Two robot thoughts:

I really liked what I saw from the pilot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I like Summer Glau(of Firefly fame) who is the only person on the cast I recognize. They pulled a lot of bits from both Terminator and T2(and thankfully they ignored all of T3). I like how they brought back Miles Dyson’s family. I really like how they tried to recreate some of the moments from the original movies(though I could have done without the obligatory “Come with me if you want to live” bit). The action sequences were pretty good. Although I’m not sure that the new bad guy terminator has to grimace in every single scene, I prefer T2’s Robert Patrick with his steely visage rather than the angry new guy. If the rest of the series is as good as this episode, I’ll be very happy with it.

On an impulse at Costco the other day I bought a Roomba 550. I’m not super happy with it. I think the concepts are fine and it is pretty fun to watch in action, but in terms of actual cleaning power, it leaves something to be desired. Our floor plan is open but it has to navigate some furniture, and it does a mediocre job of handling it. And the areas it does cover aren’t done that great either. I’m probably going to return it, but I’ll give it a couple more tries.

For the holidays, we went to my brother’s house on Long Island. We hung out with all of my family, including my parents, 2 brothers + wives, and 5 other kids. The kids were pretty excited to be all together(though they don’t really know each other that well). There was lots of eating and playing with kids. It was a good time, but we were only there 5 days. We also got to go to Peter Lugers Steakhouse and took the kids to the Long Island Children’s Museum.

For New Years, we didn’t do much. We went to my cousin’s house for a potluck. Tracy brought a very good tortilla soup and some very good lemon cookies. They had a Wii set up and Lucas had fun watching me try out Super Mario Galaxy. We left well before midnight because Lucas and Tracy were tired. I of course stayed up and played online poker and Team Fortress 2 to bring in the new year.

Also I got my new graphics card. It’s an EVGA 8800GT and it is excellent. TF2 draws much faster and its improved my gameplay quite a bit. I got pretty annoyed with Dell because even though they had a good deal on a similar card, they delayed my order 4 times(1 week per delay). After a while, I got fed up and just canceled it and went to Central Computer and bought it. Interestingly, Dell sent me an email after the 2nd delay which said that the FTC requires me to confirm an order after the 2nd delay in order for them to continue processing it otherwise it gets automatically canceled. There must’ve been some people who got screwed by consistently delayed orders for this rule to be instituted by the FTC.

I’m watching the equity markets pretty closely right now. I have some money I am going to put into some index LEAPS to get some leverage, but the way the markets keeps sinking has kept me on the sidelines. I will definitely get it in within a few weeks unless the situation worsens. I’m also trying to figure out some estate planning stuff for my parents and that’ll help me get educated on how to do it for myself and Lucas as well.