What the hell is going on???

The Story of Steve Dono

So I've been having alot of dreams lately. Last nights was about the 3rd one in the past week. However, the dream I had last night was....uh, quite disturbing, but as usual, completely random.

So, the dream is an episode of some game show that Joe Rogan is hosting. I'm not really sure about the details of the game show, but it's basically a "Would you Rather" show where they dare people to live up to statements they've made in the past that go something like: "I would rather ___ than ___." In the episode in my dream, a pretty 20-something year old girl is the contestant and she'd made the statement to her friends that "I would rather eat peanut butter off of Steve Dono's chest, than date another asshole."

Steve, is a guy that she had gone to high school with, and all the rest of her friends she had made the "would you rather" statement to, rembember him well. At this point Joe Rogan does a backstory on Steve showing video clips of him growing up, etc. His video montage begins when he is about 8yrs old and with his family. They are all at the house listening to music. Steve begins to dance...or at least attempts to. Everyone in his family begins laughing at him because he can't seem to move his hips right to the music and it looks completely awkward. He's humiliated. As Joe Rogan narrates, they show Steve progressing through childhood through yearbook photos and the effects that fateful day had on his life. He began to get fatter and fatter as he sunk into depression still unable able to dance.

At this moment, the last picture we had seen of Steve Dono was his Senior picture where he was about 350lbs, greasy, pale, and an unshaven, sparsely hairy face. Basically someone who had completely given up on life. No one feels sorry for him, just that he's a loser for caring about something so deeply. Joe Rogan makes the typical announcement of a show host: "let's bring out Steve", as if he's some sort of circus monkey we should marvel at in awe and wonder. Steve is brought out onto the stage sitting on a diving board perched precariously over an extremely large see through tank of water, much like one of those dunking booths at a fair. Steve is now nearly 1200lbs of blindingly white skin and fat, still depressed as ever.

Jennifer, shocked and embarrased of her statement coming to light begins to excuse and beg her way out of the situation. Joe quickly puts a stop to it though and says that she MUST eat peanut butter off his chest or take back her comment on dating assholes. She refused to giving in that far.


....Now here's where this dream goes from something that's ridiculous, to completely messed up. With her peanut butter and spatula in hand, she began to slowly approach Steve, sitting glum in a pile of his own self pity when the diving board breaks, sending Steve forward into the pool and a wave of water crashing over the sides. Steve is so large he can't swim as he lay floating face forward in the pool. The camera zooms in on his face as you see a man who's so depressed and humiliated with his life, yet trying to fight for what humiliating part he has left of it. Meanwhile Joe Rogan is scrambling around trying to figure out how to save him before his head goes completely under and host a live TV show all at the same time. Jennifer sits aghast at what's going on, halfway glad that she won't have to go through with the challenge.

As cameras sits fixed on his face with his head slowly sinking under the water because he can't hold his head up any longer, we see a sense of delight on his face that his horrible life ended in such spectacular failure. Everyone pauses and sits transfixed on Steve with their heads cocked to the side feeling momentarily sorry for him as he finally dies.

As Steve is being lowered from the tank to the floor, Joe finally comes to his senses with a mentality of "the show must go on"! Joe says to Jennifer "While that didn't go the way we expected, you've still got to follow through on your end of the deal." At this point she is shocked, livid, and at the point of throwing up. Joe defiantly takes the peanut butter and begins spreading it over Steve's lifeless chest. She looks into Steve's empty eyes and realizes that now, "she'd rather date an asshole than eat peanut butter off Steve Dono". And it's at that point that I wake up....

Song Lyrics

So, I'm sitting here listening to Humanity by Scorpions. It's a great song by the way. And decided to finally look up their lyrics. Now, I've been listening to this song for a few weeks and I think I know what he's saying most of the time. He does after all speak fairly clearly.

