Last week I bought a PDA. It came in the mail Monday night. I bought a Dell Axim x50v on ebay (brand new). I won’t say how much I paid for it, but it retails for $450 and I sure didn’t pay that much. The reason I got the x50v is because it has a TRUE VGA screen. You have to get some freeware called OzVGA to get it to really go to true VGA (instead of just a really clear looking form of QVGA), but it is so worth it. This PDA is so advanced compared to my Phillips Nino 500 from six years ago. The processor is (roughly) the same speed as the processor in my original motherboard from 2000 (624Mhz). I also paid the extra to get the x50v because it comes with Bluetooth and a wireless modem/card/whatever built in. My plan was to find a mobile internet service and make VoIP calls and chuck my cellphone. I’ve run into a slight complication with that plan though, information on (use everywhere) wi-fi service is spotty at best. Most places (T-Mobile being the largest) want to sell you a plan ($20 a month) to use your wi-fi at their hotspots like Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, etc.….which is obviously a rip-off. Why am I going to drive to Starbucks just to use my PDA to get online when I can get online at home and at work? I’m certainly not driving to Starbucks every time I want to call someone… The PDA is so cool that when I showed it to Amy, she decided she had to have one, and she is ordering the same model on Monday. She had a Sony CLIE a little while back and sold it on ebay.

Speaking of Amy, she started working at the Wilshire Grand last Monday. She is the new manager for the Café and restaurant there. She tells me about all the great food there and I’m jealous every single day. She even gets free Starbucks at the Starbucks in the hotel. And yes, Wilshire Grand means on Wilshire…I can see the hotel from my office, and I walk past it on my way to the food court every day for lunch.

On Thanksgiving, I accompanied Amy and her family to a restaurant in Del Mar. It was in an Asian shopping plaza, but the cuisine was half Chinese and half Islamic (everything but the menu’s were totally Chinese though). We ordered a lot of food, but the centerpiece was a whole roast duck. So I didn’t get any turkey on turkey day, but at least I ate a bird.

On Sunday Amy and I went to the movies. We saw Ray. It was ok. I used to hate Jaime Fox, but he is improving the farther away he gets from “strong ethnic” roles like in Any Given Sunday. Perhaps the thing that always annoyed me about him the most was his weird little beady eyes, which of course were covered up by glasses 99% of the time in Ray. After we came out of the movie, a guy offered us free tickets to some upcoming advance screenings. I took a ticket to Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.”

The screening was on Tuesday night. The special effects were nowhere near finished, and that was the only thing anybody would see the movie for. Even when the special effects are done though (the release date is March 11th I think), this is going to be a stinker. Do a google and watch the trailer yourself to see what I mean. Think of it as a crappy network TV movie mixing I Robot (without any robots) and Jurassic Park 2, except with a quarter the CG budget of either of those movies. Ed Burns as the hero was also a very bad choice. For some reason he had to take his shirt off at least three times (a definite no-no in a movie made for guys). His dialogue and delivery made it seem like he thought he was filming Days of Our Lives instead of a Sci-Fi movie. The most damning aspect may have been Ben Kingsley with Andy Warholish white hair. Yes, the man who has played serious brooding baldies from Gandhi through House of Sand and Fog (and lets not forget Species!) has a full head of stark white hair. Despite my criticisms, it was cool to be a part of something I never could have been in Ohio. This was the first and only (so far) screening of the movie. You don’t get to do that in Ohio, and I got to do it for free. This is probably the sixth time they have approached us outside the theater with this, but this is only time the movie in question sounded interesting (another choice for this week was the new Steven Segal movie for example). Sunday also proved productive because Amy and I discovered and ate lunch at a place called Wahoo’s Fish Tacos. Great Mexican food and really good tasting batter on the onion rings.

In other exciting news, Aaron got us a free couch at a moving sale yesterday so now y’all have somewhere to sit….if you ever come visit…ever…