Tag: everything

Stuff on the Net XI

Stuff on the Net

Ever wanted to know everything that was never true about Television? Go here. Every time I go, I find something to laugh about.

It came from Ofasoft… a well intentioned thread about Pirates of the Caribbean 2 turns into a discussion about Johnny Depp’s Americanness.

Picard vs. Vader … at last the “Trek” versus “Wars” dispute is settled.

A guy I know is in a movie… check out the preview on its MySpace page: The Signal.

People want the President of Russia to answer some questions. Mostly about young boys, humanoid robots, and Cthulhu.

Over on Yahoo, Stephen Hawking asks “How can the human race survive the next hundred years?“

My Jeep

Random Thoughts

I have a love hate relationship with my Jeep Cherokee. On the one hand, it was the car I wanted. Of course, at the time of purchase, gas was about $1.19 a gallon. With typical prices of $2.80 a gallon these days I begin to hate my car. In the years that I have owned it (6), we’ve been through a number of things… flat tires, break ins, minor accidents, and the usual tune-ups. About two years ago, it developed a squeek.

Now, having been through squeeks before in other cars, I decided to have someone look at it and tell me where the squeek came from before deciding to fix it. Some squeeks are bad. Some are not so bad. In a previous car, the squeek ended up being a need to replace a $5 plastic fan blade that was part of the airconditioning system. So I had the car checked and… same problem. They fixed the squeek. But there was a side effect. Appearantly, they knocked a wire loose, and from then on sometimes the dashboard would go dead. They looked for the wire, checked the plugs, but ultimately couldn’t find anything to fix, but I could home remedy the problem by banging on the dashboard and it would spring back to life.

About six months ago, the car developed a squeel. The squeel could be stopped by turning off the air conditioning and then turning it back on, so I figure it wasn’t a big deal. Probably another fan blade issue.

Sunday, I’m driving over to Acworth from Duluth, the back way using Pleasant Hill and Arnold Mill. As I’m driving, the dash goes dead and the Check Gauges light comes on. I bang the dash and it all goes back to normal. I cross over 400 at Old Milton, and the light comes on again, only this time the rest of the dash is working fine. We drive for a bit as I look at my gauges. Gas, fine. Battery, fine. Oil, fine. Temperature, fine… no, wait… no… fine… umm… redline!

It was kind of like in the movies. I pulled off the side of the road and popped the hood, steam blowing off the engine. I give it a minute, then check the coolant. Empty. So we call my brother and have him drive over to pick us up and bring some coolant. I’m fuming now because I just got an oil change and they were supposed to check this stuff.

My brother arrives with the coolant, we fill it up and head on our way. All is right with the world again and I’m talking about how I’m going to give those guys a piece of my mind. Then the temperature redlines again. We stop, the coolant is fine, but still its over heating. We give the car a few moments, then head out again.

A little while down the road, redline. Once again I check the coolant and once again its fine. I decide to check everything. The oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid… basically everything with a dip stick or a valve I can open I check. All is a-okay. So we begin to travel yet again. Everything is going great until we start hearing an awful clanging under the car. And of course the temperature redlines again. We finally decide to give up.

Everyone piles into my brother’s girlfriend’s car, a VW Bug Convertible, four people and a dog, and we leave my car to deal with it later.

After dinner with Dad, we borrow one of his cars and the wife and I head to get the Jeep. The plan is to limp the car, which should be fully cooled now, to the Goodyear place not too far away, and leave it for them to inspect and repair the next day. So we get to the Jeep and I start limping it while the wife follows me.

Now, I’ve never been one to treat my car like a person, but somehow the moment felt like a good time to start. Back when I got my white Jeep Cherokee, some people insisted that I name it. The only thing I could think of was “Moby Dick”. So as we drove, I began, for the first time, to talk to Moby (Mr. Dick to strangers). I promised we’d make it better, that the Goodyear guys would fix everything that ailed it. All it needed to do was get there.

Moby almost did it. As I topped the last hill, I felt the engine begin to go. We were a hundred yards from the station and there was only a left turn remaining to go. But I knew that it would quit on me when I made the turn. I was right, and as I slowed to make the turn the engine gave up, along with the power steering, and I fought the wheel to make the left into the shopping center, and then the right into the parking lot of the Chinese place, and Moby finally silently pulled to a stop… with about a hundred feet to go. I tried the key twice and realized that it was no use.

Swept up in the moment, I threw open the door, popped the truck into neutral and began to push and steer. The truck was really heavy, but adrenaline gave me the strength to get it moving, and the power to steer. Across the parking lot we glided, but one more obsticle stood in our way… a small incline and a speed bump. The front tires cleared the bump, but not the rear, and quickly I hopped back into the car and slammed on the breaks.

