Dispatches

Work today was so much better than yesterday. The day went fast, everything was easy to deal with, and I even managed to demonstrate my ever-increasing knowledge of the city without the falling upon the crutch of using a map.

It was hot and miserable on the road at work today. I set up detours, dealt with summer school kids and was still somehow bored the entire time. I didn’t even have the energy left to watch all of Princess Mononoke (which I bought on DVD today), and that is sad.

I bet you never thought this would happen in your neighborhood.

I found this game through Boing Boing and it is pretty creepy. I only scored 5/10 which shows what I know. Go see if you can do better!

My friend Christina directed to me this site. It is very addictive. Bad Monkey!!

If you have not done so yet, do yourself a favor and pick up the new White Stripes album, Get Behind Me Satan. It is wonderful and I have been seriously digging on it for the last few weeks.

It is hot and humid and I hate it. I would give anything to get rid of this heat. I do not enjoy the extreme seasons of winter and summer, and we have more than two months left of the latter.

Well, I made it. I survived my trip. Actually, I never had any doubt that I would survive my trip. But my car survived, which is more than I expected. For all of its mechanical problems my little rattling death machine successfully limped down to Cedar Rapids, where I switched to my dad’s car for the rest of the way to Des Moines.

Tomorrow I am heading down to Des Moines for a wedding. Two of my friends (and former coworkers) are getting married to each other. Isn’t that sweet? The cool thing is I will be able to go to their wedding, see the whole Cambus crowd again, and then go to Cedar Rapids on Sunday to spend Father’s Day with my dad.

It is nice to see a lawmaker with the consumers of digital media forefront in his mind, rather than the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists. Read about it in Wired here.

"The Fugitive" Which Firefly character are you? brought to you by Quizilla For those of you not in the know, the amazing show Firefly is also being made into a movie: Serenity.

Last night I attended the midnight showing of Batman Begins. All I have to say is: Holy shit! That movie had everything I ever wanted in a Batman movie, and effectively managed it all.

So my Internet connection finally just came back up. The storms passing through Wisconsin had disconnected me from the net the last couple hours and unfortunately the disconnection came at the worst time, basically losing my big blog entry.

Whoo-hoo for my new monitor! I finally got rid of that old CRT I was using and got a 19 inch flat panel one like I have at work. Of course, at work I have the computer running a split-screen between two 19 inch monitors, but this is great.

I found some entertaining reading for you all. Check out Darth Vader’s Blog. It is really pretty funny as Vader complains about the day to day aspects of his job, stupid minions and annoying contractors.

So one of the coolest things my dad got me for my birthday was a new computer desk to replace the cunningly stacked boxes that I have been using the last few weeks.

Check out this new measurement device for bad movies. It cracked me up. I originally heard about this on Mur Lafferty’s Geek Fu Action Grip. Take a peek.

For those of you interested in the Diplomacy game server I am working on, I have made some real serious progress in the last couple days. I think the database schema is close to being done, and I am pretty proud of what I have come up with so far.

I am trying to post daily here, but I have a bit of a headache so my more substantial postings will have to wait. In the meantime, I highly recommed you read the online comic strip Sluggy Freelance.

So my birthday is this Thursday, which means I will be a quarter of a century old. That actually does not weird me out very much, although everyone asks me how I feel about it as if it should.