However, there is one section to this song that seems quite odd to me. And *as far as what I hear* it goes as follows:

Humanity
It's over. What? To your insanity
You sold your soul to feed your manatee
Your fantasies and lies

Now, here is this great song. And in the middle, he throws in a line about selling his sole to feed a "manatee". Why? Does he actually have a pet manatee? Or is he just some bizarre musician that is obsessed with these odd mammals. Well, after looking at the lyrics today. I realize I'm a *bit* off on the lyrics. Here's the real line.

Humanity
It's au revoir to your insanity
You sold your soul to feed your vanity
Your fantasies and lies

Sooo... Uh... This makes a bit more sense, but now after singing about the Scorpions manatee for so long, I feel like the poor guy is getting left out. So you know what. The manatee will remain in my version. Screw vanity. I'll feed my manatee!

Coolest Car Ever

The last 30 seconds of this had me hook, line, and sinker.

Radiohead - Geeked out

Though it takes awhile to get going, this is truely amazing. I'd suggest listening to the original version of the song first if you haven't heard it.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Going HD

So May 19th, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy that HDTV I’ve been wanting and fawning over for 4 years. After years of research and bickering with myself over the pros and cons of Plasma vs LCD, I decided that I’d get the Plasma. While the LCD is maybe technically better nowdays, I’ve been wanting the Plasma for so long. I placed the order not only for the TV, but also for the HD Tivo that is needed to record those types of channels. This is going to be a huge upgrade over what I had before, because not only will I get all the digital channels and HD channels, I’ll be able to record two shows at the same time! That Monday was a good day.

That’s when things slowly deteriorated to a grinding halt that I’ve still not seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Problem Numero Uno: The TV. I didn’t get any information on a tracking number by Wednesday 48 hours after my initial order. So I gave them a call. They said it was because I didn’t provide a valid telephone number. Odd. Why didn’t they email me asking for this? Usually they don’t need it to deliver a package. However it was due to them using an off-brand delivery company that needs to verify that I’ll be at home when they deliver the package. So I give them the number. A day later, another email from them saying that my Credit Card had been rejected. So I call the credit card company and have them remove the lock they put on it for suspected activity. Friday, they finally process the order, but the carrier can’t pick it up till next Tuesday! Over a week later my TV is finally “in the mail” on the way to the house, with an expected delivery of a little over two weeks after my order date.

Issue Number Two: The Tivo. I placed my order through VANNS. I had ordered from them before and they seemed to be pretty good. When I placed my order the Tivo was on backorder. Oh well, I figured that it wouldn’t take to long to get *new* ones in. And it didn’t. A few days later, I got an email saying my Tivo was on its way. Yay. This is going smoothly, I think to myself as I’m trying to work out the issues with the TV. That smoothness ended yesterday when my Tivo arrived. I open the box to find out that it’s an “Open Box” item. I paid for a “Brand New Sealed” item. All the bags are open, the batteries already in the remote. At this point, I’m pissed and depressed that nothing has gone right. I’m considering turning it on and seeing if it works alright and calling and complaining hoping they give me a gift card. Or if it doesn’t work, buy one at Best Buy and returning it with the “open box” version and still complaining to VANNS.

The ONLY thing that has gone right so far has been the HDMI cables, which I can’t really test out and make sure they are working until I hook up the TV and the new TIVO. Regardless, they all came in quickly from monoprices.com. That site really is a saving grace in the cable industry and I will definitely be using them again in the future.

At any point, going HD has been a huge hassle. And while I knew it would be to my pocketbook, I didn’t think there would be this many hurdles to get over. HOPEFULLY the TV will arrive in one peace, and in a new box. If not, I may cry.

Flickr vs Picasa

I'm fairly new to the web photo album crowd and recently decided to try out two of the biggest names in the business: Flickr and Picasa. Really the only way to figure out the winner was to set up accounts and give each a try with an album and see what they can do for the user and what they can do for the author. Over the past month I've given each a try and seen first hand their benefits and their shortcomings.

vs

Flickr is owned by Yahoo (Picasa by Google). One of the big corporations in the internet business that has been around forever, though may be on the way to getting bought out by Microsoft. Regardless, Fickr does seem to be run by the original founders and keeps a somewhat loose tie to their parent owners as far as user experience goes, which brings me to my first issue.

