Category Archives: Entertainment

Zelda; Diablo

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I actually did write a post yesterday, and somehow when I saved it it just disappeared. I don’t know where it went but when I opened the index.shtml file again it was the previous day’s post. I could not find the other one anywhere on my local machine, and I know I didn’t upload it so I will assume that I have somehow mistakenly saved it as a different date in my archives folder. That assumption doesn’t make any sense for a lot of reasons, most notably that would require me to use the ‘save as’ command and also to verify overwriting an existing file, unless I just somehow invented a date for it. The real reason that this theory doesn’t hold water is that my ftp client allows me to view files by the most recently modified and I could not find anything in there with the correct date on it, I searched through all of my documents and there was nothing.

That all happened last night as I was trying to ftp the file to my server, I could have written a pretty good copy of it yesterday while it was all still pretty fresh in my mind, yet I didn’t. Today I barely recall the topics that I discussed. I know that I made mention of our puppy’s condition, then I talked a bit about diablo, after that I am blank. Probably better that way I suppose, since today I have no more to talk about than I did yesterday and the same two topics are still on my mind.

Our Zelda puppy seems to be getting better for the most part. She is able to walk in limited doses, though she does strongly favor her driver’s side leg while she is doing it. Whatever pain that she is feeling isn’t bad enough that it is causing her to shake and breathe hard like it was when the injury first occurred. I think her progress may have come along a lot more quickly had it not been for my mother and father in law stopping by the day the injury happened, which led directly to her getting up and running over to them since both of our dogs get really excited when they see new people. Then yesterday my brother in law stopped by to pick up an old dryer, which again made her get up and frolic more so than a dog in her condition really should. I can’t fault the relatives for stopping by, nor can I fault her for being a happy little puppy, I do hope that she can just get a lot of rest over the next couple of days and hopefully get better. I just took the above photo and as you can see the dog does not look particularly happy. As you can also no doubt see, we are in serious need of new carpet (though the stains are not nearly that visible to the naked eye. I think my digital camera may be just a bit too good for my purposes; especially considering that the image size is one third of the actual photo, and it has been compressed insanely to make it viable for internet viewing).

• On the up side I was able to expend a bit of my time in mindless gaming yesterday. Why that is an up side? I got no idea. I played a lot more diablo. Not that it was my intention to play a lot more diablo, more I was hoping to get through the first couple of quests in act 3. What happened after that is the strange Diablo Time Warp that I have previously discussed, only about ten-fold.

There have not been that many changes to the normal difficulty since the recent patch, at least not many that I have found, but the ones that I have found have irritated me on a lot of levels. Act 3 is the most univerally hated of all the acts in the game to begin with, so hated that few people actually waste their time doing it. Knowing this, Blizzard went ahead and made it ever harder and more mundane even for the beginner. WTF were they thinking?

I wandered out into act 3 thinking that I would do the first quest pretty quickly, that didn’t happen at all. When the first couple of super-unique monsters didn’t drop the jade figurine I assumed that this was to keep people from doing only that quest for the +20 to life and the getting turboed to the next act, which is a good idea I think. After I had been playing for about an hour and had mapped the entire zone, not to mention clearing the false spider cavern near the waypoint, I still didn’t have the figurine. When I went into the real cavern (I always get the names confused) the figurine was dropped by the super-unique spider that guards the chest holding Khalim’s eye. I grabbed the figurine and went back to town completely forgetting to get the quest item from the chest. This would have been a very minor problem had I realized it at the time, unfortunately I didn’t realize it until I had gotten the Gidbinn and cleared the Flayer Jungle as well as the Flayer Caverns, where I got Khalim’s brain.

The only reason that all of that was bad is that I had to map the entire Great Marsh before I found a way into the Flayer Jungle. I dropped many Town Portals along the way and when I finally got the part of Khalim’s Will from the Flayer Dungeon (or whatever it is called) I just ran as fast as I could into Lower Kurast, hit the waypoint, went back to town and exited the game so that I could write yesterday’s post, which is lost. When I logged back on after having written yesterday’s post I looked in my stash expecting to see two pieces of the Khalim’s Will quest, but there was only one. This meant that I had to remap the zone (from the waypoint) to get back to the real spider cavern and get the damn eye. Once I had done that I just quit for the day. As a matter of fact that was when I realized that something had gone wrong with yesterday’s post, that is when I just gave up on anything related to the computer for good.

I am likely going to play a bit more of Diablo tonight, still in the act 3 area, but if it starts to piss me off like it did yesterday I may just have to but a real sword so that I can straighten out a few programmers over there at Blizzard. –Not that a situation like that would be likely, since it was my own haste that made me miss my quest item in the first place, and it is possible that it was just a strange map that made me have to clear every zone along the way, but My Random Fluctuations of Time and Space (God, for the religious) that was irritating.

If someone happens to car-jack me tomorrow, I may have some content that is a bit more interesting. If that fails to happen, you should expect the same dribble that you are getting now.

Car; Diablo; Barber; Baby story

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Well, I skipped yet another post yesterday. No real reason for it, I just didn’t write anything. Sure there were external factors that controlled it, such as wasting my time in numerous ways, but as writing anything here is not really productive in any way it is hard for me to gauge which action would have been more productive.

I actually got off of work early yesterday, (well, I got of at noon, which is when I am supposed to get off, but it rarely ever happens) and after also just picking up my pay, I decided that I may as well go get the oil changed in my car. I did not know until I got to the oil change place that it had not been done in fourteen months, but that is another story. Anyway, after an hour, and dropping $105 dollars, I walked out of the local grease ‘n go joint with fresh oil and a flushed cooling system. It kind of made me grit my teeth to have to pay for them to do it, but I just did.

There was a time, say a year ago or so, when the thought of simply letting someone else change the oil in my car was laughable. I kind of let go of that foolish notion about the time that it cost the same or more to do it myself. That really only started to happen when someone decided that you couldn’t just dump used motor oil on the ground anymore, which requires that you haul your used motor oil to a place that has the facilities to recycle it, and you have to pay them. So, if you don’t buy the oil on sale (or if you buy a really shitty brand, the type that I wouldn’t even put into my neighbor’s lawn mower) you are out ten bucks for the oil, say five for the filter, then three bucks to dispose of the oil, add on the gas to drive the oil to the nearest recycling center and you are at about twenty bucks; that is assuming that you have all of the necessary tools to do it in the first place. When you can get it done at a shop for 25, without getting your hands dirty, and with the airing the tires and vacuuming and the such, I just no longer see the reason to do it myself.

