chuggnutt.com

I don't drink much anymore. I haven't really had the inclination to drink much since the kids were born (which is a good thing), and truth be told, I'm not really into drinking when we go out without the kids either.

Not that I'm against drinking, by any means, nor do I want to sound like I'm passing judgment a là "drinking is bad." No. It's more like the desire to drink has melted away, along with any sense that I actually have time to drink anymore, and as a result, my alcohol tolerance is way, way down. The other big factor deterring me from intoxication— more so than ever before— is the hangover.

That having been said, I'd like to pass on some general advice and thoughts about imbibing and hangovers, and how to avoid them.

First and most importantly, drink lots of water. I cannot stress this enough. Your body uses up a tremendous amount of water when dealing with alcohol, and this is the most important factor in hangovers: dehydration. As a rule of thumb, I try to drink a glass of water for every serving of alcohol. This saved my ass a week and a half ago: when my best friend was in town for my daughter's birthday, we stayed up late Saturday night catching up, and ended up drinking a pint of beer (some of my homebrew), 2 shots of tequila and a shot of Canadian whiskey— all in about an hour's worth of time. By all rights, I should have been sick as a dog the next day, but I drank 4 or 5 large pint glasses of water before going to bed, and woke up with only the vaguest hint of a headache. No other ill effects at all.

If you can, take extra vitamin B, preferably before drinking, but after will do in a pinch. You get depleted of vitamin B when alcohol is processed, and this also contributes to hangovers. Vitamin B is needed by the body to process sugars, and the lack of water and sugars getting to the brain is a large part of what causes the hangover.

I've noticed that back in the day, when I would wake up at 5 am with a throbbing, pounding headache from drinking, that if I took aspirin, it would help the headache go away... but if I took ibuprofen, then it wouldn't necessarily help my headache, and I would start getting queasy. So if ibuprofen seems to kick off the nausea part of the hangover, like it did for me, stick with aspirin.

If you're drinking beer, stick to microbrews or homebrews; the yeast content and the non-filtered nature of these beers help to replenish the nutrients you lose and lessen the ill-effects. Plus, they taste better!

If you're drinking booze, I don't have any good advice for you about what to drink.

Here's an interesting link: R U Pissed? On their home page, they have a blood alcohol calculator.

Enough of this. I'm going to go home and have a beer in a bit.

Thus the season of celebrating and eating lots of fattening food commences. The "big three" holidays of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years (I always lump Christmas and New Years together, because it's like a week-long holiday to me) are always more action-packed for my family, because of the way birthdays in my family fall around this time of year.

Start with Halloween. We always end up with lots of candy left over. Two days later, my daughter's birthday. Big one-two punch there. She just had her third birthday two days ago, and it was lots of fun. I swear, my kids get more presents than anybody.

Short breather through the first half of November, then my Dad's birthday falls on the third week, soon to be followed by Thanksgiving. Eat far too much, and enjoy pie afterwards.

Another short breather, though it's not enough to fully recover from Thanksgiving. Then my Mom's birthday the first week in December. You'd think that would be it. Wrong.

My birthday. Two days before Christmas.

Then Christmas Eve. Big family dinner.

Christmas Day. Eating rivalling (some years, surpassing) that of Thanksgiving. Again, my kids get more presents than I've ever seen. We then coast along on Christmas food and goodies until New Years Eve, which basically consists of a buffet-style meal of Christmas leftovers, alcohol, and noisemakers. We don't usually stay up very late anymore, with young kids and all.

Finally, it's all over. Everyone breathes a big sigh of relief, then hunkers down for the winter.

Don't get me wrong. I love this time of year, I love the holidays and all the birthdays and the good food and family and giving gifts and warm fires and decorations and snow. It's my favorite time of year.

And we're already done with a third of it.

Winter's coming early this year; it snowed in Bend today, about three weeks early. Ordinarily Central Oregon doesn't get its first snow until late November, and that melts off and it doesn't snow again until after Christmas. (When I say snow, I mean a significant amount that covers everything under a white blanket, not a light dusting that's gone before the end of the day.)

