my mental sieve...
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| Evil Wayne my mental sieve... |
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Monday, May 30, 2005 Fire And Brimstone Are Next We had quite the little storm yesterday. Starting around three o'clock, the sky went from mild overcast to dark. And it stayed dark for about an hour. Then the thunder started to roll in, but it was quite distant at first. The trees started blowing and the thunder kept coming. At about ten to four, there was a rather close crack and I decided to shut down the PCs and just watch TV. Not five minutes go by and I was standing in the living room, talking to TheBoy when there was a brilliant flash, everything went out, and thunder ripped somewhere above the neighborhood. It was so instant with the flash that I was mildly concerned that maybe everything was fried. Then the rain came and it was unholy. For awhile I couldn't see across the street it was so torrential. The storm drain couldn't handle it and the whole street flooded.  Then, about halfway through it, there was hail. At first, it was this funny pinging noise, but it got louder and heavier. Looking outside, it was like the Earth was being assaulted with moth balls.   With the power out we had to sit around and actually talk to each other. My favorite scenario is Earth Overrun by Zombies. With the power out, it's easy to imagine being the last survivors of the zombie hordes. How would we fortify the house? What essentials would you try to collect? I think Mike sort of got into it after I told him he'd have to learn how to use a shotgun. I figure that if you manage to thin out the hordes where you could make an escape, some of the best communities might be in Marblehead or Nahant, where you could have the sea to one side and a nice gated mansion walling the other three. From there, securing an armored transport of some kind to collect food and weapons and lots and lots of books. Starting with stuff on How Things Work. Eventually, I suspect life would lead to actually hunting and gutting game animals and I haven't a clue how you'd do that. Unless they were zombified, then you can just eat the shotgun. posted by Evil Wayne | 8:30 PM 0 comments Thursday, May 26, 2005 Busted 12:24 PM *sigh* I'm wicked jonesing for anything to listen to. I keep reaching to put my headphones on and there aren't any. So I've decided to hit Best Buy at lunch and pick up a cheap pair of earbuds. I was going to download a couple of podcasts, but I just got off the phone with a guy in MIS telling me basically to knock it off (it was much nicer worded than that. In fact, Lou made it sound like he didn't know what was going on, just a lot of traffic and was everything okay?). I got the hint and quite what I was doing. So I've got one episode of Keith and The Girl and that's it. L My next plan is to buy some soundtrack music on CD or something to get me through the rest of the day. I can't believe how much this blows. === 1:53 PM Right before lunch we get *the* email. The one that anonymously lets you know you've fucked up and gotten busted.
Sigh. I'm not really sure, but getting talked to (even though it was nice) and then the official reminder always makes me feel dirty. I feel like a little kid again, getting caught doing something wrong. I just want to hide under a rock and this day just won't end. I went to Best Buy, picked up some cheapie headphones (~$8.00) and the soundtrack from The Matrix. I almost bought the Master and Commander soundtrack, but having never seen the movie, I didn't want it to suck. I made it back here with about 20 mins for lunch left. To think, if I had just remembered my iPod, none of this would have happened. 2:10 PM The owner of the company just walked by me while I was getting coffee and said, "Hi Jason." I've been here 5 years and they still have no idea who I am. WFT? This day suck-dilly-ucks. I'm so gonna need a drink when I get home. posted by Evil Wayne | 2:42 PM 0 comments Jonesing I forgot my fucking iPod today. Goddamnit, I feel naked without it. Like how am I supposed to get through my day without my freakin' iPod?!? To make it worse, I realized I didn't have it about half-way to work. So I decided to turn around and just be late to work (yeah, I'm a junkie). But I was at Sharon center by then and I figured the easiest way would be to take a side street and turn around. Only the street just went back and I turn here and there and the next thing I know I'm freakin' lost. So instead of doing a 180, I keep going thinking it will come out somewhere I know. After all, I have a good sense of direction most of the time. I feel like I'm still headed in the general homeward direction. Only the road goes in a way that's starting to feel really foreign and I start getting worried I really don't know where I am. I start thinking that if something remotely familiar doesn't show up soon, I may have to actually take a half vacation day. But I end up on Bay road, a nice long road that will either dump me in Easton, near home or back in Sharon. Only, because I'm on a part of the road I've never seen, I don't know which way to go. I choose randomly and damnit all if I don't end up back in Sharon (after about 20 minutes of winding scenic roadway). At this point, it's about 9:10 and to go home from here wouldn't put me back at work until almost 10:00, so I force myself to just suffer and get to work. So not only did I arrive late anyway, I still don't have my music/podcasts to get me through the day. I should put together some emergency-music choices and leave it here at work in case this happens again. Because the day is going to drag without some way to alleviate the boredom. Man, I already need a fix. