She was born April 9th 2009, weighed 7lbs 3oz, loves to cry and poop in her diapers. Things were not all that smooth in the delivery room and they had to perform an emergency C-section. That’s the reason it’s taken me so long to share the pictures with you all.

I want to thank everyone for the kind comments and well wishing. I’ll keep updating with pictures and status updates. You can also follow me on Twitter @FreakZombie for more updates as well.

Happy Holidays!

The Chinese Theater is the location where all the stars put their hands and feet into the cement and then sign it.  I found a couple that were really neat, especially the last one:

I am planning on going back soon and hopefully getting some more photos of some historic places.  One interesting thing I learned today: the stars on the Walk of Fame are not gifts.  The stars pay $25,000 as a fee to have their name on the street.  They are nominated and then selected by a commitee, so not just anyone can have their name in concrete.  They still have to pay the fee as a “security” fee for the ceremony and it covers the cost of the ceremony.

Look for more from me in the future!

Whedon was granted the extra time because the show is a mid-season replacement and there are a few months before it will be airing.  It makes you wonder, however, if maybe this has something to do with the executives at Fox wanting a different direction or if it’s really his will to re-work the scripts.  Could this be some consipracy like what we saw with Firefly?

We can only hope Whedon is polishing an already wonderful, witty script.  This is the view I plan on keeping.  When January comes around, we will see if the extra time was worth it.

It’s been a really hard decision to make, to stay or go.  When it comes down to it, We have a great opportunity to get into some part of the industry we love so much.  I may even try to work for Sony in a paid internship position for a few months.  We’re not sure exactly how everything is going to turn out and we may even have to come back home after a few months.  Either way, it took about 6 months to make a final descion to take the plunge.

This does make some things a little difficult for us.  Randy and I are going to be 2200 miles away from each other.  This doesn’t mean that the podcasts will stop, however.  We’re going to be recording still, but the format may change a little bit.  We’ll let you all know the details as we figure them out ourselvs.  One thing is for sure, look forward to many more shows with Randy and myself.

I have acquired most of our old equipment and will be taking it with me so whatever we do record, it will sound good and not like it was done over the internet.  So for all who are curious, I’ll set it up and record my experience once I get out there.  I gotta do a test recording right?  Don’t worry, I’ll be taking plenty of pictures so there will be lots of things to see!

For those of you who have been following the live call in shows, you may have heard us briefly mention the Large Hadron Collider.  Well, the people over at CERN have made a little educational video to explain what it is and what it will be used for.  When I say educational, I mean you learn something from it.  The one thing I learned was that they should stick to what they know, science, and leave music videos to musicians.

So those of you who were not attending the GeekInput Heroes Episode will find this bit of news a little surprising.  Wayne here to announce a little news.  If you didn’t guess it by the photo attached to this post, my wife and I are expecting a little geek of our own.  Of course we will be raising our kid on Whedon, comics, and video games.  We couldn’t be any happier or scared all at the same time.  Anyone with advice, warnings, or anything, just leave a comment.  More info will be posted when it becomes avaliable.

Release Date: March 10th.

If you missed the opportunity to stream the 3 parts of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, all is not lost. You have until July 29th (4 days as of this writing) to go to iTunes and purchase each act at $1.99 each or $3.99 for all of them (Season Pass). Go get it HERE now!

Once it is pulled from iTunes, there will be a DVD released, date still unknown, that will have special features along with comentary, woo hoo!  Don’t miss your chance to have the original, though. If you haven’t seen it yet, then it’s well worth $4.

*Edit* Joss has recently said at Comicon that there will be a part 4 to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Also, he goes on to talk about the DVD features. Those features include Commentary: The Musical, and the 10 best fan applications to the Evil League of Evil. Good stuff, and thanks to Paul for passing that bit along to us.

I got my hands on the update the day it came out and decided to wait a week or two before coming to any conclusions. Downloading apps from the Apple store is a breeze. You have two options to get your apps, from iTunes or from the new AppStore icon on the phone itself.

There were tons of free apps when the store launched and three times as many paid apps. Some apps are useless, while others are the best thing since sliced bread. My wife and I have had issues with some apps randomly crashing and/or taking the whole system with it. It seems that we experience this less and less since we are no longer just playing around and actually using the apps we are comfortable with.

There are a couple of new features added to the phone but the one most people asked for was a contacts button. Before, you had to go into the phone and there was an icon at the bottom for viewing and editing your contacts. Now there is an icon on the home screen that can be placed anywhere.

If you don’t have the 3G iPhone with GPS, you are not totally shut out when it comes to location specific apps. Using the cell tower triangulation technology, most apps will work fine. The apps that require more precise coordinates may seem buggy, but that’s to be expected without GPS.

