Life

What can I say other than it sucks. Most of you know of our plight. I won't bore you with the past. But today, my car just barely started. I noticed it yesterday not giving it's all on ignition. And today, it barely cranked over. Fortuantely it's probably just the battery. But it might as well be the transmission cause right now $40 is no different to $1000. This on top of everything else really puts a whole kink on life right now. I haven't even gotten any interviews for minimum wage jobs. I haven't gotten anything...I don't have anything...

So yeah, being alive sucks right now. Really, really, really sucks.

A quote for the ages

While wandering around the internet today, I ran across a quote that I've not seen before. It didn't list who said it as I certainly can't credit the post from which I found it. Anyway, here's the quote:

The only difference between religion and superstition is the spelling.

I had a little chuckle on that and thought it worthy enough for the ol blog. So, here you go. Wisdom for the ages.

Seattle

So, the Seattle Seahawks managed to shutout San Fran. It was cool. What's better is that San Fran's streak of no shutouts in 420 games has been broken. That's right fans, Seattle rocks! They are 3-0 and St. Louis is 1-2. St. Louis is the only competition for Seattle this year within their own division. Seattle has a bye next weekend so no screaming or moaning for me. heh But Seattle will pick it up again in 2 weeks against St. Louis in Seattle. I can't wait for that!

Oh praise thee that is Linux

Yesterday I decided I would boot into my Linux partition on my computer to prepare for an upcoming project at the game club. The last time I booted to Linux was before I had upgraded my mobo and other stuff within the ol' box. So I was delighted to see that Red Hat 9 still came up with little problems. I did have to track down some nVidia drivers for the network card and 3D portion of my video card. Everything went smooth, after I remembered how to work with Linux. I now have most everything I had on my Win98 partition. Though I imagine I'll be going back and forth as I was working with MFC and Visual C++ which is only on Windows. Though on a plus side, I can now install the .Net framework and learn C# which was something you could only do on XP. So take that Redmond! :P

Hey, tomorrow is Seattle's third game. They are playing celler dwelling San Fran in Seattle. Man, it's nice to see other teams in the celler. heh I'll be watching at 1pm. Please come over if you want to see some hot screaming/moaning action. lol

The Job Hunt

Today I dropped off one of the few applications I had to fill out by hand. This was for an IT position at La Clinica. This is promising on a couple of levels. First the job only requires 0-3 years of exp (that's me) and an associates degree (that's me again on top of a 4 year degree). When I got up to the desk by the HR department, I had asked to see where HR was. The receptionist asked if I was asking about the IT position. I evidently looked the part of uber geek though I didn't have any tech on me other than my watch. I was dressed casually. Then the HR person came out. She was at the Worksource Job Fair and she remembered me. Unfortuantely, I didn't remember her. Hopefully I played it smooth enough (LOL). Anyway, she was just about to send all the apps to the hiring manager. Hopefully I'll be able to hear back from them. Pluueaze.

Scrabble anybody?

This is just a little post about a short flash film I just watched about Scrabble. It's pretty entertaining. A worthy eight minutes of your time. :)

PE

Yesterday, there was this PE event for the home schoolers for the area. At best, the kids did get to run around. At worst, it was chaos. Here are some observations.

They played capture the flag. The idea was to find the other team's flag and return it to "no-man's land", the scoring box. It came with jails and prison breaks and chained releases. There was no "babysitting" your own flag. There was no waiting for the other team across the line. If you asked to hide the flag, then you didn't get to hide it. This last one, when I heard that, I had thought you get to hide the flag once and that's it. This rule was unclear and got Dave excluded from being able to hide the flag.

I'm used to playing capture the flag found on top games like Halo and Unreal Tournament/Championship. There each team knew exactly where the other flag is. There were several strategies that could be used including "babysitting" the flag. Sometimes that was the only way to defend the flag. However, the way it was set up, only one person on each side would know where the flag is. On a side note, they were playing in a rose garden. Who in hell lets kids play in a rose garden? Anyway, you couldn't defend your own flag on top of having to search for the other team's flag at the same time, in rose bushes.

