Painter for hire

Spent much of this weekend painting my daughter's soon-to-be new room. I just want the thing done now. Originally I was going to wait for my sister and her husband to come up and paint... but then I thought 'I painted her first room, the nursery, so I should also paint her new room'. So M went to Cinci Friday and Saturday, so I got a late start on Friday due to procrastination... went to bed at like 1am... then worked a few hours on Saturday. Sucks when you have to wait like 3 or 4 hours between coats. Grr. So all I got done was putting on the primer and then painting the base boards. Once I get the the walls done, then things will move really fast since at that point it's just about putting together the crib and her dressers. I don't mind the sauder furniture stuff. They used to really really be a pain to put together, but they've made great advances, so it's pretty easy to do.

Had some friends from back home come up on Sunday. I don't think I had seen them since N was like 3 months old... so it's been a while. Their daughter is about a month older than N so they managed to amuse each other, though N was a little bit shy. She's been doing that alot as of late. That whole stranger anxiety thing is kicking in. By then end of the day though, she of course cried when they had to go. They just don't understand things like 'we'll see them again soon'.

I forgot to mention that my Canon SureShot A75 finally croaked on the CCD harness. There was a problem that affected a bazillion or so cameras back in 2005 (which was 1 year after I had originally bought mine). There was a piece which connected the CCD to something which wasn't manufactured correctly, so after a while, it would just stop working... aka, no more taking pictures. Well, I was taking a blizzard of photos of N the other day and then the screen went blank. I knew exactly what it was. I was concerned that Canon wouldn't fix it for free as they did back in 2005. I was also concerned that they would replace it with a new camera, which I really didn't want since I like the one I have now since it's fairly light and takes decent pictures and I know most of its tricks. But, it turned out they would fix my current one. When I finally sent it in, I was concerned that it was going to take them more than a month to fix it which wouldn't be in time for N b-day... but about a week later, they had it fixed and shipped it back. Works like I a champ. Thank you Canon for fixing a problem correctly.

I started a blog the other day to track what I'm eating since I've gained about 10 lbs and my pants are starting to not fit as well. Did you know that an Admiral's Feast at Red Lobster is 1060 calories. Neither did I. Egads. And those stupid tasty cheddar buiscuts are something like 230 cal eat. Realizing what one is eating sucks. But, if I have any hope of losing any weight... it is a necessary evil to understand what I am eating.


Um... not much else.

what in the world...

.. have i been up to lately. i honestly can't say really... but i'll make a half attempt:

* been sorta kinda not really getting lil N's big girl room ready. i really need to get it primed and painted cause then it's just a hop skip and jump before it's ready. oh ... i need to steam clean the carpets as well. oh.. the electrician came in and did his thing... so now the light switch actually controls the ceiling light. yay!

* i hung out with todd and ian last friday. it was all good. there were hot pork rinds digested. we watched 'the legend of billie jean' and some funny ass green wing. ok, assy mcgee wasn't good, but that was the only blemish. man, i hated that show. i'm glad it was only a 15 minute episode.

* went back home for b-days and early father's day last weekend. lil N got to run around and play in the sprinkler with a couple of my cousin's kids. the burgers were good and we also had homemade ice cream which was tasty tasty. i haven't had homemade ice cream in, like, 15 years or so. it's been a long time. and it's every bit as good as i remember.

* went to the zoo two weekends ago. ate lunch there. it was cool to hang out with the Mrs and lil N. weather was nice. not the overly hot crap or rainy crap we've been dealing with as of late.

* i still need to decide where i want to have my father's day meal. it's still really weird to know that _i_ get to celebrate father's day. weird indeed.

* i'm not motivated to work today... this sucks. i'll find something work related to bide my time and keep busy so i don't drive myself nuts.

Music Counter update

Well, this week I finished up MP3 DVDs for both Elvis _and_ Yes. So the increase in the counter is significant. 15,000 songs and 975 hours of music. Dang!

Currently in rotation are: another Elvis MP3 DVD (full of lots of Christmas and Movie recording sessions), a Journey MP3 DVD (which is basically their entire catalogue... twice), and one of the many Napster era MP3 CDs which is labeled Vol 6... and I know I have up to 26 before I scrapped the volume numbering system. I tend to rotate three discs, listening to each for about 2 hours at a time. I found that when I started getting to huge single group discography sessions (like the 20 Kiss MP3 CDs) that I was starting to get burnt out very very quickly and was getting pretty agitated at work because of it. I like my job, so I found a way to remedy the situation.

Um... not much else new.

If you have time... go catch Devilcake playing the Hell City Tattoo Festival at 3pm at the Hyatt Regency Hotel (the MySpace says 8pm... ignore that). Food metal... acoustically!

S. . . l . . . . . . o . . . . . . . w R . . . . .a . . . . . m . . . . b. . .l . .e

I feel slow today. I'm sure that it has to do with being at work on Friday after being off Monday through Wednesday on our first family vacation (we went to Cinci, went to the zoo and fun was had by all). I dragged through yesterday as well. And I slept on the couch last night (due to some tasty but less than friendly food from PF Chang's and my wife's sensitive nose).. which actually... it's that big of a problem really since I actually slept until 6am or so... but I do have slight remnants of a crick in my neck. And of course it's dreary and rainy out. Blech. And I have to do not one but two status reports. And I feel like a big dope at work lately, wondering if I'm cutout for this crap. Everyone seems to think I'm doing an okay job though, so, I guess I'm not doing that bad. I feel like I'm sitting in some slightly cooled jello. It's not a solid yet, but it's getting there. I'm still able to move, but not with the greatest of ease. Maybe I'm slightly dreading looking at the Discover bill and reconsiling everything in Quicken this weekend. Maybe I feel bad 'cause I didn't get through getting all the home movies onto DVD before Mother's Day. I need to look at the can lights in the family room as well. 3 out of 6 are currently out and putting new bulbs in doesn't do anything. I hope there isn't a leak in my roof. That would suck. I really don't feel like doing these status reports, but I need to since, well, it's part of my job. There used to be plenty of time before the first build came for the new project, but it's quickly coming up now and half my team are noobs. They know some stuff, but they are still unsure of themselves. Plus, we have a gazillion high level docs to write. I need to get my brain back up to speed so I'm not looking at a whole lotta nothing where there should be tons o test cases. Later.

Buy and Sell... Buy and Sell

Sorry... been out of the loop for a while.

Lately there's been some buying and selling going on.

Oh... about a month ago we bought a new microwave, stove and dishwasher. Didn't sell the old ones (though I could easily have gotten 50 bucks each for them since all of them worked.) In the case of the microwave, while the new one heats better, it is a little bit noisier. Luckily, most stuff nukes in 3 minutes or less.

Last weekend, we bought a new 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan. Yeah, I can officially be considered old now.

I put a couple things up on Craigslist this past weekend and can happily say that I sold 300 LPs for $75 to a nice old man who plans on giving them to his son-in-law as a birthday present. Hopefully the son-in-law likes them. Also, if everything goes as planned, the futon frame (the mattress was destroyed a couple of years ago) will be gone and I'll be $50 richer. Kinda, well not sad, but... something... to see that futon go. Probably because I know when I moved into my house in '99 that I paid $400 for that darn thing. It's a good frame, but alas, it's just in the way of everything so it had to go. I think in the coming weeks I'll start posting crap on eBay. I have waaaayyyy too many CDs and boxset n stuff (aka electronics from my circuit bending days). There's just not enough room in the house and I have too much stuff. I don't listen to but a third of the CDs I have and I haven't circuit-bent anything for at least a year and a half... maybe longer... so, it's gotta go.

Um... what else...

Oh ... I bought a laptop computer. Since all the computer moved downstairs, I figured the missus and I needed a way to quickly check email without having to leave the lil one unsupervised.

I've had massive allergies this year. They seem to get worse every year. And it sucks. But, it seems to finally be letting up. It helps that the tree that drops TONS of pollen appears to be done. No lie. Tons of pollen. It drops hundreds these little things that are about the size of a golf ball and they are loaded with pollen. M swept a bunch of them off the driveway they other day when it was still a little damp out and now I have a driveway made for Stryper, ala being nothing but black and lots of yellow streaks!

As far as the 'Music Counter' goes, I'm sitting at 14245 songs and a total listening time of 899h 59m 28s... juuuusssstt shy of 900 hours.

Oh... and I got a little raise at work. 4%. I'll take it. Could have been better, but considering my boss told me I got one of the higher raises, it certainly could have been worse. I just bought a minivan for crying out loud. I need gas money. I'll take it!

And holy poop! I just checked my checking account and I already have my stimulus plan money. Woooooooooot! And not a moment too soon. My credit card bill this past month is huuuuuge.

Quick update...

Notta much going on...

Todd came over on Saturday to give me hand loading and unloading the Sauder chest and drawers we bought for the little one's new room. Actually, the loading was taken care of for us. The guy from 'Just About Furniture' whipped them into the car by himself. Todd and I then of course back to the house and the things weighed a ton. I have no idea how this guy just swung these things around. Crazy! After that was done, Toddeus wanted the exercise equipment that I had in the basement, so we dismantled the bike and got that into the Transformermobile and then I dumped the cardioglide into the Vibe and we set off for his house and got them unloaded.

Sunday was spent driving 2 1/2 hours down to Portsmouth where my sister lives for Easter dinner. We visited for about 5 hours and then jumped into the car and drove the 2 1/2 hours back. And the little one was very very very good this time, barely making a peep. This was contrary to the last time we went down about 6 months ago where she cried and screamed for about 2 hours in each direction. It was, to say the least, a less than pleasant experience.

