Troll Echos

This is a sort of addendum review now that I’ve seen Avatar in 3D, for the base review please see my Movie Review – Avatar post.  Most of this post I realize is more about 3D movies in general than about Avatar 3D specifically, but again if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to avoid this review for the couple of minor spoilers that could have gotten in.  I would like to preempt my own review with the information that I loved the movie, and would like to see it again in fact, and that things I say are observations more than complaints.

In the realms of 2D and 3D there are some important, and likely obvious, differences.  A 2D movie is like really any other movie you’ve seen at the theater or on your TV at home.  The picture you see is the only picture being projected on the screen when you are watching it.  This may also be obvious, but 3D movies need to project two movies onto the same screen at the same time and then provide your eyes some way to let each eye see only one of them.  With each eye seeing a different image there is really nothing that makes it any different than the way your eyes actually work, thus things can pop out of the screen or fall into the screen almost like magic.

The chosen method of “letting each eye see its own image” for the IMAX 3D version I saw was a pair of opposing polarized glasses with a light green tint in one lens and light purple tint in the other.  The glasses were light weight and reasonably comfortable even over my normal glasses, but in the warmth of a theater full of people made me feel a bit clammy with sweat after about half of the movie.  The effect the glasses have on the movie is that everything is a little bit darker and the colors are a little bit skewed.  It also left the whole movie just a little bit out of focus.  I’m not sure if that changes based on where you are sitting in the theater, but I suspect not thanks to the polarization that seemed to be at 45 degrees off of horizontal or vertical.  These two problems took away from the vibrantly colorful and amazingly beautiful scenes of the movie for me.

The most commonly used effect for most of the 3D in Avatar was that things fell into the screen providing a parallax scrolling style depth to things.  Occasionally things felt like they were out in the theater with you, but generally never in the hokey need to duck and flinch to keep from getting hit in the face with things kind of way made famous by older 3D movies.  The most common thing that was in the foreground was the seeds of the spirit tree or an occasional bit of plant life.  These effects were cool and didn’t feel overused to me, but I also felt they didn’t really add much to the movie.

My final determination having seen the movie both ways is that I prefer it in 2D.  A movie full of such bright colors and clean crisp graphics genuinely loses a little bit when darkened, color skewed, and slightly out of focus.  I highly recommend you see it both ways to compare for yourself since it’s a great enough movie that seeing it more than once is a wonderful thing indeed, but if you are only going to see it once, see the 2D version.  The true beauty of the movie speaks for itself without the need for added depth from forced 3D.

I will do my best to keep this as spoiler free as possible, and at the very least avoid spoiling anything that wasn’t already spoiled a bit by the trailers for the movie.  This is a bit of a rant about the movie Avatar and as such may want to be avoided by people that haven’t seen it.  I have seen the movie, so the following is based on my own experience, and not on other people’s reviews.  Which brings me to my first complaint.

Other people seem to love the idea of hating things for no reason.  There are an almost unending supply of “reviews” out there that simply pan the movie without details, and countless more that offer an opinion about the movie simply to join the masses when they haven’t seen it.  If you are going to pan the movie, offer some real convincing reasons about why you didn’t care for it.  If you are going to offer an opinion prior to having actually seen it you need to simply shut the hell up.  You don’t deserve an opinion.  That would be like the judges on Iron Chef deciding who wins in the episode they are judging by watching a previous episode.

Beyond that, I will clarify that I chose to not see the 3D version of the movie.  It was a decision made with my friends before we went involving concepts of not getting sick during the movie.  Thus, I offer no opinion of the 3D version at all.  It may be awesome, it may be nauseating, I’m not the guy that can tell you.

Even in its non-3D form, the visuals in the movie were simply stunning.  I jokingly offer them a 14 on a 10 point scale.  In plain English, they were beautiful and captivating.  Everything from the vast scale of the Navi themselves and the trees to the wonderful effects of the bioluminescence of everything on the moon of Pandora at night to the military machinery and explosives was interesting to look at and held my attention superbly.

Most reviews proclaim loudly that Avatar has limited characters, weak plot, and presents a basically hallow experience.  I can’t help but to disagree across the board.  I will grant you that the story is a tad cliche’ as a whole, but when was the last time you could say otherwise about really any Hollywood Blockbuster movie?  It’s about the ride for me.  Exciting action, a little bit of love story, some fun explosions and a whole lot of prettiness to take in while experiencing something that can’t be experienced in person.  Isn’t that what a movie is?