The cooling system flush, on the other hand, was something that I really hated to pay for and wish that I had done myself. I believe that the manufacturers recommend that you get it done every 50,000 miles, though I could be wrong on that. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter all that much how many miles are on the car when you do it. If you have a car with 300,000 miles on it, and the water in the radiator is still clear, well, green Kool-Aid colored, but without a lot of rust or gunk in it, then you don’t need to get it done. My car has 105,000 miles on it, and it has never been done, so I went ahead and let them do it. I don’t know how they can charge you 60 dollars to do it with a clear conscience. I figured they would drag out some big extragavent device that would send little robots with scrub brushes into the motor to clean it out, but no, they did it just like I have always done it. Only they did have a machine that took out the human effort. All you have to do is run clean water through the engine and radiator. The way I have always accomplished that is to drain the radiator completely, then hook my radiator hoses to clean pans of water and let the engine run for ten or fifteen minutes, pumping the clean water in through one hose and the dirty out through the other. No real science to it, it sucks the water in clean and pushes it out dirty, when the engine is clean the water is pushed out clean. After that I would just use a sprayer nozzle to blow all of the gunk out of the radiator. Total time, about 25 minutes, depending on how dirty the engine is. The same amount of time it took them to do it, but for only the cost of water, Not the sixty bucks they charged.

• The other thing that happened yesterday that directly contributed to my not getting around to doing an update was Diablo. I hadn’t played the game since the last time I mentioned it here. I was worried that my on-line players may be getting near the termination date, so I logged them all on to make sure it wouldn’t happen. Then I noticed that I had a Paladin that was just starting act 2 in normal, I hadn’t played in so long… What could 30 minutes hurt, or so I thought. Radament was gone in ten minutes or so, so why not go get the cube? Of course since the map doesn’t save in on-line play, I also wanted to get the waypoints for the other two staff quests. About thirty minutes into it I had the cube, so why not just run and get the staff, I never have any problem with the worm pit (or whatever they call it). I don’t remember them having those lightning beetles in there before, but anyway, I mowed right through it. Might as well go ahead and complete the staff quest, only one item left. I found the temple, got all the waypoints along the way, and got the headpiece. I then stopped, since the rest of that act can be done as a stand alone. It only took me about forty-five minutes…in my mind…In the real world it had somehow just consumed almost three hours of time. That damn Diablo time warp is a very strange thing. I bet there are physicists out there that wish they could explain how it works and harnass the power…

• As for today, well nothing happened of note. I got up in the morning and went down to the barber. I have been in desperate need of a haircut for a couple of months. The barber shop was, of course, closed, so I came back home and jumped into the shower. –That is something that I have always thought was a bit odd. If you go to a barber they prefer that you have dry hair for the cut, while if you go to a salon they prefer that your hair be wet. I don’t have any idea why that is, but it is.–When I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror, my bangs were hanging to my bottom lip. That is way longer than I have had my hair for about a decade, so I took matters into my own hands. I have never used scissors on my own hair, at least unless there was a big wad of chewing gum involved, so I was a bit apprehensive. It turns out that it is not that difficult to cut two inches off of one’s own bangs, at least if they are long enough that cutting two inches off of them still leaves the hair pretty damn long. No one at work noticed, and it kept my hair out of my eyes, so it will do until I can find the barber shop open. Though I am now developing a theory that he hides when he sees me coming. He is the only game in town, and charges a flat fee for all haircuts. It usually takes him three times as long to cut my hair as the other guys that go in, so I can see why. Fear not, I have developed a new strategy. The barber shop has windows on only two sides of it. I normally approach from the main road, where he can see me coming. If I just use some of the back streets to get behind the shop, park in the alley and crawl past the one window to reach the front door I will be in! Though that seems like a hell of a lot of work and planning to go through just to get an eight dollar haircut that looks like an eight dollar haircut…

• Now a quick story about the least intelligent mother in Florence:

Have you ever seen those wide, white stripes that are painted on the ground next to stoplights? Sure you have. Do you know what they are for? Sure you do. They are cross-walks. Those are the places that are designated for pedestrians to cross busy streets. Now I am not sure how the laws work in all states, but in the state where I took my drivers test, “Pedestrians have the right of way in all cross-walks, marked or un-marked”. I take that to mean that you can cross the street anywhere you want to, and you will have the right of way, as it should be, but use some discression for your child’s sake.

In case you are really bad at picking up on fore-shadowing, there was an incident that happened to me today that directly relates to this all. You see there are only two stoplights in this whole town. Neither of them is ever very busy. Cars will usually stop for anyone crossing the street on North Main St., which is the historic part of town, regardless of whether there is a cross walk nearby. The thing that one must consider, especially one pushing a baby carriage, is that if you are pushing your baby across the street, behind a huge SUV, and only the SUV’s length from the cross walk. The driver, that is turning left, not being able to see past the SUV, is not going to see you pushing your baby across the street only 10 or 12 feet from the cross walk.

Follow me here. I had full view of the sidewalk on the other side of the street, there was no one on it. I had full view of the cars in front of me and no one turned down the street I was going to go down. There was no indication that there would be anything but clear pavement there. I made the turn and had to lock up the brakes when I saw an obese woman pushing her kid out from behind that SUV. Honestly, in the entire time I have been driving I have never seen anything like that. That was more like the scenario that they put on the driver’s education videos. Why didn’t she walk the additional ten or twelve feet to get to the cross walk? Why didn’t she wait until there were no cars coming? Why did she give me the finger after I locked up my brakes to keep from hitting her and her child, without even honking my horn?

I was not going fast enough at the time to kill anyone, at least I don’t think I was, but had I hit her and the little stroller, I would likely be going to jail for manslaughter. Not because I was drunk, not because I wasn’t paying attention, not because I was talking on the phone, but because this little fat mom pushed her baby into traffic only a few steps away from an intersection. Though I don’t suppose she got fat by walking all the way to the intersections.

I must note that had she not flipped me off, I would not be writing about this now. I must also note that had she not been wandering into traffic behind an SUV I would have seen her before I rounded the corner. I must also note that if it had not been be (or another responsible driver) rounding that corner (someone in an SUV on the cell phone, for instance) this would likely have a vastly different outcome.

Now the question. Would you risk the life of your child to save yourself taking three steps?

Stupid Bitch.

Meta blogging; Ozzfest

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I spent some time today screwing around with the layout of my page. I came up with a couple of things that I kind of liked, but nothing that I was sure enough about to commit it to the internet. The thing is that without any advertising logos to put on here it just seems foolish for me to have it divided as it is, when there is so little information in the left column. I like the things that I do have over there, but on the occasions where I actually write a bit there is just a lot of dead space over there. Conversely, when I removed the left column the daily text stretched so far that it became difficult to keep the eyes on the correct line. That led to me reducing the size of the table, leaving about 40% of the screen as just background.

Once again I realize why I just ripped off this layout instead of coming up with something of my own.

Having written the previous, I went on to spend a lot of time looking for a few songs that I remember fondly, with hopes of updating my side bar. It turns out that the first three I thought of were absolute shit, and the one that I ended up placing there was not far behind. I guess that is why every generation hates the music that their parents listened to, considering that I can hardly listen to most of the hair band shit that I used to listen to. The one saving grace of my generation is that we have Megadeth and Metallica to listen to in a pinch. I don’t mean the horrible soap-opera-esque crap that they started putting out in the mid-late ’90s, I mean the real Metallica and the real Megadeth.

I am sure that every generation makes a stand like this at some point. Trying to defend the music that they grew up listening to against the new bands that are coming out. The thing that makes me think that some of the power bands that I was listening to when I was sixteen, Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera specifically, are better than the bands of today is the fact that they are being played on the radio in rotation with the new Metal. Perhaps that is just in the area I live, but the fact is that they are still being played, more than twenty years later. The only other songs that get that kind of air-play are oldies.

