So Thursday found me getting too caught up in working on the new pictures and redesigning the main page over at Heroic Portraits, which meant that it was time for bed before I knew it.
This also meant that of the shitload of things I wanted to get done before going to bed only the tip of the dung heap got accomplished, a fact which I realized Friday morning as I was trying to get everything in order before heading in to work.
What made matters worse was the fact that I was going in for a workout, so at 4:15 in the morning I was scrambling to do all of the things I’d failed to do in the full day I’d had before.
Suffice to say I wasn’t in a very cheery mood by the time I headed out the door, nor did my mood improve when I realized that I’d forgotten something and had to go back in and get it.
On the way to my car the second time, I spoke my first words of the day: Fucking spiders.
This was in response to the fact hat I had walked through a spider web that was apparently being built between my car and the one next to it.
More than the annoyance of having spider web all over me, I was irritated by the audacity of the spider. I mean, the cars were like four feet apart; how goddamn big was this spider planning to make its web? Was it planning to catch low-flying birds?
Anyway, once I got in to work and into the fitness center, I said my third, fourth, and fifth words as I approached the lat pulldown machine: Fucking tall people.
This was in response to fact that the guard that you put hour legs under to keep you in place while you’re pulling down the weights was raised up to ridiculous heights to accommodate some freakishly tall person whose knees, evidently, rise four feet up into the air when seated.
In any case my mood – and my language – improved somewhat as the day wore on.
And it did wear on, with a lot more work than has been usual of late, with many of the issues being weird and annoying.
Still, I did manage to maintain at least the closest facsimile to a pleasant disposition that I can generate despite the length of the day and its various annoyances.
Of course, that night my hard-won good mood was shattered by my neighbors.
Why is it that so many people feel the need to congregate in parking lots? Further, why do they feel the need to shout at each other rather than speaking at a normal conversational volume?
The people involved were this young couple who lives in my building whom I already don’t like. They annoy me because they feel the need to lock their truck two or three times every time. As this is done with a keyless remote, it sounds like this: click-click-honk (pause) click-click-honk (pause) click-click-honk.
Why this obsessive need to lock, relock, and re-relock their vehicle? I have no idea, but it’s irritating as hell.
So when they felt the need to congregate in the parking lot right outside my bedroom window on a warm, windows open kind of night for a half an hour to visit with the woman’s parents, who had just arrived for a visit, my existing dislike of them shot up several levels.
To make matters worse, the couple brought their dog out with them so that it could greet the dog that her parents brought with them. Their dog was on a leash; her parent’s was not.
So in addition to the sound of the people jabbering I was treated to the sound of a dog choking itself as it pulled at its leash to try to catch a whiff of the new dog’s ass.
Once they went inside and I managed to fall asleep I found myself waking up every 45 minutes or so, making for a less than pleasant night’s sleep.
But at least things have been pretty quiet today, and tiredness doesn’t really impede my ability to do nothing in particular.
I did find out today, though, that in July we will likely be moving over to the new shift schedule, which means that my three day work week will be moved back a day and I’ll actually have a day off on the weekend.
It means more to Scott, what with having the family and all, than it does to me, since as far as I’m concerned one day is the same as any other.
Still, this does free up my Saturday nights, so if I had a social life I could actually have a social life.
In any case, the end of the day is approaching and I should probably try to find something to do.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Quick Post
Don't have much time, as it's almost time for The Simpsons, and then bed as I prepare to enter my work week.
I made an update to the main page over at Heroic Portraits. Not sure if I like it better or not, though I do like the tiled images at the top and bottom.
Or at least, I like the idea of it, as it shows several different kinds of portraits (super-heroes, barbarian warriors, fantasy creatures, science fiction) and different styles.
Speaking of which, here's a larger copy of the faerie picture (which I just did today) that's included in the tiled image:
For those of you wondering (and to confirm it for any who might have spotted it), pop singer Kylie Minoque was the model for the picture.
I did another picture today, which is also included in the tiled image, but even though it's wholly original (no reference model at all), I didn't feel the need to post it here.
It was pretty much just a throwaway image designed entirely for the mosaic-y dealie.
Besides, it's nowhere near as pretty as this (unless rampaging barbarians are your thing).
Anyway, that's it for now.
I hope you all have a more exciting Memorial Day weekend than I'm likely to.
I made an update to the main page over at Heroic Portraits. Not sure if I like it better or not, though I do like the tiled images at the top and bottom.
Or at least, I like the idea of it, as it shows several different kinds of portraits (super-heroes, barbarian warriors, fantasy creatures, science fiction) and different styles.
Speaking of which, here's a larger copy of the faerie picture (which I just did today) that's included in the tiled image:
For those of you wondering (and to confirm it for any who might have spotted it), pop singer Kylie Minoque was the model for the picture.
I did another picture today, which is also included in the tiled image, but even though it's wholly original (no reference model at all), I didn't feel the need to post it here.
