England my home..?

As you've probably already noticed, we're back from England and a very happy time it was. We hadn't seen my parents since the wedding so most of the time revolved around catching up with them and other friends, hanging out in pubs and the usual stuff. The party my parents put on for all the family and friends who couldn't make the Caribbean trip was an incredible amount of fun - Dad did his usual speech where he takes the piss out of Kim and myself and embarasses us with old photos from our childhood we thought had been dead and buried a long time ago. He pretty much outdid himself this time though with a love letter from a girl I received when I was 5 and a photo of Kim which made her positively squirm. Needless to say these were much enjoyed by the company and the speech went down a treat. Amazing what parents keep around from when you're kids.. Be warned!

Chester is still as beautiful as I remember it, great architecture and a mixture of modern and old. Chester has over 2,000 years of history, and a rich Roman influenced heritage. It is the most complete walled city in the country, it's in possession of stunning medieval architecture, a beautiful cathedral, unique two tier shopping streets and some great little shopping nooks. Unfortunately I think the modern is taking over the old as there were too many trendy new wine bars, fancy little hangouts, or hip overpriced skate / surf shops instead of the older traditional British pub, or holes in the wall stores I remember. Some of the old haunts still exist, but somehow it's not quite the same any more. I think it's a shame - the whole charm and culture for me is to walk around ancient places that have been there since Roman times which give a unique atmosphere. It definitely no longer feels like home, which makes sense as I've been gone 10 years now. Still, it is a very fun place to visit and walk around with friends. Kim and I had a cool time, but also are glad to be back. I'm glad to be back to the realm of connectivity, of having a laptop, playing my mp3's as I blog, and resuming my addiction to the 600rr.net site. America is home now, and that's just fine with me, me mateys.

More on fender eliminations, mods etc

Hi there Jay! I'll post this response both in the comments and in the home page in case you can't find your link back to the old archived article you were referring to about bike mods. It's nice to see people stumble across our pages from time to time, so let me first quote your comment for the sake of the main post:

Hey, You got wicked pics on your site. I have the same bike and was thinking of similar mods - what's your advice on the Larry's Fender eliminator regarding the optional turn lights and license plate light; would you go for them or hack the original Honda lights? Also, where did your buddy Dallas get his low profile turn signals? Thanks. Jay

Aesthetic mods are largely a matter of opinion. One person's beauty is another man's beast - and turn signals seem to be no exception to this rule. Let me speak a second to both the look and the practicality of both mods you mention. Firstly, the turn signals provided by Larry are fantastic looking - clearly a notable improvement from the stock honkers they give you. I was more than a little bit concerned that they would not be bright enough, but this was swiftly negated when turning them on for the first time in bright sunlight. No problem spotting them from behind - confirmed by my Wife driving behind me down the road. I would heartily endorse them for the small addition in price they add to the package.

As for the licence plate lights.. While they look pretty, they are both fiddly to install, and honestly do not give off enough light to make them of any practical value whatsoever. They give the license plate a nice romantic soft glow at night, but that's about all. While I believe that by law you are required to have lights on your plate, it is also the case if you're on the more risque side then you can make do without them. Dallas rides without them and I don't think he's been pulled over yet in about a year, but then he rides at warp speed so it might be more luck than judgement.

If you are worried about having at least something to keep on the right side of the law, then it is my opinion that Larry's lights look a lot better than the stock. It would certainly be more than a little fiddly to retro-fit the stock lights to the new fender eliminator, but certainly not impossible if you are a dab hand at do-it-yourself. I'm still not completely happy with the wires that you need to run to the license plate as I think it spoils the clean look one is trying to acheive through the fender elimination, but this is probably splitting hairs a little too much.

It's worth remembering that there are many other eliminators on the market, however in my opinion Larry's represents the best value for money, and he's also a contributor on 600rr.net, so you have to support the boy! :) It might also be worth mentioning here that Dallas initially went with the Competition Werkes' eliminator but changed to Larry's after I got mine installed - he much prefers the angle it gives to the license plate.

As for Dallas' lights.. To be honest I have no idea. I will give him a call and let you know. Let us know any more pics you'd like to see to help make your mind up and I can post them for you.

Let the Man Go Through

Yo.

First of all, I'd like to point out that, much like it's title, "Super Bon Bon" by Soul Coughing is one massive piece of musical candy, complete with soft noughaty center. This song never fails to grip me by the short and curlies and hold my attention for its 3:33 play length. And it uses the word "mezzanine", a term woefully underrepresented by modern music.

My reign as Lord and Master of All Things Football ended with a simply change of difficulty levels. I had been playing on Pro level, which one would think would be fairly difficult given that it's pretty hard to become a Pro football player. On the other hand, my beloved Redskins are pro football players and sometimes I wonder how they manage to make it out of the tunnel without seriously injuring themselves, the stadium staff and half of Kansas. Feeling that I was ready for the challenge, I bumped the difficulty up to All-Pro. This was, in retrospect, a bad decision. On the plus side, it makes the game more realistic in terms of your team's relative performance, on the minus side, I play as the Redskins, so the last thing I want is to have a game realistically model their performance. At any moment I expect Dan Snyder to barge into my basement, order me to draft a 4th string TE with my first pick and then fire me. It's a genuine concern. Plus, I decided to play my first All-Pro game against the hated Cowboys and they took me to school. And not high school either, this was pre-school where I spent the whole day practicing my letters and eating paste. I think Terry Glenn stole my lunch money too. So, it's back to scrimmage mode to see if I can put together something that vaguely resembles a successful play. It doesn't help that the CPU's wide receiver AI allows WR's that are quintuple covered to magically barrier tunnel through defenders and come up with the pass, while my WR's can't catch a cold when they've beat their man by 10 yards. Of course, if my QB didn't keep throwing the ball into the fucking parking lot, maybe we'd have a chance. Stupid football. Oh, and Sega, releasing your game weeks ahead of Madden doesn't matter if you squander that lead with server problems that keep people from playing online. Just some advice from me to you.

