The Sopranos is over and the dish washer is running.

Part of me wants to climb into bed and read my book, part of me wants to play games, part of me wants to file some paperwork, and part of me wants to write up the geocaching trip.

The girls will be awake in 7 & 1/2 hours... What to do, what to do?

We just finished a geocache with the Diggs. I am sitting in a park tapping on the laptop as the kids play on the equipment, I'm testing out the new Sprint PCS wireless internet connection and it rocks.

I was a huge pain to get working, but now it's pretty good.

I think after the park, we will go have some ice cream.

Life is good.

It's funny, 'cause it's true.

I thought I'd do the Friday Five tonight.

1. What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?

I like reading, playing games, and goofing around with the kids. Being outdoors is always a plus. The key to me being able to relax is some peace and quiet. If everything around me is loud and busy, I have trouble relaxing.

2. What do you do the moment you get home from work/school/errands?

I put down my briefcase, unload my phone, wallet, keys, etc. Then I talk to the girls and see how there are doing. Usually it's time for dinner, then the girls bath, then putting them to bed and reading. By around 8:30 or so, I get some time to myself.

3. What are your favorite aromatherapeutic smells?

I don't like a lot of smells. I do like a hint of vanilla, coconut, or mint. Anything too strong is irritating to me. Poor Michele, she can never wear much perfume or I complain.

4. Do you feel more relaxed with a group of friends or hanging out by yourself?

Hard to say. Some times I like the peace anf quiet of solitude, but having fun with friends cures much stress.

5. What is something that you feel is relaxing but most people don't?

Playing videogames. Michele refers to it as 'killing nazi's'. When I play games, my mind is focused on doing well on the game and nothing else. My thoughts of work, money, and other stresses disappear for the moment and I am in the moment of the game. I don't think Michele or the rest of my family understand the relief I get after playing games for a bit. They all want me to sleep. Sleep sucks. As Warren Zevon said, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

I stumbled over to Bush Rant for a sec and saw this wonderful graphic.

Thanks to Sandra W for bringing it to my attention.

Being Daddy is being updated again.

Don't tell Michele I had Der Weinerschitzel for lunch today. I had my hair cut at the stylist she makes me go to these days. Much hair, odd smells, wierd people, and other strangeness. I felt the need to get in touch with my manliness. I felt a chili dog would be just right to recalibrate me from the trip.

The company store is out of Kingdom Hearts. Dang nabbit! I was hoping to score the discount on the game. The girls finally asked for a Playstation game unprompted by me. When I say the girls, I include Michele. She wants Kingdom Hearts too.

Scriptlogic

Scriptlogic vulnerability

Nothing to see here, move along...

At the office, the five day attempt to install Gentoo Linux ended in victory. After giving it a good try, I continued to get a kernel panic upon boot. Our resident hacker, Yoshi, was unable to unfuck it as well. I gave it a shot and I like the idea behind Gentoo, but unless you are already a *nix guru, don't attempt it.

I pulled out the Mandrake Linux CDs and reinstalled that. Fairly smooth. I struggled a bit the rpmdrake software manager. On a whim I installed the Ximian/Gnome Desktop. I loved the fact that the install was a command line instruction for lynx to run a script remotely. That install was smooth as glass. I then checked out Gnome for the first time in several years. Holy Finland! IT looks great now. Back when I chose side in the great KDE/Gnome debate, Gnome looked terrible. Now it looks great. I played with the Red Carpet software manager. Red Carpet is incredible. It is, dare I say, easier to use than Windows. More today in my quest to get Evolution working as a corporate mail client with our Exchange servers.

I finally got the license for Spam Assassin at work yesterday. I've been using it at home and it does a fantastic job of blocking Spam. Hopefully this morning I will find a small Inbox and full Junk Mail folder. It's well worth the money.

