I have kind of been in a reading rut lately. Usually by this time of year I have read 15-20 books. I think I am only up to about 8 or 9. Some of that I can blame on the life changes this year, but there really is no excuse to be so far behind.

I picked up a book last week that I thought would be interesting. It was a buddy cop murder mystery type of book where the "buddies" are women, kind of a Cagney and Lacey kind of vibe to it. The problem is I am 50 pages in and I am bored out of my mind. It is not exactly the subject material, it just seems like I have read so many books that start out exactly like this book plot wise that it is not an enjoyable read. I know I should probably give it another 50 pages or so, but I think the book is going back to the library.

Usually when I am bored with fiction I go through a spell where I only want to read non-fiction. The interesting thing is that the time it is taking me to get bored with fiction is getting shorter and shorter.

There are a number of fiction books coming out this fall that I am interested in including the new Dan Brown book and the new WoT book (sans Robert Jordan). Maybe I need to do some creative Amazon searches to see if I can find some potential gems.

In the meantime I have a non-fiction book I just got delivered today from the library. More about that later.

Skype can really be a pain in the butt sometime. I go to their website to renew our online number tonight and of course they reject my credit card and point me to Paypal to finish the transaction. Since Skype and Paypal are both in the same bed it is not surprising, but since I have never had problems with my credit card at Amazon and other places online it is pretty annoying.

So I got to PayPal, login, and then scratch my head. Adding a credit card to your account is buried in their menu options. PayPal is also complaining to me that I don't have a valid account anymore because of "changes" and I need to validate my address and phone number on file. So I go and see my address, but the phone number is masked only showing the last three digits which I don't recognize. This is really turning into a pain in the butt.

I end up calling PayPal's customer service line and I give them my info telling them that I have no idea what the phone number for my account is. After some back and forth I found out the number they have on file is from 4 years ago when we used to have an actual home phone. So before I get a chance to tell them what my new number is, the rep tells me she needs to transfer me to a "specialist" because I have "limitations" on my account and that I would have to hold on the line for a few minutes. Obviously it was an upsell to their premium product. So right when she puts me on hold I say screw this and hang up. I have already wasted more time on something that should have been 2 minute procedure.

I was about to give the big FU to Skype and drop my online number when I go back to the Skype site and notice that you can pay by Moneybookers. So I research to make sure they are legit. I go to their site, enter in my info and within 2 minutes I have my online number payed for.

If PayPal didn't have Ebay would they even still be in business? or is it because of Ebay that PayPal has gone downhill? I can understand the need for validation to cut down on scams, but it really was ridiculous.

I was a little peeved today.

I have been holding off upgrading my wife's iPhone 3G to 3.0 just to make sure the new OS worked solidly on my first-gen iPhone. Amazingly, 3.0 has been relatively bug free for me. In fact I think it is a lot better than the 2.2.1 update. The battery life feels longer. Apps haven't been crashing for me. Safari is snappier.

So this afternoon on a break from work I decided to upgrade my wife's phone. Everything runs dandy until I get to the point where the firmware is installed and it is looking for activation via iTunes. I get this nice nasty message window saying to "check my Internet connection". Oh great, the activation server is down.

Three hours later the server finally comes back up and the phone is activated. Everything is gravy.

I understand why Apple has to do the activation, but it really is a pain in the butt to essentially have a bricked phone until the servers come back up. About the only nice thing is that you can still make outgoing emergency calls, but that is about it.

Just before my daughter arrived, I fell off the wagon. I had been doing a good job of losing weight by both cutting down on my intake of food and getting my butt out and exercising. I lost 30 lbs since May 2008. And then we decided to get the house fixed up. That meant we were eating out more, exercising less because we had contractors at the house, and generally going overboard with food.

Whatever the excuse may be, I gained back about 15 of those lbs. I am happy it wasn't all, but still disappointed that it was so easy to gain back.

So this week I have started back on the routine. My wife has been cooking some healthier dinners. I am walking Barca every day (even in the heat). I am drinking water rather than juices or sodas. And I am skipping the midnight snacks.

Last night I finished the novel Pygmy by author Chuck Palahniuk. Palahniuk is the same author of the novel, Fight Club, that the movie is based on.

Since Fight Club (the movie) came out, I have always tried to read everything by Palahniuk. He has a perverse and absurd sense of humor that for some reason makes me laugh even though his books usually have a bunch of dark material. Pygmy didn't disappoint.

