Legacy

Just came back to work after a five-day weekend. A micro staycation, I guess. Really I was just taking advantage of my regular every-other-Monday-off and this Wednesday’s holiday to get some stuff done around the house. All I had to do was take Tuesday off to get that five-day. Doesn’t happen too often.

Anyway, my family is coming in for Thanksgiving and there are many things to get done. I could have done a lot more, but I’m happy that I got a couple of things accomplished that J-mom’s been wanting me to do for, oh, two years or so. Shelves in the garage. Man, who’da thunk something so relatively simple to do would take me so long to get around to? Well, anyone who knows me pretty well would have to say that they would. But they’re done now and the garage is almost there.

I’m not sure what other projects J-mom has in store for me, but I still have to haul off some things from our back porch and do some general cleanup back there. I’d like to be able to actually move around on my porch while doing Thanksgiving setup/cooking.

As for the title of this post, to prove that I didn’t just throw that out there for no reason, I present to you my office shredder:



Is there something poetic in this or what?

Veteran's Day

To all veterans, past, present and future, those who paved the way for the freedoms we now enjoy, my contemporaries and those I've known, those who've yet to serve - thank you.

RIP Fort Hood soldiers

Rest peaceful warriors.

On dreams and dairy

I don’t often have vivid dreams, but last night I did. I dreamed I was a contestant on The Next Iron Chef. I guess it’s not terribly odd as I’ve become a pretty big fan of the show and I find myself wanting to become a better cook the more Food Network I watch. What’s weird is how completely sane and average the dream was. I mean, even the rare times I have a vivid dream and it’s about something mundane, fantastic things usually happen. There is often flight or some other kind of superhuman or supernatural goings on. This time, we just cooked.

I also remember what I cooked. I pounded out a chicken and pork cutlet very thin, almost paper thin (guess that’s a bit of fantasy). I then wrapped them around some sliced veggies and a fish stick. Can’t remember what fish I used, but I cut and breaded it myself in the dream. I wrapped the cutlets around the veggies and fish stick and then deep fried the entire thing. I’m almost thinking this isn’t sounding too bad.

Oddly, I was so proud of what I’d came up with. I was sure I had the winning dish. Alas, it wasn’t to be. I was beaten out by Amanda Freitag, who is an actual contestant on the current iteration of the show. Man, I was bummed (even though she’s my favorite to win the actual show). I had to, in my dream, placate myself with an amazing caramel apple cake.

Maybe it was the lortab I had to take yesterday, but that was a damn fine dream.

Memphis is about to float away, y'all

Even the amphibians are seeking shelter. Found this little sucker in our foyer this morning.

So much rain! If it doesn't stop soon we're going to be flushed away and land on top of New Orleans. Which, come to think of it, maybe isn't such a bad thing after all.

Happy 70th anniversary Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics started 70 years ago as Timely Comics. Their first comic, Marvel Comics #1 was released in October 1939. It’s hard to believe that the company has been around this long and has had so much impact on our collective culture. The recent purchase by Disney has many of us long-time fans concerned, but looking at the history of ownership and the crap they’ve put up with, the company should hold up fine.

It’s hard to explain exactly what Marvel Comics means to me. First and foremost they were my comic company of choice. Before I discovered independent companies, I was an X-Man fan. I was a Wolverine fanboy before there were Wolverine fanboys. Of course, my innocent fascination turned to disgust by the later ‘80s when the very comics I turned to to teach me a degree of worldliness displayed the same behavior they had taught me to be cynical of.

While I won’t go as far as to say comics flat-out taught me any great life lessons, they did help me better understand certain things. Being raised in a Christian home, the values of right and wrong were always important. Comics reinforced these concepts while at the same time introducing complex ethical dynamics. Beyond that, though, I think the biggest thing I got from any comic is a yearning for literature. Comics generously lift characters and ideas from all kinds of places. Because I read about Hercules, Thor, Faust, Grendel, and the concepts of Orwell and Huxley in the pages of comic books, I decided to go out and find the original books.