The biggest expectation I had for this update was the ability to play games now. Sega has announced that the iPhone is about as powerful as the Dreamcast. This was no lie. With games like Super Monkey Ball being a launch title, this phone looks like it could be a great new gaming platform. The battery, however, is the only thing holding it back. Playing a simple tile game seems to drain my battery so fast that I have to plug it in to play.

Overall, I would say that Apple has finally made the iPhone worth the price, especially since they lowered the price. Now my only quarrel is with AT&T. Please lower the monthly cost. $200 a month for two phones is killing me!

One last thing I have to add, a new WordPress app was added to the store the other day, so this whole review was written on my iPhone.

For those of you who play old school RPGs or are fans of the Final Fantasy franchise, yesterday was a great day. We saw the release of Final Fantasy IV for the Nintendo DS. If you don’t know what this is all about, let me give you a little history lesson. Final Fantasy IV was originally Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo. The series was published in Japan but seemed to stop here in the US. In 2002, Final Fantasy Anthology was released on the Playstation and included FFIV. This was just a port of the original Japanese with a new CG intro. The game was more difficult and many players didn’t like the lack of an update to the graphics. Square Enix, following the success of FFIII on the DS decided a 3D remake of FFIV would be a good idea. Thank you to Square Enix!

I’m playing right now and believe that this has to be one of the prettiest games on the Nintendo DS. I have played almost all the way through the original on the SNES and plan on finishing the story on the DS instead. So far the game is a little harder than I remember, but the extra features and the 3D facelift make this a winner. I’ll have an update once I complete the game to let everyone know what I thought about it overall.

Pixar’s masterpiece?  Movie of the year?  There is not a person in the world who can resist the charm of Wall-E.  From the very first trailer, kids, teens, adults, and robots alike were all emotionally bonded to this little guy.  Take one look at the picture above and try not to go "Awww."  Pixar has once again shown why they are the leaders in CGI feature films.

When we first met Wall-E, all alone and working away at… whatever he’s doing, it seemed like just another animated robot movie.  The more we saw of his everyday life, the more we felt sorry for him for being alone.  With absolutely no dialog or facial expressions, we still felt what he felt.  Knowing nothing about the plot, voice actors, or pretty much any other details, almost everyone walked away with the same reaction.  "I have to see that."

The first 30 minutes of the film reminds me very much of Castaway.  The last robot left of earth with no company except for a pet roach makes for a very empty feeling.  Fortunately it was filled with wonderful images that told the story of our future.  It seems that Wall-E was not the only one of his kind, however he is the last.  Mixed in with CGI, we have a few scenes of actual actors shown on screens that are solar powered to show advertisements which conveniently let the audience know what the last humans were doing right before leaving earth.  This clever storytelling can only take us halfway through the movie however, so we need to see some new characters to take us through the rest of it.

If Apple Computer were to build a robot, it would be Eve.  This little egg shaped wonder looks like something the designers of the iPod made up as a joke, only Pixar said "We gotta put that in our movie!"  Once we have her around, Wall-E just gets more cute.  The two of them seem to have a bond early on that obviously will bloom into such a touching relationship.

Although this is a Disney/Pixar movie, there is quite a bit of social commentary going on in the main story line.  The writer’s vision of the future is that we rely so much on technology that we become lazy and in turn, slaves to it.  One scene that ties this to our time right now is about halfway through.  You see a man in a floating chair talking to another on a screen floating in front of his face, discussing what they want to do for the day.  When the camera pans out, we see that the person he’s talking to is right beside him.  I’ve had roommates block me on instant messenger programs because I would talk to them on there instead of walking 5 feet to say what I want to say.  The fact that we do rely of technology so much these days just makes this vision even more frightening.  Some people may not like the "lesson learned" from this, but we can all understand what they are saying.

I have to admit that I was a little skeptical going into this movie.  I didn’t know if it was going to be another Nemo or Cars.  I have nothing against Pixar, but I don’t generally like Disney movies.  I loved this movie so much that I plan on going back and seeing it again with other people just to see their reactions.  As soon as it’s released on DVD, I know I’ll own it.  Pixar has really outdone itself this time.  If you have not seen it yet, then you really need to get out there and just have a day of enjoyment.  Who knew a little robot could be so fun?

Wayne gave out his Xbox Live Gamertag for all to see as well:

Let’s all join in with a chorus of Happy Birthday to you.  Post a comment with your B-day wishes AND send him an email to saberj@geekshow.us so we can flood his email with birthday wishes and he’ll miss all his important messages.