There are also parts of the story that some would describe as slow.  I personally actually liked those parts the best.  The main human character and the main Navi character learning from one another, or I guess the human doing most of the learning in that arrangement.  Learning the culture, language, and skills of an entirely alien race was exceedingly interesting for me and was easily my favorite parts of the movie.  I’m quite glad it was happening during a lot of the movie.  I actually found myself about as saddened as the main character when he was pulled back to the human world.

A sure sign of a very good movie for me is one that I find myself thinking about all night after seeing it.  I was wishing I could return to the places it showed me and it left me wanting to see it again.  Overall, I give the movie a 9 out of 10.  It was neither the best movie I’ve ever seen nor a merely mediocre one.  I highly recommend everyone goes to see it, and I will own it on Blu-Ray once it comes out as well.

I likely qualify as a reasonably “normal guy.”  I am in generally good health, I am happily married, I am gainfully employed, etc.  The main problem I had was nagging and common headaches.  Regularly I attributed the headaches to shifts in atmospheric pressure since I could tell you with clockwork accuracy whether it was going to rain later in the same afternoon or some time tomorrow just by how bad the headache was.  Sometimes the headaches were incredibly painful.  I regularly found myself taking Tylenol or Advil at least once a day, and often two or three times a day.  Every now and then I would get a day off for good behavior.

And so I lived for years.  Fearful for my liver with all the pain killers I was running through it, I sought the answer aggressively in little spurts when the headaches were particularly bad.  No answer, no one’s blog, no medical web site had any obvious answer that didn’t involve prescription pain killers or migraine medicine.  Then, without warning they vanished.  Entirely.  Then they came back again.

It was like a mystery to solve.  I had found the secret without knowing it, or likely even realizing it until it was too late.  Reminded that I had fixed it by the glaringly obvious return of the headaches instead of the subtle absence of them.  I looked over the month long gap in headaches and nothing stood out especially clearly as the solution.

Like any well meaning office drone, I live my life bouncing back and forth between eating properly and well, not-so-much, as I try to keep a life sitting down at a computer from ruining my body.  During the month of missing headaches I wasn’t on any diet plan, so that wasn’t it.  I wasn’t working out, I wasn’t stress free, I wasn’t doing anything different.  But I must have been, regular headaches don’t just stop without warning.

Then while walking through my local warehouse club store I turned down, of all places, the snack aisle.  I remembered a while back having purchased a big box of Fiber One bars, and I remember enjoying them tremendously.  They are after all, delicious.  Probably the tastiest granola type bars made by anyone.  Not thinking of the headaches that were once again just a part of my daily life, I picked up another box, purchased it, and wandered home.

The headaches vanished again, replaced by intense gas pressure in my gut, but I was paying attention this time.  The secret appeared to be fiber.  I once considered myself to be eating approximately correct amounts of things.  I ate reasonably well thanks to my wife’s wonderful cooking.  I had meats and veggies and starches and grains and fruits on a basically daily basis.  Somehow it wasn’t enough.  After a couple of weeks of eating a single Fiber One bar a day, the gas pain vanished as my body got used to higher amounts of fiber in my diet.  The headaches stayed gone.

My track record at this point for around eight months of daily Fiber One bars is roughly twenty Tylenol, and not all of those were for headaches.  From using two to six a day, to two per month on average.  By adding a simple tasty granola bar to my daily routine, I now use virtually no pain killers for headaches at all.  So to all you out there with unexplainable headaches, try a Fiber One bar every day for a little while.  It may not be the solution you need, but for me it was the “magic pill” I’d been looking for without success for nearly a decade and I’m eternally grateful these delicious things were invented.

Welcome to Maui.  Land of tropical pleasures, amazing landscapes, twisted crazy roads, and fantastic culture.  Come for fruity drinks with umbrellas and food that may remind you of a 1950’s drive-in, complete with as much fat and cholesterol as you could possibly want in your vacation food.  Leave because the locals hate you.

Any lovely evening at a luau should be enough to educate you about a bit of Hawaiian history and would teach about 100s of years of history and mythology before Hawaii became the 50th United State in 1959.  If that weren’t enough, they enjoyed a generally well managed monarchy until we (the USA) came in and abolished it all.  In their minds, generally speaking, this was not an excellent day for them.  (August 21st, 1959 to be exact.)