This morning I spent my 30 minutes on the stationary bike in the garage and watched the end of the Better Off Dead DVD. THe movie finished with about 5 minutes left to ride. I was quite pissed off that there were no bonus materials on the disc. What a ripoff! You know there were some good deleted scenes and outtakes from that flick.

The weather here is quite strange. It's foggy, there is ash falling from the sky due to the fires in the hills, and it's supposed to hit 90+ degrees today. When does Autumn arrive? I'm ready!

Lastly, there's a great movie from Ikea. It's worth the download wait. Click on the TV.

So I know I should be working, but what the hell. The fargin plans for the email migration and the latest round of signatures can wait.

So I ask you all if you like the linkage at the top of the page. What response do I get? My mom posts that she likes the old way better. I'm shocked! Mom isn't down with change? Who would have thunk? Brad walks into my office and says he doesn't like the link of weblogs on the top. Just two people?

In any case, after looking a few other sites, I realize that my design skills are PATHETIC!

Take a look at Escribitionist, Very Big Blog, and Doc Evil. Go ahead, look. I'm be here when you get back...

See how their shit just sings style and attitude? My stuff sings 'engineer learning basic CSS'.

Enough bitching, I need to finish up around here.

Lastly, I finished creating my mother's weblog last night. The URL is supra-sekkrit until she want's it public. Heaven help us.

I've been messing around with the banner linkage.

Good? Bad? You don't care?

After 4+ years of reading slashdot, I finally was able to give a little back. I submitted a brief item on California banning spam from mobile phones. It was deemed worthy.

In other news, Zoe's soccer team, the Black & Yellow Dolphins, won their game today with a score of 5 to 0.

It appears that my friend Paul, has taken me at my word and created a couple Cruft logo buttons. Paul roxxors.

I am proud to present them to you, my loyal readers:

Can you better? I doubt it... You are all worthless and weak. It's not like any of you can run Photoshop or know how to animate graphics...

In other graphic news, I updated Michele's site with a new graphic. Enjoy.

I came up with a new word today.

Shittastic.

I'm sure others have used it before, but I don't care. It's roughly defined as an adjective that describes a noun as extemely shitty.

Common usage would be something like, "I had a shittastic day.", or, "I'm feeling shittastic."

Next...

As seen on Metafilter, if you live in Indiana, find this woman and drag her to the police station. I really would like you to beat her senseless, but that could be considered inciting violence. Just get her away from the child.

Next...

Send good mojo to Martin. His computer is having a shittastic day after being infected by a virus. We're hoping his OS is not completely fuxxored, but it may be. Send your positive mojo.

Next...

A few people have asked for link buttons. As ususal, I have done a shittastic job with my key graphic program, PhotoDeluxe.

Behold:

If you don't like them, then make me something better.

Lastly before I get up from the computer to get another scotch to counter my shittastic day, here's a repost from a post I made at Metafilter about Bush's proposed war on Iraq.

Do you know where Saddam got the VX nerve gas, the anthrax, and his military hardware?

It's all about GREED.

I can only hope that America wakes up to the hijacking of our country by Bush/Cheney.

OK, I'm getting up for more scotch and my Blade II DVD now. Later.

So I was like reading my brother weblog and stuff yesterday, . crookDIMWIT .: Tuesday Tidbits, and I thought that what his did was pretty funny. I asked him to send me the picture of Yoda he had used. I printed out a copy, pasted it to my company ID, and began wearing it around the building. The security in our building, the much storied Pinkerton guards, don't seem to mind that my picture is that of Yoda.

But today I went to the studio for lunch and had to get past the Disney Security folk. The woman checking IDs did a double take on my ID and said, "That's not you." I was forced to remove Yoda and show my real picture. At least someone is on the ball.

After lunch I sat back down at my desk to read this bit of spam in my inbox:

-----Original Message-----
From: Khristina [mailto:magnoliaglv@arsenals.lv]
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 5:09 AM
To: Inbox
Subject: Ik am be looking

Hallo,


I wanting to meet man from West Europe/North America/Asian?
Men in mine Country not so well.

