X Mountain Lion now available, I decided it was finally time to sell my 5 year old iMac and move up to a faster machine. We went to the local Apple store and bought a Mac Mini first and I swapped out the paltry 2GB of RAM and sluggish 5400 RPM hard drive with a 8GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. I was a little nervous at first, but the entire install only took about 20 minutes. Once I did the Internet Recovery option on the new drive, I downloaded and installed Mountain Lion. Installation went very quickly. Once it was done, I test the reboot times. Less 10 seconds from chime to log-in! All the apps open in less than a second.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with my new Mini. The jury is still out on Mountain Lion. I like it so far, but at first glance it doesn’t seem much different than regular Lion. I’m sure it’ll take a few weeks to unearth all the gems and tweak it to my liking before I truly fall in love with it. And if you are one of the 3 million users that downloaded Mountain the first week it was out and you want to extract all the awesome sauce from this new iOS, check out these 80 tips for Mountain Lion.

On Saturday, I spent about another 10 hours in the garage wrenching on Pokey, my 1972 VW Beetle. A lot sanding, grinding, scraping, and cleaning! I have just a little more body work and some prep to do before it goes out for painting. I won’t bore anyone with the details. You can follow my build thread here. You can see what’s happening with Pokey in my Flickr gallery below. New pictures will show up there when they’re uploaded.

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Finally, on Sunday Joy and I went to see the new Batman movie “Dark Knight Rises.” I was a little worried that we weren’t going to like it based on some of the web comics I read and such, but overall we enjoyed. I liked it more than Dark Knight and I was actually surprised that I like Anna Hathaway as Cat Woman. It had a great ending and I’m actually a little sad that Nolan isn’t going to continue the series.

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Movies

A day at the movies

After entertaining with family yesterday and spending Saturday with friends on Saturday, Joy and I decided to take Monday holiday to ourselves and head to the movies for a double-feature. We actually saw three movies, but only one together. Joy went to her own movie while I saw the Karate Kid remake. I absolutely loved the Karate Kid. Personally, I thought it was much better than the original, even if the names were changed and they were in China and not California. The scenery was gorgeous and the story was really touching. I highly recommend seeing this one while it’s out in the theaters.

We also saw Toy Story 3 on Sunday with my family and I was blown away by it. Definitely the best of the whole series, but as it builds upon the previous two, you shouldn’t see it until you’ve seen those. The opening sequence alone was worth the price of admission, so make sure you arrive to the show late! A word of caution, Toy Story 3 is a very emotional ride. It has it’s ups and downs and really tugs at the ole heartstrings at the end. I caught myself welling up at the end and wanted to go home and dust off some of the toys from my childhood. There’s also a few moments in the movie that might be a little intense for youngsters. We saw at least one child get carried out during some scary scenes. I don’t know if Toy Story 3 was rated G or PG, but if it as G, it was definitely pushing the limits.