As I approach 30, I realize that I am no longer the kid that used to bang his head while listening to the old metal bands, but when I see kids half my age wearing ‘Master of Puppets’ t-shirts, I realize that some of the kids are still listening to it.

I had the opportunity to go to OzzFest last summer, thanks to my wife having an amazing job where she won V.I.P. tickets to the event. The one thing about that experience that really surprised me was the sheer number of old metal t-shirts I saw. I felt like I was damn near the oldest person there, but lots of the kids were wearing Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Slayer t-shirts, regardless of the fact that they weren’t even alive while those bands were in their prime.

I sure hope that by the time I reach say 50 I will quit trying to defend all of the metal that I listened to when I was a teen, but the sad truth is that there is just nothing coming out today that is as heavy and even tries to tell a story. Thunderous guitar riffs are pretty easy to come up with, the hard part is making something that will last. You can have the heaviest riff known to man, then have someone just scream, “keep on rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,” over the top of it and it will be absolute garbage. Put that next to the riffs in a song such as Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”, which is basically an anti-drug campaign, but it tells a story and it sticks. I am sure you can see the difference. If you can’t then I am old.

• The aforementioned OZZFEST was by far the best show that I have ever seen. There were so many bands there that I could not possibly list them all. The ones that played the main stage, though, were Chevelle, Disturbed, Korn, Marilyn Manson and, of course, OZZY. We wandered around the festival for a good five hours or so before they actually opened the entrances to the main stage. I was able to see a couple of bands, like Voivod, on the second stage that I had always wanted to see. There was another band on the second stage called MotoGrater that I mention only so you will know the name.

I don’t remember the exact date that the show was, but it was in the middle of the summer, in Arizona. Temperatures outside that day were over 110 degrees, which led to us using our V.I.P. passes frequently to get to the only area with a misting system, and the V.I.P. restrooms, which were the only air-conditioned place in the whole venue. It was there, the bathroom, that I met the guys from MotoGrater as they were trying to wash off the silly make-up that they put on before they do a show. An hour or so later, I met the bassist for Korn in the same restroom. Keep in mind that it is tough to try to talk to someone while they are pissing in the urinal next to you, let alone ask for an autograph. I briefly thought about shaking his hand, as we were walking away, but considering that neither of us had stopped at the sink to wash our hands, I thought better of it. And NO, I didn’t look at his Johnson. I stared at the wall just like I always do. I did ask him if he was in the band ‘Korn’ and he said that he was. Then he asked me who was on stage, I told him who it was (though I can’t remember at this point), and he disappeared through a door marked “NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT”. I didn’t try to follow.

I was absolutely blown away by Marilyn Manson. I do not care for their music, but won’t turn it off if it is on the radio, it is just the kind of thing that I don’t actively hate, or like. His (their) theatrics really stole the show. To the point that I was a bit disappointed when I finally got to see Ozzy (for the first time in my life). Manson certainly took care to stage a show that would shock and entertain you for his full set. The rest of the bands, Ozzy included, just did their songs. I will give ozzy a bit of lee-way on this one, since he is no spring chicken, but the other bands, like Korn, couldn’t they have done something other than just play their songs?

Manson had choreographed marionettes (they were actually people behaving as such) that did things for his entire set. He had a little tiered stage kind of thing that they would climb. It is difficult to describe, but it was an experience. The other bands just played their songs. If you want to hear the song, you have the cd, the sound quality is going to be a lot better, just listen to the damn cd. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, really sold me the experience. Even though I do not like Marilyn Manson, I would be more likely to buy tickets to his next concert than I would be to buy tickets for the next, say, Korn concert…Even though I like Korn a lot more than I like Manson.

That is about enough for today. Feel free to email me if you agree/disagree, that is why I put the link down there after all.

Song remakes; Tawny Kitaen

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Well today was a really shitty day for me on the work front. Mostly due to having to work a hated ‘split shift’. If you are unfamiliar with the term, that is a shift of eight hours that really screws over your entire day. In my case I worked from nine until noon, then had to go back from three until eight. That doesn not lend itself to actually accomplishing anything other than just work, it sucks basically.

That being said, I was not able to accomplish anything today. Not that I usually do anything on Saturdays anyway, still I can at least blame it on work. It is healthier that way, right? So I just have a few various things to bitch about today. I will jump right to it.

• I bitched in one of my early posts about my disgust of artists remaking songs. Not just any songs, but songs that were over the top hits when they were first released. D.J. Sammy is a horrible offender when it comes to this practice, so horrible in fact that the songs get airplay for about a week and then simply go away. So I won’t bitch too much about him.

So who am I going to bitch about? Jessica Simpson (I was forced to listen to some of her ‘music’ for the sake of adding that link, so I hope you appreciate it). Anyway, this girl who thinks that Chicken is Tuna took it upon herself to remake the wedding favorite “Take My Breath Away”, which was first performed by Berlin, even though they did not write it, but that is quite common for movie soundtracks. So why do I feel the urge to bitch about it? Because she did it horribly!

I have nothing against Jessica Simpson, but I think that someone close to her should have mentioned, at some point, that her singing voice is really not all that great. Were she to weight fifty pounds more than she does there would be no way in hell that she would have a recording contract. Why would she chose to remake a song that is still in circulation on light rock radio stations all over the U.S., and do it so poorly? Sure she likes to sing it in the shower, but isn’t that the reason that god created the shower (then completely forgot to tell the human population about it for 1800+ years)? So that we wouldn’t have to listen to Jessica Simpson singing a song that still stands as one of the great love ballads of all time?

I know that I am a cynical son-of-bitch, but when I heard her “render” that song, And no, I did not mean ‘rendition’, which would imply that it was her own personal spin on how the song should sound. I meant ‘render’ as in what meat-processors do to the carcasses of dead animals, which I think far more accurately describes what she did to that song, I was sickened. That is quite possibly the worst ‘cover tune’ of all time, BAR NONE. Someone please take away her microphone, which is sort-of penis shaped, and give her a penis, which will hopefully keep her mouth full long enough to keep her from singing! Not that I hate Jessica Simpson or anything…

• Well, as long as I am ripping on women and the music industry, I may as well toss out a bitch about Tawny Kitaen. Sorry, I am crutched by a dial-up modem and thusly can not find an official page for her (and why is it that the ‘official page’ for a celebrity or band is always on like page nine?). If you do not know who she is by name, I will just say that Tawny Kitaen is a serious actress that has landed a lot of roles, most notably the role of rolling on the hood of a Jaguar in WhiteSnake’s video for the song “Here I Go Again” (which I also can not find a link to).

If you are like me, that being a child of the ’80’s’, you probably saw that video roughly 11,000,000 times in your youth/pre-adulthood phase. You likely thought that there would be no way that you could land a girl that pretty. It turns out that you were lucky to not ‘land her’, or have that same thing happen conversely.

That woman has had sex with every musician that ever lived. I am still a little unclear on how she had sex with the classical composers, but I have no doubt that she did. Exhuming a body would be a day to day operation with her. Hell, that is kind of how she was living at that point. I do not mean to dog Miss Kitaen for her actions, just to mention that she has had sex with every rock star there ever was. Sure, she started small with a member of the band RATT, long before they ‘made it’, but she kept the taste for ‘Rock Stars’.

