Jury Duty, bah humbug! I thought I could get away from doing it, and even did the whole "ignore the summon and they'll just think you never got it in the mail" technique. Well that's a load of crap, because they assume you got it anyways, even if you by some chance really didn't. They sent me a "failed to reply to jury notification" card, so I had to register no matter what, and now here I am typing this blog at the court house waiting for my court room to be back in session. It cost me $5 for one hour of internet use, but it's worth it just to keep me occupied.

See, I wouldn't mind serving Jury Duty, really I wouldn't. The problem here is that I do work the graveyard shift, and in fact I drove to the court house right from that job. In other words, I've been awake for roughly 21 hours straight so far, and didn't even get to go home yet. This means that by the time I get out of Jury Duty, I'll have maybe one or two hours of sleep, maybe even an hour to eat and take a shower, before I have to leave for work. Not to mention that the court house is 22 miles away from home, and I'll have to waste time by driving through traffic. Unlike most people, I don't get an excuse not to go to work. In this near two hours lunch break that we're given, I could theoretically stay in a bench and take a nap, but I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to wake up or worse; somebody might steal something from my sleeping body. Arrggh, this sucks!

I did have some humor to liven up the day though. In my jury pool, there are only a handful of attractive females, and the guys sure notice them. At one point, a big heavy set jury member walks into this huge 300+ capacity room, skips through all the empty seats, and seats down where? You guessed it, right next to one of the few attractive ladies. Ofcourse I don't blame him, but the guy doesn't even try to start a conversation with the girl, which is such a wasted opportunity.

Well, I was pulled from the huge jury pool, to the select 18 people that will then have to be shortened down to just the 12. Hopefully I'll be one of the six to be dismissed, because if I'm not, then I'll be returning tomorrow once again for more sleep deprivation. I can only hope I'm able to stay awake behind the wheel driving home or back to work hours from now.

*update* I'm finally back home with just about four hours until I have to leave for work. I still got to go back to the court house tomorrow though, because I'm now officially one of the 12 selected jurors for this criminal trial.

Mardy Random Bum

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Hostel: Part II  (2007)  C+

When I saw the first Hostel, I thought that it was relatively a good movie with a great premise, but it really wasn't anything that special. Here comes "Hostel: Part II" and although I was originally going to wait for the "unrated" DVD release, I just had to see what the oh so shocking ending for this movie is; just like what the advertisements suggests. Well it definitely wasn't that shocking an ending, but it wasn't bad either, kinda humorous too, but not that shocking.

The whole movie as a whole just didn't grab my attention as much as I hoped, because it's almost like a recycle of the first film. I do like the fact that they did a switcheroo by making the victims females now, as well as how the story shows us more about the people who pays to kill. The torture scenes ofcourse are probably what people who go to this movie would like to see, and they aren't bad. The plot moves along well enough, but while this is suppose to be the definitive last installment of Hostel, there were several plot elements that I wished were covered a bit more. Some glaring plot holes also ruin the premise of the film and kept me detach from the movie.

The main character Beth is greatly played by Lauren German, but she oddly might be intentionally contradicting as the main heroine. She's the one who tells the other girls to play it safe in this foreign country, and yet she herself does the same mistakes that she preaches about.

Eli Roth had a great idea with Hostel, but technically being a young director / writer, I felt he wasn't able to make the movies themselves as great as the concept. This is unfortunate because the concept is really cool, and it's just the stuff of horror legends that you want to tell your friends about.

Most internet goers are familiar with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It is afterall the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so the validity of the facts presented can be put in question. However for the most part the majority of the information are spot on and educational. The best thing about "wiki" is that it covers so many things from science, politics, movies, video games, and just people in general, that it really has become a go to site to look something up. I've said before that if you want to know an answer to anything "just google it," and now I have to add "check the wikipedia" to that suggestion.

