Category: Life

Checklist of things to do when Heather leaves:

1. Turn on lights in all rooms in house.
2. Turn on all radios, softly, so I don’t have to walk into an achingly silent room.
3. Practice Unreal Tournament 2003 to catch up with her 733t skillz at it while she’s off away from the Arena.
4. Order pizza.
5. Drink beer.
6. Watch DVDs.

Same as last time.

For those of you who are paranoid enough to want a secret door but are trusting enough to buy one off the shelf, on your credit card, there’s Hidden Doors.com.

This will come in handy in some future trivia game:

Mantacore.

You’re welcome.

A San Francisco magazine offers Dorkstorm: The Annihilation: The ten geekiest hobbies.

Although I score pretty highly, I cannot imagine mixing Collectible Card Games and Dungeons and Dragons in a single person, but then again I am one of the role players throwing four-sided dice in the bloody CCG vs RPG wars that used to take place at GenCon. I mean, for crying out loud, Collectible Card Games take the worst aspect of role playing games–rules lawyers magic users who thought the point of the game was their demonstration of arcane computations and recombinations of magic which invloved spending a lot of a gaming session flipping through supplemental spell books and outwitting the game master–and made that worst aspect a game into itself.

Oops. I guess that little screed probably detracted from my utter sexability more than my creepy Peace Gallery picture.

Ech, it’s like washing your mouth out with some cheap malternative beverage watered down by a club down on Washington that won’t let you in with tennis shoes, and my bathroom has fewer hot chicks with tattoos.

Also, it doesn’t burn as much as the regular Listerine, which leads one to wonder if it’s as effective. As with an actual dentist visit, one equates sheer pain with success.

You know, an olive is really nothing more than a salty little grape, no matter what Athena told the Greeks.

The Book of Ratings grades Dungeons and Dragons monsters. For example, the blink dog:

These intelligent, teleporting, other-dimensional fox terriers are the natural enemies of displacer beasts. I love that Gygax had this whole magic-spewing ecosystem going on. Of course blink dogs are the natural enemies of displacer beasts! And esophagus monsters feed on the tender leaves of the rare-but-majestic elf ficus! It all fits together! Anyhow, blink dogs are chaotic good, which means that they’re one of the few creatures in the Monster Manual that don’t exist solely to guard treasure and draw blood. Instead they can aid the party, provide information, and look really surprised when you kill them to search their spleen for emeralds. C-

(Link courtesy Brock Sides at Signifying Nothing.)

As a reminder, Chuck Norris becomes eligible for Social Security next year.

Now, to quote the eminently quotable Eliza, “How do you feel about that?”

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things does not belong.

Can you spot it?

Click for full size

Beer for Soldiers

Books for Soldiers

The combination, of course, would be Late Night Philsophical Rambling Discussions for Soldiers, but leave that to them.

I don’t know why I felt the need to post this; perhaps because I spent yesterday reviving and relighting old clone (remember when we called them “clones”?) boxes, including my first foray into Windows 95, an old Packard Bell Pentium 233 (but with MMX technology, werd) which I bought to go in my first apartment in 1998.

This journal entry was written on an old 286-10 box running MS DOS 4.0 and LotusWorks. But I guess we’ll come to that by and by.

. . . .

I laid to rest an old friend today. A friend I had known for years, since the beginning of high school. A friend that was always there for me, that I could depend on for a little recreation when I needed it, to impose logic on the topsy-turvy world that adolescence too often proves to be has been placed in the box.

I do not speak of a friend placed in his or her coffin, but rather of my old Commodore 64 home computer. I prefer to think of it as a personal computer, or even a friend. We shared a lot of time together, and I began to feel affection for it, I have discovered now that I have had to put it in the closet.

We first met toward the end of my middle school career in a little hamlet in Missouri where there were few actual people to waste my time on. It was a Christmas gift from my mother, a treasure than in its prime of its technology, the creme-de-la-creme of personal computers. Its actual position in the marketplace and high standing among its users was of little concern to me. It was a COMPUTER. And it was MINE.

It is hard to trace the actual roots of my affection for it in our early relationship. We played a few games together, trivial things now that I reflect on them. But a bond was developing as I fought my way through waves of defending Russians in Rush’N’Attack and evil martial artists in Yie Ar Kung Fu. My old Commodore kept me entertained on nights when the rain rumbled upon the roof of our mobile home or when I was grounded for some minute infraction of the house rules.

