thomasng [dot] net a nerds life. changing things one byte at a time.

The last 3 months

I’ve kind of disappeared lately. The last few months has been filled with the usual stresses of work, lot of cycling, and just filling late night time with TV shows before dozing off. I stayed at home sick today with the intention of getting some work done, but that isn’t happening. Instead, I’ve been thinking about bits and pieces of my life. I wanted to try and catch you all up. I say “try” because I always start out with the idea that I’ll get my point across but inevitably fail because I soon find that writing about myself isn’t the most interesting thing at all. I’m surprised that you’re even reading this really.

Work has been stressful, as I’m sure many of you can relate. I spent the better part of May, June, July and August cooped up in the hardware engineering lab or the EMC chamber until the wee hours of the morning. There were a few off-site adventures to NW EMC to checkout FCC compatibility of my project, and at times find out that we’re not so compliant which led to a lot of debugging. As it were, it was a constant rinse and repeat cycle of working from 8-5 verifying my project, and debugging issues. I’d go cycling for an hour or two to get my head on straight, then return to the office from 8-midnight or later. I’m sure that can’t be good for anyone. Some days I would be so tired that my mind was completely numb, and I’d just walk around in a daze.

Cycling, for the most part, kept me sane. I’d ride 20-30 miles after work just to get my mind off of things. It was really nice to just sit and propel yourself on a country road for miles at a time. I started the season back on March 12, 2009, and officially ended it just last week on Sept 23rd, 2009 with a total of 2321 miles over the last 6 months. My bike, a 2006 Specialized Tarmac Comp has seen well over 4000 miles since i bought it in the spring of 2007. I wore out the original set of brakes and the original set of wheels after 3000 miles. The chain was changed back around 2000 miles and it’s only been through one “accident” during the 2007 STP. Not too bad.

Other stuff
Somehow I found some opportunities to fall in love with a new movie — well, new to me anyway. In early August, I was over at a friend’s place and and watched “Serenity“. Yes, it was originally filmed in 2005. The acting was great and the concept of a colonized universe because the “Earth was used up” seemed appealing to me. Apparently my brother, David, tried to show me this movie back in 2006 after it came out on DVD, but I had no reason to watch it. Boy, was I mistaken. I come to find out that the movie was based on the 2002 TV show “Firefly.” I looked it up on Hulu the same weekend and gave the first and second episode a shot. Boy, it was good and I wondered why I never heard of it before — perhaps it was because it was stuck in the library studying my ass off at the time.

I watched almost the entire season in the first weekend and thought I’d better see how many seasons this show ran. I was saddened to find out that the series only ran for one season before being canceled by Fox. D’oh! I bought the Blu-Ray versions of both titles and watched them both at least twice over now. I think it just gets better each time really. As a side note, I found the character of Kaylee Fry (played by Jewel Staite) really sweet and loving. She’s the ships mechanic, who is sweet and “bubbly” and yet be very stern and straight with someone when she is upset. I think Jewel is hot, so that may have something to do with it as well The whole Firefly / Serenity series consumed about 2 weeks of the late night hours which is great – something to watch before I doze off to sleep for the night.

Somewhere in here, I bought a new home theater system. I thought, man, it might be time to get sound that is better than just the two speakers from my TV. I’m glad I made that choice since the “movie experience” in the house went from “OK” to “DAMN! I didn’t know that bullet went from the front left corner of the room to the rear right!” (Of course, you may have guessed the first thing that popped into the DVD player was The Matrix and the all mighty lobby shoot out scene

ANYWAY… After finding out that Firefly only aired for a season, i started looking at the Filmography of the principle characters and found a couple of other good shows as a result. Nathan Fillion (who played Captain Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds) was in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog (starring Neil Patrick Harris — yes, Doogie Howser); Adam Baldwin (who played Jayne) is in Chuck as John Casey (knew this one already since I already watch Chuck!); Summer Glau (the Terminator on the Sarah Connor Chronicles, duh!) and Jewel Staite who was casted as a recurring guest star in Season 4 of Stargate: Atlantis and promoted to a regular status in Season 5 as Dr. Jennifer Keller.

I watched Stargate: SG1 on and off for the last few years on SCI-FI and was familiar with the whole “Stargate” concept so I thought I’d give Stargate Atlantis a try — started with Season 5. I watched it and definitely loved the characters in the show as well as a continuation of what the SG:1 series had already established. But again, I was saddened to find out that the show did not get renewed for a sixth season. (Man, i thought, that’s two shows that I’ve watched and that’s two shows that I find out that has been canceled?!?). So if you know me, then you’ll also know that I really like Science Fiction — yes, even Star Trek; I’m sure there is a Trekkie side in you as well — so I went a head and bought seasons 4 and 5 of Stargate: Atlantis on DVD (there is no Blu-Ray version, unfortunately ). While I waited for those to arrive, I started watching the Pilot episode of Stargate Atlantis and for the next month I watched Seasons 1, 2, and 3 from, uh, shall we say, an “online, and out of country, source.” The video quality suffered a bit, but the story line was rather engaging. I then followed suite with Season 4, and re-watched Season 5 for continuity and clarification and got all of the inside-jokes in the screen play. Watching SG:A revived my love for Sci-Fi, I went a head and bought Seasons 1-3 as well.

Stargate: Atlantis (SG:A) is the second part of the Stargate series (preceded by Stargate:SG1). With the cancellation of the show, the SyFy network premiered Stargate: Universe (SG:U) to explore the 9th chevron of the Stargate (9th symbol address to “dial” between two stargate devices and establish a connecting wormhole). Some back history can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(device). It should be noted that much of the “Stargate” travel is heavily based on theoretical astrophysics, particularly that of black holes and wormholes — so not entirely “far fetched” considering that there are real people, today, that spend their lives doing theoretical astrophysics. But of course, “far fetched” is used broadly in this context Naturally i watched the pilot episodes and find it intriguing at this time. The only actor/actress that i know from that series is Ming-Na (who played Dr. Jing-Mei Chen on ER).

Oh yeah, so after watching the last season and episode of SG:A (for the second time!) i started to search for other shows that the main characters are a part of. First, there’s the obvious (because I told you above, unless you just skipped a few paragraphs) — Jewel Staite from Firefly who played as Dr. Jennifer Keller, Chief Medical Officer of the Atlantis base. David Hewlett (who plays as a self-described genius and astrophysicist Dr. Rodney McKay) wrote a British comedy themed movie called A Dog’s Breakfast — which starred himself, Kate Hewlett (real life and movie sister), Paul McGillion, and Rachel Luttrell – which i found quite odd and hilarious since some of those are the primary cast members and recurring guest stars on SG:A. I bought A Dog’s Breakfast just yesterday along with SG:A Seasons 1-3, so lets watch it at a movie night sometime in the near future.

There’s currently rumored to be a direct to DVD Stargate Atlantis movie, but the release date hasn’t been announced. I hope that one makes it through.

In closing:
If you’ve have made it this far, I applaud you.

When i started to write this several hours ago, I re-watched the Firefly episode “Out of Gas.” – If you don’t get into the whole Firefly series or the Serenity movie, do yourself a favor and at least give this episode a try. It shows a lot of the character development and the back history of the main characters that were on the ship. In my estimation, which may or may not be worth anything to you, it is definitely a “MUST SEE”

Thanks for sticking with it.
-T