spartan

Construction has started on our new home and our current place is still up for sale -- no decent offers have turned up yet. In the meantime we are kind of resuming our normal life although with a bit more economy and restraint. I've hooked the PS3 back up to the TV so we can at least watch some Blu-Ray movies.

Recently I watched John Woo's epic historical drama Red Cliff which runs a staggering 4+ hours across 2 discs. The film depicts the historical Battle at Red Cliff from 208 AD. Although it's a long film, I thought it was a triumphant return to form for John Woo -- the only disappointment for me was that long-time Woo collaborator Chow Yun-Fat withdrew from the film early in its filming.
But his fellow Hard-Boiled alumni Tony Leung does a reasonably good job playing the charismatic and wily commander Zhou Yu. Some of the memorable battle scenes feature the fearsome general Guan Yu, who to this day is deified by Chinese around the world, as the god of loyalty and righteousness.

Now I'm wondering if I should pull the XBox360 out of the closet as well -- next week the free multiplayer beta of Halo Reach comes out for Halo3: ODST owners... that would include me!  But that would mean I need to renew my XBox Live Gold membership which I let expire, so I'll have to think about it.  Not sure I'll have time to play games as work picks up again this summer...

In the meantime, I did take more photos recently - check out the collection below.  And we have a weekend trip up to Yosemite coming later this month, I am looking forward to seeing (and photographing) some spectacular scenery out there.



-p.

renovation

You may have noticed a new look to this blog, I figured it was time for some change and hopefully it's for the better. I tweaked the layout to allow for a little more width in the main body column (that's the column you're reading this text in), and removed some redundant ads and links. I still have links to Amazon to the side and at the bottom if you want to keep helping me out whenever you purchase anything from them.

I enjoy buying stuff on Amazon myself... recently I've bought and thoroughly enjoyed watching The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One (TV Series) on Blu-Ray. The full length movie (Star Wars: The Clone Wars) that preceeded the TV series is not nearly as good (pretty lame plot-wise), but it is the starting point that introduces some new characters and reinterprets some of the old ones from the Star Wars double-trilogy. I got them both just to have a complete set.

I've also decided to try and get back into reading again... by which I mean something other than magazines and internet sites. I used to be really into the Tom Clancy novels like The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising. One of my favorite books of all time was Without Remorse.
Now I've tried to pick up where I left off in the Jack Ryan series, with a book that's 10 years old at this point, The Bear and the Dragon. It's been years since I read books on a regular basis, so wish me luck.