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[Sep. 21st, 2008|11:46 pm] |
After a few days of thinking, visiting the humane society, and more thinking, Wendy and I adopted a puppy named Caramel.
She's about 9 months old and is a Rottweiler mix.
While neither of us are done grieving for the loss of Lily, it's still good to have a fuzzy monster trucking about the house again. Better than that, it's been weeks since I've seen Wendy actually smile, and since we brought Caramel home she hasn't stopped :)
She's very well behaved for her circumstances (a rescued stray). She has some odd behaviors (like being terrified of the TV), though, not sure where that comes from. Yay doggy :) |
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[Apr. 13th, 2008|03:29 pm] |
Some updates -
Wendy and I booked our honeymoon; we're going to St. Lucia. I finally finished our taxes for last year, hooray. Lastly, I'm switching jobs to work at a startup, my last day at Google is April 25th. This should be a fun switch :) |
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[Mar. 9th, 2008|11:05 pm] |
Not much to update, but here goes anyway:
Gaming:
I picked up Assassin's Creed last week, and the ending left me with 'wtf'. Gameplay was good, plot was good, but the tasks in the game were too repetitive (climbing a tower to get a requisite birds eye view repeatedly gets old fast). I also picked up Super Smach Bros for the Wii today, and it is totally awesome.
Work:
Still enjoying myself at Google; got my yearly bonus this past Friday, horray moneys. Recent weeks/months have had me wanting to do my own business, but I haven't quite gotten around to that yet.
Travel:
I went to Shmoocon in February. I'm probably coming to Rochester the first week in April for BarCampRochester3. I'm also planning on going to BSDCan in May. |
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[Jan. 30th, 2008|11:05 pm] |
I get a lot of jesusfreaks soliciting my time at my house. I figure I get a visit once or so a month.
I usually try to spin them away by saying that I'm a jew, or trying the athiest angle, or any other things I'm hoping will turn them away. Nothing works.
So, I've come up with a new stragegy. That new strategy has lead me to start reading the bible for the purpose of using it against said jesus freaks, so they really go away. I wasn't really sure where to start, and I certainly wasn't out to be a god-hater, because I'm not, I just want to fuck with the jesuspeople who bother me at my house.
found a website which has the bible in like 500 versions. I found the '21st century king james version' which is supposedly the original king james edition with updated language usage (aka, using 'you' instead of 'thou' and other nonsense).
I started reading the book of Judges. The complexity in many of the sentences makes me really wonder if the common man actually reads the bible, or actually just claims to have done so. Furthermore, the book itself doesn't make much sense. I read through chapter 11, and there were at least 20 stories contained in those 11 chapters all which had the same exact plots and outcomes, but only really varied in length.
For any story I read in judges, it followed precisely this pattern:
1) Israelites forsake God (the one true god in the Bible) for other gods.
2) God gets angry.
3) God causes some other group to enslave or otherwise conquer the Israelites.
5) Israelites cry "Boo hoo this sucks", God saves them by sending someone to lead them to victory.
6) The Israelites win their freedom.
7) One of: 40 or 80 years pass
8) Go to step 1
Every story. The same thing. Sometimes the author(s) decided that the stories needed to be longer than 3 sentences, and needed to add more filler. At one point (Judges 1:12-13), it is advertised it's cool to marry your cousin:
And Caleb said, "He that smiteth Kirjathsepher and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah my daughter for a wife."
And Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, took it; and he gave him Achsah his daughter for a wife.
(Caleb and Othniel, by the way, are both protagonists)
What's even more scary is that there are a few zillion "versions" of the bible, but somehow they're all still "god's word" - really?
So I gave up on reading Judges because that shit is boring. I picked another random book: John. Somehow, the 100 editors on the 21st-century King James missed out on updating the language in this book to anything newer than Shakespeare, because it's still full of "Doest thou thyself art thou thyne?" kind of stuff - which, by the way, is fucking hard to read.
I'm only slightly into John, and it's pretty silly. I mean, it opens up sloppily by saying the word is god and god is the word and other weird things, which would make sense if that theme was kept, but then two guys go up to Jesus (wait, when did we introduce Jesus?) and say "prove you're the christ guy (aka, savior)" and Jesus says "I saw you down by that tree!" and one of the other guys is like "Whoa you are christ! LIKE TOTALLY!"
