One thing works for me: I do not have to digitize hundreds of hours of 8mm video recordings this time around. Also, I now have a considerably more powerful hardware than I had then. And I am undoubtedly more skillful with the various media software. On the other hand, I haven’t done much movie-making since before our England years; I could be rusty, for all I know.

My activity log so far has a couple of hours for photo prep and about the same amount for introductory slideshow. I expect the total time to be in the vicinity of 150 hours. I better get on with that.

We weren’t disappointed. The 3D experience is quite rewarding, special effects and amalgamation of live action and CGI continues to amaze, Johnny Depp is brilliant, other members of the cast were all quite good, Tim Burton’s take on the familiar story is appropriately dark and hilarious by turns. Kimmy, who is normally easily scared by on-screen monsters and startling action cuts, did not find the proceedings too scary.

My only problem was with Mad Hatter falling into Scottish accent during his rants. It must have been too long since I left UK – I had a bit of trouble deciphering his speech. Becky, on the other hand, had no such problem.

A solid on my scale.

Almost.

I was almost expecting the looping “important message from Cablevision” that blamed all ills on ABC throughout the day on Sunday to be replaced by live Oscar feed just in time for the ceremony. That the feed was restored about an hour into the broadcast partially mitigated my displeasure with both ABC and Cablevision (which, I’ve no doubt, was shared by the 3 million Cablevision subscribers residing in WABC-7 broadcast area), but it still does not excuse either company. The Dolan family, cheapskates extraodinaire, seem to have positioned me and other subscribers as potential hostages in any dispute with content providers (which, judging by the fact that this is the second time this year that a popular channel was taken off the air, may become a regular happenstance). In this particular case, the little I understand about TV content economics does suggest that ABC is more at fault; I can’t imagine why a local affiliate in one specific region of the country, who produces very little of original content beyond local news broadcasts, would be suddenly worth 20% more than before, especially since it is, in effect, a free channel. (And I do know several friends who bought themselves digital antennas to ensure that they could watch Oscars even if the dispute was not resolved in time.)

The outcome will undoubtedly be higher rates for my cable subscription. The Dolans will quote-unquote apologize and blame it on the greedy networks, but that hardly makes me any happier.

As it were, we missed only the opening part of the ceremony, which might have been one of its more entertaining parts. We seemingly did not miss any of the actual awards, joining in when the Best Supporting Actor – which, I believe, is traditionally one of the very first categories to be awarded – was up.

There were surprisingly few entertaining bits in the rest of the broadcast. Only one production number, with brilliant street dancing to the nominated Best Original Scores. No live performances of the nominated Best Songs, which must be the newest trend. Several presenter routines were clever (Ben Stiller, or Diaz and Carell), while quite a few people looked uncomfortable and camera-shy. I liked the recently adopted practice of giving each of the Best Actor/Actress nominees a personal panegyric by a co-star; some of those salutations were quite charming. The Martin/Baldwin duo, conversely, was not at all funny and looked out of place – I can barely recall a joke of theirs that I laughed at (ok, the Paranormal Activity spoof wasn’t half bad); overall, IMHO, they were a huge downgrade from Hugh Jackman’s performance last year.

A number of acceptance speeches for “lesser” awards was quite rudely cut off, which may have helped to move things forward (nonetheless, the broadcast lasted a bit over 4 hours), but also probably contributed to there being very few good ones – I think Sandra Bullock’s was the only one that managed to be both funny and heart-felt without sounding arrogant or patronizing; I can only recall a couple of others (the French guy who won the Best Animated Short, the winner for the Best Score) who stayed away from the tired formula of “I couldn’t imagine this X years ago – Look at me now! – Thank you the managers and the agents and the members of the crew [and James Cameron the Visionary]“.

The Hurt Locker looks like a great movie that I definitely want to see, but its haul of Oscars and especially its Best Picture award look to me a bit of a stretch. Ever since Shakespeare in Love won over Saving Private Ryan in ‘98, the Academy has been trying to over-compensate in favor of the socially- or politically-profound movies, and this must have been the case of the voters being biased towards a current-events, touches-the-nerve story over a fantastic allegory. Still, I felt that a ground-breaking movie a decade in the making, and one that so effortlessly became the most widely seen movie in the entire history, was slam-dunk deserving of the Best Picture Oscar. Makes it even more of an anomaly that The Return of the King cleaned up in ‘03.

Also, the Best Picture award provided a single exception that I noticed this year to the trend of the same people winning all awards during the season. Jeff Bridges won a Golden Globe, a SAG Award and an Oscar for his role. Sandra Bullock did likewise. So did Christoph Waltz. So did Mo’Nique. I can’t imagine that their performances are such stand-outs compared to those of their fellow nominees that different voting bodies would each agree. Only when it came to the best movie, did the Academy of Motion Pictures vote differently from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Weird.