1. URL Accessability
With flickr, the website is just flickr.com. And to get to your album, you can simply go to flickr.com and login, or type flickr.com/username. With Picasa, you can't. You have to go to picasaweb.google.com/username. While that may not seem like that big an issue, they could have simply forwarded picasa.com/username to the same location saving keystrokes. And why do they not have the login screen on picasa.com? You actually have to remember the link to get to it. Retarded.
Winner: Flickr

2. Page Load
One of the biggest issues that I found with Picasa. Is it is soooo sloooow. It's amazing that Google has such slow response times with it and can't fund better hardware and bandwidth. Sometimes images won't load at all or load at 56K telephone line speeds. Pitiful. Flickr was much more responsive and has shown that they know what they are doing and have been in the business longer.
Winner: Flickr

3. Sets vs Photostream
I'm not really sure where I stand on this one yet. Picasas way of displaying photos is by different albums/sets. Flickr is more of a "photostream" meaning that pictures don't have to be tied to a certain set (though they can be). They are just organized by your most recent pictures wherever they are taken. I guess it depends on how you take pictures to determine which is more user friendly. I'd have to give the edge to Flickr since they give you the option to not place a picture in a set if you don't want to?
Winner: slight edge to Flickr?

4. Viewing Style
In one sense I prefer Picasa's way of viewing the photos. Depending on the resolution of your browser window, they will display the image as large as they can. And with ONE click you can see the full size image. Flickr defaults to a somewhat small view of the image and you have to click twice to get to the full size image on a different page (first the zoom icon page, then the size you want), which then makes it very annoying to navigate going out and back in, out and back in, to see all the photos at a decent size. Where flickr IS better is that when you view a large scale image, you don't have to drag the screen around like you're looking through some peephole as with Picasa. In the end, they both fail in my book.
Winner: Neither.

5. Software
While I haven't used the software NEARLY enough to get a full impression on it, I think Picasa has a very handy Desktop interface to your photo albums. They show their strength in searching old photos and organization and "coolness". Flickr does seem to have very handy online software to help batch edit and organize your photos.
Winner: Both

6. Photo Storage
Again, this is personal preference, but I think flickr has it right here. Though they may regret that in 20 years. Picasa has a set storage limit of 1GB of space. Considering average picture size, that'll give you about 20 albums of 50 pictures each. That's really not that much space if you plan on adding 5-10 albums/year. Flickr does it differently. They give to a monthly alotment that translates to 100MB/month. In one year you've already surpassed the amount of space that Picasa offers.
Winner: Flickr

Conclusion: Now, I've been a Google fan for awhile and I gave Picasa my first go because I trusted that they could deliver, but when i kept having issues I had to try something else. And Flickr is clearly the winner. They provide the most space, the fastest user experience, the easiest access, easy batch editing, and seem more stable and less of a beta project like Picasa appears. If Flickr could find a way to easily view full size images without having to do some painful navigation, then they'd be set. Until then I'll just have to be annoyed...

BBQ Fest Photos

I know this happened awhile ago but since I don't post often, here we go. I went to BBQ-Fest this past Friday with my friend Spence. I met him after work downtown where he works. I drove down in my mildew smelling car with soaking floorboard and all. (Do not leave your sunroof open in your car in the middle of a thunderstorm overnight.) The weather downtown was great and nice to be down there with the sun setting over the river. I don't go down there that often and rarely ever when the sun is still up so it's a different experience that I don't often get to enjoy.

Unfortunately the night had to be cut short because I went to go see Chronicles of Narnia at 10:30 and needed to drop Spence off beforehand. I hear I missed out on some drinking. Go figure.



Here are the pics in all their delicious glory..

