The Empirical Manifesto

Purchased at Best Buy:

• Soundtracks




1. The Great Escape


2. The Omen (2006)


3. The Manchurian Candidate




• Movies




1. Stargate


2. The Godfather Trilogy

Was thrilled to find The Great Escape. All my score purchases were Varese Sarabande's, a label I was completely unfamiliar with until swashbuckler332 pointed them out to me last month. I was also shocked that of all places, Best Buy was carrying them. The Manchurian Candidate release contains both the 1962 and the 2004 scores, so double bonus for me! (I never saw the 2004 release - I mean, how could it possibly even compare to the 1962 version???) The Omen (2006) is dedicated to Jerry Goldsmith and contains a track entitled 'Omen 76/06' which immediately made me want to listen to The Boys of Brazil which I discover is not only not available, but apparently my dad's LP is worth $100. Wow. I put away three more, one of them being a Klaus Badelt score (who, as a Zimmer understudy and who's work on Pirates I found uninspired, I was a little nervous to spend the $15 on, Nanny McPhee (Patrick Doyle) which I would prefer to hear at least a small preview of first, and Hero - which was the hardest to put back because not only did I greatly enjoy Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but Itzak Perleman plays on this as well (Yo-Yo Ma played on CTHD).

Stargate is the Ultimate Edition, widescreen version (remember the wife wants me to replace my laserdiscs with DVD's) and was priced at an incomprehensible $6.99. A steal as far as I was concerned, but believe it or not, it rang up at $4.99 It boggles the mind.

---

Boy's been doing real hitting the ball out back. As I don't have a sport-bone in my body, I find this puzzling, but nonetheless want him to enjoy what he does and open up to new things. So today, in lieu of a toy - I got a couple of mitts and a T-Ball (which I discovered just today, is the size of a baseball, but soft). I spent half an hour or so out back today teaching him to catch. I wish my father was as patient with me as I am with him. As I have no expectation of 'pushing' him to any particular goal, I'm hoping he'll have more fun and give us something to do together. Furthermore, a lot of the tricks I learned in actually wearing a mitt and catching a ball, I learned later in life - not at Little League. So I try to impart these things to him to make him more effective. Either way, my goal is to have something to do with the boy, and to have fun doing it. I hope this can be one of those things.

For my own mitt, and given Target's (I hate Target) limited selection, gloves were between $60 (soft, Corinthian leather - think Ricardo Montalban selling Cordoba's) and $20 (hard plastic-like material). Well, drax0r's seen how long I take to choose. And given the fact I almost couldn't hold a T-Ball in the softball gloves, I settled on a nice, leather, oversized baseball glove (which could easily hold either size ball) for $35. Now I just hope we'll use them.

---

Drove a 2004 Dodge Stratus R/T. It was very similar to my Sebring, minus all the leather, and with the addition of ground effects and a larger 3.0 litre V6. I asked about the Challenger and was told it would be in showroom floors Fall of '07 and that the base model was priced at $45k. I don't think I'll be buying a Challenger. The Stratus was a little rough on the paint & sunroof, but for an asking price of $15k, I could probably negotiate down closer to $10k. Several factors are involved here, however. My Cav, though I despise it, has never given me a bit of trouble. Ever. My Sebring not so much. This one had 40k miles on it, with a factory warranty of 30k miles still left on it. The Cav's has expired. Furthermore, (once again) I find that even with my very-high credit rating, Missouri interest on used cars is 7%. I WOULDN'T PAY SEVEN PERCENT FOR A CAR IF IT MEANT I HAD TO WALK TO WORK. Sales tax is higher than in Wichita, but lower than in Dallas. Meh. I think I'll just save back my car payments for a year or so once mine are paid off and just pay cash. Like I'll get anything outta the Cav anyway on trade-in.

---

Maybe I'll watch Stargate tonight...Or perhaps Serenity again, as I've had a hankering.

Today I picked up:

1. Superman Returns


2. Prince of Persia Offical Trilogy Soundtrack


3. Kate Bush: Aerial 2-disc set


4. The New World (Horner)


5. The Omen (1976)


6. X-Men (the first one)


7. Downloaded the F-Zero 'soundtrack' (heh, SNES)


8. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly - Expanded Edition


9. Cabaret


10. Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift


11. The Godfather, Part II (to complete my collection)


12. Wicked (the musical)


13. Terminator 2

Adding artwork took forever, but Superman Returns gave me goosebumps!

Long day at work. Came home to more work. My wife and her father had picked up the pantry for the kitchen, and he was waiting for me to get home to help him move everything in and start installing it. Then my daughter locked her bedroom door. It was the master bedroom and had a key lock. I had to punch out the doorknob just to get in her room. I'll have to replace that with a non-locking doorknow tomorrow. So during the electrical part of the kitchen, my father-in-law killed the power to all the computers during the move of the kitchen outlet, which corrrupted my recently moved iTunes database. No problem, I update the shortcuts and...nothing. Busted assed. I estimate I've only lost 10GB of songs. Oh, I still have them on spinning disk, just not in the database. I'm not too happy. I am considering (because I now have the drive space) re-importing EVERYTHING. This could take hours and I'm sure I'll lose my hard-earned and tediously perfect album art. Add to that when the computer rebooted, it brought up my old sc-trans executable which is pointing to the now non-existant iTunes path creating a 40GB log file which filled my primary drive. *sigh* Again, I'm not very happy about all of this, and dreading any course of action I need to take. Even though I have every piece of album art online, it's in quark's gallery - which is offline until I get my firewall in place, which is even more time. I'm exhausted.

