Brainwaves of Sken

Jane McGonigal (ARG fame, for those of you who weren’t beekeepers) was mentioned (specifically, her engagement ring) in the O’Reilly blog.

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I was telling Lucy, as we lounged on the grass in Plymouth, that I need to get together with people more often directly after work and, y’know, make hay while the sun shines. Except less with the hay, and more with those things you do in the summertime that are relatively inexpensive and fun.

We haven’t hit Memorial Day yet, so pools are mostly closed, but even chilling out in the grass in the public square was fun. Picnics, frisbee, bbq, etc, all good. So, you think about that. Also, my apartment complex has a pool, and I hope to use it this year. ;) With company!

She’s leaving for Cleveland today, and soon for camp – on the one hand, 10 weeks is much longer than the 6 weeks during summer she was gone last year. On the other hand, I’ll probably have dinner with her once a week, where I can hear about her many adventures with the chilluns. :D

In other news, I received a spam promising to make my nethers larger than Russia, and for a moment I was stuck in some visual parodox, a mixture of the climactic* Akira moment and the “it’s wafer thin!” skit in Monty Python.

Relating to socializing, who wants to come over for a bad movie night, where-in we can watch The Last Dragon? I own it now! I can make scads of popcorn, but am otherwise crushingly poor until my next paycheck. :) No rush, just curious. IMDB says it’s “One long music video with chop socky thrown in”. It was created by Berry Gordy, head of Motown Records. Who could ask for more?

Someone bring over Remo Williams, and we’ll have a “cheap chop socky” fest.

*everyone knows the difference between climactic and climatic, right?

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Good things today:
In late afternoon, lucy and I did some errands (she’s making friendship bracelets for the girls at camp) and made our way to downtown Plymouth. There are some amazing stores that I hadn’t seen, including an Earth Lore that’s twice the size of the one in Livonia. They had just about everything you could want – I want to drag somacandra down there for some weird reason. :)

I saw a few video production houses, and I’ve been checking them out – that’s as much as I’ll say on this unsecured line, over. Three monkeys fart at midnight, over.

We had delicious gelato and sat on the grass in the square, watching people play on the fountain and just basking in the warm day. I love days when the green of the trees seems to saturate everything. After a little Jimmy Johns, we made our way home, where we’ve been up to our own devices (but together) since.

Annoying thing today:
I’m working on the Chuck Roast video, and I’ve discovered something incredibly frustrating – the audio works perfectly in Media Player Classic and in Windows Media Player, but it makes loud pops every five seconds in Premiere Pro. If I use PP to export a wav file, you can hear what it hears in any player.

Clearly there’s some codec problem – Premiere Pro is using some ass codec, but the other programs are doing ir right.

I haven’t yet figured out how to get around it. *sigh*

EDIT: SO you can download programs that tell you what format the audio track is in, right? What’s it say? “NO AUDIO”. Uhm… YES there’s audio, I can HEAR the audio. GRR!

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I’ve had a lot of fun over the past week or so, and I thought I’d put up a quick gallery – it’s really more of a melange of photos. :D Dancing at Luna, my lovely home, etc!

Photo Gallery

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It could take up to ten minutes for it up update with the auto-transcription. :)

EDIT: Not bad! It missed Schenectady and understood Saskatoon. Of course there’s no way for it to know skennedy, but it did a pretty fine job, methinks. This short paragraph took less than a minute.

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“A controversial new idea suggests that a large space rock exploded over North America 13,000 years ago.” (bbc)

Yesterday was great: Lucy and I had an early dinner with mom. In preparation, we cleaned my house from stem to stern, I finally put up my prints and the floating shelf I’d been putting off for the better part of a year. The place is looking great! We made mom make a Mii, and I taught her how to bowl on the Wii. :)

The Karinny came over afterward, and the three of us cuddled up and watched The Boondock Saints, which is always lovely. It’s just been a vigilante weekend, with Kill Bill the night before. Lucy made fantastic cinnamon chip cookies from scratch.

*munch munch*

For my Wii brethren and sistahs:

July 30 – Mario Strikers Charged
Aug. 20 – Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
August – Space Station Tycoon
Aug. 14 – High School Musical: Sing It! (clearly this is the lifetime highlight of any person’s gaming experience)
Missing – a certain date for Super Mario Galaxy.

(see for yourself (nwf))

I ran into this quote on a forum: “I wish MS would have stol^h^h^h borrowed more ideas from it.” and the delete-commands made my BBS days strike my memory like a mack truck. Er, a fairly painless but still surprising mack truck.

Copyright law explained via Disney clips (youtube)

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My uncle John is getting married!

And he wants me to be the best man!

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My girl (blue_lucy)is selling her desktop – she’s been using her mac laptop for quite awhile, so this thing isn’t doing anyone any good gathering dust. She’s had trouble selling it on her journal, so we’re dropping the price by $50 and I’m posting about it here.

For Sale:

One well-loved PC, with some new parts and some slightly older but thus-far failure-free parts:

Elitegroup AMA K7 motherboard
AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz processor
1 GB of DDR RAM
40 GB hard drive (split on two drives)
PNY GeForce Verto GeForce 6600 256mb video card, with VGA, DVI, RCA, S-Video and component outputs (fairly new)
350W Power Supply
3Com Ethernet card
Wireless keyboard and wireless mouse
Logitech webcam, older but still works
Functional speakers
21″ monitor, (older, but works well)
All necessary cables

Software CDs:
Complete Diablo bundle: Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Sims 2
Civilization 3 Gold plus the Civ3: Conquests expansion
Children of the Nile (SimCity type game)

The drive is clean – install your own OS, please. :)

$300. If you know anyone interested, please let me know. I’m cleaning it all up as best as possible, but this is a well-loved PC, so it’s not going to be going to anyone shiny new and spiffy. I’ll do my best to get it pretty though.

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Alan Tudyk says the phrase “Crazy-go-nuts” in the commentary to the episode War Stories of Firefly. Hehe. Think he’s into Homestar?

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Honestly, I find myself troubled and conflicted about my reaction to the news. On the one hand, he was a man who incited death and division (literally, if you consider his comments on 60 minutes), hatred toward one’s neighbors (locally and nationally), religious zealotry in secular matters, and the institutionalization of his own heinous ideas (Liberty University).

He judged those he had no right to judge, and caused others to do the same.

On the other hand, he was a human being, and he’s dead. And jumping up and down about it is frighteningly close to his own bigotry.

I’m uncomfortable about it, all around. The world, in my opinion, may be better off without him, but I’m sure his family would not agree.

EDIT: But I love this image.

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