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:35 AM 0 comments Wednesday, May 25, 2005 Is This Thing On? Okay, I'm just gonna delete this fucker once it gets posted, because it's surely not going to act like I want it to. Whatever posted by Evil Wayne | 1:28 PM 0 comments Yet Another Entry I'm still testing the blog upload segment of the journal software. To date, it seems to force a font style and size that I'd understand how to control just yet. I do like the idea of accessing my blog without going thru the web interface, but to date, I've had to go in and fix the entries anyway. This is being uploaded in Courier to see if that makes a difference, as the default Times New Roman and Courier New did not seem to work. I've also noticed that the Archives have stopped being updated. Or should I say the archive function does seem to generate a new link, because when I look in the root, they are there, just not displayed on the sidebar. If I can't fix it, I may have to manually link them (truthfully, the date-range irks me, I'd rather have it say October 2004 than that). posted by Evil Wayne | 11:57 AM 0 comments Tuesday, May 24, 2005 24 According to Steve: Sometime in the last year, I read an article announcing Israel's retirement of the Uzi from official use. The article included the gun's history (it was first introduced 4 decades ago) and thanks to Hollywood, the gun developed a greater reputation then it deserved. Hence the reason Marwan opted to use one during his last stand? You could tell he was a dandy by the way he dressed and the company he kept but really, the entire season went down crapper when he pulled out the machine pistol built by his sworn enemy. It even betrayed him by not destroying his PDA! Kidding aside, I enjoyed this season enough. As a series, its really in class by itself; allowed to pull shit that no other series could get away with. That said, I wish they didn't feel the need to wrap the storyline like they did this season and last. I would have preferred not know one-armed Chase's fate and Jack's until the following season. Also, I think Jack's departure was a little easy/careless. What about the China's satellite? Granted, CTU didn't actually known it was positioned over their LA bureau but they could figure it out. I wonder what will happen to Howard? Think he'll remain in China's custody? Could he be a future villain? Oh yeah, Mandy and Chloe, there series that needs to exist! I ordered the official Mandy garter holster! I can't wait till I receive it!! posted by Evil Wayne | 2:52 PM 0 comments Monday, May 23, 2005 Dream Sequence I dreamt I was aboard a big oil tanker at sea with a group of people. The only one I remember was Joe. Most of the dream took place in the bowels of the ship. Steel corridors, stairwells and a mass of pipes and conduits. There was also an alien on board, although I never actually saw it. We spent most of our time banding together to keep from being eaten, while moving around the inside of the ship. There was either one attempt to trap it in a cargo area or talk of how it had failed, I'm a bit unclear. Most of the crew had already died and we were somewhat adrift, until we came into a harbor where we were stuck. A few other tankers came out and surrounded us, but refused to help. They were clearly there to contain us. Joe and I were on the deck waving flags at the ships to get their attention and the ships seemed to tilt and bounce, causing a giant wave to roll towards us, crashing over the deck and sending us flying. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:31 AM 1 comments Friday, May 20, 2005 Testing the Journal I'm checking out some different journaling software and this one, The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/), has a blogging interface, that I thought I'd try. So if this make it to the website, then it works Let us see. posted by Evil Wayne | 5:15 PM 0 comments Thursday, May 19, 2005 Reading and Writing TheBoy was sick yesterday with a slight fever, yet oddly no other symptoms. It's more like he was just running a little hot than anything else. I took the day off and did a whole lot of nothing but entertain him. Played some PS1 games (because that's all the damned PS2 can handle now) with him and WarHawk without him. He actually seemed to enjoy sitting there telling me when to fire missiles and shot this guy or that. I've been rereading my NaNo novel that I stopped in mid-stream last December. I was about halfway through the story when Christmas sucker punched me and I let it get away from me. But, with most television ending soon, I think I should make a stab at actually finishing it. Getting reacquainted with the story is tough, as I have only a vague idea where I was going next. The general plot line is clear, but the details are fuzzy. I left it in a weird place too, because I'm really dumbfounded as to what I was thinking. Only six months till the next NaNoWriMo. