| Been busy lately. |
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| 11:52am 24/04/2007 |
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mood: installing music: Commercials on the local classic rock station
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It's been really busy at the brewery lately, and I've been working on installing a new computer system for them, so I haven't managed to get online recently. That, and I've had gigs or special events going on all week--a jam session on Thursday, gig on Friday, gig on Saturday, a Dinner at Hogwarts special event on Sunday, and a practice session yesterday.
Reviews for the XBOX 360 games I got will be coming this week, as will discussions on what exactly this new computer system installation happens to entail. At least it hasn't reached "rigmarole" status yet... though it nearly did when the KEYBOARD didn't work. :P
Games to be reviewed (in case it matters):
Chrome Hounds (X360)
Prey (X360)
Rainbow Six Vegas (X360)
WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw (X360)
Valhalla Knights (PSP)
Also, I'm getting a chance to work with Windows Vista, because that's what came installed on the new machine I'm setting up here at the brewery. Hasn't crashed or commited seppuku yet, so that's a good sign. The whole thing looks really cool, too. Haven't really gotten beyond file copying and program installation, though, so that's all the impression I've gotten so far.
Further bulletins as events warrant. Have a nice day.
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 2 - Post |
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| Blockbuster Video, thou art dead to me. |
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| 12:36pm 17/04/2007 |
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music: Funk Ad-Daft Punk-Homework
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Wherefore, o Blockbuster Video, hast thou ostracized me? What pernicious misdeed dost thou punish me for? In days of yore, did I not faithfully return to thy local store and while away my hours and amassed wealth upon thy rentable entertainments? Did I not purchase from thee no less than ten off-brand XBOX controllers because they were the cheapest in the land? Did I ever do thee wrong?
Many games did I obtain from thee, some for only a short while, and others for longer--the copy of Smackdown: Know Your Role that thou didst sell to me still bears thy mark, thy lasting stamp upon the disc that doth warn against removal, foretelling of great detriment to the disc should I endeavor to do so. Many games did I acquire from thee, and many movies, also. Candy I didst purchase from thee in great quantity; forsooth, empty tubs of Gummi Bears bearing thy sigil in silence abound in my rooms of entertainment.
Through drought and abundance did I frequent thee; thy "Guaranteed To Be There" games could always be found in their places, though their non-guaranteed fellows were often out of stock. Only the newest games, many of which I did not seek, adorned thy shelves. Fifteen copies didst thou stock of that which came out the fortnight previous, but thy multitudes of extra copies did quickly disappear when new material was released. Seldom did I leave with the game I sought upon my entrance, but still I returned to thee.
Verily, I did do thee wrong once, when squire Lurch and I rented from thee Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, and that ill-conceived Magic the Gathering game of disreputable strategy. Unintentionally did we return the Magic game to the wrong branch of thy empire, forever blemishing the account. Narrowly did we escape punishment beyond the revocation of our renting privilege, for my cohort's credit card that thou didst list on the account had long since become defunct. And, verily, we, in our ire against thy revocation of our privilege for a mere mistake, did keep thy games and distanced ourselves from thee.
Since that fateful day, I have become dissatisfied with my life on the outlaw fringe of video rentals, dodging between other video rental stores in a furtive manner lest I be spotted and captured, forced to make restitution for my misdoings. For thou didst build more convenient locations than thy competitors, and thus seemingly beckoned me back into thy entertainment-laden embrace.
This past night, I did return to thy local branch and attempt to once again procure entertainment, but thou didst not heed my request. All accounts that once bore my name in thy computer have been closed, leaving no avenue to me open, save one--beginning anew. Wishing to end this years-long struggle for easily-accessible entertainment products-for-hire, I informed thy clerk, Chris, that my wish was to begin an account. Then did he ask me for identification. I produced the license to operate my own transportation that was bestowed upon my by the government of our fair land, and he saw that it was good. However, thou doth require two forms of identification to begin a rental relationship.
I found it strange, nay, patently ludicrous that he denied acceptance of my social security card as an alternate form of identification. Nor would he accept expired licenses or learner's permits; had I been a villain assuming the identity of him whose name was borne on the licenses I proffered, then verily, I have been standing in for him for many a year. What he asked of me was a utility bill bearing my name and address.
Furthermore, when I offered my credit/debit card to him to add to the account information, he would not accept it; nay, it was not a "real" credit card, he said. Had he put it in the computer, it would work identically to its brethren that represent borrowed money instead of actual funds, and the difference would have surely eluded him had my card not borne the word "debit" upon its face.
These regulations that thou hast instituted in my absence have barred me from renting from you forevermore--no utility bills do I have to identify myself (though I bear multiple forms of identification sufficient to purchase firearms but not rent games) and no credit cards do I carry to register to possibly pay for puchases with money that I do not have. Verily hast thou spat upon my gesture of friendship, thou hast shat upon my olive branch of peace. Knowest thou not that once plucked, the branch can no longer feel fertilization? It is merely a metaphor.
Henceforth, thou shalt not see me within thy premises. More distant (and thus, less convenient) may thy contemporaries be, but they require not the rigmarole that thou hast instituted for the basest of thy proffered services. Verily, they will rent to me the very products that thou hast denied me, and thus shall partake of my business in lieu of thee.
I dub thee "Lackluster Video" and say goodbye. |
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Read 2 - Post |
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| Gaming |
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| 03:30pm 16/04/2007 |
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music: The Man In Black (Duet With Johnny Cash)-One Bad Pig-The Quintessential One Bad Pig, Vol. 1
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Bought an XBOX 360 yesterday. Yeesh, those things are expensive. Cool-ass, but damned expensive.
Of course, I bought the extended service plan and extra controllers because one extra controller is far, far cheaper than another 360. And a game, dammit. Some original XBOX games are compatible with it, but not all of them, and besides, there's no way to transfer my saved games off of my old XBOX (which IS compatible with ALL of the original XBOX games, obviously). So those forty-some-odd hours of play in Fable would go down the toilet were I to simply start playing everything on the 360. I mean, the wireless controllers are nice, but not nice enough to start over in every single RPG and combat-stat-tracking FPS I own.
The whole thing came out to seven hundred dollars--the 360, the service contract, three extra controllers, and Rainbow Six: Vegas, which I shall review sometime this week in my normal, extremely verbose way. I'd do it now, but it's already 3:00 pm and the brewery gets busy about this time.
So I'm now in the current generation of gaming. I've been saving money for several months for this, but it still seems steep. At least I didn't get a PS3. :P
On an unrelated gaming note, I took a goofy RPG Class Test, though it should be a "Dungeons & Dragons Class Test" because that seems to be the source of all their RPG classes. The test result follows, though not in a concise, pre-generated manner that one would usually find on these things (I think I'd need to sign up for their site to get the pregenerated results).
I scored:
Monk
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
- You scored higher than 99% on Combativeness
- You scored higher than 99% on Sneakiness
- You scored higher than 99% on Intellect
- You scored higher than 99% on Spirituality
A friend of mine took the test and turned out Arcane Trickster, but she got an actual description. Again, probably a signed-up-only thing. Interesting, though, that I turned out to be 99th-percentile on everything. Didn't know I was that sneaky.
Anyway, that's all for now. Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| I hate HMOs. |
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| 03:21pm 13/04/2007 |
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music: Low Rider-War-The Radio Behind Me
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I don't know what it is with me and HMOs; we're from two different universes, or something. Whenever I end up having to go to one FOR ANY REASON, I get caught up in red tape and find it nigh on impossible to accomplish anything.
Take today, for instance. My brother Timothy (Babbitt) was sick (they thought it might've been strep throat, though the preliminary tests turn up negative and we'll get the official results, like, tomorrow) and I had to take him to the doctor's office. Which means, of course, good ol' Kaiser Permanente. Now, I figured that this would go easily, because we: A). Had an appointment for 9am this morning, B). Got there on time, and C). Knew exactly what information to give them to identify him without his Kaiser ID card (which my mom probably has). Of course, they don't care if you get there on time or not (as long as you're not HORRIBLY late), they'll still somehow manage to get everything tangled up with the check-in process.
First, we gave her Babbitt's birthdate, then his last name. Then his first name. Then his middle initial. Then, she couldn't find the appointment. Which was odd, as it was definitely reserved. So, we started from the other end--with his NAME instead of some numbers. This time, she found him, but needed to confirm his birthdate (for some reason, they had my other brother Sean (SpamOMan)'s birthdate in there instead of Babbitt's) and change it in the system.
Meanwhile, we'd been standing at the check-in desk for, like, five minutes trying to check in (which is usually the easiest part). Finally, she's done FIXING THEIR DATA ERROR, and she hands us the sign-in sheet. The whole checkup took only about thirty minutes, we got his doctor's note because he'd missed school, and then we were done. But for some reason, we took five times as long as everyone else to check in because they're too incompetent to input data into their computers and/or too stupid to ask for someone's NAME for check-in.
I guess that all things considered, this visit wasn't too bad. My previous experiences with them have been, though--I broke my leg several years ago on a Sunday and we had to go into their After-Hours Care Facility in Denver because our local branch was closed. Which was understandable, as they're not a real hospital, just a huge, corporate-run doctor's office with a freaking ESPRESSO STAND in their waiting area. Anyway, we went down to their after-hours care facility, they took X-rays to find that it was broken (the fact that my ankle looked like a balloon was enough to convince me), and then they put the cast on it. No problem. They said we could get the cast taken off at our local branch (instead of driving 25 miles into Denver to get it taken care of), and we left.
Weeks later, when I could literally walk on the foot again (though I was still wearing a cast), we went to our local Kaiser. After the check-in process, I clomped back to the orthopedic area and they took an X-ray (just to make sure it wasn't broken anymore). Then, we proceeded to wait for AN HOUR while they checked the X-ray and sent it to the original branch we'd gone to (the after-hours care one) for comparison with my last X-ray, or something.
Eventually, after an hour of waiting, they told us that their system for sending X-rays back and forth between branches (which they called the "Bone Phone," which I assume to mean some manner of complicated, high-tech fax machine designed for X-rays) wasn't working and they couldn't get confirmation that my leg was healed from the original orthopedic surgeon. So I had to go down to the after-hours care facility AGAIN to get the cast off.