The only positive that I can take about looking for information regarding her is that she did eventually go into rehab, break out and start to run amok through our cities. That is the purpose of rehab, right? She eventually did settle down, and, as I read it, is pretty happy now just being a mom.

I have a dollar in my pocket that says she probably really regrets ever doing the “splits on the hood of the Jaguar” thing that made every male that was near puberty hope for her. While that same dollar is saying that she wishes that she hadn’t given herself to anyone who could play an instrument at that same time.

If you are a little groupie whore, what do you expect to happen? History will change when you decide to settle down? Personally, I think it is a great thing that she has found a purpose (raising her children), but I still remember her as the groupie slut that let a nipple slip out while filming a video. Whether I am right or wrong about her past, I am certainly right about her present, best of luck to her in raising a family…Especially when those kids reach puberity, and start to say, “well, you danced naked on the hood of a car,” because what could her comeback possibly be…

That is all for today. Tune in the day after today to see a new post. Please, do not search for the word that means the same as the ‘day after today’ on google, it might skew my stats.

Mac OS X; Deadly Rooms of Death

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It turns out that Flux over there at BlackChampagne (whose site layout I totally ripped off, btw) quoted part of an email that I sent him in his latest post. He linked to my site in the quoting of the email which was completely unexpected. The result of that is that anyone who linked through it would have seen one of my least entertaining posts. Unless those people enjoy reading baseball discussion. But with my current readership countable on one hand, even if the hand was missing a couple of fingers, I will take any publicity I can get. After all, had I known that he would be linking to my site it is not like I would have turned into a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for a day. I write what I want to write in the way that I want to write it. That may have something to do with the number of readers that I have. Come to think of it, I should write what people want to read in the way that they want to read it. Being that I do not have the skill necessary for that sort of an undertaking, I will just continue to ramble the way I always have.

• There was one thing in the news today that I thought I would never see. Especially since I had made a mention of it in a previous post. I actually mentioned it in passing the day before the link that I posted, where I said; “So when is the last time that you heard about a problem with the security on a macintosh system? Is that a rhetorical question or does the Imac team just handle it a lot better?” Here is today’s headline.

Apple Says OS X Vulnerable to Security Breach
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL – news), long considered to be relatively immune to the security holes and viruses that plague longtime rival Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, said on Friday a security hole in its software leaves users’ computers vulnerable to attack.

Mac, and its legion of enthusiastic users, have long touted the benefits of owning Apple’s Macintosh (news – web sites) personal computer, such as its ease of use and immunity from the computer viruses that plague users of PCs running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

So it finally happened, right? They finally had a security flaw. Now let’s see if Microsoft jumps onto it as harshly as I speculated on March 11, where I said, in part;

I strongly believe that if a single OS X system anywhere on the face of the earth encountered security issues, Microsoft would be on it like maggots to rotting flesh. Macintosh has been a thorn in the side of Microsoft for decades and the thought of them not attacking mac if even one person ever had security issues is ludicrous. It would be in every Microsoft commercial and ad campaign from here until the end of time. If you are thinking, no, Microsoft would not attack them for something like that, since they have had so many problems of their own…Sober up…

I still believe every word of that. I really am curious to see if Microsoft is going to start doing ads about it. Not in a ‘better than you’ kind of way, but more in a ‘so they have security flaws too, now you are no different than us’ kind of way. Though reading further in the news article I saw one other line that sets the OS x security flaw apart from all of the windows security flaws.

“Apple takes security very seriously and works quickly to address potential threats as we learn of them-in this case, before there was any actual risk to our customers,” said Schiller.

That is going to be as opposed to what the quote would have read had it been from Microsoft where it would have read more like this.

“Microsoft takes security very seriously and works quickly to address potential threats as we learn of them-in this case, before there was any actual risk of me losing any money,” said Gates.

Keep in mind that the last quote was me spoofing the Apple quote, not actually anything that anyone named Gates, or anyone affiliated with Microsoft has ever actually said. But wouldn’t be funny if he/they did?

• After making a very brief mention of Deadly Rooms of Death yesterday, I decided that I would go ahead and play it on the new PC. Instead of just transferring game information over from the old machine I decided to play through it again. I don’t know, maybe I thought it would be nostalgic. It went pretty well for the first five levels or so, then I started getting back into the boards that really piss me off. I realize now why I like the game and why I don’t like the game.

The only reason that I like the game is that it is a puzzle game. I do enjoy puzzle games of all sorts. This one adds a bit to the idea of a puzzle game by making the components move in unique ways that add to the puzzle experience. That kind of thing can be appreciated when intelligence alone can solve a problem. When you must be intelligent and lucky it becomes tiresome. Perhaps I am reading into it wrong and every board can be solved with intelligence alone, but the boards that have multiple spawners on them are extremely difficult.

As I think about it I am pretty sure that each board can be solved pretty easily with intelligence alone. The guy who programmed each board probably tested them over and over again to make sure. The thing is that he knew where he wanted to start it and likely tested all of the boards based on that starting position. Most of the boards have three or four different starting positions (if it has only a single entrance) and if you enter on the wrong square it can be impossible to win without exiting the room and re-entering from a different square. That, in my mind, is not really using intelligence to solve a puzzle. If the game were modified to make the entrance squares to the board not count, so that you could move up or down a square (while still on the entrance tiles) and turn to get your sword facing the correct direction, that would definitely improve the game. Usually you are able to just exit the board an re-enter having done all that, but wouldn’t it be easier to figure out which would be the best starting tile and sword direction if you were actually looking at the board at the time?

I guess I really should quit bitching about that game. It seems to me that I have spent more time bitching about it than I have actually playing it. Maybe I should quit playing it too, but it gives me so much bitching material. Catch 22 eh?

That is all for today. Tune in tomorrow when I will feature an expose on self-circumcision, or not.

Randy Johnson; Weird search strings

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There are only a couple of things that are on my mind today, so this will likely be a short one even by my standards. That being said I will get right to it.

• Being an Arizonan, I was just as excited about Randy Johnson’s perfect game as the next guy, even more so in a lot of cases I am sure. Since it was only the 17th perfect game in recorded history it is quite an accomplishment. The fact that Jonhson was able to do it at the age of 40 is mind-boggling. Understanding that he is a major league athlete, and as such will excercise as one, his body can not possibly be in the kind of shape it was ten or twenty years ago. He does deserve all the congratulations that he is getting. Not some two-bit guy like me to criticize it, but I pay for the opportunity to bitch, so bitch I shall.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to pitching a perfect game. First and foremost you need to be a top notch pitcher like, say, Randy Johnson. Second you have to have an umpire that is a bit lenient about the actual strike zone, as a pitch an inch too high/low or too far out/in side could ruin the whole thing. The third thing (in my mind) that has to happen is all on the pitcher, and that is that he has to keep it perfect for three or four innings; if he strikes out 8 over four innings and the other three are routine flyballs and maybe a grounder to first the rest of the guys are going to start to feel the energy. Once those three things have happened it is no longer just about the pitcher, unless he happens to strike out the last fifteen guys, which is unlikely. This is the point where a lot of perfect games become ‘no-hitters’.