Umm... I have work to do, so I gotta run. Just figured I'd give a brief update.

It's Monday and I'm already looking for some Friday movie ackshun with my peeps!

Finally!

After listening to 3 straight CDs of Kiss stuff, I am finally through the 100 CD spindle of MP3 discs. That puts me just over 800 hours of listening. Whew!

Plenty of MP3s left to go (including a billion years worth of Elvis stuff), but I can finally put that spindle to rest.

I got a little change in my pocket...

to the tune of $90 for all the video games that I sold to Play It Trade It. I was hoping for $100, but eh... it's all good. They are now out of the house and someone can actually get some game playing on. I will miss them but I'm slowly getting over this 'want to have things'.

Todd and I were talking over the weekend about our records. We've got tons of records, but we hardly play them at all anymore. I think I have mine pared down fairly good. I have about 300 records I need to list on craigslist along with a couple exercise machine which see no use. And a futon frame.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Last night the Mrs and I watched Disney's 'Meet the Robinsons'. My goodness was that a bad movie. The funny thing is that the bonus features showed lots of very very cool stuff and idea that they ultimately scrapped in order to make this horrible piece of celluloid. Ugh. It was very slow in the beginning and later parts of it were so frenetic that one couldn't really follow (and I couldn't be bothered to try by that point). I'm glad we got this one from the library and didn't have to pay for this horrible movie.

Let there be light... and other stuff

Well, the weekend is gone. But at least something got done. My sis and her husband came up on Saturday. I had a couple of fluorescent light fixtures go bad in the basement so I was looking to replace them. I'm not talking about the bulbs going bad, but the whole thing went bad (aka the ballast). So, we got those installed with only a few casualties. Dan cut his hand on one of the fixtures, then one of the coveres cracked a little bit (cause we didn't read the directions... doh!) and then Dan got a little shock. But overall, it was a great success and now the basement doesn't feel like such a dungeon.

On Sunday my parents called and said they wanted to come to town for a visit (read: we want to see our grand daughter). I already had plans so, they came and I went. First stop was to the local "Play It Trade It" store. I've had some old video game consoles sitting around from my bachelor days and they were just sitting in the basement, getting in the way and collecting dust, so I figured I might as well sell them off and get a few bucks. So I dropped off the stuff. Since I had so much stuff, they needed to look it over and test it out and all that happy crap. They are supposed to call me with a purchase quote by Tuesday. Punks better not lose my stuff. It was sad to drop off the Intellivision, ColecoVision, Odyssey 2 and original Nintendo, but... I wasn't playing them. If I had even played them more than 5 times in the past 5 years, then I almost might be able to make a case for keeping them. But I haven't even played them that much, so it was time to bid adieu to them.

After dropping off the games at Play It Trade It, I headed over to Todd's house. We ended up watching Deathproof which is Quentin Tarantino's half of the Grindhouse double feature. It was pretty cool. The second half was much better than the first half. First half was more horror / thriller oriented, whereas the second half was just a big long car chase with dents and busting glass and cars running off the road. I like that kinda stuff. :)

um... what else...
On the Music Counter front I surpassed the 12K mark. I only have 3 CDs left from the original spindle. Of course, they are all Kiss MP3s. I think I'm just going to power through those even though I might drive myself slightly insane by only listening to Kiss for the next 3 or 4 days. But I just want to be done with that spindle so I can take it back home and say 'I've listened to all of this!'. It would be a little bit easier if it was a mishmash of different shows (a couple from 77, one from 82, another from 96, etc)... but the majority of them are from the 2004 tour so pretty much every single show sounds the same with the exception of occationally Gene's voice being screwed up and him having to sing an octave lower than usual. And of course, they are pretty much all fairly consecutive. So you'll have 07-03 in Indianapolis, then 07-07 in Wisconsin then 07-11 in Cincinnati, then 07-14 in New York. You get the idea. So if Gene's voice is blown out, then likely it'll be blown out for a week or so.

I'm listening to Somerset, WI 06-26-04 right now. For the past 3 discs, I've heard what I swear is a girl singing during love gun. But now, I'm convinced it might be Eric Singer since it has shown up exactly the same way and practically the same balance in the mix, which were from the Rock the Nation tour which were mixed from the soundboard. Or maybe it's Tommy Thayer. No idea. But it's really high in the mix for Love Gun and it's kind of annoying. Oh well. Wish me luck. 3 days of nothing but Kiss.

Almost there...

I'm almost done listening to the original spindle of MP3 CDs. The counter has been updated. Nearly 12,000 songs and 750 hours of listening time. Wow.

However, at the moment, I'm hitting a bit of a brick wall as far as patience goes. From the original spindle, I'm left with: 1 CD of Elvis, 4 CDs of Kiss and 1 CD of Smashing Pumpkins. Not alot of variety there. You tend to get tired of listening to the same three voices.

Luckily, today I brought in the majority of the MP3 CDs that I had left at home. Some of those are just random goodness from the days of random websites and Napster when it was rare to find complete albums. There would be days where I would find someone with a huge collection and a super fast connection and would just download everything they had. Those were the ones that really paid off 'cause you would end up with just randomness from ABBA to Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa. I found out about alot of groups that day and purchased many CDs because of that. So I've got those to look forward to.

I also have... (sound of dread) ... 2 DVDs and 3 more CDs full of Elvis to get through. At the time, I was in a big Evlis phase, or at the very least a big Elvis downloading phase. I think it was RCA that had all of Elvis' records out on CD in a 50 CD collection, which were numbered. That is the worst thing you can do to a complete-ist. I did manage to get them all, thank you very much. I also found LOADS of outtake CDs from his movie soundtracks and many many soundboard and audience boots out there as well. Did I really need every day of his 7 day stand at some casino in Las Vegas. I dunno. But I have it.

On the upside, I brought in my Have A Nice Day collection which consisted of 28 CDs (2 MP3 CDs) chock full o' 1970's goodness. That will be a nice relief. Then there are the others that I already had here at work: Another DVD full o Kiss, DVD full o Chicago, a DVD full o BeeGees, 2 DVDs full o Pop Culture goodness (anything from Superman 'audio comics' to children's records to Sammy David Jr. Christmas albums), ... looking at pile ... 1 DVD full o Smashing Pumpkins (I also had a SP phase, can you tell?), CD full o King Diamond and Mercyful Fate, DVD of Beach Boys (lots of outtakes), CD full of 80's music, DVD o Rush, CD o Genesis, DVD o random Rock goodness (lots o ben folds), DVD o Pink Floyd, DVD o Beatles (I don't recall exactly what's on that), CD o random Rock goodies, DVD called Metal Mayhem, 2 DVD of Psych and Garage Band goodies, hey... there's my copies of Dream Theater's Score album... and a few more... other than the 50 random CDs which I talked about earlier.

But I'm glad that I'm almost to that milestone of getting through that spindle. I figured it would take me a while. I guess if I think about it, it's taken nearly a year since I believe I started this project about the time I started my new job. Ha!

I remember in H.S. listening to all of the cassettes I had. That took me nearly a year as well. I had alot of cassettes. Had? Still have. They're down in the basement keeping the cats company. Same goes for all my CDs. That took something like a year and a half. But I got through it, and I'll get through all of these MP3s as well.

Here's to another year of music!

Kill Bill Vol. 2 and other things this weekend

This weekend was, well, a weekend. But I got some things accomplished and that is good.

What did I do on Saturday? In the morning, I got my hair cut. It had been about 2 months and I was starting to look like a scruffy Beatle wannabe. After that I went to Lowe's to pick up some shit for fixing some things in the house (see discussion on that below). When I got home, the wife, the kiddo and I _tried_ to go to Sonic for lunch, but it was a bust with all the 'stalls' filled up and the drive-in lane literally all the way around the building. So we ended up going to Chik-Fil-A instead and then straight back home. That was a bit of a disappointment, but, on the upside, at least we have a Sonic in Columbus now. And man, they make some tasty hamburgers (and chili dogs... and I really really want to try their country fried steak sandwich). Oh yeah, and I got a migraine after we got back so I took some meds and laid down for a few hours.

I really worked about as fast and hard as I could at work on Friday. That left my brain spinning and my neck all in a twisted mess. I wasn't even recovered when I woke up Saturday as I still felt woozy. It's not often when I wake up with a headache, but Saturday was one of those days. Luckily, this coming week is the last week for testing this Build of the software. It's been pretty rough on me. My hours may not compare to some factory workers, I know 'cause I've done that too, but it still doesn't mean that I don't become physically fatigued and more so mentally fatigued. Just knowing that after next week, I'm done for a couple of weeks (plus, having the help of others help me catch up on the test cases) is starting to put my mind at ease.

Oh yeah, so the wife and I came up with a list on Friday of what needs to be done upstairs and downstairs in the next few months. The good ol' Honey-Do list. I dread the Honey-Do list, but, for someone like me who is... well just weird about getting shit done, it's a good thing. I dread putting it together, but then it gives me something to drive for. It also puts things into perspective. If it's not all laid out, I tend to bunch it all into one big ball of sh*t and it just starts getting to me and I freak out in the way I tend to freak out. But once there is a list, usually I see that it's not _that_ bad of a list and I'll start cranking sh*t out.

So, when I got up today, I had it in my head that I would get some sh*t done.

1) Fix the light switch in the office. This has, no lie, been in my head as being something that needed to be done for no fewer than 9 months. So today, I got out the screw driver and fixed it within 15 minutes. Why it took this long, I have no idea.

