"Pumpkin Boy"

Today was rather uneventful. I can hardly believe how fast this week seems to be going by. My weekend starts on Friday, ya see. Soon that schedule will change, but that's how it is now.

Tonight I did get to watch a new show called Lost. I thought the first episode was quite intriguing and made me want to keep watching. Tonight’s episode also revealed a little more but not too much (or too little for that matter). Creating a TV show like that is kind of like a good video game in that there must be just enough reward with each experience to entire the audience to continue. And lost has it down just about perfect. And hey, that hobbit is not so bad of an actor really. I think I will try to keep watching it. I can only imagine how I'll remember back to these early episodes and look at them with such disgust and impatience by the time they get to season three. At least that's the way it went with 24 and Alias.

Lately I've been having some weird recurring dreams. I should start to say I don't think I've ever driven as much as consistently as I have these last 6 or 7 weeks. At least an hour one way. Before that I could go a week not driving more than 10 miles. So only make sense such a regular activity suddenly introduced into my regular routine should make it to my dreams. The dreams are me driving but in the wrong lane, complete with cars driving at me. Not really nightmares as I don't recall any fear or other emotion involved. Just felt really weird.

Lastly I guess I'll talk about the presidential debate. For the record I'm writing this on Wednesday, the 29th of September, 2004: the day before the first presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. So sure I could be wrong, I won't know for 24+ hours. My prediction is Bush will do about as well as he did at his convention: not spectacular but better than merely mediocre or adequate. Kerry, on the other hand, will walk that delicate tight rope appealing to many different audiences at once and come off as a bit of a mess. In fact Kerry will probably do something weird. And I don't mean just the looking like a pumpkin either. I can't say what this as of yet act of weirdness could be, but I think it'll be there. As for who will win the media coverage will say what they always say: that Kerry won, that'll be irregardless of how Kerry actually does. Kerry doesn't even have to show up and CNN will say he won (a courageous decision! Wins by default!) while the public will know for themselves.

I have to say though I do think there is an ever enlarging gap between reality and the way the elite media types think. Just watch one of those "media talk's media" type shows on cable to see what I mean. You'd think that whole governor recall we had in California would be slightly indicative of this to even the dimmest of "analyst" but I guess it isn't obvious. And it'll get ever worse too.

Hope you enjoyed this entry.

  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 Comments

 

"The Paddle"

Well it's been quite a week. Actually not that much has happened, except that I spent all weekend painting the condo I will soon be living in. The date of which seems uncertain at the moment but I will be moving in there soon. I'm still sore from all that damned paining. Stupid old body. Stupid, old 26 year old body.

I've been trying to form a new opinion of Sundays lately. I do work on Sundays, which is perfectly fine for me because there's no traffic either going to or coming home from work allowing the coveted sub-hour commute time. On the other hand the good talk shows normally on during the week are not on in the morning and for some reason all the music stations I would ever think to listen to play nothing but 80's crap. I mean three different stations playing 80's crap? Damn it. I just need to buy some music CDs or something. It sucks. Still if that's the thing you have to complaing the most about you must not be doing too badly, right?

In other news I found something I thought had mysteriously disapeared forever: the Atari 7800 I purchased years ago along with some games. I didn't know about about it all at the time of course and as it turns out some of the games are merely 2600 and 5200 games. None very rare but at least I know fully what I have now.

I actually think this is good news because the 7800 is backwards compatible with the 2600 so I have a way to play all those 2600 games should I decide to do something unwholesome to my couple of 2600 systems, rendering them inoperable. Not that I really need to play the 2600 games a lot with all those ROMs and all but if I need to ebay off some duplicates it may come in handy.

In work I had to learn a seemings extra books worth on Thursday. I wasn't even feeling confident I got the stuff from the four weeks of training all down and now I'm learning a large amount of new stuff in a short period of time (a day). So I'm a bit nervous about that but I suppose I will learn it eventually.

Last week I also pre-ordered the newest star wars game, battle front. Of course as soon as I did amazon dropped the price and I still have yet to see it since I opted for the free shipping. In fact the game just shipped out to me on Thursday. So I could recieve it tomorrow or Tuesday. Finding time to play it especially with my computer hooked up to a TV everybody's watching may be a challenge.

That's it for now. So exciting, I know.

  ¶ 8:49 PM 0 Comments

 

"Where's the printer port!!"

I know I've been saying this for at least six months now: obviously Kerry doesn't really "want" to win gthe election. He keeps flip-flopping, or chaning his mind or whatever you people call it and then saying he's been consistent the entire time. This will win an election? And I knew the libs would start acting wakier and wakier. I think I said that almost a year ago. And what do ya know? CBS fakes some stupiod story. What a shock! I suppose in good old days CBS never would have been caugt. But alas times have changed.

