The Empirical Manifesto

Ended up watching Aeon Flux. It was pretty good. I hope Ultraviolet is better. Thought I heard Eric Serra in the score, turns out it was Graeme Revell. Not to shabby. To date, the only Graeme Revell I don't despise is The Saint. I LOVE that one.

Steaks were perfect, spuds were perfect (started them about half an hour before I threw the steaks on) and stir-grilled some snap peas that came out crunchy, but flavorful. Tecate, Carta Blanca, Dos Equis, and Dos Equis Amber throughout. What a wonderful end to the week!

So it looks like a .5 terabyte RAID vault is not quite in the cards. I have something like 3.5GB left on my internal mac drive (st0rage). I do have another anemic 30GB laptop drive which,if coupled with a USB 2.0 enclosure would increase st0rage at least until the vault thing comes to fruition. Yes, the entire internal drive of the mini is iTunes, currently sitting at 34GB.

...sleep...

Picked up the following soundtracks:

Stargate
Over the Hedge
Deep Impact
The Island

Back up your computer, upgrade storage capacity or easily transfer files with this stylish, compact and user-friendly drive. Expand your digital life by storing more photos, videos, music, and files with the LaCie mini drive - the ideal companion hard drive for Mac mini. Its unique 4-corner crown fits seamlessly into the underside of the Mac mini to create a stable, symbiotic harmony. The LaCie mini drive was brilliantly engineered to allow for a natural cooling airflow to move between these two drives for greater heat dissipation. It offers convenient plug & play and ultra-quiet operation. Stack several LaCie mini drives under the Mac mini for additional capacity or use it with any other computer with a FireWire connection.

I gotta admit, I could give a rat's ass about buffer size, arial density, or platter rotation speed. As long my new drive contains symbiotic harmony, I'm good. I'm good.

Watched Batman Begins this afternoon, and I must admit, I really enjoyed it. I found it interesting and engaging. It was well cast, and they did a good job. I also enjoyed the score immensely as an accompaniment to the movie, much more so than standalone. Then later, when my inlaws called as they had arrived in town early - I loaded up the kids and slid behind the wheel of my wife's black Saturn wagon, which felt then and there, like the batmobile! I drove as such. What fun! The sound of the engine in movie was great. And I really enjoyed the pod-racing sound of the engine braking in the turns. Every stunt in that car was real, no CGI for this Batmobile!



Well, I'm yawning, Tony's listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn, David's drinking beer, Carla's already asleep, and Tom is back on crack.

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery.

Chose Batman Begins to be my HQ-mode testing on the Magnavox. Granted, it runs 2:30 (read three DVD's) but I have yet to see it, and when I do...*shivers*

My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.

I've read quite a bit on the X-Men: The Last Stand score composed by John Powell, and then picked it up, listened to it, ripped it - tar'd it, scp'd it to work, listened to it there - anyway, I have to give this one to schpydurx, but I do prefer Powell's score to Mr. & Mrs. Smith. There, I've said it. It's just so fantastic. Sorry for giving you grief Tom, you're right - worth having.

My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.

I'm taking tomorrow off, so I probably won't be as active as usual. Then again, I may be MORE active. Who knows. As soon as the wife found out about my decision, she started in on where we would go and what we would do...

Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy.

Didn't get a chance to grill tonight, but dinner was fantastic nonetheless. Wife had shredded some chicken I grilled a few nights ago and made the most fabulous quesdilla's yet. Ain't nuthin wrong with dat!

The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.

Did not enjoy Lost as much as I wanted to. I'm new to Michael Giacchino (being introduced to him in The Incredibles) and nothing has come even close to that sound - save MI:3 where I can pick him out every now and again. In a surprising move, Lord of War was excellent, but I've only heard it once now, and require another listen or two before I suggest it.

My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets.

Daisy jumped on my desk while I was sitting here and managed to, in about 4 seconds, power on my Solaris box, rename an avi, bring up the Dashboard, and knock all the Batmobiles off my desk! There's a lot of untapped computing power under that fur. If only I could get her to code.

When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds - pretty standard really.



At the age of twelve I received my first scribe.

Picked up today:

Chronicles of Narnia Soundtrack
Final Fantasy Advent Children Soundtrack

At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles.

Still want on DVD & CD: The Godfather Trilogy. Even I have to admit, my uber-geekdom laserdisc player is getting dated.

There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking - I highly suggest you try it.

The grill is the stove I never had. It's just massive. We had a Cinco de Mayo celebration Friday night. I was sauteing on the side-burner and boiling stock for the chicken chipotle soup on the left two burners and grilling THREE quesadilla's on the right. It was fantastical. The weather was perfect (if not a little warm), salsa music was playing on the deck and Carla was mixing up margaritas! The chips were crispy and the salsa cold. The neighborhood kids stopped by in droves and each left with a slice of quesadilla. The chicken chipotle soup was way to spicy for the ladies, so I've been eating on it the last three meals, and it leaves my belly hot for several hours after each meal - fantastic! Anyway, tons of fun.