It was pretty much just a throwaway image designed entirely for the mosaic-y dealie.
Besides, it's nowhere near as pretty as this (unless rampaging barbarians are your thing).
Anyway, that's it for now.
I hope you all have a more exciting Memorial Day weekend than I'm likely to.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Britney Back When She Was Still Hot
In my quest to avoid actually doing anything constructive, I was ideally browsing through some of the gigabytes worth of downloaded pictures I have taking up space on my hard drive when I stumbled across a picture of Britney Spears that positively screamed for the Heroic Portrait treatment.
I decided to mess around with the sort of comic booky, illustrative, post-Nagel style thingamabog, and this is what I came up with:
Personally, I think it's pretty cool, though I'm kind of interested in seeing how it would turn out if I did it in a more conventional style.
Still, I think this one would definitely be at home over at the Potraits site.
It occurs to me that it's been a very long time since I last did a Britney pic, but then, it's been a long time since she hooked up with that scraggly douchebag and started cranking out babies.
There might be some kind of causality there...
Anyway, just thought I'd share this pic with all of you.
I decided to mess around with the sort of comic booky, illustrative, post-Nagel style thingamabog, and this is what I came up with:
Personally, I think it's pretty cool, though I'm kind of interested in seeing how it would turn out if I did it in a more conventional style.
Still, I think this one would definitely be at home over at the Potraits site.
It occurs to me that it's been a very long time since I last did a Britney pic, but then, it's been a long time since she hooked up with that scraggly douchebag and started cranking out babies.
There might be some kind of causality there...
Anyway, just thought I'd share this pic with all of you.
I Knew I Wasn't Achieving Anything
So I just got an e-mail from Red Hat.
Here's the screen cap of it, minus e-mail addresses:
Wow, my certificate looks surprisingly similar to a missing attachment. Neat!
Of course, the odds are it was sent using a computer running Linux and a Linux e-mail client, so it just goes to show that even the Linux experts can't figure out how to get it to work...
Here's the screen cap of it, minus e-mail addresses:
Wow, my certificate looks surprisingly similar to a missing attachment. Neat!
Of course, the odds are it was sent using a computer running Linux and a Linux e-mail client, so it just goes to show that even the Linux experts can't figure out how to get it to work...
Lethargy
Apparently 8:20 am is the ideal time to break out the weed whackers and stand outside my window for a half an hour.
Finding it impossible to block out the sound, I opted, against my better judgment, to get up, though after the walking alarm clocks had moved on I considered going back to bed, as I felt extremely tired.
I’m not sure why I was so tired, as I hadn’t stayed up particularly late, and it wasn’t that much earlier than when I normally get up.
Still, the greater than normal lethargy meant that I didn’t actually get showered, dressed, and out the door until about ten to 11.
I needed to get some things from Wal-Mart, which meant going to Sterling, as I avoid the Leesburg Wal-Mart, which is where ghetto meets white trash, at all costs.
Even though it was nearly 11 by the time I left, and I had to drive around 10 miles or so, I had completed my shopping and walked out the doors of Wal-Mart by 11:30.
So I had accomplished pretty much everything I needed to for the day in about 40 minutes.
I don’t know if that makes me a model of efficiency, or just really, really sad and pathetic.
In any case, I felt like I should do something else, though I wasn’t certain what. I tried to think if I had any reason to go to Best Buy, but was unable to think of one, which is odd and kind of scary.
Ultimately I headed over to the Dulles Town Center and grab some lunch at the food court, opting for my standard foot-long Bacon Dog.
As I was sitting there clogging my arteries, I was thinking that I had just been to the Town Center a little while ago, then realized that, in fact, it had been over a month ago, when I was trying to find something for Kathleen’s birthday.
It’s difficult to explain just how rapidly the months fly by for me with my odd schedule and the ever-increasing pace of my march towards middle age, but at times, like today, it can be a rather startling and unnerving realization.
From there I simply headed home, giving up any effort at making it seem as though I have a life and that there’s any reason for me to spend time out in the world.
Once I got home there were any number of things that I could have done, like some drawing, some tweaking of the Heroic Portraits site, messing around with my Red Hat installation, going for a walk, and so forth, but instead I just kind of sat around feeling tired, and after about an hour I decided to head out to the hammock and chillax for a while.
Having accomplished that, here I am, still feeling rather tired.
There’s an extremely long stoplight that I have to deal with whenever I go anywhere. Despite the odds against it, 99% of the time I arrive at the light just as it’s turned red, so I always have a long wait, which pretty much always puts me in a lousy mood and makes me feel inclined to rant to myself as I sit there waiting.
Today was no exception, though I actually had a particular topic to rant about as I watched the guy in front of me smoking a cigarette.
What set me off was that the guy appeared to be in his fifties, which meant that he’s managed to get in twenty more years of smoking that I did, with no immediately apparent ill effects.
Given that to this day I still wish that I could smoke, I was annoyed to see someone much older than I am getting away with it.