Lately however Wikipedia has been eating up a lot of hours of my time. Do you remember back when the World Wide Web was still fresh to you, and you just had a hunger to check up whatever web sites you could go to, sucking up as much information as you are capable of? That's how Wikipedia has been to me lately. I would look up some information on anything, and part of that information opens up more things I don't mind looking at, and then that gives me another subject that I want to find out, and the next thing I know a couple of hours has passed by. It's almost addicting eating up all these information.

Remember, check the wikipedia.

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I'm still playing around with what I can do with the LG enV (VX9900) cellphone that I got. Still loving it so far, and while it has some limited smart phone features, it really isn't a smart phone and the limited web browser is the biggest testament to that. I think I finally got most of it's features down, although I'm still currently working on a few things. I bought a 2GB Micro SD flash card for the phone to increase it's storage, primarily for some videos and music that I want to play with my enV. I just need to plug in my Micro SD card to my computer, put in any mp3 files I want into the "my music" folder, and I've got music on the go.

I also bought a blue tooth headset that also allows me to listen to my music with a push of a button. The problem there is that the same exact button that starts my music is the same button that allows me to use my phone's voice commands. Sometimes, I get the music player when I want to do a voice command, and that becomes a bit of a hassle. Speaking of hassle, I was having a hard time doing the voice commands, until I realized that I had to do the "train voice" function first to make it a lot more accurate.

I also downloaded some games, Tetris, Texas hold em, black jack, the usual things I would play on a phone. Not cheap when most of those games cost between $4.99-$7.99.

The biggest problem I faced at first was trying to figure out how to go around using my own personal ringtones. Being that Verizon has their own ringtone service, I understand that they don't want people saving money by using our own music. There were a couple of methods that was suggested by the internet. The first one was to put a small mp3 file to the "my sounds" folder and text message it to myself and save as a ringtone. That didn't work. The second one was to use the bitpim program to hack the phone, but I needed a USB cord for it which I don't really want to have to buy. I did some other things before I realized that I could try what I did with my previous verizon cellphone, e-mail myself the mp3! I just need to e-mail my phone's default e-mail address an mp3 file that is only 300k big. So I've been editing my favorite Metallica songs to a riff or two, convert it down where it's less or equal to 300k, e-mail it to myself, then save as ringtone. It worked!

Right now I'm transferring some more video and music to the micro SD card, and once I'm done, I think I can finally stop treating my enV like a new toy. Next step for me is to investigate a feature that might allow me to use my cellphone as a way of getting my laptop connected to the internet without requiring WiFi.

My contract with Verizon Wireless for my cellular phone needs is already up for renewal, and with it comes a new phone (I'm sticking with Verizon because it does honestly have the best coverage in my experience). I've been meaning to have a new phone that follows at least certain features that I want, that isn't a dedicated smart phone. It has to at least have a 2.0 mega pixel camera, internet browsing capability, an mp3 player, allows an external memory card, and a QWERTY keyboard (I'm just tired of pressing on numbers for the letters). Being that I'm talking Verizon Wireless, they really don't have many phones that fits that criteria, except for one. Thankfully, it's actually a phone that I've been wanting for a while now. The Verizon LG enV (VX9900) phone.

 

Like most cell phones with a qwerty keyboard out there; that aren't a dedicated smart phone, it has that "candy bar" shape to it which I don't mind. I like the sound of the speakers too, as it's surprisingly pretty loud for a cellphone. I'm still awaiting my microSD card to arrive, so I have yet to test out those speakers with mp3 audio files though. I like that I can go online with it, even if it's still pretty limited, but it's kinda cool being able to go to my blog using a cellphone. My only complaint so far is that the directional pad is kinda small, and sometimes in the closed position, I accidentally press the "clear" button when I press down sometimes. Either than that, I'm pretty darn happy with it. Admitedly, it's not as cool as the iPhone which is coming up pretty soon, but I have my issues with that as well, and I'm not going to bother with changing my provider.

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