So we watched Lord of War. Tom saw a trailer which made the movie look like a comedy. It was anything but. Anyway, great soundtrack, lots of good, hard-hitting songs from the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Now this part - is funny. Normally, when I'm looking for a score, I usually only find the soundtrack. This time, I was actually looking for the soundtrack, but got the score! So, bonus. Sorry galinda822!

These cats are worse than children! They are into EVERYTHING! Both of them have just started this habit where they will climb me. If I am standing still, they will leap at me, then make their way up my person, usually laying down once they've reached my shoulders. And today, while wearing a $75 Polo, Niobe tried to eat a hole through my shirt! Grrrrr. (heh - incidentally, the same shirt in my grill avatar; that's it - these wildcats are after the beef smell infused in the threads!) Then Daisy disappeared. That pissed me off. She doesn't do it often. Showed up again just before midnight. I love my Daisy.

Dreamed I had an Italian dinner with celtmanx and his folks; he ordered the same thing he always orders, the Cannilloni. Also dreamed the wife and I went back to Germany together on vacation. I wanted to bypass traffic, so I was driving a tiny yellow dune buggy on the sidewalks. Until it ran out of power. Then we marched up this enormous parking garage to get to the car rental place, but I kept thinking, "Why not just take the train?" They had a kiosk in the German car rental place in which you could rent mac mini's at 65 Deutsch Marks a day. I thought that was a pretty good price.

All I have to do today is mow the lawn.



That picture reminds me. Our Missori neighbors were open the first time I unfolded that chair with the Texas flag on it. I asked them, "Now that I live in St. Louis, might as well get a chair with the Missouri flag on it. Think they make one?" The answer was, "No." It was sitting next to my cooler with the Texas flag on it. "What about one of these?" Again, "No." Now, I've lived a lot of places. Why are us Texans so damn proud of our flag?

Also, discovered 13x2000 First Edition Hot Wheels, 16x1999 First Editions, and 3x1998. Also 4 more Daytona's. Previous entry updated with this new information.

There's gay (http://spaces.msn.com/ehowton), and there's most gay (only being able to post to http://spaces.msn.com with Internet Explorer). Any shade or even hint of gayness pisses me off. You can imagine my mood after running into this. Grrrrr.

I'm ran into a rut with my new Delta Flyer gif. Once I resize the preview images I presented to the correct size, the one my public picked, #5 becomes lost in the color. Hmmmm. Back to the drawing board. I took one of the plain-jane ships, separated it from it's deep-space background, rendered clouds with a trekkish blue/green tint to it, pasted the ship into that and ran a 25% smudge across the stern of the ship and it's port winglet, touching up the entire outline of the ship with a 50% blur before adding a spotlight effect from the rear. And again, I'd like to apologize for the entire polling disaster.



Poor little CPU fan on my laptop is running 90% of the time now. 20+ browser tabs, ST with 8 sessions, gAIM with 10 sessions, Lotus Notes with 15 tabs & calendar, Outlook with six messages open, two IE windows, Windows explorer, two ms-dos consoles, three putty sessions, calculator, notepad (my all-time favorite MS app), Access, four Excel spreadsheets, iTunes, Thunderbird, Photoshop Elements 4.0, and our ticketing system...Stupid laptop.

Ah, that wasn't fair. My little mac mini at home can't keep up with me any more either. I've begun working more and more on my uber-XP box. NOW I see why Tony wanted his dual-proc G5 tower. Speaking of OSX, my USB-attached CF card reader has stopped working on every box I own, except my linux box. Discuss.

Since I changed themes on my lj to one with a black background, the transparent gif I use for my page edits is no longer an effective visual (as it it black) so I went about updating it. First of all, I moved from a Star Trek font, to the Diablo II font (Exocet). Easy - just make it white instead of black, and go. Unless...I'm on someone's friend's page with a white background. Right. I tried a variety of primary colors, but they all looked like ass. Fine. I put a nice drop shadow on it, so it could be black, and still visible on both backgrounds. Not quite. Between the cross in the 'O' as one example, retained white, not being large enough to be considered selectable for transparency. I then bounced back and forth with some success between outer glow (which outlined the black letters perfectly) and emboss & inner glow. However, without a proper matte selection for primary background color (we're talking black & white here - literally) the rough edges surrounding the soft glow made it look my 3-year-old's work. After much thought, I decided on an image, which could be turned into a transparent gif easily, and retain the soft glow of the outlined text atop that - which would translate easily to any color background. What image, though? Because I was using the Exocet font, a sword sounded like a good idea, and one which would translate easily to my mind's eye - a slim, lengthy image! I browsed a sword site under the 'fantasy' collection, as I wanted as ornate a hilt as possible, and found a beautiful specimen. CMD-CTRL-SHIT 4 overrode the php image holder disallowing 'Save As' and crop/rotate/resize in Photoshop gave me the perfect orientation. But the blade was wrong. Found a broadsword blade: nip/tuck/ta-da! I must've saved this image 15 times using different gif options, as it looked absolutely beautiful on every browser/OS combination except *ahem* my primary system: Firefox/OSX. Oh well. Posted anyway:



I updated Firefox for OSX from 1.0.5 to 1.5.0.3 and it fixed the .gif issue.