Don’t get me wrong here, not all of the locals are bitter and angry.  A vast portion of them are actually very friendly.  Those tend to be the ones that either understand basic economics or at least work for someone that does.  People of Hawaiian decent that are near a resort are likely to be some of the friendliest people you’ve ever met.  Travel out into the middle of no where and all bets are off.

No where is this more true than on the Road to Hana.  This particular road clocks in at a mere 52 miles in length but offers the sadistic driver almost three hours of driving in each direction and yes, if you drive it once you have almost no choice but to drive it back later.  Each pass of this road includes 620 turns, 59 bridges (46 of which are only one lane) and hundreds of stretches of one lane road with “yield to oncoming traffic” signs and no indication of where that oncoming traffic could be coming from.

Our trip lasted almost exactly seven hours, put us through double the number of one lane bridges, turns, and miles and subjected us to raw hatred without cause.  Not typically what you would expect to hear about a well known tourist attraction I suppose, but as I mentioned before, the locals hate you.  I can only imagine that they hate that it takes you three hours to drive the road they would rather complete in one, and they hate that you personally abolished their kingdom and forced being a state down their throats.  Locals are often as easy to recognize as you are as a tourist.  You are the couple in a rented car driving at generally sane speeds, they are the seven people in a single rusted white pickup truck that literally yell and swear at you as you go by or nearly run you off the road as they pass you in the middle of turns 375 and 376.  Whatever gene it is that allows someone to think it is a good idea to pass you in a one lane road full of twists and turns, I find myself quite glad to have evolved beyond possessing it.

If the nausea, screaming headache, and general exhaustion wasn’t bad enough the destructive emotional force of unwarranted hatred left me a bit depressed for almost the whole next day.  My advice to you is to go to Maui for all the good things, eat cheeseburgers with high calorie toppings, drink silly looking drinks with fruits you’ve never even heard of, and to skip the Road to Hana entirely.  The drive sucked, the locals are mean and angry, the view while interesting was not at all unique after the 400th turn, and when people tell you there is nothing in Hana at all they are being kind to the town as a whole.  Nothing doesn’t begin to describe what was waiting for us at the half way point of seven hours of hell.

There was literally a police station, a resort you aren’t allowed on, and a general store.  If you are looking for more than that, you are wasting your time, it’s just not there.  We had heard there was nothing in Hana, but as the destination of a massive tourist trap we figured there would at least be a little something to do.  We were flat wrong.

In a pattern most people that have been through college would recognize, I busted onto the scene of “real life” in roughly May of 2000 with very close to $100,000 in debt.  According to my loan granting institution, I had a full twenty years of paying on those loans lined up ahead of me.  To most people in this situation it is “just the way it is” and the twenty year plan tends to make the payments every month a little more manageable.  In reality however, you get done being a student and instantly acquire a mortgage backed by your soul.

If that weren’t bad enough, a lot of us, myself included, were driving around the old car we were given near the end of high school by our parents.  I am not referring to a silver spoon “congrats on your graduation or sweet 16 here is your brand new Lexus” but rather the “here is the car that we’ve been driving into the ground for the last decade that may or may not run properly, has well over 100,000 miles on it and may or may not burn slightly more oil than gas and we know selling it would be a waste of effort so you can just have it” type of car.  So aside from a mortgage on your soul, most former students immediately find themselves with a car loan for some slightly less used car because their’s died.

Now imagine that twenty year time window for a moment.  A huge list of things will likely happen in that time frame.  A lot of people will need at least one more car, sometimes two.  Many will purchase some form of real estate.  This time the mortgage is backed by your house instead of your soul at least.  Most will be married, many will have at least one kid, and so on.  Thanks to economic forces beyond our control, most will also spend frantic periods of time unemployed and trying to figure out how to survive on credit cards or money from family or both.  In other words, this twenty years of college debt is never the only debt in your life largely thanks to the fact that it is over such a large time frame.

I often referred to myself as “the best paid poor guy I know” to my friends.  I will not lie, I am well paid for what I do and fortunately to support that, I’m also very good at what I do so I don’t have to feel guilty or anything.  Dispite my status of being well paid, I had the eight college loans, the three cars, the real estate, the wedding, the unemployment, and the credit card debt over the years.  That produced a strange pattern of literally living paycheck to paycheck as I funneled as much money as I possibly could toward debt every month.  My goal was to beat the odds, and pay off not only my college loans, but all of my debt in any form, and to do so before twenty years had elapsed on my college loans.

