James Chamberlin

It wasn’t that long ago when I blogged about The Mummy 3 possibly being made. While browsing Digg.com, I found an article stating Jet Li would be joining the movie’s cast. I was a bit surprised by this. I don’t watch his movies, but I loved him in Lethal Weapon 4.

Other odd pieces of info from the article include the fact that the movie’s location will be in China and that the film’s protagonist will not be Brendan Fraser, but rather his character’s son, now 22 years-old.

When it comes to new consoles, I’m usually the last guy to get one. I didn’t get the PS2, for instance, until it was out for a few years. Today, my new Xbox 360 was delivered. I ordered it on the 19th and it got here this morning… pretty speedy shipping for UPS.

Naturally, I quickly assembled everything and hit the power button. I got no response from the Xbox. I examined the power connections and saw that the light on the power brick was lit up. Figuring it was the connection to the XBox 360 itself, I removed the power cord and re-connected it. I hit the power button and it was off and running. The green light came on and I was happy… for about 10 seconds.

The green light turned to a red light and filled the left upper corner of the circle. My knowledge of the XBox 360 is very limited, but I do know that any sort of red light is bad. I read the error message on my TV and did a quick Google search and went to Microsoft’s support page. It said it was a problem with the hard drive. It suggested detaching the hard drive and powering on the XBox once again. I decided to just turn it off and turn it back on.

Instead of red lights and error messages, I was getting all green again. I was prompted to create a profile for collecting game achievements and the like. I set up the date, time, etc and everything seemed to work okay. Since I haven’t purchased a game yet, there wasn’t much to do, so I shut it all down.

I have to admit that that error message regarding the hard drive really freaked me out. The system was right out of the box new. I’m hoping things will go well in the future. I’m looking forward to the system. I just need to invest in a nice HDTV to go along with the XBox.

Yesterday, I received about three inches of snow. It’s nowhere near the amount of snow New York state has received recently… 7-10 feet, yikes. The local and national news has been showing video of homeowners climbing onto their roofs to shovel off the snow, fearing the weight of the snow could make the roof collapse.

At the end of January, I decided to sign up at a local gym. I’ve never been in good shape and I figured now is as good as any to start working on it. I’ve since been in about a half dozen times, usually in the morning at about 10 am. The crowd has been pretty much the same group of people… a few women who would appear to be stay-at-home moms, a few college aged men & women, and a few retired folks. They don’t seem to talk with one another very much, which surprised me a bit. The only small talk that seems to take place are between those who came to the gym together. Everybody else either has their iPod or is staring at a TV monitor.

The treadmills are almost always busy when I walk in, which is not surprising, judging by what I’ve heard from others. I generally lift some weights for a while until someone steps off of a treadmill. I haven’t lifted weights regularly since gym class in high school. It’s kind of embarrassing when I see how much strength I’ve lost over the past 8-10 years.

One of the concerns I had with joining a gym was the cleanliness of the place. I’ve seen enough news reports on 20/20, Dateline, etc to know that gyms are full of germs, and not just the typical stuff with mild side effects. Fortunately, I haven’t noticed myself getting sick, but then again, I haven’t been there very long. LOL

Solving two problems at once, researchers at Purdue University are working on a generator that creates useful energy by munching up all sorts of garbage. Dubbed the “tactical biorefinery,” it’s being designed with soldiers’ needs in mind. They can tote this thing around to not only give them mobile electricity, but to take care of their garbage as well.

via CNET

Like most kids who grew up in the late seventies/early eighties, I loved the Ghostbusters movies. I remember that they were a big success at the box office. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a sequel made in a hell of a long time. This seems to be changing as Dan Aykroyd, who played Dr. Raymond Stantz in the movies, has announced that a third Ghostbusters movie will begin production. It’s going to be in CGI and even Bill Murray has agreed to be involved in the project.

In a related story, Aykroyd announced that a Ghostbusters video game is going to begin production as well.

According to the Sci-Fi Wire, Brendan Fraser is interested in playing Rick O’Connell in a third Mummy film. I’m surprised he’s not talked about this before. The Mummy series has been fairly successful. It’s unfortunate the producers haven’t come out with another sequel yet. Making an action-packed adventure film out of a subject like archeology isn’t done very often.

It has been over six months since I kept a blog somewhere. My previous blog was located at TV.com and primarily talked about the sorts of contributions I was making to the site. Since I left that site, I’ve sort of been without a home for a blog, not that I’m feeling a daily need to express myself.

Just this past week, I registered a domain name on GoDaddy.com and signed up for hosting with Dreamhost.com So far, the hosting and DNS has been a bit of a pain in the ass. I’m hoping things will go a little more smoothly soon, as I’d like to be able to develop and host some projects here on Dream Host.

Being new to WordPress, I’m finding things to be rather easy to figure out, although I’ve not played with the themes & templates a whole lot yet. There are a lot of customizations possible through CSS. Things have certainly changed over the years. It doesn’t seem that long ago when NewsPro was the best script available for this sort of thing.