In any case, Oscars always rekindle my interest in watching movies. That, and the sight of gorgeous women in beautiful gowns – hey, I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit that I enjoy that sight tremendously! – makes the Oscar night one of the most important TV nights in my viewing calendar. Good thing ABC and Cablevision came to their senses before it was too late.

From a point of view of an architecture lover, Chicago must be one of the most impressive American cities. All over the Loop, there are gorgeous examples of a wide variety of architectural styles. The concept of uniformity was seemingly paid no heed whatsoever when Chicago was built up in 19th-20th centuries, so there are literally no two like buildings in any proximity of one another. On a bright, sunny day, even the heart of the city’s concrete jungle is rather pleasing to the eye.

I’ve been to Chicago quite a few times in the past, and yet I never knew that many streets in its Downtown area exist on two levels, with the lower level providing a quicker driving route between various points; much fewer cars use those lower streets. When you walk around Chicago on foot, you may never realize that a wide thoroughfare such as North Michigan Ave is, in fact, an elevated roadway, with the ground-level street directly underneath it. When a taxicab suddenly took me along the lower-level route, I was stunned by the discovery.

I also feel like I should have been familiar with that before.

Having had been a comparatively frequent business traveler prior to the family move to England, I have not been on a business trip for nearly three years. The shaving cream can felt victim to my lack of recent exposure to traveling without checked-in luggage. It was a large container, well above the 100g limit allowed in the carry-on these days. The TSA agent looked at me with barely concealed disdain and my pride took a serious hit for being publicly nailed in an attempt to break the law, however inadvertently, especially as I was unable to conceal my incredulity and duly attracted the attention of everyone behind me in the security check line. It all makes sense, I suppose: Idiotic rules make you feel like an idiot.

On the other hand, I consoled myself, at least I can hope that a truly dangerous object would not escape TSA folks’ scrutiny, seeing how successful they were in preventing various bottles, cans and containers to accompany their hapless owners. My shaving cream joined a pile of at least 50 similar objects…

My little problem: I don’t want to embarrass my kid. I want to be a cool Dad. And yet, 90% of music on my iPod is in languages other than English and hardly any is in genres that teenagers would appreciate. The rest falls into the “oldies” category, with a good chance of appearing too dated to the kids.

My only safe choice seems to be in going with my 50-song Beatles playlist. The Beatles are kinda undissable; even if the other kids don’t like it, I can’t imagine them giving my daughter hard time about her old man being a Beatles’ fan.

At some point after the kids get in the car, Hello Goodbye comes up in the shuffle. Suddenly, they all start singing along from the backseat1. Becky notices my apparent surprise of that and remarks: “See, Daddy, my friends are cool!”

If they are cool singing to it, I must be cool playing it.

Whew! Aced it!

———–
1 It came up in a conversation afterwards that the teens know the song mostly because of Jonas Brothers’ cover, but they all agreed that they hated that and that the original version was much much better…

Overall, I am happy with my choice. I like the design and the feel of the reader, the user interface and the navigation is simple enough, and the reading experience is not at all taxing on the eyes. There are few bells and whistles beyond plain book-reading, but I neither care to listen to music while I read nor have any interest in carrying grayscale versions of my favorite photos on the device. Absence of 3G connectivity (and of the ability to buy and download books on-the-go) does not bother me in the least.

PRS-505 is not as small as to fit into an average shirt or jacket pocket, but a ski jacket provided me with a perfect compartment for it, and on other occasions I think I’ll be fine carrying it in a bag. On the other hand, I wanted the device with at least a 6″ screen, and I appreciate the fact that its navigation buttons do not demand too much of “dead” space around the screen to be accommodated.

Since this particular model is no longer being produced by Sony, it makes little sense for me to go into a detailed review. Let’s just say that if it was still freely available in the stores, I’d lean to strongly recommending it to others.

It is not without shortcomings, though. The one that bugs me the most is that there does not seem to exist an option to select the initial font size when the book is first formatted for reading. The device defaults to “small”, while I find “medium” more acceptable. Pressing the font change button causes the book to be re-formatted, which can take 15-20 seconds. Having the formatting process run twice before I start reading is a minor annoyance.

The device also self-reboots on me occasionally. In fact, when the “currently reading” value exists and I want to change to a different book, the reader is certain to reboot during “new” book’s formatting. After it restarts (45-60 seconds), the “current” book is no longer marked, and the formatting goes ahead without a problem. But with one book, I could not make the font larger, as the device kept rebooting during each “second” re-formatting. I am willing to attribute this as a side effect of russification, but I need to play with various formats to find out if it can be overcome. Strangely, I have all of the books on the device currently in its native .lrf format, which I least expected to cause me problems.