For one last time, I turned the key and the engire roared to life. Together we made the last fifteen feet into a parking spot, and then I let Moby rest. It had done its best.

Honestly, I figured Moby and I were done, that it’d gone to big junkyard in the sky. However, one water pump, some hoses, new breaks, a transmission, and a head gasket later, and it appears Moby will be sticking around a while longer. And that makes me smile.

It may only get seventeen miles to the gallon, but I still love my Jeep. Hopefully in the near future, I’ll start working from home and more of my time in Moby can be spent enjoying the road.

The Break-Up

Reviews

Monday I got to see a sneak preview of the movie The Break-Up.

Damn it was funny. Seriously, everything you can think of that would be funny about a couple arguing and breaking up, its all pretty much in here. The end was a little bit dopey, but at least it wasn’t a cop out… and if you see the movie, you’ll know what I mean.

And I’ve come to realize I need a rating system of some sort… so I’ll have to work on that. But in the meantime, I’ll give The Break-Up four out of five whatever they are.

The Amulet of Samarkand

Reviews

I suppose one of the things that always kept me away from the Harry Potter books were the descriptions of Harry himself. In the beginning he’s pure and noble, and everything he does is for the good. Its almost sickening sweet. The later books help fix him up right as he makes mistakes and costs people their lives.

In The Amulet of Samarkand, the first of the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, one of the main characters is a horribly flawed boy who lives in a horribly flawed world. In the London of his world, magicians rule, literally. They aren’t hidden or secret, they run Parliment and keep the “commoners” beneather their feet. Common children are sold into apprenticeship where they are forced to forget their birth names and learn the ways of magic. Nathaniel, is one such child who is apprenticed to a minor magician of small power, but Nathaniel wishes to be greater, teaching himself more than his master will allow, especially once he is humiliated by Simon Lovelace, a much more powerful magician. Nathaniel takes his self taught knowledge and summons Bartimaeus to help him get his revenge on Lovelace. The only problem is, in seeking his revenge he stumbles on to a much more deadly plot by some of London’s other magicians. While keeping revenge on his mind, Nathaniel also decides that he needs to help the society of magicians by stopping this fiendish plot.

Most of the tale is told by Bartimaeus, who like many of the demons summoned by magicians, hates magicians and their petty squabbles. He’s also a wise cracking smartass, which helps keep the book fun and fast. One of the things I really enjoyed about this book, however, is that while it does leave some loose ends, the tale sits well by itself, and if I never manage to read the rest of the trilogy, I won’t feel like I’m missing something. I would gladly recommend it to young and not-so-young readers.

The Walking Dead

Reviews

For Christmas, I was given a book that I asked for, The Walking Dead. Its a comic book about people trying to survive in a world of zombies. Yesterday, on a drive to North Carolina with my wife, my brother and his girlfriend to visit his girlfriend’s family, I re-read book one, and read books two, three and four.

The Walking Dead is, quite simply, the best zombie stories I have ever read. A while back I posted about Brian Keene’s books, and those were very impressive for horror books, but The Walking Dead, which is a comic book series and not novels, deals more with the people than the zombies. They aren’t zombie stories, they are people stories where the setting happens to be a world full of zombie like you might set a drama with a backdrop of World War II or the Depression Era US.

I recommend these books, and Amazon has a very reasonable deal for buying all 4 collections for $33 right now. The rest of this review is going to contain some spoilers, a little plot revelation, so avoid it if you want the books to remain secret until you page through them. Read more

State of Fear

Reviews

This book, State of Fear by Michael Crichton, scares the crap out of me, and its not even a horror novel. The topic of the book? Global Warming. Now, it is a fiction novel, detailing a fictitous lawsuit against the EPA and a tangled web of espionage and adventure as the lawyer of a billionaire environmentalist gets pulled into a crazy plot to engineer difinative proof that global warming is a dire threat to all of humanity.

But why does it scare me? There is a point in most people’s lives when they finally come to an understanding of just how little we, the human race, really know about how our world works. And I am not talking about just a personal realization, because I had that many years ago when I discovered that I did not know everything. I am talking about how much science is going on and how little actual certainty there is about what they are studying, especially when it comes to complex systems like global climate.