This article on Doom 3 is pretty interesting, for us hardware geeks mainly, but also because it shows how id, from the very beginning, designed Doom 3 to be able to run on a machine 1.5 to 2 years old. And not just run, but run in a manner that won't make you jealous of the guy down the block who just sold his wife for a new rig and video card. If you don't believe me, read the article and check the difference in screen shots between Low and High quality. The differences are pretty hard to spot. In the gaming industry, it's virtually unheard of for a developer to give this much love to older systems. It makes sense though as Doom 3, due to it's iconic status, has a very good chance of attracting gamers who haven't used a PC for games since the original Doom came out. If those people have a stock rig that they bought within the past 2 years, chances are they can play Doom 3, and have it look good, with minimal cash outlay. I know in past postings, I wasn't exactly thrilled with Doom 3, but I have to give John Carmack and his group an enthusiastic "hells yes" in regards to this decision. I'm sure it's made his day on some deep, virtually unknown subconscious level.

Finally, as anyone who knows me can attest, I am a whore for good web based comics. I read a bevy of them on a daily basis and am not in the least bit ashamed to say that I am sexually attracted to Shelley Winters from "Scary Go Round". OK, maybe just a little ashamed. Anyways, one of my favorite comics is Achewood, due to it's surreal combination of humor, simplistic style and cast of animal characters. One of the recent additions to the Achewood world is a collection of blogs written by each of the major characters, in the style of said characters. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this and it's fucking hilarious. If you've read Achewood for any length of time, read the blogs and then tell me that they aren't spot on. They should be as they spring from the brain of Chris Onstad, Achewood's creator, but still, it's downright freaky how good they are. Plus, they provide additional storylines that can't be represented in the comics as well. One current example is Ray's finding of a Ken doll that's like a voodoo doll only with pantsing rather than poking with needles. It would probably make more sense if you just read them for yourself. Go ahead. I think we're done here.

Just Don't

Someone got to this site by searching on "picture of Clinton Portis tattoo's" in Google.  While I'm impressed that the words "picture", "Clinton Portis" and "tattoo" all appear on our humble site, my feelings of pride are overwhelmingly drowned out by fear that somewhere out there, someone who isn't Clinton Portis is considering getting a tattoo of Clinton Portis's picture.  Let's hope that this brave soul found nothing other than our ramblings to help them in their decision and has since decided to get something less bad.

Thursday Theme redux

Today's theme is "I Have Nothing to Post About and Unfortunately, No Time At Work to Post If I Wanted To".

Enjoy.

Thursay Theme

Today's theme is "Post Whatever the Hell I Want To Because Andy Isn't Here".   Actually, Theme Thursday was my idea, so I shouldn't give him shit over it.  A more apt description would be "Post Whatever the Hell I Want Because I'm Lazy and Couldn't Think of a Theme".  I'm a kick it Phyxie style and just do a brain dump, so try and follow along.

Are You Ready For Some Football?
I bought ESPN NFL 2K5 yesterday, and in doing so, bought what is easily the most capital letter rich game title on the market today.  Ha!  Seriously, I played a game last night, Redskins (me) hosting the Chargers (the computer, I call him Karl) and I fucking beat Karl's ass.  With a stick. Granted it was on Pro level which, from what I've read on the various message boards, is the mode they train monkeys on, but it felt good.   The game looks freaking amazing.  Madden, my usual football purchase, is developed to look the same on the PS2, the Cube and the Xbox, which is just plain silly seeing how the Cube and the Xbox are able to do a lot more than the PS2, and the Xbox a lot more than the Cube.  Despite the "commentary" and some other limited broadcast trappings, Madden never felt like I was playing a game that was actually being broadcast.  In reality, it felt like I was playing a game in some weird stadium out in the middle of nowhere in a strange and distant land propulated entirely by triangular polygon people.  The players looked OK, but the fans.  Good Lord, the fans.

On the other hand, playing ESPN is like watching an ESPN broadcast of a football game, and oh, by the way, your quarterback just got sacked because you're a fucking moron with the reflexes of a dead person.   The player models are amazing, the animations are superb, and I don't know how they did it, but the halftime and end game reports are cut together from discrete bits of audio to form a whole that is seemingly impossible given its various parts.  Like pouring out a can of hex nuts and having them form a puppy. 

I can't say how the AI is, as I don't know what I'm doing well enough to know if they're reacting properly.  I know that when they have the ball, they try to score with it, and when they don't, they try to get it back, so as far as I can tell, everything is good.  I'm sure I'll end up tweaking the sliders some, because winning can be so boring.  A few things I can say about the game play are that if you throw to a WR who has the entire population of Jakarta covering him, chances are you'll be intercepted.  Also, Clinton Portis, the new Redskins RB, is able to plow through mountains of men as if they were fluffy, whipped cream bunnies.   I tie the success of the real life Redskins to their digital counterparts with a fervor usually reserved for mental patients and televangelists, so you can imagine how excited I am to have a runningback in DC that seems to know that when he has the rock, he is to bring it to the house, because, by God, that's where it fucking belongs.

Now that I have ESPN, there's no reason to buy Madden, especially when you consider that ESPN was 20 bucks and Madden is 50.  I do not have spare 50 dollar bills lying about, so until such time that ESPN is no longer a challenge, I'll be sticking with the boys from Bristol.  If someone is unhappy about this decision, by all means, buy me Madden and I'll be so happy to play it, I will prance with glee.

