Archive for the 'Jasmine' Category

Batman - The Dark Knight

Published
by
kyleabaker
on July 22, 2008
in Jasmine, Multimedia and Video
. 0 Comments

The Dark Night

So I just watched this excellent movie with Jasmine and I’ll have to say that it impressed me even more than I expected! I know there is also a lot of talk about the movie due to the unfortunate loss of Heath Ledger, but I must say that he was the most impressive actor/actress in the entire film.

It almost felt like the movie was aimed more towards him, even though it was…well…you know…a Batman movie. Batman Begins does a really good job of covering his own origins and what not, but The Dark Night doesn’t really focus much on him..except for maybe a couple things in his life. I won’t give out the details…so all I can say is that I wasn’t disappointed.

You won’t be either, so…Go see it and take your friends!

UPDATE (2008-07-23):
Here is a quick update from one of my blog readers.

Hey Kyle,

I read your review today of The Dark Knight. I don’t know if you heard about this, but did you see that PETA is now condemning the movie because batman hurts dogs in it? Pretty ridiculous.

http://bloggasm.com/peta-criticizes-the-dark-knight-for-its-treatment-of-animals

Anyway I thought you would find this amusing.

Take care,
Cory

That is really ridiculous! I noticed that there were several dogs that would just be thrown around in the movie, but I can’t believe PETA is complaining about it really. The scenes with the dogs aren’t really cruel scenes at all. Just self defense really.

Anyway, thanks Cory for the email!

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Wednesday..yet another hump day

Published
by
kyleabaker
on July 9, 2008
in Jasmine, Multimedia and Picture
. 0 Comments

Today (well, part of yesterday as well) Jasmine and I spent a while looking through her pictures from Peru. She has some really excellent pictures in the ~560 that she took. It’s a really good thing that I lowered the picture quality a notch or two one my camera before she left. The memory card had about 20% of the space left when she returned…so if I hadn’t thought of that then she would have ran out of space early and only brought home around ~300 Peru pictures and missed out on so many pictures during trips towards the end.

Along with the images that she took, she also has some ~900 that one of her friends, Chris, from the trip put on some cds for her. His images are also great, but far less of them actually have her included in the group shots for some reason.

If you have a flicker account and want to checkout her pictures then you can check them out on my flickr photostream, but you’ll have to request me as a friend first..as I don’t want my family pictures and pictures of me in general available to random strangers across the Internet at wild. I’m sure Jasmine wouldn’t like that either. ;) Just sent a request via flickr and I’ll hook you up with some sweet Peru pictures though!

You can find me in the flickr-sphere here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyleabaker/

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Welcome home party

Published
by
kyleabaker
on July 8, 2008
in Jasmine and News
. 0 Comments

Cleaning Jasmine’s apartment for a sweet welcome home party! Her room is a mess, but we’re progressing….gotta have room for the party roaming. Off to get some pizza in the living room…

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Jasmine’s Home

Published
by
kyleabaker
on July 7, 2008
in Jasmine, Multimedia and Picture
. 0 Comments

So I woke up early and got to the airport today to pickup Jasmine! The flight may have landed on time (12:05 PM), but it took another 50 minutes or so before they came through the terminal. I also made sure to get there early…around 10:30…so I would have plenty of time to find parking and find the terminal where she would come out, but honestly it was all very simple!

After picking her up I took her out to the awesome subway on Western Blvd. here in Raleigh…so we sat and ate while she told me about a lot of her fun stories. Seems like she had a ton of awesome times and memories in Peru!

I lent my camera to her as well and she took a good amount of pictures, nearly filling the memory stick with ~560 pictures of her with friends and scenery! There are some great pictures from the Inca Trail as well. If you’re a friend of mine on flickr then you can check out her photos on my flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyleabaker/.

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Guy night out

Published
by
kyleabaker
on July 6, 2008
in Jasmine and News
. 0 Comments

Well, today I get to drive down to Raleigh and have a “Guy night out”. Haha, I’ll be alone so that’s why it’s funny, but it should be a fun night away from home and hanging out all night doing whatever I want to do. Then tomorrow I get to pick up Jasmine from the airport!