I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but stoplight-inspired rants seldom do.
In any case, I was sitting there saying, “Sure, this bald old bastard gets to sit there happily enjoying his cigarette, and meanwhile here I am, smoke-free for over two years, and yet I’m the one who’s easily winded and is sitting here with the tightness in his chest.”
I then added, in a slow tone that indicated a dawning awareness of the significance of what I was saying, “And a stabbing pain whenever I take a deep breath. And pain and numbness all down my left arm. Wait a second…”
I didn’t get too much more time to think about it, as the light finally changed and traffic started moving, and as I went along the tightness and pains (which I’m pretty sure were just the result of heartburn brought on by eating a Granny Smith apple for breakfast) passed, and once I stopped resting my elbow on the door and moved it around, normal sensation returned to my left arm.
Obviously I was very shaken up by the experience, though, which is I why I had a Bacon Dog for lunch an hour later.
I really should take that sort of thing a little more seriously, though, I guess.
I mean, if nothing else, family history (though there are plenty of other indicators) shows that I’m a prime candidate for a heart attack somewhere along the line.
Somehow, though, I just can’t get myself too worked up about it. I think mostly because getting worked up about it would mean I’d actually have to do stuff.
And we can’t have that.
Besides, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m reasonably certain it’s going to be some sort of slapstick-style, Rube Goldbergian comedy of errors that takes me out of this world anyway.
Which reminds me, I need to give props to the Universe for getting in a good one on me yesterday.
Clearly I should have seen it coming, but that’s part of what makes it such an outstanding effort on the Universe’s behalf.
I was at the bathroom sink preparing to wash my hands, so I reached over to the soap dispenser and pushed down on the pump.
Nothing happened.
I tried again.
Still nothing.
I’ve run into all sorts of problems with recalcitrant pump dispensers over the years, so in annoyance I picked the soap dispenser up and was kind of jimmying the pump to see what the problem was.
Turns out there was simply dried soap clogging it, dried soap which was blown clear as I angrily pumped away, causing me to splatter soap all over my shirt and arm.
It would have been better if I’d gotten myself in the face (which, I imagine, is what it was hoping for), but even so, I have to give the Universe credit for so effectively taking advantage of my stupid short-sightedness.
Which leads me to…
Eye Am An Idiot Department:
One day last week in Red Hat training my eye started to really irritate me, so I headed to the bathroom, took out my contact, rinsed it off, and was about to put it back in when I noticed something very strange in the mirror.
There were these two grayish-white blotches on my eyeball.
“That can’t be good,” I said, as I leaned in for a closer look.
It looked, actually, rather like there were some sort of stickers placed directly on my eyeball.
As I moved my hand to try pull down my lid for a closer look, the splotches disappeared, and I realized that what I was seeing had been multiple reflections of the sink I was standing over.
I sighed, shook my head, replaced the contact, and went back to class, feeling that much dumber for the experience.
On that note, I’ll leave you with a link to an article on Superman that Neil Gaiman co-wrote for Wired.
Finding it impossible to block out the sound, I opted, against my better judgment, to get up, though after the walking alarm clocks had moved on I considered going back to bed, as I felt extremely tired.
I’m not sure why I was so tired, as I hadn’t stayed up particularly late, and it wasn’t that much earlier than when I normally get up.
Still, the greater than normal lethargy meant that I didn’t actually get showered, dressed, and out the door until about ten to 11.
I needed to get some things from Wal-Mart, which meant going to Sterling, as I avoid the Leesburg Wal-Mart, which is where ghetto meets white trash, at all costs.
Even though it was nearly 11 by the time I left, and I had to drive around 10 miles or so, I had completed my shopping and walked out the doors of Wal-Mart by 11:30.
So I had accomplished pretty much everything I needed to for the day in about 40 minutes.
I don’t know if that makes me a model of efficiency, or just really, really sad and pathetic.
In any case, I felt like I should do something else, though I wasn’t certain what. I tried to think if I had any reason to go to Best Buy, but was unable to think of one, which is odd and kind of scary.
Ultimately I headed over to the Dulles Town Center and grab some lunch at the food court, opting for my standard foot-long Bacon Dog.
As I was sitting there clogging my arteries, I was thinking that I had just been to the Town Center a little while ago, then realized that, in fact, it had been over a month ago, when I was trying to find something for Kathleen’s birthday.
It’s difficult to explain just how rapidly the months fly by for me with my odd schedule and the ever-increasing pace of my march towards middle age, but at times, like today, it can be a rather startling and unnerving realization.
From there I simply headed home, giving up any effort at making it seem as though I have a life and that there’s any reason for me to spend time out in the world.
Once I got home there were any number of things that I could have done, like some drawing, some tweaking of the Heroic Portraits site, messing around with my Red Hat installation, going for a walk, and so forth, but instead I just kind of sat around feeling tired, and after about an hour I decided to head out to the hammock and chillax for a while.