The book reads like any other thriller type novel, but right at the beginning there is an author’s note that states “references to real people, institutions, and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate.” And the paperback copy of the book contains a 32 page bibliography. So while reading the book, I didn’t take everything Michael Crichton chose to spoon feed me. I looked up the books and articles and read some of them myself, and I read others not used in the book, and in doing this research I ultimately came to the same conclusions about the material as he did when it came to writing his book: the media and politicians exaggerate the hell out of conjecture and dish it up as solid fact. When you read a bunch of the data, you come to realize that it is very possible that we might one day have another ice age, or that we might have a global drought with searing heat, but that we cannot conclusively say which or what is going to happen because these is alot of data out there and it points in every conceivable direction and we do not know all the variables yet. Global warming could be very real, but right now we have evidence that supports it and refutes it, in fact if you restrict your view to the data that global warming supporters throw out you would be lead to believe that the planet is actually cooling. And what really gets to the core of why this book scares me is that the world is making policies based on conclusions that are not fully realized, that cannot be fully realized.

I highly recommend this book, and I also recommend reading up on what is really going on in the world. Do not settle for what the TV tells you.

On the Road

Reviews

Pretty much all my life I’ve seen and heard references to the book ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac. In movies, on television, in songs… its spoken of as a guide to life, a philosophical journey, even a right of passage… its talked of with a reverence that is usually held for things like the Bible… So, I was at the book store and I saw a copy on sale for $7 and I thought, ‘What the hell?’ and I bought it.

Perhaps the problem is that times have changed too much for Kerouac’s work to hold up, but, man, does this book ever suck!

Seriously, first off, its written in a stream of conciousness style from a man whose conciousness is like a wreck of freight trains, going in a dozen directions at once all piled on top of each other in an enormous mess of words. Secondly, none of his characters are sympathetic… perhaps in the late 50’s and early 60’s and even into the 70’s it was ‘cool’ and ‘with it’ to leave all responsibility behind and just run off and travel the roads, but that time has gone or at least I just don’t get it. The entire book I was waiting for someone to sit Dean Moriarty down and slap him in the face… He’s a completely reprehensible human being. He meets a girl, marries her, gets her knocked up, then immediately leaves town to find another girl. He blows off everything, storms into other people’s lives and leaves charred wreckage in his wake. The fact that Sal keeps hanging around this craphead is just annoying, and even more so that he seems to idolize him.

In the end, as someone who wants to be a writer, I’m glad I read the book. In my opinion, its a perfect example of everything not to do. I just wish it hadn’t been such a slow read so that I wouldn’t have wasted as much time on it as I did.

Dragon*Con

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I got back from 4 days at Dragon*Con.

If you don’t know what it is, go here. Short version, its a convension for Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comics, Horror… Books, Film, Games, etc… Everything.

I had fun as usual. I managed to go through a few panels and seminar things on gaming, writing, publishing, short films, and more… Plus I got to see tons of people in various costumes, and meet people from all over who have some of the same interests that I do.

We snapped a few pictures and those are up in the Pictorials section. Not alot, but.. well, check it out and see the reason.

Next year I’ll be more prepared.

The Lord of the Rings

Reviews

I went last night to see the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and…

This is, by far, the best trilogy of films ever made.  Ever.

The story is fantastic, the filming is beautiful, everything.  Its as close to perfection as a set of movies can be.  I doubt in my life I will ever see a set of films so good.

In a way, I am saddened.  When I was younger, I had dreams of creating films, and I still do.  I even dreamed of making films of this particular series of books.  And now that I have seen them, it saddens me to know that not only did I not make them, but that I know deep in my soul that I could never have done a job as good.

I will still dream of making films, but now I finally have both ends of the spectrum in mind… there are films that I know I could have done better, and now there are films that I know I’ll never surpass.

If you have not, go seem them.

Money

Random Thoughts

As they say (or sing in this case), Money don’t get everything, that’s true, but what it don’t get I can’t use.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman. If there was a ladder set up, I ran up it. I would pick things up and run up it. I would run up them, get stuff from whatever was at the top and bring it down. I used to volunteer to water the lawn because.. it was on fire, and I had to put it out! My imagination was and is quite vivid…

Of course, I also wanted to be an astronaut. And a policeman. And a racecar driver. A doctor. A computer hacker. A superhero. Etc, etc, etc…

See the one thing missing up there? Not once while I was growing up did I actually think to myself, “When I grow up, I want to make money!”

I have to admit, I’m pretty well off in some respects. My family is fairly normal. No divorce or discord. I drive a car that I always wanted. A Jeep Cherokee, 1998, before they started making them all rounded and bubble-like. I have a woman that I love.

I still, however, also have many problems. The issue I have with my problems is that they can all be solved with one thing.

Money.

I don’t have any esoteric, emotional, philosophical, mental, relationship problems. I only have bill paying problems.

That being the case, when people tell me, “Money isn’t everything.” or “Money isn’t the most important thing.” I get a bit upset, because, well, to me, money is the only thing that can solve the problems I have. And of course, people only say those things when they mean “I’m not going to give you any (more) money.”

Oh well… this is my random thought… back to humming “Gimme some money” by Spinal Tap.