2) Fix the toilet in the master bedroom. It's been 'making dripping noises' for the past few weeks and it was driving my wife nuts, which pretty much means it drives me nuts. I had the same problem with the guest bath about 2 years ago. So I bought the parts yesterday and, hell, they had the exact same kit that I used before. So it went fairly easily. Only one 'where the hell is this water coming from moment' and after I figured out what I did wrong, I remembered that I did the exact same thing 2 years ago. It is the next to last step where you're attaching the guts to the main water line. There's a little fastener that connects the two and I was so focused on that part that I forgot to do the OTHER fastener which makes the guts snug to the tank. Duh! Getting ahead of myself. So once I got that figure out, the rest was peachy.

That's it for the official Honey-Do list.

So after I did those two things, I went to the library, picked up my reserved copy of Kill Bill Vol 2, went to the store, picked up my meds, did some grocery shopping, came home, handed the wife the groceries (which she quickly put away as I lugged two 40lb. boxes of kitty litter into the basement.

Then I sat down in the basement on the computer with the headphones plugged in so I wouldn't wake the little one sleeping directly above me and watched Kill Bill Vol 2. I enjoyed it much more than Vol 1. I'm sure that's partly because I could hear the actors and the music and the sound effects whereas with Vol 1 I had to pretty much watch it on mute with subtitles. But I also think I liked the direction of this one more. As Quentin says in the 'Making of...', Vol 1 was done more in the Shaolin samurai movie kinda vein whereas Vol 2 was more Spaghetti Western-ish. Yeah, I can see that.

I watched the extras (what few there were) later on in the evening. I learned from the Kill Bill Diary that David Carradine wrote, that there was this fight scene with this huge black guy that got cut. David said he hoped it would make the DVD extras. It did. But it was, honestly, a bit disappointing. It was much shorter that I was expecting. Seemed like it only lasted 4 minutes, though I'm sure it was longer than that, but probably not by much.

Anyways... I'm babbling. And I need to get up bright and early tomorrow so I'm just gonna end it here. Sorry that most of my thoughts tonight were only half-written. I don't consider myself much of a critic, so I tend to just stop myself before I go there. I guess that's how it goes sometimes. I can tell you, though, that the mexican meatloaf my wife made this even was tasty! Yummy stuff.

G'night!

Breaking the 10K mark

Well, finally broke the 10K mark on ye olde Music Counter. Actually, I passed it a while ago. I'm about it pass the 11K mark now. But no matter. The Kiss MP3 CDs have been going rather quickly. Actually, they all have been since I've had to keep my head down and my fingers testing. And when you're pulling 10 / 11 / 12 hour days they tend to move along a little faster as well.

The hours are starting to wear on me, but I think the 9 hours I got last night helped out quite a bit. I went to bed at 9pm. It's been a while since I've done that. Woke up at the ass-crack of 5:45 this morning, my wonderful wife was already up with our sick daughter and made me some bacon and eggs. It was quite a nice way to start the day. Then at lunch, I got 10 Banquet meals for $5.38 _with_ tax! They had some BOGO coupones in the freeze section for pot pies, so I got 5 of those. Then the reg meals were 10 for 10. And on top of that, K Rogers was having some weird promo where, if you bought 10 banquet meals you got 2 dollars off your bill automatically. Wootage! So yeah, 10 meals + 5.38 = awesome. Better than the $2 I would spend in ONE MEAL at McDs.

Um.. what else.. I already exclaimed about my 50 musicals DVD thing. Still haven't had a chance to watch any yet. I wonder when my Kill Bill Pt 2 will be coming in. Started reading a book on bad casting in movies. Like John Wayne as Gengis Khan (sp?). Yeah, how that got through the studio heads is beyond me. That's a good book for when you're not really in a reading mood. You read one little blip and then you can be done and not retain ANY of it to memory like you would with a reg piece of fiction or even a biography. I made a feeble attempt at starting Turn Turn Turn, a book about the folk-rock revolution of the 60's, but I don't think I have the mental capacity for that right now. It's like 300 pages, which wouldn't be a big deal, except that it's in microscopic font... so 1 page is like 3 pages of regular text, which makes it a 900 page book. And nil pictures. It's put out by Hal Leonard, so I think it might be used as a text book as well.

The Dilbert calendar hasn't been that good this year, but I'm sure it'll pick up. It's Dilbert which means it ALWAYS applies to me. I see the project creep mentality first hand. Except, 'round here it seems to be feature swipe, where it's in your project until they look at the time line and don't like it, so they swipe it from your project and put it on a later project.. which makes it this huge thing... and then when they look at that project's schedule... you can guess what happens. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Um... been having some odd dreams lately. One involved me looking around a warehouse full of pillows to find two matching ones that would look ogod with the couch, but they had to be on sale with a little orange clearance sticker.

And this morning, I had another one of my 'I'm late for school' dreams. So, I was heading to school and following some dude who 'knew the way' and had to cut through a shipping warehouse (at which point he disappear)... I ended up on top of one of the trucks but then safely swung down and ran out the back door... but then I noticed at some point I lost my pants and was wearing only boxer shorts... and I didn't have any in my gym bag. At first I thought that maybe I could just go to school that way, but then decided that maybe falling out in the middle of class might be frowned upon, so instead of going back through the warehouse, I attempted to go back home another way which involved cutting through an old apartment building. At that point I started to get mugged, until a TV crew showed up. So the main mugger dude (there were about 8 of them) put his arm around me like we were pals, to which I responded to by repeatedly punching him in the face, which didn't seem to phase him. And then I woke up. Yeah, take that one to your shrink and see if they can decipher THAT. At least there wasn't an overflowing toilet. That's a common reoccurance in my dreams as well.

Well, I gotta get back to the grind. Later!

New Stuff

I've been working like a dog lately. At least the end is a mere 3 weeks away. Ugh. I'm on multiple projects at the moment, but of course, the scheduling assumes that I'm 100% for each one of those... so at the moment, I'm hopelessly behind and really have no chance of catching up without pulling in a few more people. Hence, why I'm working on a Sunday. This sucks.

In better news, I ran across a coupon where I was able to get a free 2GB Flash Drive. The coupon / promo ended today. I'd been eyeballing a new flash drive es since the free on Todd gave me was only a 64 MB one. Honestly, I've never needed much more than that, but there were a few times where I was needing to tote some ISO images and couldn't, so... now I can... as long as they are CD ISOs.

Since I wasn't sure of the validity of the coupon in hand, I wandered around the store looking for something cheep so I wouldn't end up at the counter with just the flash drive and nothing else. I'm weird like that. Anyhoo... I wandered over to the DVD section which always has some interesting DVDs on sale. I almost picked up Kill Bill Vol 2, new, for $6.50. But I put that back. And scanned the DVDs some more. One thing I have a weakness for is the 50 Movie Packs that are usually around $20.00 and contain 50 movies on 12 DVDs. They are usually horrible movies that either can be bought uber cheep or are 'public domain'. Anyhoo... I picked up a couple of them, but they were all full price. One that I had been eyeing for a while was '50 Musical Classics'. I had done a little bit of research on it and decided that I wasn't going to pay anywhere near the $20 retail for it since it wasn't really the kind of musicals I was thinking about (Easter Parade, Meet Me In St. Louis, etc). It's more like Rock, Rock, Rock will Bill Haley, old soundies with Duke Ellington, and the like.

Anyhoo. As I was just about the leave the section, I noticed another set of 'sale' items... in front of the 50 Musicals Movie Pack. No way was it on sale. They never are. Until today. Yay! It was $8.18. That's what I'm talking about yo! So now I have a 2GB flash drive (free) and the 50 Musical DVD set for less than what I have in my toy budget. Gotta love that.

I've also been reading David Carradine's book "The Kill Bill Diary"... which he wrote while making the movie. It was pretty cool. Much better than "Endless Highway" which I didn't give much of a chance since it didn't go into much detail about any of the Corman movies he was in, which is all I really cared about. I finished it up last night and, like I said, I liked it pretty much. Now I want to see the movie so I can put into visuals some of the things that David described.

Well, gotta cut this one short... the process I was waiting for finished. Later!

Movies... n other stuff

I'm sitting here eating Michellina's Lean Gourmet Mac n Cheese doused with some El Yucateco XXXHot Habeñero Hot Sauce and figured I'd give an update.

=-=-=-=-=-=

Last night the wife and I watched the movie Junebug. It was definitely an indie film, not in that the acting sucked (it was good) or that the cinematography sucked (there were quite a few very nice shots and interesting camera angles which I enjoyed), but more in that at least on a first watching, the theme or story or whatever isn't exactly concrete in the way that watching, say, Men In Black would be.

So, I enjoyed and didn't enjoy the movie. I admit, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I'm not a moron either. I understood in most cases where the movie was going.. but when it was done I was left wondering 'Why did I just watch an hour-40 of this?' Yes, I got the whole big-city vs. small-town thing. I came from a small town, I get that some of the things we do there can seem a bit backwards and all that crap. Have you every witnessed 'hog trough dancing' at a wedding? I rest my case. So I understood that aspect of it. But I felt like there should have been something more there. I dunno what that should have been, but there should have been something more. Or maybe, my feeling of uncomfortable emptiness at the end of the movie was the intended reaction. That happens sometimes I guess.

It got quite a bit of good press and most reviews are 'glowing' and the like. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it. Maybe it was because it was a 'talkie' movies and we had to mostly watch it with the sound turned off (because for whatever reason, the geniuses to pressed the DVD thought that only French subtitles were needed). Maybe it's 'cause some of the material hit close to home for me and I was busy thinking about things in my brain when I should have continued to pay attention to the movie. Again, I didn't hate the movie, but on the other hand, I likely wouldn't want to see it twice.

