Cranky-D

I came back from California today. I left this morning on a 6:30 am flight. The flight was not all that pleasent, because I felt, and still feel, like crap.

When I got back, I saw that on the news that there’s supposedly a “California Flu” going around. Maybe there is. And maybe I helped the disease vector by bringing it back to the northern midwest. I’m sure you will all thank me for it sooner or later.

I got lucky on the plane. I had no tissues, and my nose decided to start running. Luckily a woman (I hesitate to call someone under 30 a woman, but I’m supposed to, so there you are) had tissues and provided them when asked. Otherwise I was going to have to use my flannel shirt.

The disease only started setting in during the last few days. Otherwise I was in pretty good shape for the entire “vacation.” I hesitate to call it a real vacation since there is nothing I’m vacating from at this point. Normally I end up getting sick every time I visit my dad, so I didn’t think this was anything different. The fact that I’m part of an epidemic makes me feel a bit better for some bizarre reason.

Still, I’ve felt worse. There’s nothing like a little Jameson to make a body feel a bit better, or at least not feel as bad. My head’s so stuffed up I can barely tell if I’m buzzed, but I imagine I am. I just finished watching a bit of fluff on TCM. The stuff on late at night is almost always the good stuff.

Right now I turned on the stooges. I have no idea how long that will last. Unlike most men, I don’t really care for the stooges. I think it’s fairly dumb.

The plan tomorrow is to sleep all day. That’s something I think I can manage.

In a few minutes my father, sister, and I will be driving to my brother’s house for Christmas. It’s about 3 1/2 hours away.

I am not particularly looking forward to the trip. Spending Christmas with the family is pretty stressful. I find it difficult sometimes to hold my tongue. There are many things I would like to say but so far have managed to avoid saying.

I have long since abandoned buying any gifties. I send money for the kids to my brother and let him take care of it. There are often strong “suggestions” on what to get the kids, and rather than follow someone else’s directions, I prefer to let it slide completely.

If things go well, I will have a job next year. Perhaps that will be the time when Uncle Dave goes nuts and throws a kink in everything. I’m thinking electric guitars and electronic drum sets. Just the thing to make a racket and annoy the parents. Those are the kinds of gifts an uncle should be giving.

Merry Christmas to all who bother reading the site. And if you’re one of those heathens who doesn’t want to hear about Christmas, well, Merry Christmas anyway! HA!

It’s been a long time since I’ve picked up my guitar. Whatever callouses I had are long since gone.

I’m not sure why I stopped playing. I guess I was too busy with school stuff and a few non-music hobbies.

I was fairly serious about playing at one time, or at least serious about having a proper instrument. I went through a few store-bought guitars before I decided that I would have to build my own to get what I wanted. I bought a neck and body from Warmoth. The neck was one of their compound-radious models and was 1 3/4″ wide at the nut and had the tallest frets they offered. The body was one they had already manufactured for someone else who I guess didn’t buy it, so it was cheap. It was made of swamp ash, and was strat-shaped and cut for top-loading single-coil pickups and no pick guard. I had them route it out for a Wilkinson tremelo.

I finished the body in a cherry stain and then covered that with clear urethane. It isn’t perfect by any means, but I like it. I made my own nut from a graphite blank. The tools to cut the nut cost a fair amount of money (files and a razor saw) but I can always use them again for another project. I used sperzel locking tuners. The pickups are Seymour Duncan antiquity pickups, made as much like the originals as possible and artificially aged.

I have no idea how much I spent on the guitar, but I imagine it was quite a bit of money. Maybe it’s time to start playing again. I talk a good music game, but lately I haven’t lived it very much.

I have a great job prospect right now. I’d have to start out at relatively low pay until I prove that I’m not a deadbeat, but the plusses are incredible. For instance, I would be working independently, and since there’s no central office to speak of, I would be working at home.

W0rking at home has a tremendous appeal. The hours would be very flexible, I imagine. I suppose I’d have to be available certain times of the day for phone calls. No commuting is involved, so I could keep my crappy car (with no working heater, and no thanks, I’m not spending $550 to fix that) indefinitely. I could get a pet and be able to spend a lot of time with it.

There are some days where I’m on fire and can keep working all day. Sometimes I get ideas at 11pm and want to work until the early morning hours. Those things would be possible with a job like this one.