Tried a variety of things; moving errant folders into the iTunes folders, 'resetting' my path (which appeared to re-read the database) and 'consolidating' my music, but I think the entire time it was simply working off the corrupted database which does me no good. Furthermore, my new 160GB drive is formatted with FAT-32. How gay is that?

Grrrrr.

One last thing. I've noticed in the past with iTunes, if I select an entire folder to 'Add to Library' as opposed to shift-select'ing them...I sometimes get multiples of the songs. I'll get 26-tracks of a 13-track album. I'm really scared to 'Add to Library' my entire 42GB worth of music because of this. I could be creating more a headache once this operation is complete. And I'm unsure if it will complete the 8-hours I am asleep...

Fsck!

Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Ok - it's kicked off. 9637 songs x 1 second per song / 60 = ~3 hours. Not too bad I guess. Lost my 'last played' and 'Play Count' too. *sigh* That's how I keep track of what I've listened to and when. I also lose my 'Date Added' which is how I like to keep my playlist arranged. I bet I'm too angry to sleep tonight.

This sucks so bad.

An entire dynasty - lost!

I am so sick and tired of computers. I think I'll...do something else for a living. Digging ditches sounds like fun.

...time passes...

Ok, let's be reasonable. Perhaps, just perhaps - I can recreate the lost 10GB (mostly that Final Fantasy collection) with this new database...extract what was lost from it; reinstate the old database and add to it what I lost. I'm sure that's the next course of action. Now if I just had the time to accomplish all that.

So tired...




To do: Research a good distro of OpenSolaris...

My alarm went off. As my head was on the pillow, I saw my alarm clock sideways, and as my glasses were sitting on the end table, I squinted. I couldn't make out the time. Something was blocking the display. I reach my hand out to move the obstruction. There wasn't one. I've only had five hours of sleep. Trying...to...think. I sit up, put on my glasses and stare at the clock. Sure enough, "J:20" Crap alarm clock. Cost me $50 and took me half an hour to pick out a year ago. Poor Tony, suffering next to me while I sweated over the features. Once, we went to Fry's to pick out cases for our computers. He chose his in 14-seconds. I took nearly a full hour.

What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.

Stayed up late working on my new avatar last night. It's some of my best work to date, if for no other reason than the lack of good source material, and what I was actually able to accomplish with what I had. The subject was similar in color to the background making for a near impossible extraction, so I had to roll with it. First off I had to rotate the image 45-degrees just to get it visible enough at the size limitations. Then, using the color scheme, rendered some clouds, clone-stamped the other areas by hand, brought out the foreground with a spotlight effect and added a lens flare. Fantastic!

Unbelievable.

Reprising my role as Grill Master this evening, my first act will be to grill salmon for dinner! I can't wait to light that cigar, stroll out on my deck, and fire up that grill. Of course they're now linking grilling to cancer. Carcinogens from dripping fat hitting the flash plates and the char produced from ultra-seared meat. Nice. That's one tip I didn't need to hear about SomeBritInMass!

Marty, you're not thinking fourth dimensionally!

So yesterday, even though the IS department is not responsible for meeting setup, I get a call from one our Directors. It was her meeting, and in it she had her boss. So I go up there. The projector was setup in the middle of a box of tables strung with interconnected hubs and power strips. "What can I help you with?" I ask the Director. "BIGGER!" yells her boss, throwing his hands into the air. "Can we increase the screen size?" she asks me. "BIGGER!" he yells again. I try to NOT give him my tone it down, asshole I am so done with your mouth looks. "BIGGER!" he yells again as I carefully roll the cart containing the projector on it. I reach the limit of the cabling. "BIGGER!" he yells yet again. "I WANT THE PICTURE ACROSS THE ENTIRE SCREEN." He grabs the cart, and pulls it back further, dragging half the powerstrips and hubs to the floor. I know I visibly sighed. There was nothing more I could do but leave. I shit you not, I heard one last time, "BIGGER!"

Yeah, I know, I got a real problem with that.

Later, on http://ehowton.livejournal.com:

(4:25:12 PM) drax0r: I'm writing a post about morning jazz
(4:30:53 PM) EricHowton: I'm going to write about the proposed legislation curbing bandwidth access and speeds from the telecommunications lobbyists because they feel they bear the brunt of the burden providing access which allows entrepreneurial companies to get rich off their lines without them getting a slice of the pie.

AND:

(4:45:03 PM) EricHowton: I don't know which is worse.
(4:45:12 PM) drax0r: ?
(4:45:13 PM) EricHowton: Living with my wife who, every single day reminds me I haven't submitted an expense report for six months, or...
(4:46:18 PM) drax0r: That. That's worse. There's nothing you could say now that would make me think there's something worse than that.
(4:46:54 PM) EricHowton: Submitting a 6-month old expense report to my boss.
(4:47:30 PM) drax0r: Wow.
(4:47:45 PM) drax0r: That's a tough one.