Archive for May, 2004
Video Games Are Evil
May 29
Well, the deadline has come and gone. The paper was sent on Tuesday morning around 11:30 a.m. Got back here on Friday around 10:30 a.m. Looks pretty good (I’ve only been able to check 2 of the 6, though). I think this is one of the best-looking months we’ve had yet. Maybe I’ll post a shot of the front page next week. I’m happy for the three-day weekend, though. Very happy.
We went and watched Troy last night (Friday). It was pretty good, but there are some really annoying parts. Paris, played by Orlando Bloom, is possibly the most unlucky person in all history. He causes more trouble and more death than anyone else in the movie; even more than the insane, power-hungry king of the Greeks. That’s another annoying bit. They made the Greeks out to be this completely evil, horrendous people…they weren’t, though. Not any more than the Spartans or the Romans or the Trojans or anyone else. They were all warmongers; it was the only way to survive. And, one last glitch. When they show the prosperous city of Troy, before the war starts, there’s a shot with a man leading two llamas. Llamas! In Greece! Surely you see the problem?
Anyway, this week I managed to beat Enter the Matrix as Ghost. I’ll have to go back and play it as Niobe, too. It’s an amazing game. One of the best I’ve ever played. I also picked up Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: Substance, Phantom Crash and Silent Hill 2 the other day. Haven’t played them much yet, but MGS has some touchy controls that are a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes. I’ve also been playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic this week and it has a great storyline…the companion characters are kind of annoying, though. Especially Mission, the Twi’lek teenager; Carth’s distrust of you is no better, though. I’d feed them both to a Hutt or a rancor if it would let you. This is my reason for the title. I was supposed to mow this weekend; so far I’ve spent all day playing video games. They’re evil, I tell you! Evil!
I’ve been abusing BitTorrent lately. I’ve downloaded some great albums, though. Some of the bands I’ve gotten to hear lately that are just awesome are: Poison The Well, Alexisonfire, Fordirelifesake, Funeral For a Friend, Stretch Arm Strong, and From Autumn to Ashes. I strongly encourage you to check these bands out. You can get torrents from PunkTorrents if you use BitTorrent, or, better yet, go buy some CDs or check out some shows.
Jumping back to the subject of movies, Elaine and I watched Bubba Ho-Tep this past week, too, since it just came out on DVD. Oh man. It’s not a horror movie, it’s not a comedy, it’s not a drama or anything else. It’s just a movie. Elvis (played amazingly by Bruce Campbell) is often introspective and thoughtful…and then vulgar and amusing. It’s a great movie, though. Go rent it.
Well, we have to head out to Wal*Mart now. I’ll write more later.
Sick is the Suck
May 24
I hate being sick. I really do. Elaine has been sick for about 11 days now (since Thursday, a week ago) and I’ve had it since a week ago today (or so, I think I started on Sunday). It starts off as a flu—aching, feeling bad, small fever—then turns into a horrible head cold—sneezing, coughing, stuffy head. It gets a bit better every day, but it still sucks….Any of you sick, too?
Well, it’s deadline finally. We’ve been at work every day since Wednesday. Yes, we were here Saturday and Sunday. Bleh. But it shouldn’t take too long tonight. Everything is built and printed. Forrest and Elaine are finding mistakes while I edit pages. Then, just have to collect the pages and send them to the printer. Collecting takes about 6 hours, plus an hour for stuffing and another hour for FTPing the stuffed file to the printer. Seems so decisively geek to FTP the paper to a printer. Alas, we’re not a geek newspaper. Just a regular ol’ newspaper that seems to spend quite a bit of time on the celebrities and elite of Tulsa.
Well, in the time since my last update, Manny has gotten his domain and site in order again. He had a perfectly serviceable layout, but he went back to the drawing board again, sort of, and came up with a much better on, in my opinion. John hasn’t really done much to his site, but he’s added a couple of posts and a pic showing off his new motorcycle. We really need to finish his site, but I guess that’ll have to wait until we both have time for it.
I haven’t done much myself. Moved a few things around on the site, but it’s still basically how it was. The photo section works a bit differently than it did orginally, thanks to a plugin. I need to play with it a bit more, see if I can get it to show thumbnails or at least put the links below the photographs. Regardless, it’s a great setup for now. I also added a new section in the links. It’s a parsed RSS feed from falldrop and the august. I might add more later on, but for now, I think these two are pretty good.