-----End Message-----

I think it's fucking hilarious.

So I'm installing Gentoo Linux on a box at the office. Thanks to the corporate firewalls, the emerge sync process is taking forever. Fargin proxies...

Why am I installing linux on a work box? First I get to do pretty much what I want in regards to computers at work. I try not to go overboard, but there I times I can't resist the lure of using the power my office supplies. Second, it's the future. Maybe not tomorrow, or next month, or even next year, but eventually Microsoft will fall. Let us not forget Ozymandias.

I want to be ahead of the curve on this one. And you can't get far ahead of the curve if you aren't willing to start walking. So I've started walking.

I posted on LA Blogs that we are still having the Weblogging Meetup.

You are invited. It's Wednesday night at 7PM. The link above has the details.

I'm probably dragging my wife and kids along. Since it's in the Vroman's Bookstore, the kids will have food and books to look at, ensuring happiness.

So get off your lazy butt and go to the meetup. You don't have any excuses...

I've been playing around with Web Album generators for a project I've been working on lately.

I made a couple of albums using pictures from Zoe's soccer games. You can see photos from the first and second games of the season. The girls decided the name of the team would be the Black & Yellow Dolphins. Dolphins are quite popular with 6 year old girls. We count 4 dolphin teams in the under 8 group. Go figure.

Anita asked what a soccer parade is in comments below. The soccer parade is when the teams all parade by the stands with their special banner, players and coaches. Here's the picture from the parade of a team coached by our neighbor across the street:

Make sense now? Funny coincidence that there was a story in the LA Times about soccer banners & parades this weekend. You can read the article here. You can use the login of cpunks/cpunks, if you don't want to register.

Back to web albums... I'm looking for one with a few features. I'd like to be able to enter comments that get displayed and I'd also like to be able to add to the album on a continuing basis. Let me know if you have suggestions.

Lastly, it appears that groovymom has got her weblog groove on. Plz show her the love!

Well, I didn't get the free time I was hoping for in this morning. Besides the mound of laundry I had to fold, Michele's plane got in almost 45 minutes early, squeezing my free time even more.

Almost showertime for the girls. Hopefully tonight I'll find some time to go through the last set of pictures off tha camera and get some soccer pictures posted.

Now on my want list is this and this. I yearn for a dual boot WinXP/Linux box. Fuck that boot manager shit. Hardware isolation baby!

It's Sunday morning and hte house is quiet.

The kids are at my parents and Michele is winging her way home from Philly.

A few more things to clean up around here, and I am free to do what I want for a couple hours. I resolve to not spend it in front of the computer.

Just finished 3 & 1/2 hours of soccer parades & pictures. We get a brief rest until 2PM when Zoe's game starts.

This big ball of fire in the sky was making me hot and getting in my eyes. I hope it goes away by 2. Or at elast some clouds....

It's around 7:30 on Friday evening. We just got back from soccer practice and the girls are winding down from the post-practice snack. They are playing Elmo's letter adventure on the Paystation.

I checked fileplanet, and sure enough, Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is available. I'm d/ling it now. 21 minutes to go!

Michele's out of town, so once I wash the girls and put them to bed, it's gaming time. I think I'll even drink a beer.

Time to get off my lazy ass and go start the shower.

A few items of note:

Please welcome in the weblog world, GroovyMom. Our good friend Colleen has joined the extrovert crowd. She hasn't posted much, but I'm sure she'll have a story or two to tell.

My mother is considering creating her own weblog. Anyone have suggestions for the name?

Since I now have access to cheap hosting and domain names cost me $8 I have way too much freedom to do silly things.

One of those silly things is create binaryblockssucks.com.

As you may know, Binaryblocks was a web hosting reseller that went out of business by not paying their bills. I had been using Binaryblocks, and had recommended it to friends and family. When they went out of business, they caused trouble & headache for me and thousands of others.