Hopefully I can fit a beach trip in soon, but until then I’ll take advantage of my time away from home and chilling in Raleigh! Actually I’ll be staying in Cary tonight, but Raleigh after that. Hopefully they’ll have a pool where I’m staying! I haven’t looked into the options yet, just got a room.

There’s something about staying in hotels that I’ve always loved. I still have no clue what it is really, but it’s like getting to do whatever you want like your own apartment or whatever with the benefits of not having to clean up anything…and just take advantage of everything that…that’s the fun part.

Well, I better get on the road! Maybe I’ll blog again when I get to the room.

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Welcome back into the wild

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 31, 2008
in Birthday, Jasmine and News
. 0 Comments

Well, I just got back home from a great party with some of my home-boy friends. They had a good throw down up in Boone, NC with a bunch of people I hadn’t met before.

I randomly ran into Brandon and Scuff at Ingles in Boone! How weird is that!? I mean, Brandon’s always in Boone, but the fact that I just randomly went to Boone and saw him there..that’s funny!

Adam stayed at the party since it was pretty much for him, but Will went with me to grab some more party “materials”. ;) You know…cup-cakes, sodas, candles, balloons…lol, just kidding. The “other” party items. :P

It was really interesting to hangout with them again! It brought back some memories from childhood..which is always cool.

I mean, once you go off to college, you lose touch with your best friends from home and make new friends. I can’t say that I like either group of my friends more than the other, because that would be a lie..but wow..isn’t it great to catch-up with old friends again!

We just played some pong, a little sequence (the board game..only modified for the party mood), talked on a balcony, walked up a deserted road and downed a few bottles and basically just had an all around great time!

It’s sad that when you move off to college you have to leave them behind and start all over, but at least I know now that good friends are friends for life. We just connected again almost like we hadn’t been a day apart!

Sometimes you hangout with friends again and have nothing to do or talk about, but wow…that was probably the best time I’ve had with them yet.

It was great to catch-up with Will and talk to him about what’s going on in his world and what’s going on in my world. You know, just the basic definition of catching up.

When I first called up Will last night, he was like “Kyle??….Kyle Baker??? Holy crap man! I can’t believe it’s you! What the heck are you getting into tonight!?” Straight from long time no see to what’s taking you so long to join us and party?!

It was like a re-bonding experience. Fantastic!

Then later, Adam and I sat up until like 5:30 am playing Halo 3 on his xBox 360. I pretty much got pwn’d every round, but it was cool.

We sat up talking about all kinds of cool stuff. He told me about how a long time ago when we were kids he came over to my house and we sat down at my families piano and I showed him how to play this piano part while I played to other half of it.

It was just cool to listen to him tell me about a memory like that. Honestly, I didn’t recall any of it..but it made me feel awesome to know that I made a cool memory with one of my friends so very long ago..even if I didn’t remember it.

I feel like I remember so many little things that I did with my friends that they probably don’t remember and those little things were the best times of my childhood.

Anyhoo, I’ve got to get some sleep now. More partying and socializing is in the works for later this evening!

While I sleep, I hope Jasmine is regaining her “health” (feeling a little sick while in Peru) so she can go on the Inca trail!

I hope everyone is having a blast as well. You only get one summer per year. ;) Use it wisely. :P

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Well, it’s been a typical Friday

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 30, 2008
in Jasmine, News, Web and Web Design
. 0 Comments

Except for the fact that I got my stitches removed today! All ~40 of them. :P They just put tape on the scar for now, as extra support to make sure it doesn’t open up (boy that’d be bad).

I’d upload a photo or two, but Jasmine has my digital camera while she’s in Peru. She’s got to get up at 5 am in the morning (Saturday) to go on the Inca trail. They’re one hour behind us there, so that means it will be 6 am here. ;)

She seems to be enjoying her stay there…when she’s not feeling sick from some of the food.

In other news, Google changed their favicon today (or was it yesterday evening?). Well, I personally don’t care much for the new favicon. It’s a lowercase “g” instead of being uppercase.

Old Favicon:

New Favicon:

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Jasmine’s in Peru

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 23, 2008
in Jasmine and News
. 1 Comment

Well, Jasmine has gone on a trip to Peru! She left yesterday around lunch time, but I’m not sure what time they arrived. I haven’t heard back from her just yet.