The job itself would be prototyping new applications for inventory control. It sounds boring, but it isn’t. The technology behind it is what’s interesting. I have a good chance here, I think, because I know something about the technology. I’d be doing a lot of simulations, model building, and model tweaking. The experimental part of computer science, and the actual coding, are the parts I enjoy the most.

Fingers crossed. If this doesn’t pan out, I’m probably headed for a temp/contract agency and code monkey status. Those bills don’t pay themselves.

Something really cool happened the other day. Acidman visited my site and left a few comments. Cool. I’ve been reading him for a few years, way since before I started this thing. He’s usually a daily read for me, or at least 2-3 times per week. He’s one of the best writers on the web, though he does have a tendency to say controversial things fairly often, which has resulted in charges of racism and sexism. I guess if you’re pissing people off, you’re probably doing something right.

He’s been going through a tough time lately. He went to the hospital to get “the cure” for excessive drinking. He was, basically, drinking himself to death from all external appearances. Now he’s getting better and has stayed away from booze so far. I put off writing to him while he was in the hospital, but a lot of internet denizens did write, so he wasn’t neglected.

He bought himself a recording setup a while ago, and claims he’s going to start recording some music. I hope he feels well enough soon to get started. I’m curious about what he can come up with.

I’m safely in southern Cali. The weather is, of course, great. I told everyone it’s shorts and t-shirts weather, or it would be in the northern midwest. I guess it’s in the low sixties. Then again, it’s so damp where I am that you still get cold easily.

My sister’s cat doesn’t run as fast as she used to, or she isn’t as “afraid” of me any more. It’s all a big game with her, I think. She only likes one human, and that one not as much as a cat should. The sucking up is strictly limited.

I’ve been bad about keeping up at the Christmas site. I put up a bunch of posts today, with delayed posting times to make it look like someone else is doing the writing. As seems to be typical, once you get to about a week away from Christmas, the co-authors disappear. I’m kind of wondering whether it’ll be worth it to try next year. I probably will, but maybe the site owner will give it up. I won’t cry too much if he does. It just isn’t getting much traffic, I think, and it’s hard to keep fresh unless you have other people participating.

Being a hard-core geek, I tend to do things the hard way sometimes. Case in point, ftp. I can only access this website via ftp when I want to, say, modify the core code or add images. I used to do all that using one of my linux boxes. However, I found the program Filezilla a few months ago, and today when I wanted to upload those gun images, I did the old click and drool with Filezilla and there they are on the site.

That is way cool. I think I’m going to put more images up there as time goes by. I have plenty of drive space and plenty of bandwidth left over every month.

I don’t like a lot of things about windoze, but it can make life a lot easier in some circumstances. That’s why, probably, I spend most of my clicking time in windoze. That and most web sites are geared towards windoze boxes.

I still refuse to use explorer, though.

It seems inevitable that whenever I do a drive changover, one of them decides it’s had enough of this world. This time, the drive I had just had replaced under warranty decided that it had done enough for me. I had been using it for, maybe, 6 weeks.

It died as in it cannot be read by the O.S. However, I have long since purchased a program that can scan the drive directly and ferret out whatever used to be there. The problem is, when the drive has lots of errors on it, as this one does, it takes days to finish scanning it. The alternative is to copy the drive contents block by block to another drive and then scan that to find out some kind of file structure. That’s what I’m going to do.

This will take at least 3-4 days. I’m leaving in a few days for “home” in southern California, so I’ll leave the process running while I’m gone.

Yeah, I know, exciting news.

I actually had two commentors today. Unbelievable.

One of them asked me what “gun pron” is. This post is to demonstrate what I’m talking about. The first picture is of a standard M1A with a flash suppressor and adjustable sights.

Pretty. Maybe a little scary with that magazine hanging down there, since good little guns don’t have that feature. Compare that to this gun, the Mark 14 Ultimate Battle Rifle.

Sexy. Dangerous. Hide the children! Those who know guns realize that these two rifles are functionally equivalent. I can shoot just as many bullets with the first as with the second, barring barrell overheating issues which wouldn’t be a problem unless you’re actually in a war.

I want the second one more than the first, though I’d love to have both. The second one makes gun-fearing wussies cry, and that’s a good thing.

Note: I lifted those images from the Fulton Armory site. I hope that’s okay with them.