That is not to say that comics aren’t capable of being great literature in their own right. Everyone uses The Watchmen or V for Vendetta as examples, but I’d list Camelot 3000, Stray Toasters, Elektra: Assasin, Maus (more than almost any other), and many others as great examples of the heights to which comics are capable of climbing.

I found it difficult to give up X-Men even though Wolverine was literally showing up in every Marvel title while having two of his own books of one which was bi-weekly. I found a new psycho in First Comics’ The Badger, but it still didn’t have the nostalgic pull of the old-school Marvel comics. I eventually weaned myself off of them when I got into my later teens. I was far more interested in girls and figured that reducing my amount of geekiness would improve my chances. However, I’ve come back to read them time after time and I’m now an avid reader again.

The Times Online has a wonderful list of 70 facts about Marvel comics that you (maybe) don’t know.

The X-Men cover I chose to accompany this post is Uncanny X-Men #216. I chose this issue specifically because there was a full-panel splash page of Wolverine on Page 1 that I traced and drew and drew and drew. That’s how I learned to draw comics tracing and then doing free hand. I never got very good, but, at least for a while, I was able to hold my own. So, thank you Jackson Guice and Dan Green for creating compelling artwork I copied a whole bunch.

My hardware woes (and a garage update)

The garage progresses. J-mom and our wonderful friend made much headway. I hope to get shelves up on the other side so we can finish it up. Then we can make the kids go play in there.

I am fixing a couple of our computers. One of my laptops has a bad hard drive. I ordered a replacement, but I ordered a SATA instead of PATA. And, of course, Tiger Direct didn't accept returns on the item because it was OEM. I wound up having to order another new hard drive and I decided to buy a USB enclosure for the SATA one so I'll have a handy mobile external hard drive.

My next computer project is causing a bit more grief. For quite some time, I've been getting a CMOS Checksum error when booting up my primary desktop. I thought it was a bad battery, but after replacing it, I still got the error. Much Google-fu later, I came to the conclusion it was the motherboard. I ordered a replacement and went to install it. Everything was going fine until I got to the part where I needed to connect the front-panel items to the motherboard headers. All my devices have 8/10 pin connectors. The new motherboard has 4/5 pin connectors. Now I have to figure out how to make these connections. It's giving me a headache.

I have found tons of information about regarding the various types of motherboard headers. Tons of information about how to make sure you connect the correct wire to the correct header. I've found next to nothing regarding how to connect a 8/10-pin connector to a motherboard with a 4/5-pin header.

Anyone with any information on my latter problem here, please feel free to overshare.

Meant to post this some time ago

A pic of Darth Allie wondering why we must hate her so.

We've lived here for two years, guess it's time we start acting like we own the place

I am a horrible procrastinator. Nowhere is this more evident than in my attitude toward housework. "Never put off 'til tomorrow what you can put off 'til next month," is my usual approach to getting things done in the homestead. However, yesterday I actually made a bit of headway on a project J-mom and I have been wanting to tackle for a while - the garage.

There will always be yardwork to be done. There's always dishes to clean, floors to sweep and garbage to take out. However, the garage is a huge task that's just overwhelming. I am not exaggerating by any degree when I say it looks like someone backed a dump truck up to my garage and just dumped stuff in it. And that's because when we moved in, we used the garage as a staging area. The furniture and such went right where we knew it would, but a lot of boxes and such were stacked in the garage and we slowly got to sorting them out. Once we had everything we needed, everything else just sat there. Seasonal clothes. Decorations. Who knows? As it remained stacked in boxes and Rubbermaid containers, the detritus of life also accumulated around it. Slowly the garage became unmanageable.

Yesterday I struck a blow against the clutter. I cleared out one side of the garage and built shelves! Perhaps that doesn't sound like much, but it was a huge step forward in regaining use of this space. What's really amazing to me is that it's the first time I've ever attempted to build a project this big. Now, the shelves aren't pretty, but I got up in about four hours and I'm proud of that.

Today, J-mom and a friend are supposed to tackle the rest of the garage, but it's supposed to pour rain all day. Figures. They'll have to reschedule, I'm sure.