=-=-=-=-=-=-

We watched another movie the other day called The Namesake. This indie film is one I enjoyed. It's the story of a boy/man who was born in America to Indian parents and given an 'interesting' name by his parents when he is born. At first he likes the name, then rejects it later in life and tries to distance himself from his parents and his parent's heritage. The lead character in The Namesake is none other than Kal Penn, Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

Interestingly enough, Kal Penn's character is, at first, a doped out high school student, which pretty much mirrors his performance in H&KGTWC. But after those first few scenes and he moves into a period later in his life, Kal really put in a good performance, in my opinion. Hopefully he will continue to take challenging roles but still continue to do goofy movies like Van Wilder and Harold and Kumar.

=-=-=-=--=-=-

I messed up at work today. I'll make this the short version. We were waiting on a group in UK to finish their stuff. My boss was supposed to have a meeting with some peeps in the UK to determine if we could start. Got an email from one of the lead testers in the UK saying that their testing had PASSED. I assumed this meant we could move on. Half hour later, boss shows up and says 'they are doing another build'. I say 'uh, oh'. He says 'You haven't told the group to start have you?'. I say 'Yes'. He says, 'Tell them to stop. You were supposed to wait for me'. I say, 'Ooops. I figured someone saying that the testing had PASSED meant that we were all clear. Obv not'. So run around and tell everyone to stop. We'll likely get the new build tomorrow. Sigh. This puts my schedule 'techincally' behind. However, since we can't move the dates, I have to somehow absorb a two day loss. Shouldn't be a big deal really. Just had to comment about it since it was on my mind.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Found out in my testing group of about 15 people that there are like four drummers. What are the odds. Drummers are scarce... or usually don't come out of the woodwork unless provoked. Wow! That's like a quarter of our group. Weird. I mentioned to one of the other peeps that we should start our own taiko group. That would be bad-ass.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The 'super machine' downstairs is acting a little weird. I switched out a power supply and that seemed to make it less weird, but it has rebooted on my a few times already, so it seems that maybe it wasn't just the power supply. Maybe the mobo is a bit goofy. Noticed it was running a little warmer than my machines upstairs. Generally runs around 120F which shouldn't be a problem, but the odd thing is that it is like 60 in the basement, so you think it would run COOLER than the ones upstairs where the room temp can usually get up to 80-85F when the halogen and the two computers are running. I dunno. Maybe I will have to switch out the mobos.

Or, since I am considering going wireless and buying a laptop (a cheepo, but a laptop nonetheless) for the main computer for both me and the wife, maybe I'll just not bother and use my old computer (which is nice and solid) as the new 'toy' machine.

Good Weekend

On Saturday, I got to hang out with my bro Todd. We went to Cici's Pizza and buffet-ed our selves silly. Then we went back to his place and played a few hours worth of Rock Band. That was fun. I first tried being the 'drummer' and let me tell you when you're a drummer, you don't want some screen telling you where to hit. Plus, it probably did not help that my first song was The Who 'Won't Get Fooled Again' which is typical Keith Moon - i.e. pretty much it's one big drum fill with nothing every really repeating. I found I did much better in Singing Mode, though by the end of the evening my throat was getting sore.

On Sunday, my wife's sister came up for her birthday and we went to the Money exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art. That was pretty cool. After that we went to The Cheesecake factory and rang up a sizable bill. But at least I have left overs for the next two days. Man, those portions are out of control.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Just want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday. I hope everyone has safe travels wherever they go be it to out-of-town family or down the street to the store.

*Darrin holds up a mightily spiked egg nog*
Cheers! Don't Drink and Drive!

Shop-o-rama

My family did the family shopping spree yesterday. 9am to 3pm. Wore me out. But I got pretty much all of my Christmas shopping done in one big swoop. It's a tiring but happy feeling. Wasn't like the old times where we would literally shop from 8am til 8pm. Thank goodness my family sees internet shopping as a good thing. Plus, you usually save a few bucks along the way. $19.99 for Carrie Underwood's newest CD at fye? I think not. Wal-Mart of Amazon.com will have that cheaper thank you very much.

I still have all of Norah's toys to put together. Currently, I have a scoot-car thing, a shopping cart and an entire kitchen to put together. As far as I know, that's all I have, but I'm fairly certain that after Christmas with the grandparents, there will be a few more things to put together. I don't mind it really, it's just getting started and tearing myself way from whatever selfish, all time engrossing thing I have going on at the moment.

I'm over the 8800 song mark on ye olde Music Counter. I think by Christmas I might actually break the 10k mark. Wow. That's alot of music.

Over on Twin Galaxies (my current selfish, obsessive thing of the moment), I hold 18 World Records (as recognized by Twin Galaxies and the Guinness Book of Worlds Records). Most of them really aren't that great. It's easy to set a world record for a game from 1982 that no one cares about. My one achievement that I am proud of in that mix is my 26k score on Sky Diver. That one actually is a pretty decent score. The others? Feh. Give someone a day and a half to beat them. What I'm actually have more fun with now over in TG-land is running a weekly MAME challenge where I pick a game that doesn't have any scores yet or only has one lone score and challenge the other players on the forum to set a new high on the game. So far (aka the first three weeks) the turnout has been mild but still quite fun. I'm sure the holidays are quite busy for everyone, so overall, I'm quite happy with the turnout.

A quick shout out to some friends:
Hang in there Tom and Amy! You're doing just fine!!! :-)

What in the hell?

I purposely did not watch the football games last night. I knew that Oklahoma had a chance at beating Mizzou. But what I did not expect to see what I saw when I visited ESPN.com. On the main page, it only mentioned that Pitt had beaten West Virginia (I had overlooked the scoreboard at the top of the page because of the glaring Pitt headline). I was stumped.

When I briefly saw the games as Maryann was channel surfing, I saw that Pit was trailing WV 3 - 7 in the 3rd. I said, 'Wow, Pitt is actually hanging in there' and I thought they had a chance. Then Maryann changed to the other game and I saw Oklahoma score a TD. What the??? I immediately told her to turn off the TV since I didn't want to jinx either of the upsets that just might occur. I figured Oklahoma had a chance, but didn't give Pitt much of a thought. No one did.

So I finish reading the Pitt article when I glaced over to the right and saw the Top 25 scores... and saw that Oklahoma beat Mizzou.

I'm still in shock, almost literally.

This has been one f*ed up season of college football.

Wow.

R.I.P. Evel Knievel

Evel Knievel, a great man who jumped over just about anything on a motorcycle, died on Friday, November 30th 2007.

I had two of those crank up motorcyles of Evel's. One was his signature white Harley Davidson and the other a dirt bike (which I am fairly certain Evel never used, though, his son Robbie did). Those things were awesome.

poo

I feel like poo. No fun.

Thanksgiving weekend went well. Food was good. Yummy.

The music counter has been updated. I finally got through the psychedelic compilations MP3 DVD plus another CD full o m0torhead and s1ayer, so it's just up by about 1400 songs and 70 hours. Whee!

Basement peeps came to the house... again. They are using what they call their 'Super Epoxy' to try to stop the efflorescence from pushing out the sealant. I tried Dry Lock and that worked for about 6 months. The expensive epoxy sealant that they put on lasted a mere 2 months. Hopefully, this new super stuff, which they put on one day and then come out and re-epoxy a few days later after it has fully dried, will do the trick. I really really really don't want this to go on forever. It's a big pain in my arse.

Robot Guitar

This thing just baffles me for many, many reasons.

I introduce to you (if you hadn't heard about it already)... the Gibson Robot Guitar.

http://www.gibson.com/robotguitar/robotguitarvideovoting.aspx?playvideo=training

A little slack, please.

Buckeyes go into yesterday's game seated at No. 1.
- They lose to Illinois

I need to rake leaves to the lawn can get winterized. Meteorologists say there will be light precipitation Sunday evening.
- It rains and sleets by 8:30am Sunday morning

I need to lower the mattress on the crib which requires my hex wrenches.
- I can't find my hex wrenches

My wife's computer needed an anti-virus update late last night
- Now the computer restarts when trying to perform a virus scan or spyware scan.

Oh oh... and last but definitely not least, my sister came over yesteday. She hadn't see the basement since we had it sealed and what not.
- She looks at the wall and says 'Is it supposed to be bubbling up like that?'. In other words, the few grand I spent on sealing the basement didn't do jack and the minerals are pushing their way past the 2 layers of 'epoxy' (or whatever they put on, should have been Elmer's Glue for all I know) and a layer of primer. All within two months of having it seals. *sigh*


C'mon! Work with me here!

Ooooooooooooooooooops

Seems that my little Excel spreadsheet had some summary issues and was not summing up about 20 rows which included an MP3 DVD with over 1100 songs on it. So instead of reaching for the the 4000 mark, I'm now reaching for the 7000 song mark. Wow.

The calc for the total time has been correct though. So I'm still reaching for the 500 hour mark there. :-p But that'll probably be broken tomorrow when I finish up the last 3 or 4 hours of the 'Electronica Shmlectronica' compilation I got from Toddeus.

And for those who care, with the current stats of 6889 songs and 490h 10m time, this works out to and average of a little over 4 minutes 15 seconds for each song.

The end.

Misc Etc

Just miscellaneous stuff.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I've updated The Music Counter. Just about to eclipse the 4000 song mark. Whee!

