Diary of a Wolfeman

Everybody’s had one. You know, that one idiot friend or roommate from your past that you always knew you’d find in the paper someday, doing something stupid. For me, it’s Geordie, the Guy Under The Stairs. He lived in the cupboard under the stairs of the townhouse I lived in waaaaay back when in ‘Vegas. He was a Dead Head, didn’t shower anywhere near often enough, and was either funny or damned annoying, never anything in between.

B:tNG pointed this out to me the other day:

Two more arrests at Biscuit fire salvage

Liam O’Reilly of Ashland and Gordon Gilbrook of San Diego were charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with agricultural process, authorities said. They were booked at the Josephine County Jail.

Rich Parrett was driving a log truck early Thursday when he spotted Gilbrook in the middle of the road. The activist was suspended 20 feet high in a platform below two poles anchored to a Volvo.

A banner below the platform read “These forests need fire, not old-growth tree removal.”

Yep, that “Gordon” would be Geordie. I’m betting two things. 1) – Geordie was trying to get in some dreadlocked patchouli-smelling hippie-chick’s pants, and 2) – the sign was somehow mispelled.

Like there was any real question…
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Okay, maybe there was a bit of a question. By the Power of Being a Gemini, I score well for 3 of my favorite starships, plus that un-pronounceable one and a space station.

Of course, since they are my faves, it would seem likely that I would score well for those. It seems to me it would be far simpler to just ask “what’s your favorite crew?” that to make you take the quiz. Shrug.

Or, “The Trials and Tribulations of Buying Online”

For weeks now, I have been hungrilly searching through the inventoru at NewEgg, cobling together the list of parts that would eventually become my latest computer build. I’ve probably spent about 6 hours on this since January.

One thing about me though, is that I am impatient. When my tax refund arrived on Friday, there was now way in hell I was going to wait another two days for shipping, and then probably until the end of the week before I could actually meld thos parts together into a computer. Saturday morning, I went to Fry’s.

The problem with having spent so much time getting the perfect list of parts and then going to another store is not always finding what you spec’d out. I think the only two things on the original list that made it into the final build are the processor and the MP3 player I wanted. The rest is “close enough”. Here’s what actually made it into ‘Hyperion’:

Antec tower case (I wanted a Centurion, but they didn’t have the no-psu model, and I wasn’t going to pay $40 for a psu I was going to throw away)
Antec SmartPower 500W modular psu (spec was 450W, got this for the same price)
AMD 3700+ 64-bit proc
ECS nForce4 motherboard (spec was an MSI model)
2Gb PC2100 RAM (1 gig from the old box, another gig I had lying around without enough motherboard slots)
eVGA 256 Mb GeForce 6600 PCI-E video (this change was good – it turns out the eVGA 6800XT board I saw at NewEgg is a typo and doesn’t exist)
a pair of Maxtor 100Gb SATA drives in swap bays (spec was Western Digital 40 Gb SATA, which they were out of; these were 15$ more each)
Creative Zen Micro 6Gb MP3 player. (Ok, not a computer part, but damn cool anyway :) )

This is my first time really playing around with a 64-bit processor, and so far I am mightily impressed by the speed. I’m used to having to wait a tick or three when I click on an icon, but the AMD 3700+ reacts almost instantly. OpenOffice.org Calc opens in less than four seconds – without the quickstarter. Firefox in less than two! I can’t wait until I get some time to install Kubuntu’s 64-bit edition.

Ahh….new computer bliss ;)

Ok, it’s not often that I will review (maybe critique is a better word) a TV episode, but this one goes to great lengths to make people want to talk about it. I’ll start with the good bits…

Lady Heather rocks mightily.
Yes, we knew that already, but in this episode she gets to be the woman I think every girl wants to be: she is intelligent, strong, and at least one step ahead of the whole crew, including Grissom. More on this at the end.

One of the darker plots this series has come up with, and has some additional twists I didn’t expect – like Brass being the one to come up with a line that stumped a lot of people. “Starved, shaved and numbered…what does this remind you of?” I thought he was referring to a past episode, and I’m guessing there’s a bunch of folks out there who didn’t realize until later in the show he was actually thinking of a Nazi camp.

Now for some of the bad.
Anyone reading this has the ability to discover that “Highway 55” doesn’t enter Nevada, and Sparks is outside of Reno – an 8 hour drive from ‘Vegas. (Maybe 6 hours for Katherine and Sara, I’m guessing that they drive fast.) C’mon, guys, we expect you to use real road and place names as much as possible, but let’s make them realistic, ok?

