August 23, 2005

The absurdity of comparison

My friend Fred - prolific forwarder of emails - strikes again!

A plane leaves Los Angeles airport under the control of a Jewish captain. His copilot is Chinese. it's the first time they've flown together and an awkward ilence between the two seems to indicate a mutual dislike.

Once they reach cruising altitude, the Jewish captain activates the auto pilot,leans back in his seat, and mutters, "I don't like Chinese."

"No rike Chinese?" asks the copilot, "why not?"

"You people bombed Pearl Harbor, that's why!"

"No, no," the copilot protests, "Chinese not bomb Peahl Hahbah! That Japanese, not Chinese."

"Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese... doesn't matter, you're all alike!"

There's a few minutes of silence. "No rike Jews!" the copilot suddenly announces.

"Why not?" asks the captain.

"Jews sink Titanic," the copilot responds.

"Jews didn't sink the Titanic!" exclaims the captain, "It was an iceberg!"

"Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg, Rosenberg, no mattah... all same!"

August 21, 2005

A good name for a knight!



Sir Tiffy Cashien, it's quite an honor to meet you!

An RS Photo (or 2)

So I'm doing a lot of firemaking today. After having started probably 500 fires (seriously) one gets bored...


(It's a flag...)



(Jen took this one. Someone planted flowers all over the front of the Falador bank!)

...And not much else

I haven't been doing a heck of a lot else other than working and RuneScape lately. I did rearrange part of the garage this morning, and I put away some dishes out of the dishwasher, but that's not much. Sorry Jen!

This upcoming Monday we start officially using the Stromberg biometric timeclock system at work.

You go up to a timeclock (strategically placed near my office - hehe) and punch in your ID number -mine's 5 digits - and then you touch the sensor on top to clock in. It's really cool. I love it. I am almost guaranteed to get at least a few minutes overtime each pay period now because the payroll department has decided to pay to the minute. So, since I almost always take a short lunch, I should get 30 minutes or so extra per paycheck. I can't just sit in the lunch room when I know there's work to be done. So, a few extra bucks won;'t hurt and no one will probably care enough to say anything...

We saw Robots yesterday and I really enjoyed it. I'd like the DVD, I think.

I need to watch the Matrix (first one) again. It's been months since I've watched my favorite movie.

I want to get the DVD of Harry Potter 3. I never yet mentioned in here that we finished book 6 last week. We were sad, devastated even. R.I.P. sir! I think that he'll make a reappearance. I'm not saying who, as I'm particularly not fond of spoilers. Go read it! hehe.

I went outside today and watered the front and back yard. Bren played with the hose in the back afterwards for a while and got soaked, which was fine. :) He really likes playing with the water hose. Very similar to another little blonde boy from the country many years ago. He's my son all right! The bad thing was that at 4 o'clock I looked out and noticed the hose was still running at full blast! Doh! Well, we'll have a really green patch of lawn this week!

Have had lots of car trouble lately. Spent a ton of money at Pep Boys (not my preferred automotive doctors) and after two trips, it was fixed - or so I still think. We'll see if I get to work tomorrow. Hope so. I hate being stuck on the highway. It's even more of a concern now that we only have 1 car. Oh well, such is life.

Have watched a few Voyager episodes lately. Really enjoy it. We've watched it all before, when it was in production, but it is almost as much fun to watch now in reruns.* We're almost finished with season 4. I love the end-of-season cliffhangers!!!

* You know - reruns. ;)

That's all for now. Back to woodcutting and firemaking. I'm a high score in firemaking now. Wahoo! I wish I could put a link to that here, but the RuneScape people don't let you link to anything other than their front page. Runehq.com has a box that you can put on your website showing your scores, so I plan to do that, but I have to find out how and where I can put it so it doesn't mess up my blog...

Really, that's all for now. :=)

My RS idea

Ok, so here's the idea I've been thinking of lately. I was to create a fusion of my two great RuneScape passions: Buying cowhides at below market prices & giving away stuff to new people. How do I reconcile way underpaying for a commodity and then giving stuff away? I can't, but that's not the point. :p So, here's my idea: I want to go to Lumbridge town (where new people always start) and call out "Who wants to play RuneScape Trivia?"

I can get some people to come off to the side and ask the group a few trivia questions (I'm hoping for a group of 8-12 to start). I will say that the prize gets better over 3 rounds of 1 question each (start slow, I think) . Round 1's prize will be like 500 gold, round 2 will be 1000 gold, and round 3 will be a full, five-piece steel set - that's longsword, helm, platebody, platelegs, and kite shield. Jen can make all those for cheap. What a gal!