Now, I assume that had I gone to our local branch in the first place (if it had been open, that is), they would've had someone on hand who's qualified to, let's say, diagnose a broken leg. It seems like they'd have someone who could do that, since they have all the equipment to aid in the diagnosing process. And, it would stand to reason that I'm not their only customer, so they'd have someone like that on hand AT ALL TIMES when they're open, in case someone else has a broken bone at some point. But, apparently, nobody could simply look at my X-ray and say "he's healed." And then take the cast off. Which is all I needed these bureaucratic fools to do in the first place.
Anyway, we had to go down to the other branch. Which isn't just around the corner, so we had to do it on a different day (which actually turned out to be the following week). Once we were there, I didn't even have to see a surgeon, the NURSE took the X-ray, diagnosed that the bone was healed, and took the cast off. Problem solved.
Maybe it's just my branch that's populated by incompetent people. The after-hours care place sure takes good care of me.
It's not just the one incident, with the wearing of a cast for an extra week and all, that has soured my impression of Kaiser. About a month ago, I caught some kind of death-flu complete with cough, aching head, runny nose, and about every symptom described in the NyQuil commercials. Runny eyes, everything. I seemed to cough all night long sometimes, which did a particularly good job of wrecking my voice OVER ST. PATRICK'S DAY WEEKEND. Well, this was before St. Patrick's Day that I actually called them, hoping to set up an appointment and figure out what I'd caught and what they might prescribe to take care of it (as I'd had it for about two weeks at that point and couldn't seem to get my voice back).
So, first I called their main office. They told me to call my local branch. So I called my local branch. I had to describe my symptoms to the receptionist, then get transferred to an actual nurse or doctor and describe them again. I said I'd had these symptoms for two weeks and didn't seem to be getting better, so she said to start taking Robitussin DM. I'd been taking Mucinex DM, which is a caplet instead of a syrup that's designed for the same symptoms, and told her as much, but she told me to just take the Robitussin and see if the symptoms persisted.
I mean, really. "I have a cold and cough and I've lost my voice from coughing so much. What can I do?" "Take some cough medicine." "Oh, really? I'd never have thought of that! This is why I pay you so much money, to tell me to take COUGH MEDICINE, which is the FIRST THING I STARTED DOING!"
The symptoms did persist for about another week (and it took another week and a half for my voice to truly return at all), but damned if I was gonna call THEM again. Maybe I can change my branch... I mean, it'll mean driving farther, but they'll probably actually offer treatment instead of indecisiveness and common sense information.
Anyway, that's enough ranting for now. Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 2 - Post |
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| I haven't laughed this hard in a long, long time. |
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| 07:55am 11/04/2007 |
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mood: amused (one of the first moods I put down that's actually in the list) music: Pokémon in the background, ironically
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This is hilarious--the sheer level of stand-in-line, don't-question-anything-we-tell-you-because-we-invoke-God's-name antics is staggering. Misinformation abounds. Hilarity ensues.
It's basically a bunch of poorly researched anti-videogame rhetoric spouted by someone whose anal sphincter is wrapped so tightly around her neck that her brain has forgotten what oxygen is. Don't join the idiots that keep replying en masse to the stupid, vapid posts; they just take that as your being somehow warped by the devil into no longer understanding English (they actually have one of the articles that a "recent convert" translated into Leet, though they still wonder if he's "recovered" from his bouts of satanic rites... er, videogames).
But seriously, it's just amusing. Stupid on a level that I don't even think Jack Thompson has touched (he pops up in that story they translated). This just goes to show that Morel Orel actually has some roots in reality. And it's teeming with inaccuracies; the ONLY information that they got right is that Caterpie evolves into Metapod in Pokémon. THAT IS IT.
If you have a brain, or at least a part of one, you will most likely find at least 99.8% of this offensive on the most basic of thought levels. Remember that I've warned you.
http://www.shelleytherepublican.com/category/entertainment/videogames/
Oh, and apparently, A. A. Milne didn't write Winnie the Pooh like everybody says, it was some Disney worker drone named Fran Posner. Sorry, that particular piece of information kinda crossed the line with me. WHY MUST MODERN IMBECILES PERVERT OR BASTARDIZE THE THINGS I CHERISHED AS A CHILD?
Case in point: Star Wars transformers. I once said, "I don't think that ANYTHING couldn't be made cooler if it could transorm into a giant robot. I was wrong, and I lament that comment. They actually managed to find something that is NOT cooler when it turns into a giant robot. In fact, were I able to find the subhuman bastard who came up with the plan, I'd kick him in the balls so hard he'd have to tilt his head sideways and pee out his ear.
Now that I'm done with that, I'm gonna take a nap before work. On an unrelated note, however, are the BBN boards working for ANYBODY? Has Outerverse talked to anybody? Nobody's online when I log onto AIM, unless you've all changed contact info since last time.
I haven't, though, so you'd think that somebody would've seen me had they been there... oh, well.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter
EDIT/ADDENDUM:
Okay, upon further searching, this thing's a hoax, but a damn good one. To the point where they managed to get someone to try to debunk them, and then somehow sued him for blogging. There's other evidence lying around, though many of the original pages used to confirm that it's a hoax aren't available anymore.
I mean, the whole video game thing seemed real enough, being that there's people out there (Jack Thompson, for example), that actually HAVE those views. But other things on the site--such as their exposé on the Song of Solomon having been added in by European liberals in the fifteenth century--cross the line from patently ludicrous to downright unbelievable. I think that they intentionally went this far to do just that, though they still seem hell-bent on covering up that the whole damn thing is a hoax. To the point where one of their characters posts replies to the FriendlyAthiest link I linked earlier in this edit.
They really had me going there, though. The disemboweled Sims seemed like something someone would accidentally pull up when trying (obviously half-heartedly) to "research" and the Islamofascist Metapods bit (because "it is crescent shaped, like the crescent-moon the Muslims worship") was true enough to real life--I've met people that believe crucifixes are graven images because people kneel before them and cross themselves, which they interpret as worshipping the crucifix, not the deity it stands for.
Cancel red alert. Secure from general quarters. Stand down weapons.
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 6 - Post |
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| No flaming death for me, thank you. |
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| 01:11pm 10/04/2007 |
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mood: unburned music: Loch Lomond-Mulligan Stew-A Pint To Go
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Well, I managed not to burn down the brewery yesterday. The power cord to our big kegirator decided it had experienced enough of life, and partially combusted. When I arrived at work, I smelled burning dust and/or plastic, and found out that the heater was on in the building (and I turned it off). When the smell still lingered, I opened up the doors to let the place air out. Still, the smell lingered.
Ted, one of the brewers, started sniffing around like a bloodhound, and eventually found the culprit--the lowest plug on the power strip (which leads to the kegirator) was burned and/or melted onto the power strip. He turned it off as the other brewer, Jeff, came upon this scene.
Jeff looked at the cord, then looked at the cash register, which was no longer functioning (as we'd turned the entire power strip off, seeing as the lower part of it was a melted slag), and assumed the worst--that the REGISTER had just died. Because that would be hella annoying. So, he has me call poor Tamara back in to see what we could do about the situation. She walked up just as Ted and I discerned that the register was fine, and it was the kegirator that wasn't functioning (we'd pulled the bad cord out of its still-hot, blackened outlet on the power strip and turned the strip back on), wondering why we were all standing around an electrical outlet with the scent of burning plastic in the air and Jeff swearing up a storm, thinking that now, instead of manual bookkeeping, we had a non-working refrigeration unit.
In the end, though, Tamara watched the shop for a short time while I walked over to the hardware store and got a new power strip and a new plug end for the kegirator cord. Ted and I installed the new plug and I hooked it all back up again and it works fine now.
So that was MY amazing yesterday. Also, that's why I didn't have all the time I wanted to finish my parade story or really do anything other than stick a few random "define yourself" blurbs generated by one of those username script thingies in my last post. So, I guess that I'll have to finish the parade story.
The first part of this story can be found here.
Once we finally started moving along with the assembled masses (including the jerk in front of us in his unassuming-looking PT Cruiser), we found that even once started, parades take a while to really get going. We stopped and started nine or twelve times on our way out of the parking lot, waiting for all the floats, groups, stupid-hat-wearing people, and PT Cruisers to get moving. On the way, we passed some big Budweiser promotional truck/float thing, complete with a DJ on top and bikini-clad women enjoying the noonday sun and beer that tastes like deer piss. And they had a pool, too, hooked up in some sort of trailerish method to the back of the giant beer truck party bus.
Once we finally managed to get out of the massing area and onto the road, we started up our music. We got some pretty good volume out of our sound system, and I'm pretty sure we overrode whatever easy listening smooth jazz llama dung muzak our "friend" in front of us was playing on his custom stereo. So he got to listen to us for the whole parade. And then some after, though I'm getting ahead of myself.
Things got interesting once we were in the parade, because we were running the entire thing off of a shuffled playlist comprised of our two CDs on my dad's iPod. We opted not to skip any songs, just because that would make our banner-clad PA-hooked-to-the-car-battery pickup "float" seem a little less professional. If that would even be possible, I suppose. So, we'd get a random song every couple of minutes, and it was almost always exactly the opposite of what we might've sung for a given audience as we passed them by--loud half-naked college students hanging out of windows and clambering onto roofs from their nearby apartment balconies often got "Danny Boy" or some other sad, slow song and the small children, whenever they were congregated, would usually get the blood-and-guts war songs or any song featuring the words "run like hell away" or "damn near drives me crazy," which got us some upset looks from a few parents. Just the luck of the draw, I suppose.
Speaking of the luck of the draw, one of our songs just happened to come up in my laptop playlist as I type this. Lurch's solo track off of our first album, actually. Back to the story.
At one point in the parade, Sherman flagged down a passerby that had a jug of whiskey and took a swig. We were kind of envious of him at that point, since all we had to drink was a jug of water that Greg happened to have in the back of his pickup truck. At a couple of slower points in the parade, I was sorely tempted to hop out of the truck and run to one of the roadside beer tents providing liquid refreshment to the parade-goers, but wasn't sure if I'd be breaking some manner of law (I probably would be, and the police, who were out in force, would be far less likely to let four big guys in kilts get away with it than they would the bikini-clad Budweiser beer bus babes).