Brass has known Lady Heather for some time now, and he didn’t think to put a tail on her? You know a person with her drive, personal connection to the crime and mental ability is going to poke their nose into the investigation and possibly do something not quite legal. (Hell, I would). Brass should have put an officer or two on her as soon as she left the station the first time.

We’ll finish the same way the show did, with one of the best parts: Lady Heather tracks down the bastard that killed her daughter just like we thought she would. Does she kill him? No. She straps his ass to the hood of a car and goes after him with her whip. No easy death here, this fucktard needs to suffer.

Moral? Never fuck with the daughter of a dominatrix.

It’s only Wednesday, isn’t it?

Home: busy busy busy, since Pookie’s stepfather TS is out of town on business. Since the EMC doesn’t drive, Pook has been sleeping here every night due to the closer proximity to her school. (5-minute drive for me, 1 1/2 hour bus trip for EMC)

I hate waiting. I have a big fat check coming from the IRS, and I already have it spent in my head. I want it to be here already! (Of course, there will be an additional two or three days of waiting once the check gets here, because the parts I’m buying are from Internet suppliers…)

Had to replace the Ratboy’s power supply last weekend – thankfully, that and a fan were all that went.

Work: Bossman went on a rant at a couple of meetings about how we aren’t doing enough business and he’s going to have to cut hours to make up the slack. Then he calls me later and tells me I will be the last one on the list to get my hours cut, since I’m the one bringing in money.

Today I sold a $1155 computer; had to revise a bid to a bigger server ($3000 to $5000) that will almost positively sell (and will lead to a couple more PC’s in a couple months), and finished off the notes so Bossman can finish up two more thousand-and-something-$ project bids.

One of the things that keeps me going in this job is the “Hallelujah!” look I got when I popped a floppy disk out of a drive and booted a supposedly “crashed” computer. Next week I’ll see that customer’s “contented peace of mind” look when I install an external storage drive and backup software.

I rock :)

My Roomie posted an email from Spud that was really well thought-out. So well thought-out that it got me remembering the sports we played in PE back in Podunk when I was a kid.

Basketball: not so much. We were all VERY white and we all sucked. Sure, we had a school team and all, but man, what a bunch of no-talents. Come to think of it, that described all of our “official” teams – with the exception of our footbal Defense squad. It seems that bailing hay all summer sets a guy up pretty well for throwing around other guys his age.

Baseball: I never really played; I became a Little League Umpire instead. I was the one in the sleeveless shirt with the ponytail. We did play a little softball for a while though. The one time I can remember, Coach Bradshaw was pitching to give everyone a “fair pitch”. (I think he just liked to pitch.) I remarked off-hand to one of my chums as I walked up to bat “watch me hit him.” First pitch came in low, and I let it go by. The second pitch, though, that pitch was perfect. That aluminum bat sang as it connected with the ball.

Coach grunted as the ball connected with his leg, just a couple inches lower than the jewels. You should have seen the look on his face as I took my bases.

Wrestling: what the football D-squad did off-season. The rest of us stayed the hell away.

Football: In PE we played flag with a 5-aligator rush. This means the when the ball is snapped, you chant ‘one-aligator, two-aligator…up to 5 ‘gators before you can rush the quarterback. We did this because the 6th-grader with the least talent invariably got made center, and there was no way he was going to stop an 8th-grade nose tackle.

Jarrod and I were the only 8th-graders in that class one day, and we of course appointed ourselves QB and Nose Tackle. I’m only so-so at tossing the ball, but I had an absolute talent for counting 5 gators in about 1/10th of a second, running a few steps and launching myself into the air. There would be poor Jarrod, trying to find an open receiver with Da Wolfie hanging in the air over his head like the hammer of Thor.

The funny bit came when Jarrod tried a running play and I ended up chasing him. He could run just the slightest bit faster than me, and he was pulling away when I just leapt for him. Somehow I managed to get both of his flags in hand as I fell back to the turf, and things got a wee bit embarrassing for Jarrod. See, Jarrod had a habit of crushing the Velcro tabs of his flags as much as he could so they wouldn’t come off – and when I hit the dirt, so did his flags, his flag belt,…and his shorts, which immediatley tripped him onto his face.

