Andy Gapin

I’ve got some Magic Kingdom photos for you right here…

Thanks to my fiancée’s Valentine’s Day gift to me, Bender, my MacBook Pro got a very appropriate tattoo.

The decal is from LapTatt.com.

Some Epcot photos!

Alright, so it took me almost a month and a half to fully finish up my photos from Disney this year, but there were about 2500 to go through! Everything is now edited, tagged, rated, and…whatever else I do to my photos. I won’t go into making excuses for taking so long to finish up, but to be fair, I did post photos on Facebook a couple weeks ago before I even started tagging them.

I’m going to be posting a somewhat smaller set of photos here and I will be doing it over the span of five posts, one for each park and one for miscellaneous stuff.

To start, here are the photos from Animal Kingdom. Many of these were taking with my new Canon 70-200 f/4 L USM. These are really the only shots I’ve taken with it so far, actually.

I actually forgot that I saw this (a week ago). I think that’s kind of all I really have to say about Gnomeo & Juliet, it’s a cute movie, but it’s forgettable.

The main problem that Gnomeo & Juliet faces is that the idea was to make a happy and fun children’s movie based on possibly the most well-known tragedy ever. We all know how Romeo & Juliet actually ends and that’s just not conducive to making a children’s movie. This really does change the entire vibe of the story (I mean come on, there can’t be a single second that any audience member actually expected a tragic ending), but I can give credit to the fact that Romeo & Juliet’s actual ending wasn’t totally ignored. This deviation from the original story is addressed in a manner that works well enough for a children’s film, but also feels like an easy way out.

Gnomeo & Juliet is good enough to entertain for an hour and a half, but does not leave any desire for a second viewing. Kids will like this, Elton John fans will be in heaven, and everyone else will be rather indifferent about it.

Rating: C

Last Friday, I took a ride up to Brooklyn for the first night of the Don Giovanni Records showcase at Death By Audio. The lineup was The Steinways, The Measure [SA], Black Wine, Full of Fancy, and Big Eyes and except for the disaster that was The Steinways’ set, the show was awesome.

I was able to photograph three of the bands, but of course the lighting was awful and I didn’t bring my flash. I had to bump the ISO all the way up to 3200 to get non-blurry shots, but they turned out to be pretty damn noisy. But since I knew this would be the case going in, I didn’t worry about it too much and just had fun with it.

I ended up having to convert most of the photos to black and white to deal with the different colored lights, but I did decide to keep the color for a few to see what I could salvage.

Honestly, I kind of enjoyed some of the results.

Yup, still alive over here and still hardly posting! There just hasn’t been much going on to post about. I haven’t seen any movies besides The Green Hornet (I’m probably going to go see Gnomeo and Juliet this weekend), I haven’t been allowed to run because I’m trying to get over my ankle pain, I haven’t been taking many photos because I need to finish getting through my Disney ones.

Excuses!

Oh, and part of what’s slowing down the Disney photo processing is the file server meltdown that I’ve been dealing with at home. Long story short, all my media is kept on a home server and it’s been having problems lately so I don’t really have much access to it until that’s sorted out.  My MacBook Pro is running out of hard drive space for stuff that I’d normally keep on my server (gigs and gigs of photos, music, and video) and making sure I’ve got two complete backups of all my data before blowing the server away and reinstalling Windows Home Server starting fresh with Amahi Home Server has been a two weeks and counting process. I’m getting close though. Also, because of that, I haven’t really be able to put any new music on my iPod in a while so I’ve got nothing to post about on that front either.

Anyway, I’m just about done with the photos (they’re been processed, they just need to be tagged), which I’ve already posted many of on Facebook, so I’ll post those here in the next week or so probably. If you’ve seen them on Facebook, then you’ve seen a larger, but less organized selection than I’ll be posting here.

I’ve also been meaning to add more to the nerd post count here by doing a Lifehacker-style “what I use” kind of thing. Maybe I’ll actually finish that and post it too.

And lastly, I’ll be hitting up the first day of the Don Giovanni showcase on Friday so I’ll probably have some photos or something to say about that.

Alright, yeah.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted here in this running log in quite some time. The reason for that is because I haven’t run in a month now, not since the Disney World Half Marathon. I’ve been trying to heal up from my ankle injury and I have orders from the doctor to do absolutely no running. It sucks. I’m not liking this at all.