Blue Eye'd Brunettes

I've always been more attracted to these girls for whatever reason and it wasn't until today that I figured out why. I'm not sure how I put two and two together, but it comes from one of the first girls that I found attractive in a movie. Everyone has their first love of a movie star and while Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science was my high school love(another blue eye'd brunette), the first was Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. I'm not sure if it's because she was virtually naked the whole movie, and/or if it was because she was closer to my age at the time. I don't know. But she was a babe then and, while not a prerequisite, pretty much forever defined what it is I wanted to find.

What the...?

So I was at the driving range down at Plantation on Friday. I was planning on going golfing the next morning and was needing to warm up my swing and get some confidence in it.

Almost done with the bag of balls, feeling good about how I was swinging, I put a ball on the tee and swing away. Next thing I know my hands feel quite a bit lighter. I was trying to process what happened and said "Oh crap!" out loud thinking that the entire club had slipped through my hand hoping I hadn't hit someone with it. However, I realize that the handle is actually still in my hand and I look at what's flying through the air down the driving range.....my club head.

It flew so far that everyone there at the range, hearing me scream, was able to see the head flying down the range. I wasn't really sure what to do at that point. I'm still standing there clutching to my club handle trying to figure out what happened. Everyone else, is looking at me. I'm looking at them. Then I start my trek down the range to retrieve the club head. What seems like 10 minutes later, I return. Everyone watching me the entire way. I think they understand the predicament and that it wasn't my fault, but the embarrassment was enough to have screwed up my confidence in my swing the rest of the day, and the golf game on Saturday. And I'm out a driver. Bah.

Stupid Moles

So I go home for lunch today (mmm Popeyes), and I'm on the phone talking to my mom out in the backyard when i begin to notice the ground moving. Yes, protruding up from the ground kinda like some dead body in an Indian burial ground, only smaller.

So off I go to get a shovel to kill this thing and by the time I come back the movement has of course stopped. I look around and theres mole tracks all over my yard. At this point, I'm pissed and begin stabbing wildly at the ground with the shovel in the area that it was popping up. Cursing the thing and laughing a little bit know that it surely hadn't survived my broad attack. "Shock and awe" anyone?

I eventually dug up a shovel full in the area fully expecting to find the slain beast, but nope. Damn thing took off. What the crap!? How fast are these things? They don't have eyes and worm their way around in the dirt. So here I am sweating my butt off, ticked, a worm obviously scurrying away in the wake of my tirade, and a wasp flying around my head. WASP! I take off running, then a frog jumps away in front of me. I jump, kick the thing for scaring me and run inside and slam the door. Crap! I just wanted to come home for lunch.

Demolition Man

Construction, or should I say destruction, has begun on the TV Cubby to eventually set up my HD TV. I'm a bit anxious to get it all done. I've been wanting to do this for about 4 years now and a night or two ago I pulled out a marker and started drawing lines and next thing I knew I had a saw in my hand (still in my work clothes I should mention).

I did get a bit overzealous though on how wide it should be. It's looking like it'll be around 53" right now. I've gotta do something about that. Possibly, that'll be a piece of trim on each side to create a nice smooth edge and reduce the width to around 50". Anyway, now that I'm done tearing stuff up, it's time to put it back together and figure out how to use spackling. I'm definitely wanting to have this thing done in the next month and buy a TV shortly afterwards.

All the pictures are here: TV Cubby

In The Beginning

I've been sitting on this "blog" for about a week now wondering how to start this thing. How do you do it when you have no viewers, no focus, no experience, and little content? I've been trying to decide whether or not to make this a 'public' blog, or a personal, 'private' one.

In the end (or beginning if you will), I've decided to just go with the public concept. As for focus, it's going to be random. Whatever is on my mind or interesting to me. The viewers are the unfortunate souls who actually have so much time they can go around looking at blogs, and of course me, the one who has enough time to actually write a blog.

So there you have it, the first post. Maybe I'll write again....