north7380

This isn't exactly new but it's nice to revisit the classics.

Here is your weekly random picture -- this time with 200% more WTF.

"What we have on our hands here, gentlemen, is a potentially fatal outbreak of Jethro Tull . . ."

Brilliant.  I love British rock journalism almost as much as I love Lester Bangs.

That being said, I love this album.  I cannot stop listening to it.  And maybe that makes sense since I really like Jethro Tull, as well.

Mr. T, on the other hand, seems incredulous and keeps asking, "What's all this jibba jabba?"

This from io9 regarding the Texas Board of Education decision to strip any reference to the age of the universe from textbooks:

Chair of the Board Don McLeroy testified to the reason why that may be the case at the meeting:

"I disagree with these experts. Someone has got to stand up to experts."

That's right! Standing up to experts and facts is exactly what the chair of an educational board's job is supposed to be!

I really could not say it better. Have things gotten so fundamentally off-track in this country that we are now supposed to "stand up" to experts while praising and rewarding ignorance?

This makes Ryan a sad, sad boy.

TGIF motherfuckers. Go do something fun and absurd. Like this:

A while back I signed up for Twitter, the service that allows you to send status updates to friends through text messages (or online). After a couple of weeks I abandoned it. Not systematically but through neglect. My general reaction was "Meh". I got Liz to sign up but otherwise didn't have any one to follow and no one was following me. It was lonely and seemed pointless. I kept my account and still get Liz's tweets but otherwise don't use my account.

And then I found the greatest thing ever: Christoper Walken's twitter feed (cwalken). Oh. My. God. I follow a few other "celebrity types", mostly techy people like Leo Laporte but no one but Liz has the special privilege of having their tweets sent to my phone. Christopher Walken has earned that privilege.

"cwalken: Someone corrected my last post; said it's "frightened by" not "frightened of." Know what else I'm frightened of? Crazy people."

And that is why. If you can read it with a good Walken voice that only makes it that much more enjoyable.

If you go back and read a lot of his old tweets you may notice that he seems to dwell on birds a lot, which would be weird with any one else.

PS -- If any one reading his has twitter and wants to follow me my name is "rpschill".

I found this in the "Internet Guide" that is available on the political science department's website at my school. Pigseye was (I hope past tense would be correct here)their email system.

If you have a computer and modem at home that is hooked into your phone line, you may dial up the school to access Pigseye through your modem (as long as it is at least at 2400 baud rate). You will then need some type of communications software that will support terminal emulation (this converts the computer language which travels through the phone line back into text to display on your screen). Many computers have these pre-loaded. Some examples are Qmodem, Quick Link 2 Fax, or Hyperterminal.

Thank God I went all crazy and bought that 9600 baud modem so I'm not crawling along like those other suckers using only 2400. Suck it, lamers.

I've been practicing all my life, baby. . . .

I’ve been home sick with the chickenpox for a week. I’m a 28 year old grown-ass man felled by the chickenpox. Completely owned by the chickenpox. Thank God for paid sick time.

So, being stuck at home and looking for any way to distract me from the massive all-consuming itchiness, I started playing video games again. I play video games almost every night with Liz -- Mario Kart mostly; games we can play together. But a full time job and a full load of college classes have kept me from really getting into much else. I have a substantial backlog of video games. So I dug back into the real shit: first God of War and then Dragon Quest 8.

First of all, for all the countless hours I have spent playing video games in my life -- and we are talking thousands here -- I have never been very good at it. I guess you would say I dabble. I could never get the hang of complicated combos in fighting games and brawlers. Mostly I forget what they are. I’ve never felt drawn to the minutiae of hardcore RPGs -- the stats and menus and hours spent perfecting your inventory and armor. I’m about as good at sports games as I am at sports. Mostly I muddle through. I play games because I love to play games and even being bad at them is fun.

God of War is, of course, amazing. I suck at the puzzles though. I’m not afraid to admit I cheat and read walkthroughs. Hey, I still have fight all those motherfuckers, am I right? So what if I get help figuring out where to go and kick ass next.

After a while and about 75% of the game I had to take a break. A man can only take so much of that. He needs something a little less intense and gore-infused. Figuring time was the one thing I had plenty of this week I moved on to Dragon Quest 8. So far I had only put in about 30 minutes, so just enough to get through most of the talking and move onto the actually “doing stuff” part. I love it. The simple act of leveling up is so satisfying. The game is fun. But all it did was make me want to play Final Fantasy VII, the game that I see in my head when people talk about RPGs. Unfortunately I no longer have a copy.