As I'm writing this I'm a watching a Japanese movie called Red Shadow. It's a non-animated Japanese language-only action movie. Only it's a little cheesy. Something close to the cheesyness of The Mummy but not quite as bad as say Power Rangers (which I never watched). Wierd music, wierd lines, a lot of night-time lense filters that aren't very convincing, still entertaining I suppose.

Also, I am writing this on a notebook I borrowed from work. So here I am, using a mac and not even complaining. An interesting thing about this notebook, I couldn't get it onto my secured LinkSys router wireless network. With the new USB thumb wifi card and my wifi-enabled PocketPC both were on the network rather quickly and easily. Perhaps the firmware of the rotuer needs to be updated. All I know is it's really, really annoying. So I'm borrowing the connection of a next door neighbor, with his permission of course.

And another thing: there's a reason laptops are now "notebooks" -- the manufactures don't want to encourage users to place the notebooks on their laps as too much heat is now generated. I say this of course as I'm improperly using the notebook on my lap.

I had the most interesting call this week. Seems this guy who sounded like he was from somewhere in the south wanted to hook up a damned printer and needed to know how. He then quickly added "and don't say the damn USB or I'm going to get really mad!!" or something to that effect. So I had to tell him the "parallel port" type printer connector does not come on Macintosh any more however there is suppoed be an adapter so you can still use parallel port-only printers. Somehow I really can't imagine a printer newer than five years that doesn't at least have both the old and USB type interfaces. That guy was fun.

  ¶ 1:00 PM 0 Comments

 

"Just the grind"

For some reason I changed around my meta tags the other day and thus let all the "spiders" back in. According the stats from that day I got more than 70 hits. Usually I get maybe 1 or 2 if any. I just think it's weird the way that works.

This week I only get one day off, today. On the bright side I work the rest of the week on my schedule, 9:30 to 6:30. Finally, no more 4:30am get times for me. Also Sunday traffic won't be so bad and I'll have Friday off so I don't have to worry about that day which is the worst as far as traffic.

My life has turned into much of what it was at my job a year ago: drive, sit-and-work, drive, sleep: repeat. At least this time there's lots of people around and they seem to actually want to be there and take the job seriously. It's so nice! I'm going to need to see a movie or something different however.

Tonight I actually did rent a movie: an old TV movie called simply V. A mini-series from circa 1983. Actually it wasn't that bad of a movie, either TV movie from the 80s-wise or just plain movie-wise. There were of course convenient twists and plot holes, as expected, but I thought it was quite well done.

Too bad I only rented the first two parts to it and not the latter half. I just rented it, the latter half was not available. Just the fact Lucas let them play the Star Wars sound track (ending credits) I thought was pretty cool. And it did have a few subtle references to it. I mean it was 1983 after all, everybody still did love Star Wars.

Well it's no Knights, but I would still recommend even if it was only to the geekiest among us.

  ¶ 9:08 PM 0 Comments

 

"Damn"

Today wasn't such a good day at work. Of course, I won't be going into details at all. Lets just say it was really hard to do stuff and answer questions. An Irrate customer doesn’t much help the situation. Tip for those people calling tech support: screaming out your name extremely quickly along with the serial number of an unnamed product will not make the tech support experience go any faster. You must work with the person on the other phone, not against them. Is that really such a terribly complicated concept? Yeah? That's what I thought.

Other-wise I have purchased a new USB thumb-drive-sized WiFi card. This I have hooked up to my computer that is now in living room hooked up to a TV. Unfortunately the XP software keeps losing the connection with my network and hooking up to my neighbor’s router, making networking of any sort virtually impossible. The blurriness of the test on the screen doesn't help any. I've been using the "magnifier" utility from the accessibility tools to help with the blurriness (and it does help) but it's still too frustrating to figure out. At least I have internet access from the computer hooked up to the TV if nothing else.

I have also tried playing games on it and the games actually look quite good. Why do I suddenly get the feeling I've written aboot this before? Anyway I'm surprised how well this thing works.

The only other thing I've tried to do is install Windows 2000 on this computer I just purchased from a friend of mine (for $300). The Win2k CD I have isn't bootable to I had to be creative (or make a series of 5 floppies -- doesn't sound like fun). So I booted into Bart's PE via one CD-ROM and inserted the Win2k install disk in the other tray and tried to run the installation from Bart's. And it actually did work albeit asking me if I wanted to upgrade or merely "fresh install" (at least I think that's Windows terminology...stupid macs). So obviously it either saw the existing Win9x installation or it saw Bart's PE as an earlier version of Windows. Neither of those makes a lot of sense. The installation program was acting as if I had run setup from files sitting on the same HDD I was trying to install to: obviously meaning I couldn't re-partition or format those partitions.