At least that's the pattern I've noticed over the past four years or so.

I hate driving in the snow, especially the first snow of the season. Traffic jams up, because everybody forgot how to drive on slick roads and panics, and cars creep along at 15 miles per hour or slower. Worse, many people living here are transplants from elsewhere that doesn't have the snowy conditions we get here, so they don't have a clue. Not that I'm the best winter driver, but damn.

We carved pumpkins tonight. I always get a big kick out of pumpkin carving, especially now that the kids can start appreciating it more. I outdid myself this year; I carved my pumpkin (a big one!) with the likeness of Charlie Brown.

Two of the best shows on TV are on Cartoon Network: Justice League and Samurai Jack.

I filled out a quiz on Emode today, "What's Your Best Quality?" It tells me I am Reliable.

phpMyAdmin kicks serious ass.

In an odd moment, I realized today that vampires are violating the laws of physics by not casting reflections. This bothers me.

Of all the things I want to buy from ThinkGeek, the first thing is going to be either the WTF? coffee mug, or the beer glasses. Much to my dismay, they don't seem to carry the "All Your Base" mugs anymore...

Here's something to mull over. I was emailed this a few months ago, incorrectly attributed to a commencment speech Bill Gates gave at a high school graduation in California. The reality is, it's from Charles J. Sykes (view snopes.com for the whole story and list). I think this is brilliant and well-said, and definitely needs to be said more often.

I'm paraphrasing a bit here.

Rules Kids Won't Learn in School

Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it.

Rule No. 2: The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It'll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock.

Rule No. 3: You won't make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice president or have a car phone either.

Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait 'til you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.

Rule No. 6: It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible.

Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn't. In some schools, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don't get summers off.

Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs.

Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them.

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

This is apparently the season where the limits break down on primetime TV.

And I'm not just talking 'bout cable.

For instance, tonight was the second week now that "NYPD Blue" has used "bullshit" out of the, er, blue. On ABC.

Bullshit.

I wasn't as blindsided by it as I was last week, but still. Remember when "NYPD Blue" first came out, there was such an uproar over the use of "adult" language on TV? And partial nudity? Anyone?

With that in mind, I'd've expected to have heard something about it, somewhere, beforehand. But no, not a peep.

In general, too, this season on TV looks to be testing boundaries all around. From the... incident... on "ER" (I'd hate to spoil the surprise for those who might not have seen it yet), to the first episode of "Firefly" where the captain kicked the bad guy into the massive spaceship engine. I feel like I've been rubbing my eyes in disbelief.

And I hope this trend continues.

Random Web Link: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Go check out my favorite bit, titles.

I just finished up making a batch of beer, an English Old Ale that I'll be giving to my Dad for his birthday this year. This is the second beer in as many months that I've brewed, and I've already got plans for at least two, maybe three more: a Pumpkin Ale (I used to brew this every year around Halloween), a wheat beer for my Mom's birthday (perhaps a blackberry wheat), and I've been thinking about a barleywine in December. Though I've been thinking about experimenting with the style and using wheat malt instead of barley malt— a "weizenwine" or something.

Here is an extremely cool site: Wikipedia.org. It uses the (relatively) new concept/technology of the "wiki web," and is essentially an online, freely editable encyclopedia. And by "freely editable" I really mean freely editable— anyone (anyone!) "can edit any article right now, without even having to log in" (in their words). It's true. I had edited their Beer page and added an entry for Barleywine, then added and edited the very page for Barleywine myself, just today.

And, it's collaborative. Within three hours of my creating the Barleywine article, someone else had edited it and added links. What more can I say? Check it out.

Random Web Link: BookCrossing - I just love this concept. Right along the lines of Where's George?

I'll be more active on the site again, soon. Until then, here's a quick recap of what I've been doing:

• Reading A History of Knowledge
• Working the new job (programming, programming, programming)
• Getting caught up in the new season of TV (grrrrrr....)
• Pouring concrete (well, I only spent a Saturday doing this, but it was 800+ pounds of concrete...)

  That's about all for now. Changes coming though!