Several months ago I paid off the last of my college loans, putting me almost eleven years ahead of schedule, but I wasn’t done.  My credit cards are all at zero as well, but I had a mortgage on my house and a loan on my car so I wasn’t quite there. 

When I met my wife we both owned houses and that put us in a somewhat unique situation.  We had an extra house.  Honestly not a terrible situation to be in if you can each pay for your own place the same way you obviously could before you met.  Based on location we decided to move into her house instead of mine.  After a long process lasting roughly a year, my house has been repaired and sold.  This brought about an awesome debt tour de force.

The only two debts I had left were my house and my car.  I had just sold my house making it go away, and with the profit from the house in my pocket and no need to move it into another house thanks to having a second one already, I had the unique opportunity to pay off my car at the same time.  I did exactly that this morning.  So from May of 2000 to August of 2009, a total of nine years and three months, I have scraped my way entirely into the black.  I am now completely debt free.

Having worked at it so hard for so long I think I may still be in a little shock about it.  It doesn’t yet feel real.  The sudden drop in my monthly expenses will probably make it feel very real indeed very soon I suspect.

Over the years I have revised my own home made vegetarian chili into an inexpensive and very delicious adventure in meatless dining.  In the beginning, I used dried beans as a base but rapidly realized that they simply aren’t worth the trouble, even if they are a little cheaper.  I also used my own blend of spices and seasonings and realized that too was a waste of time and in fact tends to increase the cost of the chili.  Here is the current incarnation of the chili.  The best it’s ever been in my opinion.  Enjoy.

Recipe:

• 9 cans of beans.  (Any kinds you like.)
• 2 cans of potatoes.  (I like sliced, but any will do.)
• 2 cans of diced tomatoes.  (Unseasoned.)
• 2 packets of chili seasoning.  (One mild and one hot.)

Preparation:

1. Place a large pot on a large burner using an aluminum heat spreader disc in between the two.  The heat spreader disc is crucial for avoiding burning any chili to the bottom of the pot and the lack of burnt chili means nothing odd in the flavor when you are done.
2. Dump all 13 cans of beans, potatoes, and tomatoes and both packets of seasoning into the pot unceremoniously.  For best results, you should drain the potatoes but nothing else.  This gives the chili its moisture so no water needs to be added.  In my pot once everything is in, the pot is full to within around one quarter of an inch from the top.
3. Turn the heat up to roughly half way between low and medium on your dial, stir the contents very carefully, put the lid on the pot, and wander away.  This level of heat with the heat spreader disc in place will eventually make the chili bubble gently but never really boil.
4. Stir every now and then.  I tend to stir about once every 30 to 45 minutes when I make it.  During your stirring be sure to rub the spoon on the bottom of the pot to ensure nothing is burning to the bottom, if you find that it is, turn it down.  If you used a heat spreader, you should be ok.  Please stir very slowly, the pot is very full and you don’t want to lose any chili to the burner in haste.
5. After about three hours, remove the lid, and stir it again.  Do not put the lid back on the pot, it’s time to reduce the liquid.  Good chili takes time and we aren’t done yet, so go find something else to do.
6. Continue to stir occasionally as before.  You may find “chili skin” on the top each time you come back during this phase.  This is entirely normal.  Press it down into the pot and stir gently to break it up.
7. After roughly two more hours (bringing us to five hours total) your chili should be roughly two inches farther down the pot than when you started.  Stir it once more and remove it from the heat.  Put the lid back on and leave it alone for at least 30 minutes.  This will allow the chili to thicken.  If you intend to freeze or refrigerate it I recommend you leave it covered in this way overnight to cool and put it in the refrigerator in the morning.

Nutritional Information:

• Serving Size:  1 cup
• Approximate Servings:  17
• Weight Watchers:  4 points per serving
• Aproximate Cost:  $12.00 per pot.

Serving Suggestions:

• Eat it “as is.”  It’s delicious on its own!
• Add one link of turkey sausage per serving.  (4 extra WW Points.)
• Add browned ground beef or turkey to make it non-vegetarian.
• Add pasta or pour over a bed of rice for a bit of variety.
• Add a box worth of prepared Mac and Cheese to two or more servings.

