I received my copy of Cinematic Titanic's The Alien Factor in the mail the other day. I watched it this morning since I was up early with little to do. The Alien Factor like East Meets Watts, is a "live show DVD," a recording of a live performance. I didn't think I'd like either as much as I did because of the laughing in the background, but it wasn't too bad. (In case you don't know, I have a strong aversion to laugh tracks.)
In any case, The Alien Factor was a horribly low-budget film. In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't some amateur film school dropout project. A significant portion of the movie involved people walking around in the woods not saying anything!
The plot (what there was of it) involves a crashed alien spacecraft that held dangerous biological entities the aliens intended to study. They are freed by the crash and begin terrorizing a small town. There was a ton of plaid and most of the pants flared out at the bottom (always funny!) and the acting was horrendous. The "hospital" scene was obviously a white sheet backdrop, and the sheriff's car had only two doors. A "state policeman" showed up in uniform driving a VW Beetle.
The worst part, however, has to be the end, when we find out the guy helping to kill the monsters is actually himself an alien. The woman he's speaking to screams because he's hideous, and the sheriff shows up and blasts him with the shotgun and the film ends abruptly. While I enjoy this type of entertainment (well not the movie, but the riffing), I think I enjoyed East Meets Watts more than The Alien Factor.
- Someone did something truly AWFUL in the men's bathroom. You could smell it IN THE HALLWAY! #
- Then someone over-corrected by spraying half a can of Lysol. Now I can hardly breathe, but it smells slightly better. #
- Lunch with a Cisco technician today. It's about time.. #
- This is awesome: http://xkcd.com/705/ #
- Oh yeah. New #CinematicTitanic release is mine! #
- Bought Jeff lunch because it's his birthday. Woot! #
- Think I just blew out the TCP/IP stack on my router. It choked while browsing web, downloading files, and copying a 1.2G file internally. #
- I keep looking for pedobear in the audience at the Olympic figure skating rink.. #
- Installing Ubuntu 9.10 x64 desktop in VMware Fusion. Hopefully my MUD development will continue in the virtual machine. #
- I had no idea that 'port install meld' would take so long. How do people live without meld?? #
- Woohoo! Another @wootoff!! #
- Port is still fetching and building prereqs for meld... #
- Reading about the Cassandra data model for next-gen databases. Interesting stuff. #
- Seriously. Does meld really require so many prerequisites? Like gnome-keyring? GIVE ME TEH MELD!! #
- Well that was a waste of 45 minutes. Meld won't install. #FAIL #
- Hello, snow. Where have you been? #
- Office meeting in 15 minutes. I'm not sure I'll finish anything I started today... #
- News: Killer whale kills somebody. WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?? #
- Meeting time. Not sure how many I've had this week, but the hour count is over 8.. #
- Boss admitted to blowing off my proposed solution email last night. Turns out I was right after all. #vindicated #
- Good news: @InvaderCon is 1 year, 1 month, and 1 day away #
- When my Tatung rice cooker dies I will get very choked up. Seriously, there could be tears! #
- Happy gorram birthday @adamsbaldwin! #
- Just finished cutting up 4.5 pounds of chicken. Into the fajita marinade with you, chicken! This is going to be soooooo good. #
Wow, I think this is one of the longest periods of time I've not written anything here on the blog. Even on vacation, I manage to write a few posts and add some pictures. I guess it's been stressful lately.
Today I'm focused on relaxing and winding down. We're hosting family dinner tomorrow night, and we're making fajitas for Ronnie (it's his birthday dinner). They are delicious, and this time we're adding in homemade flour tortillas, it's going to be awesome!