As far as the Xbox goes, Tenchu had to go back and I was very sad. It’s an awesome game, and I hope to get it before too long. I haven’t really had time/felt like playing anything else, so I can’t comment too much, sorry. It’s so nice, though, having that in the bedroom so we can watch movies in bed and fall asleep to them. We’re horrible about that; we’re so old!
We rented and watched Scary Movie 3 last week. Wasn’t that great, but we didn’t really expect it to be. We’ve also rented Spartacus which has, so far, been awesome. Kurt Kirk Douglas plays the title character, and even though he has a horrible chin, he does a great job. You should go rent it. Just be ready to devote yourself to a movie. It’s over 3 hours long.
Well, the print queue has finished and so have I.
Sorry I haven’t written, but I’ve been a bit sick lately. In fact, Elaine and I have been sick since thursday (May 13) night. She got sick that night, feeling bad and she had a sore throat. I didn’t get anything really until Sunday or so. Her mom (a nurse) thinks it’s some sort of flu. We both still have sore throats and a lot of congestion, but we’re getting better. And, you know me, a little phlegm can’t ruin my birthday. So, let me tell you about it.
Friday (14th), Elaine gave me my birthday presents from her. She’s so wonderful. She got me an Xbox with RF adapater (the TV it’s attached to is kind of old) and the DVD playback kit. She also got me the Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon video game. Is there anything better than making a scarily-built chinese guy going around and kicking the crap out of people? I think not.
On saturday (15th), my parents came up from Ardmore and John came down (he was at Virginia’s house to help us move our new piano (pictures to come later, I guess). Virginia came down, too. After we moved the piano, we cooked some hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. MMM grilled onions. It was a really good lunch and it was nice to have everyone together. That night, we stayed at Virginia’s house so we could all hang out together and go to dinner. We had dinner at a local Thai restaurant and then we came back to the house. We were going to watch The Triplets of Belleville but everyone was pretty tired, so we watched some episodes of MXC instead. Fell asleep at some point and woke up only enough to climb into bed.
Sunday was a nice, sunny day. Got up around 8:30 or so and watched St. John’s Wort. It’s a pretty crappy Japanese horror movie, but it was good for a first-thing-in-the-morning kind of movie. Also, played a bit of Tenchu: Return from Darkness that John and I had rented (I also rented Hitman Contracts but it wasn’t that much fun). Then Virginia made breakfast for all of us. Sausage, eggs, pancakes, hashbrowns, juice, coffee…you name it, we had it. It was wonderful! Then she gave me her presents: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Enter the Matrix. Of course, the next few hours were spent playing games. I also helped John set up his site a bit more and taught him some of the basics of Textpattern. After lunch, we all sat down and watched the Triplets of Belleville movie, which is really funny and different. There’s hardly any dialog in it, mostly just background sound and music. You should go rent it when you can. Then, after all that, we packed up our stuff and came home. We were pretty tired, but we stopped at Wal*Mart to get a couple of things for dinner and I picked up a copy of The Last Samurai on DVD which is a freakin’ awesome movie. After dinner and a few british comedies on PBS, we went to bed.
Monday was horrible. I woke up feeling like shit. So did Elaine. We only got out of bed to call into work and say we weren’t coming. Monday night I got up enough to pick up some food and get Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Those’re good wholesome games! Took all of the rest of my birthday money. Tuesday was just as bad for me, but Elaine was feeling better. Tuesday night I started feeling a bit better and I upgraded my computer to the newest beta version of Mepis. It’s running pretty well, but I can’t seem to get my resolution above 1024×768. There’s something missing from my XFree86 installation, I think, but I can’t tell what. Guess I’ll have to dig around some more.
In any case, Wednesday saw us back at work, and that’s that. If you have any advice on games to try or ways to make Mepis work better, drop me a line!
So, How’re The Kids?
