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.

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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!