K. Close III

Monday, May 31st, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | No Comments

I need to start writing here again, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Things just seem so slow, I don’t know that there’s anything anyone will care about, even though there’s fucktons of stuff going through my head lately.

what the hell, it’s small…

Monday, May 24th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 1 Comment

From Go-Quiz.com

Friday, May 21st, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 5 Comments

So I’ve restarted keeping a database of my DVDs. I’ve done this at least once before, if not more. This time I borrowed a barcode scanner from work. It was retired from the lab when we moved to a magnetic stripe reader and it was about to be surplused (the governmental equibalent to thrown in the trash, only the trash is a warehouse of crap no one wants but the state officially owns). Anyhoo, I took it home last night, and the software I use to catalog my DVDs and CDs (collectorz.com) supports searching by Barcode. All I had to do was set up a search queue and pull each DVD out about two inches and scan the barcode (conveniently, all DVD barcodes are in the upper right hand corner of the case so you don’t even have to take them off the shelf, just lean them out a bit). Then I hit search and one after the next, it searched the internet databases for those particular barcodes. Of all my DVDs, I think I had to manually enter 10 (thats out of 179).

Holy crap, I have 179 movies!? and thats not even counting the TV series DVDs. Schnikeys!

Anyway, yeah, so some of my editions aren’t actually online, so if I want to really make this accurate, I have to scan some covers and shit, but otherwise, its all going very well. I’ll probably set up a space on pelovish for all this in case anyone is interested and wants to view me as a very limited lending library.

Friday, May 21st, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 2 Comments

I just realized on my way into work this morning. that I don’t take as many pictures as I used to. I guess I got tired of taking pictures of the animals and Heather and ran out of things that weren’t just “boring.” As a result, I just fell out of the habit of snapping shots when something less than boring poped up. I’m gonna have to work harder at taking more pictures.

Anyway, a lot of stuff has happened since the last time I updated. Heather and I had been musing about changing the philosophy aroudn how we watch TV and movies. As I had said earlier, we were looking at getting ReplayTV and Netflix. So as of Tuesday, we now have our ReplayTV unit and we started trying out Netflix. We had ordered the ReplayTV unit on Friday, but it was 9-10 days for free delivery. We signed up for the 14 day trial for Netflix at lunch on Tuesday because it was a 14 day trial and on Tuesday, 14 days later would be the first, so we wouldn’t have to worry about not having money. So over lunch, we sat and ate, while adding movies to our queue. I decided to take the afternoon off and push on to the end of the Transformers game and not twenty minutes after heather left, the UPS man showed up with our ReplayTV unit.

Now let’s do some quick math. I ordered the ReplayTV unit on Friday, the 14th, and requested free shipping which was 9-10 days. At best, that would be the 23rd, and yet, here it was, at our house on the 18th, a whole five days early. I was astounded. Best shipping I’d ever gotten for free.

So anyway, back to what I was saying. Heather and I had decided we were going to try these two services and see how our lives would adapt to this new take on entertainment , not being a slave to the TV by watching whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, though we did have to set things to record to do so; while at the same time, never actually going to the video store, so we no longer really have total control of what movie we watch and when, though we have control of what three movies are at the house at a time). It’s almost exactly the opposite of how we used to view entertainment in our house, so we wanted to see if we’d like it or not. So far, the two services together have been nothing but fun. We’ve spent hours , literally) simply sitting on Netflix.com rating movies that we’ve seen, which results in relatively accurate recommendations that we then consider adding to our already heaping queue of movies we just want to see, recommendations or not. So after two and a half days playing around with ReplayTV, we recieved our first three movies from Netflix. Its been a big week to say the least.

Here’s our Queue, currently.

Monday, May 17th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 6 Comments

Had an incredibly lazy, incredibly non-productive, incredibly enjoyable weekend. I had some tenative plans that all but fell through, so I shoved them through out of lack of motivation. I finally managed to rent Transformers for PS2 on Friday and played a couple hours that night, but more impressively, I played for 15+ hours on Saturday. Sure Heather and Nur were surprised by this fact, but I was a bit surprised as well. I haven’t had that focus and dedication for a game in a long time. It’s rented, so that’s part of the drive, but at the same time, even when it was so annoying I was ready to throw the controller out the door, I still kept playing because, well, because it’s the TRANSFORMERS (oh, and I have a wireless PS2 controller from Logitec, it’s $50 so there’s no chance it’s going out the window). The game is very true to the original cartoon (though I keep expecting some different voices, especially since they included some of the original PSAs from the cartoon), so part of the reason I can’t put it down is because I’m kind of playing my childhood. I’m still antsy to play it again, but I won’t get a chance tonight.

For you see, tonight is our anniversarry and we’re going out to dinner. Okay, that won’t take up the whole night, but it just doesn’t seem right to play a video game on the night of our anniversarry. Though I guess there is a chance that I’ll have some free time to do so.

