Reno, baby, Reno. Ok, so I did not double down. Actually, I haven't gambled so far on this trip. Reno is actually pretty nice. Minus the whole fact of it being FRIKKIN HOT during the day. But at nights it is really nice, which I love -- nothing beats the nice warm evenings.

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Bad Boys II is awesome -- really violent and hilarious. Michael Bay (the director) has a bunch of awesome camera angles, etc., which is fun to watch. Definetely worth seeing, especially if you liked the first one.

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This whole Kobe Bryant thing sucks. I don't think he did it, but you never know. If he did, wow, I really was a bad judge of character. It's amazing how the human mind can get distorted easily -- in this case it is because he is my favorite basketball player, yadda yadda yadda. Hopefully the girl is just nuts and is just trying to get money out of the whole thing. The whole "cheating on the wife" thing is HORRIBLE, but sexual assault is even worse. It's easier to forgive somebody who cheats in this day of age -- look at Clinton. 'Nuff said. But of course, I do NOT support him cheating. That is just wrong.

I somehow managed to mess up my blogger settings so if old blogs are missing or blogs are showing up twice, sorry.

Update on movies: LXG was not that good. Pirates of the Caribbean was really really good.

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I got a new cell phone plan today from T-Mobile. I was part of the family plan from Verizon, but I decided to get my own when I was trying to figure out the best way to deal with international coverage and T-Mobile was the best priced. So far I like it. The quality is definitely better than Verizon's coverage -- that is thanks to the GSM network that T-Mobile has.

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Gary Payton going to the Lakers is HUGE. This means Karl Malone should give the "I'm going also" word soon (hopefully Thursday). Then, the Lakers are UNSTOPPABLE next year. It must be a sad day in cow-town (Sacramento, duh).

A starting lineup of Payton, Kobe, George/Fox, Malone, and Shaq is SCARY. I think I could even play the 3 for the Lakers and they would still win. I don't think they will win 70+ games like some are already predicting, but they'll be really good. When the Bulls won 72 and then 69 the following year, that was simply amazing. I don't think that will ever happen again. If so, I guess the Lakers now have the best shot at it since they are now stacked with talent and are highly motivated.

Yet another paragraph about movies. Sorry, but I have seen a lot of movies lately. Charlies Angels. It was pretty good. For some reason I could never get fully into that series... it was good, just not spectacular. I had a "woah, that was good" feeling after Terminator 3, and I just didn't have that feeling after Charlies Angels.

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I struggled with SQL Server queries for a while tonight. What a pain in the butt. Luckily, the majority of the time I do not have any real problems writing queries. However, tonight I had problems getting two tables that have quite different information to join together. (Sorry, I am incredibly vague here, I know). But after about 1.5 hours, SQL books on the floor, multiple IE windows open tuned into Google, and a little luck, I finally got it working. :-)

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If you haven't watched 24: Season One, watch it. Go buy it on DVD. I don't know anyone who doesn't like it. And if you didn't like it, you suck. Seriously.

Terminator 3 was really good. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wasn't sure what to think of it -- I was thinking it may have been an attempt just to "cash in" on the Terminator name. But no, it was really good. The story made perfect sense and the special effects were really good. A lot (correction: A LOT) of stuff got blown up, which was great. And T-X, the girl terminator, was kewl and had some neat features.

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I am now waiting for my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop to arrive. The other night I started to look around the Dell website with Brian and was amazed how cheap everything was. I ended up ordering: 2.6Ghz Pentium 4, 15.4" widescreen with 1900x1200 resolution, 1 GB ram, 60 GB Ultra ATA, 64 meg nVidia geForce 4, DVD-Rom/CDRW, and the other features standard with the Inspiron 8500. It's now currently just waiting to be packaged and shipped -- it has already been made and tested. Woo-hoo!!!

I really wanted to get a PowerBook (that 17" PB is NICE) or a G5 desktop, but the laptop made the most sense as I am going to France for 3 weeks and can use the added screen space for all of the programming toolbars.

If you have not seen The Italian Job, go see it. It's really good. I went with Brian last night (my second time seeing it) and it does not disappoint. You can't go wrong with a heist (or action!) movie. Seth Green is hilarious and "Turkish" (Jason Statham) is great. He is probably one of my favorite actors. Damn funny.