Having accomplished that, here I am, still feeling rather tired.
There’s an extremely long stoplight that I have to deal with whenever I go anywhere. Despite the odds against it, 99% of the time I arrive at the light just as it’s turned red, so I always have a long wait, which pretty much always puts me in a lousy mood and makes me feel inclined to rant to myself as I sit there waiting.
Today was no exception, though I actually had a particular topic to rant about as I watched the guy in front of me smoking a cigarette.
What set me off was that the guy appeared to be in his fifties, which meant that he’s managed to get in twenty more years of smoking that I did, with no immediately apparent ill effects.
Given that to this day I still wish that I could smoke, I was annoyed to see someone much older than I am getting away with it.
I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but stoplight-inspired rants seldom do.
In any case, I was sitting there saying, “Sure, this bald old bastard gets to sit there happily enjoying his cigarette, and meanwhile here I am, smoke-free for over two years, and yet I’m the one who’s easily winded and is sitting here with the tightness in his chest.”
I then added, in a slow tone that indicated a dawning awareness of the significance of what I was saying, “And a stabbing pain whenever I take a deep breath. And pain and numbness all down my left arm. Wait a second…”
I didn’t get too much more time to think about it, as the light finally changed and traffic started moving, and as I went along the tightness and pains (which I’m pretty sure were just the result of heartburn brought on by eating a Granny Smith apple for breakfast) passed, and once I stopped resting my elbow on the door and moved it around, normal sensation returned to my left arm.
Obviously I was very shaken up by the experience, though, which is I why I had a Bacon Dog for lunch an hour later.
I really should take that sort of thing a little more seriously, though, I guess.
I mean, if nothing else, family history (though there are plenty of other indicators) shows that I’m a prime candidate for a heart attack somewhere along the line.
Somehow, though, I just can’t get myself too worked up about it. I think mostly because getting worked up about it would mean I’d actually have to do stuff.
And we can’t have that.
Besides, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m reasonably certain it’s going to be some sort of slapstick-style, Rube Goldbergian comedy of errors that takes me out of this world anyway.
Which reminds me, I need to give props to the Universe for getting in a good one on me yesterday.
Clearly I should have seen it coming, but that’s part of what makes it such an outstanding effort on the Universe’s behalf.
I was at the bathroom sink preparing to wash my hands, so I reached over to the soap dispenser and pushed down on the pump.
Nothing happened.
I tried again.
Still nothing.
I’ve run into all sorts of problems with recalcitrant pump dispensers over the years, so in annoyance I picked the soap dispenser up and was kind of jimmying the pump to see what the problem was.
Turns out there was simply dried soap clogging it, dried soap which was blown clear as I angrily pumped away, causing me to splatter soap all over my shirt and arm.
It would have been better if I’d gotten myself in the face (which, I imagine, is what it was hoping for), but even so, I have to give the Universe credit for so effectively taking advantage of my stupid short-sightedness.
Which leads me to…
Eye Am An Idiot Department:
One day last week in Red Hat training my eye started to really irritate me, so I headed to the bathroom, took out my contact, rinsed it off, and was about to put it back in when I noticed something very strange in the mirror.
There were these two grayish-white blotches on my eyeball.
“That can’t be good,” I said, as I leaned in for a closer look.
It looked, actually, rather like there were some sort of stickers placed directly on my eyeball.
As I moved my hand to try pull down my lid for a closer look, the splotches disappeared, and I realized that what I was seeing had been multiple reflections of the sink I was standing over.
I sighed, shook my head, replaced the contact, and went back to class, feeling that much dumber for the experience.
On that note, I’ll leave you with a link to an article on Superman that Neil Gaiman co-wrote for Wired.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I Obviously Haven't Been Paying Attention
I know I've mentioned (and linked to) the "Superman is a Dick" site many times, but apparently, totally unnoticed by me, over a year ago a site devoted not only to the "Dick" covers, but all of the out there and suggestive covers of comics' past popped up.
Check it out at SuperDickery.com.
Check it out at SuperDickery.com.
Spring Cleaning
Unless you’re an especially eagle-eyed Threshold reader, you probably haven’t noticed that in addition to adding a link to te Heroic Portraits site over on the right (which you may have noticed), I removed the link to 15,000 Years, the blog I kept as my contribution to National Novel Writing Month back in 2004.
Beyond removing the link, I actually took down the entire blog (I blogged the novel as I wrote it).
Why? Well, it was my first ever attempt at writing a complete novel, and was, actually, the longest single story I’d ever written, and while it was a success in that I made the word count within the deadline (50,000 words in 30 days), it was decidedly not a success in any meaningful fashion.
Though I was proud of it solely in terms of the accomplishment, my attitude toward the actual content of it was something along the lines of patient indulgence; I was willing to accept its innumerable shortcomings because of the circumstances under which I wrote it.