There was also this rule where if you tagged the other team while they were on your side, they would go to jail. But then if someone from the other team came to tag the people in jail, they could go free. But there was this chaining rule where you can hold hands for a free escape. What's the point of the jail if one person can get everybody out? And "No-Man's land" seems a misnomer as you can obviously go in there cause that's how they scored. Typical capture the flag would require the return the captured flag to the location of your own flag.

A few of the dads just kind of stood there, wondering what the hell was going on. This was my first time there with this PE thing. I wasn't happy with it and Dave didn't enjoy himself after being taunted by a girl. I understand the kickball last week was as bad. This needs some solutions to create a more enjoyable time for the kids. This I will need to think on and come up with something. Please feel free to leave you input as well.

A Mighty Suck

Well, the Seahawks are 2-0 on two away games. They equaled their total wins away for last year. That's a good thing. The bad thing is that I had to watch them suck and suck badly. I don't know how many three and outs they had. It was more than the number of fingers I have. And on the last drive for Tampa, they had three major pentalies against Seattle. Fortunately for Seattle, Tampa had a new QB in which didn't have the exp. The QB's last play was an interception. Geeze...talking about crap. I didn't even see any of the scores for Seattle. Busy watching a documentary about Star Wars. :D

So, Seattle is top of the NFC West for the time being. They have their first home game next week. And I wish Mr. T to have a sucky time there. :P Actually, no. I hope you enjoy your time there. Hopefully they will go 3-0. Here's to hoping.

He'll be back

I'm glad I don't live in California. I don't have to contend with earthquakes, traffic, and now governers who like big businesses, like Wal-Mart, to destroy local economies. Arnold just vetoed a bill that would at least deter super stores like Wal-Mart popping up all over the place. He said that he didn't want to stop businesses from expanding. Well, Arnold, big businesses don't need to expand any more. It's the little guys that need the help. Wal-Mart will just run the little guys out of town. Three cheers for minimum wage, part-time jobs at Wal-Mart! Yay! Yay! Yay!

In other news, the number of people not having insurance have increased yet again. Could there a connection here between not having insurance and Wal-Mart? Hmmmm....

Just a g33k?

Just trying to avoid the hits related to Wil Wheaton's book of the same name...well, with the e's. Coincidentally, he's gonna be the subject of this post.

Tonight, I've been looking at his old posts on his website WWdN. It was interesting to see that he had this insane dislike of William Shatner and then suddenly, while watching a baseball game with him one night, he discovered he's not so bad after all. Of course this was posted like three years ago. He's had several interesting posts since then. I kind of like the blue hair he had back then too. But what I do see is how he grows as a human being.

He seems like a very interesting and likeable guy. He has lots of interest that he shares with a good portion of geekdom. He plays video games, Munchkin, and runs his own website. He even shares some musical interests with Dawn (Cake, Tenacious D, Weezer). He has his share of strengths (humor in his writing) and weaknesses (staying up 72 hours to stuff an online poll). He is human, after all. These are just a few reasons why he has one of most popular sites to visit on the web. One of the most linked to websites as well. And I'm thinking that's he's becoming one of my role models for life.

Here's my reasoning for this. On his site, he not shy about what he likes, what's on his mind, etc. When something pisses him off, he vents. He vents and he has a whole bunch of people he may or may not know behind him 100%. When he sees that he's wrong, he quick to say so and apologize to whomever. He's hard at work doing what he likes doing (comedy in his little troupe, spending time with the fam, Star Trek conventions?). And on top of that, he runs his own website, tweaking it to his hearts desire. He has fun doing it all, well, cept for venting. I'm not sure if that's fun for anybody.

He is everything I wished I was. Though I admit, I am pretty good at venting. I have been known to hold grudges for years and do silent treatments for weeks upon end. The only thing I'm hard at work is keeping the cushion on my chair pretty compressed. I'm pretty reserved about what I say on my blog, believe it or not. His website could run circles around mine.