Eventually, we got to the judging area (though we weren't really expecting to win any awards for the aforementioned four kilted guys in the back of a banner-clad pickup rednecked together with a PA to allow for the blaring of folk music to annoy the dick in front of us), which kinda came up on us unexpectedly. They'd said on the website that the judges would be on the end of the second leg of the parade (which basically made a large circuit relatively rectangular in shape), and we'd have a short time to present to them our float, which they would supposedly view from the front (though most floats are built to be viewed from the side, so we thought that odd). However, they ended up being three quarters of the way down the second leg of the parade, viewing the floats from the side. So we didn't expect them to be where they were and just kinda waved surprisedly as we passed (though what else we would've done, I don't know).
We didn't actually end up making it onto the TV coverage of the event; we went by the cameras during what was apparently a commercial break. The jeeps behind us (which I recognized on the parade footage because I remembered one of them had a Dukes of Hazzard horn and he beeped it as they passed the cameras) made it on, though. And the prick in front of us was also COMMERCIALED!! and thus didn't make it onto the TV either.
After that, the parade kinda wound down. Less people came to watch the parade on the other side of the judges' stand, and we eventually got back into the Coors Field parking lot complex/parade massing area (where we saw that floats were STILL queued up, waiting to get going). Lurch and I exited the truck as we passed the lot where he'd parked (so that he wouldn't have to walk the half mile all the way back to his car from the far end of the parking lot where the truck was headed to get my dad's car) and our adventure was complete. That is, it was complete once we managed to find Lurch's car, which took about five minutes of looking because he couldn't remember exactly where he'd parked it as he'd basically leapt from the car the second it was in a viable spot and high-tailed it down to where I met him back when the guy in the PT Cruiser insulted Greg's truck.
There we go, the story is finished and I can stop putting off finishing it.
Tried yesterday and today to post something for BOTP7/The Battle for NeoSeattle, but the forums over at Black-Blade.net (Outerverse's site) seem to be down. I posted my character profile, but then the boards ceased to function while I was reading the actual story posts. To find out what and/or who I want to post about, of course. I thought that this was odd, as the main part of BBN worked, but not the forum subdomain (even when I tried to connect from home later in the day yesterday). I wonder if Outey is mucking about with it or something. I did figure out, however, that I still have copies of a few of my posts from the first time we tried to do BOTP7, but the only complete ones feature at least one character that's NOT IN this incarnation, like Wolf vs. "Lord" Sullivan or Gwen dialoguing with Delta.
But amidst all of these now-useless text files, I did find that I still had my introduction-to-the-battle story where my character jumps out of a spaceship in the clouds mimicking Winnie the Pooh's "raincloud" disguise (though an eight-hundred-pound cyborg glides somewhat less gracefully than a stuffed animal when tied to a balloon and rolled around in a mud puddle). So as soon as everything is working again, I'll probably post at least that.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| Unrelated Adventures |
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| 11:43pm 06/04/2007 |
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mood: continued music: CSI: Miami in the background
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Firstly, I've applied to rejoin the seventh Battle of the Posters, which, knowing the people who read this, probably needs either no explanation whatsoever other than the fact that we tried to start it months ago and it fell apart and then I went offline for a while, or needs far more explanation than this space really allows for. But in any case, it's "news."
Secondly, a telling of an adventure (that's what I'm calling it, at least). Of course, most mundane tasks (like driving into Denver or taking an alternate route from anywhere at all to anywhere else at all) turn into 'adventures' for me.
The scene unfolds this past St. Patrick's Day, otherwise known as, like, three weeks ago. Saturday, March 17th. This is a big time for Irish bands, one of which I happen to be a part of. Well, this year, we had the honor... er, privilege... er.... we were allowed into the local St. Patrick's Day parade (which is the second largest in the nation, right after, like, Boston or New York). You see, the band had played at a local Irish festival, the director of which had worked out a deal for the parade in that anybody who'd played at the festival could be in the parade without having to pay the registration fees (about $300+, or more than we would want to spend on this method of advertising when considering the small amount of actual advertising value we'd get from it). Ironically, I didn't actually play that festival with the band; I was quite busy singing through mouthfuls of rainwater at the local Renaissance Festival.
I mean, it rained cats and dogs on THEM at the Irish Festival, apparently, but I was, like, five miles away from where a two-lane highway with a full shoulder washed out five feet deep up to the double yellow line. And they had a pavilion that they were singing under; I had a weatherbeaten leather hat that I took off to serve as a tip jar because I'd left my basket back at the stage where we were performing, not intending to attempt a performance in the deluge until the music director flagged me down whilst sprinting between buildings and offered me one of the best street stages in the place because the harp player couldn't play it in the rain (but a drummer/singer could, had he a synthetic-head drum, which I did).
Anyway, they complained to ME of rain, after I sat there literally spitting water out of my mouth as I sang, dollar bills floating in my hat that sat on the stage in front of me. I mean, I was already wet, and I was going to make damn sure I got paid to be out there. Made out pretty well, too. But this is all quite off-topic.
Anyway, the band, sans me, played at the Irish Festival and we got a free spot in the parade because of it. So, we took them up on what was essentially free advertising, and planned to do it. Lurch, a.k.a. Big Mike McIntyre, even managed to get off work to be in the parade (but we didn't know until that day, more on that later). The plan was to ride in the back of Mike's older brother's pickup truck with our sound system hooked up to the truck, playing our CDs (as we still had six hours of gigs left to play in the day and didn't want to strain our voices by trying to sing a parade live), which was relatively simple in nature compared to many of our other plans. Which I will conveniently not describe here.
I'll post the rest of this in a bit, or just tack it on tomorrow. Got interrupted.
The Insane Space Hunter
Continued 4/9/07:
Okay. I'm back, baby.
Lurch called me to let me know he was on his way to the parade at about the same time we finally found the right parking lot, so I went about trying to navigate him into the same place we were with the printout that my dad got from the parade participant website. Which is difficult in downtown Denver, mostly because every single street is one-way only, and none of them go the direction that he wanted to go. We were parked, sunblocked, and waiting for the truck to show up before he finally found the right section of town.
First, though, I had to run halfway down the giant parking lot to find his brother, Greg, and the truck we were riding in. He'd ended up coming down the wrong side of the lot and getting forced into line with other floats that were scheduled to go out quite a bit later than us. After negotiating our way up the parade to our actual spot, Greg, my dad, and Sherman all started rigging up the sound system to the truck while I got on the phone with Lurch.
Eventually, I got him into the participants' parking lot, which was NOT the parking lot where we were supposed to mass for the parade. Thus, he ended up a good half mile from where we were and had to walk all the way down the length of the giant parking lots to get to us. I managed to direct him to the southern side of the lot and walked toward his parking lot to meet him halfway.
Eventually, though, we all managed to assemble and get in the truck. It took the better part of an hour to get Greg and Lurch to where we were supposed to be, but the parade was slow in getting going so we ended up having plenty of time. Once in the truck, we even managed to have a few scraps of conversation in between bouts of "Margaritaville" blaring from a float some distance behind us, sporting palm trees and tin-roofed shacks. Near to that float danced people wearing giant foam cowboy hats, since the theme of the parade was "Irish Roots & Cowboy Boots." Of course, what on earth either of those things had to do with Margaritaville was beyond me.
Also, being proud of both being Irish and being American, it kinda irked me that now, on St. Patrick's Day, I not only saw the standard garish plastic green bowler hats that everyone naturally seems to associate with drunken Irish people, but also people wearing those goddamn ginormous foam cowboy hats inexplicably decorated with giant sheriff stars that people APPARENTLY seem to associate with, uh, drunken Irish cowboys. Thus, it was offensive on all fronts.
Also, something in front of us offended us, though it's completely different from the aforementioned stupid headwear and I really just used the "offensive front" part for a good segue into my next comment. Directly in front of us was the PT Cruiser Club (or something along those lines), which was composed of about twenty PT Cruisers, tricked out in various ways. Some sported streamers, some sported gigantic wind-up keys, and others just had other various custom parts and such. The one in front of us was driven by a particularly snooty fellow, whom we heard to comment "I don't want that [hunk of junk] anywhere near my car" (though I'm not quite sure of the exact wording, being that I was, at the time, finding Lurch) in referring to our truck when we asked him to move forward just a smidgeon to allow us enough clearance to get the truck into its proper place in the parade. His was a nicely customized model, ON THE INSIDE. His PT Cruiser was nice-looking on the outside, but aside from a custom license plate and upper middle brake light (both of which said "Phantom" or "Shadow" or something), it looked pretty much normal. Well-kept, but normal. Inside, while his rear gate was open, I did notice some XBOX game boxes and several DVDs, lending themselves to the theory that one could sit in the back seat of his Cruiser and watch movies or play games while on the road. Wasn't much to look at on the outside, though. And his attitude certainly could use some straightening out.
I mean, we're not all rich dicks with enough money to install DVD/game screens in our cars to keep our kids occupied while driving. Some of us just have a work truck to loan to friends in Irish bands who are in parades, and we certainly don't need arrogant pricks like this guy talking down about our automobiles.
Of course, Lurch and I once hooked up an "in-car" setup that would put his to SHAME, though it involved a 300-watt power inverter directly cabled to the battery, ripping the arms off of the front seats so that a bigger TV would fit between them, an XBOX, and my sound system that's cobbled together out of an old boombox and computer speakers and he probably wouldn't have really thought much of it, either. But our screen was definitely bigger than his, and our speakers much, much louder. Thus, we win.
Plus, we're not dicks about it. Yeah, that should do it. We definitely win.
Anyway, once all this had transpired, the parade actually began. It's picking up at work now, so I'll relate the actual parade happenings tomorrow next time (maybe tomorrow, but I make no promises).