Having watched only one perfect game, but seeing many ‘no-hitters’, or perfect until the ninth inning games, I have worked out a theory on how one could pitch the ‘perfect game’.

While a lot of people are rooting for the pitcher, a lot of people are also rooting against him; The perfect game would be lost if you were not a respected pitcher. No one, save the fans of the team, would want to see an unknown rookie throwing a perfect game, you need to have enough respect in the baseball community that the opposing fans are even on board with you achieving this feat.

This one doesn’t carry much weight considering the Current Standings, but you must be playing a team that is not really all that good to begin with. Johnson was facing a team that had 18 strike-outs against the Brewers (of all teams) a day or two before.

Now the aforementioned team energy needs to come into play. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be the guy who bobbled the ball at second that cost someone a perfect game? I can’t, but I also don’t make a ton of money, thus insuring that I will be in the public eye for all of my life. That is why it is up to the pitcher alone to keep it perfect for three or four innings, long enough for the rest of the guys on the team to get it in gear. Keep in mind that the rest of the guys on the team play 162 games a year while the pitcher plays every, what, fourth game? The guys on the field need to realize that it is happening so that they can wake up just long enough to make it happen. If you think that it is akin to blasphomy to say that, you haven’t seen a lot of ball games. Having attended a few of the games myself, I have seen that a lot of the players (outfielders in particular) sometimes seem to forget that they are playing the game at all. One of the players (for the Reds) that was in the outfield actually took off his shoe and was shaking it out while there was someone up to bat.

Now that we have very good pitching, respect from the fans (even opposing fans), and a really bad team to play against, there is still one more thing that needs to be factored in. That one thing is the guy on the other team that is an asshole for the sake of being an asshole. This is not really a concrete term that should be attached to the guy, but I am going to use it whenever possible. The scenario would go thusly:

The opposing pitcher has a perfect game going.

It is the ninth inning.

Your team is down by two runs.

There is no one on base.

There are already two outs.

You bunt to get on base.

I don’t think that the previous scenario has ever happened, but I bet that it will if it hasn’t.

The only thing that I am intending to say here is that it takes a lot more than a good pitcher to pitch a perfect game. All of the players on a team are involved in it. From the catcher that sends the calls to the pitcher, to the lowly outfielder (who is likely bored in a perfect game), the whole team must come together to help the pitcher achieve greatness. I bet that the pitcher knows this as well and likely will buy them all dinner and drinks after the game.

• The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird strings that have resulted in people looking at my site through Google.

Two people clicked through on “drod roaches”, that one I can kind of understand since the drod website was (is?) still down, and I had mentioned them previously.

I had one click on “emachines 466is cpu upgrade”, of course when I googled that I am right near the top, but I shouldn’t be. I was bitching about my emachines antiquity, then talking about upgrading to a new system. I guess they do have to just go by what is on the page though, as opposed to what you were thinking/writing.

The third Google search really freaks me out. Someone searched for “tomorrow site:shadowtwin.com”. I am pretty sure that the word ‘tomorrow’ is going to be in a lot of my posts. Why would someone search for that particular word on this site? If I said, “tomorrow, goat porn”. Wouldn’t you search my site for goat porn? Or would you think that I had somehow forgotten to describe the goat porn as “goat porn”? I don’t know, that one just seemed a bit weird to me.

Meta blogging; Abu Ghraib

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I spent a bit of time on Wednesday, and an hour and a half today, getting finished with the March 2004 archive page . That, of course, required reading through my posts from the month of March which, while time-consuming, was a lot less depressing than I thought it might be. It turns out that it really is better to let what you have written sit there for at least a month before you try to read it and do a short description, as it seems that you are looking at it with fresh eyes. There were a couple of essay type things that I wrote during the month of March that I think were really quite good. There may be some point later when I pick a couple of them out and post a section of ‘stuff I wrote that doesn’t totally suck’ on here, but that would make people quit reading my daily update, which usually does suck, and then just go to the link for the stuff that doesn’t suck. The inherent problem is that I do not know if what I am writing sucks until I read it a lot later than when I write it. In my mind everything I write sucks, only time can clear my mind enough to look at what I have written with a clear perspective and that does not lend itself to making sure that every word I put down is worth the paper keyboard it is written on.

The other thing that I noticed as I was reading through the old posts is that I seem to be getting progressively better at getting my idea down as time goes on. It seems that with each new post I get just a bit better at keeping all of the ideas in my head long enough to put each one down and move on, while in the earliest posts I was trying to type all of them at once and often lost most of them in the process. The result of that was that each paragraph that I had written would look like it was four paragraphs that I had taken a sentence or two from and tried to make into a single, flowing concept. It was shit, honestly. Though I am always my worst critic, I am sure that anyone reading this would really have to agree that my writing in this form has gotten better from when I started. That being said, I still have a long way to go to make entire posts that will hold a reader’s attention and not make me look like the ass that I am. But isn’t that what I signed up for when I started this whole page in the first place?

• I haven’t posted any news here for a while, not for lack of trying. I was hoping to get a bit or two up here today, but it seems that all there is to talk about anymore is the damn Abu Ghraib garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I think that what our people did to those prisoners was inhumane. From the pictures that I have seen, though, it did not seem as there was any physical abuse to the men. It was sick and wrong for anyone to even stage the events for such photos, but it happened, and we (the U.S.) did it to prisoners of war (well I guess there is a loophole so they aren’t actually POW’s, still it was inhumane). If we (the U.S.) can’t understand that the entire world has a microscope on the way we are handling ourselves in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ this is going to get infinitely worse for our brave men and women who are there actually fighting it.

Whether those photos were staged by the U.S. troops who posed in them as ‘trophies’ to take home with them, or if that is the way we treat prisoners on a daily basis seems to be a dead discussion in every nation except ours. Less than half of our country is behind the war in Iraq at this point and I don’t think we have any allies left that would actually send more troops over to help us if it came to that. That whole war has gone completely to hell. I am pretty sure that Dubya doesn’t mind, since it has driven oil prices over forty dollars a barrel, and that is extra profit for him, but now it appears that he is ready to bail out. Just makes me wonder what his reason for bailing out is, the fact that he has a financial windfall with oil prices skyrocketting, or the fact that an american civilian got his head cut off.

That is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics. I have some pretty strong views, and Dubya is such an easy target. I sure wish I hadn’t voted for him, but I did. So, please, to help clear my conscience, do not vote for him next election. We have seen the FUBAR that the country can become when being backed only by ‘big oil’, and that somehow drives the prices up. I am so sickened by the situation that I am honestly thinking about putting down ‘Reagan’ on my vote, as a write-in.

