Jeffrey Vanneste’s Personal Blog

I turned my xbox 360 on last night and it just started to blink 3 red lights. I think I shed a few tears. I called microsoft this morning and they are going to repair it for me. I asked what the cost is going to be and she told me nothing. This is good news but I don’t think it will pan out. Everyone in forums says it’s $160 to get it fixed. This is horrible news.

In other news, Frank Miller (the guy who wrote Sin City) has a new movie coming out called ’300′ and it looks awesome. A not so good quality version of the trailer is available here. I think I’m excited.

UPDATE: Sean always tells me that I luck out.  I’ve been complaining that I have no money since moving to Montreal.  I’m broke.  Prior to moving $160 would be chump cash, but now I don’t have any extra money.  Anyways, my 360 breaks and guess what comes out today: free repairs on all 360′s manufactured prior to 2006.

Rach and I went out to Ottawa for her big 26th birthday. We left on Friday night and had supper with one of her friends from school (Tracy and Chris). They had a pretty sweet house and were amazing hosts. They cooked us almost every meal. If they ever come to visit us we will have to make some really good toast and have a lot of banana’s.

Friday night we just hung out around their house and ended up playing Mario Party 5 (Tracy and I won, that’s all that matters). Saturday we toured around Ottawa a little bit and the girls went shopping.

We went to some classy restaurant for birthday supper at a place called ‘Empire’. After that it was off to some small pub downtown where everyone else tried every Martini on the menu.

There was a big apple conference today announcing new iPods and a new iTunes which lets you download movies.  It doesn’t work in Canada yet but it’s coming in Q1 2007.  Anyways, here is the summary of the conference:

• 75 movies are available to download now from iTunes, at an initial cost of $12.99 for the first week and $14.99 after that. Preordered titles will be $12.99 and older movies will be $9.99.
• Future releases will be available the same day that DVDs are released.
• Downloads will take about 30 minutes but can be watched during file transfer.
• Image resolution is 640 x 480.
• The movies will only be available in the US until 2007.
• DRM for movies is the same as it has been for iTunes TV shows.
• A wireless set top box for TV, tentatively called iTV, will launch in the first quarter of 2007. It will be half the size of a Mac Mini, it will include USB, ethernet, 802.11b/g, component video, optical audio and HDMI. It will be controlled by the Apple remote.
• iPod announcements included $4 games for the iPod, longer battery life and brighter screens and an 80GB model with prices starting at $249.
• The new Nanos will come in 5 new colors, have a 24 hour battery life and up to 8GB capacity.
• The Shuffle has been completely redesigned, now comes with an aluminum case and costs $79.

Check out apple’s site for more info.

Rach wanted to get me out of the apartment today so she decided we should go for a short walk. Little did I know that this walk was almost 3 hours long. We walked the opposite direction from the metro terminal that we always use towards Parc du Mont-Royal. There was a little pond there and an insane amount of people. Think like the Saskatoon fringe but I’m guessing it’s like this every weekend. I told Rachel it was because no one has backyards here. She argued.

We walked around the park until we heard some drums and went towards that. Apparently every Sunday hoards of people get together and bang on some bongo drums. It probably has some official name but I don’t know what it is. Anyways, when we finally got there I quickly discovered that this bongo thing was just a reason for all the hippies to get together and smoke pot. We sat around for about 1 minute before Rachel allowed us to go.

And now the exciting part of the walk, right after leaving the pot drums we see a plane in the middle of the street. Yes, a plane. There are police cars and firetrucks everywhere. The plane had one wing that looked quite damaged. There were a lot of people taking pictures and talking about it. We just kept walking away from it and listening to everyone that we passed talk about it. I guess it was the big event for the neighborhood. We could land planes in the middle of Saskatoon if we wanted so what’s so special about this? When we got home I searched for news coverage of this event and to no surprise there are quite a few stories already.  We stopped for some sushi on the way home which was pretty good but also very expensive.

I learned some valuable lessons on this trip:

• Bring my camera with me just in case you see a plane crash land in the middle of a city
• The rotating bars when you leave the metro are just the right height to sack me. It’s a good idea to turn side ways when walking through these

First things first. Projector pictures. You know. This is the temporary screen. I’m just shooting it on the wall for now which has a horrible glare but it’s still watchable.

This is Rachel over joyed with the projector getting setup. Party on Wayne. The desk she is at we got from Sean when we helped him move. The wooden table on the floor we got yesterday for $40. It was suppose to be the coffee table but I’m trying to convince Rachel that it should just hold the home theater PC. The shelf on the right really sucks but we managed to get it to stand properly. We got it for $20 from craigslist as well.

This is my “office” away from home. We bought a “jerker” desk from Ikea. It’s actually pretty nice.

This is our lovely bathroom. As you can tell from the lack of picture, it’s not very big. Rachel let me tin foil the window. I win!

I had to take a picture of our shower head. This thing is crazy. It’s like an anti-water saver. It only takes like 15 seconds before you are ankle deep in water (the drain can’t keep up).

This is our temporary bedroom. 1 blowup mattress. 1 used Ikea dresser (thank you craigslist again). You can see the curtains we put up in the corner. I’m not much of a handy man so it was quite a feat. The exercise ball was bought for me so I could sit on it in front of my desk. Little did we know the ball was very small. It will not be used.

This is our kitchen. Not much to say about it. You can see our lovely table in the corner.

And finally here is Rachel starting homework. She is displeased that I am blogging about our apartment with pictures before she did. Apparently she gets dibs on posting the pictures when the apartment is “finished” with a bed and more furniture.