I told her she should keep a pretty complete journal of her trip, cause I went to Bolivia once a long time ago and only wish I had kept a better journal. :( Ah well, I still remember a lot of my trip. I was just so young when I went that I’m sure it would be fun to see what I wrote about. :D

I setup an account here so Jasmine can blog here about her trip while she’s there if she wants, so you might see some posts rolling in from here. That should be fun to read. I also setup a blog for here at http://jasminebaker.wordpress.com/ thinking she might rather blog there, so I’m just waiting for a reply email to see which she chooses.

Anyway, Jasmine..I love you and hope you have a wonderful trip!

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Ubuntu: Mac OS X themed!

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 23, 2008
in Applications, Jasmine, Linux, Mac, Open Source, Opera, Operating Systems, Picture, Ubuntu, Web Browsers and Windows
. 0 Comments

So my fiancée loves the way Mac computers look, but who doesn’t? They’re so clean and simple. Well, as much as I like the clean and simple look..I’m not dedicated enough to try to get OS X installed on her HP dv1000.

Don’t get me wrong, her laptop is a mean little machine (especially since I’ve been playing on it lately). The problem with installing OS X is that you have to hunt for all of the drivers and some of them you have to manually configure. Manually configuring in this case also means little to no resources online for many of the things you will have to configure.

There are a few decent places with information about getting Mac OS x86 installed on a non-Apple computer, but trust me…it’s not been simplified enough just yet. ;)

I tried installing OS X on my desktop about a year ago and ran into many complicated situations…so I did the next best thing. I installed Ubuntu! Now that I’ve had it installed and running for ~9-10 months I’m beginning to thing this is the best!

So why would I install Linux on my system if I don’t want to manually configure everything? Okay, I don’t mind manually configuring something here and there. Today most Linux distros require very little manual configurations to run properly. Ubuntu literally required none!

The best thing about using Linux is that you can do anything with it! Having this in mind, I took Jasmine’s laptop (~5 months ago) and installed Ubuntu on it. After getting everything installed and updated I began to Macify it for her. I got a few things done here and there, but just recently I became more interested and began finishing some more of the conversion.

Now, there I’ve seen several screenshots where people have made almost pixel perfect copies of the Mac OS X environment. The screenshots here clearly show some faults, but overall they have the Mac feel going on!

I basically just searched around the web and found little tips here and there on how to get certain looks in Linux. The dock is Cairo-Dock. The web browser is actually Opera, which in Linux has the same skin as the Windows version, but I skinned with a Safari themed skin and altered the toolbar to get the address bar above the tabs.

You can click them for a larger image. I’ll try to post some finished product screenshots once I tidy up the menu bar a bit and add a few more Mac’ish ends. ;)

In the meantime, if you’d like to get started with any of this on your Linux box then you can navigate over to my forum topic with several helpful links to resources!

I’m planning to write a guide for this pretty soon that will step through each little detail for you, but if you can’t wait then go checkout the forum topic. The topic is in no means a tutorial or a guide, it’s really just a note/pastebin for my thoughts and work process, haha. A way for me to hold onto some information in a slightly organized fashion. :D

Stay tuned for the guide in the near future!

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College Years - Ending another semester

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 2, 2008
in Jasmine, News and School
. 0 Comments

So I’ll be here at NC State until Monday, just finishing up some things. This semester has flown by so fast! I hope I can relax this weekend and get some time to myself, but everyday’s been busy for me lately with planned things and unplanned things.

I guess the one word that I chose to describe myself in my “Self-Imaging” post really is true, haha. Story of my life..being unscheduled.

Well, I added a forum to the blog so if you just want to chat with me you can. You can continually find the link in the column to the right. It is labeled “bbPress Forum“, which is also made by the same team that works on WordPress. They tied in nicely together, but it did take a bit of hacking and customization to get the appearances to match. I didn’t want it to seem like a completely different site, so I had to work on the style sheet and header a bit.

For now, you should check out the bbPress Forum and bookmark it! I’m planning to using it like a general chat, off-topic, whatever kind of board just for friends and visitors to talk in general with me. Hope you enjoy it!

I’m working on fitting a Photo Gallery in, but that will be just a little bit before it goes live. ;)

Hope everyone’s exams are going well! Good luck! I’m off to grab Jasmine a Red Bull before her exam..

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