• Guild Wars

Today is the last day of the E3 trial of the aforementioned game. I played it a bit each day that it was online and it seemed pretty cool. The one thing that I question is whether the local PC crashes that I experienced were based on it downloading ever more data, or if my system just can not run the game. I am leaning towards the game downloading as you play, I have all of the minimums beat by a lot but still get weird freezes when trying to play it. I hope that they get that all worked out when they go to Beta testing, which I am sure they will, and the game could be really cool. Also, having the game already installed on your machine, as opposed to having to download each zone that you enter, would likely make it much easier to play. I am not going to throw out an opinion based on my experience as it would be quite negative, if they do have a beta test for it, though, I am going to jump all over that. It would be extremely cool to see such a game in its infancy working towards a world-wide release. I do suppose they would likely be looking for players who had cable or dsl connections though, yet, at the same time they must be trying to sell it to normal people like me who have neither., My hope is not dead yet…

Survivor; Windows; Childhood hobbies (legal and not)

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Well I spent the majority of yesterday at work. Once I got home the new computer was doing the usual things like updating windows and Norton, which has always seemed a bit odd to me, but I guess they were current when they put the computer together six months ago, patches will always be necessary straight out of the box, or so I tell myself.

I also downloaded and installed a few of the things that I simply must have. Including core files to run a couple of games and some ad removal software and the such. Then, just for fun, I decided to try to download the new GuildWars thing that is supposed to have a free demo in a week or so. I must say that I am quite impressed with the transfer speed. Keep in mind that everything about my system is exactly the same, only the tower has changed, but the downloads over a 56k modem seem notably faster. Could it be that I simply had antiquated drivers for the modem on my old machine, possibly. Could it be that more ram and a faster processor make it faster, possibly. Could it be that I was expecting it to be faster, and as such think that it was faster even if it wasn’t, likely.

I am still not quite sure if I like Windows XP or not. It seems to work just fine, in fact it seems to load a lot faster than 98 ever did, and I have not been getting random ‘blue screens of death’ yet. The thing that I find annoying is that they have changed everything around. Moved the buttons away from where they used to be, eliminated the little tray icons for quick launch, just a bunch of little things like that which just annoy me. I was able to find the way to set the appearance to “windows classic”, but opted to just leave it be, I think I should give it a week or so to see if I can get used to it. And get used to it I will, it is not like I am going to return the computer and live in a cave somewhere using windows 98 unwilling to upgrade regardless of how much better the technology has gotten.

On a side note, even as I type this I just got another ‘Urgent warning’ about a security flaw in the Microsoft Virtual Machine that must be patched. I am downloading it, but I tell you that I am going to disable all of the antivirus and system protection on this thing when I hook up to play a game of Diablo. There are three separate things running on the machine, the windows update, Norton and something called ‘BigFix’, bigfix is the one that is continually telling me about all of the patches even though I have seen nothing about security issues on MSN.com. Whether or not all of the patches are necessary is something that I will likely never know. I am sure that in a month or so I will have given up on using all of the ‘live update’ type crap and just go back to just downloading the fixes myself once every couple of weeks.

While I am bitching about Microsoft and related products, I just must mention that I really think the Windows OS has been on a steady decline since the release of Windows 3.1. I do remember that it was a bit of a pain to have to go into DOS and use memmaker to free up enough system memory to play some games, but compare that to the problems that I have had with Windows 98 and it would seem like a cake walk. With 3.1 you had to kind of know what you were doing to make pretty much anything work, which seems bad on the surface, but with later releases trying to do it all for you it simply paved the way to a multitude of ‘blue screens of death’ when the computer is forced to make a decision and decides wrong. Amusing thing with windows 98 that happened at work a couple of months ago. I had installed a new modem (used actually) and when it detected the modem it was looking for the drivers. It could not find them in the windows directory, I didn’t have any disks to install them, so it decided it was going to connect to the internet to try to download the driver for the modem. Then it gave me an error about not being able to connect because I didn’t have the correct modem drivers. I mean really, would any human ever try to do that? It would be like being stuck in the middle of nowhere and trying to get electricity by plugging an extension cord into itself, it just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, but the computer gave it a go..

The previous portion of this was written yesterday after Mother’s day dinner and prior to the seson finale of Survivor. I completely forgot to upload it, so I am just going to piggy back onto it today.

I would love to go into a long winded rant about the Survivor All Stars, but I am sure that you can find that type of thing all over the internet at this point, and I don’t really care enough about the outcome to do it. One thing that I do think bears mentioning was in regards to a question that one of the jurors asked of Rob and Amber, the question about what they were going to do with the money.

Now everyone knows that Rob lied to and stepped on everyone to try to win the game. The fact that he claimed that he was going to use the money to set up a scholarship fund was so much bull shit. Did he really expect anyone to believe that? Not just Rob, but anyone who signs up for Survivor is out to win the million dollars. When they win the million I bet the first thing they do is buy a fancy car, then likely a house. Maybe after they have blown 80 percent of it on creature comforts, maybe then they will feel a bit guilty about it all and donate some of their old clothes to goodwill. They certainly did not go into the game thinking that they were going to sacrifice their time, struggle to survive in horrible conditions just so that they could donate the money to a good cause. If there are people out there that actually would do that they are just insane.

A final thought about this season’s Survivor. I wonder if Rob would have been so gung-ho about proposing to Amber if he had really thought that he had a good chance of winning. I know that the votes were actually cast months before, but he was able to watch the show just like the rest of us prior to the finale, makes me wonder if he thought he may not be getting the check, or at the very least hedging his bets. I guess I am a bit to cynical since I actually believe that is a real possibility. Or maybe I read to much in the way Rob was portrayed in the editing of the episodes, I am sure for all the bad that he did he probably was also unselfish and helpful also…I hope… Pointless to speculate, but when they show up in some scandal rag after a horrible break-up I won’t be the least bit surprised.

• Something that I saw in the news today interests me a bit. I just read it in the quick notes on some website, not sure where I saw it, that is not really important anyway. The quick note just said that the US is failing to follow suit with the rest of the western world by slowing or requiring permits to purchase ammonium nitrate. I suppose that it should be a bit surprising with the current administration’s ‘Stop Terror Now’ facade. This is the very substance that is used in many terrorist bombs, it is cheap, readily available and you don’t even have to show an ID to buy it. I wasn’t really sure how destructive the stuff was until I googled up some news about it. I didn’t know that this was what was used in the Oklahoma city bombing, I thought that it was just the kind of thing that the terrorists in the middle east use. Who knew.

I bring this up only because of yet another childhood obsession of mine. Pipe bombs. Yes, I built pipe bombs. Not the type that you see on the tv news that were filled with shrapnel and killed and mutilated, no I just did it to hear the boom and see some faux destruction. Without going into any detail about how to actually make them (if you want that there are a lot of sites out there that will tell you, just not mine) I will just give a brief mention of what a few friends and myself did with them.

There is a bit of a digression before I get to that, be warned

First, I remember exactly where I got the idea to try to build one. I was a model rocket entusiast when I was young and always had marveled at the way the little engines would roar to life and send my creation skyward. It was quite an enjoyable hobby, but in the pacific northwest the rocket retrieval ratio was pretty low. Even when I launched them in a five-acre open field the wind would often pull them off into the forest never to be seen again. That was a bit depressing after having spent so much time building and painting a rocket (not to mention the out of pocket cost, which was a lot for an unemployed teenager), just to watch it go up once. I never really lost my enthusiasm for that hobby, but it was put into the background when a new friend introduced me to Radio Controlled Airplanes.

