Happy New Year!!
Posted on Thursday, January 1, 2009 at 12:52 am
Welcome to 2009, everybody!!
Enjoy your life while you can. According to the Mayan calendar, we’ve only got about 3 years left before everything explodes. And all my friends in high school always told me that my child would probably be the Antichrist, so… you know… that’s gonna be nice, too. If we’re going by that, you’ve got about two weeks left to get all the sex you can.
Happy new year, y’all!
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Your rock station still sucks.
Posted on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I know what you’re thinking. Two blog posts in one day?! That’s crazy! Yes, yes it is. But it’s going to happen. Because I’m just awesome like that.
Today is Festivus, so in the spirit of airing grievances, I think I’ll finally get around to writing the post I’ve been working on in my head for a good long while. It’s a follow-up to another post I made nearly two years ago. Unfortunately, the situation hasn’t gotten any better. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse - though traffic has been significantly worse over the last month, so perhaps it just seems worse because I’m agitated already.
Anyway, as I have been driving home most days lately, it seems like the rock station here in Dallas (102.1, “The Edge”) has been playing more and more old music. Then, when I got home tonight, I looked up their last 10 played songs, and it was indeed worse than I thought. Of their last 10 songs, 4 of them were made more than 10 years ago. One of these was even a Nirvana song from 1991.
I’m sorry, but I have a question: what, precisely, are you purporting to be the “edge” of?! Right in the damn middle of rush hour, when you’re probably getting the most listeners, a full 40% of your music is from the 90’s. I’m not necessarily saying there’s anything wrong with that music… I’m not particularly fond of it, but I admit that its got its place. So, allow me to give you a suggestion: its place is probably not during the middle of rush hour, on a station that is supposed to be playing new rock. Its place is, much more likely, the other rock station (which is a new development since the previous post) that plays a bigger mix of stuff going all the way back to the 70’s. Because that’s its format! When your format is supposed to be new rock, you probably ought to stay away from songs from 17 years ago.
Also… Gnarls Barkley and The Gorillaz. Seriously, what the hell?! Did nobody tell you that these are rap/R&B groups? Why are you playing them on a rock station?
Finally, that God-awful new Death Cab for Cutie song about the obsessive stalker guy… it’s just really, truly an awful song, and you should never, ever subject anyone else to hearing it again. Please.
Ok, that will about do it for my grievances for the time being. But I reserve the right to make yet another post about this in the future, if the radio station continues to blow large amounts of ass. Because it’s really just not cool.
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Technology is kind of awesome.
Posted on at 12:05 am
I am the VP of Technology for the company I work for. So I may be biased. But it kind of struck me tonight how simply awesome technology is, and how far we’ve come since things like ENIAC, the Apple II, and even the Pentium. (Sidenote: the first computer my family ever owned had one of the original 60mhz Pentium CPUs that contained the FDIV bug. So that’s kind of cool.)
Anyway… I just got a new computer at work today. So I brought the new computer and the old computer home with me, to work on getting all of my stuff transferred over. Some rather annoying transfer problems notwithstanding, we’re doing alright so far. It’s late, it’s taking significantly longer than expected, but (so far) nothing has exploded or murdered anyone. It’s boring, but not horrible.
But as I am sitting here waiting for file copying to finish, I can’t help but notice something. I am basically within arms’ reach of 5 fully functional computers, and also enough spare parts to come damn close to building 2 more if I felt so inclined. I’ve got my own personal desktop and laptop, plus the old and new work computers, plus my home fileserver. In one single room, that’s a combined total of something like 11ghz of computing speed on 12 CPU cores, 2tb of storage space, and 10gb of memory. (God help me, I just thought about my electricity bill and nearly passed out.)
In this same room, I also have a hard drive from 1985 with a total storage capacity of 120mb that weighs probably 5 pounds. It’s sitting on a shelf, and it’s probably one of the coolest things in the entire room. (Thanks, Scott! I still show it off to everyone who visits my house!)
The absolute sum total cost of every computer I have in this house is orders of magnitude cheaper than those first computers cost to create, even in “pure” numbers, let alone if you accounted for inflation. And even the controller chip inside a single mouse is orders of magnitude faster than they were. And I’m just one guy who happens to be a techno buff. Imagine companies like Google or Microsoft… how much sheer processing power they control, how much storage capacity.
Ok, I suppose I probably ought to quit waxing poetic about all this stuff. But have you ever really stopped and thought about how good we’ve got it now? What would you do with your life if computers didn’t exist? I, for one, would be hard-pressed to support my family, if nothing else. I’m scrawny and uncoordinated… I wouldn’t last 15 minutes doing manual labor!
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El. Em. Ay. Oh.
Posted on Sunday, December 7, 2008 at 12:01 am
I’m not usually one to make posts that do nothing but link to someone else’s content. If I want to make a blog post, it usually has its own purpose. But this is just too good. This thread is a great example of why I started reading Fark in the first place. And if this had been a weekday, when I was at work, I probably wouldn’t have accomplished anything else for the rest of the day, because I would have been too busy hitting reload and hoping for more comments. It’s a damn good thing this is a Saturday night.
So yeah, here’s the thread that pretty much made me not stop laughing for an hour or so.
Read it. Laugh. Enjoy.