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I'm still #1. Actually, I'm #1 about 4 times over at Twin Galaxies. I have to admit that in one case I am the ONLY score they have for a specific game. There are so many games for MAME (something like 4000+ games) that it's difficult for them to get scores for every single one of them since many people are just trying to get that perfect Pac-Man score or get to the kill screen in Donkey Kong. I figure I'll start raising a little hell on the forums and getting people to step up to the plate and log some better scores than my paltry entries.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Me lady was in Cinci on Friday and Saturday. This let me play some more video games and also let me do some cleaning up around the house. I had fun, however, my wife did not because she was dealing with a toddler who refused to sleep (cause she was a little bit sick) and weird family memebers. Sorry babe. I did try to give her a little bit of time off on Sunday but I'm sure it was too little too late. Sorry again babe.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Hung out a little with Sir Ian. We watched some DVDs and went to Asian Star Buffet where the Hot & Spicy chicken was good. I ate too much and burped profusely for the next 10 hours. The kicker story at the buffet was this bizzaro woman who was hunched over the pork fried rice (which I wanted) and was using the BIG spoon to try to, I dunno, work around the PORK in the PORK FRIED RICE, and was taking her sweet time. So I went around to the other side and reluctantly got the overcooked and dry white rice. AS I was on the other side, I could see the very very small about of fried rice she did get, there were still like 3 pieces of pork in there. Freakin' twit. *sigh*

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I need to rake the leaves before it rains and they glue themselves to the grass and kill what remaining green grass I have in the back.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Umm... I really need to get to work now. Later!

Happy Halloween!

This year's pumpkins. Happy Halloween!!!

R.I.P. Mr. Goulet. :(

In case you hadn't heard, Robert Goulet died Tuesday morning. Bummer. He was da man.

I'm #1

So, Todd and I went to see "King of Kong: A Fistfull of Quarters" about a month or so ago. Much of the movie centered around him tyring to get his Donkey Kong score validated by the official video game scoring group, namely, Twin Galaxies.

As we were leaving the theater, someone had mentioned that Billy Mitchell had broken then record again. Out of curiosity, I looked up Twin Galaxies' web site to see if they had an online score board. Which they do and, yes, Billy Mitchell reclaimed the top spot from Steve Wiebe by putting in a score of 1,050,200.

While I was perusing the score, something caught my eye. They allow scores for M.A.M.E. If you don't know what it is, do your homework. Now granted, scores recorded against M.A.M.E don't count towards those records set against actual arcade games, but still, for games that are mostly long long gone and are hardly seen in the wild anymore, it's kinda nice that you can use MAME to set a score.

And so, I threw my hat into the ring. I mostly like playing the really really early titles. Lots of stuff from the first two years of video games, stuff from 1979 and 1980. One of my favorite games is Depthcharge. It's a fairly simple game where you heave explosive barrels at submarines below you. Now, the MAME score for this is really high. I thought I was pretty darn good at the game, until I went to Twin Galaxies. Right now, I'm sitting at #12 with a score of 3780. I've only pulled that score off once. My high up until a few weeks ago was in the 3500 range. I can consistently get into the 3000s, which I thought was pretty good. However, the top score at the moment is 4800. I have no idea how that guy pulled it off 'cause there is alot of delay for the barrels to get to the bottom. I'm starting to guess that despite the fact that I have spent many many hours, I have not noticed that there is a pattern somewhere.

"But Darrin", you say, "I thought you said you were #1". Yes, that is what I said. I am. Just not for this game. That game would be Datsun 280Zzzap!. And my score, at the moment, is 4.10. So, according to the official video game score keeping body, I have the world record score for playing Datsun 280Zzzap! using MAME.

But the victory is some skewed. You see, there is another contingent of players who log their scores at MARP (MAME Action Replay Page). This is where players can post their best MAME scores. A couple of people have logged scores at 4.64 which pretty much obliterates my record. Why they haven't posted them to Twin Galaxies probably has to do with a whole Jets vs. Sharks West Side Story kinda thing. Basically, there are some members of MARP who think TG sucks, and some members of TG that thinks MARP sucks. I don't know why this is really. They are both groups of players to strive to be the best. Some players happily exist at both places and are just as confused as I am why there is such friction there. I dunno.

But no matter, it is what it is. At the moment, if the Guinness Book of World Records wanted to put out a book about the top MAME car driving scores, I would be No. 1, Numero Uno, Top Cheese at Datsun 280 Zzzap! And that's kinda cool.

I really need to try to improve that score, but some people are just much better at video games and it's just a matter of time before one of the top 10 players at MARP finally get fed up and submit their score to TG and I am dethroned.

But like Billy Mitchell, I always have something up my sleeve. I'll keep you posted.

For now, HERE are my scores at Twin Galaxies.

Excuse me while I Ad Lib this...

So... back in the diz-ay while I was a freshman at OSU, I had a roomee by the name of Todd. He was cool. His computer was cool. It was a DOS machine of course. Probably DOS 5. He even had a sound card. An Ad Lib sound card, one of the first commercially available (and useful) sound cards available. He used to create crazy ass music with the music software that came with it, namely, Visual Composer and Instrument Maker. Visual Composer let you, well, visually compose music with a little graphical keyboard. Instrument Maker let you craft 'instruments' by tweaking FM Synthesis values (at least I think it was FM synthesis). He had albums (or cassettes) of this stuff. Rodomontodd is the title of one I can remember. And I thought the stuff was fantastic since it didn't always conform to what one would normally call music. Sometimes there wasn't a specific melody. Sometimes, it seemingly lacked structure all together. Until you looked at it in Visual Composer. Then it made all the sense in the world. It was like painting music. But Todd spent only a couple of quarters at OSU and then he went away. Taking with him his Ad Lib rigged computer and his cool ass software and music.

Around 1997, after finding another tape of music he had given me, I looked him up again on that new fangled and growing by the day thing called the Internet. We got back together and began making music together. Not in a gay way but in a musician way. Unless you talk to the cashiers at Kroger's, then they might swear by the previous.

Annnnnyyyyywwwaaaaayyyssss, from the minute we got back together, we had talked about getting that Ad Lib software back up and running. Unfortunately, we have difficulty in doing so. Windows had come along and DOS was going by the way side. Neither of us had DOS disks anymore. We tried for years in vain to get it to work. 10 years to be exact. But to no avail.

Then, the other day, a mutual friend to Todd and I posted some old music for a group that consisted of Todd. Of course, it was some of the Ad Lib music stuff. So again, my interest was piqued and I began trying to figure out a way to get this running again. I figured I might try loading up Windows 95 on an old PC I have at home and seeing if maybe I could resurrect the Ad Lib music software. I still had all the binaries with me since I made copies of the disks during the one moment in 1997 when Todd had located them. I believe he's not sure where they are at the moment. No matter. I have the files.

Recently, I also started getting back into old game emulation. Things like emulators for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, the Sega Master System, etc. As I was surfing today, I ran across a sweet little program called DosBox. It's been around for a few years and I even remember telling a friend about it a few months back when he was getting into playing the hundreds of old DOS games he still had lying around. I had totally forgotten about it until I stumbled over it again today.

So this evening, I came home and DL'd DOS Box and found the Ad Lib software on my drive and gave it a run. And wouldn't you know it. It f^@#ing worked!!!

I present to you, the first song written by me (and quite possibly anyone else in the world) on the Ad Lib Visual Composer, which features the scrapings of a custom instrument called 'screech' created in Instrument Maker. The song is called "Yeah Baby!" for 'yeah baby' I got the Ad Lib stuff working!!! Wheeee!!! Enjoy!

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

Here's what it looks like in Visual Composer.

Almost done...

Today, I anticipate, will be the last day in a few weeks when I'll hve to get up early to come into work before 7am. Thank goodness.

=-=-=-=-=-

While gettig ready this morning, I had an idea for some lyrics for the love ballad in V: The Musical.

Some people may call it beastiality
But, me, I call it reality
I love my little lizard... yes, I do

My blood runs hot; Her blood runs cold
But her hand is the one that I want to hold.

(I may have to alter this since I can't remember if the lizard in love was a
man or a woman. I think it was a man, so that means I'll have to alter them slightly.)

=-=-=-=-=-=

Went and picked out another pumpkin last night with the wife and the kiddo after work yesterday. We had little N in shoes. I put her down so she could walk around, but she just stood there like she was glued to the ground. I'd call to her and you'd see her trying to move her legs, but they weren't going anywhere. It was funny. She's not used to shoes yet. Poor thing. I guess we'll just have to put her in shoes more often.

=-=-=-=-=-

As always, The Music Counter has been updated.

Yawn......

Another long week for work. Been getting in no later than 7am. Today I was in at 6:15am. Ugh.

I've updated The Music Counter. Nearly 100 hours longer than the last update. The last MP3 CD I went through was torture. It was only had stuff from two bands on it and the songs repeated quite a bit. It was torture to get through. Glad that one is over.

Had a good birthday. Lsat weekend we went to my sister's new house in Portsmouth, OH. Very nice place. Got some cool stuff for my birthday from everyone. I got a giant wooden Brutus Buckeye from the parents. It's sweet. I'll probably only put it out on game day and then bring it back in cause I don't want it to get swiped. The wife got me Season Two of 'Home Movies' which is sweet cause I've been wanting them for years. She also got me an awesome 6-CD Box Set called Metal: A Headbanger's Companion as well as Fiona Apple's 2004 release "Extraordinary Machine".

On my birthday we went to BD's Mongolian Barbeque for dinner. It was tasty. I had sirloin and crab with a mongolian ginger sauce. A deviation from my norm and I have to say it was a welcome one.