So, I tell people to come over and give those items away. Somewhen, I work in that anyone who doesn't win can get a consolation prize of 25 gold for staying afterward to hear a "short presentation" - on the merits of leveling up fighting cows and selling hides to the nice gameshow host. Hahahahaha. That's kind of scammy marketing, I know. Actually, I would have been happy to do this to make a little money easily when I started. Okay, okay, so it's just a scheme to draw people into my spiral of killing cows and selling hides. I have no excuse for this. But I have to make money to keep up the RuneScape lifestyle to which I'm accustomed! I can't apologize. Hopefully the public service of giving stuff away will (somewhat) rub out the black mark on my karmic ledger.

A lazy Sunday afternoon

Just goofin around today...playing RuneScape of course and surfing. Saw J-walk and then ended up at NotMartha.com. Neat stuff!!! http://www.notmartha.org/tomake/jellofruit.html is something that I'd like to do. She supposedly has some kind of Jello sushi too, but I haven't found it yet...

Thanks, jen! It's http://www.notmartha.org/tomake/hostesssuchi.html. Looks yummy!

Whata Bahgan!

I just traded some guy 10 raw Trout (8 gold each) for a Mithril Warhammer (2158 gold each). Good deal! I should be sleeping!

August 16, 2005

RS Idea

I have a great idea of something to do in RuneScape that no one else is doing. I don't have time to write it now, but I am going to do that in a couple days. This will be a lot of fun, and maybe profitable!

Oooohhh, plus I just bought two Rune Pickaxes for under 20K each. What a bargain!

August 14, 2005

Gigapxl

This man is a genius. Check it out:
http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery-shuttlenight.htm


I love the space shuttle, and anything space-related.

McDonald's Photos

The other day we ate and took Brendan to play at Micky D's (didn't I swear not to eat there anymore after Super Size Me?)

Oh well, here are the pictures:








She's soooooo cute in there! Awwww!

We had fun and Bren got to play with some other little kids, which happens all to rarely these days. Jen and I have been talking about taking him somewhere where he can play with some other 2 year olds...we have to do that.

(Jen just mentioned to me that these are almost a month old. oops!)

Slow Blogging, Mishmash, Vacation Story

I've been rather off from blogging recently. Not for any reason, it's just that I've had other things going on. Work has been insanely busy as we get ready for school to start next Wednesday. I am still trying to catch up after vacation as well. Sometimes I think that I'd just be better off not going on vacation as much as it sets me back at work. Nah, to heck with work, I'll deal. Vacation was worth it.

I'm getting the photos off my Kodak DC280 right now. I'm annoyed b/c I just started using the camera on my Win XP machine and the naming format on the pictures is now different. I have always used an older Win ME machine to download from the cam, but I recently wiped and "Dr Frankensteined" it so that it has a little more power. Now I only have XP on the 3 machines in the house and have to deal with the change. I don't like changes like that. Instead of the normal (to me) names like DCP_3930.JPG now I have things like P1005175.JPG. It just messes up my whole day to have to deal with that. I'm so anal retentive sometimes. Haha, that's just my personality, I guess. [Bet you've used that phrase before and never seen a real definition either. Read it! I'll use it less often now, I expect. :p]

As I write this, I'm listening to XRM Radio Alternative which I found on Winamp/Shoutcast's internet radio list. I'm one of only 230 people listening right now, but it was the only station I could find playing what I wanted to listen to - that'd be Marcy Playground and Better than Ezra in the last couple minutes. That's my mood du jour.

Camera picx are almost finished copying. I have to say that one big benefit of moving the pictures with the XP machine is that it retains the original date and time, which I didn't have on ME. Guess that's the silver lining. Ah yes, all done now. Let's see, I want a pic of our vacation, so I think I'll find a good one. I'm going to try something new this post. Since beloved Blogger now hosts pictures (this is for you Les) I am going to test it out and see how it works rather than hosting this post's pictures on my house server.

Okay, so, I have the picture in My Documents. It's P1005194.jpg and it is already sized and cropped properly for my blog, which means that the max width is 321 pixels. Any wider than that and my template and right side bar get messed up. So, I'm clicking on the small photo icon (to the right of spell check) on the toolbar. A popup does so and is entitled Blogger: Upload Images. I hit browse and pick where the files is that I want, but then I have to make a choice of how I want it formatted. I have to choose a layout, and I don't know what that means, so I'll pick none. I also have to pick and image size and don't know precisely what that means, so I'll take the default of medium. I wonder how I manage these images after they are uploaded anyway? Ok, so now I hit upload image. It says "Your images are being uploaded to Blogger." Then I click done... It inserted the picture at the top of the post and I just drug it down here.

Viola! The picture of the boardwalk outside where we stayed on Port Aransas. It was pretty.



I think I might like this photo upload thing. It linked the photo automatically to what probably would have been a larger version had I not sized it down prior to uploading it. I have to do that linkage manually when I host my own pictures. My question is what happens if I want to delete the picture from Blogger's server sometime in the future. I don't see any way to manage the photos you've uploaded. Hmmmm.