Peace.

We just got back yesterday from a week-long vacation on the Oregon Coast. I should say, "We just got back and recovered," because a week in hotels with young children is taxing. But, it was a good trip.

We started out in Newport, and the weather for the first few days was crappy: chilly, foggy, wet. Consequently, I started getting a cold and had to drink tea and take echinacea for a few days. But we found things to do before hitting the beach anyway; we visited Lincoln City for some shopping, wandered along the stores on the bayfront, enjoyed good food. We had lunch at the Rogue Brewery in Southbeach, but I couldn't drink any beer because I was at the peak of my sore throat! How can you visit one of the best breweries on the west coast and NOT drink beer?

Our last day in Newport, the weather turned nice, and after a great breakfast (marionberry French toast), we spent time on the beach. The kids had a fantastic time. After that, we moved on to Florence for a night.

I'm not too crazy about Florence; it's kind of a dingy town with a worn-out feeling. We visited Old Town Florence (decent shopping and eating), and went to the Sea Lion Caves about 11 miles north. That was impressive; you take an elevator 200 feet down into the largest sea cave in the world to see the sea lions on the rocks.

After Florence we moved on to Bandon, on the southern Oregon coast. I like Bandon; it's a charming, tiny little town that I can picture myself living in some day. There's not much around there, though; the largest towns are Coos Bay and North Bend to the north, which aren't saying much. I hear people mostly like to leave Coos Bay.

Finally we drove over to Roseburg (not on the coast, but close enough) and visited the Wildlife Safari there, and the La Garza winery. The Wildlife Safari was fun; I'd been there years and years ago, as a teen. Kaitlyn and I rode an elephant, which was very cool.

We got back yesterday (Friday), spent a good part of the time getting unpacked, doing laundry and recovering. I've gotten caught up on everything, and getting geared to start my new job up this next week, on Tuesday. We've got office space, I've got a desk and three chairs that need assembling, and a computer.

Should be interesting.

Here's an interesting study: Drinking alcohol makes the opposite sex look more attractive (Yahoo article; MSNBC is here). Haven't we all known this for years? You know, along the lines of those T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaiming "Beer - helping ugly people have sex since 1883" or somesuch.

I mean, really. That's what alcohol does. It's the same thing that makes me really good at pool after 3 or 4 drinks.

And this right on the heels of the Beer is good for you news story. Maybe we'll be seeing a resurgence of beer-drinking and microbreweries again.

Random web link: Henson.com, the official Jim Henson site. I was looking at this site the other day to find an image of Animal from The Muppet Show, and it seemed kind of cool.

This past month since I last posted has been a very transitional one.

I quit my job with Alpine, and I'm taking on a new one in September. I've got slightly less than three weeks off as of now. Of course, that means I've had to change servers; I no longer have the convenient access to everything I needed on the Alpine servers to play with my websites.

I'm going with Pair Networks as they offer an affordable, reliable service with PHP and MySQL. So now, chuggnutt.com is brought to you by Pair!

Anywho... during the decision-making period to leave one job for another, and the subsequent "last days" with Alpine, I've neglected my site. Not that I imagine anyone was reading it anyway, apart from a few family or friends. But, it's back. I'm back.

In other news, I made a batch of homebrew today. For the first time in 2½ years.

2½. Years.

Keeping in mind that I used to make a lot of beer. Not as much as some homebrewing friends I have who are fanatical about it, but more than average. But, once the kids were born, I just didn't find the time... or so I told myself...

And I'd been thinking about it lately. So, enough was enough. I've got (nearly) three weeks off, so yesterday we went to the homebrew shop, bought some basic ingredients (pale malt extract, ½ lb. 40L crystal malt, 2 oz. Cascade hops, dry ale yeast) and a wine kit for my wife, and today made the beer and the wine.

The beer is bubbling happily away as I write this. The house smells like malt and hops.

I've missed this.

As you can see from the image to the right, I have been playing around with Paint Shop Pro and doing some fun image editing. I don't know why, but this seemed like an extraordinarily funny thing to do, and the results turned out pretty good. Better than the Darth Maul/Boba Fett image I did yesterday.

