Author: Dave

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300 babies


Tuesday night and, as promised, I’ll post some pictures of the evening’s goings-on. I did however, fix the images I posted of last night’s thang, making the clicky ones bigger for your viewing pleasure. Nothing exciting mind you, but I gotta stay true to the project. And tonight, the project is good, because I don’t have much to write. So, let’s to it then.

Today I got the new dance pads for the DDR part of the console emulator, so I hooked them up and messed around with Stepmania and DWI. I got pretty decent results, but plan to ask my DDR-freak buddy at work if there are any “tweaks” to getting the pads to register better. It’s not that the steps and beats don’t match up, but there’s a small perception of the timing being just a tad “off.” Oh man, I’m such a terrible nerd… when did I get this bad? Help me… As promised, here are the pictures from this evening. Some descriptions, right-to-left, top-to-bottom: cookies (read below for the full story); me, writing this; testing out the new dance pads; how evening’s here usually end up, with Sharaun asleep on the couch. Yeah, here they go:


In one of the pictures, you can see the cookies Sharaun got mad at me for eating. See, every year, I buy a huge tin of Danish butter cookies from whatever warehouse store I happen to be in. Sharaun hates them, won’t even eat them; I love them, with a glass of milk especially. She always chastises me for buying them, and eating them. So, tonight, when I sat down for an after-dinner cookies and milk dessert – she looked at the three or four “soakers” half-floating in my glass of milk (you sink ’em at the beginning and then get a few extra-soggy treats at the end), and with a level stare called me “disgusting.” Then, her gaze shifted to the enormous cookie-tin itself, and a shocked “Oh my God…” slipped past her lips.

See, that tin, the huge one, is almost empty. Being that she doesn’t eat them, I guess she immediately realized I must be the sole party responsible. She picks up the near-empty tin, turning it around, looking for something. “Three hundred cookies,” she says, glaring at me as if I had eaten 300 babies rather than delicious butter cookies. “Three hundred, David. At four cookies per serving, and 160 calories per serving, that’s like… 12,000 calories.”

In my ears, I hear a steady buzzing, but can’t quite make it out over the loud crunch of yummy butter cookies in my mouth. “You bought that like, last week,” she accuses. “Nuh-uh!,” I retort, “I totally bought these like over a month ago!” The timeline doesn’t really matter, of course, I can’t win. So I just down my last slurp of disintegrated cookie-milk with a smile.

Sitting at my desk today, it came to me that we’ll be aboard a plane bound for the other side of the USA in less than a week. I’m ready. I’m big-time ready. There are a couple things I’d like to do when I go home, aside from the usual family-time and kicking back. I want to try and make my way down to what’s left of Astro, and snap some pictures. I’d like to do the same for Rinker. I think it’d be cool to do “follow-up” stories to a few of my entries… like a “where are they now?” for past post topics.

See how I artfully padded out what is essentially one decent paragraph to create the semblance of a multi-paragraph entry? Yup. Artfully.

Dave out.

Posted on

slumpin’

You choose the color of Jesus.
I feel like I’ve been in a pretty bad writing funk lately. Looking back, this is the last entry I can remember being proud of when I hit the “publish” button. It’s OK though, things get like this sometimes. I lose motivation. Not just for writing, but for all manner of things. I lose motivation to get work done around the house, lose motivation at work where I should be doing real work, just lose motivation in general. It’s cool though, the slumps tend to be short-lived, and then I’m back in action. Sometimes I need a vacation to “recharge,” and next week’s trip to Florida should be just the thing. Going back to the place I, for some reason, still call “home” always gives me plenty of material to write about. I’m really looking forward to it, Turkey and ham and family and mashed potatoes. Put me on a plane, I’m there.

Got a phone call from an old, old friend the other day. Surprised me to hear from him, although we do occasionally get together for a beer or two when we both happen to be home visiting family in Florida. I’m really bad at “staying in touch,” I don’t call old friends, don’t write, don’t do much at all to “KIT,” as we used to write in yearbooks. So I was surprised to hear from this guy, whom I would call equally as bad at keeping in touch. In high school we were good friends. He was the son of a preacher and I was a bad-kid, it was like an after-school-special. When I found God in my senior year, we at least had something to talk about. Now, it seems we’ve both “lost our faith” to some extent, and surprisingly we agree on most everything. Maybe our common trials put us in a common resultant position or something. Anyway, we chatted about our shaky faith in higher power, in government, and in general. It was a good discussion. He mentioned he’s looking to get out of his current state, being a red one, and move into a blue one like mine. Ahh.. the bennies of living in a rabidly liberal state.