My friend trained me in the basics of flight with a powered glider. He would fly it while it was under power to get it as high as possible, once the engine cut he would let me fly it down, with him handling the actual landing the first dozen or so times. I clearly remember my first landing, as I was getting very low to the ground at far too steep an angle. I tried to pull the nose up and pulled it way too far. The plane stalled and came down from about twenty feet, tail-first, and snapped the fuselage in two. Not the best landing I could have done by far. After repeated failures and mending I was able to land the thing pretty well as long as I had no cross wind. Before long he was letting me fly some of his planes after he had done the take-off, only taking the control away from me if I did something very foolish or if it was time to land (many of them having to land while still in powered flight due to weight issues). He thought I was ready to fly solo, but requested that I buy my own kit and build my own plane so that he would not have any monetary reason to net let me learn by trial and error. (I haven’t thought about him for years, but he was a damn good trainer and friend. I wonder what became of him).

The very first airplane that I built was a Fokker Eindecker. It took me several months to build it, due to inexperience, but came out looking every bit as good as the one in the previous link, only mine was red and my kit didn’t have ailerons. Once the plane was complete, my friend gifted me an old radio, receiver and servos to install in it. That plane was my pride and joy. I had at least a couple of dozen pictures of it even before it ever flew, which I knew it must eventually. I had never actually been at the controls during the take-off (which was a hand-launch in the case of this plane), and decided to let my friend have the honors of the first flight. In retrospect I think mostly I wanted someone a lot better at the sport than me to try it out and make sure that I hadn’t totally fucked up with the installation of the elevator, rudder or some other thing that would just make it impossible to fly, at the time I said I wanted him to have the honor since he had introduced me to the hobby and gifted me the radio -well over a hundred dollar value in the late eighties-.

The plane flew beautifully. I was staring on in amazement as he executed loops and rolls with it. He even did a drop from high altitude followed by a nearly vertical ascent. After about six minutes the engine died and he brought the plane in to land, it touched down so softly it was like a marshmallow landing on a cloud. My little plane was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, so quick, so manueverable. I was ready to give it a go myself.

–There is an intricacy to the hand launch that is hard to describe. One person must run with the plane above their head until such a speed is reached that, with luck, the plane will be able to ascend under its own power. Variables like any wind (especially cross-wind), angle of release, the speed of the runner, the height of the release, hell there are tons of variables that I can’t remember since it has been so long since I have flown, can mean instant disaster.–

My friend was going to be doing the hand launching while I was guiding the plane. This was my very first attempt at doing that so I was a bit apprehensive. He ran for a bit and let go. The plane immediately began to dive hard to the left, holding hard to the right while trying to first level, then pull up, I managed to get the plane airborn. It was at that point that I looked down at the radio to see that I had somehow moved the trim for the rudder all the way to the left prior to the hand launch. In my estimate, I was lucky that I was flying at all after that little oversight. Yet, flying I was. No tricks, just mostly a circle around the field. When the engine died I lined up a nice straight course to land in the soft grass. Only inches above the ground I was still holding the wings perfectly level, the landing gear touched down and the rest of the plane followed, but not in a good way. The landing gear was basically the pivot point to swing the cowl into the ground. Luckily I only broke off the tail and it was a quick fix.

It was a couple of days later before we went out to fly my little plane again. Confident in my ability to correct for the variables, I asked him to launch it for me. This time the launch went perfectly. There was no descent, no turning, just a perfect launch. Then as the plane went over the tiny valley created by the two small hills we use for hand launching, a cross-wind caught the wing and sent it almost vertical. without ailerons I was trying to use the rudder and elevator to level the plane as it was heading, at full power, towards both the ground and the trunk of the only tree in the field. The plane was going hard left and down, so I instictively pulled hard right and pushed up, in the panic forgetting that when you push up the plane goes down. There was a marvelous display of balsa and radio equipment exploding on the ground when it hit. I must say that I would not have thought that a fall, even at full power, from only ten or twelve feet could have so completely destroyed my creation. I suppose it is no wonder that they don’t use balsa wood to create commercial airliners.

Back to the bombs.

So having given up on a couple of hobbies along the way (the radio receiver was destroyed in my crash), I decided to find something more destructive to occupy my time. I still had some of the so called ‘solar ignitors’ from the days when I was launching model rockets, as well as the launch box. The launch box is just a button that has a wire running to the pad so you don’t have to light the engine with a match. My dad had a lot of gun powder, since he reloaded his own bullets. I had a lot of free time and some wide open space. What do you think would happen.

I had played with the gunpowder before. I liked to draw designs on the pavement with it, then once you light it there will be a brief fire and the design will stay on the road for a while. Now, though, I was in posession of gun powder and a remote ignition device. I began to wonder what would have happened if the model rocket was not able to expel the energy by forcing itself into the air. I realized quickly that a bomb would be the result. But how powerful would it be? There was a broken wind chime in our old shed. It had a bunch of little pipes on it. Each pipe had two holes drilled in it very near the top end (where the wire that suspended it went through).

My usual target was the wood pile in the back yard. I would put the bomb at the bottom of it and hit the button just to see how much of the wood got thrown how far. As time went by I had to improvise the conatiners, and each time the wood pile was destroyed I had to rebuild it before dad got home. The culmination of my destructive wood pile fetish came when I created the largest (by far) pipe bomb that I ever had and set it off in the wood pile some thirty feet away. One piece, roughly four pounds, hit me square in the back and it hurt like hell. It took me (and a couple of nameless friends 😉 ) several hours to get the wood pile back into a form that even resemled a wood pile. Even after that my dad questioned why a lot of the wood was charred.. We never let on, but I think that he knew what was going on.

After that I never tried to construct another pipe bomb. I am pretty sure that neither of the other two ever did either, as they are both also happily married now and I really think the curiousity about bombs/destruction goes away for most of us after the teen years. I don’t own any guns, or any gun powder for that matter, and happily lock those little experiences away in my mind as things I would rather not have done (now that I am an adult and can look objectively at the risk/reward of what I was doing. Something that you never think of while you are in your teens).

Speaking from the point of view of an adult, I think that it should be much more difficult for anyone to acquire components that can make explosives. I consider myself pretty lucky that I didn’t kill myself or someone else while I was farting around with gun powder as a kid. Now imagine that someone wants to use it to kill/maim, knowing the consequences of their actions. There should be laws in place (in the western world) to keep things like that from happening.

While I was using actual gun powder for my little bombs, imagine the kid on the farm that realizes that fertilizer is the ultimate bomb. Shouldn’t anything that is potentially lethal have slightly better safeguards than, “Well, he didn’t look like a terrorist.”

Fox Sunday; Underworld

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Well, I skipped yet another update and the net result was one of my site’s busier days of all time. I had 6 visits, of which I can only name three of them. I think that the pretty picture that I had on the last update might have been a contributing factor. At any rate, yes I skipped another one, and if anyone who is reading this (other than my wife) really cares, shoot me an email to let me know how disappointed you were, perhaps I will feel for you and soldier on, even on days when I really just don’t give a damn. Don’t hold your breath.