I finally saw Attack of the Clones last Friday (the 5th), and it was pretty good. Better than The Phantom Menace, at any rate. And I've been thinking of the odd, cult-like popularity that has arisen out of two Star Wars characters, Boba Fett and Darth Maul.

Yep, utterly geeky.

My best theory as to their popularity is that they are visually interesting, bad-ass characters who were not overused. (Although, with Jango Fett in AOTC, they may be trodding down the overused path with clan Fett.) You know, less is more.

So, I decided to merge the two characters into one, ultra-cool, ultra-bad-ass creation:

Darth Fett.

Here's the image I whipped up to illustrate.

Nuff said.

Still around. Had a nice, four-day holiday weekend, and now I really don't want to go back to work Monday morning. It's odd; I love working with the Internet, and developing in PHP, and the cool technologies, and being hands-on in all aspects of a web site from domain name registration and server management to server-specific Apache configuration, but I'm also growing very weary of the day-to-day Alpine grind.

(Grind is not exactly the right word, but I'm being lazy tonight. Also, it alliterates nicely with "Alpine.")

Thinking about it now, perhaps I'm getting tired of being a part of a struggling start up company. It's draining, and wasn't what I had set out to do two and a half years ago when I was looking for a new job. I often feel that the amount of energy and effort and personal stake I'm investing (as I am with Alpine) should be directed to my own endeavor and not necessarily somebody else's vision and risk.

In other words, if I want to work for a start up, it should be my own.

But don't necessarily hold your breath.

Yet.

So I may be behind the times on this, but check out this link: Eric Harshbarger's LEGOŽ website. This guy is my new hero. He actually builds LEGO sculptures for a living.

No, really.

He makes a living building LEGO sculptures. Professionally.

What the hell am I doing wrong?

Portland was really good. We picked a good hotel this time (we've stayed in some real dives) and the Portland Spirit dinner cruise was fantastic. I'd highly recommend anyone looking for something nice to do in Portland, check this out.

TODO list for chuggnutt.com:

• Get blog search working
• Get the featured "Check it Out" link-thing working, so it rotates through actual links rather than just the one
• Drop in some more pages of content
• Uhm... more links?

We're off to Portland tomorrow, without the kids, for an anniversary dinner cruise on the Portland Spirit. Should be a pretty good trip; I may even get to finally see Star Wars Episode II.

Here's an interesting little piece of news/trivia: Deschutes Brewery is apparently bottling their beers in a new bottle (they were simply plain brown 12-ounce bottles): brown with a nice raised imprint of hops around the bottle just below the neck, and gold caps (formerly they were silver). These were from a six-pack of Mirror Pond Pale Ale picked up at Fred Meyers today. I can't find any mention of this bottle upgrade on their web site, but maybe it's to help celebrate their 14 year anniversary.

Random Web Link: It's been around for awhile, but still proves entertaining: The Greedo Assassination Conspiracy Page

This is what passes for news in the Bend Bulletin, our local newspaper. I swear, this reads like it's straight out of The Onion (excerpts, with my own commentary):

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Prineville man questions how the pyramids were built

Alan St. John was reading the December issue of Popular Mechanics when he spotted a one-page article about an investigation... about how the pyramids were built....

That's the Egyptian pyramids, not to be confused with their muddy Mexican and Central American siblings....

(That's good. I didn't want to accidentally misunderstand which pyramids we might be reading about here.)

Just how the ancients constructed these triangles in the sand has long been a head-scratcher for scientific eggheads and occultists alike.

(Triangles in the sand? Pyramids have square bases and four sides. Nice tone to this paragraph, too; I think it's meant to target the low-brow audience.)

They have good reason to want to reason through this: They didn't exactly have backhoes 5,000 years ago....

(Gee. They didn't exactly have backhoes. What exactly did they have? Tractors? It's clear at this point who the intended audience is: people who are intellectually equivalent to having lived in a cave for most of their life. Give your readers some credit.)

St. John believes everyone has been overlooking the obvious.