Polls are gay. User-created polls are even gayer. However, I was going to ask you, my readership a question, and figured that a poll used in this instance might be less gay, and certainly easier to tabulate. Please provide your input. Thank you:

[Poll #729408]

(Delta Flyer 2 being the unmarked animated gif)

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EricHowton: "concatenate the file, pipe it to 'strings' which extracts all text, then pipe that to more for pagination."
drax0r: You get -1 points for unnecessary use of the cat command.
EricHowton: heh -was talking to programmers



Apparently, you can't vote if your not logged in, which means no anonymous voting. Nice. I told you these were gay!

heh:

Xanga will be down today from 7 am - 2 pm EST, as we move our servers to a new network facility (we ran out of room in our old one). We're loading a few hundred servers onto a truck, driving them across the Hudson River, and reassembling them in New Jersey. We'll get the site up and running again as soon as we can!

Thanks for your patience,
The Xanga Team

Bought a 5-pack roll +1 (2x3-can special pricing) of Grizzly this morning at QT. Hand him my card, he swipes it and asks, "Credit or debit?" I give him my standard answer, "Your preference." As I've noticed different proprietors prefer using one or the other based upon either certain charges associated with one or the ease of the other. With a line of people behind me, all in a hurry to get to work, he loudly exclaims, "It's your money, man! Your money! You decide!" Nice. Let me see if I can translate my answer here, for you, the common man who works at QT and possibly reads random lj entries: "I DON'T GIVE A RATS ASS HOW YOU DEBIT MY CHECKING ACCOUNT."

Grilled salmon in the rain yesterday when I got home. It was perfect. Friday night is our order-out night, and the day I get to bring home a brand-spanking new case of Pilzner Urquell! I love that beer, you know. To me, there is no more perfect beer on the planet. So cold, so fresh, so damn tasty! But of course that's all the wife will drink as well, which is always a double-edged sword. On one hand, I think she's awesome because of it, and we only ever have one type of beer in the fridge. On the other of course, She's drinking my beer! And Friday night is the one night a week we turn on the television. We've got catching up to do on The Sopranos.

I only post on lj, however, not everyone is as singularly minded as I am, they jump around - post everywhere! Have you ever tried to follow a thread on xanga? Following a conversation is a nightmare. And as drax0r heh, heh, pointed out all responses are posted on the corresponding person's page? wtf? My point is, in order to effectively post (or sometimes to post at all) an account is required. I regret to admit to the following:












Carla took off work Thursday, Friday & Monday. As she was leaving the office she exclaimed, "SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY!" I was mortified! To her credit, she was unfamilier with the euphemism.

My wife's uncle was diagnosed with stage four lymphatic cancer, and we went to Wichita to comfort her mother and to see her uncle. He was in great spirits, and I enjoyed each visit we had with him. We will possibly be going to Wichita once a month throughout the treatment, which is on 21-day cycles until further notice.

lookin' for a little affection

Astro is on his way to St. Louis with five Begnal kittens, two of which we get to pick. We've decided that Daisy bringing us two bunnies was her way of telling us that she wants some friends.

I took a shot as a contestant on the Love Connection

Bought my third set of Dale-II's whilst in Wichita. Gotta love the Dale-II's! Unfortunately, danzigfried wasn't wearing his during our lunch at Chipotle.

The audience voted and you know they picked a winner

Our plans were to come back Saturday or Sunday, but he was not allowed visitors after Friday, so we packed up the car, and drove back last night, arriving about midnight - a seven hour trip. Guzzled an energy drink and hit the road. stuf123, this one's for you dude:



I took my date to the Hilton for Medina and some dinner

Mother-in-law's mobo appears fried. I think I have one of Tony's old Socket 478 motherboards, but will require a CPU and some memory, as I'm sure I don't have any spare DDR laying around. I went to CompUSA today to price processors and a new video card for my XP box. I had to crack mine open to see what I had, as its been so long since I built it:

Existing Card:

GeForce 5300
128MB DDR2
250MHz Engine
350MHz RAMDAC

---

Possible New Card:

GeForce 6600
256MB DDR3
500MHz Engine
400MHz Dual-RAMDAC

She had a few drinks, I'm thinkin' soon what I'll be gettin'

It looks like xirr rebooted at 1521.

Instead she started talkin' about plans for a weddin'

My boy and I are going to go out back and pretend to be Zeo Power Rangers. I'll be Jason, the Gold Ranger, my son will be Tommy, the Red Ranger. I can't wait. *eyeroll*

Said wait, slow down, love, not so fast, says "I'll be seein' ya"

Didn't sleep well at all last night, but I did get about an hour of DS2 in, which is always nice. Unpacked this morning, went grocery shopping, and plan on getting the kids down about 2000 tonight. I sure hope I rest well this evening. Tomorrow, mow the lawn, get things ready for work Monday, and do as little as possible in-between!

That's why I found you don't play around

I may try to pretend that Gold Ranger is chasing bad guys with the lawn mower and kill two birds with one stone!

With the Funky Cold Medina!