It honestly appears so far that this book was written by a very inexperienced writer, or even a student looking to plagiarize.
1) Many of the protagonists and antagonists lack any kind of character development or background.
2) Those that do have background, and many many paragraphs of text dedicated to explaining their role in the story, often exit the story with "Greg the Awesome died. The end. Moving on... 80 years later, this guy Bob drops into town..." and that's the end of Greg the Awesome.
3) The language style changes constantly; a signal consistent with one author plagiarizing from multiple sources, or multiple authors who didn't employ an editor.
4) There are often multiple antagonists with very similar names, such as Zordas and Zordis (I made that up, but you get the idea) and if we're learning about these guys they are swapped in and out of sentences, almost interchangably. Why bother having 2 antagonists anyway?
4) You'd have to be a cartographic mastermind to understand the geography. I'm pretty sure the Lord of the Rings books came with like.. a map and shit...
There are lots of magic numbers. Sometimes people attack in groups of exactly 300 (Gideon, for example) or exactly 10000, almost no other numbers. Seems kind of strange.
However, this God gets my vote for "Most Ridiculous Way to Select Your Army" -
Judges 7:5-6, So Gideon took the men down to the water. There the LORD told him, "Separate those who lap the water with their tongues like a dog from those who kneel down to drink." Three hundred men lapped with their hands to their mouths. All the rest got down on their knees to drink.
How retarded is that? "Whoever drinks from the water in this one way will be your team"
Hilarious.
I'll probably keep reading, because it's in many ways entertaining. |
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[Nov. 18th, 2007|09:54 pm] |
Came back from Dublin, and 2 days later flew to Seattle, WA to help with a day-long training event. By now, I'm fully decompressed from traveling. I spent this Saturday at a house of one of Wendy's friends who were celebrating Slava. Delicious food.
Next week is thanksgiving, and is sure to be slow at work since we tend to avoid making changes during the holidays. It'll give me some more time to work on things that aren't related to firefighting. Horray. |
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[Nov. 2nd, 2007|06:37 pm] |
I'm flying to Dublin on Saturday. Trip will last just over a week. I wish wendy could come, maybe next time ;)
At any rate, I'm very looking forward to Ireland. |
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[Sep. 18th, 2007|12:40 am] |
A few bucks later, and I think I may have fixed my xbox problems. I played tonight for a few hours with the case fully assembled without it freezing. Though, after a a while it did freeze.
It's definitely a heat problem. I attached Nyko's Intercooler thing in addition to attaching a small fan to the cpu heatsink and covering the ductwork with aluminum foil so that the air being sucked out by the exhaust fans is forced over the cpu and gpu/ram heatsinks.
If it continues to freeze, I'll try another suggested method of removing the heatsinks, cleaning them, and applying new thermal compound.
It's still confusing as to why heat issues are so common on xboxes, and that Microsoft seems ignorant of the problem and is more than happy to charge customers $99 to fix it each time heat causes solder or chipset failure? (In my case I'm strongly leaning towards solder cracks based on the behavior).
At any rate, the additional fans alone weren't enough. Adding the aluminum foil covers to the heatsinks seems to be the magic ticket. |
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[Sep. 15th, 2007|05:40 pm] |
My xbox 360 dies shortly after (I think?) it's one year purchase date. Coincidentally, also one week before halo 3 comes out.
Microsoft wants $100 to fix it. Sigh. |
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[Sep. 3rd, 2007|10:06 pm] |
I was outrageously productive this weekend, despite having my life consumed by BioShock (which I finished last night).
I'm totally looking forward to going to Rochester on Thursday. Mark's will shortly follow. |
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[Aug. 27th, 2007|03:38 pm] |
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Wendy and I will be coming up to Rochester for Welcome Back. Yay travel :) |
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[Jul. 15th, 2007|11:11 pm] |
Today was crazy productive at the house. We got some new furniture and we washed+waxed my car.
Two of the pieces were idendical TV stands / media centers we're going to be using for shelving. They're the perfect width to fit between the wall and the fireplace on both sides. I spent too much time putting my stereo and xboxen into their new home, but the end result is that you barely only see two wires going to the TV; beyond that you can't see any entertainment equipment other than the subwoofer, which is pretty nice.