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| It's not just me... (or: Pants That Fit) |
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| 01:39pm 05/04/2007 |
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mood: repantsed music: Turn The Page-Bob Seger-The Radio That's Playing Behind Me
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Well, I got feedback from some "real-life" friends of mine about my comments about MySpace, about the slow reply scripts and such, and apparently, it's a prevalent problem. Well, some of the problems are prevalent, at least. So it wasn't just me that tends to avoid replying or commenting because the thing runs like molasses flowing uphill.
Want to know what's going on in my thrill-a-minute life? I bought new pants today. Kinda had to, as the zipper on my last pair of work jeans broke when I was changing out of them yesterday. Of course, the cuffs were pretty much gone (except for the front part that rests comfortably atop my shoes whilst I walk off any extra length from the back) and there was a hole in one of the pockets, but they were good jeans. I'm the kind of person that gets everything they can out of an item of clothing; I usually wear clothes until they literally disintegrate before my eyes. Shoes, especially. All I expect from shoes is that they somehow keep the bottom of my foot from touching the ground (perhaps by putting a quarter-inch rubber pad underneath it), and that they adhere, via some means (mundane or otherwise), to my foot. Now, if that means that I have to duct tape the soles back on my tennis shoes, then I do that. I don't care what they look like, they're my feet. And I'm a guy. I'm not supposed to have pretty feet.
Personally, feet are not something that I think can ever be particularly pretty anyway, so either way, I don't care.
So, anyway, I go into K-Mart. Now, usually, I go to the thrift store, but unfortunately, people my size apparently also wear their clothing until it wears out, because there is consistently NOTHING in my size. Whenever I find my waist size, it's either for someone eight full inches shorter than I am or, like, ten inches taller. I need a thirty-inch leg, and all they have are twenty-twos or forties. Seriously. They have my length in waist sizes six inches too small, as well. But nothing that truly fits (thus the fact that I'm often walking off the extra length from my jeans).
Anyway, in K-Mart, I can usually find pants that fit. They're about four times more expensive than the ones I get at the thrift store and last about as long, but they fit, dammit. The problem is that every brand fits slightly differently, and every measurement is roughly the same from brand to brand, but not exactly. So a forty-two-inch waist sometimes fits perfectly, other times, it'll be forty or forty-four. I usually like a very loose fit in the legs, so I usually go a size up anyway and get the forty-four. Which is what I did today--I found out that "carpenter-style" jeans inexplicably have a more relaxed fit than the so-called "relaxed fit" jeans. The extra pockets are great anyway (though I've never made use of a hammer loop in my life), but the carpenter-style jeans are also twice as expensive. Are people who are carpenters by trade twice as rich as those people who have other careers?
That's all for now. Next time, perhaps I'll relate one of my previously unrelated adventures, wherein Lurch and I (and the band we're in) took part in the Denver St. Patrick's Day Parade and it took us an hour to find each other amidst the oppressive throng of humanity and parade floats that was the massing area.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| More things I dislike about MySpace |
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| 12:17pm 04/04/2007 |
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mood: displeased music: CSI: Miami in the background
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Poking around my MySpace friends list today, I started trying to read blogs, keep my laptop from suddenly bursting into song whenever someone's home page reopened, and reply to things. None of these were as easy as they should have been. So I've decided to compile a list of things I dislike about MySpace to present my views in a delineated fashion.
Things I dislike about MySpace:
- Each blog entry is a separate page, which means you keep having to go back to the user's main page to open the next entry. Which means that you have to wait for all of their damn musics, pictures, SLIDESHOWS, friends listings, YouTube videos stuck in the bottom corner, and multiple CSS table data cells to appear.
- The music. Sure, it's neat to have music on your page (for instance, my band's MySpace has some of our music playing), but what about when you don't want a song someone else picked out playing over your speakers (like when you're listening to something else in iTunes or what-have-you at the time)? Sure, you can hit the stop button, but you have to wait until THAT loads, along with all the other miscellaneous crap that people adorn, nay, festoon their pages with. And when you pop back onto the main page to wait for it all to load again so that you can read another one of their blogs, the music starts AGAIN. Thus requiring a full loading/stop button pressing every time you want to read another post. Unless, by some miracle, the blog section actually manages to load before the music player, at which point you can just click on the next post and leave behind their ridiculously bloated front page.
- Replying to blog posts. For some reason, the reply-to script runs like junk on my computer. It *does* run, but it takes literally ten minutes to type out a reasonable reply. I mean, it's only about a minute and a half to actually type it, but then, I have to wait five minutes for the stupid thing to catch up. THEN, I have to go back and fix any typos I may have made, after waiting for all of the text to finish being entered.
Perhaps it runs fine on other people's computers/browsers, but there's NO REASON why it shouldn't run appropriately across the board.
- Animated Javascript Thingies. Whatever it is that people use to, say, make raindrops or hearts flutter or fall across the page. Again, this is a browser compatibility issue, perhaps--it runs okay in IE, but I don't use IE. Especially not for this, the one thing that it would actually do that I wanted it to.
I suppose that's about it for my gripes about MySpace today. Perhaps later I'll post something of consequence, but I just felt like bitching about that other online community site.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| Notches on my BB pistol |
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| 02:55pm 03/04/2007 |
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mood: HAIKU-ED!! music: Sure Would, Sherwood-Puke & Snot-Puke & Snot Vs The Bard In
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Crazy computer game driving antics and mouse-related mayhem abound. Don't read the first part if you're one of those people that believes in humane treatment of invasive vermin within the premises of one's sleeping quarters. Just skip to the section with the SkullDaisy graphic.
Anyway, we've had problems with mice at the house for a while now--we keep trapping, killing, or frightening them easily, but they soon return in greater numbers. Now, small things like mice, to me, are little more than an annoyance, nibbling inexplicably at books left on the floor or perhaps chewing on food left out on the counter, but they frighten my mother to death. Which changes their status from "little more than an annoyance" to "sworn lifelong enemies that shall be ethnically cleansed from our abode like one scrapes pond scum from one's waders whilst one is flyfishing." Meaning that I armed myself with my Walther PPK CO2 pistol and enough BBs to kill Mothra (whom I only used because I couldn't remember any huge mouse monsters and thus went to "moth" which is at least near to "mouse" if you sort vermin alphabetically) and took to playing my PSP in the basement with the lights off, waiting for the blighters to appear.
Now, I *did* remove some of them humanely; one inexplicably fell into the trash can in the middle of the room, so we took it outside, and we caught one in a pizza box and let it go. But still there were mice. And so I decided to employ a more decisive action--the glue traps, while effective, simply weren't eliminating them fast enough. Especially since my mom was getting more up-in-arms about the whole thing every day. I still think it's kinda silly to have such an inane fear of something so, well, tiny, but that's beside the point.
Last night, just as I was going to bed, I heard a mouse clambering around next to the trash can where we caught one of his brethren. I'd figured out on previous occassions that they would often see me moving to kill them when the lights were on, so I left them off and primed my pistol. Plus, my eyes were already adjusted to the dim light cast by the TV set. Within about thirty seconds, I'd picked out my target. I'm actually kind of proud of the shot I made, since it was a small mouse about an inch long about ten feet away in the dark and I hit it on the first shot. I only wounded it, though, and it started trying to crawl away, so I shot it twice more to make sure. The second time I hit it, it moved again, but whether that was from the force of the BB impact or because it was miraculously still alive I have no idea. The third shot pinned it up against an ottoman in the middle of the room and it moved no more.
Fortunately for me and the cleanup of my kill, all three shots had taken place while the mouse was atop an open wide-ruled notebook, which effectively caught both the blood and two of the BBs. Plus, it was undoubtedly easier to see the brown mouse on the white notebook in the dark than it would've been to pick it out on the reddish carpet. I picked up the notebook and took it to the trash cans outside the house (checking to make sure I hadn't just shot holes and spilled the blood of my vanquished foe upon someone's homework--I can just imagine the conversation the next day: "Timothy, where's your homework?" "Oh, well, it's now a bloodstained and pockmarked battleground in my brother's holy war against the infidel mice that frighten my mother."), thus ending another invader's reign of terror.
This is actually the third mouse I've killed with the BB gun--the first one was on the stairs and the second was actually a mercy killing after the bugger got caught by a glue trap. This is also the third one eliminated within a week--there's no telling how many are actually around (there's at least two more, I think), but at least we're making progress.
On an unrelated note, mice are cannibalistic. We caught two with the same glue trap (the first one with the mice-attractant bait and the second one, apparently, with the dead body of the first mouse)--we found the trap with the mice on top of one another, and the one on bottom had been chewed on something fierce. I don't think it was just rough sex, either. Though that would make it necrophilia. :P
On to more pleasant matters.
(SkullDaisy Sigil used to identify a video-game related section, apparently)
Sunday (and for a bit on Saturday), Lurch and I played Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. Brilliant game, lots of fun. For the better part of seven hours(ish), we tooled around in jeeps, tanks, and parachutes, guns blazing and rockets roaring. My brothers came along for the fun on Sunday, giving us five out of six members of Team SkullDaisy--me (El Gimp), Mike (Lurch), Sean (SpamOMan), Timothy (Babbitt), and Daniel (Vagabond). The only one missing was Chris (Quark), but that's because he's in the navy for several more months or so.
I, being the de facto leader of the team (generally, we've just worked together enough to end up in the right places at the right times to support each other and thusly plan little, if at all), took on the role of medic and squad leader--allowing me to set targets for our AI commander's artillery strikes, act as a spawn point for everybody in my squad, and direct my intrepid comrades into the thick of the battle (or at least to where the enemy artillery is so that we can blow it up). Also, I have the ability to heal people (mostly Lurch and SpamOMan, both notorious for charging tanks on foot; though Lurch at least has C4 to blow it up with, unlike SpamOMan's shotgun) and revive them with shock paddles. The shock paddles also double as my close-quarters weapon; sure, I have a knife, too, but my brain is mapped to pull them out on a moment's notice when Lurch suddenly explodes and thus, when I empty my rifle and my pistol, I think of them, use them (or die trying), and then say "Oh, yeah, the combat knife. RIIIGHT."
