Better Late Than Ever

I haven't gotten a chance to ramble about 24 yet, so I shall start now with the usual collection of weird ramblings. SPOILERS ahead. You've been warned.

- So Jack's dad is Zephram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive. That explains how Jack can get anywhere in LA in "10 minutes".

- Nadia is getting hotter each week, but she set off three "Uh oh's" this week. More in a moment.

- What funeral was Chloe on the way to when she got called into work this morning? Did they finally push Edgar into an open grave?

- Dr. Pepper guy (yeah, I know he's not the guy who did those annoying Dr. Pepper ads in the 80's, but he reminds me of him so that's what I call him) is the world's whiniest boss. Anyone who has ever worked under me is not allowed to comment on this blog.

- Aha! Bill Buchanan did something incompetent. Go figger.

- So let me understand this...15 arab detainees are beating the shit out of a guy in the middle of a armed detention facility and the FIRST person through the gate is the President's sister.

- UH OH #1 : Nadia is of Middle Eastern descent. Odds that she's the mole: 100 to 1.

- "The work you're doing for me has not gone unnoticed." - Translation: When I'm in front of the firing squad, I'll pull you in front of me.

- Presidential Address Tips 101 : Keep a picture of a President the public liked behind you at all times when you're on camera.

- UH OH #2 : Dr. Pepper guy logged her into HIS account. Odds that she's the mole: 20 to 1.

- I keep closing my eyes when Tom and Karen are fighting and pretend it's John Cage telling Ally McBeal how annoying she is. Is that weird?

- UH OH #3 : Nadia gave Dr. Pepper a knowing "I'd like to screw you right before I kill everyone in this room" look. Odds that she's the mole: 10,000 to 1. Too obvious. It's probably Bill.

- A red shirt got the drop on Jack. He is so fucked.

- "Gimmie back my gun." Pure Jack.

- Looooooong look at Marilyn. That kid is sooooooooooooooooo Jack's son. Just wait kids, there's another annoying Bauer offspring for next season. Someone wake the cougars.

- Has anyone been stabbed or shot in the thigh this season? I'm losing interest fast.

- I want to see Fayed at his hideout with "Dex" from the Qwest Dex commercials sitting on his kitchen counter. "Dex, I need someone to reprogram the triggers for a Russian suitcase nuclear bomb." "Oh, I know four people within 15 miles that can do that for you! Should I dial?" (I gotta skip over the commercials more)

- Team two to Team one...Team two to Team one...ah well, let's just wait. Oh look, a mushroom cloud!

Next week, Jack, his dad and the two red shirts dig a large hole. I presume, that the hold was already there because it would take 1 man (the other is "watching them") well over an hour to dig that hole and we just can't be bothered by watching a man dig a hole for an hour. Unless you count a Presidential address. Anyway, Jack and dad are staring into the hole. Guess who's going to end up in it. I predict that Nadia will just get hotter. Her and Chloe should never appear on screen together. I mean really.

Rest In Peace, Oh Floppy One

And to think that I started my computer career with punch cards and cassette tape drives. I remember when the floppy was new technology.

Still, he hung on valiantly. PC World has declared the floppy dead.

Trees They Can't Find

What the hell is going on in that stupid new McDonald's commercial? It's about their Dollar Menu and making fun of the "new Dollar Menunaires" or some such crap. Toward the end of the commercial, some idiot is flashed on the screen identified as "Jeremy Miller" (I had to look it up on IMDB.com) saying "These people live like money grows on trees. Trees they can't find!"

WTF?

I don't even know what that line means, much less this whole stupid ad campaign. Thank God I can skip past this crap on Tivo.

You Just Never Know

My 5-year old is very smart. She can do math, she can spell, and she's a wiz kid on the Internet. She also knows how to find the stuff that interests here.

So she very innocently types in www.cinderella.com expecting some sort of fairy princess web site.

Whoops.

Fortunately, the wife was close by and my daughter says "Oh, I don't think this is a website for kids."

So now we're to the point where it's time to carefully where she goes and what she's does. Not that I think she's going to be setting up a MySpace page anytime soon (or while there's breath in my body) but I'm now worried about she might actually stumble across.

And yes, I spent about two hours typing www.[INSERT DISNEY CHARACTER HERE].com into the URL bar.

*sigh*

The More You Know - Thanks NBC!

Who needs WebMD? This hilarious little ditty from this week's episode of Scrubs pretty much explains it all. If you get a chance to see the whole episode, it was an absolute riot!

Ice + Video Camera + Cars = Fun

We recently had a wicked ice storm here in the Northwest. It essentially went like this:

1) It got cold.
2) The rain froze on its way to the ground.
3) Everyone decided to try and drive as fast as humanly possible to get home before the caffeine buzz wore off.

For those of you in the warmer climates, here's what it looked like.



By the way, we can only assume that the guy in the first 30 seconds of this video is thinking "Well, I've already dented my car so I'm just going to go fucking crazy!"