- ç¥å¤§å®¶è™Žå¹´æ„‰å¿«ï¼Œè¬äº‹å¦‚æ„ï¼Œå¹´å¹´æœ‰é¤˜ï¼ #
- Sister-in-law and her family have been delayed at the airport on their way to Jakarta. 3 extra hours in the Spokane airport = no joy #
- Wife had a chocolate filled donut spill on her shirt. She said she didn't know there was a hole. I told her that's how they put filling in.. #
- Just bought a replacement for my office firewall machine. The old firewall is a 466Mhz celeron with 512Mb RAM. Runs Linux like a champ. #
- New server is a 1U rackmount 1.6Ghz Intel Atom with 2Gb RAM and 750Gb hard drive. Purchased for $297 on NewEgg today. #
- Select Dell Mini 10 netbooks are now coming with Ubuntu 9.10. Nice! I'd love to get one, but it's hard to replace my high-end Precision. #
- Cinematic Titanic has a new live DVD release coming on the 23rd. Awesome! #
- Started writing a UDP broadcast packet-listening class for an idea I've had a good while now. #
- Unfollowed a guy today because he RT'd Ashton Kutcher. #
- Installing the Traditional Chinese version (Taiwan) of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Because no one else in the office can.. #
- Just installed Growl on my iMac. The Qt systray example needed it. #
- Taking a much-needed day off work #
- It was awesome to not work most of the day today. #
- Did four hard sudoku puzzles tonight. In pen. With no extra marks. My brain-Fu is good tonight. #
- Just picked up a Boogie Board at Amazon: http://bit.ly/a7G3h4 #boogieboard #
- A coworker's brother is an amazing artist: http://www.n8main.com You can buy some of his original artwork there, too! #
- Give Fi a rocket launcher and find an umbrella quick! (@bnwrites)http://yfrog.com/4iwzhllj #
- And just like that, the #boogieboard is sold out again. Glad I got in earlier! #
- Up far too early for a Saturday. Going to need a nap today.. #
I took a much-needed day off work today to hang out with Lorien. It was nice. We drove to Spokane, did some shopping, watched some Olympics (mostly commercials, thanks to NBC). I didn't work on any of my projects, but I am up and running on Skype (I'm hsinche) now.
I haven't had much to say here, and like my mom always told me, "If you don't have anything snarky to say, don't say anything at all." At least that's what I think she said.
Well, maybe that's what I heard.
Anyway, work is as busy as usual, not enough hours in the day, blah blah.
- I don't care about the stupidbowl, and don't watch the commercials on principle. It's lonely out here though. #
- Is it over? Is it safe to come back to Twitter? #stupidfootballgame #
- Listening to Roger Waters' Ca Ira (opera) in my office. Freaked out one of my coworkers with the mad scientist vibe. #
- "Hoots Mon" just came up on random play. Heh. I have some weird mp3s in my collection. #
- Got to use Captain Mal's line today: "That's what a government's for, to get in a man's way." Felt awesome. #firefly #
- Tired. Didn't sleep so well last night. #
- Eating my Christmas taffy before it gets hard.....er. #
- Trying to watch the latest episode of 24 on Hulu. It's super slow right now. #
- Wonderful Pistachios are exactly what they say they are. I'm working on my second 32oz bag.. #
- If they collide with "eeda biscuits" they destroy each other in a giant explosion, too. http://tweetphoto.com/11084385 #
- Just saw 2 people run from an "amazingly underdressed undead with extra cheese ultra-rare goldfish" level 31 in #munchkin They had baby oil #
- Attending the Spokane Chinese Association's Chinese New Year Exhibition #
My wife asked what I wanted for Valentine's Day. I said I didn't want anything, no big deal. What I didn't say was what I really wanted: robot pants and a velociraptor with head-mounted lasers to do my bidding.
To be fair, they'd be pretty expensive.
Well here goes another Windows rant. I set up a new Redmine server on the internal network. I also added records for it to our primary and secondary DNS servers. Unfortunately Windows hosts couldn't reach it, or even ping it!
I used nslookup (which I thought was deprecated years ago in favor of dig but apparently not by Microsoft) and sure enough, DNS queries halted at our domain server, which only serves out local DNS (not for the Redmine server). It should have deferred the query to an authoritative DNS server, but it wouldn't until I told it to dump its entire DNS cache.
Windows continued to refuse to resolve the name until I ran a ipconfig /flushdns on each host that exhibited the problem. This should never have happened with a hostname that has never been used before.
Can you say "stupid?"
Today's Woot podcast resounds in my soul. You can hear it here if you like.
Today is my old friend Laura's birthday. She recently had a baby. Happy multiple birthdays, Laura!
