I love Netflix. I think it’s the greatest thing since frozen pizza and microwave popcorn. I can catch up with series that I’ve wanted to watch, but for one reason or another, I usually miss. Lost is a good example. I watched season one straight through as fast as the DVDs could come in the mail. More recently, Battlestar Galactica and 24 are also being watched this way, with season one of 24 currently in queued up.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m watching the episodes back-to-back or what, but I’ve started noticing something about 24. I’ve also seen it in Battlestar Galactica and The Bourne Supremacy, as well as other shows and movies. I think I first saw it when watching an episode of NYPD Blue some years back. It’s the hand-held, move-the-camera-all-over-the-place point of view that I’m referring to. Some shows are subtler. Others are so jumpy it makes you wonder if the person holding the camera has Parkinson’s Disease. And once I notice it, I can’t NOT notice it. It’s like thinking about your tongue in your mouth, this piece of wet, flexible muscle just laying there in your mouth and once you start thinking about it, you can’t NOT think about it, at least not immediately.

The camera work is intended to heighten the intensity of the moment, I assume…but quite frankly, it just bugs me to no end. I don’t look at normal everyday objects like that, my head’s not attached to a giant spring like some warped bobble head, so why do the produces of these shows think I want to watch my TV that way?

Ah well. If I ever write a script that gets made into a tv show or movie, before selling it, I’ll stipulate that they’re not allowed to do that. Unless of course, they offer me a boatload of money. Then they could put the camera in a paint can mixer for all I care.

Hrm….that doesn’t say much for my respect, or my integrity of my work now, does it.

Well…I’ll burn that bridge if it ever appears before me.

Sorry I haven’t written in awhile…seems to be a lot going on lately.

Friday last, my son came into the house around 5:30 and said, “What’s with all the cop cars out front?” Naturally this piqued my attention, so I wandered outside to check it out. There were five cop cars, an ambulance, a fire-engine and the County Bomb Squad.

Yup. A bomb-disposing-remote-robot-carrying bomb truck on my street.

Turns out a neighbor was driving through town when a package attached to a parachute floated out of the sky and landed on her car. She grabbed it, put it in her car and then drove home with it and put it in the garage. When her husband got home, he walked in the garage, said, “What’s that smell?”, discovered it was the package, dragged it outside and called the cops. Who in turn called more cops. Who then called the bomb squad.

After 3 hours or so of inspecting the package, they ended up dragging it to the middle of the road and blowing it up. I’m assuming there was no body parts or chemicals or anything else in there that might spread about after having been blown up. Hoping at least.

Just Weird. Yes, with a capital W.

Elsewhere in my world, as you may or may have not heard, AOL, the company I work for, is pretty much going free (if you have a broadband connection). Where once our subscribers had to pay $25 bucks a month, it’s now free. This has been a crazy few weeks, at least in my department, getting web registration paths lined up, etc. And we had a ton of new registrations yesterday, so that sounds positive. The not-so-positive part is the planned reduction of 1 Billion in overhead costs.

You know what that means. Layoffs. And a heap of them from the sounds of it.

So, not only have we been crazy busy (which I hope bodes well for my department), but we’ve been stressed about losing our jobs. Fun stuff.

And to add to my stress, my dad went into the hospital yesterday to have a softball-sized tumor removed from his pancreas. He was in surgery for over 11 hours. They sent the tumor off to have it tested and see if it’s cancerous. Here’s to hoping it’s not.

So yeah, it’s been a week. Thanks for letting me rant.

I don’t understand what’s with me and cargo shorts. If you recall, a few weeks back I lost my cell phone in a pair at the store. Well, last week, I did something similar again: this time, I forgot my cell phone was in one of the extra pockets and I sent it through the laundry.

Apparently, cell phones don’t hold up so well when you do that. I tried letting it dry out totally, but it is well and truly dead.

So all week I’ve been on eBay shopping for cellphones. I didn’t have insurance on mine, so if I bought on from the store, it’d be a minimum of $200. I don’t understand their pricing schemes. Regardless, I’ve had three that I’ve bid on, and lost all three. So, I imagine I’ll find another today to bid on and lose as well.

I also sent my watch through the washing machine via the same method as my cell phone. Perhaps I should give up on wearing cargo shorts.

As a side note, I haven’t forgotten about this page. Things have been busy at work and at home with school, so I find I have very little time to create a new layout. I have something in mind, at least that’s a start. I’ll probably find a theme to download that will at least get rid of this default look. That’ll be a start.

For quite awhile (I’m talking years here), I’ve been fielding IMs from teenybopper gangsta’ wannabes thinking that I am Lil Bow Wow (or now, just Bow Wow). Why you might ask? Why would a mid-30′s white guy be mistaken for a young black rap star?

Glad you asked.

See, it seems Bow Wow’s real name is Shad Moss. And apparently, at least according to some of these people who’ve IM’d me, there can only be one Shad in this world. For awhile, I would respond to the emails, baiting the people who IM’d me, and generally making fools of them (or myself). I’d then proceed to share these conversations with friends of mine.

Recently the flow of IMs has dried up. Until someone went and created a profile on tagged.com, stating that they were Bow Wow and their IM name was Shad. So, naturally, the flood of IMs has started again. Which has prompted me to save a couple. So, I thought I’d share…

Continue Reading »

After posting a quarterly profit of over 8 billion dollars, why don’t you spend some of that no-so-hard-earned money, wisely? Instead of sending off outgoing chairman Lee Raymond with a $400 million dollar bonus (seriously, does he need that much? Wouldn’t 50 million be enough for anyone?), why don’t you spend a good chuck of that change in research towards more economical fuel types? Look into the growing trend of biodiesels and use your might and resources to make biodiesel a feasible alternative.