Lurch, my second-in-command and mounted machine gunner, took on the role of special forces operative and demolitions. He gets a fully automatic M4 instead of my burst-fire M16A2, sure, but no shock paddles. He also has a silenced pistol, which I'm sure makes a difference somehow, in theory. We employed his C4 quite a bit, between destroying tanks and artillery emplacements. Of course, half the time, he'd blow himself up along with the tank, at which point I'd revive him (God bless video game mechanics), but we got the tank in the end.
SpamOMan was our engineer and close-range shotgun-wielding maniac (he only killed me once), who repaired our hummers when I'd roll them most of the way over or just run into things/people/tanks/other cars. Incidentally, vehicular homicide is now my favorite method of killing people in that game. He also set mines that sometimes worked, or at least, that worked sometimes when I was watching so as to notice that they worked. They may have worked other times, too, but I didn't notice (probably because I was upside down in a creek with a combat jeep and fifty-caliber machine gun on top of me).
Vagabond (otherwise known as Oh Heck) messed around with a few different kits before settling down as a support specialist, resupplying our ammunition and generally laying down a whole lot of covering fire with his M-249 Squad Assault Weapon. He was handy whenever we'd need to take over a base crawling with soldiers, seeing as Lurch had an automatic weapon but only thirty bullets in a clip and I had a burst-fire assault rifle and shock paddles.
Babbitt worked as an anti-armor "rocket man" and also as a special ops guy when Lurch would get a bee in his britches and run off with a support specialist to "stick it to the man." Since Lurch had made a habit of blowing up tanks and himself with C4, the anti-armor was probably the one kit we could do without. Well, we didn't have a sniper, either (that's where Quark would otherwise come in, had he been here and not on a naval base in Washington or something), but my M16A2 is pretty good a long range and men way far away from us are generally unimportant as they'll either be chased down by Vagabond in a tank or Lurch and I in a jeep anyway.
We actually successfully defended one of our outposts with a jeep once; our commander ordered us to defend a point that the enemy forces were taking over, and it so happened that we were in a jeep at the time. Thus, we high-tailed it over there, guns blazing, and found that our intrepid AI commander had sounded an all-points alert because two men--a sniper and an engineer--were hunkered down next to our flag. Now, it's possible for two men to take a flag, especially if it's Lurch and I, but we make sure to hunker down behind something so that some yahoo can't just run over us in a jeep.
These men, however, didn't think of that. They bravely stood next to our flag, attempting to take it and firing their guns as fast as they could work their respective actions, but to no avail--I smashed the jeep into the wall behind them, with them sandwiched in between. I then looked at Lurch and said "Defended!" to let him know that we had successfully done just that, and we drove off into the sunset (or another wall).
You'd think that with heroics like these, our AI commander would like our slapdash, misfit "SkullDaisy" unit, but I don't think that's the case. It might just be bad planning on the part of the AI, but he seems to order us into an area, wait thirty seconds while we secure it, and then proceed to blow it to kingdom come with a precision artillery strike (taking us along with whatever we haven't blown up or killed yet). One can almost envision a by-the-book commander leading a platoon of troops into battle, mobilizing armor and infantry with military precision, and then getting to the base and finding that "that damn medic lieutenant and his ragtag band of bumbling misfits got here before us, crashed a jeep into their guard patrol, blew up their defensive tank and their artillery, hijacked a troop transport (Grand Theft Auto, eat your heart out) and took the base in a raging firestorm of metallic shrapnel and flying body parts." So naturally, he then orders us to the front line, then calls in artillery strikes in hopes we'll accidentally be killed by "friendly" fire. It's probably because after the battles, we're hailed as heroes and he has to preside over a ticker tape parade in our honor or something.
THAT would be a sight to behold--Lurch, in a body cast covered in Purple Hearts, SpamOMan stroking his shotgun lovingly... anyway, it would be an interesting parade.
In closing, gaze upon this haiku a generator thing spat out at me. And have a nice day.
The Insane Space Hunter
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| We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. |
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| 01:46am 31/03/2007 |
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music: Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends in the background
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And... we're back from commercial. Not sure why it wouldn't post earlier from my client. Anyhow...
I had a troupe of Minnesotans invade the brewery today... well, yesterday, at this point. Though I shall continue to refer to it as "today" because I am of the opinion that today doesn't become yesterday until I sleep. That's right, I can ignore the passage of time. So there.
Er...
I had a troupe of Minnesotans invade the brewery today, along with their relatives that they were in town to visit. At least, that's the connection I drew from two out-of-state licenses in the company of one in-state license and thirteen kids that ran around like cousins that hadn't seen each other for six months. And invaded my brewery like the Huns of old. I'd consider building some sort of great wall to keep certain situations from happening, but it would make it hard to get back to my car.
It's not that I mind kids. It's not that I mind kids in the brewery (though it is kind of a strange concept in the first place). It's that I mind when parents are mindless of their children who enter the business designed around the manufacture of alcoholic libations before their parents can catch up with them and start picking up every bag of chips, Rice Krispie treat, and candy item I have in stock and start wandering around with it heedless of whether their parents know to pay for it or not .
It's also not that they're Minnesotan tourists, either, that has nothing to do with it. They're just the last batch of parents that perpetrated this upon me.
The fact that they were from Minnesota actually only relates to the second half of my "this day in the life of a brewery manager" story in a small way; the fact that I'm fairly certain our strange Colorado weather confused the hell out of them. You see, I wrote the other day about the fact that it went from sixty-five to thirty and snowing four inches in a matter of hours. Which was a bit out of the ordinary. Today, however, most of the snow melted off (seemingly overnight, which only further defies comprehension), and it was cool but sunny this morning while I was on my way to work. The Weather-Mo-Tron said that it would be partly cloudy, which I thought incorrect when I looked upward and saw a large blue bowl of sky rimmed with slight wisps of cloud. Which is not "partly cloudy," it's "not cloudy enough to even be regarded as truly having any clouds whatsoever." The sun warmed and melted the snow with reckless abandon, even though it was probably about thirty-five during the earlier part of the day to which I refer.
It did cloud up a bit later, and started to snow again. Lightly at first, then harder. Nothing actually stuck to anything; the snow basically served as slow-moving rain for the purposes of rehydrating the Colorado soil onto which it fell. But there was snow in the air.
Then, the cloud cover melted off again, leaving only a few scattered, thin clouds, none of which were directly abovehead--mostly, they just hung around, floating just above the horizon. The sun came back out (though it didn't do us a lot of good, as it was still a mere thirty-nine degrees for the high) and everything seemed to be back to the way it was that morning.
Except, of course, that it was still snowing. With no clouds anywhere near and the sun out and snow in the air, those poor, poor people from Minnesota pointed questioningly at the sky as if to say "What the hell is going on? Things like this don't happen back home." I'm sure that they have snow in Minnesota, and I'm sure that they have a lot of sunshine, too. I'm also fairly certain at this point that they do not have those two things at the same time, however, simply judging by their reactions.
After work, I played at a pub for a couple of hours and had a good time, then picked up my brother from work at the pub I used to work at. Then, we left just in time to narrowly avoid having to talk to someone named Amanda whom I am not very much of a fan of. More on that later, perhaps, as I'm going to sleep for approximately ten hours, having literally nothing of importance to do in the earlier half of tomorrow and could use some extra sleep.
Oh, yeah, the nerd test from my last post... I kinda wondered whether I'd come out more musical nerd or computer/video game nerd. Literature kinda goes without saying, and it's no small wonder that artistic showed up on the bottom of the charts. It was kind of ironic, as well, that science and math were grouped together as one kind of nerd, even though all the science-versus-math questions were indeed that--science-VERSUS-math. As if to ask which one you liked better, and then have that result somehow tallied to put the two together. Thus, would it be possible to limit the ranking of that nerd type on the chart because you said you liked math, but didn't like science, and thus it remained in place? A question not destined for this or any other time, probably.
However, I did have one question: What the hell is a "social nerd?" Just kinda wondered about that.
Have a nice day night!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| Technical Difficulties |
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| 04:05pm 30/03/2007 |
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mood: difficult music: Whiskey In The Jar--Off Kilter--Kick It!
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More to come tonight; I had a post typed up but somehow, it got lost in the internet between Golden, CO and LiveJournal. If you should happen across something about Minnesotans and snow coming from a clear blue sky, lemme know. I shall, however, post the geek-test result so I can close that tab in my browser.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter
| What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Gamer/Computer Nerd You enjoy the visual stimulants of a video game, chatting on AIM, or reading online comics. Most of these types of nerds are considered dirty who lack hygeine, of course they always end up being the ones who make a crapload of money. And don't worry, that's just a stereotype; I'm not calling you dirty. ^_~ | | Musician | | | Literature Nerd | | | Social Nerd | | | Drama Nerd | | | Science/Math Nerd | | | Anime Nerd | | | Artistic Nerd | | What Be Your Nerd Type?
Quizzes for MySpace |
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| It's snow, baby! |
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| 05:00pm 29/03/2007 |
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mood: suddenly snowy music: Caislean Ui Neill-Darach O'Cathain-Traditional Irish Unaccompanied Singing
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Yesterday was a warm, sixty-five degree day with only a few clouds in the sky. Squirrels perched on branches and chittered excitedly as the sun traversed the sky in its lazy arc. Small birds gathered fibers and twigs to build or reinforce their nests in the ivy growing on the building on the opposite side of the beer garden.
Today is a chilly, thirty-three degree day (that feels like twenty-five, according to the weather-mo-tron that Google spat out at me) with snow falling constantly (but fortunately not remaining a solid once it hits the roads). The birds are probably huddled in their nests and God knows where the squirrels are. The ivy has snow all over it and the sun has yet to be viewed by the human eye. Clouds adorn the skyscape like a thick, well, blanket of... clouds.
All right, that's enough with the semi-poetic crap. Needless to say, it never fails to strike me as odd that Colorado's weather can suddenly decide to drop thirty or forty degrees in the space of eight or twelve hours and change from no precipitation to snow. Apparently, the forecast was for three or so hours of snow mixed with rain beginning around five o'clock this morning. Well, at four, when Oh Heck went to work, he said that there were already three inches of snow covering our backyard. There were about five inches I had to sweep off my car when I left for work at twelve-thirty, and there's probably about that much smothering the lawn furniture in my beer garden as I write this.