So I do have Win2k installed now I just still have all the existing files intact which is not what I wanted. So my next step will be to format those partitions from within Bart's and try the setup again to see what will happen.

  ¶ 6:37 PM 0 Comments

 

"Four Words: You Suck!"

I think the President did it. He managed the mediocrity threshold I mentioned in a prior entry. Further Kerry seems to be collapsing in on himself. You know someone thinks he's in trouble when the person question has a political rally at midnight. Did anybody else catch the you suck! line for an audience member after Kerry's line "I have four words"? Inspiring.

I missed the first night of the convention. I did hear part of Rudy's speech and not really any of McCain's. This is too bad since those were two of the greatest speeches ever delivered apparently. I did get to watch Cheney's, Mrs. Bush's and the "Bush twins" or whatever they are. I also got to see a large majority of Zell Miller's speech. Now that was a good one! As was Arnold's.

The President's actually was also good, but I'm not sure I approve of the content. And that protester or protesters was/were annoying also. Can't you shut up for a couple hours and let someone else talk? Damn nazis. Anyway I've all that stuff from the Bush speech before. Four years ago almost to the day as I recall. Let’s just say "I'll believe it when I see it" (and even then I'll be highly suspicious).

In other semi-news I received another part for the Super VCR Mod I haven't worked on in a really long time. And I found the mini ATX power supply I thought I had lost some place. Perhaps now I'll finally be able to work on it.

Work-wise I'm taking calls on my own now. Or at least mostly on my own. Now the real job begins. With any luck I'll be working there for quite a long time.

Oh and I "graduated" from training today so I got to see the fruits of the labor from the "iLife" day when we got to make little mini-movies. The movies from the other groups were pretty good. Or two of them were anyway. The third didn't really look like it had been complete edited but was still pretty funny the way they did it. My group's on the other hand got some good reaction but I wasn't over-dubbed as was promised by the rest of my group so that thing that happens when I'm recorded and/or video taped happened (namely I look and sound extremely bad). Not everybody's a natural in front of the camera, ok?

My group mates that did do the final editing (leading up to minutes before it was shown) put in some of the clips I brought in: some from Dumb and Dumber, some from Ace Ventura: When Nature calls and some of course from the cult favorite (the cult consisting of me alone) Knights. The Dumb and Dumber audio clips came from the dream sequence, both from Jim's character and from the Kung Fu chef that gets some throw down with the Three Stooges sounds thrown in. The Knights clip was my favorite character saying "oh no, am I on fire now?", my favorite line of course (besides "where do ya plan to stick that thing?!").

I was honestly laughing pretty hard at it. And the scenes without any sounds kind of made it funny also. Very F-movie-ish, if there were such a thing.

Well I'm going to bed. Long day.

  ¶ 9:24 PM 0 Comments

 

"No Secrets Here"

Not much news to report for work this time. I am getting some live calls I have to handle on my own and I am doing pretty well with that. By next week I'll surely be handling the calls on my own just fine.

I, like everyone else, just got to see the new iMac just yesterday when it was officially unveiled to the rest of the public on the Apple's web site. And I for one really like the design and thought it looked cool. The first thing I thought was "I could make one of those".

Obviously when people want to do nothing but imitate you, you've probably done something right design-wise (and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery etc). Of course my version would have a relatively lackluster CPU and graphics capability, limited RAM and an LCD screen that can probably only go up to 640 x 480. And possibly the screen will be smaller because I don't have much money. But it is definitely "do-able". Though likely the apple logo would be replaced with either the Tux penguin or a LiteStep logo (even though I haven't used the latter in quite a while).

I'm thinking if I ever get to that project I will do so with a friend of mine I met at work and we'll do it in the form of a blog or maybe just a normal web site. We've only talked aboot it once and that was the day the images of the new iMac were released.

Politics wise the RNC convention seems to be going rather well. Of course I called the election in the past tense several months ago (before the VP was announced and immediately following the VP announcement). Keeping in mind I'm writing this before the President's speech Thursday night I think all he really has to do is be mediocre and likely he will slide into a victory. Unless the Dems cheat on the election. Don't put anything past them; they certainly seem capable of it. And I'm still waiting for the mandatory-fucking-classes so the STUPID old people vote for the right mother-fucking candidate and we don't have to spend yet more years listening to the stupid fucks whine and bitch...

G'night.

  ¶ 6:50 PM 0 Comments