Archived News starting from 11-06-2003 and earlier
BlogToday the building I work at had a
fire drill which turned out more exciting than anticipated due primarily to the antics of the "fire marshals" which were essentially a comedy routine. After the drill,
Duane and I went to Tubbies for lunch, and I finally got a
picture of me sitting on the dolphin statue outside the resturant. Quite possibly the most pointless sculpture I know of, it was something that had to be done.
Tonight I got home and was greeted with 70 degree weather. I took the opportunity to mow my yard free of leaves, (attempted to) fix my exhaust on my
Cougar, and replaced the headlights on my S10. By this time it was 7:00pm and still beautiful outside! Unwilling to be inside, I walked down to
Duane and Gina's stopping at Donut Town on the way. Unfortunately, they were both sick and not quite as excited about the weather as I was. Nonetheless, I was handed a bottle of wine for my visit, and had a relaxing walk back. Now I get home and see it will be snowing this Friday. Oh well, at least I had one last day of summer.
My ISP again had an undisclosed problem with connectivity around 10:00am this morning. When the problem was fixed, my cable modem wasn't able to reset itself and get back online. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get home until 9:30pm, so the entire site was down for 11.5 hours. Everything is again operational after a simple power cycle of the modem. Ridiculous.
My recent acquisition of a
day/night color camera means the
Gnome Cam is no longer limited by the sun. Consequently, it is now operating from 8:00am - 11:00pm. Unfortunately, the camera is sensitive to cold, so once the snow hit's it's back to the old daytime camera until spring. But for now, it's late night Gnome Cam!
The following IM conversation is the same pattern found in all IM's with Enorym:
enOrym:
its about 20 a shirt
enOrym: let me find out how much shipping is
AtomicInternet:
What happened to $12.50?
enOrym: dunno
enOrym: hang on ill ask
enOrym: thats what my boss's wife said
AtomicInternet:
http://www.pacificautosalvage.com/shirts.htm
AtomicInternet: I'm suing for false marketing
AtomicInternet:
or they can just give me free shirts and I'll
drop the lawsuit
enOrym signed off at 1:31:20 PM.About 5 years ago, I read an excellent book entitled "
Amusing Ourselves to Death." It is a discussion on how the various media we are bombarded with is affecting our lives, and some possible ramifications. Today, the free press ran a
good article on the use of media in educating children. While I spent a good deal of my childhood watching "He-Man," "Smurfs," and "Transformers," I also remember my parents forcing me to go outside and play with my friends quite frequently. I still became a computer nerd, but thanks to them I developed enough social skills to maintain relationships with my fellow human beings. I'm not saying we should all panic and run around in circles blowing up TV's, I'd be a hypocrite if I said that. Instead, I'm assigning everyone homework: buy/borrow/steal the book and read the article. If you're aware of the issue, you think differently. Don't let your imagination get swallowed up in mainstream media. Dare to be different, and express your creativity even if it doesn't make any sense at all. Here are a
few good examples.
The Surprise Visitor has been coming to my porch for almost 5 days now so
Melissa and I decided to take action. I called up my mom and asked if she would watch the cat for the next few weeks while we put up posters in case he has an owner. She agreed and now
he has a place to live. He's a surprisingly quiet and affectionate cat, and definately polydactyl. In case you didn't notice, I also installed a hood for my oven, which was long overdue.
Steve and Candy came over lastnight for the viewing of the "Nineteen Eighty Four" movie. While we were watching the movie, a
cat showed up on my porch. He had
gigantic eyes and was so friendly it couldn't have been a stray. Melissa set out a cat carrier for him, and we later saw my neighbors do the same. I don't think he was lost so much as he wanted to socialize. My cat, however, definately was
not interested in socializing and went insane trying to attack him through the window. My cat going absolutely nuts was definately entertaining.
I recently acquired a copy of the movie
Nineteen Eighty Four, an adaptation of the novel by George Orwell. I've read the book and saw the
Macintosh commercial based on the movie, but never saw the movie itself. I hope to change that this weekend. It's a story about a future society (1984 was the future when it was written) based on "Ingsoc" (
newspeak for English Socialisim). In the story, "Big Brother" spies on citizens 24/7 and runs their lives. I'm a big fan of apocolypse movies and if it's anything like the book this one should be awesome. Yes, I know I'm probably the only person on the planet who hasn't seen it yet.
Brian recently purchased a
G5 computer and immediately started running Seti@Home as a benchmark. It was very fast, and looked slick on top of it. We drooled over it for quite some time. I had switched from running Seti@Home to
United Devices cancer research client almost 2 years ago and then just stopped running distributed computing entirely. The recent demonstration had me digging around for my account and I finally
found it. I once had 10 PC's running the client to get my stats where they are, and now I'm sure I can run it on my single PC and accomplish the same amount as the 10 PC's did 2 years ago. You can watch my progress
here.
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