However, after a year and a half my patient indulgence has worn thin and I’ve begun to hate it because of its shortcomings and can no longer ignore them just because it was written with very little forethought in an extremely short space of time.
I think the fact that it had some amount of potential – potential which I couldn’t bring myself to go back to develop because, after living with it day-in, day-out for a month, I was sick to death of it – is what really made me hate it.
The other thing that started to bother me was that the only people who were going to it (I was tracking its traffic; it didn’t get much) seemed to be people doing a search on the phrase “hands under her blouse,” and then viewing one page and moving on.
Add to that the fact that whenever I looked at it I’d find that it was riddled with typos (I discovered that Chapter Twenty-Six, for example, was actually posted as Chapter Tweny-Six thanks to some Web searcher’s typo) and poorly-constructed sentences, and the end result is that it’s gone.
Done.
Dead.
If you ever had any intention of ever reading it, tough. I don’t think I’ll ever share it with anyone ever again.
Similarly, though I never did post it, I grew to hate 2005’s entry, though my hatred of it grew much, much more rapidly, and only the two people who have read it (if they ever did read it after I sent it to them) ever will read it.
I also obliterated the blog I’d started for my whole Ideal Queen of Perfection idea, which I started out thinking was funny, but as I kept failing to develop the idea into something other than just an amusing notion I started to have less and less interest in it and find it less and less funny, and since there was nothing actually on the blog, I said, “Fuck it,” and deleted it.
Now if only I could perform this kind of clean up on my life…
Beyond removing the link, I actually took down the entire blog (I blogged the novel as I wrote it).
Why? Well, it was my first ever attempt at writing a complete novel, and was, actually, the longest single story I’d ever written, and while it was a success in that I made the word count within the deadline (50,000 words in 30 days), it was decidedly not a success in any meaningful fashion.
Though I was proud of it solely in terms of the accomplishment, my attitude toward the actual content of it was something along the lines of patient indulgence; I was willing to accept its innumerable shortcomings because of the circumstances under which I wrote it.
However, after a year and a half my patient indulgence has worn thin and I’ve begun to hate it because of its shortcomings and can no longer ignore them just because it was written with very little forethought in an extremely short space of time.
I think the fact that it had some amount of potential – potential which I couldn’t bring myself to go back to develop because, after living with it day-in, day-out for a month, I was sick to death of it – is what really made me hate it.
The other thing that started to bother me was that the only people who were going to it (I was tracking its traffic; it didn’t get much) seemed to be people doing a search on the phrase “hands under her blouse,” and then viewing one page and moving on.
Add to that the fact that whenever I looked at it I’d find that it was riddled with typos (I discovered that Chapter Twenty-Six, for example, was actually posted as Chapter Tweny-Six thanks to some Web searcher’s typo) and poorly-constructed sentences, and the end result is that it’s gone.
Done.
Dead.
If you ever had any intention of ever reading it, tough. I don’t think I’ll ever share it with anyone ever again.
Similarly, though I never did post it, I grew to hate 2005’s entry, though my hatred of it grew much, much more rapidly, and only the two people who have read it (if they ever did read it after I sent it to them) ever will read it.
I also obliterated the blog I’d started for my whole Ideal Queen of Perfection idea, which I started out thinking was funny, but as I kept failing to develop the idea into something other than just an amusing notion I started to have less and less interest in it and find it less and less funny, and since there was nothing actually on the blog, I said, “Fuck it,” and deleted it.
Now if only I could perform this kind of clean up on my life…
I Didn't Know I Could Hurt There
After going six days straight between Red Hat training and work, it was nice to have a day off yesterday.
Or rather, it would have been if I hadn’t had to go to a training session yesterday afternoon.
It was only a couple of hours, but it was a little irritating to have something interfere with my day off.
It didn’t help that the training was really, really boring.
The session was held at one of the local facilities of a company we do a lot of business with, and was basically just a high-level review of their network and how our data travels over it.
The person giving the training is this engineer I’ve met before who’s a really nice guy who knows a lot about networking, as he’s been involved in the business for a long, long time. I’m talking about being around to see the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors long time.
So when he talks about this sort of thing it goes beyond simply being over my head to being somewhere in the level of a low earth orbit.
It was reminiscent of this class I took in college called simply “The English Language,” which was a very in-depth exploration of the language, its history, its variations, and its mechanics.
The professor was from India, and while many people complained about his accent, there was no way you could dispute his command of the language. He was very much the product of a colonial education and as a result knew all of the ins and outs of the language better than most people know the backs of their hands.
As frequently happens with someone who has that kind of wealth of knowledge of a particular subject, there was a sort of disconnect from reality that occurred in his mind between what he knew and what he assumed other people knew.
For example, he would frequently advise us, “Remember your Latin,” to which we had to respond, with some trepidation and fear of derision, that none of us actually had any Latin to remember.
In the training yesterday I had a similar experience when the engineer said, with considerable amusement, that a particular piece of equipment “still uses rip routes, if you can believe it.”