So this is the part of the blog where I talk about things that are possibly less than legal. I decided to do a little research and see if it was possible to play Playstation games that were burned to CDs. Eventually I found some torrents and some basic instructions. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. I spent hours working on this. I still don’t know if this is my fault or not. Regardless, I have one last possibility. Liz’s younger brother still has a copy of FF7 and he will let me borrow it. So I can try to make direct copies of the disks rather than mucking about with disk images and the like. And if that doesn’t work I’ll just play his damn copy and hold it hostage.

I know, I know, why not just buy the game? Well, it’s expensive and rare and I’m poor. So, you know, Plan B.

I think the ultimate point is that when you take two weeks off from work because you have the chickenpox you suddenly find yourself spending hours working out ways to download and burn old Playstation games to CDs because you have nothing better to do and no energy to do it even if you did.

So get ready for many more posts in which I do a whole of nothing and try to fill my time with projects that require lots of time and very little physical effort.

Hey, I’m old and the chickenpox didn’t kill me so I’ve got that going for me.

yeah, I have the chickenpox. seriously.

so if you need me i'll be on the sofa resisting the urge to scratch the shit out of myself.

A funny thing happened after I posted my last entry; someone replied to it. Which, in itself, is not particularly remarkable. What makes this a notable event is that the person claims to be David Pogue. They were quite flattering about my writing which was very nice; but the whole thing is very confusing.

I see three possibilities here:

1.) David Pogue reads (or at least improbably stumbled upon) my blog and kindly commented on it;

2.) One of my friends decided to do their best Pogue impersonation -- this does not sound like something my friends would do; or

3.) Some random person found my blog and decided to impersonate Pogue.

Oddly -- or not -- not one of the three sound plausible to me. So, because no one wants me suffering from the ill effects of not knowing the truth, if you are the wonderful person who tried to make my day better, please let me know. My email is on my profile page if you wish to remain publicly anonymous. But, seriously, the suspense is killing me.

If you are someone who actually pays attention to my blog (excuse me, "blog"), all two or three of you, you may have noticed that my ambitious plan to do NaBloPoMo this month got essentially fucked after the first week. Then again, you probably didn't; nobody ever notices when things *aren't* there.

I've always had it in my head that I would love to be a writer. Unfortunately my complete inability to write on any kind of consistent schedule has pretty much torpedoed that dream. This might be okay if I had any kind of talent for writing fiction but I do not. I'm not creative like that. While I have this romantic dream of being a writer like John Updike or Neil Gaiman I just don't have that storyteller gene that a good novelist has to have. Apparently I stopped having a real imagination sometime in high school. Since then I've contented myself with the secondary (backup) dream of being a writer like Chuck Klosterman or, if I'm feeling particularly daydream-y, Lester Bangs. But I only whisper that one for fear that I might either a) jinx any chance of that happening or b) insult Lester Bangs with the very notion. Shit, I'd be David Pogue if I thought I could out David Pogue David Pogue. Think of all the free tech shwag!

When I try to picture my ideal life it looks something like this: I'm a writer (it doesn't matter what I write, only that I make a living at it -- it would be nice, but not necessary, if people thought I was actually *good* at it as well); I live in a white farmhouse built on a few acres (at least) of land with a copse of trees ringing the perimeter and large expanses of grass and garden (a baseball diamond would be nice, but not necessary); I would sit at a moderately sized wooden desk facing a window on the second floor and I would spend half the day writing and the other half reading (we'll call that "research") but I would also have the flexibility to go run errands in the small New England town that is nearby. Hopefully I make enough money as a writer that Liz doesn't have to work and we are both home all day with the kids.

I think I may have stolen that entire thing from a Chevy Chase movie but I'm not sure. Either way it sounds pretty damn good to me.

In the mean time I spend my life initially excited about and subsequently annoyed by writing projects for school. Sometimes I write on here. Whenever I need to write for work I freeze up and begin parsing my sentences as if they were each the last sentence I will ever write; however, this may have more to do with drafting letters in legalese than with my ability to write. Whatever.