So there’s poor Jarrod, faceplanted, with his bare ass in the air. And 20 6th graders laughing their ass off.

It’s a good thing I never liked Jarrod, or I’d have felt guilty about it :)

Winter was when PE really got to be fun. Podunk Oregon, like any other stretch West of the Cascades, is bloody wet from October through April, which means we were largely confined indoors. This equated to a lot of co-ed games like volleyball and badminton. This of course meant we had a fair number of girls bouncing around in skimpy shorts and worn-out t-shirts.

And my chums all wondered why I liked PE ;)

One girl I can remember to this day. Julie wasn’t one of the pretty girls – she was unfortunate enough to have the eyes of a bat, and wore true coke-bottle specs that did nothing to improve her appearance. She did have, however, a spectacular body to offset the glasses.

She came into PE one day with the best shirt ever: a picture of Garfield with the caption “You might as well take all of me, because the parts you want won’t come off!” spelled out across her chest. I almost fell over laughing.

We decided to stay in with a couple of movies over the weekend, and chose Lord of War and Transporter 2. I’ll list them in the order we watched them.

Transporter 2
We had been warned ahead of time that while the movie was good, there are some seriously painful parts. They were right.

The plot isn’t bad for an action movie, although it’s finer points needed more work. Of course, we know what the basic plot is going to be when we go into it: The Transporter takes a job to move something, gets involved somehow more than he wanted to, and ends up kicking everyone’s ass. This they do, and well.

The rough parts come with the why the bad guys do what they do – aside from normal bad guy stupidity.

The really painful parts come with the action sequences. Most moviegoers are willing to suspend disbelief for a while, but this film asks us to simply shut our brain off and watch the pretty pictures at a couple of points.

In all, I give it 2 1/2 paws out of five.

Lord of War
This is not a happy movie. One of the first sequences follows the life of an AK-47 round (from the bullet’s POV) through manufacturing, delivery, dissemination and eventually to the end of it’s life – in the forehead of what appears to be a 14-yr-old African boy.

It doesn’t lighten up much from this for the rest of the movie.

I get the feeling Cage took this project to in some way make up for a couple of the cheesier roles he’s taken recently. National Treasure was pure Disney, and I’m not sure Ghost Rider is going to turn out very well. So, he takes the role of one Yuri Orlov and tells you how this character turned from potential restaraunteur into an arms dealer.

Cage does a very good job of making you like and identify with Yuri, who is not in any way a good man. He provides the means for nations to lay waste to their neighbors in exchange for cash, drugs, contraband and lives. Through all of this, you still like him.

Not exactly a date movie, but well-made and worth watching. I give it 3 1/2 paws out of 5.

Content? When I can linky?
Devils Panties. What to do with squirrels.

I took a rough estimate of my tax picture today and came up with good mews and bad news.

Compared to 2004, I think I may have finally found the sweet spot for making sure I don’t owe any taxes: pay the State an extra $25 a paycheck. The sad part is, that just breaks me even – I won’t be getting a State refund. (Gee, like I’m surprised.) The Wolfie Savings Plan seems to be working as well, because the extra $15 a paycheck I gave the Fed should turn into a rather nice chunk of change on my 1040 return.

Here’s the bad news: how I figured this all out. I kept a copy of my 2004 returns, and compared my wage listings with my final paystub for 2005. They are almost identical.

Most of you are thinking “hey, that’s not so bad. Sure, you didn’t get any raises or anything, but it all works out.” True, except for one salient fact: I was unemployed for 8 months in 2004. Three months at my previous job plus about a month of contract work plus 8 months of unemployment equals what I made working 12 months straight.

Yup, that’s right. My job sucks.

On the brighter side, that Federal return is going to be put to good use. The Beastie will get some TLC, and the Rayboy will get some time in a dentist’s chair. Anything left over after that goes to the computer slush fund. I smell a 64-bit upgrade :)

To answer B’s question about why the commenters don’t get a rich text editor: because it doesn’t work as well.

It turns out that the thing is slow to respond, so if you hold down the backspace key or something, it doesn’t always stop where you want it to. This means us lousy typists end up spending a lot more time correcting typos.

It also makes any cut-and-paste operation twice as long, since you will have to go back and edit the HTML to fix the tags it breaks.

So, it’s easier to use the old editor – at least for me. You can turn the RT editor off in the “Options – Writing” pane.