As you know, I'm in a pretty shitty position due to my own fucking around. Projects I start may or may not get off the ground. While I am at my computer, my desire is to learn/create something starts off at a high point only with it ending up with me flipping through about five to ten of the same websites, most of which I just hit up about 20 minutes earlier. I've stopped the exercise I started in July because of being lazy and/or being depressed about not having a job.

Wil, while not having it easy, shows he has worked hard to get where he's at. He's been depressed and he's bounced back. He started his website and made it what it is today. And he speaks his mind, of course when it's appropriate. It's just all of these things that make me come back to his site. And it is also the reason why today, with great honor, I add him to my list of favorite blogs on the Internet.

In related news...

I finally got the piece of paper saying that I have my 11 year degree. I'm so thrilled. Maybe I'll frame it...right after I'm done working 80 hours a week. I'm sure I can slip in a 30 minute break on Sunday to run to Fred Meyers for a paper frame that they threw away. I can't wait.

exp points

I'm soo fucking tired of every company wanting some god damn experience. Even for junior and entry level positions they want 2 to 3 years of experience. That's fucking stupid...I'm getting fucking fed up with it....

As it stands now, I'm going to have to work two minimum wage jobs to pay for all of my fucking debt and bills. That's just great....I enjoy spending my whole waking existances working...That's why I live...to work for minimum wage.

If you need me...i'll be working........

Shaking off the Dust

Well, if you look around the site, you'll notice a few changes. Firstoff, which will make most people happy, I got rid of the tag board feature. It wasn't being used much and gave most people ads to look at. So I just went ahead to took it off. Also the site will load much faster :)

I've also added the "email this" feature that's a part of blogger. Looking a little further you will discover I listed this site to several weblog searching sites. I'm hoping to draw in the big numbers now, baby! Or keep it pretty local, still. While linking to those sites, I discovered a service called Blogrolling. It's a central site where you can manage all your links on your blog, or any other web related document for that matter. It's pretty neat. They have it set up to where if you found a site that seems interesting, you can click a button (which you have to drag into your browser, look for instructions on how to do that on the site) to add it to your list. You don't have to go into your template, like in blogger, to add a new link. You do have to add one line initially, but that's really painless and easy to do. If you upgrade, you can get multiple blog rolls. So it's all good.

Hopefully I've inspired you all to spend a few hours to do the same on your own blogs. So, that's it for now.

Broken Schools

Some of you might know of this already, being the all-knowing home schoolers you all are, but John Taylor Gatto, an honored and critized school teacher from New York state, wrote a book about his experiences in the American school system. This book is online and it's 18 chapters long. I will eventually read it, but I wanted to post the link to it so others who read faster could write a review for me....cause I'm lazy. heh Actually I will read it all. Just not now.

So, whoever finishes it first will get the most honored "Brownie Point" from yours truly. Good luck.

Arcade games that should have been?

I enjoy a good photoshopped photo as the next guy. This series of pics feature arcade games that could be made. A bit of warning though, there are some tasteless ones and ones that would appeal to the geek inside. I'd say it's above average. Enjoy!

Things I miss from school

Yes, sadly, I miss school. Well, parts of school. The looming deadline of projects and the endless studying for tests I don't miss what so ever. What I do miss is the socialization I got from school. There were other people I got to talk with about computer stuff, games, sports, and other stuff which I just don't get any more. I miss playing pool in the lounge, losing a vast majority of the time. I still attend the game dev club I started last year so I can get my fix. But it's not enough. I like to talk about how you can use some technology to do something that you wouldn't normally do with it. Or even thinking aloud of the what-ifs that is generated.

So I'm a social geek that doesn't talk much, but who cares. I still need that room full of other geeks wanting to do whatever with technology. I miss that the most from school. And that makes me sad.

Invader Zim, interview with a vampire

Over at IGN.com, there is an interview with the creator and color designer of Invader Zim, the best animated television show ever to shown on Nickelodeon and a whole bunch of other TV channels. Look into the minds of which sprung the world of Zim.