1 Comment
Oh, happy day!
Posted on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Congratulations, President Obama!!!
2 Comments
Please vote.
Posted on at 12:01 am
No matter who your choice for President is, and no matter where you stand on all the other people and issues you will be asked about, please go out and vote today, if you haven’t already. Thanks.
2 Comments
Pics from Halloween
Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Went to a costume party with some people from the office, so I got to dress up. It was loads of fun. 
The costume was called “Edwardian Spectre,” in case you’re interested. This is the first costume I’ve actually bought outright in, well, seems like forever. All through college my buddy and I would make our own costumes from scratch (making giant round South Park heads out of paper mache), or assemble them from ready-made parts (eg. camo pants and a flak jacket when we went as soldiers). So it was kind of sad to just buy one off the shelf this year, but hey, I’m older now, and have significantly less free time with which to make costumes than I used to in college.
These pics were taken at the end of the night, after we got back home. So most of the makeup is wearing a bit thin. I did put on a fresh coat of lipstick, though, so that at least part of it still looked fresh.
And some pics of the pumpkins the wife and I carved. Keeping in mind that we live in Texas, you won’t be too surprised to know that three days after we’d carved them, someone came along and smashed them.
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I’ve quit smoking.
Posted on Friday, October 17, 2008 at 10:38 pm
As of 11:00pm tomorrow, I will have gone 6 weeks without a cigarette.
I’m using the patch. It really hasn’t been that bad; much better than what I was expecting going into this whole ordeal. And I’m using the generic patch - not even the “real” patch, but the store-brand patch. And it really hasn’t been that bad. There are three steps to it. You start out with a 21mg (real nicotine, not some replacement chemical) per patch (each patch is supposed to last for 24 hours), at step 1. After 4 weeks (I did it in 3) you move to step 2, which is 14mg. 2 weeks after that you move to the 3rd and final step, 7mg. And then after 2 weeks of step 3 you quit everything. So, I’ll start my 7th and final week of the patch on Sunday. Then I stop completely.
The modern patch is supposed to be time-released stuff that’s supposedly effective over 24 hours, which I find is kind of a crock of shit. Nights were pretty bad, when I first got started on it. It did, indeed, do a pretty good job of getting me through the day without smoking. But about 7-8pm or so, it would start wearing off, and I would get headaches and everything else. It was generally unpleasant. After about two weeks those started wearing off, but each time I moved from step X to step Y, I would get another week or so of nighttime headaches. It’s definitely proof that Elise loved me, because she held out and let me be an asshole for awhile. Hell, she was even pregnant and hormonal at the time, and she still hasn’t (left | kicked me out). So it can’t have been that bad.
I did this for my child. I’d always told everyone - by which I mean, my family and anyone else who gave me shit about smoking - that I’d quit whenever Elise got knocked up. But I always kind of said it just to get them to shut up. Then the pregnancy really happened, and I actually decided to do it for real. And I’m really proud of myself for having lasted this long. I have a very addictive personality - hell, I used to somehow be addicted to DXM, which is physically impossible to be addicted to - so the fact that I’ve managed to go this long without a smoke is simply stunning to me.
I bought Rockband 2 as my reward for going 3 weeks. I plan on getting a very large, very tasty lobster at Pappadeaux as my reward for finishing. I’ve only got one week left before that happens. And let me tell you… a lobster sounds really good right now.
5 Comments
Pics of Jhonen’s room
Posted on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 7:44 pm
My sister came to visit us this past week, and was a massive help in getting the baby room completed. We’d gotten the furniture and bedding, and had done the big wooden letters and the three paintings, but she put so much work into making the curtains and painting the wall. I’d doodled the wall several weeks ago, and did a little bit of the painting, but mostly I supervised while she did all the hard work.
So here are some pics of the now finished room. Thanks again to my sister for all her work. It wouldn’t have been possible without her. Well, it probably would have been possible, but it wouldn’t have gotten done until the kid was in kindergarten, so it wouldn’t have been very practical.
The crib, and the big wooden name letters that we painted and decorated.
Here’s the dresser (oooh! aaah!) and the three hand-painted canvas paintings that I drew and Elise finished.
A little random decoration, because that wall looked kind of lonely.
The awesome curtains my sister made. They’re made of corduroy, almost black-out curtains, so I am now officially jealous of my unborn child, since I don’t even have black-out curtains in my room.
The complete treasure map wall, with my sister standing in front of it so you can get an idea of the scale.
Treasure map, sans sister. All this was drawn on paper about 3 weeks ago, and the three of us painted the entire thing over the course of last week.
Detail of the whale.
Detail of the palm trees.
Detail of the pirate ship.
Detail of the compass.
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It’s a boy!
Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 5:37 pm
The first pictures of the future Jhonen Blount are below.
And yes, look at the size of the weenie on that one!!! He’s definitely my boy.
EDIT: From the family members I emailed these pics to, apparently the “it’s a boy” pic is rather ambiguous. This pic was taken from the side of Lisi’s stomach - basically, it’s a perfect upskirt shot - or it would be, if it was a girl who wore skirts, which it’s not. So, without further ado, my very own Photoshop commentary on the clincher pic. View what follows in conjunction with the previous image, and it will become patently obvious exactly how much of a man my little boy is. That’s right. I said it.