There are three contributing factors to my missing an update yesterday. 1) I played way to much of the damn ‘Deadly Rooms of Death’ game. 2) With the obvious exception of ‘South Park’, Fox’s Sunday evening shows, King of the Hill, the Simpsons and Malcolm in the middle are the only reason anyone should ever watch network television (unless you get addicted to ‘Survivor’ like I did, in which case you can watch an hour of CBS on Thursday). 3) I watched a movie that my wife had rented on DVD, which I will likely bitch a lot about later.

The good news on the DROD front is that I have learned all of the necessary tactics to win nearly every board with ease. The even better news is that this has resulted in me not enjoying it quite as much as I did when I started, and as such had no clue how to play or what the hell was going on. The net result of that is that when I enter a new board I will scan it for a minute or two, come up with the solution and then play it through. Sometimes the playing it through can take thousands of moves, literally, and that becomes a tad boring. I think I will go ahead and complete my current level and then give it up. Much like Tetris, this game loses all of the enjoyment once you know all of the rules and the boards become more tedious than actually challenging. Hell, at least Tetris forces you to move faster the further you progress..

As far as Fox’s Sunday night line-up goes, it was pretty good this week and kept me watching. I think it is a solid fact that pretty much any show they put on after ‘The Simpsons’ is going to do really well in its time slot, but ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ is a rather amusing show. Perhaps I only think that because my mother has taken to believe that I am Malcolm, while the older brother who is away (I forget his name) is my oldest brother, and Reece(sp?) is the middle brother, who was always causing trouble just for the sake of causing trouble. As far as that little equasion goes my mother did pull of a pretty good ‘insane mother’, back in the day, while my father was never so subserviant as the father in the show, but it certainly paints a better picture of a real family than say ‘Full House’ for example.

• UnderWorld

Thankfully I did not have to pay theatre price for this movie. I watched it even after reading the horrible review that Flux over at BlackChampagne.com gave it. It was every bit as horrible as he said.

My biggest bitch about the movie is also one of my ‘pet peeves’ when it comes to films. Ammunition. You can either take the Hollywood approach, that is that you never run out of bullets, ever. Or you can take the ‘real life’ approach where both sides have to reload. You simply can not mix those two without making the movie seem absolutely fake. This movie even goes so far as to show you the clip that is being used in the ‘semi-automatic’ gun, which is conveniently ‘fully-automatic’ when it is necessary. Though the clip is mostly empty when you see it, you can deduce that it could only hold eight or nine more rounds, for a total of thirteen or fourteen, at best. Yet, the hand-guns are routinely fired sixty+ times, then they stop to reload. Come on..

Then there is the issue about Selene, she can be all-powerful, when necessary. She can be as fragile as a 300 year old tea service also, when necessary. She can beat the shit out of a dozen of the werewolves, yet can’t seem to open her own nail polish. It just seemed so fake.

As far as the ‘plot twist’ at the end of the movie, if you didn’t see it coming by the time you were a half-an-hour into the movie, you just weren’t paying attention.

The movie did take my mind away from real life for about two hours and that is roughly 1% of a week. By that metric, it only cost a few cents to watch the movie, and I still think I got screwed.

Politics; Deadly Rooms of Death

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Well as you may have noticed, the real life event that I thought might lead me to bitching did not happen yesterday, sorry. It was such a good subject too, but since it didn’t happen it just makes me think that I am really a cynical son of a bitch. Today I will bitch, regardless of your protests.

There was, I understand, a closed door meeting today between George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the 9/11 commission. As of now I can only find one news story about it, and it does not speak of anything that might have come to light after the meeting. I went to check the Political Animal (which is the new blog spot of the former CalPundit blogger) and he has yet to put in his two cents. I am sure that whatever news you happen to see regarding that meeting is going to say the same thing; The administration didn’t know that there was any possibility of a multi-terrorist attack on American soil. Which is obviously bull-shit. The Clinton administration left them plenty of information regarding terrorist activities in the years leading up to Dubya becoming president. A cursory search for “9 11 warning signs” on google (without the quotes for the search) just got me a few hundred thousand web sites. I read a couple of the older ones and found that, yes, the information was in place, it was simply not acted on.

This is a subject that is far too political for me. I encourage you to check out the Political Animal website if you are looking for more information, he has nothing posted about the interview with the 9/11 commission at the time I am writing this, but in the morning he will likely have whatever is available, and break it down into bite sized pieces.

I think I am gonna totally switch gears. I was flirting with actual content there for a second…

• Deadly Rooms of Death (that cumbersome name) , yet again. I don’t know what it is about these old games that drives people to play them. I know what drives me to play them, but the rest of the people, I got nothing.

The game is, first and foremost, a puzzle game. There is an illusion created that there is some hacking and slashing, but the reality is that you are just doing puzzles. That may be the thing that sours the average ‘First Person Shooter’ player, while it is what lets me look past the really sparse graphics and focus in on the puzzle. Of course, talking about this game right now is like releasing the walkthrough for the old Atari Pitfall, but I must go on.

You would not like this game. It is one of the games that you either Love or Hate, there is no middle ground. It gets progressively harder as the level number raises, but the fact is you are doing a puzzle. It might look like you are actually killing things to clear out the dungeon, but if you don’t do it in the right order it is possible to be stuck to the point where it is impossible. Perhaps I have played way too much Diablo in the last few months and welcome a mental challenge, I don’t know, I just know that those puzzles keep making me try until I find the way to do it ‘just such’ to clear the board. Yet another addiction for me, how many addictions does one have to have before he/she can stop it.

• Mandatory Birth Control

This is an idea that I have been kicking around for a couple of years. I am sure that the idea is not going to go over well with people who are very poor, but those are the exact people I am hoping to get involved in it. If you have a baby, and you can’t afford to raise the child, needing the government’s assistance in the form of WIC, WELFARE and FOOD STAMPS, as well as reduced cost Housing, I think that you should have to take passive birth control measures.

I do not mean to say or imply that there should be government regulations regarding child birth, or who can have children, just that if you do have children you need to have a way to support them. It is very easy to have a child, a lot harder to support that child. If you have no means to support that child, and ask the government to do it for you, it would only seem fair that the government would ask, in return, for you to not have any more children, until the point where you can provide for them on you own. The easiest way to get to that point, in my mind, is passive birth control.

The passive birth control will be the latest birth control implant that women can get. It seems expensive at the start, but think that the cost of raising a child (food and diapers alone will cost more). No more babies while they are on Government Assistance plans. It really doesn’t seem that bad of a deal to me. If they want to have more babies, they just need to get off of the government assistance program, then they can have a baby whenever they want.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am a high-school drop out, yet I pay all my bills with funds that I earn through my own labor. I don’t ask the government for anything (possible exception being to make the man with the most votes be President), I just think that it is wrong that two people, without one job between them, can spit out kids and live as well as I do. The government pays their rent, buys their food, pays their utilities, even gives them gas money to look for work, though they never get the job. It could be different in your area.

So a child that is raised in that environment, do you really think that child is going to go out looking for a job? I think that child is more likely to do what mom and dad did. That is my tax dollars, and your tax dollars, but them, they get money back from the government even though they never paid in a dime…