Tonight’s (today’s, whatever) entry needs to be done early, because we’re going to the Blonde Redhead show downtown tonight. My goal is to bring the camera and take some pictures, then post them here on this blog-thing. So I’m ready to go, sitting here in my chinos (what are chinos? I’m calling khaki pants “chinos,” is that right?) and fashionable long-sleeved button-up/down shirt. I look appropriately indie for the evening, I believe. We’ll be dining first at some kinda brewpub with food, y’know the ever-so-popular mix of sit-down restaurant and microbrewery type-thing. We’ll linger sufficiently long at said brewpub, in hopes of missing in entirety the set of an utterly horrible opening act called the Liars. Man, they suck so hard.

Well guess what, turns out I got the opening band wrong, and we missed half a set from an awesome live band Ben and I have seen before – the Helio Sequence. The show was a little underwhelming to me, not that Blonde Redhead didn’t sound good, they just didn’t excite me live. Owell, I did accomplish one thing… which was to take pictures of the evening as my first effort in a “week in pictures” thing I thought of. I’ll take a few snapshots of each evening this week and post them the day after. Most likely won’t be anything exciting, but at least it gives me something to post about. So then, here’s the thumbs from last night’s concert outing.




There ya go then. More to come, even if it’s just snapshots of me sitting on the couch or doing dishes. What a grand experiment. Man, I should go into business. Next they’ll tell me it also functions as a cutting-edge indie music jukebox… and I’ll have been squarely billhooked off my high horse.

Dave is out.

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not a gamer

Blow on it a little, maybe lick it. Pull it out 5 microns and then push it down.
I did nothing this weekend, nothing at all. I should have, could have, done lots… clean the garage, mow the lawn, clean the house, etc. But I didn’t. Now it’s Sunday evening and I realize I’ve wasted my days off. How ashamed I am of my laziness.

I did do some “work” on Sunday, but not of the break-a-sweat variety. Sunday afternoon I spent a good deal of time working on plans for my Pac Man cabinet “upgrade.” That’s right, I’m breaking my own cardinal rule and messing with something that’s working fine in an effort to make it work “better.” I’ve always held that it’s a stupid thing to do, make something better when it’s not really bad to begin with – but I have a pretty hefty upgrade planned. I’m going to add a 3rd control panel, with two sets of controls, so that the cabinet can now play horizontal games. Since the original design is true to the old-school cocktail style cabinet, it’s limited to vertical-oriented games. Adding a 3rd panel along the long-side of the cabinet will allow two players to sit side-by-side and play games horizontally on the monitor. Upgrading the cab like this opens up the machine to thousands of new games… two-player side-scrollers, fighter-games, etc.

Must be “video game fever” time for me or something, since I’ve been working on the Pac Man machine and making plans for the future console emulation project I’m planning. The other day I ordered the dance-pads for the Dance Dance Revolution portion of the console emulator, got a good deal on Ebay for two pads. If someone had told me that one day I’d actually enjoy playing Dance Dance Revolution… some silly dance-on-a-pad game, I’d’ve probably laughed at them. That’s no nevermind though, because it’s gonna be part of the emulator now since I love it. Anyway, the console emulator machine will be the next project, and I estimate work starting early next year.

What’s with this Extreme Home Makeover show? If I remember right, back when my wife first starting watching it, it was kinda tolerable to me – showcasing the actual home-modification. I’d sometimes put down the computer to watch the builders frame a wall or run wires or knock down a room. Now, it seems like the focus has completely changed. Suddenly, they only fix homes for families with greater than 10 kids, a certain percentage of whom have to be either addicted to crack, autistic, or afflicted with some other horridly unfair childhood disease. Now it’s more like a Lifetime or Oxygen channel show, where everyone cries at the end because the makeover crew built a touching monument to the dead father or an elevator for the five year-old born without ankles.

Out of time, out of words; out.

Posted on

i got nothing

Turkeys that got killed.
I have the urge to somehow pore through all my past entries and try to compile a “wordcount” for what I’ve written so far. It’s more of a “look what I did” thing than anything useful, I just think it’d be neat data to have. Speaking of poring through old entries, I still need to go play “cleanup” on the entries that had a less-than-perfect transition to WordPress… like the one’s with Chinese characters and whose commas turned into question marks. I shudder to think of the potential new reader being turned away after finding archived entries impossible to understand with all the Chinese and imperative-overuse.