Six Feet Yawning
Is it me, or is Six Feet Under seriously sucking this season.  I mean, my Lord, I know that Chez Fisher has never been a warm and happy place, but this is getting ridiculous.   Let's break down our list of characters:

Nate - now I know that his wife died, but come on, he had to see how annoying she was, I mean the rest of us sure did.  Where's the free-wheeling, biking without a helmet Nate?  Now we get Mr. Mopey and his mute daughter.  Peter Krause is being wasted this season.

Ruth - married a guy who she barely knows and now is upset to find out she doesn't know anything about him?  Wow.  Didn't see that one coming.

Claire - how do you take an annoying and pretentious teenager and make them even more annoying and pretentious?  Send her to art school!  I fear that the world's best crop of future artists won't ever produce because they're afraid that they have to go to art school and hang out with losers like Russell.

Keith - actually I like Keith this season.  I also like the fact that David and he aren't fighting anymore.  They seem normal now.  Well, they did anyway.

David - OK, I'm not going to go in depth over last weeks's ep so that I don't ruin it for those that who haven't seen it by my God, come on!  David, you're an idiot and now your idiocy has resulted in us having dumb-ass plot devices hoisted upon us.  If you become a crackhead I will reach into that TV and smack you.

Rico - Jesus man, how stupid are you?  Just leave, please.  Really, leave.

Now that Deadwood is over, I need quality drama on HBO and this ain't doing it.  And while we're on the subject of Deadwood, which one of you morons on the Emmy nominations committee decided that Ian McShane didn't deserve to be nominated?  Didn't any of you watch him on Deadwood?  He was fucking brilliant, and brought a depth of character not seen in a villain since, oh, I don't know ever!  Dumbasses.  

Luckily, HBO has Entourage to cleanse my mouth of SFU's blechiness.  I was unsure when I first started watching, but I quickly grew to like the show.  The dialog is exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of guys who have been friend for a while.  Plus, the characters are all likable in their own way.  Jeremy Piven is fantastic as Ari the Agent as is Kevin Connolly as Eric.   Definitely funnier than anything Curb did this past season.

Marvelous 3 , We Harld Knew Ye
One of my most favoiritest bands, Marvelous 3 broke up like 2 years ago and I had no idea.  That's the problem with my radio free existance, I don't find out these kinds of things.  Luckily, their lead singer, Butch Walker put out an album 2 years ago called Left of Self Centered.  I picked it up and it fucking rocks.  It has everything I loved about Marvelous 3, namely rock, rock, and more rock.  Oh yeah, the lyrics are good and pretty clever and humorous at the same time.  He's got another album coming out next month, so I'm excited.  Two good albums that I didn't know about in the space of one month?  Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

Toodles!

I'm outta here. See you after a week of pubs! Woohoo!

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

A little over a year ago, we switched to balancing our checkbook on the computer.  I should say that we began balancing our checkbook, rather than "switched" because prior to moving to the PC, we balanced about as well as en elephant on a two-by-four.  Sure we paid bills, on time even, but when those cute little bank statements came in with their listing of withdrawals and deposits and cashed checks, they went into The File, never again to see the light of day.  We finally made the move to the PC, because with paying for the adoption and saving for college for the result of said adoption, we wanted a better idea of where our money was going .  It was tax season at the time, so we managed to get Money 2003 free when we bought TurboTax, or some equally useless tax product.  I shouldn't say that the tax program is useless as it's not the tax problem who has a problem answering the very simple question "Do you have a boat?"  What can I say?  Fear of auditing makes me question my ownership of marine vessels.  For one brief moment, I was a boat owning farmer with massive gambling debts.  Good times, good times.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I pay some bills online and bring up Money to enter them into the register.  Money tells me that my June power bill is overdue, an oddity seeing how the bill I just paid was the July bill. No problem, I probably just forgot to enter in the June payment. Then I notice that there are a lot of things overdue, and not just a month or so overdue, but 390+ days overdue.  Then I notice that one of the bills that is overdue is to Ben's old daycare, the daycare he was switched out of in February.  I open up the register, and what, to my horror, do I see?  Money has lost all of my financial data since May of 2003.  Yes, that's right, 14 months of financial transactions, gone. 

I thought, this isn't a problem for a saavy PC user like me.  Save early, save often, I always say. I'll just restore the trusty backup that I keep on a floppy.  Every two weeks or so, Money would ask me to back up my file to a floppy and I religiously agreed as if my PC ever went bye-bye, at least I could restore my data on a new machine.  I popped the disk in the drive, hit the Restore button (actually it was a series of menus and dialog boxes, but I like the drama of a big, jolly, candy-like Restore button) and waited. What?  Money can't restore the file because there's no space?  That doesn't make sense.  OK, it's probably trying to restore it to the floppy, silly, silly Money.  I'll copy the file to the Desktop and go from there.  What?  Cyclic redundancy error?  What the fuck is a cyclic redundancy error?  Give me back my data you soulless harpy!

After several bouts of Googling, I managed to get a data recovery tool to get the file off of the floppy, but still no dice.  Money says it's fizzucked.  Lovely.  As far as I can tell, here's what happened.  The last time I closed Money, at some point in the saving process, something went horribly, horribly wrong and fucked my data file.  When Money went to start, it couldn't load the aforementioned fucked file, and rather than bother me, the user, with an inconvenient and confusing error message, it just groped around in the dark, found the closest hard disk based backup file and restored it.  That file happened to be over a year ago, May 2003 to be exact. Because Money automatically saves when it closes, it saved this file over the "bad" file.  I can, to some degree, understand hiding the error message from the user, because God forbid that the customer have to call the fucking customer service center, but Money comes with tools to fix bad Money files.  How, exactly, am I supposed to use tools to fix files that I don't know are broken?  That last line has a lot more heft if you speak it in a Lewis Black style of mounting rage and thundering yelling.  I'll give you a second to read it again.  Doo-doo-dee-dee-hum-hum-hum. Done? Great.

