Oct 15

In the band

When I do something I’m gonna do soon, I’ll be rockin’ a mohawk, custom-tailored banded collar shirts, corduroy pants and cowboy boots. And you know what?

It’s gonna be awesome.

Oct 13

Moore Chloe

Wait, how did I not know that Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore were going to be in a remake of Stephen King’s Carrie?

If they had to pick a white actress, Moretz should have been Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games movie. She’s the right age now. What a lost opportunity, because she’s great.

But I wasn’t really interested in the new Carrie film until I found this out.

Oct 12

Book it

I hate almost all mainstream book awards because they’ll generally pick the top five most boring-ass books about white men having mid-life crises published in the past year, meanwhile absolutely wonderful so-called genre books are completely ignored.

In my opinion, the best book of last year was Jo Walton’s Among Others. It was far better than at least two of the books on the NBA list that I’ve also read. Far, far better, really.

It pisses me off to no end that Walton’s masterpiece is ignored just because it had some fairies, but Eggers’ somnambulistic male midlife crisis book-curse of the month club is chosen.

Makes no damn sense.

Oct 12

Here, kitty

I would bite the heads off kittens for a 27”+ monitor with the PPI of my iPad.

How awesome that would be is nearly incalculable. Not biting the heads off kittens. The monitor.

Oct 12

Smarty man

The one thing I dislike most about my current job – and really, any IT job — is that when you are the “smart guy” you get to be the shit-sweeper.

Everyone gets to screw everything up with wild abandon, but you, ah you are the one who is supposed to be always there to fix it.

I’d rather not be known as the “smart guy,” but once everyone figures out that you can clean up their messes, they then feel that you have the obligation and the absolute requirement to do so.

Guess it means I’ll always have a job if I want one, at least.

Oct 11

Dirty fighting

Was just thinking about the fights I’ve been in today.

I’m not a big guy. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for someone to beat on me before I lay into them. Especially if there is two of them. Then I stand no real chance if I don’t act first.

One opponent, I might give them a free punch. Unless I can’t see them, I’m usually able to duck it or dodge it as my one true (and sometimes, only) advantage is speed.

There’s been two times in my life where I’ve fought against more than one opponent. One time I got beat up fairly badly, but I still guess I technically won. Though my face didn’t feel like I’d won. Luckily, I don’t bruise easily so what on most people would have been an enormous black eye was barely noticeable.

The other time was pretty successful. The only real strategy I can use against two opponents given my size is to hurt the first guy so badly quickly that he won’t get up again for a while. In the case I am talking about, it was a really hard throat punch combined with stepping on the guy’s foot and pushing him backwards as hard as I could. He fell and didn’t get up again for thirty seconds or so, enough time for me to deal with his friend.

The advantage of this is that it intimidates the second guy, too.

The disadvantage is that to the police, you will appear to be the aggressor even if it’s clear these guys were going to tear your head off.

In the last fight, the one with the throat punch, the second guy rushed me and tried to get me on the ground, but I kneed him in the stomach a few times, did a short elbow to the side of his face and also put a finger in his eye shortly thereafter – all really dirty techniques, but as I said I am not big and every opponent I’ve ever fought has outweighed me by at least 40 pounds, and some by as much as 80. Not odds in my favor.

The fight ended when it got broken up, but it was pretty much over by then, anyway. He didn’t want any more of that.

Oct 11

h8

I don’t hate Windows 8 because it is different; no, I hate it because it fucking sucks.

I have no problem at all with iOS that runs on my iPad. It is nearly the perfect OS for a tablet. It very effectively minimizes the limitations of a tablet and maximizes its capabilities.

For how I use a tablet, their might be a better possible OS using the technologies available today, but I am not smart enough to think of what that could be. That is to say, Apple’s iOS is pretty much ideal for its tablet use case.

But using a tablet or phone OS on the desktop, as Windows 8 attempts to force users to do?

Yes, yes, I know, tablets are allegedly the future and all that. But the fact is that right at this very moment, despite what you’ve heard in the media, PCs still outsell tablets by something like 20 to 1. And also, there are something like 120 times as many PCs in the world that could run Windows 8 than there are tablets of any type.

So this means that Microsoft is going out on a limb of their own choosing and forcing their much larger number of customers to run an OS designed for a tablet or phone on a desktop machine.

Not sure about you, but my desktop ain’t no tablet, and it surely is not a phone. The use paradigm for the two smaller devices is much different than what is is ideal on a 23”+ monitor.

I used Windows 8 for a few days. It was exercise in sheer frustration, and then unbridled fury. Not even Windows ME riled me up so much. At least the interface in that one made sense, even if it crashed every half hour.

I know how to shut any Windows OS down at the command line, which I still managed to find in Windows 8, but while using it I wanted to attempt to figure out how to shut it down the regular “consumer” way, as most people would experience it. It took me 30 minutes of continual searching to discover how to shut down the OS.

Amazing.

And that’s not even the most frustrating part of the OS.

I hate everything about Windows 8, and hope it dies a painful death in interface hell.

Oct 10

A $15,000 bike

I don’t really care that much about bike trick-riding or anything about the whole biking world, but the cinematography and editing of this video is really superb.

The end is bad, though.

Oct 09

Ah, the memories

Sometimes, I go to florida.arrests.org and for fun look up the county where I grew up to see how long it takes me to find someone I know – or rather, knew.

It usually does not take that long because I grew up in, let us say, less than savory conditions.

Take this one, for instance.

Arrested for battery? What a shocker.

I once chased this clown out of my house with a chainsaw when I was about 16.

Funny to think that in some video games people think it is badass to wield a chainsaw as a weapon. I’ve wielded one in real life that way. Heh.

If only I were making this stuff up. If only.