We’ve been married for six years now, which doesn’t seem that long, but I know these days that’s a pretty major accomplishment. I don’t know how I feel about that fact. I’m proud that through better and worse, we’ve stuck by eachother and are still together, but at the same time, it bothers me that the world has gotten to the point that thats a big deal. People just don’t seem to be as serious about marriage as they used to be. I know Heather and I have had some rocky times, we’re still not the perfect couple, but we try, and we put effort into it. We talk, we listen, we pay attention, we work at maintaining our relationship. A marriage is not just a “set it and forget it” relationship and I know there were some points where we were in that mindset, but we’ve moved past that. I’d love to see a day where six years is paltry in the grand scheme of things, but for now, I’m going to go to dinner with my wife, stare into her eyes and be proud of what we’ve accomplished in a time of animosity and divorce.

I just wish we had more money to go out. We’re in the process of casually planning a Yard Sale. We’ve started evaluating the stuff in our house and deciding what can stay and what can go – and what can make a buck. We’re also inviting our friends to join in our yard sale. The more crap we have to sell, the more people will show up, so if you have stuff to sell, feel free to contact us and we’ll see about setting you up a space on the lawn where you can have your own little sales booth. We don’t want any of your profits, we just want the sale to look really big. We also want plenty of “salesmen” to make sure people are helped as quickly as possible. Even if you only have a little bit, we can still set you up a spot. I think you’ll be surprised by what you have to offer if you really look.

Friday, May 14th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 2 Comments

So I’m in the lab this morning, and I was wondering where my lab attendant was. so I pull up the schedule to see who I should be grumpy at, and I realize its the person I accidentally scheduled for the May Minimester who isn’t even going to be here until Summer I. So when Craig comes down and gets that look on his face and says “we really need to hire people show up when they’re scheduled.” I had to look back and say that I screwed up and to stop being so negative toward my lab attendants. He doesnt’ think very highly of them and I feel bad that he feels that way.

Anyway, I have a meeting today and if Nick doesn’t show up soon, I may not be able to go to it. He needs to get here so he can sit in the lab while I go to the meeting. I may even have to call him so I can go. Crap I hate waking up people, especially if it’s for something like work, and especially if they’re not morning people. Especially if they’re Nick.

Okay, so Nick showed up before I even finished typing about waking him up. I’ll be able to go to my meeting afterall.

Heather and I are ballancing budgets right now because there are a couple of monthly expenses we’re thinking of tacking on to our lives. We’re looking at ReplayTV and Netflix. If you have any experience with either of these (or maybe TiVo, or can argue that I should look into a different service for either of them) please let me know. I’m really interested in both now and am willing to start shelling out the cash. In fact, I’m tempted to sign up for both in the next week or so, as both get a 10 day trial.

Anyway, I gotta get going to my meeting, so I gotta wrap this up.

Excelsior!

Friday, May 14th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | No Comments

You may not have heard, but there’s trouble in Bond-land apparently. The producers of the next 007 film are not entirely in agreement that Pierce Brosnan will be reprising the role, and it’s also rumored that he may not be as interested as he once was either. There are rumors of Hugh Jackman and Clive Owen, who are both incredible actors, but I don’t see either of them as James Bond. There is a petition currently to get an actor from this season of 24 (and apparently some episodes of ER) into the Tuxedo.

Please consider signing this Petition to at least have Paul Blackthorne looked at for the roll.

Friday, May 14th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 3 Comments

How can I possibly argue with this?

What random image am I?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | No Comments

This week is creeping along like a slug in winter, I tell ya. I even took half a day off yesterday and I still feel like I’m not moving. I’ve spent the majority of the “week” making small updates to the web page since we went live. I’ve recieved a good number of alerts from users saying files are missing and have been able to update them much faster than if there wasn’t a custom 404 page telling them who to contact about their missing links.

If you feel you need a custom 404 page, be sure to visit this link: 404. It’ll give you the hook up.

As corwin75 announced, he’s going to do a high level short game with old, semi-retired characters, or, for those people who’ve never been in Steve’s game, new characters. I convereted one of my favorite characters from his game yesterday with my free afternoon. Izyurirosu aka “Riposte.” He was a Tiefling flourentine fighter who bent the laws of time and space with his speed and extradimensional attacking. He’s also been known to loose and arm or three, and be on the cutting edge of fashion trends (in his Vrock Hide Jacket). Anyway, converting him from AD&D 2nd Edition to 3.5E makes it apparently how differently the game works. There are things (like armor) that I had no need for in 2nd Ed, that I had to actually sit down and buy for him as if he’d had it the whole time. Conversions are fun, but frustrating at times. You want to keep the character as true to form, but not hamstring them in the process. Sometimes you gain new things to ballance out what you were before (ghost touch to negage the 20% while blinking), and other times you just lose things that aren’t worth converting (I had wings and innate fireballs before!). All in all though, I’m actually excited to play this character again and would love to convince Steve to play him through his destiny of being the Demi-God of time and space.

If not that, then at least pull my evil character out of mothballs, because he had a truely great destiny, and I’d love to see that one through to fruition.

Well, my site’s done synchronizing (to a degree) so I should go in, reply to people who have pointed out missing files and check all the latest links.

Friday, May 7th, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 1 Comment

Another one stolen from mandroid

I feel bad, but I dont actually read every post on my friends page…