Funny thing is, I think there was more snow down in Arvada where I live than there is here where Golden nestles against the very bosom of the mountains. It's generally the other way 'round. Either way, it's pretty dead here at the brewery. I mean, the very concept of having the time to type all this out is staggering when held up against the normal crowd that invades my beer garden at three o'clock. I did have sixty students from the Colorado School of Mines (located conveniently two blocks south of us, up the hill) in for some special thing that the school was doing where Mines paid for a pint for each student that had a plastic armband from the event, but that only took about an hour and was pretty much just making a mark on the band, marking down a pint on the sheet, and pouring it. Quick in-and-out service. Also, since they included some gratuity in the payment, it was also one of the easiest thirty dollars I've ever made in the alcohol sales business.
Not the easiest, mind you, but one of the easiest. Yeah.
Well, it's back to work for me, I suppose. Since I'm there, and all, and have some clean glasses to restock. On an unrelated note, I finally uploaded the team icon that Lurch and I use in games like CounterStrike. So if ever you see this symbol on a wall, I'm probably lurking nearby waiting to be shot. :P
Team SkullDaisy--undead hippies or poisonous flora?
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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| Another reason I prefer LiveJournal to MySpace... |
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| 12:20pm 29/03/2007 |
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music: Star Trek: The Next Generation
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Bots. Or, I suppose, there is a slim chance that they really pay people to write messages in the style of goofy girls attempting to befriend everybody on MySpace. But they're most assuredly not real people.
Case in point:
CutiePiez
http://www.myspace.com/173446365
Date: Mar 29, 2007 2:37 AM
Subject: howdie
Body: H3Y BABE !!!...Cool myspace u got there.. was just browsing people who live near me and found ya..... Feel free to add me to your M~S~N or A~I~M (both are listed on my MS page..I prefer M`S`N as A'I'M freezes on me so I may not get ur messages...I jusst m0ved so try!ng to meeet sum new people.. xoxox chat soon cutie xoxoxo Paris
I got three messages from three different SNs all containing that same text. The actual pages only differ in that they have a different AIM SN (also, who puts tildas in between letters in instant messenger programs?). I was pretty sure that they were spam when they said "Cool myspace you got there" and mine features the default colors and multiple messages saying "this MySpace site has no purpose, look at my LiveJournal."
Also, I get, like, 900 friend requests a week from, according to the picture on the profile, the exact same half-naked girl. Of course, there will be two or three that look legit until I get there and Tom is their #1 friend, followed by fifteen "yer hot wanna meet me sexylady thanx 4 da add you wanna get @ me"-esque messages left by geeky-looking teenagers (or wannabe gangstas) and a "go to another site to see my pics, they're too 'revealing' for my space lol"-type blurb. Then, penile enhancement pill spam written from the point of view of a girl attached to the comment of somebody with a guy's picture for their avatar start creeping into the comment section. Also, they've all put "I don't want kids," obviously because they're pornstars and that would really mess up their career. :P
I even found one that was booby-trapped; no matter where you clicked on the upper half of the page, it would link you to some cheapass dating site. At least some of them are changing their pages from the default look. It's ironic, somehow, that these porn spam bots have better-looking MySpace pages than I do. :P
Then, I find Badger amidst all of the friend requests. Well, Badg, you nearly got mass-deleted with a bunch of bimbos--not a bad way to go, all things considered.
It's getting about time to head to work, where I have large quantities of bottles waiting to be labeled. It snowed suddenly and for no reason last night, and still continues to do so even now, so this should be an interesting day (or a deathly slow one). Since the majority of our seating area is actually outside, there probably won't be that many people coming in for beer today. I figured I'd at least post this much before I left because I don't know how the wireless signal will fare against the elements today.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| Changed the look of my journal. |
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| 01:36pm 28/03/2007 |
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music: Jeff (the brewer)'s iPod Top 25 Most Played
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Two posts in a day... this is some kind of record, I think. Especially regarding my general behavior toward staying online for more than a week at a time. At least I'm on day three now. :P
In case you hadn't noticed, I changed the theme of my journal. I like this one better, it's far more poorly organized. :P Of course, I only broke it for about ten minutes (pink links on a gray background, oops) in the middle there while I was doing it, but it's all better now. I think the bandwidth issue had something to do with it--the "custom colors" section of the preferences page wouldn't load until I completely reloaded the page five or six times, changed into a non-custom color scheme twice, and changed back.
Of course, then, I had to edit my last post (most notably the quiz result dwarf thingie on the end) because some of it was in black text on what is now a black background. So that had to go. I didn't manage to fix the extra HTML tag that appeared in the quiz results table while I was in there, though--couldn't even figure out where it came from. It all looked okay when I laid it out a bit better to fix the colors.
Oh, well, it's not a big deal. Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 2 - Post |
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| Houston, we have... post-off? |
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| 01:36pm 28/03/2007 |
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music: some funk that the brewer is playing over the stereo
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Well, I got a Mac OSX LiveJournal client downloaded and running--this is the same client I used to use back when I was posting to my LJ actively. It's more convenient to simply boot this up and post with it than it is to boot up my browser, hit LiveJournal.com, log in, click on update, and proceed from there. Plus, it just seems cooler when it's got its own standalone application that can find out what music is playing on my computer--that is, when I'm playing music off the computer instead of listening to the radio (or, in this case, the music the brewer picked out while he's bottling).
Nothing much else is going on... I've got some good connection today, so reading Penny Arcade, PVP, 8-Bit Theater, and Ctrl-Alt-Del took a mere ten minutes instead of the usual thirty when I have to keep refreshing the page to actually see the whole comic image. Stupid bandwidth.
We're bottling today at the brewery. Which is to say that the brewer and one of the other employees are bottling, and I'm posting things on my LiveJournal. I'd help, but it seems to be mostly a two-person job; one person rinses the bottles and puts them under the nozzles that fill them, and the other takes the filled bottles off the other side and puts the caps on. They *did* let me press a couple of caps on, though, which was actually kinda nifty. Everything's done by hand at the Golden City Brewery, from the brewing to the bottling and the labeling. I suppose that I might not have to actually bottle the beer, but I am the one responsible for labeling these hundred cases or whatever, so we all do our share in the end.
There was a TV crew at the pub where my band played last night, taping for some Comcast Cable MetroBeat TV special thing coming up in April about Denver's favorite brewpubs or something. Details are sketchy at this point, but apparently, there will be footage of us playing on the local Comcast channel and available on their On Demand service sometime in April. If I can get my hands on a video, I'll post it.
Or, I'll let my dad get his hands on it, at which point he'll probably post it on the band's MySpace page. Also, you can hear some of our music on our MySpace already--I guess that the bloated behemoth that is MySpace has it's uses.
Maybe one day I'll get my own MySpace page to look like something other than the default. I mean, I would just do that, were it possible without a lot of mucking about in CSS as defined by someone else. They have a built-in customization engine for the BLOG section of MySpace, but nothing for the actual front page that people, y'know, see. I mean, I could go to a third-party site and get someone else to do all the coding for me, but since I, the internet programmer, can't bring myself to do it for myself because it doesn't really matter what it looks like as it's pretty much just a pointer to get people to come over here to my LiveJournal, I don't think that'll be happening anytime soon. Or possibly at all. :P
I was moderately amused by a quiz I ran across on MySpace during my first few forays into that territory populated almost exclusively by twelve-year-old girls that invade my local computer gaming café and squeal with delight when their best friend posts a comment on their page from the computer right next to the one they're on. Or when their other friend says "I'm sending you this great movie" and then runs over to the computer that they're sitting on so that they can both watch it together, when they could also just as easily have watched it on the computer the friend sent it from when it was ON IT.
It's not really that bad, except when they start to get rowdy. I think that soccer moms occasionally use the place as cheap day care when they're doing their laundry at the coin-op laundromat next door--I once saw one walk in with her three girls, slap a twenty on the counter, and say to the clerk "I'll be back in two hours." Of course, it need not have been a twenty, as that may or may not have purchased the correct amount of time, but for the purposes of the story, it is sufficient.
Oh, yeah, the quiz I was talking about. Right. Apparently, I'm a dwarf, which comes as no surprise to me--Lurch confirms that idea on a roughly weekly basis, and whenever the "what character from the Lord of the Rings do you most resemble" conversation starts (usually at our weekly Dungeons & Dragons get-together at the pub), someone invariably points out some attribute I share with Gimli (such as drinking voluminous quantities of beer at social gatherings and belching when necessary). The quiz itself is actually kinda juvenile, but I found it amusing, so here's my results and the links and such to subject yourself to it take the quiz.
Also, I have no idea why that extra </td> is in there... their coding is too jumbled for me to care enough to bother fixing it.
EDIT: Changed how my page looks, and thusly had to change the text colors of the quiz results, and thusly figured I'd fix their coding while I was at it.
EDIT AGAIN: It's still there, and I don't know why. There aren't any extra <td>'s that I can find... I even deleted one that was supposed to be there and it had no effect. Oh, well, screw it. You can't see it on the black background anyway, mwahahah.
 | You scored as Dwarf. You are a Dwarf, small but courageous, funny, and a great person to be around! you are very loyal to ones that are close to you. You are also pretty handy with an axe and a good miner!
Dwarf | | 88% | Human | | 63% | Elf | | 54% | Wizard | | 50% | Dark Magic User | | 29% | Nymph | | 8% | </td>
What Mystical Medieval race are you?!(Kool Pics!!)
created with QuizFarm.com |
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Read 4 - Post |
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| PSP and Justice League Whatever-It-Was |
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| 02:44pm 27/03/2007 |
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mood: Justified? music: The Rights of Man--The Wolfe Tones
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Another entry, another "mood" somehow interpolated from what I'm writing about.
Well, I got a PSP recently; I love my DS to bits, but, well, damn, that DBZ Shin Budokai (and possibly that Street Fighter Alpha 3 that's apparently out for it as well) just couldn't be done without. So I got one.
