Monthly Archives: September 2007

Friday Round Up

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I am working my way through the first two DVDs of Heroes, Season 1. While the cast members are all very pretty, Hiro is basically the reason I’ll continue to watch. Though, Mohinder has such an awesome speaking voice, it makes absolutely everything he says sound important.

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A man came and flattened a decent sized section of our backyard yesterday. Hopefully, I’ll get some time to do something to make it playable soon, not that a big patch of mud hasn’t already been demonstrated as playable by RocketBoy.

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Because I am a very stupid man, I thought it would be a good idea to install an extra hard drive to use as a quick, medium-safe backup in my (recently rehabilitated) lab computer. But in a nice example of irony, I managed to format my main drive that I had just finished installing everything to. I managed to lose a little bit of data and a month’s worth of emails, maybe, and of course hours of install/setup time. I’ll finish surveying and repairing the damage as time allows.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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I went to see Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris1 at the Alliance this week. It’s a musical review of Jacques Brel’s works, songs about love, death and war. Also, how women compared to dogs.

I had hoped to write my first ever review on TheaterReview.com, having no connection to the show whatsoever, a first in a long while. But I feel unequal to the task… I have little context to understand the significance, and the music is not particularly my music. I’d not heard of a single song before. It was well performed. I think. I’m not musically astute enough to know, actually. They may have been so off key as to not be able to see the key from where they were, but I’ve no way of knowing and it sounded fine to me.

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Home.

1 He is not anymore.

RocketBoy Caulfield

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A couple nights ago, we were talking about steakums‘ father retiring, and RocketBoy asked what retiring was. So, we explained that you work and save money, and when you have enough money you don’t have to work any more if you don’t want, and that’s called retiring. RocketBoy said I had enough money, so why didn’t I retire?

I explained I didn’t and asked him what type of work he might like to do when he grows up.

“I want to be the person who catches planets before they fall into [black] holes. The planets go spinning around the solar system and when they start going in the hole, I catch them in a big net.”

Dumbfounded and amazed at the parallel I answered, “You want to be a catcher in the sky?”

“Yep.”

“You’re going to need a big net.”

“And a small one… for pluto.”

When he starts making conversation with astronaut-nuns in a diner, I’ll know to start being worried.

Book Log: First Among Sequels

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First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

The fifth Thursday Next novel.

Fforde turns self-reference up to 11 as Thursday Next is training innacurately-written fictional Thursday Nexts from the first five books (including the non-existent The Samuel Pepys Fiasco) to become Jurisfiction Agents, with a subplot about time travel.

Enjoyable mind candy.

Coming over to the Dark Side

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A friend of mine posted this link to an article about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the Wii.

I’m not a gamehead. I can count the number of video games I’ve played in the last ten years on one hand.

But… to hold a virtual lightsabre and woosh it around with all the accompanying sound effects…

That is tempting.

If anybody gets it for Santamas, invite me over.

DEAR Reader

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This morning I was the D.E.A.R.1 reader for RocketBoy’s Pre-K class.

We read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and Earl’s Too Cool for Me. Also, we debuted RocketBoy’s Planet book.

Alexander was adapted to the stage and performed by Synchronicity a while back. Earl was given to steakums long before she had kids, and was featured on an episode of PBS’ Between the Lions.

Since I am RocketBoy’s dad, he got to sit in the Rocking Chair of Honor next to me as I read.

When we read with RocketBoy, it’s a very interactive experience with much discussion of each page and every picture. This class has been taught to be quiet and listen, so it took me a full book (Alexander) to get them in interactive mode, and reading along with the tag line “It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” They were in full respond mode throughout Earl. “What? A bicycle made of hay?? That makes no sense!”

Then we pulled out the Planet Book RocketBoy had made from planet photos printed from the Internets. His teacher had laminated and bound the pages for us (alas, out of order). We went through the pictures and talked about the various planets. The biggest hit was a photo I wasn’t going to put in, an artist’s rendition of the asteroid that hit the earth and killed all the dinosaurs.

RocketBoy jumped out of his chair and went into teacher mode and explained to the class about each planet, and about the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs, and how you can take three Earths and put them in the red spot on Jupiter. He was about to launch into his rendition of “Interplanet Janet” when I cut him off.

I filled out the class DEAR book log, and headed out as the kids prepared for breakfast.

Delightful. I’ve got my next DEAR session all planned out. I’m going to make a 4 foot high book with a page about each kid and let them be the live illustrations, standing in front of it. steakums says I should check with the teacher first. I say, I’m an elementary school rebel.

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1 Drop Everything And Read… everyone reads or is read to for 15 minutes every day, from 8:00am to 8:15am.

Chasing the Penguin

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Hey geeks, what’s everyone’s favorite Linux distribution?

With my new computer system up and running with four fully functional SATA drive ports and a seemingly infinite supply of free 160GB SATA Hard Drives at my disposal, I figure it’s high time for a dual-boot system.

I’ve installed Red Hat on some decrepit old systems that eventually gave up the ghost. But I believe there are a multitude… Debian, SuSe, Slacker… I may be dating myself by mentioning some of these.

The Computer is Dead, Long Live the Computer!

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The New and Improved Less Blown Up computer is at home, waiting to be tested out. I finished putting all the guts back in last night after the messy motherboarderectomy. I was too bleary eyed to be trusted to check it over before powering up.

Foolishly, I did not pay close attention when I ordered the motherboard to the types of sockets and plugs that were included… I failed to get one with a 20 pin power supply style (hopelessly antiquated! After three years!) or a AGPx16 socket for the display. So, a new power supply (24+4) and display card (PCI Express) needed to be purchased.

So, if anyone has need of an AGPx16 compatible display card or a 450W 20 pin computer power supply, I can help you out.

So, tonight, after steakums gets back from her business meeting with her clients1, I shall shut my eyes tight and flip the power button.

May the deity of ones and zeros have mercy; I need my computer back.

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1 Translation: Hitting a bar with the Georgia Shakes folks.