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Just One of Those Days

Pictures

Thursday the 35thSee that picture? And yes, you are reading it right. The company I’m currently contracting for prints out a calendar for its employees every year. Its one of those things where they put pictures of some people who work there along with quotes about how great the company is, and generally looks like it was designed by a man who thinks that advertising graphics peaked somewhere in the mid to late 1970’s. One of my coworkers didn’t want his calender and I didn’t have one, so I took it. It’s been fairly reliable all year, days of the week in the right order, Saturday and Sunday next to each other making the weekend and Wednesday smack in the middle, all the holidays on the right days, the 4th of July actually on July 4th and so on.

At least until today…

I got curious and checked a few other people’s calendars, all are the same as mine. So you have to wonder, how exactly something like this makes it past the quality assurance, past the test print, and all the way through the several thousand odd print run without anyone seeing it. Or maybe they did. Perhaps the calendar is correct, perhaps today isn’t November 3rd and instead is Thursday, November 35th, 2005.

I can already tell this image will be stuck in my head forever, and every November I’m going to snicker and giggle and laugh and then embarrassingly have to try to explain it, and no one else will think its funny at all.

All Hallow`s Eve

Random Thoughts

The Halloweens of my childhood are dead.

This may not seem like a great revelation considering that I’m 31, but it is sad to me to think it, to realize that it is really gone. First off, lets begin with the costumes. As a child, it was rare for a kid to have a 100% store bought packaged costume. You never did that. You bought pieces and parts, then you took some old clothes and made the rest. A vampire costume was some fake plastic teeth, some fake blood, maybe some white face paint and a cape… the rest of the outfit was made of dressy church clothes with hidden holes or that were a half size too small and were going to be tossed out or donated anyway. My personal favorite year was a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors… some fake blood, a little black face paint around the eyes and I was a pretty kickass zombie. Too many kids these days just go to the store and pick up a costume. Then one by one they come to door looking exactly alike, the same couple dozen or so popular costumes over and over.

Second… it’s 5pm right now, the sun is still shining quite brightly, and already I’ve seen kids out in costume. Its still daylight… trick-or-treating is supposed to happen after dark! As a kid, we never started until the sun had set. Not that there are many kids out, because most of them are going to be doing their trick-or-treating at the local mall, where its completely safe. Of course, to a degree I can’t argue… when I was young, my parents taught me pretty well about avoiding strangers and I was required to know all the local streets, how to get home, to trusted neighbor’s houses, and even to the nearest police or fire department should an emergency arrise. It was called parenting, and my parents did it. Most kids I’ve bothered to speak to these days can hardly find their front door from a half block away, let alone be trusted to actually think too much for themselves and reason out how to handle an unexpected situation. In my day, if a sicko tried to snatch a kid from a group, the other kids would run screaming, parents would be swarming the street in seconds… now, I suspect most kids would stand there and wonder if it was going to be on the news later, and it might dawn on one of them to tell a grown-up what happened if they knew they were going to be rewarded for it. Not that many of today’s parents would ask, or care, or even realize their child was gone until it came time to send them to school the next day… maybe.

Third, no one decorates anymore. I do, we put up monsters and spiderwebs and all that stuff in the front window. (Hey, I’d decorate my lawn but I live in an apartment and I don’t have one.) But one window out of a few hundred just ends up looking silly. The neighborhoods I grew up in, they had style. Frontyards became graveyards. Eerie music would poor out ever time a door opened. You actually approached each house with apprehension because you didn’t know if it was just going to be a person with a bowl of candy, or a monster to jump out at you and toss candy in your bag if you could manage not to run away. One year, when I started feeling a bit old to actually go out for candy, I worked the door at our house. I dressed up in some jeans and an old flannel shirt, I put on a mask and stuffed pine straw into my clothes so that it poked out at the ankles, wrists, neck and waist… then I sat on the front step with the bowl of candy in my lap and a little sign that said “Take One”. I stayed as motionless as I could, and some kids were scared to approach, but if they did I stayed still for them… but the ones who walked right up and tried to take a handful of candy instead of just one, them I grabbed, by the wrist, and held on as they tried to run away screaming. Once they’d wrench free and I’d get back up, these teens would stop crying and compose themselves and start laughing about who just got scared, and they’d resolved to find someone else and send them this way, and I’d assure them I’d be there.

And that leads into number Four… Haunted Houses. I love them… or I used to. The last few that I’ve been to though, they just sucked. Too crowded, we walked single file through the house, never more than five feet from the person in front or behind, and every scare was anticipated. If they jumped out at someone a few people ahead, they wouldn’t be reset to jump out at you, and if you watched seven people walk past corner or dark spot without a scare you could be pretty sure it was waiting for you. Thanks to the cry babies and sue happy idiots in our litigious world, they can’t touch you. Not that I want people in a haunted house to get man-handled, but part of what is frightening about a guy in a hockey mask coming at you is the idea that he’s going to get you! Of course, if he’s legally not allowed to come into contact with you in any way, it’s not too worrysome anymore. He may be running out you, but he’s going to stop… he has to or he’ll lose his job, and you can sue the haunted house right out of existance.