The downside to having the stereo behind wood doors is that obviously the remote doesn't work anymore. My fix for that will be some cheap fiberoptic cable to be the eyes for the stereo.
The other furniture is a white china cabinet for the breakfast/dining room and a really nice alder dresser. We also put in an order for two nightstands that match the dresser. The place we bought the furniture from delivered them less than 2 hours after we bought them. Sweet!
So tired. The waxing on my car took longer than expected and I didn't finish until it was very dark outside, which means I"ll be waking up tomorrow to find many missed spots of wax I'll have to polish off. It's been almost a year since I've washed my car, and it's shiny again. |
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[Jul. 15th, 2007|11:33 am] |
Wendy and I are (in theory) getting married Aug 23rd 2008.
...
Unless she kills me first. |
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[Jul. 9th, 2007|01:44 am] |
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Too many hours spent at 3 car dealerships, but it was worth it. Wendy is now the owner of a 2007 Chevy Aveo. It's sexy red. |
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[Jun. 10th, 2007|10:30 pm] |
Installed our 6 recessed lights in the living room this weekend. Wee that sucked, glad it's over.
Shocking. To power them, I traced the power line from the fan in the other side of the room to it's junction box. Connect the new cable I ran for the dimmer switch to that box and went downstairs; prior I had turned off all the light circuits in the house at the breaker. In the living room, I start to cut the new cable to prepare it for hookup and BAM. Sparks. Everywhere. I scream (like a little girl?!).
Turns out the junction box didn't just house power for the fan (assuming I'm right), it looks like it also holds the power for the garbage disposal. Guess which one I plugged the new lights into? I finished hooking it up after resetting the breaker (which had blown properly). Yay. Lights.
We also hooked up the washing machine and added a new future-project to our list of things-to-do: replumb the garage. The garage (washing machine and sink) are iron pipes. A sea of red came out of the faucet when we turned it on. Yay rust. It went away after a few seconds. I had to replace the outlet for the washing machine because it wasn't 3-prong or grounded.
Hurray for electrons. |
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[May. 30th, 2007|12:44 am] |
It doesn't matter how many times I hit 'refresh', it's still not a time machine, and UPS still isn't getting my packages to me any sooner.
*twitch* |
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[May. 19th, 2007|02:36 am] |
I've started running with Lily (dog) at night. I've only been doing it for about a week, and I can easily run 2 miles now which isn't very surprising I suppose. I've found a 3 mile loop I'll start taking soon. I'd run longer, but I doubt Lily will be able to run for much longer than 3 miles.
House is good. Job is ok. Life is good.
Ordered a wallmount arm for my TV which should be showing up any day now. My stereo system randomly shuts off when there's "too much" input or output. It's very strange. Seems like there's probably a bad circuit that gets overloaded when the volumne (in or out) is too high. I should see if I can warranty it, if not, get a new one. |
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[May. 7th, 2007|05:16 pm] |
Time put their archives online for free. Someone pointed me at the 'Hitler man of the year' issue. I looked at it, and one of the articles was this one about global warming.
70 years later, we're blaming it on SUVs. Stupid hippies. |
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[May. 6th, 2007|08:24 pm] |
I'm getting somewhat stir crazy at work, since there are fewer things to do as of late. I've been putting off larger automation projects that aren't required yet (but would be great to have). Mostly it's stuff I want to automate and then request a group transfer since there's nothing interesting left to work on (It's been automated).
On the house side, we spent the past few days moving in things and unpacking boxes. The living room is useful now. The new couch/loveseat (they're both recliners!) made their way in and I hooked up the stereo, tv, xbox360, etc.
I put my old Thinkpad 600 laptop by the tv so it can play mp3s from my media machine. I also took a chance to day to put time into reviving my dead xbox. It died sometime between leaving Rochester and showing up in California. I heated up all of the solder joints on the mod chip, causing a frightening amount of flux to boil off. Turn it on, and voila, it works. Xbox media center is awesome, and the only reason I cared to revive it. Yay for fixing things.
Wendy's dad had been working on installing the closetware and finished it today. Wee.
The garage in our house has tons of cabinetry. Wendy bought a 12-pack of tupperware box things taht I've been sorting random bits into. Hurray for storage.
Can't complain. House rocks. If you're bored, have a look at the photos on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jordansissel/sets/72157600033686549/ |
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