The book is a little disconcerting at first because it is written completely in Engrish. The main character, Pygmy, arrives in the midwest US as an exchange student from an indeterminate country. Pygmy is part of a terrorist cell who wishes to carry out Operation Havoc with a group of 12 other foreign exchange students.

Besides the subject of terrorism, the book wanders into the territory of abortion, teen pregnancy, religious hypocrisy, extreme patriotism and gay sex. Pygmy, the character, has a tendency to repeatedly quote communist leaders such as Castro and Mao Tse Tung (who I never knew was the originator of the quote "If you have to fart, fart. If you have to sht, sht.").

The funniest bits in the book have to deal with cultural differences. For example, the spelling bee that goes on for hours because the foreign exchange students know how to spell tough english words better than Americans. The whole chapter on what takes place at the Model UN is laugh out loud funny.

Pygmy is not as good as Choke or Lullaby, but it still is an interesting read. I give it three out of four stars.

We saw it last Friday. Soulless, almost humorless, and a big waste of money.

I never saw the second one, but I remember being at least amused by the first one. I looked at the watch at least 3 times in 10 minutes wondering when the mess of a movie would be over.

About the only thing mildly enjoyable was the Boy versus Girl Squirrel in that Road Runner versus Coyote way.

One out of 4 stars.

I am a little late with this review.... but what a great movie. Pixar has done it again.

The whole intro with Carl, the main character, meeting his wife-to-be was so well done. Pixar does such a great job at telling a story with nuance without spoon feeding the audience with dialogue like most movies. We totally understand why Carl has to go on the adventure, as crazy as it is.

I also like the contrast between Carl as an elderly person and Russell the energetic "Boy Scout". Carl used to be Russell when he was younger, yet sees Russell as a nuisance at first.

The movie was so special, I really don't want to spoil anything who may have not seen it yet (including my wife :) ).

I give the movie 4 out of 4 stars. I can't wait to buy it on disc.

I went and saw Transformers 2 today. I guess I have mixed feelings.

I know I am no longer in the Transformers demographic, but I used to be. Transformers used to be my favorite cartoon in the 80s. Some liked Go-bots, some liked G.I. Joe. Transformers was my fave (followed close behind by Star Blazers - aka Space Battleship Yamato). I have seen every Gen 1 episode numerous times (including watching them via Netflix a few years back). I watched the 1986 movie a number of times even though that movie seems to be two movies in one (Before Prime and After Prime). It was great childhood/early teen memories.

The first Michael Bay Transformers movie I gave a lot of slack. I knew it was going to be re-imagined for current times. No space ship crashed into a mountain. No Teletraan-1. Heck, not even Spike. I think Bay captured some of the flavor of the first generation in the first film, due mostly to the fact that they got Peter Cullen to do Optimus Prime's voice.

This second movie I am a little more critical of. The big scene where Prime takes on 3 at a time was great. Even Soundwave being re-imagined as a modern day communication device was pretty awesome (I am glad that wasn't spoiled for me). Ravage was pretty sweet. However the other Decepticons really needed some work design wise. For the most part, their robot forms were all silver/gray. It was really difficult to tell any of them apart with all of the action. Even my son commented on that. I didn't even realize that Megatron could not only transform into a plane, but also a tank. When Megatron changed into a tank I thought I was just looking at a different robot. Confusing.

For the real actors, John Turturro was funny in this movie and I even have to admit that Shia Lebeouf was good, but everyone else was just painful to watch. The whole going off to college plot is so overdone. The only chuckle I got was the conflict that happens when Bumblebee was parked in the bushes in front of the frat house.

Other nits.... The twins' stereotype was just atrociously bad, gold tooth and all. Sideswipe, Arcee, and her twins had their small action scenes, but otherwise throwaway characters. All cars being GM based is lame (Sideswipe was a Lamborghini in Gen 1), but I guess necessary to pay/market the film.

I give it 2 our of 4 stars.

This review is very late in coming... I watched Watchmen when I was in San Francisco a month ago. The hotel had it as one of the movies you could rent so I watched it the first night I was in town. With all that happened that week I forgot to post about it.

