A new year...

...and I've missed the first four hours of 24? Crapola! At least they have the full episodes on their website, and I'll try their "new player" to see no stuttering and no buffering.

I've got a lot of catching up to do, so grab your mantyhose and let's go!

Superheroes from spam

So I got an interesting sounding spam email a while back, and either these spammers are also trying to get me to run a Mutants & Masterminds supers campaign, or they are randomizing their subjects to try to sneak in under my radar!

I think it is the latter.

Technorati Tags: Spam,superheroes

Most Humiliating Spam.

So here I am, just minding my business when I notice some mail in my Junk/Spam folder. I try to scan them since the filter can be a little aggressive in shielding me from email it thinks is spam.

Most of the time it is pretty good. The emails follow spam trends (how many Nigerian princes are there really?), but this is one that I hadn't seen before.

Ouch! Is this supposed to shame me into getting a prescription, or turn me away from using it at all?

Technorati Tags: spam,Viagra

Personalized gift cards

We get occasional "On the Spot" instant bonuses at work, usually around $50, and you can pick what kind of gift you want - usually I select a Visa gift card. Once you log on and verify the code number, you have the option of adding a personalized message to the card face, which I did.



I got zero response from any vendor to whom I presented the card. My friends thought it was funny, but I guess all the merchants' sense of humor has been ground down to nothing.

I know what you're saying - "$48? I thought you said $50?!" Yes, it is a $50 gift minus a $2 processing fee for the privelige - nay, the honor! - of getting one of their cards. Lame.

A vintage Halloween pic

Vintage? Really? Halloween was only what - six months ago? Is that my timeframe for blogging? Can there BE any more questions (or Chandler references)?

Anyway, we cut a pumpkin on Halloween. 2007 - please. Wait...does the act of cutting the pumpkin turn it in to a jack-o'-lantern? I think so, but let's see. Wikipedia to the rescue!

Yes, it does.

So we made this jack-o'-lantern, and I kind of forgot about it for a while. Maybe just a week, but the spirit of Don King...you know, that traditional apres-Halloween visitor...came by and, well, this is getting out of hand. Picture, please.



Wow, that's a lot of buildup. Hmmm...I meant buildup in terms of raising expectations, but I guess it works in the hair/mold sense as well.

Finally some action pics

I know - playing a child's guitar in my jammies with a micro-Mariachi hat wasn't actioney enough. To satisfy my rabid fans, here you go.



Living on the Greenbelt is nice! Whenever we want to bust out the firepit, I just go outside the fence and find a big log. I tried using an axe, but I've had much better luck with my reciprocating saw from Harbor Freight.



I've gone through all my demolition blades and now I have a pretty scary specialty wood-cutting blade. Itsa nice! By nice, I mean it looks nice - I haven't actually cut anything with it. But believe me - it looks like it will do the job!

Here I am sanding our deck. We rented a huge industrial sander from Home Depot, and it pretty much drove us around the deck.



It was time for another treatment of stain, and we didn't want a repeat of the original stain job (oh, the humanity!) to happen again. Last time we waited too long after we had it built and then waited until the weather was as hot as possible. It was awful. The wood was so hot the stain would not be absorbed, and it never got a good lock, or set, or whatever the term is to indicate that stain has soaked in to your wood correctly.

Now we have to decide whether or not to keep the deck or take it down and build a stone patio!

You mean I can get a new rate...AND syphilis?

I got a nice email the other day. Whoever this person is seems pretty helpful! Who wouldn't want a $200,000 loan for $626 per month?



Something tells me that the "gift that keeps on giving" isn't a good rate. If this person actually followed my blog they would know that I'm used to getting mail from unusual people. Something like this almost doesn't even show up on my radar!

200 Posts!

Wow - this is my 200th post! Here is my first post, for that trip down Memory Lane.

I started this blog because I was going to Singapore for business, and we finally decided that it would be too much trouble to bring my wife and kids with me. I wanted to document the trip for anyone that wanted to see.

Naturally, it's morphed into "my blog," where I document stuff that I think is interesting...for posterity? Kicks? Who knows, but I like it.

Death by...Home Depot

We just spent over nine hours across two or three days in Home Depot (with some excellent customer service from Bruce, Daniel and Kent) agonizing over carpet choices. Believe me - our kids thought the agony was much worse than we did. I can make only so many laps around the store with them in the cart waving DANGER flags before they get bored.