May 11
I hate when I take this long between posts. Oh well, guess it can’t be helped. Quite a bit to tell you about, actually, which is good, I guess.
the site
You have eyes, you can see what’s changed. I’m also working on adding a few new features and of course working out any and all bugs in this layout. Yes, John, I’m going to leave it alone. I am, however, going to make some alternate stylesheets so that you can change the colors and stuff. I think a pink/purple and a blue. Maybe one with a pattern in the background, too. I dunno, we’ll see. I’m also working on adding tagline(s) to the top, below the “logo.” We’ll see how well that goes (didn’t work too well in the tests).gigantuan
Ah, yes, my project is sort of up and running again. Manny installed and set up a Textpattern CMS since ours(Manneth) isn’t going too well. We hope to get everything set up like we want it and start writing articles before he starts his new school. I’m tired of telling people “Yeah, Gigantuan will be all you need to learn to do web design…but it’s not done yet.”tiny-sphere
John’s web site is, for some reason, not wanting to resolve to his new host. Somehow the subdomain got deleted a few days ago, so we’re waiting to see if resetting that will cause the DNS to finally resolve. If so, we’ll be able to get his Textpattern up and running so he can finally have the site I promised him a year ago. I’m so bad at promises and such.dogs
We went to my parent’s house this past weekend for Mother’s Day and just because we haven’t been there in awhile. Their dog Spanky had puppies about two weeks ago and, of course, we wanted to see them. They’re so cute! They’re half Boston Terrier and half…mutt. 3 girls, 2 boys. The boys are brindle & white, the girls are mostly black & white. Unfortunately, my mom didn’t take them to get their tails docked or their thumb claws removed. Still, they’re extremely adorable and fat. She also told me the other night on the phone that they’ve started growling and barking at each other. We should have gotten some pictures, but I guess we’ll do that next time.Also, a relative of mine is wanting to get rid of her Boston Terrier that’s from the same litter as my mom’s Boston (ironically, both are named Spanky). I think a co-worker is going to take it, but Elaine and I seriously considered it. Pets are just so expensive that we don’t think we can afford another one right now.
movies
We’ve watched a few really good movies lately (a couple of which I need to add to my wishlist). Here’s a synopsis:- Zatoichi
- Movie about a blind samurai/massuer in feudal Japan. For some reason, everyone wants to kill him…. Not a bad movie, but not a great one, either. Worth watching if just for the fact that the same guy wrote, directed and starred in it.
- Ringu
- I watched this alone, since Elaine doesn’t like horror movies. I hate to say this…I really do…but the American version was so much better. Leave a comment if that bothers you, but it was. The Japanese version leaves too many plot points too vague. The American version covers all the bases so you get a scary movie that doesn’t leave you asking questions like “Why’s she in the closet upstairs when she got killed downstairs?” and “How did the girl kill them when they were in a car if she comes out of the TV?”
- Girl With A Pearl Earring
- Damn. A) This is a really good movie that’s a little bit slow in parts, but definitely a good story all around. Doesn’t try to explain the painting or anything, but does a good job of giving a possible reason for why/how it all happened. B) They couldn’t have found a better person than Scarlett Johansson to play that part. She looks so much like the painting, it’s kind of freaky.
- Calendar Girls
- Yes, we watched a movie about older British women taking off their clothes. It’s really funny and well-written…but it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of a British sense of humor.
We’ve watched others, but I think these are the highlights. Besides, I’m a bit tired of looking up movies at IMDB right now. I’m sure you understand…
the end
Well, I think that’s about all the new stuff, folks. I’ll try my damnedest to post more often; I know you can’t get enough of my drivel.Eyeheartzombies has changed quite a bit this weekend. Well, OK, not a whole lot; some. I have become XFN friendly and I’ve added a GeoURL. EHZ also now sports a CreativeCommons License.
That’s the external stuff. Internally, I updated the templates so I don’t have to go and edit menus in five places. I’ve also added a couple of plugins and other nifty little features. Last week I added a custom comment preview page.
As you can see at the top, there is now a contact page and a temporary version of my resume. Soon I hope to add a photo gallery and a portfolio. The gallery will have to wait until I get my digital camera working with Mepis again. Sometimes the spottiness of Linux really annoys me. But, for the most part, it works great.
I do have one problem that has crept up this weekend. I need some way to make Textpattern auto-add a rel=”external” attribute to all non-local links. This could be very generic, just adding it to any link with an http-starting href. Then it’s just a simple matter to add a javascript to open all rel=”external” links in a new window. Of course, I wouldn’t have this problem if XHTML 1.1 (and 1.0 Strict) didn’t lack the target=”" attribute. Yes, I say lack. It was a very useful attribute and I (and many others) will miss it dearly.
Anywho, if you feel that you can help me with the Textpattern modification, please leave a comment or email me.