(Yeah. The obvious. Despite the obvious lack of any evidence to support his theory. I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who's got a theory they think is "obvious.")

With pulleys and enough rope, sand could be used as a counter-weight to the huge stones....

(Here I admit, this sounds reasonable. Then of course, 3 paragraphs later, comes my favorite part:)

The recently divorced St. John, who lives in a fifth wheel trailer next to his parent's house in Prineville, has been a quick study in Egyptian history, when he's not working at Norm's Extreme Fitness Center....

(Okay. This blows away any shred of credibility he might have had. He's a kook.)

The article goes on with St. John citing Herodotus (which the Bulletin misspells as Herodatus), but apparently that's as much as he's read on the pyramids. He also sent a letter to Popular Mechanics, which generated some initial interest, but hasn't subsequently heard back from them. And that leads into the most sensible quote from the entire article:

The problem... is that there's no hieroglyphic or archaeological evidence that counterweights were ever used in ancient Egypt....

What amazes me is how this made it into the paper to begin with... it really does come across like an article you'd read in The Onion. I'm thunderstruck and laughing at the same time. How did they find this St. John guy? Did he approach the Bulletin? And why— why??— is this considered news?

Unfortunately, the Bulletin isn't even running the article online on their web site. Otherwise, you could even see the goofy photo they have of this guy holding his hands over his head in the shape of a pyramid...

This was just too priceless not to share. Interestingly, the same issue of the paper also has an article about Rocket Guy, arguably Bend's most notorious and colorful character.

What a day.

Do NOT watch "Bandits."

To my great delight, Amazon.com has the entire first season of the Transformers on DVD. This was the perfect television show that embodied the 1980s: a wildly popular cartoon whose sole purpose was to support an insanely popular line of toys, and yet there was such a seamless integration between the two that at times it seemed toys were introduced because they had characters in the cartoon (like the Dinobots and Constructicons).

I was a total tool for the Transformers— the toys and the cartoon both. One thing that always bothered me about them, though, was the names of the various factions; in the beginning, there were two: the good guys were the Autobots, and the bad guys were the Decepticons. Simplistic, yet descriptive: the Autobots were robots based on cars, and the Decepticons were deceptive robots that were bad (like cons— as in convicts). If you didn't look for any real meaning behind the names, fine. But why did they always have new factions or groups with names ending in "bot" (for the good guys) and "con" (for the bad guys)?

That was just plain silly, even to my brainwashed mind. It was the laziness of marketing greed going too far, and destroying the illusory experience of deeper meaning. I mean, really. Right off the top of my head I can recall (aside from the Autobots and Decepticons) Dinobots, Constructicons, Insecticons, Aerialbots, Motorcons, and Predacons.

So then, I have to ask: where do Emoticons fit in? You know, emoticons— those plain-character simulated facial expressions that are an inseparable part of Internet culture (like

:)

;)

:P

Perhaps only I know the true answer...

Some Transformers links for the stalwart:

• Hasbro's official site
• BigBot.com - a Transformers portal site
• Ben's World of Transformers

Ah, Friday. A fine end to a skewed week.

We finally got a decent connection to the Internet at work, after three weeks in the new office in Bend. The DSL connection provided by Oregon Trail Internet just didn't work out— the connection kept getting dropped, and when it was active, bandwidth would fluctuate wildly. No good. So we replaced the DSL with a high speed wireless connection provided by, well, High Speed Communications, formerly Empire Net. Today was the first day it was active, and it was stable and fast. Finally!

Plus, my mid-week trip to Portland really threw things off for me. Hopefully next week I'll be able to get back on track.

Random Web Link: VillianSupply.com

Went on a business trip to Portland today (for Alpine Internet Solutions, the company I work for) to meet with a new client we recently signed. It's a big project, potentially high profile... though I probably shouldn't mention who they are yet. I don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention too soon...

Here's a cool link: The Internet Archive, featuring the Wayback Machine. They've been taking "snapshots" of websites for a number of years now (in association with Alexa) that you can search for and view. So you can check out what your favorite website looked like in days past. Pretty nifty!