I have no idea why that would be funny, or why I should have difficulty believing it. It was kind of like having Nick Burns crack a joke, though this guy is considerably less surly.
In any case, because I was going to be in her neck of the woods that afternoon I IMed Kathleen to see if she wanted to get together for lunch.
We agreed on a place and a time, and at the appointed time I was waiting outside her building to pick her up. That’s pretty much the way we always do it, but for some reason this time Kathleen thought – though she found it odd – that I had wanted to just meet her where we were going to eat, so after I’d been sitting there waiting for ten minutes, which is pretty late even for her, she called and said, “Please tell me you’re not sitting there waiting for me to come out.”Ultimately no real harm was done, but it did make for a short lunch.
Anyway, after I got home from the training I went to work on the Heroic Portraits site…after I finished my self-portrait. Basically I was just stalling because I didn’t want to have to deal with putting the site together. It’s such a pain in the ass, what with having to make sure that all of the links work, make the thumbnails, and etc.
I haven’t tested it in multiple browsers, though the application I used can check for the most common compatibility issues. It found some possible issues on the “About the Artist” page, but that page isn’t really that important, so it’s not a big deal to me if it doesn’t render properly in Firefox or something.
Today I went out and did a little bit of grocery shopping, though I’m planning on a more significant outing tomorrow.
While I was in the store I noticed this woman in a track suit. In addition to wondering, as Scott did a bit ago at work, why so many people seem to be wearing track suits these days (though this one, at least, was not velour), I noticed that she had an extremely nice ass. One of the best I’ve seen in a long time.
She wasn’t especially pretty, though if she didn’t look so haggard and prematurely aged (I’d guess she was in her late twenties or early thirties, but her tired, baggy eyes made her look much older) she would have been considerably more attractive.
Still, she was attractive, and I have to say that ass – which was, ironically enough, well-served by the track suit – went a long way to make up for her other shortcomings.
There are people who claim that the supermarket is a good place to meet women, but I’ve never found that to be the case, as it’s fairly unusual to see an attractive woman, and even when you do, she’s married.
I never managed to do a ring check on this woman, but based on the contents of her cart she at least has kids.
Anyway, how would I have approached her even if I’d been of a mind to do so, and if she hadn’t been talking to someone on her cell phone the whole time?
“Hey, I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve got a great ass, and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the way you’re leaning forward on your cart and making it stand out more prominently. What are you doing tonight?”
I never really heard her say anything, but while it was of ambiguous ethnicity, she just looked like English wouldn’t be her first language. So odds are I might have been able to say those things to her without her being able to understand me well enough to be insulted, but I have the feeling that rejection and humiliation are the same in any language.
In any case, she got in line behind me, and while I was standing at the end of the register and waiting for the cashier to finish ringing me up I had the perfect vantage point for watching her bend over to retrieve items from her cart to put on the belt.
So that was my cheap thrill for the day.
When I got home I started to prepare the chicken I’d taken out of the freezer yesterday for the slow cooker.
It was mostly thawed, but the giblets were still pretty well cemented in by ice, and as I worked at pulling them out, I was struck by the absurdity of removing a chicken’s internal organs only to put them in a bag and shove them back into the chicken so that the person who buys the chicken will then have to remove them again.
After that I decided to go for a walk.
Early on, I managed to injure a part of my body that it never occurred to me that I could injure, especially by engaging in an activity as low-impact as walking. I kept walking hoping that this kink would work itself out, which it did, but it took a while and so, feeling soured on the idea of walking today, I decided to just turn around and head home.
I’ve signed up to take the Red Hat Certified Technician class and test in July. I had been thinking about trying to take it in June so that, after failing it, I could sign up for the Certified Engineer class and test in July with Scott (you have to take the RHCT class before you can take the RHCE class, and when you take the CE test you also take the CT, and it’s possible to fail the CE but still pass the CT).
However, the only June offering of the CT class would have conflicted with an event in my social life (What the hell? Something conflicting with an event in my social life? Well, at least it doesn’t involve a chick, so it’s not too far outside the pale.), so I had to sign up for the CT class in July.
I could have still managed to squeeze into the CE class, but there was another conflict (Another instance of me having something better do? What is going on with the world?), as that’s taking place the week I’m flying home to Michigan (Oh, I’m just going home for a while. That’s okay then.).
I usually go home a little earlier in the year, but this time around I decided to wait until summer was in full swing. Of course, I was going to go a bit earlier than that, but I found out that my old grade school is having its 100th anniversary celebration towards the end of July, so I decided I’d go home in time for that.
I’m not really thrilled by the prospect. I mean, it’s not like I have happy memories of my nine years (Kindergarten through Eighth grade; currently it only goes up to Sixth grade) in that quaint little hellhole, but my mom wanted me to go, and there’s a possibility that my brother might go home for it as well, so I figured I should.