Now, this isn't really a loss of financial data as we keep everything from January of the previous year onward, so I have all of the data in bank statements, credit card statements, bills, check registers etc, however I don't have it all in one place, which, unless I'm mistaken (prepare your internal Lewis Black voice) is the whole point of personal fucking finance software!  My bank keeps 2 months of transaction data online so once I get some new software I can at least have 2 months of data, but everything else is toast.  Truth be told, it Money was good to have everything up to date, but it's cash flow forecasting tool was shit.  To Money, every cash outlay was monthly regardless of, in the past month, you paid a certain entity once or 12 times.  For example, when doing one cash forecast I nearly crapped myself when I saw that, based on our current salaries, we'd be out of money, and about 30 grand in debt, in 12 months.  After some tinkering, I saw that Money had taken some exteremely huge adoption expense that was paid once, and applied it to every month.  Far be it from me to tell Microsoft how to make its products, but maybe applying a "monthly" label to something that happened once in a 12 month period isn't the way to go.  At the very least, it was a thrilling experience akin to riding a roller coaster, but without the long theme park lines or vaguely unsettling, anthropomorphic waiting line entertainment.

As a result of this fiasco, I am now in the market for a new personal finance software package.  I'm thinking QUicken, because a) it's not Money and b) it's the only other one I know of.  I'm sure there are other, possibly better ones out there, but I don't run Linux or have a Mac or want to develop a personal relationship with Karl the developer because I'm one of his 5 customers.  I am a child of duality, and the possibilty that there may exist a third, equally viable but lesser known choice for my purchases fills me with unease.  I mean, RC cola?  Down that road lies madness.

IT issues and general stupidity redux

Laptop works. Drivers were at fault. User should RTFM. That is all.

When people ask my why I want to give up smoking I'll generally cite the usual examples, health.. cost.. giving money to crooks and the taxman.. But sometimes there are other reasons as well. I think the current state of play of our ashtray may well speak for itself. August 1st, no more smokes! I'm certainly not looking forward to hell week. Bring on the uncontrollable fits of rage! 

IT issues and general stupidity

For those of you who are *ahem* following closely my trials and IT tribulations, you might want to have a laugh at my expense. Calling Dell premium support this morning I was convinced that my internal modem was broken - see post below. Seems like the error message was fairly clear, right? So Dell had me download the latest drivers while I was pouring scorn on their ability to correctly diagnose the issue. I mean, come on, it's a broken memory chip right? No WAY are drivers going to fix the issue. So I humour them, download the latest drivers, reboot, and re-run the diagnostics. Tests passed. Bloody hell! I'm slightly miffed with myself for not trying something as insanely obvious as that before calling Dell but on the other hand I'm happy that everything seems to function now. Real test is when I get home tonight and see whether it really does pick up the wireless signal. Fingers crossed!

Why the hell does bloggerbot only send one photo even when you specify multiple photos to be sent in a batch? Not extremely helpful.  

Crazy weather yesterday. Beautiful, sunny and 80 all day, until 6pm when it poured down on me and my newly washed/waxed bike all the way home. Naturally it stopped raining as soon as I reached sanctuary, par for the course there - think someone's having a laugh at my expense. Later on, as the sun set the sky went through brilliant shades of yellow which seemed to permeate the air all around you as it was so humid. You'd step outside from the apartment and be dazzled by what looked like a crazy photoshop filter set on the rare 'fucking weird' light setting. From yellow, through orange to deep reds and then finally the sun set. Photo's don't quite do it justice, but rest assured it was ... ODD. 

New toys

I finally got around to persuading my manager to hook me up with one of those new fancy laptops at work. Fancy that is, in comparison to the P300, 256MB RAM piece of shit that I had been kicking the crap out of for years. After two hard drive replacements, two ethernet cards, more HD formats than I care to remember he conceded that I wasn't getting much work done on it. Either trade me up or it's going out of the window. Shortly followed by myself, screaming something about core dumps.

So - yay! I get this new laptop and bring it home in fond anticipation of making use of this super new 'internal wireless modem'. Just turn it on, and it will pick up all the home D-Link wireless network I have set up, right? Wrong. Turn it on. No signal. Refresh, no signal. Input the SSID, no signal. Run diagnostics..

Microcode memory test failed.
This tests verifies that the network controller internal memory is functioning properly. The test writes patterned values to the memory and reading back the results. The test fails if an erroneous value is read back. The network controller will not function without its internal memory.

I'm guessing this is telling me in technical terms, that tne shiny new internal modem is fucked. Kaput. Broken. In an anti-working state. Luckily for me I have a spare USB D-Link wireless bridge kicking around, so I plug that in. Works right away. Thanks Dell, please leave the networking to the experts. D-Link, I'll always love you. So I guess it's back to the hell that is our IT department tomorrow in the vain hope that one of them might give a shit about my plight, get off their arse, and actually do something about it. Failing that, I'm going around with my screwdriver to nab someone else's.. I agree it's not that big a deal to plug in a usb wireless adapter, but hell this shit should just WORK. I don't want ANY wires coming out of my new computer. At least the battery on this one seems to last longer than 5 minutes.. Hooray for wireless blogging!

Xbox: Oddworld Stranger

I absolutely cannot wait for the upcoming fall / holiday season for games. There seem to be more friggin' awesome games lined up than ever before.. Ghost Recon 2, Halo 2, Forza, McRae, Doom 3, Half Life.. The list goes on. Somewhat surprisingly, I find myself most of all drawn to the Oddworld game next year, looking forward to next the Spring release. The series is excellent, with it's fucked up quirky sense of humour, ugly as hell characters and interesting gameplay. Lately I'm on something of a cowboy kick what with this game and The Gunslinger series - perhaps it's just something I never got much of back in England. Hell, I think they would throw bricks at you if you wore a cowboy hat around England..