Random Web Link: Tilt of the hat to my bro: WildStorm Comics.

So on ReasonablyClever.com there is this Flash-based applet called the Mini-Mizer which allows people to build little custom Lego people out of all sorts of parts. Clearly, I've been playing with it.

The coolest part about it is some wickedly neat things like Star Wars and comic book superhero parts, and some utterly non-sequitous things like some of the items you can place in your Lego person's hands: a large drumstick, a tennis racket, an electric guitar.

Needless to say, it's been eating up my evening, so instead of various other things I had a mind to do, I've been sucked into a hilariously simple activity with endless permutations. Ah, viral marketing!

Everyone should visit Wil Wheaton Dot Net for bringing the Mini-Mizer to everyone's attention.

Ack. I've been letting my mutant ability for procrastination take over on this site, and I haven't even finished getting the relatively simple stuff done that I had intended— like, making the "Check it Out" area handle more than one item, or putting up more background material. Or perhaps I shouldn't chalk it all up to procrastination; my interest level in various projects ebbs and flows like the tide. Probably just got caught up in an eddy before getting back on track...

And of course, today was Father's Day. It was a good day; I got several books and got to spend my day playing with the kids and relaxing. And got to drink some Pike Kilt Lifter (though it was flat).

My summer reading list:
• Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko
• Programming Jabber by DJ Adams
• Everything's Eventual by Stephen King
• Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

And more to come...

We've been spending the last week or so at work packing up the old office in Sisters (Oregon) and moving into Bend, so things have been thrown into chaotic disarray while we unpack, build out, and get used to our new office space. My commute has been cut from 25 miles (one way) to 5 miles, which I am indescribably happy about. I can get to work in just over 10 minutes now!

Our new office is sweet. We're located in an old mill building right in the middle of a developing area (called, appropriately enough, the Old Mill District), in a very SOHO-like atmosphere. It's still raw, but very, very nice and will be awesome when it's all finished. I can't wait.

I'm getting my custom blog management software reconfigured, in light of the problems I outlined in the last post. So far, it seems to be working.

Something in the server configuration running this site has changed, causing my PHP script to add blog entries to not work, and I can't quite figure out why. (Incidentally, this is also why there's a big gap since the last post.) My script is supposed to send an authentication header to the browser, for simple Apache realm authentication, but the browser (Internet Explorer 6; I haven't tested with others yet) hangs. Very, very, very frustrating.

As near as I can tell, this became a problem when WebDAV was installed on this server, which must have changed the configuration somewhere to affect this. In the meantime, I'm posting directly via phpMyAdmin, which is a totally killer MySQL GUI-like interface written in PHP.

What is Progress Quest? Think of Nethack and Seti@Home rolled into one: It's an online RPG that runs autonomously on your computer, in the background. You start it up, create a character, and go; everything is automatic and it even does away with the "annoying" aspects of fantasy roleplaying: dying, wandering around mazes, solving puzzles.

Visit the homepage.

I've been running it for just a day now and I just let it run in the background, yet it's oddly addicting just to watch. The cool thing is, in Multiplayer/Online mode, it can actively compare your stats and progress in the game with all the other players in online mode, over the web. So, in a sense, it's a MMORPG. And you don't even have to pay any money!

I definitely watch way too much TV. Each year around the end of the TV season I reach some sort of critical mass where I just want to throw out the TV and not watch anything again, and use the time I spend in front of the zombie box in much better ways. Way, way too much time. And yet— and this is weak, really weak— I can't not watch the damn TV shows through the respective season finales because of the inertia that's built up from watching them all season...

But the irony is, I'd be spending a lot more time in front of the computer, so that's probably not really much better. Depending on what I'm doing at the computer, of course.

One great reason to love the summer: reruns (sad but true); you don't have to watch TV at all because you're not caught in that vicious circle of keeping up with new episodes of this show or that show... and the reclaimed time is wonderful.

