This silent film remake of a scene from “The Empire Strikes Back” is great. I love the music.

My favorite scene from my favorite movie. It makes me happy that I have this film on my G1 phone!

While looking through the Aerostich catalog I noticed they were selling an anime named “Kino’s Journey”. I checked for it on Netflix and saw that the 15 episode series was available so I put it in my queue. The story is about a traveler, Kino, and her talking motorcycle, Hermes. They travel the semi-fictitious world, stopping and visiting many different countries. These countries vary in size, technology, and culture. Each episode is a small self-contained story and usually has some insight into human behavior. I found the series to be pretty interesting, sometimes shocking, sometimes funny. But most of all, I enjoyed the motorcycle footage. It looked like a cool “motorrad”. The opening and closing theme songs are really good too. When I was riding my motorcycle last week, I couldn’t get the opening song out of my head!

We saw the IMAX Hubble 3D movie on July 4th at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It was incredible, fantastic, awe-inspiring, and actually made me proud of the good ol USA. (A couple tears welled up even) The footage of the space shuttle blasting off was amazing. Hawaii got some screen-time as well, with a great shot from orbit and opening/closing IZ song. I highly recommend this IMAX feature!

I bought a new Panasonic DMC-TS2 point & shoot camera to replace my old Canon SD200. I’ve wanted a waterproof camera for a long time and this one looks to be a pretty good one. Last year I looked at the Canon D10 which seemed to be the best camera out there, but it did have a couple things that I didn’t like. First, the video recording wasn’t any kind of HD and secondly the camera was physically bulky. At the time, Panasonic had their DMC-TS1 which seemed good but the disadvantage was that it was only waterproof to 10 feet. With the new DMC-T2, Panasonic increased the depth to 30 feet. Combine that with a small form-factor and 720p video and it became the camera to get. So far I am pretty happy with it. I’m already comfortable with the controls and the image quality seems pretty good. I am really happy to have a camera that can take some abuse and I don’t have to worry about it getting damaged around the pool. I can’t wait to take some underwater photos and video!

A couple remixes of some classic Ghibli tunes. This one has Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Totoro, Laputa, Have a nice week!

After about 10 years of off-and-on reading, I finally finished Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What a great relief to finally be done with it. I’ve started this book several times, and really enjoyed how it began, but always hit a wall at around the same point. I love working on my motorbike, and I love traveling, so I always thought this book would be perfect for me. But there’s the third part of the story, which is the philosophical sub-plot which had always derailed me. The seemingly endless “chautauquas” or lectures about Quality were so obscure to me, I always lost interest. When Pirsig applies his classic and romantic reasoning to matters of motorcycle maintenance, the book was thoroughly enjoyable. But the story of Phaedrus left me wishing he’d go back to something related to motorcycles. My most recent effort at reading the book had me not spending so much energy trying to understand Phaedrus’ quest for Quality, but rather skimming over these parts, trying to get back to the travel plot. In the end, I enjoyed the book but also can’t help feeling that Pirsig’s Zen was so obscure, it could have all been a bunch of nonsense.

A nice compilation of infomercial clips showing how not to do things.

I love this song from Lupin III. When I played the remixed version, Mariko knew exactly where it was from. Remix version below.