Right now I'm not even concerned with making a living writing; I just want to do it. I wish I could find that one thing that I would love to write about all the time. But as usual my complete lack of focus and interest in *everything* keeps me from mastering any one thing. NaBloPoMo was supposed to help me develop good writing habits, instead it just made me feel like a douche who couldn't find time to write three paragraphs a day. Maybe I'll try to get back on it. Or maybe I'll make it every other day or once a week. Anything is better then the consistent nothing I've been producing for years.

Oh CNN, I don't just watch you for the fake holograms. You never cease to entertain.

This quote from a Newsweek feature that includes a good deal of behind-the-scenes info on the campaigns made me realize how absolutely happy I am that I voted for Obama yesterday:

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Kinda has a nice ring to it. I honestly never thought it would really happen. I kept waiting for something to blow my dreams out of the water; but this time we made it. A painfully long campaign ended with a historic and wonderful night. I'm going to bed happy after an election for the first time since 1996. That's pretty nice.

Well, here we go . . . CNN has called the first two states.

I feel like it's Christmas Eve and I can't sleep because I am so excited to go open presents, except that this has the potential to crush my spirit far more than a crappy Christmas gift ever could.

and I'm proud of it.

Have you voted today?

You Should Live in a Blue State

Your preferences are 75% Blue, 25% Red You may not vote Democrat, but you feel comfortable around people who do. You tend to do best in bluer states - like California or New York. You fit in with an educated, urban, progressive crowd.

Frankly, I'm surprised I didn't score higher. Of course with loaded questions like "Who do you respect more: someone who works in manual labor or someone who has an advanced degree?" I'm not totally surprised. Still, I'd rather live in New England, although not New Hampshire apparently since that state is in play this election. Weird.

So I was going to write this whole thing on socialism and how the term is being misused this election season -- by both sides. Then I realized that I must be out of my mind to even attempt that here, especially without any rough drafts or, you know, research. We'll just leave it at: both sides don't get it but the people screaming that Obama is a socialist for wanting to "redistribute the wealth" while condoning President Bush's $700 billion bank bailout are idiots. The cognitive dissonance necessary to make that sort of statement is truly staggering.

My head is swimming from my cold and the various drugs that are keeping me semi-functional today. For whatever reason, ever since I got this cold all I have wanted is cookie dough. Yaay for cravings. And chills. I keep getting random chills. I love being sick. And I don't think I'll even get any days off out of this. It's near the end of the year and I have two sick days burning a hole in my wallet but I hate to waste them and then get seriously sick next month. I'm lucky this is just a little cold. I may feel like shit but I could feel a lot worse. If I got what Liz had I'd be on my ass and those sick days would really come in handy. I hate being an adult sometimes.

It being November 1st I am supposed to begin writing one blog post a day as part of NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month. I have always wanted to try to the National Novel Writing Month but that seems unrealistic. This is somewhat more doable. I just need to write a blog post a day for 30 days. The elephant in the room, of course, is that fact that it is nearly 11pm on the first night and the only reason I am writing anything at all is because my girlfriend reminded that I needed to. So a great way to start the month, by nearly missing the very first post.

I've no idea what I will write about but that will come. Each post will be a post; if a theme develops so be it. All I want is the motivation to keep writing and keep posting so that this becomes an actual blog instead of some dead page with 1996-style "Under Construction" graphics all over it.

I love the internet and how it has evolved.

Anyway . . . .

I'm exhausted. I may not have caught Lizzie's strep and sinus infection but I definitely picked up something somewhere. Thankfully it is moving fast: throat on friday, nose today. Hopefully this sucker will be gone for the weekend. I don't want to feel like shit in Gatlinburg. Especially since Lizzie didn't get to enjoy the cabin in Blue Ridge last weekend. I guess we'll see what happens.

I made some decent money today selling an old computer to a work colleague and setting up a wireless network for him. The computer illiterate keep me well-employed. If only I could do this for a living without working for GeekSquad. And still make what I make at my current job.

Two more days until the election. I'm looking forward to it being over, although I'll need to fill that empty place in my heart that can only be filled by political campaigns. Sigh. I do love a good campaign. I'll leave the politics out of this today. I'm just hoping to be able to go to sleep Tuesday night with a smile and not depressed the way I have the past few elections. Actually I'm just hoping it gets resolved Tuesday night and does not lead to recounts. Just give us an answer, we've waited long enough.

PS -- I'm too lazy to create links to NaBloPoMo or NaNoWriMo. Get used to it.