At this point, I’m no longer looking to break 90 minutes for the Rutgers Half Marathon in April and trying to pull off a full marathon in mid-May is looking to be out of the cards too. I’m going back to the doctor on Monday and we’ll see what he says then, but I’ve still been feeling pain, just different pain and in different spots.

For many, Apple is a love ‘em or hate ‘em company. Some don’t like their closed systems and some still think there’s an Apple tax (there isn’t, but that’s not a discussion for right now). Many, including me and my fiancée, really just enjoy their products and find them to beat the competition for overall experience and what we’re looking for. That’s not what this post is about though. This is about something else.

Two days ago, my fiancée’s iPhone 3GS decided to go swimming. Okay, in reality, it was her fault 100%. She accidentally left it in the pocket of her jacket when she put it in the washer. She quickly realized and pulled it out, but it had already been mostly submerged by this point. Acting quickly, she threw it in a bag of rice and when I got home shortly after that, I took the phone apart to speed up the drying process and put it back in the rice. We were hopeful that we had saved it, but we both knew that the phone probably wasn’t going to make it. I could clearly see all of the liquid detection indicators inside had been tripped.

We let the phone sit for a day and a half in the rice before I put it back together and tried to turn it on. The next couple of hours were spent trying to get the phone out of an endless boot cycle. It wasn’t completely dead, but wouldn’t fully turn on either. We got nothing but the Apple logo on a very clearly waterlogged screen that at least still worked if you didn’t mind the water swirls. I plugged it into my computer to try and see if I could do a restore and, to my surprise, iTunes recognized the phone and would sync it and back it up (I was sure to only backup on my computer and not hers to avoid any chance of corrupting her backup and losing stuff forever). I ran the restore process successfully, but the phone still would not boot.

After being stuck in the endless boot cycle for a while and restoring a couple more times, I gave up. I took the phone apart again and threw it back in the rice. I knew that if there was still moisture, everything I just did probably sealed the phone’s fate and letting it dry more wasn’t going to do anything at this point. Still, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

Today, we made an appointment at the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store. After work, we came home and I put the phone back together so we could bring it over there. This time, the phone wouldn’t turn on at all. It seemed completely dead.

Now, I explained all that because this is exactly what I told the Apple genius. I was completely straight about it. The phone had water damage, it was our fault, and I even took it apart (which would have voided the warranty if it was still covered). Why beat around the bush? They can tell if a phone has water damage and lying wasn’t going to help anything. At least, if he knew what happened, he would know what steps to take.

He plugged the phone into a computer and it seemed like the battery was just completely dead. We let it charge for a bit and he restored it, but the phone still would not boot. While we were waiting, I asked him what our options were and I was frank with him. I told him that we really didn’t want to sign another two year contract with AT&T and buy an iPhone 4 more than half way into its lifecycle. He totally got that and basically agreed that if that was our thought process then it made sense for us not to.

Coincidentally, the genius that helped us had actually seen that same phone before. I remembered him from a while back when the screen was acting funny and we took it in. It turned out to just be a cable that had come unseated inside and he fixed it in about two minutes. After he explained what it was, I asked if he wouldn’t mind double checking the cable on my phone (I still had a 3GS at the time) just in case. He had no problem taking a look for me and didn’t even care that my phone was jailbroken–he just reminded me that if I had a problem, I’d have to restore and unjailbreak before bringing it back. Anyway, I mentioned that to him and we chatted a bit.

Back to the point, he looked up my fiancée’s account and came back and said “I’m just going to replace this for you.” I was pretty shocked, we had prepared ourselves for re-upping with AT&T and plunking down $200 for a new iPhone 4 (this would have also killed my iPhone 5 upgrade plan since I had the idea of taking her upgrade and giving her my current iPhone 4, a plan she was okay with). I was hoping it wouldn’t come to all that and we could at least just buy a 3GS refurb cheaply or something. So when we were told that they were going to take care of us, I was pretty stoked. The guy simply said that he’d rather see us leave happy than have to decide if we wanted to sign a new 2 year contract with AT&T and get an iPhone 4 halfway through it’s lifecycle.

What other company would do this? Seriously? Companies don’t replace water damaged products, nor should they. A water damaged product is clearly the user’s mistake, not theirs. Apple didn’t need to do this, but they did…and it was their idea. The entire time, the genius was very friendly, happy, and kept small talk with us. There is nothing else we could have asked for from the experience. Actually, they could have done a lot less and we still would have been happy.

This is one of the reasons why Apple will continue to get my money. I’m no fanboy, but despite their flaws, they just do most things better.