A viral campaign has been going on since the day the trailer was released.  If you want to skip all the work and get down to the facts quickly, check out http://cloverfieldclues.blogspot.com for everything that has been discovered so far.  I spent a couple of hours going through this site as well as the sites connected to the viral campaign and came up with some conclusions of my own.

With 1-18-08 coming up this Friday, I decided to let the world know what I think and see if, after the movie comes out, I am correct or dead wrong.  I should say up front that my opinions are not fact and should not be taken as so.  I’m not giving spoilers by any means, I’m just making educated guesses.  With that out of the way, here is what I think we should look forward to.

• The main character, Rob, got a job working for Tagruato
• Tagruato has a subsidiary known as Slusho!
• One of Rob’s friends wears a Slusho! shirt showing his love of the drink
• Tagruato is a Japanese company that has many deep sea drilling projects
• One of the deep sea drilling rigs was scheduled to open Sept. 2007 but there was an incident
• This rig was located in the Atlantic Ocean, almost 1000 miles from NYC
• T.I.D.O. is a group that is opposed to the drilling of Tagruato
• T.I.D.O. states on their site that drilling causes whales to leave the area because of noise pollution
• The rig that was destroyed appears to be caused by something that spit out parts of it after it sank
• Tagruato held members of T.I.D.O. captive because they either discovered or created something and didn’t want it to go public

Some people believed that one of the quotes from the first trailer was "I saw it, it’s a lion, it’s huge!"  This caused them to believe a Voltron movie was finally being made.  However, the line was actually "It’s alive, it’s huge!"  Voltron fans will have to wait.  Others hold to the thoughts of Lovercraft, Godzilla, or even biblical monsters.  I want to say on record that none of these people must have done much research on the subject.  J.J. Abrams stated at Comicon that "We need our own Godzilla."  This means we need something like Godzilla, but not just a remake (we have plenty of those).

With all the hype and viral campaigns, one thing is certain, we have no idea what to expect.  J.J. Abrams has stated that this is an original idea so a remake of older monster movies or an adaptation of other monster stories is out of the question.  I can’t wait to see what the monster is and how the movie plays out.  I’ve spent so much time looking into what it could be to come up with one conclusion, I have no idea.  I have a good idea of the origins of the event and the characters’ backgrounds, but the monster is something I don’t think anyone can expect to know what it really is.

My opinion is open for speculation and argument.  If you agree, disagree, or just want to give your two cents worth, leave a comment.  I want to know what you are thinking and if I’m the only one who has spent more time into researching this movie than I ever should have.

When I heard the news that Michael Bay was making a live-action version of Transformers, my first thought was "SWEET!"  After it sunk in that I didn’t really like any of the other movies by Michael Bay, It occurred to me that this movie may suck.  We’ve all had those experiences where we get all hyped-up over a movie and when we finally see it, it’s like all that hype and time waiting on it was wasted.  I will admit, I was hyped over Transformers.  I was hoping to not be let down.

When the theater filled up to capacity the day before the movie was supposed to be released, I knew I was not the only one hyped.  The opening was full of plenty of ear-candy for old time fans.  Optimus Prime tells the story of how things are and how they got that way, and the whole audience ate it up.  Let me just say at this point, I’m so glad George Clooney was not cast for Prime.  The humor in this movie was better than some comedies I’ve seen lately.  I don’t like action movies that much, but I loved the action in this movie.  The casting was great, the writing was great, the action was great.

 I have to see it a couple more times before I can say if there is anything I really didn’t like about it.  There were some issues with characters I didn’t like so much.  The head of Sector 7 was really corny, but he was just a minor role so they got away with it.  The Secretary of Defense was a little weak in character just because he seemed pretty shallow and stereotypical.  Shia LaBeouf was at the top of his game.  I couldn’t think of a single person who would have made this what it was other than him.

 
HIGHLIGHTS:

Original voice of Optimus Prime

Shia LaBeouf

Tom Lenk (our whole group went "ANDREW!" when he showed up)

"Were you masturbating?"

"Are you user name Ladiesman217?"

Quick note: Jessica (my fiance)  is in love with Johnny Depp and Jack Sparrow is her ultimate favorite character.  As the credits rolled for Transformers she said "That was better than Pirates."  This was one of those "Oh my god!" moments.

For those of you who haven’t seen Transformers yet, go right now.  For those of you who have been on the fence as to weather you want to see it or not, go right now.  For those of you who don’t plan on seeing it, go right now.  I’m a big fan of the Transformers and this was much better than all my expectations, and I had really high expectations.

I give Transformers a 9 out of 10.