Oddworld Inhabitants is pushing the concept of "live ammo" in Stranger, meaning that the ammunition is actually alive. Several types of small animals inhabit Oddworld, and by collecting them you can launch them out of Stranger's dual-chambered crossbow. These creatures include smack-talking chipmunks that lure enemies to them (the enemies are rushing to stop on the little guys to shut them up), skunks to incapacitate foes, explosive bats, spiders than wrap bad guys in their web, and wasps that can shoot their stingers like a machinegun. Remember the Fuzzles from Munch's Oddysee? Those vicious little furballs that Munch was trying to rescue? You can even collect them; they act as a land mine, leaping at and ripping apart anyone foolish enough to walk near them.

Now come on, that's just fucking great! I think you owe it to yourself to check out this little gamespy preview. VERY interesting and funny to boot. As for me, I just fell in love with the main character. Lion meets Clint, fucking badass. What else is there to say? Clint is the man. Lions are boss.

It occurred to me that I hadn't posted any photos of our new townhouse yet. While we didn't have much chance to take some quality snaps while on the walk-through, I'm sure more will come that we can bore you all to tears with. Here's the stairs. Jennifer wants Kim and I to build this massive glass structure that Chakra could climb up.. It would be very very cool.. Anyone got a spare 10 large to build such an enclosure? :) I liked this photo not for its artistic merit but just for the cool lines the stairs make. The hand and paper are meant to be there in the photo, of course. It adds a design element. A human aspect. Or something.  

Photo Blogging.. Maybe

Hello have this little photo blogging tool that I thought was pretty wank until I began to use it this evening. I already had Picasa on my machine and the integration is pretty neat. It basically works just the same as the little BlogThis! tool they give you on the google toolbar. It's a small application that resides in your system tray that you can use to upload images quickly to your blog along with some comments. Brandon, you might wanna check this out and see if it works for you - easier than FTP. For full album blogging I think I'm still going to stick with Jalbum, but for the quick and dirty shit, this seems quite nice. Hooray for Google and buying companies that make neat utilities for little weblets like me.

My miserable little office. Miserable because right now I'm working on about 5 billion things at once, in parallel, before I try to get away to England next week. Miserable, because my cellphone takes shitty pictures. Miserable, because I couldn't even match them up to attempt some kind of panoramic shot. Miserable, because for some weird equality-prone reason, they have the offices on the inside of this building hence I don't see daylight all day. Well hooray for the window cubes. Blort. 

Smashing!

-----Original Message-----
From: Dallas Gotschall
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 2:39 PM
To: Smith, Andrew
Subject: mantis shrimp *random*

dude, mantis shrimp are badass.
this one glows...
http://www.blueboard.com/mantis/pics/caldwell_shining.htm
http://www.nightsea.com/mantis/MantisShrimp.mpg
this one terrorizes an aquarium...
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/killershrimp010105.html


...mean little bastards

Pebble downed by a fucking cager

Pebble had an episode with a madman BMW cager driver. Fuck that shit, it makes me relive my rather horrifying episode with that SUV last year on my ex-thundercat. It also makes me mad as hell. You're still with us Pebble, take that home and smoke it. And then smoke about 10 more, bring that V-rod back to life man. Be thinking of you. In the meantime I'm off to firebomb red BMW's in Georgetown.

Prince of Persia 2 Video Interview - Xbox

Question :: Do you trust your videogames to an art director who looks like this?



Answer :: Sure as shit, you do.

Thanks to our ever-lovely friends at TeamXbox.com there's a neat little video preview of the upcoming Prince of Persia 2. This was my game-of-the-year last year and I can't wait for the sequel. It was a game that Kim and I could play together, like watching a Disney movie or something. The fact that the sequel looks darker and harder (a bit like black porno according to Dallas) can only bring good things. No matter what Wifey said about it, PoP rocked. Does rock. Will continue to rock.

Prince of Persia 2 Video Interview - Xbox

Brandon, about Doom. I'll be running it on my PC just as soon as it comes out. I can't wait for that game either. Having been just as much a Doom fiend as you were when the original came out, there are certain things a man just has to do. Play the fuck out of Doom until your fingers bleed and your eyes pop is just one of them. Submit, young man, to your destiny.

Gaming nuggets

Everyone seems quite excited now that Doom 3 has gone gold. Feh. When Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out, I played it, and thought that it was exactly like Escape from Castle Wolfenstein, just with better graphics. Now, that could have been what they were trying to accomplish, but why? Pointless remakes, be it in movies, music or games annoy the piss out of me. Case in point, the impending remake of "The Manchurian Candidate". Why would you remake this movie? This movie is one of the finest political thrillers ever crafted? They're just going to fuck it up. You have to know they they will. Return to Castle Wolfenstein certainly didn't fuck anything up, as technically it was a sequel, but there has to be something better to do with a development house's time and money then essentially remake a game with new graphics.

Which brings me to Doom 3. I loved Doom. I fucking, loved Doom. I spent so much time, in college, playing Doom, that it was on the calendar outside of my door as a daily event. After years (gulp! a decade to be exact) of playing shooters since then, I'd be happy to occasionally revisit Doom, but I'm not so sure I'd want to play it again, even with better graphics. Maybe it'll end up being a lot different, or the graphics are so different that it becomes a new game, but based on Wolfenstein, I have my doubts. My PC has no chance in hell of getting the game to run even marginally as well as it's designed to, so I'll just wait for the Xbox version. I'll gladly let the developers of the port deal with all of the graphical tweaking. I don't need to play the game at a resolution of 8 billion by 7 billion anyways, I'd like to keep my eyes for the future.