To start off, the graphic novel that the movie was based on is just amazing. I only read the graphic novel about 1.5-2 years ago when I heard that they were making a movie of it. Rorschach has got to be one of the best anti-hero characters in any kind of super hero based literature. He's coarse, paranoid, delusional, bigoted yet strangely charming. His character translated well to the screen. I know it is just a special effect, but I love how his mask changed. It is almost as if it changed because of the mood, but maybe I am reading too much into it an inkblot. :)

I have to applaud the film makers for not changing the story to fit the times. Yes, 1985 is anachronistic, but on every level it really worked.

Casting wise I think they did a great job, except maybe with Silk Spectre 2. The actress didn't really seem like a kick ass type of girl in the same way Jennifer Garner pulled it off in Alias or Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill. I'd be hard pressed to think of an actress out there who could have replaced her though.

Everyone else was perfectly cast. The Comedian, probably my second favorite character, was straight from the comic. The Vietnam scenes are chilling. The Comedian had a clarity on human nature that showed through. The way he was written, you could understand why a personality like The Comedian played both sides. He wasn't drawn two dimensional in the novel or the movie.

I guess the controversy when the movie was out in the theater was Doctor Manhattan walks around with the full frontal. Maybe it was because I saw the movie on a 35" TV, but that didn't really bother me.

It really is hard to find anything really wrong with the movie. I wish more movies were closer to their source material. Hollywood may find that boring, but a good transfer usually ends up in accentuating the words (and in this case pictures) it is based on.

I give the movie (and the novel) 4 out of 4 stars.

I wake up this morning. Groggy. Go to the kitchen. Turn on the water. Nothing comes out. I go ask my wife about it and she said she had to go under the sink and turn off the water because one of the small copper pipes was streaming out water this morning... Oh great, plumbing.

I look under the sink, turn on the water and I see, drip, drip, drip under the cold water piping. I play with the pipes. Nothing I can do. There looks like a hole in the copper. I start looking at the hot water piping and at the valve I see another drip. Oh great, I have two problems to fix. The cold water piping was soldered on the faucet above, so I quickly realize that I am going to have to get a new faucet and a new valve.

I go to the hardware store about 4pm. I wander around and find a new faucet, new plastic bendable piping and a handy dandy wrench tool that is supposed to be good for getting in tight spaces (Total for all items $200+). I get home and the piping I buy looks to be about 10 inches too long even for a bendy plastic piping, so I am already peeved that I know I have to go back to the hardware store for an exchange.

I start trying to get the nuts off that are keeping the faucet attached to the sink. I get the left one off easy with the new tool. The right one is just rusted in there. I spend about an hour working on it with no luck. Crap. If I am going to get it off I need something with a lot more torque, but the only thing that would fit on there is a deep socket. The two deep sockets I have don't fit, but the 5/8" is really close. So instead of doing something smart and measuring the left nut that I got off, I just immediately assume that I need a 1/2" inch deep socket. Back to the hardware store.

I get back to the hardware store, exchange the piping for something smaller and head over to the tools department and find a deep socket. Crap, I need a driver or an adapter because the only deep socket that is 1/2" needs a 1/2" driver. The problem is I can't remember what my drivers are at home so I say the heck with it and get a 1/2" driver (Total for all items $40+).

I make it home get the driver on the new socket put it up there. You guessed it. It is too big. By this time I am cussing. I think to use the left nut... Measure it against my sockets and it needs a 9/16". The hardware store doesn't take exchanges on tools. Back to the hardware store.

I get the right deep socket (another $8), head home think I am all dandy. Get the socket up there. At first it doesn't go on the nut! The bolt that the nut was on was bended. I straighten the bolt and the socket goes on.. Whew false alarm. So I start trying to turn. Great torque. It feels like it is starting to move. To make a long story short(er), with both my wife and her mom's help (at different times) I get the faucet off in about an hour. I started at 4pm. Now it is a little after 9pm.

I do a little cleanup, break out the directions and start putting the new faucet together. The instructions of course are all diagrams and no words. Items are not marked on the diagram correctly. An item marked J is really K. It is like a big 20 step Lego with messed up instructions. All I can think of to say is "Who did your QA, faucet company?"

11pm comes around and the faucet is plugged in. It is running great. Even the hot water is running OK based on where you turn the valve to. Tomorrow I still need to replace the hot water valve. I am hoping that it is only a 1 hour job, but we will see.

Plumbing really bites.