Last autumn I went to my house and prepared it as well as I possibly could for the cold winter ahead since the house was going to be sitting empty for the season waiting to be put on the market the following spring.    The pipes were drained, the furnace lines too, anti-freeze was added to toilets, sinks, tubs, and anything else that had any known residual water in it or was otherwise in posession of a U-bend.  It took quite a while to get all the ducks in the row for the winter, and when I was done, I figured I would be in pretty good shape.

Over the course of the winter I returned to the house at random intervals to verify that it was still standing, do a quick check inside, sometimes to do some chores, and to grab the latest mailbox-full of junk mail.  Each time I went, everything honestly seemed fine.  No floods, no fires, no problems.    You know what they say about best laid plans though.

After the cold passed, I returned to the house to start turning things back on after the winter and to do some final preparations for sale.  I turned on the water, opened the valve, and all seemed ok.  For about six seconds.  Then the ceiling of my basement in a section thankfully not immediately over my head sprung into an odd flow of water a bit like an ill conceived cross breed between a fire sprinkler and a waterfall.  I immediately cranked the valve closed again and the amount of water coming out of my house into my basement slowed quickly to a stop again.

A couple more ons and offs later, I had a reaonable idea of where the water could be coming from and all the evidence I needed that I had a split copper pipe somewhere up in the walls of my house.  I uttered, “this is not how this was supposed to go” sadly to my wife and got on the phone for a plumber and an insurance claim.

The next day the plumber arrived, confirmed my theory on where the leak was coming from, and repaired it.  A pipe had simply popped out of a 45 degree angle connector.  Once that was patched up, I turned the water back on, and the waterfall began anew.  More trouble shooting for what was obviously a second  broken pipe in the same vertical section of house, based on the fact that the first fix was no longer leaking but the water was coming from the same place in the basement, revealed the need to poke through more walls on the main floor of the house.  

Sure enough a second vastly more obnoxious problem was discovered, this time a split pipe in a nearly impossible spot to get to without swearing about it a lot.  To back up that theory, the plumber did a fair amount of complaining as the spot with the problem proved to be nightmarish.  Once that problem was fixed we turned the water back on and allowed ourselves a moment of hope as no waterfall resumed immediately.  False hope is the worst kind indeed.

A slow leak all over the kitchen floor inspired the water to be shut down quickly again and more research into the next problem.  The water this time appeared to be issuing from behind the refridgerator, which pointed at the ice maker water line initially.  That is until the water appeared to be leaking from somewhere within the refridgerator itself instead of the cheap copper line.  The specifics of this problem remain unknown but obviously something that carries water inside the fridge wasn’t meant to freeze.  A funny thought considering the primary purpose of the water in the fridge is to actually make ice.  With the tap for the fridge in the basement turned off, the water was once again returned to service.

And shut down again.  This time the water was coming out of the dishwasher.  The front panel was removed to show a pretty obvious leak out of the flow control solenoid.  So we shut that down as a lost cause too and turned the water back on again.  This time no obvious water problems, but it was time to move onto the hot water systems.  The valve on the furnace was turned on, and within very short order revealed that we weren’t done.  Now water was issuing from under the kitchen sink.

Don’t ask me why, because I honestly can’t come up with a good reason, but there was an extra hot water pipe under my kitchen sink.  I would be forced to guess that it was destined for the dishwasher, but an alternate tap off of the sink’s hot water tap had been created instead.  The result was about 15 inches of pipe under the sink ending in a welded on pipe cap.  On its own that wouldn’t result in any trouble, and in fact it didn’t for six years in the house, but today all bets are obviously off.  The cap itself split open.  The effect was a glorious sprinkler like one that only revealed itself when there was pressure in the hot water system.

Finally, things seemed to be patched up, almost $800 later and the plumber was on his way.  Drywall needs to be replaced to fill in the holes and repainted to make it look nice again.  This is far from done, and to avoid unknown problems the water was shut down again before I left.  Better to turn it on again and find a problem later than leave it on and come back to find your house is a lake.

After months of hard labor at my job I was hitting a breaking point.  I was tired, overworked, and simply needed a change of scenery.  My wife came to the rescue with a weekend away at the Ceasar’s Poconos resorts in the Poconos mountains in Pennsylvania.  We arrived Saturday morning and left Sunday at around noon but it did the trick for relieving stress and changing scenery.  We were surprised by how short of a drive it actually was.  Including a stop for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts on the way, we arrived a mere two hours and five minutes after we left home.