This weekend I'm helping Tom put up a door. This involves a power saw, beer and chili. In that order. Beer before power saw is not a good idea. I like my fingers.

Um.. that's all I got to say. I need to get to work. I've somehow lost an hour (it's 7:15am) already and I have much to do.

Later!

25c per play

Toddeus and I went to the Drexel Gateway down on campus to catch the movie "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters". Overall, I enjoyed the movie. It would have been nice if the projectionist knew what the hell they were doing as it wasn't matted correctly, it was slightly blurry on the edges and instead of being a rectangle shape on the screen, it was more of a trapezoid. Asked the wife about that (who used to manage a theater earlier in life) and she said that it was likely that they using a flat lense with a cinemascope mvoie or vice versa. Don't hold her to those exact words since it's early in the morning and I may have screwed up the words n stuff. Something with lenses.

Anyhoo, despite that, I enjoyed the movie. I think I read an article somewhere where Bill Mitchell was upset 'cause the directors put him in a bad light in the movie by taking things out of context, etc etc etc. While watching the movie I kept this in mind, and yeah, there were parts where they made him appear overly arrogant and evil and snobbish. But, there is one scene in particular where, it seemed everything was in perspective and Billy Boy came up looking like a complete ass. I won't ruin the movie for those who haven't watched, but if you do see the movie, you'll know which one I'm talking about.

Um... it's too early for me really to be writing this, but anyways, I enjoyed the movie and it made em want to go right home and play video games. But it was late and I didn't and come tomorrow, I'm sure I'll still be trying to find a way to sell off my vintage video game consoles for some extra bread. Maybe I'll just use that bread to buy me my own full size arcade cabinet. Though, likely not. I really don't need anything else cluttering up my house taking up space.

tired.

later.

'ello govnah!

just a misc post full of random crap
-----------------------------
M and I put out a bunch of stuff out for bulk. We hadn't even finished putting everything out before someone came by and took the grill. When I got up this morning, someone had taken the speakers (which were pretty much toast speaker wise, the woofers had disintegrated into powder), a big treasure chest thingy and had cut the cords from the two vacuum cleaners (I suppose for the copper in the wires). Thinking back, I should have put the broken mirror and broken glass shower door out there as well. And that weird artists stand which doesn't stand cause it's missing some legs or something. Oh well, I'm sure we'll need a bulk pickup again in the future.
-----------------------------
I finally got a chance to work on the front porch. My initial thoughts were that basically quite a bit of dirt had washed out from under it. After digging down so I could put more dirt under there, I determined that it probably was ALWAYS hollow under there.

The process of buying top soil to put under there gave me quite a workout on Sunday. I went to Lowe's twice that day. On the first trip, I went to the garden center and loaded twelve 40 lb bags onto a cart. I soon realized that this was gonna be a bitch to move, so I found an employee and they said 'just go up front and tell them you want 12 bags of top soil, then you can drive your car through the loading dock'. 'Cool', I said. So I paid for my top soil and drove the car around. They had a woman in the loading dock. She held her own. I helped out and loaded about 6 of the bags. Then I got home and unloaded them from the car. Then later, after I finished digging, I had to move them to where I needed to dump them. Let's count up how many times I moved bags. 12 + 6 + 12 = 30 times x 40 lbs = 1200 lbs. Whew. For the second load, I bought 15 bags. I obv didn't bother trying to load them on a cart as they have top soil in back stock. So I help load about 5 bags there. Then I had to unload them from my car and then I ended up using 9 of those bags. So for the second trip I had 5 + 15 + 9 = 29 x 40 lbs = 1160 lbs + 1200 lbs = 2360 lbs of lifting. I lifted a ton of dirt. Literally.
--------------------------
Work has been nutty so I've been going into work no later than 7:15am and as early as 6:30. Ugh. This will probably continue for a while since I can't seem to catch up. The test suite I'm working on was originally for 2 people, but then it became just me. After doing some calculations, I informed my boss that I would not finish. So me managed to get me some help from one of the other testers, that'll help out some. Hopefully I can catch up a little bit and _just_ finish before the test cycle is done.
--------------------------
Tonight Toddeus and I are going to see The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which should be bad ass. It's about this guy's quest to break the Donkey Kong record and dethrone one of the uber-videogame player's record which has stood since in the 80s sometime. Or something like that. C'mon! It's a game about Donkey Kong. Why not?
----------------------------
I could write more, but I'm already 15 minutes behind in starting testing today, so... later!

getting closer to the norm

The wife and I are finally getting things put back together downstairs. The family room no longer has shelves upon shelves of stuff and actually has even less since we moved the 'scrapbooking desk' downstairs since the little one liked pulling open the drawers and generally wrecking havoc on its contents.

The studio is finally back to its old self. The drums are set up so they can collect more dust on them. I moved a couple of things around but overall, it's still crowded. Ha!

The my parents came up this weekend which allow me and the wife to finally get some alone time in. We went to the Olive Garden and had some tasty food. I do find it almost insulting that they do have lunch portions for a cheaper price, but they don't list it anywhere on the menu they give you when you sit down.

Then, instead of seeing a movie, we pretty much just dorked around. We went to WalMart and got a new vacuum cleaner since the old one downstairs bit the dust after using it for 12 years (and I got that one used in the first place... so it's life span is probably closer to 20) and the one upstairs wasn't cleaning as well as it could have (it's one of the older bagless one) and it wouldn't stand up on its own (the little mechanism that allows it to do so was not happy). Then we dorked around at Odd Lots. And then we headed back.

On Sunday, I gots a bunch of crap done that needed to be done. One thing was putting down a protective strip of wood in front of the sliding door. The new one that we had put in a few years ago was a little less deep than the previous one, so there was a spot where the carpet didn't cover the subfloor which was a great place for pebbles and fur and crud to get into. Of course, when you are a little person, like my toddler, that's the perfect place to put your fingers and pull stuff out. However, that era has thankfully come to an end.

I also put together the new vacuum cleaner and swept the house. It's much quieter than the old bagless and cleans about twice as good and rolls very nicely. After putting the new one together, I took part the old one and gave it a good cleaning and fixed the stand up thing-a-ma-jig. Turns out the only problem was that a screw had come loose, much like its owner.

I also 'fixed' the kitchen table. Once of the legs had a split going, so I screwed in a couple of, um, screws in hopes that it will make the table last a little longer at least until we figure out what they hell were going to do in the future with making the family room into the dining room or something. Words.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something important here. Oh well. If I remember, I'll write it down.

I've updated The Music Counter to have the latest totals.

New stuff, Music stuff

* New Stuff *
Ok... not much really that new.

In blogger land, I switched from templates over to the layout format. I think in the long run it'll make more sense. I did this 'cause I wanted the 'Older Posts' link at the bottom of the page. After fiddling with it for the past 2 or 3 hours, I think I have everything back to normal. The only real difference is that the 'Stupid Things' now encompasses all of the archive. Blogger finally got their heads out of their bums and you can now sort newest to oldest by default so you don't have to hack the page. I lost the 'recent posts' section (which used to be the 'Stupid Things...' section) but that's not that big of a loss since by default the page shows you the posts for the current month which is good enough for me.

In other new news, the basement is almost finished with being sealed and stuff. They missed a few small spots so they need to come back and complete that. I just wish the whole thing was done with, but alas it is not. But hopefully by the end of the week, all will be done and back in place in the basement. Kudos to the wife for helping me get a good hunk of stuff back downstairs. I don't tell her 'thank you' enough, so I'll do so publicly. Again. :-p I really am a b@stard sometimes.

* Music Stuff *
For those of you who were hoping that I had finally written and composed 'V: The Musical', you will be sorely disappointed. Since I failed to mention it in the music ideas post a few weeks ago, V: The Musical is, as you may have guessed, a musical version of the V mini-series. I dubbed the two V mini-series from the library about 3 years ago I think. This stemmed from a conversation me and the wife had late one night while both suffering from a bout of insomnia. It will be very Rodger's and Hammerstein-ish. The only lyrics I have thus far are: "Drats! Rats! That's all we can eat for now. Drats! Rats! So hungry I could eat a cow!" This would take place during the scene where some dude sneaks a peek into the spacecraft to see the Visitors woofing down rats instead of normal human food. Honestly, while I may have dubbed off the movie, I haven't sat down and watched it. The rats scene is the only thing I remember. But I digress.

The actual reason for the Music Stuff section is to announce a new counter on the side bar over here. ------------------------>

Basically since I've gotten hired at my new job, I've been listening to all the music I have on MP3. This is something like 100 discs or so. Way too many. But since I am a completist and have continued to stand by the notion that if I buy a record (or download in this case) that I will listen to it, I decided to listen through all these CDs (and in some cases DVDs). That's alot of music. As you can see, I've listened to 2326 songs which has taken approximately 304 hours 49 minutes 46 seconds. I'm sure that the song count and the time are within 1% if not a little less.

When calculating, I had to go back though all the CDs I had listened to already (which was probably around 30 or 40) and put them into WinAmp to get a total time. It would have been nice if I could have just used Windows to search for *.mp3 (since there are txt, m3u and other misc files on the discs as well), but when you do a search, you can't use the 'Enqueue in WinAmp' r-click function because windows does some sort of short hand. If you select _1_ file from the search results, it enqueques it just fine and dandy. But if you select more than one, WinAmp has no idea what you are talking about. I blame Microsoft for this one. I may have been able to use Windows MediaPlayer, it makes you play the song before trying to figure out how long the song is, whereas on WinAmp, if it's visible on the playlist, it looked up the time and displays the time (as well as calculates the total time for the playlist).