I have nothing to write, and it’s a Friday. I will slap together these two paragraphs and print it. Sorry.

Can you please look at this. Bright Eyes, holding down the #1 and #2 positions on Billboard’s “Hot 100” singles chart. Last week, Usher and Alicia Keys… this week, when the teen collective lifts their heads from their bongs, they will have claimed another indie act. Good job Bright Eyes, too bad the indie creed says I can’t listen to you anymore. Dave out.

Posted on

Raining again in sunny California

Mmmm... ice cream...
Seriously. I mean, c’mon. Yeah. Now, I know it may be hard to trust me – because it may seem like I’m gushing about a new album every few days… but for real y’allz. If someone was describing the new Go! Team album to me, saying things like, “Oh, you know, it’s like this sample-happy beatsy 70s/80s semi-disco electro-pop, with old breakdance and rap samples layered over the top,” I’d probably make up my mind without even hearing it. Just doesn’t sound like my bag. For the most part, you can have the Junior Seniors, Avalanches, and other type bands. But for some reason, be it the fact that I really like their name or not, this band is different. It’s not your everyday album that can make me bounce around in my car seat in my best impression of dancing, or pump my fists to the beat. Just to make an honest man of me, check out this track and see if you’re not happy after listening. Then, check out this brassy number and tell me you don’t wanna go plop down the $11 this thing costs. Enough about music, I think.

I’ve been thinking more and more about making a “complete console emulator” that will live permanently in the living room, attached to the TV. It would be a small form-factor PC with USB ports out the front where I could plug in a bunch of different controllers. The machine itself would be dedicated mainly to video game console emulation, and would do the job of an Atari, original 8-bit NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Nintendo-64, and GameBoy Advance. I’d also install Dance with Intensity for DDR. Along with this would come the most historically-accurate controllers, USB’d originals, and decent pads for DWI. Anyway, looking at some attractive small form-factor systems, and doing a quick mental cost-assessment, I think I could do the whole project for about $800. Not bad… very tempting in fact.

Raining again in sunny California… has been for a couple days now. Spent the whole morning rushing through my routine thinking I needed to be at work for my Mandarin class – it goes for five hours every Friday. Turns out, it’s not even Friday, and even if it was, the class doesn’t start until 9am. So, that sucked. I do that a lot, y’know. Adding to the list I put down earlier this week: I often don’t know what day of the week it is, and rarely know what the date is. A lot of times I’m just on autopilot… thinking about whatever’s monopolizing my thoughts at the moment, I should try and pay more attention to detail.

I went to the freezer to get an ice cream sandwich, but it was just a box that used to hold ice cream sandwiches. Man, what I way to ruin a craving for an ice cream sandwich. Not wholly unexpected though, living with my wife. Dave out.

Posted on

facing northeast

How may I be helping you?
Busy morning and still no internet at home. Time to press “go” on the blog.

Turns out my router is just fine, my ISP is having some issues with their “circuits,” and I’ll be out of an internet connection for an undetermined amount of time. That sucks for me, because the internet is my brainless-entertainment. I mean, for most people, it’s television. They come home, plop down, and watch TV all night before going to bed. Maybe not really paying attention, maybe doing other things while “watching,” but the TV is the prime occupier of their free time. For me, it’s the computer. I’d rather sit in front of the computer, surfing the net, listening to music, tinkering with this and that, making webpages, etc. The computer is my TV.

This has been the source of some friction between Sharaun and I before. She feels like I spend the “whole evening” on the computer, which I counter with something like, “I feel like you spend ‘the whole night’ on the TV.” This does not computer to her, because the TV is just “what you do.” I’ll admit, it’s more mainstream. I bet the vast majority of people come home from work, turn on the TV, and have it going in the background until they go to bed. Kids of the TV generation then see this as “what you do” in that post-work, post-school, evening time. It was the same way with my family, we had our “shows” that we watched. Cosby on Thursdays, Murder She Wrote on whatever day Murder She Wrote came on, McGuyver, Family Ties, etc. Problem is, in her mind, there is a fundamental difference between wasting time in front of a television and wasting time in front of a computer. One is “OK,” a socially-acceptable waste of time, while the other, for some reason, is not.