After the last time I went to a dark place, I imagine a few people decided I’m out of my mind. You know, the bit about how much anyone can trust their memories. Look for it a few posts down. I’m too lazy to find a link to it.

Now we have the flip-side of life. Without my faith in G-d, I don’t know if I would even go on with life. I mean, what would be the point? I don’t see it.

I believe we all have a purpose in life. That purpose could be completely defined in reference to other people and that would be just fine. If, somehow, I was able to make someone else’s life a little better with my presence, that would be enough.

I really doubt that I provide that sort of thing. I’m pretty hard to get along with. I have a tendency to ram my opinions down other people’s throats. I’m fairly lax with any tendencies to tact. Basically, I say what I really think most of the time and it’s not surprising that most people dont’ want to hear that. I certainly don’t want to hear it either when it’s coming from a woman I like and the subject is me and my failings.

Or, that purpose could be outside of anyone else. Maybe I’m here to do some kind of abstract good. I have no clue. I’d like to think that whatever I’m supposed to do here is ahead of me.

However, I may have already done what I’m supposed to do, and the rest of my life is lagniappe. Look it up. I think I spelled it correctly. Buckley used that word in his intro to a Doonesbury treasury many years ago.

Life is not that sweet. I manage to enjoy myself, but I’m not ecstatic about much of anything. If I died tomorrow, the bad part would not be that I’m dead, but that people I care about would feel bad about it. However, if whatever purpose I’m here for has not been served, that would be very bad.

The full circle is that I think G-d has some kind of reason for me being here. I have no idea what it is. Therefore, I must continue to survive just in case I haven’t met my goal.

I guess we all have our ways of surviving. My way is, ultimately, faith.

My readership dropped by one human recently. A prominent human. I guess I suck. De-linked by whom I consider to be a big-time blogger. I guess I’ve got nothing worth reading.

Should I repeat what everyone else says? I don’t know. I’m thinking of turning into a maniac. I have some gun pron links coming soon. I love gun pron. I love the idea of scaring gun-fearing wussies who can’t understand that you shouldn’t ever be afraid of the tool, but only be afraid of the man or woman who wields it. And most of the time, the person who wields it is more reliable than the average human you meet on the street.

Tomorrow. The sun will come out, tomorrow. And the links will follow, come what mayyyyy.

In the mean time, I’m gearing up for Christmas. And Christmas for me always means Christmas booze. I just stocked up on some English Stouts. Mmmm. And a bottle of Irish Cream. And some Irish whiskey. Jameson.

I hope those who know me aren’t worried about me. I’m cool. And those who don’t know me should know that all is well. I control by vices, they don’t control me.

I just heard on FoxNewz that S.I.D.S. is a leading cause of death among infants. How about abortion? Do they count that? I doubt it.

More anon.

I’d forgotten how much fun it is to start over installing the O.S. Yikes. I couldn’t get the install to work with either of my new drives because windoze supposedly doesn’t support drives larger than 137 GB, which is strange because I already had a 250GB drive installed. Whatever. Instead of replacing my boot drive with one of the new ones, I gave up and put my ancient boot drive back. It has never caused any problems, but it’s only 80GB which to me is a waste of time these days.

However, it now appears that the XP install is stable. I let it install all the current upgrades, until it stopped when it said I had to verify my installation. I’m going to wait on that until I’m sure the install is stable, and until I have the hardware how I want it. I understand it takes a snapshot of your configuration, and then compares that to the config the next time you contact them. I’d rather not get them all pissy with me while I figure out how I want the setup to look like.

I posess two legit registration keys for XP, so I’m golden from a legal standpoint. I just don’t want to deal with cranky microsquash personnell later.

My new hard drives have arrived. However, they are still very cold from riding around in the Fed-Ex truck all day. I’ve decided to be patient and wait until they hit room temperature before trying to format them. I think I have all my utilities burned to one disk to make the transition easier, but it’ll still take a few hours to complete the transition.

Also, I was outside in sub-zero weather Monday night, on my way home from the bar where I see Monday night football and eat hot wings. I’ve got a cold coming on, and I’m flying to southern cali next Tuesday. So, I must try to get better, just in time to get sick like I do every time I go there.

This site went up one year ago on Pearl Harbor Day, 2004. The clock just ticked over here in the central zone. I assume the timestamp will read 1 hour later, since the host is in the eastern time zone.