Our current carpet is getting a little threadbare in a few places, and kids running around with juice usually isn't good for carpet. We knew we wanted a speckly carpet, as the mixture of colors hides spots very nicely, but it doesn't change the overall color too much. At first we were gung ho for Berber, which can take a lot of wear and doesn't get frazzled, but everything we saw looked like either industrial or indoor/outdoor carpet. Not what you want in the bedroom, much less the living room.

Then we looked at Frieze (free-zay, naturally). This was a good combination of long and short loops that gave a good texture to barefeet, and it looked like we could get one that held up well. The problem was that the Frieze we wanted was coming out to over $1000 more than another one we wanted.

We settled on some light-colored speckly carpet from the Plush family. Now we have to wait some amount of days before the measuring people arrive, and then a few weeks before we move all our furniture out of the house, have them install the carpet and we move everything back.

This was a grueling exercise, and hopefully we won't have to make any more decisions like this until our next house. I know more about carpet now than I thought I ever would.

New OS version

If towns around Odessa, TX, wanted to use the new Microsoft OS, as advertised in Friday Night Lights, would they use Vista Permian?

It's been a long time, baby!

Hey, I'm back! I know it's been weeks since I've posted last, but sometimes life occurs. I have a lot of content to upload too, and I'm embarrassed to say that some of it is still Christmas-related! Wow...at least a month late, but sometimes that's how I roll.

Creative Fatal1ty mouse "review"

Here is a write-up I was asked to do for our gaming group about the Fatal1ty gaming mouse from Creative:






Day Zero with Fatal1ty mouse:


Is this just some coked-up competitor to the double-awful Razor mouse, or an actual contender for the Logitech G5 gaming mouse throne (my opinion)? Only time will tell, but here are my initial thoughts…more of an OOBE tonight, with gaming details coming this weekend.

• Box: I missed the "Open Here" sign and was trying to slide the middle part out to the side leaving the outer ring intact (similar to our printer "Wrap" ID language). Finally I stumbled upon the hinged part and noticed the magnets. I like this a lot, and one of the only other places I've seen hidden magnet closures like this is on Asian DVDs (some mid- to high-end collector's editions). Very nice!
  
• Mouse: Okay, Mr. Wendel has definitely made more money than I have playing videogames. I'm okay with that. This mouse is a little poseur-tastic, though. If I eat this mouse, will I gain more of Fatal1ty's powers? I think I'm against the idea of a celebrity mouse, but I wouldn't buy a Jonathan Ive monitor either.
  
• Finish: I really like the textured button 1 and button 2 - good feel. I like but don't love the rubberized sides. My thumb slides around on it a little too easily. I hate the glossy black button 3 and wrap-around detail. This will scuff, attract fingerprints and eventually transition to dull black.
  
• Buttons: Button 1 and 2 have nice solid clicks. Depression of scroll wheel feels and sounds good. Scrolling of scroll wheel sounds and feels cheap. Button 3 click is lame and dissatisfying. It's a hollow sound unlike all the other buttons. It sounds and feels cheap and suggests that it will be the first point of failure.
  
• Weights: Nice design for swapping weights quickly. Easier and faster than the Logitech G5. Lame implementation of retention mechanism - the fit isn't tight so moving the mouse causes the weight column to move, producing a clicking, something-in-my-mouse-is-loose sound.

Is it Halloween yet? Oh, snap!

I'm finally getting around to posting some stuff that I've needed to get up here.

For Halloween we had a neighborhood potluck party that went a lot better than we expected. Most of the people came in costume. I was in agony trying to pick a costume - I have a few aces up my sleeve but I need to work on them before I reveal them to the world.

I ended up going as a vegetarian vampire bat.

I got a beer helmet at Spencer's (thanks Chris) and spray-painted it black. My theme necessitated cans of V8 instead of beer. Lacey sewed bat wings to a black turtleneck and attached furry bat ears to the helmet (after having our five-year-old tell us about echolocation).

My family rounded out the costumes with the most beautiful pirate in the seven seas, a pirate in training and the smallest mobile skeleton ever seen.

Ags win!

I can't believe it! My Aggies finally beat Texas, with Colt McCoy playing for all but 20 seconds! I stood for most of the game (except for the time playing checkers with my boys). It looked like the Aggies were trying to sabotage themselves with some stupid errors and fouls but we managed to pull it out!