Of course, I got the super deluxe $250 package that came with ATV Offroad Fury Blazin' Trails (I don't think the title was long enough) and a one-gig memory... card... chip... stick... whatever. Oh, and Lords of Dogtown, a movie I never saw, remember hearing about but can't remember what it was supposed to be about, and still haven't watched. I'd think of trading it in for whatever I can get, but my local game shop has, like, seven used copies in stock (probably all traded in off the deluxe package) and I don't know if they'd be willing to take another one.
Actually, I'll find out. I just don't ever see myself watching a movie on my PSP when I can do that on my laptop, which features a (by comparison) ENORMOUS twelve-point-one-inch-screen, versus the PSP's largish three-or-so-inch offering. Which is great for portable games. But silly for movies. Just silly.
I wasn't done there, though, with just the $250 package, of course. I also got the aforementioned DBZ game, plus Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony and the insurance/service contract on the system in case I break it. I'm really good at breaking stuff, you see... sometimes, equipment simply ceases to work even though nothing seems physically wrong. Perhaps I drain its spirit. I dunno. The average life of a cell phone for me is about five or six months, at which point it simply stops getting calls and won't send calls half the time. Four bars of signal become nonexistent the second I put the phone to my head. It's possible that I just cause electromagnetic interference because my brain is lacking in radiation shielding, but I find it unlikely that I have a small thermonuclear reactor between my ears. Either way, having a backup plan in the event of catastrophic equipment failure is a must.
Anyway, it wasn't long before I got Power Stone Collection for it, as well. Three years ago (roughly), I posted a whole bunch about Power Stone 2, which is included in the collection (along with Power Stone 1 and some manner of "Gallery" or whatever they called the "relatively useless bonus feature that basically shows you what you've done, in case you forgot or didn't want to go into the game to find out there" section--kinda like how you can view bestiaries in Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls on the DS without loading up your saved games). Unfortunately, multiplayer requires any other players to also own a copy of the game, and most people I know don't own PSPs. And those that I know that own PSPs have no idea what Power Stone is (or what a Dreamcast is, for that matter, which is the system I played it on initially). So I'm mostly limited to item collecting and beating on people with my little martial artist friend, Wang-Tang. Which is still magnificently fun. Power Stone and Dungeon Siege are the most-played games for me right now, more or less tied for first. DBZ, which is the reason I bought the system, still sees a lot of play because my brother, whose PSP and copy of the game led to me buying all this equipment, also owns it (I'd make a joke about how I "own" him at the game the greater percentage of the time, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I never did go in for all this stupid lingo that gamers use these days; I just make up my own stupid lingo instead). The ATV game isn't bad, for a free game. And the movie sits unwatched, probably still in the PSP's original box, which sits unused in the basement (as I have better things to do with the PSP than store it in its original cardboard packaging).
So, yeah, bought a PSP and some games. And it's all good stuff. I'd expound more upon Power Stone again, but those previous posts I linked to pretty much summed up what I would say here were I to say it here again instead of linking to it there where it's already said. Dungeon Siege is greatly fun, though; a definite winner if you're a fan of the PC game (which is similar to Diablo, but with far greater character customization). The level-up dynamic is based more around straight amounts of experience and a class system than its PC brethren, which resemble Final Fantasy II in that the more you do something, the better at it you become, and the skill tree is simply a list of skills with certain level requirements that you eventually gain access to and may invest points in if you wish. Or, you can skip over the more useless skills and just invest in the ones you like without having to worry about breaking the chain so you can get the really good skills later on. Which is kinda nice after investing so many points in, say, Champions of Norrath for PS2 to allow myself to fire small, ineffective projectiles that only harm undead just so that at some point, my cleric can resurrect the dead. Or heal himself or the party, for that matter. Sometimes the tree system just doesn't work for me.
One big selling point for this Dungeon Siege is that it's an RPG where what your character equips actually changes what they look like in-game. You know, you put a hat on, and you see a hat on your character. It was one thing in Final Fantasy 1 where your leather hat didn't show up on your fighter who only had a four-character name, but the latter offerings in the series could've done with a bit more costume customization. Other than that Pretty Princess Dress-Up Final Fantasy X-2 Yes, We Made The Summoner Into Lara Croft, Dammit, that is. I also put in a pre-order for another RPG that looks really cool for the PSP, though I forget the name. Obviously, I put a lot of thinking into such purchases. :P
I also finally got a chance to try that Justice League game (the title of which I've forgotten, and am too lazy to look up over a period of five minutes due to limited bandwidth pirated from some unsecured wireless network in my area) for XBOX that came out roughly around the same time as Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It's actually pretty good, but Ultimate Alliance trumps it on about every front. You don't get to select what characters you bring along for the level until, like, the seventh mission, though this dynamic does force you to try out each character before making a decision as to which is your favorite. The skill system is similar to Ultimate Alliance in that when you level up, you get points to invest in the skills. Then, you can also take "boosts" and slot them in skills (you can slot as many boosts as you have ranks in the skill) to make them cost less energy, do more damage, have greater range, and so on. Or, you can combine your boosts and get better boosts, though it doesn't always seem to give me the kind of boosts I want when I combine them. And, like in Ultimate Alliance, you can purchase alternate costumes for your character that change their attributes--like giving Superman more damage at the cost of maximum health if you buy the costume where he has gray hair around his temples.
Some of the skills are kinda useless, though--Green Lantern's rock grinder move is funny, but doesn't do much damage very quickly. Nothing else he does is very interesting--you can trap an enemy in a force cage and then wail on it with little ring blasts that do little damage, or summon a sledgehammer that eventually hits them, or you can just punch them a whole lot and hope you don't die. Your health and (mana?) meters recharge quickly if you don't do anything for a minute, which means occassionally taking flight to avoid bees for a precious few seconds so that you can regain enough health to survive another hit or enough energy to lay waste to them all with an aerial attack.
The characters also look kinda strange; faces seem too 3D. I dunno. Wonder Woman's eye sockets seem too pronounced, and Batman seems to stick his lips out kinda strangely. The Flash is overly thin, and Wonder Woman (again) seems to have two ICBMs in her bra. I mean, really, they should give her a damage bonus when she punches because their inertia would probably cause even a superheroine to spin around in place three or four times.
Overall, the game is a fun brawler--Lurch (who was playing it with me) and I, as Superman and the Martian Manhunter, respectively, both picked up large power couplings in tandem and smashed them over the heads of some unsuspecting White Martians. Later on, mine broke when I flew up to meet a Martian Commander in midair and smacked him with it, but the resulting explosion that sent his burning corpse to the ground amidst a lopsided heap of now-broken machinery brought to mind the words "smote his ruin upon the mountain" and I was quite happy with the services provided by that particular weapon of opportunity. But I can do things surprisingly similar to that in Ultimate Alliance, and there's a lot more characters to choose from (and I can choose from them almost immediately, as opposed to after the sixth mission). So Ultimate Alliance wins out by being a moderately better version of the same thing, all in all.
I think that'll do it for now. Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 4 - Post |
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| Everything's back to normal. |
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| 02:14pm 26/03/2007 |
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music: Near-Endless Celtic Music
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Well, seeing as I haven't posted in a very long time, even aged news is new news as far as the internet is concerned. I finally caught a good bit of wireless signal at work, thus allowing me to plumb the various depths of the internet as I did in times of old.
Well, the connection is pretty slow, so it's not QUITE like old times, but you get my drift. I have had several adventures lately, at least one of which I hope to relate. It's a sordid tale of car malfunctions, helpful clergymen, and dangerous and/or stupid stunts.
That being said, it's also kinda long, as my stories have wont to be. It's said that no Irishman knows how to make a long story short and wonders why on earth anyone would ever want to, and I'm no exception. I will, however, provide a concatenated version of the story following the full version for anyone who doesn't like to read my more verbose posts (like DamnGlitch, for instance. :P)
To skip the full version and go straight to the summary, click here.
For anyone still with me, I'm now the manager of a brewery (the Golden City Brewery, to be precise). The second largest brewery in Golden, CO, actually. Which isn't saying much, as I think that the Coors brewery probably has its own zip code or something, but it's an amusing and clever marketing scheme that I wish I could claim I had something to do with.
Anyhow, as manager of this brewery, I work roughly 40 hours a week, from 11am to 7pm (give or take, depending on how busy I am that day). Of course, my duties as "manager" include everything from bookkeeping to filing to serving beer in the tasting room/beer garden area to mopping the floors and cleaning the bathroom. Oh, and fixing up anything that gets broken or just could be made better. And ordering food or supplies or equipment, and all that other good stuff. So, truthfully, I manage the books and such, but the entire staff consists of about five people (half of which work the weekends when I'm not here) and so there's not much managing to be done on that subject. The increased number of hours I get in a workweek are nice, especially coming from my 20-or-so-hours-a-week job as day manager of a brewpub owned by the same people.
It does get busy when it's nice out, though, so I don't always get of at seven... sometimes, it's closer to seven-thirty or a little later. Possibly much later during the summer, depending on how fast I manage to kick everyone out after closing. This has changed how I get to gigs for my band somewhat (really, this all relates to the story). Back when I'd get off on Friday at four or five o'clock, I'd just grab a ride with my dad (who's also in the band) down to our gig, which is about a twenty-mile stint. Not bad, all things considered, but he gets considerably better gas mileage in his tiny little Honda four-cylinder wind-up car than I get in my V6 Ford Taurus sedan. Add to that the fact that I'd had alignment problems and a busted tie rod end for quite some time, and it was just better that he drove.
My car problems didn't really start until I started driving fifteen miles to work at the brewery instead of three miles to work at the brewpub, when that whole "alignment" thing started to really matter, or at least get worse in a shorter number of days. I'd been working at the brewery about a month when, on one particularly chilly Friday night, I was driving down to our regular gig and my right front tire blew out. This had happened several times before, largely due to the alignment problems I mentioned earlier, so I pulled off the side of the highway to put the spare on. This particular stretch of Interstate 70 didn't have much to offer in the way of pleasantries for someone whose car is broken down, so the only place where there was any room to work was actually the no-man's-land between an exit ramp and the main highway. So, I stopped there, popped the trunk, got out the jack, the spare, and the tire iron, and went to work.