Um... not sure where else to go with this. I've listened to a crap load of music and have a crap load more to listen to.

What To Eat - Part II

In the first of the 'What To Eat' series, the husband was left to his own devices for lunch when his wife and kiddo were away. He chose to eat a Spam burger. And it was tasty.

Now, continuing the series, I give you 'What To Eat - Part II'. This part is my directorial debut. Nothing fancy. So, enjoy!!!

Two Triple Cheese, Side Order Of Fries

A long long long time ago, I used to watch Nickelodeon when I got home from school. One of the shows I used to watch was Turkey TV. Now, over they ears, I've talked to many different people who had Nick as a kid, but people only remember You Can't Do That On Television and Mr. Wizard's World. Not Turkey Television (or Turkey TV for short). Well, here is the intro to that show to prove I'm not nuts.



So how does that tie into my title? Well, on occasion they would show music videos for crazy songs. One of those songs was titled "Two Triple Cheese, Side Order of Fries" by Commander Cody. I attempted to locate this song but because I didn't have the title right, I was unsuccessful... until today.

This is a great song and pretty much anytime I am eating a big honking burger, I hear this song in my head. No lie. So without further ado, the video for 'Two Triple Cheese". I love how low budget and 80's this video is.



On a side note, Commander Cody was most famous for covering the song "Hot Rod Lincoln" in the 1970s, which you might know. It's also a great song as well.
If you care to watch. I'm not embedding this one.


That's all I got.

Musical Ideas I've Had That I May Or May Not Get To

Below is a list of musical ideas that I've thought about doing. Who knows when I'll get to them, but the thought is there. Enjoy (or not)!

Duke Amethyst
I've discussed this idea to people before. That was 4 1/2 years ago when I was in a King Diamond / Mercyful Fate musical phase. The idea was remaking songs from the 1970s in the style of King Diamond. Get it? King Diamond. Duke Amethyst. I had briefly researched which songs might work. Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" was the first one I picked. In fact, it was while singing the song in the car and straining to hit the high note when I thought to myself 'I bet King Diamond could hit that note'. The rest is history. The only other song that I had picked out was "Chevy Van" and that was simply because the guitar tab seemed simple enough for me to play.

I learned some interesting facts surrounding the Duke Amethyst name when looking up the wiki's on Duke and Amethyst.
1) A duke is historically of highest rank below the King. That's very fitting. There is only one King Diamond.
2) The amethyst crystal is typically 6-sided prism ending in 6-sided pyramid. The sixes are very appropriate given the satanic nature of Mercyful Fates music.
3) But most importantly, the reason I picked Duke Amethyst is because it matches my initials (DA).


Gertrude's Lemon Giraffe
Probably on my wife knows about this one. Gertrude's Lemon Giraffe is to be music in the vein of 1960's psychedelic music. The name came to me during the drive home from work one day when I was listening to alot of psychedelic music. The band names were always a bit on the odd side. Strawberry Alarm Clock. Chocolate Watch Band. Et cetera. Some also involved names (like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ala the Beatles psychedelic album). Others involved animals... and I have no examples there. So I figured I'd write a computer app that would mix and match all these types of things... namely names, flavors and animals. While running through what types of things would be generated by this app, Gertrude's Lemon Giraffe popped into my head and that was that.

I figured if I ever get to recording anything, the main focus of the music will be a guitar that is being run through the Drunken Sailor Flanger, which is a flanger guitar pedal that I circuit bent a few years back. Psychedelic bands occationally had weird sounding instruments so that would be my 'signature' sound.


A yet unnamed garage band
I never got to naming this one, but the music sound like a typical 1960's garage band. This one stems from my interest in, duh, garage band music like that found on the Nuggets boxset as well as the Pebbles compilations.

The lines between 1960's psychedelic rock and 1960's garage rock sometimes blur quite a bit and at times I have wondered if Gertrude's Lemon Giraffe should be the same as the garage band. In opinion, GLG is not a very 'garage' sounding name, though, there were bands like Sir Douglas Quintet and The Lollipop Shoppe and the aforementioned Strawberry Alarm Clock and The Chocolate Watchband that were on the Nuggets boxset. Usually garage bands have a 'the' in the title like The Leaves and The Shadows of Knight and The Outsiders and The Sonics.

Musically, I figured I could create a nice trashy sound using my circuit-bent Oxidizer Distortion Pedal. One of the settings on it is a nice buzzy fuzz sound that I think would work perfectly for the garage band sound.

There would also be lots of tambourine. I discovered that many of the bands used a tambourine to accent the down beat. I guess it gave the singer something else to take out his aggressions on besides the typically snarly vocals. I looked around for a while looking for a cheep tambourine. But I quickly found out there was no such thing. At least not in the typical circular tambourine model. Even used ones were 15 bucks and I'm not about to pay that much. So one day I was in the dollar store and saw this cheep-o plastic tambourine (which also came with some horrible maracas). But the jingles were of cheep aluminum and didn't have that nice 'ching' to them. But then I rounded the corner and there were these little sticks with jingles on them. And they had a nice ring to them, so I bought two of them for a dollar each. At the moment, I'm not really sure where in the house they are, but I do have them. So I have a tambourine for the album, just not in the traditional tambourine sense.

Another idea I had was that the album, when recorded, should have a 'live' feel to it. Meaning that in the background there will be lots of screaming of 'fans'. Back in the day, some studio execs created 'live' albums in the studio in order to create the image that the band had a big following and to also mask that the players were, well, not that talented. I figure I can loop some screaming from the Kiss Alive and Kiss Alive II albums (which, quite honestly, with the number of overdubs and redubs were techincally not live either) or grab some bootlegs from archive.org and steal the 'audience' from there. On top of the live feeling, I figured I'd have banter between the musicians. I thought I might even have one of the band members quit halfway through the show only to rejoin a couple songs later. I think the 'quitting' thing might be a bit much, but regular on stage banter might be okay. I guess it will depend on what mood I'm in when I record the 'dialogue'.

Yet unnamed progressive rock / avant garde band
This might possibly be two different bands quite honestly. Part of me wants to get my 'odd time signature' rocks off and part of me wants to utilize all the stupid toys and gizmos that I've circuit bent. Seems like good reason to start a Frank Zappa-ish band. I mean, Frank Zappa had songs that featured people playing bicycles and vacuum cleaners and whatnot.

But part of me wants a 'serious' progressive band on top of that. Not that Frank Zappa is not serious, but what music of his I've been exposed to is definitely not progressive in the way that Yes or King Crimson or early Genesis was, if you get my drift. But, there is only so much time in the world and if I ever get to this project, I just might have to find a 'musical' way to integrate my circuit bend stuff into my 'serious' prog rock band.

This pretty much feeds off of the progressive rock phase I've been on for a while. Lots of Dream Theater and Yes and Rush, in that order. I was reading the latest Modern Drummer magazine which was dedicated to prog rock drummers like Mike Portnoy. Bill Bruford, Neil Peart, Chris Pennie, etc etc etc and that got me thinking about odd time signatures and some experiments I had been meaning try like 5/4 phrases playing over 4/4 phrases or different ways to phrase things in 7/4 time (you can do 2-2-3, 3-2-2, 2-3-2, 3-2-2, 4-3, 3-4, 5-2, 2-5, 6-1, etc etc etc) or coming up with something in 11/8 time. That one kept me up last night. All I could think about was counting 1-2-3-4-5-61-2-3-4-5-61-2-3-4-5-61..., which is basically counting 6/4 except chopping off the second eighth note (1 and 2... and 5 and 6 1 and 2 ... ). I think it would take me a while to learn to 'groove' to that time signature. Course, I thought the same thing about 5/4 and 7/4 and I can do those a little easier now thanks to Dave Brubeck, Dream Theater and a song called 'Shit Chips' by Devilcake ;).

V: The Musical
V: The Musical is, as you may have guessed, a musical version of the V mini-series. I dubbed the two V mini-series from the library about 3 years ago I think. This stemmed from a conversation me and the wife had late one night while both suffering from a bout of insomnia. It will be very Rodger's and Hammerstein-ish. The only lyrics I have thus far are: "Drats! Rats! That's all we can eat for now. Drats! Rats! So hungry I could eat a cow!" This would take place during the scene where some dude sneaks a peek into the spacecraft to see the Visitors woofing down rats instead of normal human food. Honestly, while I may have dubbed off the movie, I haven't sat down and watched it. The rats scene is the only thing I remember.

(update 10-18-07) I had an idea for some lyrics for the love ballad in V: The Musical.
Some people may call it beastiality
But, me, I call it reality
I love my little lizard... yes, I do

My blood runs hot; Her blood runs cold
But her hand is the one that I want to hold.
(I may have to alter this since I can't remember if the lizard in love was a man or a woman. I think it was a man, so that means I'll have to alter them slightly.)

Whut's New

Well, not much really.

The family went to the Inniswood Metro Garden park in Westerville the past weekend and saw the Big Bugs exhibit. That was pretty cool. I'd never been to the Inniswood before and I have to say they keep the grounds up very nicely. This probably has to do with it being a Metro Parks Garden rather than a Park. At first we didn't even think that you could picnic there, however, there is a small area on the other side of the parking lot where there are a couple of picnic tables. We had KFC. It was tasty. I should post some pics, but I don't have them at my disposal at the moment. So I guess you'll just have to go yourself.

I have J&D Basement Systems coming to my house tonight after work. That should be interesting. I'm sure they will tell me all sorts of crap that's wrong with my house, at which point I will curls up into the far corner of the crawl space and cry.