Oh, haha, pretty much all of what I just wrote is already here: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=324 but I still don't see how to get rid of an image... This one doesn't answer that, but adds some other info: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1158. I did learn that I can only use (haha, I said only) 300 Megabytes for pictures. Guess that's enough. Well, I can find out how to do photo management, and maybe there's not a way. I think this is good if you don't have an existing method to host pictures, but I'll stick with my way. I have control when I host things on the house server...

So, moving right along, we had a really good time on our vacation. We stayed in a nice hotel room with a great ocean view. The pic above is from the balcony of our room. The boardwalk goes out to the beach. The first day, we went on walkabout and wasted some money at the surf shops (read: junk shops) in town. One had a much-larger-than-life walkthrough shark. Here's mum being eaten. She's awfully happy for it to!



The funny thing is that you walk thru the shark and exit at a hole in the rear - ironically, just like if you were really eaten! That was a really cool store. It was called "Destinations".



In there, there were a lot of things made in China that said Port Aransas, TX on them. Lol. They had beach stuff, shells, clothing, etc. One of the most interesting things were all the beach towels on the walls. There were wolves, tigers, lions, panthers, and lots of other things. Brendan loved those and screamed and kicked when I wanted to go look at something else. Oh well. I snuck this picture of some of those towels because I just couldn't pass up the opportunity. I wanted to buy it for my brother, but I figured he'd die of embarrassment.



Here are Mom and Bren on the way out. His mood
had improved slightly by then. He's getting so big!



We ate at Castaway's that night, and I enjoyed it, thought the reviews are not so great on TripAdvisor. I'm going to go right now and write a positive review. Hopefully it will be posted soon. We had tried to eat at a place called Moby Dick's prior to hitting Castaway's, but the service was so non-existent, we walked out.

(Still listening to XRM. Incubus - Drive is on now. Such a good song...)

The next day we sat on the balcony and then went to the beach.



The beach was lots of fun. I made a point of taking a big shovel so that I could dig in the sand with Brendan. Every time I've been to the beach, I've wanted to do some serious digging and this time I did it! I spent a lot of energy to dig a relatively small hole, and then it filled in automatically with sandy wet slush anyway, but at least I tried what I had been dreaming of doing. Haha!


See my shovel engulfed in the sand there?




Brendan didn't want to go into the water, but I finally lured him in by showing him how to pour water out of that plastic container onto a pile of sand. He really gets a big laugh out of destroying things - I wonder if I should be worried about this? :) So, to get the buckets of water, he'd walk in with me and eventually he sat with me in the water for a while.




What a cute little mon, mon!


We flew kites that Mom brought too. Glad she brought a spare, as we forgot ours. We really had a good time but the top of my head got sunburned. Doh! Hurt for a few days. hehe.

Later that night, Dad and I went on the Texas Treasure Casino Cruise. That was fun, but loooooong. They went out 12 miles to international waters, and then we played the slots. We left at about 6:30 pm and didn't come back until 12:30 am or so. We did have a good time, but didn't win big. I played for like an hour on 6 bucks on the $1 machines, though. That was a good deal. I won several big jackpots (if that's possible) on nickel machines. 1700 nickels once, 1465 once, 400 n something once. That was fun. Jen and dad did the same the prior night (while me, mum, and Bren were at Castaway's).

Here's the ship as we're driving up to it. (They're no enlarge on these; my camera phone's resolution is just to low to make posting bigger versions worthwhile...)



The tug that helped us out of port.


Me going down the stairs. It's a mirror shot.


Pretty sunset. This must be one of my favorite
things in the world to see - sunset over the
water from the deck of a ship. Ahhhhhhh.


IN addition to taking pictures, another cool feature of my phone is that it has GPS. I got a fix when we were farthest out, just to see if I could. We stopped at N 27º 38.962' by W 96º 46.587' (Accuracy 91 ft). I tried to plot that on a map without too much luck. I hoped Google Maps did mapping by longitude and latitude, but either they don't or I just couldn't figure it out. I wonder if that is actually in international waters, or they just say they go far enough...wonder if there's any oversight of that?

Dad and I were very tired when we got back, but I'd go again.

The next day it was time to go back home, but at least it was Friday and I had a weekend to rest up before work. hehe. We packed it up and Bren and Jen went back to San Antonio with mom and dad. I was going to detour thru Corpus Christi to pick up a friend needed a ride to San Antonio. Before I left Port Aransas, I stopped and ate pizza lunch buffet at Port A Pizzeria. It was very good. I highly recommend it! I also shopped at a few more junk shops and bought some T-shirts, knick-knacks, and othesouvenirsrs. Once thing I bought was a plastic bottle with some sand and stuff in it made for mailing back home. I dropped it at the post office there in Port A before bidding a fond farewell to the great vacation spot and driving south along the shore on my way back to real life.