That about covers it… everything that I loved about Halloween has been eroded and what remains is this bizarre 100% safe commercial holiday that some people still oppose of religious grounds despite the fact that nearly everything one might oppose has been stripped.

Happy Halloween!

Zathura

Reviews

Did you like ‘Jumanji’? Then you’ll like ‘Zathura’. It’s basically the same movie, but different enough to make it not feel like a retread of the same story. Two brothers, ages 10 and 6 (almost 7), are having a bit of a rough time dealing with each other and the divorce of their parents. The younger one finds a game, Zathura, in the basement of this house dad has moved them into (mom got their house in the settlement). He turns the keys, and pushes the ‘Go’ button sending them, their sister, and their house on an intergalactic journey.

It was just good, pure family fun. There’s only one dirty word in the whole thing, and the kids in the theater I went to see it at were full of ‘Oooh!’s and ‘Aahh!’s at the special effects. They were excited, they laughed, and so did I.

Covered in a White Sheet

Random Thoughts

Yesterday, on my way to work, there was traffic. Lots of it. As usual, I guessed there was an accident, and there was. Normally when I get stuck in traffic, by the time I reach the area of the accident the most I ever see is the last of the tow trucks pulling away. Yesterday was different.

The bus crested the hill and we could see the cop cars, the ones that had been passing by us for the last twenty minutes. The road is five lanes, two each direction with a turn lane in the center, and the cops have three lanes, the two southbound and the turn lane, closed and are routing traffic through the two remaining lanes. As we approach, I notice that there aren’t any tow trucks, no fire engine, no wrecked cars. As we pass, I see trails of blood on the street, and human sized white lump with tennis shoes sticking out of it. The white sheet is stained with red in places, and the shoes are pointing in directions that two feet on the same person shouldn’t be pointing at the same time. There was a truck and a couple of cars pulled over, and there was a man, the truck driver from his dress, sitting on the curb crying. About a dozen cop cars were around, and everyone was waiting for the ambulance or the coroner to show up. And then we passed and continued down the road on our route.

I assumed that the truck had hit a pedestrian, since he was the one who was crying and being consoled by officers, but I wanted to know what happened. So I started to search the web… all the local news channel sites I could find… nothing. It seems that there was another accident earlier that morning in the Atlanta area, a 19 year old kid who was drunk or high was on the wrong side of the road and killed a woman in a head on collision. I found lots of stories on that, but none on the accident I can seen the aftermath of. Finally I did find something, on Scan Gwinnett, a website where they scan police and emergency freqencies and post stories and recordings. It turns out the truck had nothing to do with it… however, the pedestrian had been crossing the street and was hit by three cars. Police are still investigating, and so far no one has been charged, and they don’t know why the man was crossing the street there and not at one of the nearby lighted intersections.

I’d never actually seen a dead body not in a coffin before, technically I guess I still haven’t since I only saw shoes and a white sheet, and the whole thing kinda creeped me out. I felt sad even though I didn’t know the guy or any of the drivers, and I also felt angry because it was his own damn fault for not crossing at the light. And today I feel… differently sad, because this guy died and three people will live with having hit him, and lots of people saw the accident and the aftermath, but it wasn’t important enough to rate coverage by any of the local news stations. I mean, I can understand having to pick and choose what stories get airtime in the limited broadcast, but there is no limit on a website. Did none of their reporters even cover it? Was a story even written?

Zombies on Mass Transit

Random Thoughts

Ever seen the movie ‘Shaun of the Dead’? The scenes in the beginning when he’s riding the bus and all the people around him have this eyes-glazed-over look to them? That’s what my ride to work is like every day. More than ninety percent of the people just sort of sit there, lost in their own thoughts, or perhaps not having any thoughts at all. That means that less than ten percent of the people, less than one in ten, is listening to music or reading or talking. Even then, some of the people who listen to music do what I call “listening to secret music” … see, on my MP3 player, I have only songs that I like, songs that make me smile, tap my foot, bob my head, mouth the words… good music. Lots of these other people, they either have only music that they don’t like, or they’ve been socially shamed into not drawing any attention to themselves or showing any emotion at all. Except for the tinny sound escaping their headphones, you’d mistake them for the one who are just sitting there lost in their lack of thoughts.

This all leads me to another issue… I’ve been having dreams lately, pretty much every night… Zombies. Running through zombie infested cities, holding off the horde from a mall or a Wal-Mart, surviving against the odds. In my conscious life I find myself wondering, if it really happened, if zombies really did start to emerge and the world went to hell, would I survive as well as I do in my dreams? Would I be the movie hero, or would I end up being another mindless creature prowling for flesh? I’d like to think I’d be a survivor.

So I find myself wondering as I ride the bus, if these people, the ones with no emotion, eyes unfocused and slack-jawed, were to suddenly turn and begin the tell-tale zombie moan, how would the story end? My daydreams echo my night, and I stand on the MARTA train, never sitting, never letting myself get lazy, and I imagine a disturbance at the far end of the car, screams, blood, and I pull the emegency brake cable and I open the door and drop to the ground running, or I yank hard on the loose hand rail and lay in with skull crushing blows on the ‘infected’. And I smile, and the music plays a soundtrack to the destruction, and I tap my foot and I bob my head and I mouth the words, and I rejoice that I’m not one of those people… the living dead, slack-jawed and mindless, shuffling off to work the grind, shuffling home to rest up for the next day.

