February 23, 2007

Oreo and I were both very ready for our day home together.  But that doesn’t mean that we got time to relax.  It was a busy work day for me and I barely got any time to do anything but work all day.  I didn’t get a chance to even turn on the PS2 all day.

Dominica got home and it was time for us to pack and leave.  We were on the road pretty late because I got stuck working until eight thirty!  Not what we wanted to have happen on a travel night but what can you do?

We attempted to get dinner at Tandoor on Route 80 Exit 299 but they closed early and we couldn’t get any food there.  So we headed on and grabbed a quick dinner at the Waffle House in Clark Summit, PA.  That ended up saving us a lot of time which was definitely good in the long run.

It was about two thirty in the morning when we finally rolled into Geneseo and it was after three before I was able to finally get to bed.  Tomorrow is packing day.  Oh the fun.

February 22, 2007

Today was a very busy day for me. Just a ton of stuff going on all day long. I barely ever got a chance to relax at all. It turned out that it was the perfect day for me to come into the office instead of working from home. Busy work from home days are a waste. Not only that but one of my managers from the UK flew in to meet me (and other people) today.

Oreo was super snuggly last night as he has been the last few days. He has his moods. He was surprisingly not too tired this morning and was ready for his last day of daycare this week. Normally his day to spend with me is Thursday but his schedule is so off from this past weekend that I am pretty sure that he thinks that today is Wednesday so he is expecting to be staying home with me tomorrow.

I got into the office and pretty much had to hit the ground running the moment I arrived. It was a crazy busy day.

Chalk this up to “I just don’t understand Japanese culture” but now they have a restaurant that creates an entire “person” made out of food (presumably not made from people but as Soylent Green showed – we could be mistaken) and the people at the table eat them like cannibals. Inside the fake person are fake intestines and bleeding flesh – the whole nine yards. Everything is edible. The weirdest part about this (I guess – I mean really how can you judge relative weirdness at this level) is that they are serving a fake RAW person. I think cannibals typically cook their food. Just a hunch. I haven’t done research.

Today was quite busy all day long.  It passed very quickly as I never had a chance to relax at all.  After work I drove down to South Brunswick with some friends and we out for Indian food and drinks.  We had a really good time.  I am working from home tomorrow and as soon as Dominica gets home we are driving home to Geneseo.

February 21, 2007: Preparing for the Cricket World Cup

Today is a busy maintenance day around our apartment. The exterminators will be in to do their usual preventative stuff. But the big news is that the closet door guys are coming in to take a look at the hall closets that do not close. We have been putting up with that annoyance for six whole months now! And it isn’t just us. Apparently it is a lot of people and it was supposed to have been taken care of right as we moved in. Six months is way too long to have pushed off dealing with such a simple problem.

Winter broke today and it is very warm here. Very warm indeed. The Weather Channel says that it is currently over fifty degrees here! That is quite the change from the arctic temperatures and feet of snow piled up in Frankfort that we experienced all weekend.

Half a dozen of the guys from the office went out for some curry for lunch today.  While we were there we got to talking about the Cricket World Cup which everyone was really exciting about.  The cup competition begins very soon and is, for the US readers, an actual world cup played for by countries from all over the world and is not a fake international competition run by a company controlling each of the teams.  This is like the Football (aka Soccer) World Cup but the Cricket World Cup is skewed more towards countries that were still associated more closely with the British empire more recently than the United States and Canada who have been independent enough long enough to not really play the game.  Few Americans even know what cricket is.  Probably under one percent of the population if I was to guess.

All of the guys at work are very excited about the cup and several people are getting the satellite feeds of the matches which is extremely expensive.  It was brought up that I am a bit of a hi-fi and home theatre specialist and so everyone wanted to know what I thought should be done for a big powerful Cricket watching system.

A group of us left the office this afternoon to head down to Greenbrook to do some stereo shopping.  The person who is hosting the major “office” Cricket theatre ended up picking up a pair of B+W speakers and tomorrow is planning to get a new Marantz receiver to power them.  Next week I am going down to his house to help set up the theatre and to start painting the wall to get ready for a new projector.   So much of the afternoon was spent dealing with that.  By the time that everyone returned to the office it was almost time to head for home.

I was really tired when I got home tonight after barely sleeping at all last night.  I did a little work online and then headed to bed quite early.  Oreo was exhausted too and came right to bed with me and left Dominica in the living room watching the third series of Angel which I would like to see but have just been either too busy or too tired to watch very much of.