Also, I just found out that Sudeki has gone gold and will be released next week. This may be the RPG to tide me over until Fable. We'll see. Early comments are that the combat system is good but it's a short game. RPG's shouldn't be short. They should be long and epic and make you sit there and sweat as you try and figure out what to do next based on all of your thousands and thousands of options. Again, I say Feh. I still have Majora's Mask. Maybe I'll play that.

Thursday Weekly Bits..

Today's topic: "Summertime, and the *blank* is *blank*".

Summertime and the...

House is calling
The mortgage has been pending full approval for a little while now and I need to give Adam a call to see what's up. I'm probably overthinking things but I'd feel so much better with the full approval in my hand before we go away (see below). That will be the last thing on the 'to-do' list before we close on the house and can move in. I seriously can't wait - the more I look at the photos, the more ideas come into my head for how I want to plan out the room. That's right - room singular because I only have free reign in the basement, elsewhere The Mighty Kibber is Queen. Thanks to the other Adam I already know what projector I want. I just need to figure out if I'm going to buy a screen or paint one on the wall with this special paint you can get. Perhaps if you're spending so much money anyway one should go the whole hog and invest in a real screen, on the other hand, if you can save a couple of grand that can go on the couch and the picture is still fantastic, why the hell not? Besides, goo sounds a lot like fun to me. Fun things to research :)


Weather is killing me
Riding in DC in the summer is something of a lottery. The weather forecast will undoubtedly be baking hot, with the occasional thunderstorm rolling through. Riding without gear is clearly nuts - best example I've heard is to take a flying leap onto your belly in a t-shirt and shorts, then imagine the same at 40 mph. So riding in mesh is the only option to try and remain cool while staying at least moderately safe. My mesh of choice is the Teknic (pronounced technique) supervent jacket, which is great as it's super-ventilated and you can almost feel the air fold around your body as you accelerate. It's also got armour on the elbows and shoulders / back where you'll need it most. Let's be honest though, when it comes to my morning post-gym commute to work when the sun's already out, my rucksack is full of gym gear, the air temp's around 90 degrees, the bike oil's at 225 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is ridiculous, mesh ain't gonna stop you sweating. Everywhere. I'm talking arms, back, crack, ankles, full-on, no bullshit sweat. Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth showering after the gym as I know I'm gonna be sweating again as soon as I step foot out of the door. Monkey butt / swamp ass like you wouldn't believe. I have to believe this in turn leads to bad riding as you're always looking for that little gap in traffic you can burst into, just for a moment, to feel the refreshing tug of wind and the momentary oasis of cool in the ragged highway to hell that is the parking-lot commute to work.

I'll still ride. Beats the shit out of ice.


Party's looming
We're off to England next week to party it up with all the folk who couldn't make the Caribbean wedding (and some who did!), so we're pretty excited. It's put on by my parents (read: free), so it should he a hell of a do. It's about time we got out of here for a bit anyway, work has been quite stressful as of late. This is expected when you work on maintenance / hotfix type releases as everything deals with pissed off customers, still it will be nice to get out and hit the pubs for a week with all my old friends from Chester. It's a great city for shopping, hanging out, or walking around the Roman walls that still stand. The architecture is great and even though it's a fairly hip city, you see these antiquated touches everywhere that are very nicely done. We'll take pics and put them up when we get back. In the interim you're in Sub-J's hands again :)


Games are nonexistent
Brandon isn't kidding. There is absolutely nothing available right now that I have the slightest bit of interest in. I would get back into PC gaming in a big way, but Kim's almost snowed under with freelance right now so kicking off the computer would not be a good idea. Promises, rumours, delayed game release dates, that's all I'm hearing right now. I ended up having to go retro last week and dig out Moto GP 2 again, and it's still the greatest ever game made for the xbox. After a happy hour or so spent screaming at my tv, crashing, and generally putting in the suckiest lap ever, the lines started to come back to me to the point where I was beating my previous best scores (and these scores were when I used to play it every day!). The biggest change I made was finally jacking in the manual gears which allowed me to focus on much improved lines and powerslides. An unintentioned side effect is that my hands get a lot less battered when I play. I used to come out of games with bleeding lips, cramped up hands from furiously mashing the gears, sweating and hyped up. Now it's just the same, but I can use my hands for other things afterwards :) Dallas, Wifey and Booster played 1/2 the tracks last night and had some great rides, but that fucking annoying bug arose where two of the people in the room (dallas and wife) couldn't see or hear each other. I had thought this particular manifestation of weird network code only presented itself in Ubisoft games (Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon), but was unhappily proved wrong last night. In Moto, it wasn't even like they couldn't hear each other but their bikes didn't appear on each other's laps / screen either. So bizarre. I hate networking, stuff should just WORK. As far as I'm concerned or care, Cisco is something you use to cook with.

Summertime and the...

Grilling's Easy
Damn right. I haven't been grilling as much this year as in year's past, but when I do, hot damn is it good. Now that Wegman's has come to our area, I can get my mitts on all of upstate NY's finest culinary offerings, such as Salamida's State Fair Spiedie Sauce. If you've never had Speidies, you haven't lived. Take chunks of meat, marinate them for 24 hours in Spiedie Sauce (not sure what's in it, but I know there's oil, vinegar, and various spices) grill said meat, and then as they're hot and dripping on the skewer, slide them off by wrapping them in buttered French or Italian bread. Drooling now. The Albany area is not privy to the magic of the Spiedie, it being a western upstate NY phenomenon, but my college roommate freshman year was from beautiful Endicott, NY right in the middle of Spiedie country. I visited over the summer, for, of all things, a Queensryche concert, and he turned me on to the joys of Spiedies. Once you've had them, it's hard to forget them. But that's not all? What do you call a 5 lb pork loin roast, split open like a book, insides rubbed with an unholy mixture of BBQ rub, whiskey, mustard and brown sugar, closed back up, sprinkled with more rub, wrapped in bacon and grilled on a rotisserie? If you're at my house on Saturday, you'll be calling it dinner. You'll also be eating twice grilled potatoes, brimming with butter and cheese. Oh yeah, we'll all be dead by 50, but it'll be with smiles on our faces.