Stat of the game... 244. The Aggies rushed for 244 yards against Texas, which came into the game No. 1 in the nation allowing 42 yards per game.

Sacred or Secular?

So we’re at church this weekend and the band…hold on – let me back up.

I’m from a pretty casual yet traditional church background – choir, pastor, church suppers, trying to stifle your voice when you and your friends accidentally start a laughing kick. Why is it that laughing is so much louder in church when you are supposed to be quiet?

Anyway, I’ve been to a few places where they have the more modern musical ensemble with instruments other than an organ or piano and it just wasn’t for me. For some reason it doesn’t bother me now. Maybe because I’m trying to learn guitar? Maybe because one of the guitarists has a Stratocaster just like mine? I’m not sure.

For a special music the band started playing, “The Reason.” Yes, the song by Hoobastank. My wife and I looked at each other quizzically, but went with the flow. The words were displayed, and if you had never heard the song before, the lyrics could be taken appropriately for a churchly song.


But that got me thinking. Was the band still playing a secular song? Did it become a sacred song within that context? If the lyrics are applicable, depending on the setting, does the song change? When I was in Houston I went to a weekly youth meeting thing where they had a really good band with a great female singer. They would usually do a song while the service was just about to start, and often it was a secular song. The only one I can remember was Sweet Surrender, by Sarah McLachlan.

Now my son is coining words!

We try to incorporate multiple foreign languages in our daily life/instruction/relationships with our kids. We're not polyglots, but we can do servicable vocabulary in French, Spanish and a little German. There's also that Russian degree in there somewhere....

While learning Spanish, my five year old has come up with a new word: delici-ocho, which I take to mean eight times as delicious.

I coined another new word

Apocellipsis: The final set of ellipses that indicates the end of a large body of written work. An ellipsis within a sentence contains three dots, like this: Dare I get...a Monster burrito? If a sentence ends with an ellipsis, proper punctuation practices demand four dots: So if I eat this I'll be.... Yes, you'll be full.

I submit that Apocellipses contain five dots, so you really, really know the end is here.

Paco

This weekend we had to put one of our cats to sleep. I won't go in to details about what happened, but I wanted to write something about him.

We had Paco for roughly six years. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant with my cousin and her husband. As we were leaving, we passed by a car and heard loud meowing, and we couldn't tell if a cat was under the car or in the trunk. We finally figured out that there was a kitten inside the body of the car, and we found a hole in the driver's side rear wheel well that this kitten must have climbed in to and couldn't back out.

One of us talked some of the guys from the kitchen to come help us lift the back of the car up enough for my wife to slip her arm into this hole and retrieve this freaked out kitten. Once she pulled him out we knew he was going home with us. He was black and white and we named him Paco since it was outside the Mexican restaurant.

He was always skittish of new people and kept to himself away from the excitement when there was anything happening. Eventually he could warm up to people and come out from hiding when everything was quiet. We think that he rode in the car for some amount of time before ending up at the restaurant, and was traumatized for it.

Fast forward to this weekend...and I don't know what to say. Things happen too quickly, and it's true that you never realize how good things are until something happens. It's almost surreal how different it is now, and I can't help but think of my own mortality; how easily things can change in an instant and how many things are beyond our control.

I had almost convinced myself not to write about this - I mean, this is just some silly journal. Do I really need to expose myself like this? I still have a hard time actually talking about it, so maybe this is the right place for it. I'm not sure yet.

New vocabulary

A friend of mine who isn't working with us anymore introduced us to a new technique to be used in everyday life or especially on a written part of an interview. I coined a new phrase and wanted to share it:

Perkins
Pronunciation: 'p&r-k&nz
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): per·kinsed; per·kins·ing
1. to look up something that one should know or someone thinks one should know <Dude, he totally Perkinsed "Kahn, Jr." after we talked to him.>
2. to provide an answer to an interview question that sparks interest in the candidate and generates a nickname <I Perkinsed that wireless question so hopefully I'll get a call.>


SP, you're famous! The royalties should start coming in....

Do you want some, Spaghetti?

So I wanted to give props to a good friend of mine, David Lenihan. If you follow the news, you may think I mean David Lenihan, but I don't. I went to college with David, and he is the one responsible for pushing me off the razor's edge between relative anonymity and blogging history - hopefully in the right direction. Spaghetti, many thanks, from Spaghetti and Steve's cat.