Spider-Man rules! I have to admit, I had initial doubts for some time now, but after seeing it tonight, "Spider-Man" turned out to be a great movie— one of the best comic book adaptions that I've ever seen. I was blown away by how good the web slinging/swinging effects were; extremely realistic, with Spider-Man moving and swinging just the way you'd expect someone to. This was classic Spidey at its best— very true to the mythology, with only sensible changes to bring it more in line with a movie adaption.

Probably the only fault I can find is that there are 1 or 2 scenes which are overly Matrix-ish. You'll know them when you see them. But then, what movie these days doesn't have some sort of Matrix tribute/rip-off?

We're going out to see "Spider-Man" tomorrow! I actually get to go see a movie, and on opening day, no less! Last movie in the theater we saw was "The Mothman Prophecies"— not my choice, an entirely forgettable movie, pass it by— and before that, I was able to make it to "The Lord of the Rings" but that's the last I can remember. Such is life with kids!

It's been one of those days at work which is just driving me nuts because pretty much all I'm doing is fixing old problems rather than getting current and new things done. No progress has been made. It's those mindless, repetitive things that you have to do over and over again to fix them, and they're not anything that you can click a button or write a script and poof they're all done, but you have to do each thing manually over and over and over and over and over and over and over... kind of like stuffing envelopes and licking stamps for Christmas cards. You just gotta do 'em, and there's no way around it.

So it's been one of those days at work. Extrememly frustrating.

Man, I can't stop playing the Pong game at G4's website (the new video game cable channel). It's a single player Pong game, you versus the computer. I can't beat it— the game goes to 21 points, and I haven't been able to score more than 10 or 11 points before getting whupped. And yet, I keep going back.

All for Pong.

That's just me, though— Old School, especially when it comes to games. I still think the Commodore 64 is one of the best personal computers and game-playing machines of all time— I own a collection of miscellaneous Commodore hardware and software— and many, many of the games produced for it are eminently more playable for me than today's games. And I think NetHack is one of the best PC games of all time, and it doesn't even require graphics or sound! So, yeah, Pong got me.

Staving off sickness all around me. A kid at Kaitlyn's daycare had hand, foot and mouth disease, and a co-worker's kid has strep. So I've been sucking down echinacea like it's going out of style, because Tuesday I felt like I was starting to get sick. Just lovely.

Also, don't forget to read up on the new video game cable channel, G4. There's a Yahoo news story here, a CNN article here, and Slashdot commentary here. Yep, that's right. A video game channel.

The dice tumbled across the table, bounced in unison against the far end and skidded to a halt. The woman in the red dress looked up, her full pouty lips pursed in excitement. Her face was bright and intelligent; her dress faltered to reveal sensuous thigh when she moved. "You've won again, Mr.—" She paused. "I'm sorry, I don't—"

"Fromage." The man's mouth barely moved as he spoke the name around the cigar clenched between his teeth. A lighter flashed, and orange-blue flame licked the cigar's tip, igniting a red ember. The man drew deeply, extinguished the lighter with a deft flick of the wrist, and exhaled thoughtfully. A cloud of sweet, pungent blue smoke wafted upwards over the table. "Jacques Fromage."

Second entry already. Whaddya know.

Got a call today from a Greg Madigan at RoommateAccess.com regarding the old chuggnutt website I used to have on Tripod. I hadn't updated this old site in about 2 years, and apparently someone based in New York used my old website and signed up for the Roommate Access affiliate program, and is now attempting to run some sort of credit card fraud.

Wow.

I spoke with Greg and the vice-president over there at Roommates, and they were very cool, they just wanted to give me a heads up about what was going on. Very much appreciated.

Needless to say, I logged into Tripod, removed all the old files from my chuggnutt account, changed the index.html file to redirect to this site, and changed the password. Hopefully that'll help clear things up a bit.

It may be pretty raw, but here I am posting the first entry to this blog. It's a homegrown system I hacked out in about 2 days using PHP4 and a MySQL database.

Still a ton of things I'd like to do with this, given the time. I probably need to make it template-based, right now the HTML is hard-coded into the PHP, but that was a quick way for me to hack it out.

So, email me and tell me what you think!