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:53 PM 0 comments Tuesday, May 17, 2005 TiVo DoOver For some time now TiVo's been in MegaBitchGoddess mode where it would freeze, stutter, pixilated and/or completely ignore the remote at the same time. Two weeks ago we sat down for Revelations and it was completely unmatchable through TiVo. It would play for 2 seconds and freeze for 3. Finally I just gave up and unplugged it. After surfing the TiVo community boards, I wasn't so sure it was a dying hard drive. The last patch apparently introduced some kind of bug that was causing freezing, particularly when you changed the channel. But my issues were extreme. Last year, when I thought this was happening, I managed to backup the hard drive to a new, bigger one. But I didn't install it, preferring to let the installed drive fail first. This weekend I finally gave up. Not having TiVo for the last 2 weeks was rough, and if it wasn't the hard drive, it was worth finding out. So I ripped it open and replaced the drive with the one I backed up last August. And Presto! It's working fine so far, plus, I just about doubled the storage capacity. It spend most of Sunday updating the software (it had like 9 months of changed to catch up on). And we lost a couple of things that I was saving - we never did get to see The Peacekeeper Wars :( But TiVo back and life is finally worth living again! posted by Evil Wayne | 9:50 AM 0 comments Monday, May 16, 2005 From The Steve Files: Look on the bright side, at least you'll have family to ship you off to an old folks home when you're wrinkle and gray. Me? The gutter baby, its calling for me... Of course, the gutter is probably cleaner then old folks home but at least you'll be getting laid. And by laid, I mean raped by the male nurses... That doesn't seem so bright after all. Hey, there's always suicide. If you want to make the papers, murder-suicide. Now a days, you need to do something dramtic simply to make the local news. If you need any ideas, let me know. posted by Evil Wayne | 4:11 PM 0 comments Sunday, May 15, 2005 Update I finally got around to updating the sidebar as well as adding some tunes to the Radio Blog (although, is anyone listening to that? I can't seem to access it at work and I'm curious if anyone cares). posted by Evil Wayne | 4:16 PM 0 comments And If That Fails, We Start Throwing Rocks… See? This is what happens when I start trolling the internet at 2 AM. I grew up in Lynn, Mass, directly on the East Coast. After getting my license, the best places to go parking were along Nahant and the causeway (actually, during the late 80's there was a DPW lot that the police did not patrol, for those necessary, steamy moments). Anyway, for those who don’t know, Nahant is an island. Or it should be, there’s a thin stretch of beach making it a peninsula that they built the causeway next to. Growing up we used to hear they had some kind of missiles stationed out there for World War Three during the 50's or the 60's. When you drove out to the causeway, you had to bang a U-turn and sometimes I didn’t and I cruise around the island. There are some places along the far side that had these giant concrete bunkers, or walls that seemed really out of place. But it always seemed like an urban legend. I mean, missiles? In a tiny little New England town? Well, there were. Apparently, right before the days of ICBMs, there was an honest to God program to use missile batteries to shoot down Soviet bombers on their way to bomb big U.S. cities using Ajax and Nike missles (and if that doesn’t qualify as Optimistic, I’m not sure what will). Some were apparently equipped with nukes themselves (although it’s probably still classified if they actually did or not). And damnit all if there wasn’t actually a rocket battery out on Nahant. posted by Evil Wayne | 2:54 AM 0 comments Friday, May 13, 2005 Strange Thumps, Part II Well we finally got the car back and they still don't know what the deal is. Despite taking it on a run to Mexico and back there's was no indications of any Strange and Scary Noises of Undetermined Origins. They're a mystery, like crop circles, or David Hasselhoff. Still, they did find it had some bad tire rods and a busted sway bar or something. Cha-ching! The only lucky thing that happened was that I manage to squeeze in an oil change for my car, which was due about 11,000 miles ago. On the plus side, I didn't have to pay for the 3 or 4 oil changes it would have had since then. On the negative side, I'm probably burning out my engine. Living in the sticks really makes it difficult to get around to these things. When I lived up north, I could walk to the garage if I had to and we had a bus stop right outside the door of my house so it was never an issue