Tattoo's Healing
As Andy mentioned in his weekend recap post, I have a new tattoo. It's my third, and keeping with the superhero theme (Batman symbol on right shoulder, Superman symbol on left shoulder) it's a tribal spider with Spider-Man's face in the middle. It's pretty cool, at least it will be once it heals up. This is the first "visible" tattoo I've ever had, located on the inside of my right forearm right below the elbow. Based on my past tattoos, I knew that they scab up and then flake off as they heal, but I never knew it looked so disgusting in the process. When it's on the shoulder, you only see it when you shower, or when you put lotion on it, and not even then as you hopefully don't need a mirror to locate your shoulder. With this one, I've been able to watch the whole nasty process, and have become quite engrossed in it at the same time. Sad, I know. Other than the fact that it's not looking it's best at the moment, I'm totally thrilled with it. I was hesitant about getting a visible tattoo, but figured "what the hell". If ever I have a job interview or court date, I'll be wearing long sleeves anyway. I like seeing it out of the corner of my eye as I go about my daily business. Plus, it makes me feel like a badass, a comical notion for those who've ever met me. Unlike Andy with his bald pate, muscles and motorbike, I'm your usual 30+ year old suburban dad. Well, with the tattoo, I guess "usual" doesn't fit quite so much now. And, for those that would think of steppin' with that "Jon Bon Jovi has a Superman tatoo too" bullshit, my response will be a shot between the eyes. Wanted dead or alive motherfucker! New Jersey represent!

Lawn's Growing
My lawn is the most fucked up piece of mass vegetation I've ever seen. Some spots are all burnt out because the trees are blocking the sprinkler heads, some parts are 18 inches high because it's been thunderstorming in the afternoon every day for a month and all of it is a pain in the ass. I always thought I wanted a big yard until I had to mow it. Feh. At least I found something to kill those accursed Japanese beatles. I don't know what's in the bottle, and what it's going to do to my kids, the ozone layer, the universe, whatever, but it kills those bastards, boy howdy does it ever. My sprial cherry tree has never looked so resplendant this late into the summer. Unfortunately I think that, along with killing all the beetles, I also killed a bird, but that's still unconfirmed. I mean, the dead bird was confirmed, and has been disposed of, but what killed the bird is up in the air. I figure with no body, there's no crime, so hopefully the Feds will back off. The saddest part about the whole dead bird affair was the fact that both of my dogs walked right by it to frolic in the yard and then walked right by it to come back inside. What self-respecting dog doesn't stop to eat, or at least roll in a dead bird? Sheesh.

Games are Nonexistant
Man, summer is the suckiest time for video games. I've read the various demographic reasons for why games aren't released in the summer, and it all seems like bullshit to me. Why crowd up the holiday season when every other thing is competing for your gaming dollar and risk having your amazing game overlooked because of a glut of amazing games? *Cough* Prince of Persia *Cough*. Why not release some in the summer and get the kids who are home from school, or the parents that are home on vacation? Shit, even if they don't play the games, what the hell do you care, as long as they buy it. Right now I'm playing the GameCube remake of Metal Gear Solid. More truthfully, I'm watching the GameCube remake of Metal Gear Solid, as this game is about 3 hours of gameplay and 15 hours of cutscenes. Nothing like mowing down rooms of enemy soldiers to get to a cutscene where one of the main characters says "War is meaningless!" Right. Apparantly it isn't totally meaningless, as it seemed to provide ample inspiration for your game. Whatever. At this point I just want to finish the damn thing to watch the 4 hour ending movie. I wondered why it took up 2 discs. Now I know why. Fable won't be out until September which sucks. I good open-ended RPG would be just the thing right now. I still have Gladius but I'm starting to tire of it. What's a man to do?

The ride

I told you, fuckin' hot. The car, not the bald bastard. Click and drool bitch.

Yay!

From Comic Book Resources News:

"Hollywood North Report is reporting that Halle Berry will not be back for the third Westchester-based mutant movie. According to an insider, "Halle was ready to do X-Men 3 , but only if Storm was given more storyline, but the studio sees the third movie as a means to wrap up the trilogy, and that means Storm won't be featured more than Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. Halle has now passed on the third movie because she's not into bit-parts. She's an Oscar winner and she wants roles that test her."

Like Catwoman? Whatever Halle. I'd put that Oscar in safe place if I were you. Most likely you won't be getting any replacements.

Monday growler

So here I am, bizzin' away at work, getting the weekly status, planning out the day to day activities, dealing with a couple of customer fires. The usual monotonous Monday activities which, while I can do them with my eyes closed, doesn't exactly do great things for speeding the day along. I happen to browse online and this is what I see. You know, Wifey, you really are a massive fucker. I mean that in the nicest of ways. I hope you crash into a tree and bleed over your navigation map.

Weekends rock

What a great, relaxing weekend. No major life-changing events to plan for, no massive money drain to worry about, just good times baby. Friday night was once again Halo night at work, while Kim and Val went out for a girly night out somewhere in town. We had the usual cast of geeks, sharpshooters, dorks, in presence. I can probably be included in all three camps! Even though I'm heartily sick of the sight, sound, marketing, taste and feel of Halo, I still have to give it up for the LAN party. It's better than even playing online just because having people there it seems less disjointed, hurling insults across the room and being there to see the reaction. We got together the usual 9-10 people and played a few hours from 8-11pm or so.