[update 02/26] After playing with different formats for a couple more days, I can conclude that initial formatting step (as well as re-formatting for font size change) is specific to native Sony .lrf book format. The involuntary reboot is definitely due to using .lrf with the russification hack – it does not occur with other formats. I do not have much of a choice if I want to be reading Russian books, because support for .epub format is currently limited enough so that I’d have to perform manual task of font embedding into each ePub file, and PDF does not really do it for me (table of contents gets dropped during conversion to PDF; re-sizing of the font size does not re-page the document, but simply breaks one page into two or three with the bottom of the initial page occupying just the portion of the screen and breaking off in mid-sentence – very disorienting), so I’ll probably ignore the few annoyances that .lrf causes me now. For an English-language-only user, seems like ePub format offers the best reading experience with practically no downside. [/update]

So, no, not perfect. On the other hand, I’ve yet to see a device of any kind that would not cause me some sort of annoyance design- or performance-wise. I have already practically recouped the money I spent to buy the reader by saving on skiing rental equipment and two days of lift passes for myself. Ability to not do something I don’t especially enjoy while generally accompanying the kids and keeping myself entertained – priceless!

 
How do I end up on their mailing list, I’d like to know!?

A single Olympiad occurred during my time in Europe and, having watched it in two different countries, I was impressed with the coverage both on BBC and also on Italian TV. It was much closer to what I remember from my Soviet days, when during the Olympics, practically every event could be seen on TV in its entirety, either live or earlier recorded, with the focus on the present competition.

Now, NBC has done its darnedest best to prove its uniquely inept approach to covering the Games.

Listen, NBC! I don’t need to hear for the fifth time in a couple of days that a Canadian skier draws inspiration from his severely-handicapped brother, or that his Australian rival is actually a Canadian born in Vancouver who bolted Down Under because of a conflict with Canadian team authorities, or that Chinese figure skating favorites have given 18 years of their lives to their pursuit of a gold medal. I already heard and saw that all on the last night’s broadcast! It is no longer enlightening if you keep repeating it. And it is not even news anymore if you simply re-cut the same video segment differently.

Least of all do I need two minutes of commercial breaks for each four-five minutes of event coverage. Especially when there’s been no athletic performances shown in the last 5-minute segment.

In the three hours of prime-time Olympic coverage that I watched last night, we’ve seen about ten downhill runs, a handful of snowboard cross heats and half a dozen or so figure skating pairs’ programs. With charitable approximation, that’s about 70 minutes of the actual event coverage out of 180 minutes spent in front of the TV. Ridiculous!

Some scheduling decisions are impossible to understand, period. I realize that with the 3-hour difference, some prime-time events are simply occurring too late for the younger kids to stay up and watch, but why would the broadcast of a final of a day-time event be pushed all the way back towards midnight? Kimmy was rather fascinated by snowboard cross, but only quarterfinal runs were shown before her bedtime. Semifinals were slotted in between figure skating performances around 10pm, and even I did not stay up beyond 11pm to see the final run. On the other hand, in one of those prime-time segments, we were treated to a riveting spectacle of a Chinese figure skater throwing a football at the beginning of his warm-ups. Followed by the drawn-out medal ceremony for the aforementioned Canadian skier.

Is there anybody out there who enjoys watching the coverage of one of the biggest sporting events on the calendar with the actual competition taking backseat to fluff? NBC has been at it for as long as I can remember. I suppose exclusive broadcast rights mean that my only alternative is not to watch Olympics at all, and since I do want to watch, I will unwillingly contribute to the ratings that will continue to fool NBC into thinking that their coverage was successful. If only I could move back to London for the couple of these Olympic weeks.

The big part of it is undoubtedly our “spoiled” attitude after several years in Europe – we simply do not find many destinations in North America all too exciting. Add to that the upper limit of three hours in the air that we are currently willing to entertain, and our lack of enthusiasm for a beach holiday, and, as one of my friends jokes, “it’s Colonial Williamsburg or stay home”.

Where did we go for a spring school break from London? Cotswolds, Tuscany, Wales, Central Europe. Fairly inexpensive, either by air or by car, comparatively short flights when driving was not an option. Ok, one year the girls went all the way to the US for spring break, but while the flights were of the longish variety, the overall travel expense was still quite minimal…

Back in the US, we can’t come up with an option of a nice place that can sustain our collective interest for longer than a couple of days, be relatively near and comparatively inexpensive to get to and spend time at. Preferably, where we haven’t been to yet. Desirably, warmer than Northeast US. Hopefully, not overrun by hordes of vacationers also taking advantage of school break.

I already admitted – spoiled.

20 minutes, 40 bucks, and I have not had even to step out of the house.

I don’t know why they did not show up and offer their services after previous snowfalls, but I sure hope they’ll be showing up the next time.