Four lugnuts later (out of five total) came the problems. First, the last lugnut didn't want to budge. I've had problems with this before where the lugnut will not turn easily to the point where I'm turning the whole tire instead of the nut because it has more give. So, I call my dad, tell him what happened, and that I need help. You see, any car problem more complex than "flat tire" or "oil/coolant/other fluid low" is beyond my scope of comprehension, so I call for help at any signs of trouble. So, my dad (who's about two exits past me at this point) gets off the highway and starts coming back for me. Then, suddenly, the lugnut let go after I kicked the tire a few times. Violence solves everything.
I call him and let him know that it's back under control again (of course, if I'd never called him in the first place, the lugnut never would've come off), so he continued onto the gig while I put my spare on. Or tried to, at least. Once again, four lugnuts would line up and work, but that fifth one was just being ornery. So, while I'm trying to line up all five bolts with the empty holes on the spare and having problems, a guy pulls up and offers his help. I accepted, being completely stumped as to why the spare wouldn't fit on the bolts when they lined up fine on the actual tire not four minutes earlier. Plus, people who pull off to help people who are broken down, I assumed, would probably have some degree of technical knowledge of automobiles beyond mine.
This, unfortunately, was not the case. First, though, I should mention that while he and I were trying to get the tire on and wondering if somehow the brake caliper was getting in the way of the wheel, I realized that he was wearing a brown monk's robe and a rope belt. Not knowing whether he came from a costume party or a Catholic mass, I didn't say anything as we tried to get the tire on. When we still couldn't get it on, he suggested that I take the parking brake off in case that was causing the problem of the locked-up caliper (which we weren't sure was the problem anyway, but I, not knowing better, went along with the plan). Of course, it should've occurred to me that I'd always had the parking brake on before when I'd change the tire, but I'd been standing out in the cold, rolling around on the ground next to my car and looking at a bunch of metal pieces that I could only guess at the functions of for the better part of forty-five minutes at this point and was willing to try anything.
Needless to say, it didn't help to take the brake off. In fact, that could be called a stupid plan. Five minutes of trying to wiggle the tire on later, the car rolled backward slightly and fell off the jack. Which means that now, the frame of the car is resting on the ground, and the tire still isn't on it.
My jack was too large to fit under anything in that corner of the car (and jacking up something nearer the back end or opposite side of the car wouldn't help much with only one jack), so he got his jack out of his car and we found a place for it to go so that we could get the car back off the ground. Now, what I found interesting is that my jack, which is the cheap kind that came with the car and is hard to use in tight spaces, was infinitely superior to the little piece of cheap metal that he pulled out of his trunk. Instead of accordion-like metal frames overlapping for support like mine had, it consisted of the threaded screw assembly that you use to make the jack go up and down and a single metal foot for support--the back end of the screw assembly would rest against the ground as you wound it, acting as the other foot. He did get the car off the ground with it, but eventually reached a point where instead of lifting the car higher off the ground, he was simply boring into the pavement with the screw-bolt-foot instead. Brilliant design. When we figured out that we weren't going any farther up with his jack, we decided to put mine next to it and just switch back to my jack.
Then, I noticed that his jack was starting to buckle. With a renewed sense of urgency (beyond the sense of urgency already instilled in me now that I was a half hour late for a paying gig), I furiously worked my jack to get it in position before his broke. This was largely ineffectual, as it's just about impossible to crank up a jack like mine in anything resembling haste, but at least I tried. I just about had it in position when his jack all but said "That's it, I quit" and collapsed under the weight of the car. Unfortunately, as I'd been cranking my jack at the time and holding it against the ground with the other hand because the car wasn't weighting it down yet, that means that the car, now held up by nothing, fell upon my hand and my jack. Miraculously, it didn't shatter my entire hand outright--it later became clear that I had a hairline fracture of the middle bone in my middle finger of my left hand--but it did cause quite a bit of pain and bleeding. Nothing too far beyond previous injuries I've sustained (like the broadsword-to-the-thigh incident), but it hurt a lot nonetheless. I did manage not to swear in front of the man in the monk's robe, though.
With my jack pinned under the car and his broken, we headed off to get another jack. He said there was another one at his priory (thus confirming the fact that he was indeed a monk and not just some nutcase or costume party participant), so we drove down there, my hand still smarting. He introduced himself as Brother Joseph, and said that we might also get help from Brother Christopher, another monk that would probably be at the priory. He was, and thirty minutes, a handwashing, and an application of sterilizing alcohol pads later, we were back at the car with another monk (though both had changed into street clothes) and another jack. We jacked up the car a third time, got my jack out from under it, put my jack in place, and went back to work on the tire. We finally got it on after tightening down the four lugnuts we could line up, kicking it a few times, and putting the last one on as far as we could.
Realizing, of course, that this was not a good thing to try to get very far with, I figured that it would be a good idea to at least get it off the highway and call for a tow. The car apparently had other ideas, as I'd made it barely halfway down the exit ramp (which I was located conveniently next to) before the bumping and grinding noises issuing forth from my right front corner gave way to the tire simply locking up and refusing to budge whatsoever. I backed up, which freed the tire, and tried to go forward again. Once I met with the same problem, I figured that forward movement was now somewhat out of the question. Which, first off, is a disconcerting problem to have in a car in the first place. In the second place, it's a very disconcerting problem to have on a slightly-wider-than-one-lane exit ramp from a sixty-five-mile-per-hour-speed-limit interstate highway.
At this point, the monks, in their car, pulled up alongside me. Brother Christopher suggested simply backing down the ramp after turning around (an interesting prospect, assuming I could get it turned around in the first place). I told him that it might work, and he reassured me by telling me that he'd seen it done in a movie once. In the hour that I'd known him, I'd figured out that he was quite a movie afficionado.
I then performed what was probably a fifty-point turn, going back as far as I could in the limited space and then rolling forward a foot or so until my tire locked up, then repeating the process. I managed to get turned around before I saw cars coming down the exit ramp. Since I was facing the wrong way, I got back-to-back with the monks' car in the left lane to let them pass. I saw that the front car coming toward us was slowing, and wondered if perhaps they'd guessed as to my situation (at least that my car was broken down; I don't think that a locking-up right front tire and a couple of Franciscan monks would factor into the equation in the mind of a passing motorist). This wasn't the case, though. As they got closer, I saw the doors open on the car, which was actually a large white truck. Two Mexican guys jumped out, and again I wondered if they were going to attempt to aid me. This also was not the case. I figured out withing a few seconds that they'd coasted off the highway and were now pushing their truck down the very ramp where I was back-to-back with a car containing two monks, thus COMPLETELY blocking traffic. It took five minutes for them to finish rounding the corner and the built-up traffic to disperse, at which point I was once again free to coninue backing off the highway.
Once around the corner (which I'd been staring at and planning my next move around for the last five minutes while the Mexican guys got their truck off the highway), I found that the parking lot conveniently located right next to the exit was inaccessible from the front. I don't know how it ever made sense to have a parking lot located five feet from the street fenced off so that you had to drive all the way around the block to get into it, but that was the situation.
Continuing on down the road backwards with two monks following me, I finally found an apartment complex that suited my purpose. Pulling into the parking lot, I got out of the car to find that the right front tire was now leaning inward at a forty-five degree angle, which even I knew was a really bad thing. The monks were nice enough to give me a ride home, and the next day I had it towed to the shop.
In the end, the wheel bearings, the tie rod ends, and some part(s) of the brakes had to be replaced on the right front corner of my car. But now it works. And I can happily careen down the road to my gigs.
Concatenated Version: While driving to a gig from my new job, the wheel bearings on my right front tire broke or exploded or whatever it is they do, the car rolled off the jack at one point and crushed another jack and fell on my hand at another point, I was helped by two Franciscan monks, and I finally got my car off the highway by backing down the exit ramp I'd fortunately stopped next to.
That was actually several weeks ago, but I just finally got around to posting it now. I couldn't do it right away, of course, as it was impossible to type with a gimped-up finger garnered from the troubles mentioned herein.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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Read 5 - Post |
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| I still live! |
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| 06:14am 31/10/2006 |
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mood: 'Spaced' out music: Adult Swim in the background
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I've had little or no reason to update lately, due to my own laziness. Life goes on, much to my shame... still trying to pay my way through school with creditors hounding my every step, still looking for love in what is almost definitely all the wrong places and possibly (but at least uderstandably) all the wrong faces, still posting whilst watching cartoons early in the morning (or late at night, either way, it's the same).
Maybe I'm just a no-account, lazy 23-year-old living in his parents' basement, not posting because nothing is happening in his life, no matter how goddamn hard he tries to get it to work. I'm taking two classes this semester, trying to get my year-and-a-half-to-two-year degree back on track five years after I started, I have no girlfriend, my best friend is living in my (parents') basement (with me), and I haven't posted here since, like, May and haven't updated my website in what is possibly one of the Ages of Middle Earth that Gandalf is always talking about that passes between notable events. Or at least, haven't updated within, like, two years. Yikes.
I played at the local Renaissance Festival, I suppose, but that was about it. Didn't post about it, partially due to laziness and partially due to the fact that few, if any, people have ever responded or paid much attention to whatever exploits I should think were worthy of attention or response. That's right, I'm not blaming my total lack of inactivity on anyone in particular--not me, for not acting, nor anyone else, for not listening to what acting I'd have done, but actually both whoever you all are and whoever I... all... well, uh, let's just say the both of us and be over it. But mostly me.
Yeah. Mostly me. Let's go with that.
Got a MySpace page today... I mean, even my dad has one, so I figured I'd join "the club." Of course, I can't seem to edit the way my page looks, so I'm currently dissatisfied with it, but I'll probably pick it up. Maybe I'm just spoiled by things that say "How would you like this to look?" to which I can respond "I want white text with a black background and yellow links" and it will DO THAT. After poking at MySpace for, like, forty-five minutes or an hour or something, my blog looks okay and the rest looks like it did when everything was automatically generated for me.
I'll try again tomorrow. Basically, the whole thing is going to serve as an extra way to attract more readers to this LiveJournal that shall also avoid reading and/or posting in reply to my messages. Yeah, I'm crazy smart that way. Like a fox.
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter |
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