The Music of My Youth

Gaming

Okay, so this is going in the Gaming category, but only because it didn’t really fit into Random Thoughts, and it does actually have something to do with games. I’m not normally one to post about crap I see on the internet, but this I just had to put up.

Nintendo Choir.

Its only not safe for work if your PC is loud, but even then most people under 40 should laugh when they hear this. Its a choir singing songs from popular Nintendo (and other) games… Mario, Zelda, Mortal Combat. And they do a pretty good job of it too…

Enjoy!

Homeland Security

Random Thoughts

Since 9/11 I’ve been through security at the Atlanta airport a few times. People are so desensitized to it now that its automatic, when you approach the metal detectors and xray machines you take off your shoes and place them on the conveyor belt. People practically strip just to avoid getting hasselled. So I went to the airport yesterday with a certain expectation… and an expired driver’s license.

Now, my birthday was the 10th and I had just completely forgotten to renew it. So I got stopped and then turned away. They sent me to a desk to argue my case and see if they’d be willing to stamp me through. They didn’t.

However, the guy standing next to me had a different problem. His name was Steve Johnson, but his ticket was in the name William Hawkins. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.) So Steve begins to unravel his story… His name used to be William Steve Hawkins, but he doesn’t like the name William so he’s always gone by Steve. As a child, he was adopted, Hawkins is their last name. He didn’t get along with them, and a few years ago he sought out his biological parents, and found them, they were named Johnson. He’s made a good relationship with them and last year he had his named legally changed to Steve Johnson. Now comes the silly part, as if its not silly enough. Steve’s wife (still named Hawkins) booked his flight for him, using a credit card that was still in his old name. So his driver’s license says Steve Johnson, but his credit card and his ticket say William Hawkins. And they let him through.

So the lesson here is, if I had had someone elses driver’s license or someone elses ticket and a good story, I could have gotten on the plane. But since I had my own expired license, I’m a security risk.

A How-To Guide

Site News

Basically, it’s for my brother, but I’ve added a simple “How To” guide on Programming to the site here. It’s over on the right listed as “So you want to be a programmer?”

It isn’t anything fancy, just the basic rules that I personally follow when it comes to programming, which is what I do for a living. The main idea behind it is that you don’t need to spend large amounts of time trying to memorize all the nuances of a language, just learn the basics and fake the rest.

Goodbye VCRs, Hello Medusa!

Random Thoughts

Sometimes I really hate the Television Networks. They seem to insist of fighting head to head instead of spreading out all over the week. Every fall season, its inevitable that of the roughly fifteen hours of TV I want to watch it all airs in the real space of about 4 or 5 hours, meaning that quite often two, three, or even four shows are on at once. Seeing as how I pretty much hate having commercials interrupt my TV shows, I tape everything and watch it later to allow fast forwarding, which also allows me to make plans any night of the week because I’m always taping anyway. One of my VCRs decided to start dying on me… crinkling tapes causing me to miss shows when they didn’t record, and its tuner started making things fuzzy… so I went looking to buy a new VCR. No one really makes VCRs much anymore, and what I really wanted was a dual tuner device so I could finally pick up that fourth show some nights (I only had three VCRs)… they don’t make those. Even these new devices with a VCR and a DVR in them only have one tuner (you can’t record on both the VCR and the DVR from two different channels at once). After a long search, I finally just gave up and started looking for a complete alternative.

I thought about going with a Windows XP Media Center Edition based PC since I know a couple of people that have them and love them, but the price seemed to be a bit much, and it only legitimately supports two tuners. Of course, you can hack it to handle as many as you want, but reports are pretty consistant that Microsoft programmed their usual bloat and once you get the 4th or 5th simultaneous recording going it pegs the processor (which shouldn’t happen, since any decent TV tuner card actually has its on encoding processor on it and doesn’t use the CPU at all) and starts chugging, causing any number of problems, unless you spend a huge amount of money on a monster machine that can handle all that. Pricey. Then I stumbled on Medusa.

Well, really its SnapSteam Media’s software, but they titled this particular setup of 6 tuner joy after the fabled gorgon killed by Perseus. I followed their recommendations, built a $500 PC (could have been cheaper, but I wanted a special case that looked like a media component and not a PC) with the exception of a 320GB drive instead of a 40 (a nice 130 hours of storage on the “Better” quality setting), and SATA-150 instead of ATA-100; and bought the Medusa pack with the 3 dual tuner cards instead of 6 single tuners. And yesterday I successfully recorded 6 programs at once. Now, with the SnapStream Beyond TV software set up to record all new episodes of all my favorite shows, I’ll never need to set a timer again.

So, like the title says… Goodbye VCRs, goodbye video tapes, goodbye setting timers on multiple units and watching TV schedules like a hawk for unexpected changes, and goodbye pain in my ass… Hello 21st Century, and hello Medusa!