with getting a car looked at. But down here, it's a major freakin' ordeal posted by Evil Wayne | 3:48 PM 0 comments Tuesday, May 10, 2005 24 From the Steve Files: I thought nothing could top Chloe with an assault rifle. Then she offers Jack a shoulder to cry. What? Are they going to sit around in their flannel pajamas with oversized cups of tea with oversized names while two cats mill about? Biggest. And hottest. Social. Retard. Ever. She deserves her own show. No. Two of them: an action adventure show with an assult rifle and a advice show candles and cats. I'm contacting FOX, sucka! posted by Evil Wayne | 12:21 PM 0 comments Monday, May 09, 2005 Strange Thumps We're down to one car lately. Last week the wagon developed a serious case of Strange and Scary Noises of Untermined Origins. I'm not a gearhead, so my cursory look under the wheels did not turn up any sticks, rocks or large raccons stuck to the underside of the vehicle. The timing was bad too, because the garage we normally take things to was on vacation. So we've had to do some car gymnastics to juggle having 1 vehicle, 2 jobs and a child in daycare. We put the car in today and while they found some rotted tire rods, but no Thumpy Noise culprit. So they've still got the wagon for "extensive road tests". Which probably mean a road trip to Canada. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:20 PM 2 comments Tuesday, May 03, 2005 I'm Slow Okay, I finally got around to watching the Animatrix - well, half of it - and it's soooo good. Last Flight of Osiris is freakin' fantastic, strictly from an animation point of view. But I dig the exposition on how the machines took over. I've been watching them at lunch and I'll plow through the rest today probably. It's got me wanting to watch at least the first Matrix movie again. In other slow-movie news we watched a brat-pack-80s-a-thon this weekend. Red Dawn, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club were all. (St Elmo's Fire was on, but so were The Simpsons and I've decided to keep it in my Never Actually Having Seen It column). My little epiphany came about near the end of The Breakfast Club. It was during the scene where they're clustered around exposing themselves to each other (not literally...). It occurred to me that adults don't really talk to each other like that. But kids sometimes do, even if they're idealizing the speech for the movie. I think that kids just want to identify with each other. That they're not all alone in how they feel, and that, in the end, despite how different they are on the surface, they're really all the same underneath. See? I've seen this movie at least a dozen times, probably more, since it came out. You probably got that the first time you saw it, didn't you? It only took me 20 years. I. Am. Slow. Oh, and to add insult to injury; I had a big crush on Molly Ringwald. Watching her in The Breakfast Club I actually remember why and I don't blame myself. posted by Evil Wayne | 11:50 PM 0 comments Monday, May 02, 2005 Worship the Computer, Part II It's all I did this weekend; Set up the computers When I finally unpacked the new system, I found that Dell seems to have forgotten one of the DVD drives I ordered. Only they didn't. The bozos at the factory forgot to remove the front plate, because when I fired it up, the computer sees two drives. I even tried to eject it from Windows and there's a buzz, click, thunk from behind the plate. So I had to call them up to make sure that if I opened it, I wasn't going to void a warrenty. Which I would have, but as long as I've got tech support on the phone while I do it, I'm covered. A 10 minute job turned into about 40 mins. The guy couldn't believe it had happened either. He was sure that because the drive won't sit properly if the plate is there, I have to be mistaken. Nope. But I'm sure they're trained to be "surprised" by problems. "That's the first time I've ever heard of that." After that fiasco on Friday, I left the grunt work for Saturday. The two tons of stuff I have on my old system. It's like moving. I have to weed through the last 3 years' worth of pics, videos, documents, music save games and everything else to see if it's worth bringing over. It's a nightmare. Not to mention all of Tine's stuff as well. Thankfully, she isn't the electronic pack-rat that I am. Microsoft has a nice little utility for porting over stuff that came in very useful. Even pulled all my old Outlook emails with it, so I haven't lost anything. Except for a few games that I want to reinstall the systems were running fine as of Sunday morning. I had tried to remove the second hard drive from my old system, but the new one uses some new-fangled connections so all the stuff I have stored there will have to be pulled over to the new system as some point soon. Unfortunately, that's like 60 GB of data. I think I might have to move the tower to under the desk. The new disc drives are loud as hell. I can't hear anything when the ROM drive is running. It almost hurts my ears. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:52 PM 0 comments |
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