Once on the property of the Cove Haven branch of the resort, the first thing you’ll notice is that the resort itself is quite dated looking.  It makes you feel a bit like you stepped back in time to an era complete with disco balls and leisure suits.  If you ignore the cheese factor of your surroundings, or in fact if you enjoy them for nostalgic or comedic reasons, the place is quite nice.  We stayed in the Adam and Eve “Apple” Suites section of the Cove Haven resort.  The building itself is a one story tall space ship looking building without a single window, but inside we found a nice layout and plenty of lights to cancel any gloom that may be created by the lack of windows and the explanation of how a “two floor” room can possibly exist in a one story tall building.

The brochure would have you believe that your room is “two floors” and that will undoubtedly inspire ideas of, well, there being two floors worth of space in your room.  That really is a bit misleading however, as you likely figured out when you saw that it was a one story building.  In reality your door puts you on the “first floor”, shortly after walking in you should immediately turn on the lights lest you fall down the three steps that separates this floor from the “second floor.”  In a stretch of logic you could in fact pretend that those three steps have placed you on an all new floor, and through that you could even likely get away with calling the pool room a “third floor” thanks to the two additional steps you must go down to get to it.  Overall, the room in all its parts, and floors, is quite spacious.

The first floor includes what I would call your second TV, a heart shaped hot tub, a sofa complete with end tables, lamps, and a coffee table.  The second floor has the fireplace, your big TV, your bed, a walk-in closet, and access to the bathroom and pool room.  The third floor separated thankfully by a glass door and windows contains your personal pool and sauna.  During our stay many interesting adventures occurred and some are worth metioning to help keep other people from screwing things up like I did. 

Each room comes with a fireplace and a requirement that you can only burn Duraflame type logs in it.  Buy your Duraflame log at a grocery store or Walmart or something before you go.  We brought our own log, but only because we were warned by friends to do so.  They will happily sell you a log if you failed to bring your own for around three times the cost you would expect to pay anywhere else.  The important things to note about burning your Duraflame logs is that the fireplace has no flue to open or close, so don’t bother spending much time trying to find it to make sure it’s open.  There is a metal log holder thing in there to put your log on, but before you do so, center it in the fireplace and push it all the way to the back wall.  When you put your log on it, put that all the way against the back wall as well.  I didn’t figure this out until our room started smelling smokey thanks to the smoke preferring to waft around instead of simply rising into the chimney.  I was forced to use the ash tray that held the free matches to push the log toward the back long after it was burning at a normal pace.  An exciting and warm experience to say the least, and the only thing I could find that wouldn’t burn that I could use to push the log with.

The heart shaped tub was a cute concept but it rapidly turned into a scene out of some weird horror movie thanks to the bubbles we had put into it while it was filling.  A pattern taken from drawing a bubble bath at home in a normal tub.  We picked up our bottle of bubbles from the porn store section at the back of the gift shop, and I highly recommend bringing your own bubble bath stuff thanks to the price mark up.  What I failed to fully realize was that a hot tub, complete with interesting water jets, takes tiny amounts of bubble bath soap and turns in into mountains of bubbles.  The only advice I can offer is that you fill the tub first, turn on the jets, and only then, add bubble bath stuff slowly, a few drips at a time and see how it goes before adding more.  I didn’t use that much stuff and we were forced to drain the tub and start again without adding more bubbles.  In the end, we gave up on being able to watch TV, sip wine, and enjoy the hot tub thanks to this mess.

The pool room is small, but kinda nice.  The sauna was really a closet sized cedar walled room with the sauna heater in it.  Both rooms were well suited to two people.  I know this is probably pretty obvious considering its a couples resort, but I would recommend against booking a room for more than two people.  The pool was warm and the right depth and was my personal favorite feature of the room even if it was a bit small.  For some reason, late at night, they seemed to turn down the temperature of the pool and the pool room.  This made it less enjoyable for my wife and I but not to the point where we didn’t want to use it.

When dinner time came around, we returned to the place where we had eaten our included breakfast.  Unlike breakfast where getting a table to sit at alone was quite easy to do, there was a very long wait for a table to eat dinner at alone.  We skipped the long wait and accepted that we would be sitting with a bunch of strangers for dinner.  By the end of the night we were pretty good friends with our dinner companions and conversation flowed easily.  My advice is to seek out a table to sit alone for breakfast since your brain isn’t likely to be working on all cylinders early in the morning before lots of coffee, but to happily accept the company in the evening for dinner.