Speaking of Red Hat, the Munin’s Red Hat Desktop: You Make The Call voting has so far resulted in a tie, with two votes for Version 1 and two votes for Version 2.
Of course, given my reluctance to boot up Red Hat and try to sort out the mouse problem it may be a moot point anyway.
In any case, this entry has been long and rambling enough, I think.
Or rather, it would have been if I hadn’t had to go to a training session yesterday afternoon.
It was only a couple of hours, but it was a little irritating to have something interfere with my day off.
It didn’t help that the training was really, really boring.
The session was held at one of the local facilities of a company we do a lot of business with, and was basically just a high-level review of their network and how our data travels over it.
The person giving the training is this engineer I’ve met before who’s a really nice guy who knows a lot about networking, as he’s been involved in the business for a long, long time. I’m talking about being around to see the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors long time.
So when he talks about this sort of thing it goes beyond simply being over my head to being somewhere in the level of a low earth orbit.
It was reminiscent of this class I took in college called simply “The English Language,” which was a very in-depth exploration of the language, its history, its variations, and its mechanics.
The professor was from India, and while many people complained about his accent, there was no way you could dispute his command of the language. He was very much the product of a colonial education and as a result knew all of the ins and outs of the language better than most people know the backs of their hands.
As frequently happens with someone who has that kind of wealth of knowledge of a particular subject, there was a sort of disconnect from reality that occurred in his mind between what he knew and what he assumed other people knew.
For example, he would frequently advise us, “Remember your Latin,” to which we had to respond, with some trepidation and fear of derision, that none of us actually had any Latin to remember.
In the training yesterday I had a similar experience when the engineer said, with considerable amusement, that a particular piece of equipment “still uses rip routes, if you can believe it.”
I have no idea why that would be funny, or why I should have difficulty believing it. It was kind of like having Nick Burns crack a joke, though this guy is considerably less surly.
In any case, because I was going to be in her neck of the woods that afternoon I IMed Kathleen to see if she wanted to get together for lunch.
We agreed on a place and a time, and at the appointed time I was waiting outside her building to pick her up. That’s pretty much the way we always do it, but for some reason this time Kathleen thought – though she found it odd – that I had wanted to just meet her where we were going to eat, so after I’d been sitting there waiting for ten minutes, which is pretty late even for her, she called and said, “Please tell me you’re not sitting there waiting for me to come out.”Ultimately no real harm was done, but it did make for a short lunch.
Anyway, after I got home from the training I went to work on the Heroic Portraits site…after I finished my self-portrait. Basically I was just stalling because I didn’t want to have to deal with putting the site together. It’s such a pain in the ass, what with having to make sure that all of the links work, make the thumbnails, and etc.
I haven’t tested it in multiple browsers, though the application I used can check for the most common compatibility issues. It found some possible issues on the “About the Artist” page, but that page isn’t really that important, so it’s not a big deal to me if it doesn’t render properly in Firefox or something.
Today I went out and did a little bit of grocery shopping, though I’m planning on a more significant outing tomorrow.
While I was in the store I noticed this woman in a track suit. In addition to wondering, as Scott did a bit ago at work, why so many people seem to be wearing track suits these days (though this one, at least, was not velour), I noticed that she had an extremely nice ass. One of the best I’ve seen in a long time.
She wasn’t especially pretty, though if she didn’t look so haggard and prematurely aged (I’d guess she was in her late twenties or early thirties, but her tired, baggy eyes made her look much older) she would have been considerably more attractive.
Still, she was attractive, and I have to say that ass – which was, ironically enough, well-served by the track suit – went a long way to make up for her other shortcomings.
There are people who claim that the supermarket is a good place to meet women, but I’ve never found that to be the case, as it’s fairly unusual to see an attractive woman, and even when you do, she’s married.
I never managed to do a ring check on this woman, but based on the contents of her cart she at least has kids.
Anyway, how would I have approached her even if I’d been of a mind to do so, and if she hadn’t been talking to someone on her cell phone the whole time?
“Hey, I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve got a great ass, and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the way you’re leaning forward on your cart and making it stand out more prominently. What are you doing tonight?”
I never really heard her say anything, but while it was of ambiguous ethnicity, she just looked like English wouldn’t be her first language. So odds are I might have been able to say those things to her without her being able to understand me well enough to be insulted, but I have the feeling that rejection and humiliation are the same in any language.
In any case, she got in line behind me, and while I was standing at the end of the register and waiting for the cashier to finish ringing me up I had the perfect vantage point for watching her bend over to retrieve items from her cart to put on the belt.
So that was my cheap thrill for the day.
When I got home I started to prepare the chicken I’d taken out of the freezer yesterday for the slow cooker.
It was mostly thawed, but the giblets were still pretty well cemented in by ice, and as I worked at pulling them out, I was struck by the absurdity of removing a chicken’s internal organs only to put them in a bag and shove them back into the chicken so that the person who buys the chicken will then have to remove them again.