To give people a place to vent their anger and discuss solutions to problems, I created binaryblockssucks.com. I'll post up a few documents later, but for now, I've installed a forum where people can post whatever they want.

On a side note, Michele headed out for a quilting expedition this morning at 4AM. She is going to be helping at a show and visiting her grandmother. Me and the girls are going to be having some fun until she returns on Sunday. We intend to leave clothes on the floor, play computer games, and not vacuum. Well, maybe I'll vacuum just befroe she returns to avoid the wrath.

It appears we made it through the day without terror.

I feel lucky that while I am sad today, I was not directly linked to the horror a year ago. After watching a few hours of the interviews with family members I realized that I can't even imagine what these people have gone through. Seeing a widowed husband talk about his young children and how they miss their mother was too much. I'm lucky I could turn off the TV. The victim's families don't have this luxury.

Life goes on and we pass this milestone. I can only hope that I don't see somethign this terrible again in my lifetime.

The page I put up today is here.

If you can read this, you are reaching the new host.

Welcome back loyal readers!

The dust has almost settled and Cruft will be back in action soon enough.

Well, there are many, many people mad at binaryblocks.com. There appears to be a reward to track down Jason Piercy, the owner of binaryblocks. Check out the page, it's hilarious.

I was surprised to see that if you do a search on 'binaryblocks' on google, my site comes up. If you find this site via google, I suggest you call cobaltracks to try to get your data off the servers or your site back up.

I'm getting close to moving this site, so stand by for further disruption.

I continue to have trouble with the great binaryblocks disaster.

Not time to post really. Between work and getting people's site's back up, it's a pain. But it appears that Michele's site is up and updated!

It seems that the webhost for this site, Binaryblocks, has not been paying their bills. As a result, today the company that actual runs the servers turned them off.

This has upset many, many people.

As a result, I am having to make arrangement to get this site and others I run hosted elsewhere. What a pain.

We just had an earthquake.

Everyone is safe. I predict a 4.2.

Michele was right, it was earthquake weather.

Brad and I have debating the cost of pizza dough via weblogs.

He wrote an excellent cost analysis of the store bought pizza dough versus dough made from scratch.

Here's what Brad didn't know...

The dough from Trader Joe's is not boboli style, it is ready to knead pizza dough. I suggest that while it is possible to save 18¢ if you are careful, you still get the tactile enjoyment of kneading dough and making the shape and thickness of your pizza.

Premade dough saves not only the time, but the mess of flour involved in the scratch dough creation.

Dare I claim victory in the Pizza Dough debate?

For to many years, I played online games and found my calling fighting the players that tried to hurt other players. I wrtoe up many stories about these fights. After 4 years, I finally burned out on the nightly routine and decided to take a break. The grief players have not.

After 5 years, grief players have made the front page. I guess when the big money of Sony & Microsoft gets involved it takes on a financial risk. This morning's LA Times has a front page article about online grief players. (You can use the username/pass of cpunks/cpunks to get in.)

Old habits die hard. The first thing I did after reading the article was get on the computer and try to track down the griefer, Kurt Frerichs, mentioned by name in the article. What I would do when I tracked him down, I'm not sure. But the urge to go after him with vengance was strong. I found a few things, but nothing that clearly tied the Kurt Frerichs mentioned in the article with the Kurt Frerichs I found via searches.

I wrote up a little page on How to make a up of tea.

Enjoy.

A couple days ago I read on Flying W Things Brad's post on his own weblogging. While I am not agains the occasional navel gaze, I beg to different with his conclusions.

IMHO, a weblog should be what it's creator wants. Audience be damned. If I want to wax on eloquently about an esoteric topic that everyone else find boring, too bad for the world. It's my farking weblog.

So my opinion for Brad is simple, write what you want, as long as you want. So much of our lives are spent following the rules and expectations of others. Everyone needs a place where they can do what they want with no regard for what others think appropriate.