- Old people make any line LONGER.. #
- Ordered a 21" multi-touch LCD monitor from HP for $299. Could that be a typo?? #
- Gonna take this new iMac home and I'm so gonna do.......something! #
- Tweeting from the new iMac. Had a weird update issue with iTunes, but it seems to be fixed since I rebooted. #
- Installing Traditional Chinese language support. Hope this works as easily as it does on Linux.. #
- Apparently the install claims I've put older files on my system that may not work properly and I have to download a 500Mb update. #
- Installed HandBrake. Let the transcoding begin! #
- Um, yeah. That 500Mb update won't install because of my hard drive. I guess 988Gb free is too little. #
- Now I'm downloading a 260Mb update for Xcode. Madness! MADNESS!! #
- Just discovered "port." In the terminal. I am home. #
- Okay, did somebody ENTIRELY FORGET how tab should work on an Apple when moving through dialog boxes?? #
- Sweet! Lost a real follower, not just a pr0n bot! #
- Having a wacky USB issue. I think it's my printer. Time to go networked. #
- Yup, it was the printer. Time to find a network hub, or make a really long CAT5 cable.. #
- Stupid iMac won't recognize my thumb drive. It said it needed to be repaired, so I did. Still won't mount. It's just FAT32.. #
- Can't figure out how to rename a folder. Yet, somehow, this is more intuitive. #
- Folder rename issue is because they were copied from DVD. A terminal and a quick 'chmod -R u+w' should fix it. Haven't tried yet though. #
- Copying files to the new iMac. Lots of data to copy. Seriously, how could they distribute it without TeX? #
- I got all excited about installing Minix in VMware Fusion, but it just doesn't work. One of my dreams just died
# - I named my new iMac "smacky" after Torque Smacky from Invader Zim. Well, that and it has the word 'mac' inside it. I'm clever like that. #
- Got Qt installed, built sample application just fine. Also installed TeX and OpenOffice. VPN works great, calling it a night. #
- Oh yeah! The latest @Footstompin podcast is off to a great start! #
- Been a @Seapine customer for many years. Really wish TestTrack License server propagated client changes faster. 30 minute wait is too long. #
- Very nice! http://tweetphoto.com/10350837 #
- My life (lately) is one long line of file copy operations.. #
- WTF?? Latest release of Zend Studio for iMac requires Rosetta? No Intel version?? #FAIL #
- Trying to finish up some work I brought home. Unfortunately, I didn't bring home my whiteboard with the algorithm I wrote up.. #
- Between meetings and lunch, I'm just now starting to work. I hate days like this.. #
- I hope you wore your purple fedora, too! (@NathanFillion)http://yfrog.com/3guzgjuj #
- I just can't get over how much I like listening to @CarbonLeaf. Especially at work! #
- Watched some dude ski into a tree in downhill on Olympic preview. Epic fail! #
I've been fighting an install of Ubuntu server on a new rackmount machine all afternoon. I've never used Ubuntu server (I recommend Ubuntu Desktop all the time), but I thought it would be a breeze.
Boy was I wrong. After fighting RAID-1 (which should be simple), and a grub bootloader that just won't install on the master boot record, I just gave up and I'm going to see if it'll run Ubuntu Desktop. I bet it works fine.
Everyone that's seen a pigeon raise your hand.
Now, everyone that's never seen a baby pigeon lower your hand.
Notice how few hands are left up? Why is this, you ask? Lacking better scientific evidence, let me explain it by asking two more questions:
Have you ever seen a fat pigeon? Yes? Okay, ever see one so fat it couldn't fly? No?? Of course not!
Pigeons are like amoebas in that they reproduce asexually. You see, when a pigeon reaches a certain size after gorging itself on fattening tourist fare, it splits into two smaller, hungrier pigeons. This is why you see so many at heavily-trafficked tourist destinations like Piazza San Marco in Venice. It also explains that, while you may see a few corpulent pigeons, you'll never see one so morbidly obese that it cannot fly.
While today isn't my birthday, I did get a birthday present:
Yes, it costs hundreds of dollars more than a comparable PC, and yes, it took three weeks to get here (I could have had parts ordered, shipped, and built in 3-4 days), but by golly, it'll look good. Expect many upcoming blog posts about this experience.