While our senators are saying “Give everyone 100 bucks for gas“, I’m thinking that’ll be good for two fill ups. TWO. So if this does come to pass, I think I’ll take that 100 bucks and buy a bicycle instead, and start pedaling to work. What a wonderful thought that is; people everywhere start biking where they need to go. The air would be cleaner, people would be healthier and Exxon Mobile wouldn’t have any sort of stupid insane 8+ billion dollar profit.

Rant over. I’m gonna go hug a tree now.

I think the definition of porn should be changed. Right now, the definition pertains to erotic behavior that causes sexual excitement. Some ten years or so ago, I read Pat Cadigan’s Synners for the first time (What I wouldn’t give to have the original UK copy in hardback…cheap!), where she uses the term in conjunction with medical shows, cop/chase shows, disaster shows, etc. Medporn, Disasterporn, and yes, even sexporn. In the way she used it, it worked well to describe a fascination (almost morbid in some sense) of the way people are attracted to bloody surgeries, deadly chases, shoot outs, etc.

I bring this up because in the last week, I’ve gotten two catalogs in the mail, both which just make me go “woohoo!” with glee. Yes, I actually say “woohoo!”. The first, which should come as no surprise is a Harley parts catalog. All that chrome. All the “Make Go Faster” accessories. All the eye-catching beautifully detailed paint-schemes. I can sit and fantasize about what my bike would look like had I the cash to drop on frivolous items such as these.

The second was a catalog from Sweetwater. While you might know of the Harley fixation, you probably don’t know that I also like to play and compose music. I have an M-Audio Oxygen8 keyboard hooked up to my G4 which I use to compose music in Propellerhead’s Reason software. It’s been a long process, both in learning how to use Reason, and finding time to sit down and work with it. But I’m digressing again…when that catalog shows up, it definitely gets leafed through quite a bit. Starts on the dining room table and ends up on the back of the toilet.

Seriously…if I got a Playboy and Harley or Sweetwater catalog in the mail at the same time, the Playboy would be looked through last…and only once.

I must be getting old or something.

For some reason, I can’t get anything below the “Asides” category (which I really need to rename) to show up in the sidebar. I’m not sure why the Categories, Archives, or various other stuff isn’t showing. I haven’t had time to really sit and suss out the problem yet, so it’s going to be rather blank over there for a bit.

Because of this, I thought I’d start filling in my Asides. It’s basically going to be like my Livejournal page was: Simply a place to post weird/funny/interesting tidbits I find around the web.

And if you have any ideas about the sidebar bit, I’d love to hear them.

So, day three and no poison ivy…I guess this is a good thing, but now Gail’s going to be more determined than ever to get me out in the garden to pull poison ivy, along with whatever other weeds she wants pulled “As long as you’re already doing it…”

She’s also convinced that I could make a ton of money on weekends, going to various neighbors and pulling ivy. What a weirdo she is.

Other than that, not much going on. This coming Memorial Day weekend is Rolling Thunder, the big ride from the Pentagon, around the National Mall, and ending up at the Vietnam Memorial. My HOG chapter sponsers a ride down to the Pentagon called The Ride of the Patriots. I usually volunteer to work this ride, which means come Sunday morning, I’m up at 3:45 a.m. to be down at the dealership before 5 to start staging bikes. Lots of fun, and usually we have a group of between two and three thousand bikes lining up.

Oh, and my buddy Martin tagged me with a book meme, but as I recently just completed one, I think I’ll point to that one instead. I think it’d be cool to do the same with movies (I’ve seen one for music recently), so maybe I’ll start a movie one.

Then again, maybe not.

Wusabi peanuts are a good thing. Very tasty, with just the right amount of spice.

Unless, of course, you inadvertantly inhale some of that powder up your nose into your sinuses. Then it feels like someone shoved a can of mace up your nose and pulled the trigger.

But that’s not the warning I’m here to give. The warning is this: Wash your hands before rubbing your eyes. It’ll make the wusabi powder up the nose feel like a tickle with a feather compared to wusabi powder in your eye.

So remember kiddies: Wusabi Powder does not go in your eyes!

That is all.

My friend Jeff gave me about fifteen iTunes caps last night, because he’s unable to load iTunes onto his PC (apparently he’s still running ME, the poor schlep…). So during lunch today, I decided to load the caps into my account, and then start browsing.

I dug deeper into the Music Store than I normally do, browsing instead of just picking an artist and searching for them. Talk about a trip down memory lane. They have the Billboard Top 100 all the way back to 1946 (though there were only 41 chart toppers then…), and I have spent a lot of time in the late 70′s and early 80′s. It’s amazing how much the musical landscape changed between those years. I find artists I haven’t thought of in years, but remember listening to on the radio.

Hearing these songs brought back memories of my mom sitting at the kitchen table, doing the crossword puzzle in The Oregonian, and having the radio on. “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty and pretty much anything by Billy Joel were two constants. I also remember lying in bed at night, the radio softly playing as Eddie Rabbit’s “I Love a Rainy Night” played.

Every time I go to the iTunes Music Store, I just love it more.