To me, they’re both wasting time. To her, watching TV together is “spending time” together. But, if I’m sitting on the couch with the laptop while we watch TV together, somehow it doesn’t count. I don’t really understand it. In order for our evening to qualify as “spending time together,” we apparently both have to choose to waste it in the same way. I’m even in the same room, the sole difference is that I’m staring at a laptop monitor and she’s staring at a television. It’s funny, if I’m reading a book – that’s cool, if I’m doing dishes in the kitchen, that’s cool too; it’s only the computer that somehow magically negates the “spending time together” thing. I predict this as a problem for more people as the brainless-pastime paradigm slowly shifts.

I talked to Tracy on the phone today, a buddy of mine is in Taiwan staying at the hotel where she tends bar. He was at the bar, and had her call me up. She still can’t speak English that well, but it was funny to talk to her. She said she’s happy that I’m coming out there again soon, and this time she might let me take her out to dinner. I mean, really, y’all be knowin’ she’s not a real “girlfriend,” or else I wouldn’t be calling her that on the internets – but she is fun to hang out with when I’m in town. Hopefully, I’ll be able to talk to her a lil’ more this next time – providing I pass my Mandarin class and don’t get fired.

Kind of related, last night I called tech support for my ISP, since the connection was down and I wanted to inquire about a possible outage. The guy I got routed to was in India (I’m not pigeon-holing here, he told me), and our conversation was hilarious. First off, without sounding too boastful, I’ll set the stage by saying I could run rings around this guy’s tech expertise. Not that what he knows won’t enable him to solve 99% of the type of customer issues he probably runs into, just that to me it was pretty much useless. Anyway, I told him my connection was dropping packets, particularly large ones. Small packets were making it through with a higher percentage, while the loss increased with packet size.

The first thing homeboy asked me was “where, exactly, are you located?” I responded with my city and state. “Mmm-hmmm, OK,” says he, “Where, exactly though, are you located, sir?” “Uhh…,” I repeat my city and state again, asking if that’s the information he wants. I go further and give him the nearest “big” city, just in case he’s squinting at a wall-map of a country halfway around the world trying to find my tiny suburb. “Mmmm-hmm, excellent sir. But, in terms of location sir, where, exactly is that located?” Wow… what?! My mind races: what does this guy want? I respond with my zip code, and wonder if I should next resort to longitude and latitude or degrees, minutes, and seconds. “Oh, and currently I’m sitting in my computer room in a large grey chair, facing northeast.” Hilarious. It goes without saying, I humored the guy for about 10min and then hung up on him when I got to feeling too bad. Yeah, I do people like that.

Dave out.

Posted on

angels and devils

Tuesday's... here!
My internet was down last night (and still is this morning, for that matter), so I didn’t get to write. Luckily, I had the following 3-paragraph bit stored away in my “drafts.” While that usually means I’m not quite happy with it and want to do a “rewrite,” circumstances today dictate that I just press “go” and get a free entry. Stupid broken internet, I have a sneaking feeling it’s my router… it’s been acting way funny lately. Anyway…

Over the years, I’ve learned that I really don’t commit things to memory that aren’t important to me. I’ve also learned that there are some common things which most people do deem important enough to keep in memory, judging by the number of those I’ve met who can call them up at will, which I certainly don’t have memorized. This tells me that I should probably know these things offhand, but I don’t. Reviewing them, they certainly seem pretty important – memorization-worthy even. For example:

I don’t know how much money is in my bank account on a daily basis. I don’t know how many miles-per-gallon our vehicles get. I don’t know what my coverage limits are on my homeowners or car insurance are. I don’t know the interest rate on my house. Sometimes I don’t even know how old I am. I don’t know how much we spend every month. I don’t know how much gas, or milk, or bread costs. I don’t know how to drive to places I’ve driven to been to before.

Looking at it, seems like most of these items are finance-related. I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing, and I’m sure there are two schools of thought there. The hippy in me tells me it’s a good thing that my mind isn’t bogged down by materialist, capitalistic creeds and ideologies. The yuppie in me, however, tells me that I should know what’s in my 401k to the penny and have a running balance sheet for every dollar I spend. More often than not, I tend to hang out with the hippy in me. He and I sit around smoking dope in me, listening to Skynyrd in me, and throwing eggs at the yuppie in me’s Escalade from the front porch of his trailer in me.

OK yeah, that was it. Come in and write a few sentences above and a few below, and start the presses. I’ll talk at ya later, until then. Dave out.