August 10, 2005

4 months ago

I was just reading this post from 4 months ago. Funny thing is, I'm still marveling at how happy I am that those losers are gone. :p

August 8, 2005

Jul 29th pics

In a comment to this post, Les wanted to know what the picture of the stormy sky was. Well, that's actually a picture I took with my handy dandy little i275 camera phone (looks good for a camera phone pic, eh?)



Anyway, that's the top of the library at the University where I work. I was walking out to my car to head home and saw that unusual dark and light cloud formation. I just had to take a picture of it. I've taken so many pictures with my phone that I would have missed otherwise. The res is not so good, but it's better than missing the shot all together.

When we were building that library, many people asked why we were building another church on campus, so that's a common misconception. Basically everything there is made to look gothic, and old-churchy...but I love it. :]

I'm glad you read me Les. Thanks. :)

Anonymous said...

In a comment on my last post:

Anonymous said...
Are you on vacation? Why no blogs lately? This is very disappointing.


First let me thank you for the round-about compliment, and second let me say yes, I was on vacation! We went to Port Aransas (a bit north of Padre Island) and had 3 glorious days of F.I.T.S. One particularly fun thing was that we rode these ferries several times. I'm easily amused, give me a break. (I love Google Maps. Try zooming in on the ferry picture.)

Pictures plus a humourously detailed account of the trip to come!

P.S. The humourously detailed account may not appear for a few days - we just became RuneScape members, and haven't even gone to a member world yet. That's HIGH priority stuff! hehe.

From the mouth of a babe

You never know what's going through the mind of a two and a half year-old. Today I was showing Brendan how to go pee pee in the potty (by demonstration, as always) and he ran up to my left side, gazed intently at the equipment, and said gleefully "It's raining, dada!"

Jen and I had a good laugh at that one!

On an unrelated note, Jen (cuckoo wanna-be-preggo on the brain girl) bought Preggie Pops - these lollies designed to be eaten while you're pregnant to ease the agony of morning sickness. I have tried the ginger and lavender flavors and decided that they both taste like bathroom cleaner. Blech! But I just tried the sour lemon one, and my gawwwwd, it was good. Lemon meringue pie filling. Mmm-mmmm!

RuneScape Membership

We just became RuneScape members. More bank space! Bigger world! Lots of cool items and quests! Only 5 bucks!

Transaction for the value of: USD 5.00
Description: RuneScape members subscription
From: RuneScape-by-Jagex
Authorisation Date/Time: 08/Aug/2005 00:44:16

Yay!

Myth Busted!

Here's what I saw the other day when stopping at good ole Sam's Club to fill up with refined black gold.



The sign on the left side was taped to each of the probably 10 double-sided pumps at this mega-station. Click the picture for a close-up.

Dude! This myth was BUSTED soundly by Adam and Jamie was back in Episode 2 of Mythbusters.

So, to all you Sam's Management induhviduals: You're Busted!

Wanna know something that'll make you LYAO? I took both the far and the closeup picture with...wait for it...wait for it...my camera phone!

August 1, 2005

Conversion

ONCE A BAPTIST -- ALWAYS A BAPTIST

John Smith was the only Protestant to move into a large Catholic neighborhood. On the first Friday of Lent, John was outside grilling a big juicy steak on his grill. Meanwhile, all of his neighbors were eating cold tuna fish for supper. This went on each Friday of Lent. On the second to last Friday of Lent, the neighborhood men got together and decided that something had to be done about John, he was tempting them to eat meat each Friday of Lent, and they couldn't take it anymore. They decided to try and convert John to be a Catholic. They went over and talked to him and were so happy that he decided to join all of his neighbors and become a Catholic. They took him to church, and the Priest sprinkled some water over him and said, "You were born a Baptist, you were raised a Baptist, and now you are a Catholic." The men were so relieved, now their biggest Lenten temptation was resolved. The next Friday rolled around, and just at supper time, when the neighborhood was sitting down to their tuna fish dinner, came the wafting smell of steak cooking on a grill. The neighborhood men could not believe their noses! WHAT WAS GOING ON? They called each other up and decided to meet over in John's yard to see if he had forgotten it was still Lent? The group arrived just in time to see John standing over his grill with a small pitcher of water. He was sprinkling some water over his steak on the grill, saying, "You were born a cow, you were raised a cow, and now you are a fish."

Cat in the Hat movie

Last night we watched The Cat in the Hat movie with Mike Meyers. IT STUNK!!! Let me say that again - IT STUNK!!!! It's got to be one of the worst movies I've ever sat through. High up there with Demolition Man. My Gawwwwwdddd, it was bad. Whew, now that that's off my chest, I feel a lot better!

Wow, I can't believe Dem Man came out in 1993. I saw that in the theater. Ohhh! Well, glad it was the buck fifty theater!