After that I decided to go for a walk.
Early on, I managed to injure a part of my body that it never occurred to me that I could injure, especially by engaging in an activity as low-impact as walking. I kept walking hoping that this kink would work itself out, which it did, but it took a while and so, feeling soured on the idea of walking today, I decided to just turn around and head home.
I’ve signed up to take the Red Hat Certified Technician class and test in July. I had been thinking about trying to take it in June so that, after failing it, I could sign up for the Certified Engineer class and test in July with Scott (you have to take the RHCT class before you can take the RHCE class, and when you take the CE test you also take the CT, and it’s possible to fail the CE but still pass the CT).
However, the only June offering of the CT class would have conflicted with an event in my social life (What the hell? Something conflicting with an event in my social life? Well, at least it doesn’t involve a chick, so it’s not too far outside the pale.), so I had to sign up for the CT class in July.
I could have still managed to squeeze into the CE class, but there was another conflict (Another instance of me having something better do? What is going on with the world?), as that’s taking place the week I’m flying home to Michigan (Oh, I’m just going home for a while. That’s okay then.).
I usually go home a little earlier in the year, but this time around I decided to wait until summer was in full swing. Of course, I was going to go a bit earlier than that, but I found out that my old grade school is having its 100th anniversary celebration towards the end of July, so I decided I’d go home in time for that.
I’m not really thrilled by the prospect. I mean, it’s not like I have happy memories of my nine years (Kindergarten through Eighth grade; currently it only goes up to Sixth grade) in that quaint little hellhole, but my mom wanted me to go, and there’s a possibility that my brother might go home for it as well, so I figured I should.
Speaking of Red Hat, the Munin’s Red Hat Desktop: You Make The Call voting has so far resulted in a tie, with two votes for Version 1 and two votes for Version 2.
Of course, given my reluctance to boot up Red Hat and try to sort out the mouse problem it may be a moot point anyway.
In any case, this entry has been long and rambling enough, I think.
It's Alive! Well, Kind Of...
It's not pretty, and it damn near drove me insane (or more insane, as the case may be), but www.heroicportraits.com is now officially live.
I'm sure I'll have to make all sorts of major alterations eventually, but in the meantime it's out there for people to see and to get in touch with me.
It's pretty late, as I spent the better part of the evening slaping together the simple site (and figuring out why the images weren't loading on some of the pages, and then fixing the problem after figuring out why), so I don't really have the energy for a full entry, but I thought I should plug the new site here.
Oh, and one thing of note at the site is my new Heroic Self-Portrait, which can be seen here.
One other thing of note is that Kathleen gave me the thumbs up on her portrait, and that can be seen here.
(Those of you who ended up at Threshold following a search on latex cat-suit may want to check it out; it's bound to be less disappointing than the picture of the cartoon cat that you probably ended up seeing.)
I'm sure I'll have to make all sorts of major alterations eventually, but in the meantime it's out there for people to see and to get in touch with me.
It's pretty late, as I spent the better part of the evening slaping together the simple site (and figuring out why the images weren't loading on some of the pages, and then fixing the problem after figuring out why), so I don't really have the energy for a full entry, but I thought I should plug the new site here.
Oh, and one thing of note at the site is my new Heroic Self-Portrait, which can be seen here.
One other thing of note is that Kathleen gave me the thumbs up on her portrait, and that can be seen here.
(Those of you who ended up at Threshold following a search on latex cat-suit may want to check it out; it's bound to be less disappointing than the picture of the cartoon cat that you probably ended up seeing.)
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Just Like A Presidential Election...
...Munin's Red Hat Desktop: You Make The Call has had an extremely low voter turnout so far.
The leader at this point is Version 2, with two votes.
Version 1 has received one vote, delivered in person.
Polls remain open pretty much until I either get my current mouse working with Red Hat, or buy a different mouse to use with it.
So you still have time. Pretend this is some piece of crap reality show that no one should care about - and which most people deny being interested in, even though the ratings are through the roof so somebody has to be watching it - and cast your vote, either via comments or e-mail.
At least in this case voting is free, as you don't have to call a 900 number or send a text message.
And when it's all over, you can say that you made a difference: you helped decide what some weirdo used as his desktop wallpaper on one of his computers.
But beyond that, when you participate in the democratic process, everybody wins.
The leader at this point is Version 2, with two votes.
Version 1 has received one vote, delivered in person.
Polls remain open pretty much until I either get my current mouse working with Red Hat, or buy a different mouse to use with it.
So you still have time. Pretend this is some piece of crap reality show that no one should care about - and which most people deny being interested in, even though the ratings are through the roof so somebody has to be watching it - and cast your vote, either via comments or e-mail.
At least in this case voting is free, as you don't have to call a 900 number or send a text message.
And when it's all over, you can say that you made a difference: you helped decide what some weirdo used as his desktop wallpaper on one of his computers.
But beyond that, when you participate in the democratic process, everybody wins.
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