I'm looking at this can of 'Mug Root Beer' and notice a couple of things. Right below the BIG BOLD LETTERS of MUG ROOT BEER, in smaller white font is says 'soda'. I find that funny. As if anyone would actually think that it is beer. The second thing I notice is that at the bottom is says 'NOCAFFINE'. It pretty much looks like that is just one word. Nocaffeine. Maybe that's the sweet n' low version of caffeine or something? The thrid thing I notice is the spelling of caffeine. For a very very long time, i've left out that middle 'e' and wrote it as caffine. Seems logical to me. Oh wait, I'm using the English language which means that everything is as confusing as it possibly can be.

---- cranky old man rant below ----

On a food side note, all of the warnings on food is starting to get on my nerves. There have been allergies to all sorts of shit since the beginning of time. I'm sure in this high-tech 'make them brighter, bigger, grow faster, etc' era we live in it is more wide-spread. I, for instance, used to eat apples all the time. Then about 5 years ago, I ate an apple at work and my throat pretty much swelled shut. I haven't been able to eat raw apples since. Apples sauce is fine. Apple butter is fine. So it probably has everything to do with either what they spray the apples with now or the super shiny wax they put on them.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I'm talking about the warnings. For example, on a can of Diet Pepsi (and just about every other diet soda) you see Phenylketonurics: Contains Phenylalanine. That one almost makes sense to have on their. Almost. If you are a person who suffers from phenylketonuria , then odds are you know that anything that contains aspartame contains that which you are allergic to. I know it's supposed to help these people not have to read all the ingredients to see what they are allergic to. I get that. But when I see a jar of peanut butter which has a warning on it that is "Contains: Peanuts", then I start getting a little bit irked. No f'ing shit Sherlock that peanut butter contains peanuts. If you have a peanut allergy and aren't smart enough to figure out that peanut butter contains peanuts, well then, sucks to be you. Same goes for milk. It should be no surprise that a bar of Hershey's Milk Chocolate contains milk. And it shouldn't be any real surprise that it's manufactured where peanuts are also handled.

Where am I going with this? Sometimes, I think warning are going too far. Yeah, I get it that some people can possibly die from eating peanuts. It sucks to be them cause, damn, p-nut butter and Reese Cups rule only slightly less than bacon. But milk? Give me a break. Most people aren't going to keel over because they have some milk. They might get an upset stomach sure. But hell, they've even proven that people can acclimate themselves to milk. On the other hand, my mother has ciliac. That basically means that she can't process gluten. That would be found in wheat and oats and barley and other woody grains, genius. But I don't think I've seen a loaf of bread with a warning on it claiming "Contains: Wheat" or "Glutenurics: Contains gluten". She can't process gluten, period. There is no ability to acclimate to it. Plus, it causes your body to not absorb much of the nutrients that you do need. She was sick for a very long time. But she doesn't need a freaking warning spelled out to her to tell her what and what not to eat. She reads the ingredients and if she sees 'wheat flour', she puts the shit back on the shelf.

There are people with allergies to just about anything. Some people break out into a rash if they waer clothes with fabric softener on them.

What I'm getting at, is that if list everything that someone might be allergic to, the odds are that we would end up listing the ingredients all over again. So what's the point. Know your illness and know what you can or can't eat.

In hind sight, I can see where maybe the 'is manufactured in the same plant as peanuts'. Maybe. That wouldn't be listed in the ingredients and so I can see how it would be useful to people with severe peanut allergies. I'm not that much of a sour-puss grumpy old man. But if the freakin' product has peanuts listed in the ingredients and you have an allergy to peanuts and you still choose to eat the darn thing, then that's your own fault.

BTW, I'm glad my wife doesn't have a peanut allergy cause then I would have to get a tattoo on my head that says "May contain peanuts". I loves my peanut butter.

This concludes my cranky old man rant for this week. Tune in next week when I complain about the use of the cloverleaf interchange as a means of making entering and exiting the highway 'safer'. :-)

My wife is great!!!

Lately work has been a bit hectic and I've been dazed and confused (for so long, you know it's true). But my wife has been very supportive especially when I've had to work a little later than usual and leaving way early and things just haven't been going right at work. This weekend was the worst. I had been spinning my wheels on a problem that had been plaguing me for all of Thursday and Friday which left me really really behind schedule. In short, something that had worked, stopped working. And to top it off, I still didn't have any solution to the problem. So I came into the weekend feeling like complete crap. But my Mrs tried her best to put me in a good mood.

This included going to the Weekend of Fire in Cincinnati. It was basically a hot sauce festival. We got there and paid our $5 each. And it turned out to be much smaller than I had hoped. Then one of the hot sauce makers I was hoping would be there wasn't. Then I spent way too much on stuff I'm not even sure I wanted. And didn't get a T-shirt that I at least kinda wanted. So now I'm behind schedule, $30 poorer and no t-shirt.

To make matter worse, I tried to go into work on Sunday and of course I couldn't get into the building. Grrrr. But my wife tried her best to cheer me up in any way she could. She's a trooper.

So Sunday night, I decided I would try to have something go right for me. I decided to finally reimage the machine downstairs. I was going to partition the small 20 GB drive so I could have multiple XP images that I could swap in and out using Drive Image (pretty much the precursor to Ghost). So, in order to do this I needed to find my copy of XP Home. Yes, a legitimate copy of XP Home with the holographic CD and little yellow sticker. Well, mostly legitimate copy. ;)

Anyhoo... I thought it was downstairs since I had moved much of my stuff down there. I looked downstairs where I put my plethora of system CDs, but didn't see it there. So I figured it must still be upstairs. I rummaged around and 'ahhhh delight', I found the nice glossy green envelope that said XP Home. I opened it up and... no CD. Now, I knew that they had been separated at some point, but kinda remembered what I did with it. I remembered putting it with a bunch of stuff that needed to go downstairs. So I went back downstairs and riffled around some more. No go. Stuff that I thought was with the XP CD was down there, but no XP CD. So I went to bed Sunday night disappointed.

At some point in the middle of the night, I had an epiphany. At work, I have an MSDN account. I could simply download the XP Home iso and use that. I have a legitimate key, so I just needed the disk.

Monday came along and I got up early and went to work at 7am. I worked with the Devs (which I should have done long ago). It at least pleased me somewhat that the Devs couldn't figure it out either. So they came up with a workaround for the moment. Which was good. However, by the time we figured all that out, the day was done and that put me now 3 days behind schedule.
But I had my ISO, so that was good.

My wonderful wife continued blowing sunshine up my arse trying to make me feel better as well as allowing me to continue my little project. Monday night I burnt the ISO and PRAYED that it would work. Luckily, it did and the rest of the evening I got the partitions set up and XP Home installed and patched. But I looked again and STILL could find that damned original XP disk. On top of that, I realized that another thing that was in that batch of CDs was the CD copy of Drive Image. I have floppies (it takes up two disks), so that part wasn't a big deal for now. But sooner or later those floppies are gonna croak and making the CD, from what I heard, was a big pain in the arse and since I hadn't done the original CD (I had tried and failed), I had no idea how to make another working CD copy. So on top of my original XP disk being missing, now my MULTIPLE copies of a working Disk Image CD were missing as well. *sigh*

So, I got up uber early again on Tuesday and got into work by 7am again. I made some progress so that was good. But the missing CDs were still bugging the crap out of me.

I came home and my wife had dinner ready. She even made me some fried zucchini which is one of my favorite fried things. Mmmm... Baking Miracle n Zucchini. Tasty! Maryann put Norah to bed and I was going to go back downstairs to continue the project, but I wanted to have one more go at finding those disks. I remembered I had taken a bag of music CDs downstairs and hadn't filed them yet. Maybe I had put the disks in there thinking that I would put them where they needed to be when I filed my music CDs. I check downstairs and there was the bag and the music CDs, but no XP or Drive Image disks. *censored* *censored*

I went back upstairs and rummaged around some more. I looked in drawers that hadn't been opened in months, I shuffled and organized all sorts of things on my desk. No disks. So I sat in my chair and harumphed.

My wife comes in and I explain that I just couldn't understand where the hell they went. I knew the disk was very important and that I wouldn't have thrown it out and I remembered seeing it and putting with some stuff to go downstairs but that SOB wasn't down there. She had heard the story at least 10 times over 3 days. But she said, 'Well, lemme help you look'. And I pointed to all the cleanliness and said 'I've checked everywhere in here'. So she poked around in a basket that I hadn't looked in (bad Darrin!) but it wasn't in there. I even double checked after she had checked... but it wasn't in there.

So I took at seat in my office chair. Defeated.

Then my wife hands me this old decrepid waste paper basket that I've had for eons and said 'Is it in here'. The minute I saw the computer cord poking out, I knew it was in there. And it was, as well as the Drive Image disk and several other computer related things.

I said, "Where in the hell was this???" and my wife pointed to the middle of the floor and said "Right here". Once again, my wife had saved me from my perfectionist, I-have-to-be-right-all-the-time, cause-I-can't-possibly-make-a-mistake self.

So I gave my wife a kiss and went back downstairs to finish my project, which I can say is complete. Well for the most part. I still have some stuff I'd like to do with different images, but the main goal was to reimage the box and set it up so I could swap in and out images. Done and done.

My wife as of late has really been very cool and supportive and helpful and has saved me from myself way too many times for me to admit. Well, that is until recent, where I now sing her praises for proving my arrogant arse wrong. :)

Oh... and my wife just called to inform me that I had forgotten my lunch. This was likely 'cause I got up at 6:00am to come into work. She's going to drop off my lunch. Like I said, my wife is great and I love her very very much.