Oh, The Burning!

These numbers were a lot higher 30 minutes ago. Yes, The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft arrived in stores today. Yes, I bought it. Fortunately, the minute I brought it home my wife got a package from an ebay purchase that defused any potential wrath. My skill in luck just increased by 1!

What's New

Despite the fact that I have had a computer since I was 15 (a TI-994A, thank you Dad) I have never purchased a desktop system off the shelf. Rather, I have always built my systems by hand.

Until now.

A couple of weeks ago, during the installation of a webcam, my motherboard suffered a disastrous crash and I suspect took my entire IDE bus with it. The motherboard beeps told me things were not good so I was looking at a messy repair. However, I had been running an Athlon XP 1.7 chip and older PC2100 DDR memory. After a quick check with CompuUSA, I realized that I would need a full motherboard, processor and memory upgrade. Add to the fact that I plan on upgrading to Windows Vista at some point, it was going to be a costly upgrade.

So I thought, why not just get a new system? Our monitor had begun to waver and I've wanted a flatscreen to clear up some deskspace. So after some time at the big box stores, I settled on a HP Dual Core 3800 with 1G of DDR2 Ram. It also uses Microsoft Windows XP Media Edition with the Media Center (which I really enjoy). The best part was how Best Buy does their package deals. The 17" m0nitor that comes with the HP bundles, well, sucks. It's fuzzy at any resolution and I hated it. The salesgirl told me that I could pay the difference for the full price of the monitor and substitute something else. So for another $25 I got a 19" LG widescreen flat panel. VERY NICE.

Pros: Nice system, AMAZINGLY quiet! I can barely hear the fan at all. Media Center is a joy and so intuitive my 3-year old can find his pics and videos to watch.

Cons: Comes with Norton's Facism Pack. Why anyone uses this piece of shit, reactionary virus protection is beyond me. Video is not the best and will require a better card at some point along with a bigger power supply. Suffices for now.

Now, the big problem is that I lost one HD and of course it's the one with my kids pictures on it. I have to find someone to do data recovery. :(

From One Speck of Sand to Another

I was downloading some Hubble photos last night (one of the last things I enjoy doing on the Net) and came across this, one of my favorites. This picture is known as the "Hubble Deep Field North". I won't go into the whole techno babble of it all but this essentially represents a pinhole photograph of a spec in our sky, millions of light years deep. According to NASA, there are over 100 galaxies just in this photo. Remember, this is a single pinhole in the curtain of the sky.

The estimates are that every galaxy contains roughly 100 Million stars, each with an average of 10 planets around them.

I like to stare at this picture when I'm depressed. I try to draw myself into the existential feeling of infinity. I truly think that somewhere in that exercise, the mind shuts down in self-defense as we cannot possibly ponder the depths of "endlessness" from the closed confines our short life spans. On the other side of that coin, is thinking of how infinitely small we truly are.

Think of it this way. When we die a house mourns. A street supports. A city denotes. A state records. A nation tallies. A world goes on. The universe...what? If the Earth and the entire civilization of mankind disappeared, would anything anywhere notice? Stare at this picture long enough, and I think the answer is clear.

And So Much For 2007

I really had high hopes for 2007.

2006, as years go, was crap for me. It started bad in January and with very few exceptions, never got better. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the year. So I really thought that starting fresh in 2007 (I know, it's stupid to assume that the change of a calendar page is in any way a fresh start) would be possible.

So as part of that, I had decided a month ago to take better care of myself. I started by deciding to get rid of the growth on my left upper lip that developed after a bad shaving cut several years ago. The doctor tried to freeze it off last year, but it just came back worse. He said that we could just cut it off. So a couple of days after Christmas, I had it cut off. Standard operating procedure is to get a biopsy. Nothing serious, the doctor said.

Then, last night (January 2nd) the doctor calls me on my cell phone while I'm in my carpool.

The conversation went something like this....

"blah blah blah blah cancer blah blah blah blah cancer blah blah blah blah cancer.

Oh, and did I mention the cancer?"

So I'm in a car with two co-workers when the doctor uses probably the worst word in their latin-laced vocabulary. Hence, I started joking with him. I think maybe that confused him a bit.

The scoop is that the growth on my face is a basel carcinoma. It's not life threatening, and some websites I read said that its a nuisance at best. I understand that I'm not going to die from this but the procedure doesn't sound like fun. I have to get even more gouged out of my face so that certainly sucks. It does mean that I now get to ride the yearly train to search my body for even more cancer. Yipee.

I have to say that 2007 looked good for one whole day, then went straight to crap. I guess there's always 2008.

And David Slew Goliath

Without question, tonight's Fiesta Bowl was the single most exciting football game I have seen in years. Going into it, there was no chance that Boise State was going to be Oklahoma. Tell that to the Sooners, eh? Boise showed control, poise, and some of the best trick plays the game has ever seen. What an absolute thrill ride, right to the end!