The activities provided were quite extensive and frankly quite fun, but I don’t think I would be able to find much to do without lots of repeating things if we had stayed more than a couple of days.  It was a nice change of pace to ice skate, rollerskate and shoot arrows in the archery range.  The standard sporty fare of mini-golf, boccie ball, tennis, ping pong and things like that were all free, but expect to be shelling out quarters or tokens for arcade games and air hockey tables.  

If the local activities have worn thin and you find yourself looking for things to do, there are a collection of somewhat famous outlet stores less than an hour away, or less if you are staying at a resort that is not the Cove Haven resort.  Be prepared to follow your wife around while she shops happily though.  If you are the nature type, also less than an hour away, but inconveniently not in the same direction as the outlet stores, is Bushkill Falls, a lovely woodsy hike with the “Niagra of Pennsylvania” waterfall to stare at and take pictures of for later memories.  Thanks to being tired and my lack of desire to take countless pictures of a landscape still brown with winter we didn’t end up paying the admission price to walk back to the falls for this trip, but I would very much like to return.

All things considered, I would definitely return for another romantic weekend in the Poconos, but I also definitely wouldn’t want to stay for more than a couple of nights.  It’s extremely convenient thanks to being close to home, and it was plenty of fun while we were there.

A recent upgrade of my personal computer left some impressive hardware available to become an all new Trollserver.  Improvements include CPU, RAM, Hard Drives, Operating System, and several software upgrades.  

The CPU improvements include a jump from a single “old skool” P4 generation CPU to a Core2 Duo CPU with tons more horsepower.  This CPU upgrade comes bundled with a 2nd CPU core to do more work as well as a jump forward into 64-bit computing.

The RAM jumped from DDR/133 to DDR2/800 and from 1GB to 8GB.  This means way more space for running scripts and server programs and the database.  So less waiting for that image to resize or having it fail due to not having enough RAM to pull it off right now.  It also means that when RAM is accessed it’s done way, way faster.

Hard drive space previously wasn’t considered limiting, but has now jumped to an almost silly four times the previous capacity.  Also with the benefits of newer generation hard drives with bigger caches and better transfer rates, not just capacity.

The Operating System moved the small click from FreeBSD 7.0 (32-bit) to FreeBSD 7.1 (64-bit) so I would have access to all 8GB of RAM and the 64-bit features on the new CPU.  Most people aren’t likely to notice much change from this specifically, but it helps all the other changes to work better.

I’m not sure if insects can fly hundreds of miles across open ocean, or for that matter, if they even want to, but as far as I can tell they can’t.  St. Lucia was delightfully lacking in the typical insects of the Northeast.  I don’t recall seeing a single mosquito dispite the almost constant presence of puddles and standing moisture they so love.  We as honeymooners were not alone on the island however.

Everywhere you look there were frogs the size of a quarter, large snales, and lizards that would impress Geiko.  Whether they were actually geckos or not I have no idea. The frogs hung out on frondy plants that hung near the short sidewalk lights that were all over the grounds of the resort.  My wife and I came to call them “Frog condos” thanks to the multi-layered housing effect and the fact that we often so more than one of them near a single light.  The idea of housing or warmth was quickly replaced with the reality that they were hanging out for a midnight snack made up of any tiny light attracted bugs that were silly enough to pass within tongue range of the tiny amphibious hunters.

During the day lizards basked in the sun on anything they could find.  Sometimes it was the same lights the frogs made into hunting zones, other times it was random guard rails or plants, but most often it was literally in the middle of the sidewalk.  My initial thoughts at this pattern were along the lines of “well, I guess you are next on evolutions list to elimitate for playing in traffic.”  How truly wrong I was.  Never in my life have I seen an animal so like a ninja before.  3 inches of lizard could go from apparently asleep in the sidewalk to simply gone before you even knew it was moving.  They moved very quickly, and were nervous enough about people that you couldn’t even get closer than about 4 or 5 feet from them before they did their vanishing act again.  This turned my wife and I into very frustrated photographers indeed.

On the exact opposite end of the speed spectrum was the humble snail in its not so humble shell.  They were large, they were slow, and frankly they were short lived.  I personally squashed at least one during our stay by stepping on it in the dark without knowing it was there.  Walking up the roads at night revealed that they didn’t have much better luck with vehicle traffic either.  There were creepy slippery smears of snail guts and shell bits all over the roads every night just waiting for the next day’s torential rain to wash them away into oblivion.