My schedule is changed this week and I am going into the office tomorrow but will be working from home on Friday instead.  That will be really handy for getting out of the office early and getting up to Geneseo as soon as Dominica is able to get home from work which will be extra early as she does not have to drive to Wallington to pick up Oreo.

Tim Hardaway – Reposted from The Dilbert Blog

This post was originally written (and still is) by Scott Adams over at The Dilbert Blog which everyone should read because it is thought provoking even if you don’t agree with Scott which is tough because no one is quite sure what his position is other than it is fun to get people to argue. He felt the need to pull this post after the slam of commenters getting really nasty about it but I didn’t want the post to be lost to the annals of history so I am reposting it here and hopefully he won’t mind since he won’t have to deal with the spam. I grabbed the post from the Google cache the moment he said that he had deleted the post. I wanted this post to continue to exist because I am rather against blanket hatred (specific hatred isn’t so hot either but at least it might have a purpose) and I am not so fond of the NBA so I like when its spokespeople do a bad job. So without further ado…

Are you following the story of ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway’s public statement that he hates gay people? This is good news for gays. When Tim Hardaway decides to hate you, it’s time to celebrate. I want Tim Hardaway to hate me too. This post should help.Years ago, I used to watch Tim Hardaway play for my local team, the Golden State Warriors. He single-handedly ruined my love of basketball. As a point guard, he had two noteworthy skills:

1. A great crossover dribble
2. The ability to do something stupid in the last 10 seconds to lose almost every close game.

Tim never seemed to notice that when he took the last shot in a tight game, his team almost always lost. Now, just to be clear – there’s nothing wrong with being a poor clutch shooter, unless you also happen to be the starting point guard, and it never occurs to you that passing to another player might work.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Hardaway ruined my love of basketball. That’s literally true. I didn’t mind rooting for a team with a bad record, but I couldn’t cheer for stupidity. I gave up on the Warriors and never regained my interest.So when Hardaway said on the radio that he hates gay people, I think he was surprised that it caused a problem. He’s not good at pattern recognition. I’ll bet he spent the first week of the shit storm just shaking his head and muttering, “I didn’t see THAT coming.”

And did I mention that Hardaway was scheduled to do some public appearances for the NBA during All-Star week in Las Vegas? Apparently it never occurred to him that announcing a deep hatred for a portion of your fan base and advertisers would be bad for business. More muttering, “I didn’t see THAT coming.”

But my favorite part of the story is that Hardaway apparently never noticed that he’s African-American. Or maybe he never realized that enthusiastically promoting bigotry isn’t a good idea if you’re a member of a persecuted minority. Either way, it’s not the sort of thing that gets you into Mensa.

The great irony of this story is that millions of people probably had the same first reaction to his announced hatred of gays: “He’s probably gay.” I doubt there’s any statistical validity to the notion that the biggest gay-haters in the world are closeted gays themselves. But lots of people believe it. So Tim Hardaway managed to insult gays while simultaneously planting the suggestion in millions of minds that he might be one.

Does he hate me yet? – Scott Adams of The Dilbert Blog

MPAA Movie Rating Scam

I have long been upset with the MPAA and their movie rating system (you know, G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.)  They are a private company set up to support the movie industry and they answer to no one.  They are unmonitored and very secretive.  I have never understood why movies are given a useless blanket rating and not rated in areas so that parents (or direct viewers) could make their own decisions of what they were concerned about seeing (some people don’t care if they see violence or suspense but don’t want to see nudity or someone might not be as concerned about language as someone else but might be concerned about drug use, etc.)  I have often felt that there are many PG movies that are very inappropriate for the majority of children and plenty of R movies with hardly anything wrong at all.

Take Evil Dead for example.  If I was a rater or a parent deciding if my kids could watch that movie I would have given it a PG rating.  Sure there is “blood” but it is SO fake and almost never human blood just “blood” like the house walls bleeding.  No amount of “wood and plaster blood”, in my opinion, should ever take a movie over PG.  What is wrong with red liquid running out of wood?  They didn’t even imply that it was human blood.  Nothing of the sort.  Just a haunted house with walls that bled.  Oh no, don’t let your kids see that!  I guess a hospital documentary would be NC-17 then.  Even if it was just shots of people using ketchup in the cafeteria.

Wil Wheaton has a review today of This Film is Not Yet Rated.  It is a good, short article and I think that anyone who ever uses the MPAA rating (I do not) should read it before relying on such a system.  If you really want to take a stand against the MPAA you can simply do what I do and never go to movie theatres.  The MPAA rating is mostly only used there and you can voice your opinion pretty strongly with your pocketbook.