Not a whole lot to show for that time, I guess. Whatever.

There’s plenty of room at the Christmas site for more authors. Most of the stock characters are still available. No one’s doing any of the reindeer, nor any of the elves from any of the specials. Pick a stock character or make up your own. Spar with the others. Have fun.

I was just perusing Ace’s site and saw a reference to this song. It’s pretty old, but still good. Not safe for work if hearing, “Everyone else has more sex than me,” blaring over your speakers is a problem. I suggest headphones. The video part is very harmless. It’s shockwave, less than 2MB.

I finally managed to get my account information re-sent for my favorite online hardware seller, and my new hard drives are on the way. I got two 320 GB ones, which should be enough for a while. They had the best cost/GB ratio out there.

I was ready to throw out 2000 and try once again to move to XP, and this is a good time to do that. The downside is that I’ll have to re-install all my utilities, track down registration keys, etc. The procedure can take a few hours. It’s something I try to avoid for as long as possible, even living with a few windoze errors in the process.

These drives are supposed to have self-correcting features to limit data corruption. We shall see. The manufacturer was recommended by a fellow geek, and he’d had the same troubles I had with the other brand that I’m phasing out, so I assume all will be better, if not well.

I have all the patience of a boiling teakettle. At times.

I download a lot of stuff. And I mean a lot. I have issues with my hard drives. I’ve spent over $500 on hard drives that are failure prone. I’m about to start replacing them with more reliable drives. However, my favorite vendor is causing me difficulties with respect to logging in and purchasing from them. I tried their system to get my passwords back, and it didn’t work.

I’m giving them until tomorrow to get it straightened out. Otherwise, I’m going to another vendor.

I’m switching drive brands. I was loyal to one brand. I’ve ended up relacing almost every drive from that manufacturer via warranty replacement, and the replacements are screwing me over as well. I’m retiring that brand from my computer, and replacing it with one that is reliable.

If you want to know which brands I’m talking about, email me. I will not open myself up to a lawsuit.

Sigh.

Dammit. I’d started a post and hit a bad keystroke and the next thing you know I lost the whole fucking thing.

Pardon my French.

Apparently, there’s something to the thought that you shouldn’t ever edit from a browser window because you can lose shit.

Anyway, we’ll try to piece it together. Unless I hit a bad keystroke again, in which case, fuck me. That’s not a plea, that’s a statement.

I’m up late watching movies. I just watched the last half of “The Last Boy Scout.” I like that movie. I like Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans. Perhaps I’ll buy it one day so that I can add it to my collection of movies that I never watch.

Right now I’m watching “The Thomas Crown Affair.” I’d forgotten that the title character was wealthy. I knew he was an art thief. I remembered Rene Russo appearing topless. I imagine that scene will be either cut or censored, even though she doesn’t have large breasts. Don’t get me wrong, she looked great in this movie, and I don’t care about size. I would just as soon they left it alone, just like AMC did with “Logan’s Run” and Jenny Augitter’s breasts, which they showed and were pretty good for tv boobies. I don’t think the kiddies will be affected by late-night boobies.

I can’t really explain the whole boobies thing. You’re either a straight guy and you understand, or you’re not and you don’t. What’s kind of funny is that I’m an ass man. I’m sure you’re fantastically interested in that piece of information.

The only really good thing about late night tv watching is that the commercial breaks are very short. They seem to be only 30 second spots, and then back to the movie. I hate commercials, so that works out well. Earlier tonight the breaks measured in the minutes, and I almost gave up. Which is why I only saw the last half of “The Last Boy Scout.”

Anyway, whatever. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Wasn’t that last post some crazy-assed shit? Oh yeah.

I probably didn’t make my point, which wasn’t that I’m some kind of latent or surpressed psychotic. My point was that memories can be faulty and sometimes highly suspect. In a non-UTI state, like now, it’s less likely that I would’ve actually committed that stuff to page. The unsurety of my memory at times is a fact, not something that only appears with alcohol. However, most of the things I remember I can be sure of, since in most cases, I don’t forget all that much.

That supposed event I related had to be a bad dream, and I also dreamed the part about someone reminding me of the event. I’ve often had dreams that referenced previous dreams.

I hadn’t thought about this particular set of memories in years. I hope they go away again.