Two week plan

I dropped Michele and the girls off at the airport this morning at 5AM. They arrived safely this afternoon in Cincinnati for a two week visit.
That means that the house will be empty and I will have no responsibilities outside of work for two weeks. This has happened in the past and I have not taken full advantage of the situation. Typically I would work late, grab some fast food on the way home, fall asleep on the couch around 8PM, wake up around midnight, putter around until 2 or 3 in the morning and then sleep. The next day I would be tired from staying up late, so I would fall asleep on the couch around 8PM, etc., etc.
This time I need to give myself a set of goals and make a plan to keep myself busy.
Here’s the rough list of things to do I came up with:

    Daily

    • Feed fish
    • Eat fruit
    • Check/water plants
    • Dishes/paper/trash

    In the next two weeks

    • Dinner with Mom
    • Remove stump from front yard
    • Put up shelves in the girls room
    • See Zaitoichi, Donnie Darko, Napoleon Dynamite
    • Go shoot my rifle
    • Go see a live band
    • Reprep laptop
    • Plan that blogging thing
    • Sell all that stuff on Ebay
    • Ride my bicycle
    • Try a Mochaberry at Borders
    • Do the hot sauce experiment

What else should I plan to do? Anyone else want to do these things?

Doom 3 Torrents


There is no excuse for this.
id Software has been a great company, making great games and consistently releasing source code of their games once they are a few years old.
To see this many people stealing their software is wrong.
Do you really think the 50,000 people you see here are still going to go out and buy the game?

One Thousand

This is the one thousandth post on my weblog.
I started an ‘official’ weblog on January 21st, 2000. I had been posting info on the net for several years before that, but that was the moment I began using software to update my site. At the time, I was using software called Newspro that was all the rage.
I started the site because I was inspired by a site called Lum the Mad. Lum wrote about online gaming and was hilarious sarcastic in doing it. He closed down the site after a while, but he had inspired me to begin writing. Scott (Lum’s real name) still runs a weblog at Broken Toys.
The first real content I posted on the net besides baby pictures is called The most expensive cup of coffee back in August of 1997. Even after almost seven years, it’s still a funny story.
So there you have it, after almost four and a half years of pure weblogging and seven year of posting on the internet, I’ve hit a thousand entries.
While a few of my entries have been of the ‘sorry I haven’t posted’ genre, for the most part, I’ve tried to make it interesting for people besides my mother, who likes everything I say or right (except fucking profanity, she hates the profanity).
I wonder what the next thousand will be like.
Here are a few entries you might enjoy:
When I liked Netscape instead of IE
A what I ate for dinner post
A lunch observation
That time I almost died in the hospital
Competitive Twinkie Eating
The death of Pom-Pom
Seven toothbrushes, four people
Photoblogging

Gameboy Advance Video

As my daughters get older and more tech saavy, I am challenged to keep them entertained. On our last trip, I brought not one, but TWO laptops to keep the DVDs rolling on the flights. Still, we ran out of batteries.
I thought about other options and stumbled onto the GBA Movie Player. It allows you to convert video down to low bitrates, put it on an compact flash card, and play the video on your Gameboy Advance. That sounds cool, but the conversion on media seems like asking for some headaches.
Last weekend I stumbled upon Majesco Gameboy Advance Video. It looks like the conversion headache is solved. The cartridges have episodes on them and are ready to roll.


I picked up a cartridge this week and gave it a try. At $20 a pop it’s comparable to a DVD, but without the expensive player.
The playback couldn’t be simpler. Zoe & Mira had no trouble understanding what I was showing them and promptly ran off with it. To the kids, the quality is good and it’s a dream come true. The only trouble is that the screen is just too small for two children to watch it at the same time.
I had a little free time today and made up a little video to show how it works.
Demo of Gameboy Advance Video (1.8 MB WMV file)
Demo of Gameboy Advance Video (4.6 MB MPEG file, for the WMV impaired)
You’re seeing the future here folks. Just imagine in a few more years when this kind of portable video and players will be widely available.

Thirty Seven


Today is my thirty seventh birthday.
37 is one of those special prime number birthdays, I’m taking the day off to have fun instead of going into work. I don’t get another prime number birthday until four years from now, so I better enjoy this one.
To my friends and family, I thank you. It’s been a wonderful 37 years.
I do wish my body was 17 again though. I don’t like that my body makes funny creaking and popping sounds now.

Chainsaw

The tree in our front yard died a while ago. I kept putting off cutting it own.
Until today that is:


The tree before I unleashed the chainsaw.

The stump after my work with the chainsaw.

The next step is getting a professional to pull out that stump. Cutting down the branches and cleaning up the mess was a pain in the butt. I’ll be happy to pay to get that stump out.
I know I’ll be having Advil for breakfast tomorrow.

It’s in the genes

As long time Cruft readers may remember, my Father has a bit of a fascination with Swiss Army knives with a collection of hundreds.
Recently he has been longing for the new Swiss Army Knife with USB and 64MB of flash memory. It arrived and he showed it to me yesterday.


Here you can see the knife plugged into my hub. Notice the drive SWISSMEMORY on the screen. It actually works.
Here is proof positive that my geekiness is inherited from my father.

Steve Burns brings the rock

Last night Michele and I went to see Steve Burns play. With cups of 7-Eleven coffee we waited in line outside for the doors to open and the opening acts.


Once inside, I went to the bar to get a couple drinks. I look to the right and sure enough, there was Steve sitting at the bar drinking a Bud talking to some hot blonde woman. He had cut his hair very short and was wearing glasses. I kept thinking he looked very much like Cory Doctorow.
There were a couple of opening acts that were OK, but we spent some of their acts killing time. Michele had brought a book and was reading. I was chatting in IRC over my uber-phone.

Around 11:30PM, Steve hit the stage started getting the show set up. There was a large screen behind him, several video cameras, and a ton of electronics.
There couldn’t have been more than 40 people in the bar and as he got started, he told the crowd to move closer. He pointed to the floor in front of him and said, “This is where the Rock happens. Come closer to the Rock.” Very Jack Blackish…

And with that, Steve began to rock. The video screen started rolling. In fact, video was running throughout the show. The screen showed different things. Sometimes it was video from the various cameras in the room. Sometimes it was specific video that went along with the song and sometimes it was just a funny snippet that played during a break in the music.
I had listened to his music before and I enjoyed the show. Like many times in the past, I find most shows overdo the feedback and drown the vocals in the guitars. I sang along with several of the songs and had a good time.
The only drawback was that Steve was concerned that the video was working right, so he kept checking the screen and the various monitors. Kinda distracting. A few parts of the video show were neat. At one point the projector pointed at his body and you could see the video play in his chest. In the final song, Mighty Little Man, the video of his friend Gabe dancing was great.
Here you can see a short snippet of Steve playing that I recorded on my phone, for no other reason than I can record video on my phone. Steve plays Mighty Little Man. (You’ll need the Divx coded to see it. It’s only 9 seconds long so don’t fret if you can’t watch it.)
Steve’s next album will be interesting and it will be fun to see how he grows as a performer. He’s got a lot to learn, but he does have more talent than lots of the other bands playing these days.

Pride

I am proud of my daughter Zoe.
For the last several months, she’s been saving up money. Between visits from the tooth fairy, grandmothers, and doing various chores she had built up quite a stash.
Yesterday morning she announced she wanted to go to the video game store to buy something for her Gameboy Advance.


Here she is counting out the singles to buy Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land.
She got the used copy and saved $5.
I’m not sure what makes me prouder, her savings or her desire for video games…