Then, as the time we had known each other became measured in months and then years, I grew to learn more about it. Commodore Basic 2.0 was my second language and Spanish only my third. I learned how to program it and make it do what I wanted. It was a novel way of impressing my family, a modern version of the old after-dinner talent shows. Aunts and uncles would come into my room to see what incredible feats I could perform with my toy. We were a team, a Mutt-and-Jeff, a duo, inseparable. I was the brains and it was the brawn.

As most children (or at least those who read the Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald) are, apt to consider themselves bold entrepreneurs, we became partners in a series of hare-brained schemes to make ourselves rich. The abortive attempts included a weekly advertising circular, which my Commodore could not handle with any success, and a pay-per-download program service. Neither got very far, but it was not due to a lack of an effort by my faithful computer. The only way it could help me in my attempts at wealth was a secondary position in my lawn-mowing business as a sign-maker.

It helped me with school, too. I used its word-processing abilities to write papers throughout high school, printing them in low-quality dot matrix type when other students were still handing in handwritten research papers. It also saw my first stumbling attempts at novels, hidden away somewhere yet on disks for future generations to view and snicker.

Our relationship faltered as I moved on to college. My time dwindled and my needs changed. I bought a new computer that now occupies the center of my desk, the old Commodore banished to some dark corner of my new room. Our relationship did not die suddenly, for it was still present if I needed a quick game of Tetris to easy my mind or distract me from some impending paper. The usage dwindled, however, and its main function of late has been acting as a dust cover for the corner of a desk. When it came time to clean my room, I came to terms with the distance between us and finally had to make the decision to put it away.

With heavy heart I unplugged the various cords and carefully wound them. I placed the components of the Commodore in its new home gingerly, fearing I might damage its fragile innards by this simple act as opposed to the numerous falls it has suffered over the years. I looked at all the software I had acquired over the years, some games unsolved and some utilities unopened. I then sifted through the stacks of computer related printouts I had accumulated, the half-completed programs and game notes offering a testimony to its past usefulness, and almost pleading for a reprieve.

If the computer were alive, it would dread the threat of the box. I will probably never use it again. The box is a veritable coffin for computers, the bottom of the closet its graveyard. It now rests in peace with my old TIs, other relics of the early years of the computer revolution. I fear I will not use it again, only store it until such a time as I no longer care about it enough that I can throw it away.

Just plastic and silicon and little chips. The dreams and aspirations, the triumphs and tragedies of a million games and a million dreams shared. Goodbye old friend.

If it brings a tear to your eye, you’re definitely a geek. Probably reading this on a Linux box, too, you psycho.

Ever had one of your favorite undergarments rust from repeated trips through the washing machine?

What, is it just me?

Yeah, I am down with the whole cam locking thing, as I spent far too much of my evening assembling a new pressboard file cabinet. Sure, it’s a step above Sauder and it’s a nice shade of cherry (until it’s a nice shade of cherry scarred into dappled beauty of revealed pressboard), but come on, it’s the hot dog of wood with painted plastic relish.

I don’t want to dwell on the fact that Michelle Malkin has a home office done in pressboard; cripes, I was hoping to escape into the rarified world of furniture that will last to be antiques, made of real wood, and not just pine or maple. But if she cannot escape it by becoming a prized public intellectual, successful columnist, best selling author, and glamourous IMAO t-shirt model, what hope have I?

In my e-mail box today:

Perverts.

From today’s column:

The New York Times turned its attention to men’s hats last month. Hats, it said, are enjoying “an unforeseen resurgence” in popularity. The “unforeseen” is puzzling, since the media have been announcing men’s hats are back regularly for the past 40 years.

“Hats are back,” the Fresno Bee noted last year. “Hats are once again cool,” the Tulsa World wrote in 2002. In 2001, the Chattanooga Times Free Press trumpeted “hats are back.” In 2000, the Chicago Tribune suggested “the hat is making a comeback.”

“Hats,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune observed in 1999, “are back.” And on and on and on.

But hats are not back, and probably are never coming back, though the reason why is lost to general memory. Everyone has seen old photographs of crowds at baseball games, and marveled at the unbroken sea of hats. What we do not realize is that many, perhaps most, of those men hated wearing hats, which were expensive, easily lost and a bother. They all wore hats because they had to.

I say hats never went out of style.

I’ll hold him, Brock; you hat him.