It was definitely cool- although it's noticeable how much people are improving now. No longer can I run amok with 5 other people around me and wreck shop - in fact more often than not, I get wrecked myself. Gotta raise the game level, Smith! Brandon's (BigB) playing about 100x better than he was since he got started and it's clear that buying that xbox helped him get down and dirty with the FPS controls. Or maybe that new badass tat on his arm was lending him super secret spidey powers. Eduardo (xPert) has always been tough, he handed me my own behind served up on a silver platter many times, and of course Mark (Loki) is always a pain in the neck to deal with, unpredictable god that he is. Good times, good times indeed.

I'm thankful that we have such a relaxed workplace and some projectors to play with in the conference rooms. They're a bit crap, but it's sure better than split-screen on someone's 32'TV where you can just about make out a tank if you're lucky. Once I get my projector set up in the new place, it will be a thing of beauty. In fact the hardest decision will be whether to set up a Halo guy's night or a Poker night.. Overall, LAN parties >> Xbox Live >> Playing solo.

Saturday saw Kim just about the most hung over I think I've ever seen her. After getting in at 6am, for some reason unbeknownst to myself (and probably to her) she got up at around 10am, and then promptly fell asleep again in our chair-and-a-half while I researched Home Theaters online. Surrounded by sleeping moggies, I think she woke up again at 2-3pm while I was _still_ researching. In the interim I did get a chance to check out Chris' (Baldgit) new ride. Whoooooaaa, baby. Even though I'm not the worlds biggest cage fan any more, that is one sweet ass ride. I have no idea how much it is and I don't wanna know, I just wanna know that he enjoys it on a daily basis. Hot.

Saturday evening was cool, hanging out with Dallas (VitaminD), Leporella, Vizzles, Drew and the still-hung-over-not-so-mighty-Kibber. Dallas and Leigh's place is looking bitchin' - so different from when we moved them in with white walls, boxes everywhere and more mess than you can shake a stick at. They've painted a horizontal stripe on the walls (I believe the official colour is called 'puddle'), art by Leigh and other neat little design touches that go into making the place feel hip but also comfortable to kick back in. I didn't bring my camera so no li'l piccies for you, sorry!

Sunday brought me back into touch with my Moto GP skills. It had been so long since I played and I'd forgotten how damn immersing the game was. After promising Kim we'd go out and do stuff together, I sat down to ride 'a few laps' with Wifey. About 2 hours later I realised how long I'd been playing and had to eat some humble pie - my bad! In my defense even the single player game is just so damn addictive it makes clock's hands spin too fast. When you combine that on live with two other players (Silverblood popped in while we were playing) you just forget where you are and focus on the line, the line, the line, hitting that apex and not shaving the grass to improve your times. The line is everything. I need to write about that in more detail some time - there's poetry to be had for sure.

We tried to watch the movie Catch-22 later on. It might be a 'classic' but frankly.. It's shit. I'm all for avant-garde slice-and-dice movies with lots of imagery, parallel plots and confusing dialogue, but.. Well it was just shit! I'm sure the book is brilliant, but we ended up deleting the Tivo after 30 minutes of 'what-the-fuck-is-going-on?'. Too bad, another triumph for modern impatience over art critics. Switched it on over to Chapelle's show and bust out laughing for about an hour. That man is so effortlessly fucking funny. Hell, I'm STILL laughing about his 'Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories' almost two months later, bitch! What I like about him is that his humour is so self-deprecating as well as making fun of other stereotypes, so it never comes across as hating, just pure class.

Other random things that didn't happen:
:: I forgot to clean my motorbike again
:: I forgot to get a new windscreen screw again - still a glaring hole in one of the sockets
:: I still haven't been back to Coleman's to get another allen bolt for my wing mirror
:: Didn't clean, haha! Sweet
:: Didn't end up at Red, Whoooo-aaaaa! :) You can hate me later, D!

Cheese Chicken

A game to play at the olive garden, by Jay Barnes

Step 1: Go to the Olive Garden with a friend or friends, and order your meal as you normally do. At the Olive Garden, you get to choose whether or not you would like soup or salad. Cheese chicken requires that everyone order salad.

Step 2: When the waitstaff brings the salad over in a large bowl, they will ask you if you want freshly grated cheese on it. You will say that you do, at which point they will begin to grate cheese on the salad, and inform you to 'say when' when you would like them to stop grating the cheese.

THIS IS WHERE THE CHEESE CHICKEN GAME BEGINS

The game:
Whoever says 'when' first, loses. The wait staff may panic or cry, but do not falter or you will be the loser.

The Consequences for losing:
The loser of Cheese Chicken shall be bludgeoned about the head with (1) Olive Garden bread stick.

Caveats:
If the waiter or waitress starts to freak out and says something to the effect of 'Are you sure you want this much cheese?', respond by yelling "HOSPITALIANO!" and point to the salad angrily.

How Do I Break Routine?

Here's the short answer: I don't. Here's the long answer. I have dogs and a toddler, two of the most routine oriented life forms on God's green Earth. For years, pre-Ben, when Linda got home, she'd go upstairs and wash her face. A long day as a technical writer makes a woman sweaty, and she always liked to wash the workday from her visage before continuing her day. QE's are lazy bastards, and barely break a sweat, so there was no need for face washing from me. That and I'm just a filthy, filthy animal. Because the dogs were so used to making that trip up to the bedroom with her, now, when she comes home, they will be all sorts of agitated and upset until she goes upstairs. Even if she doesn't plan on washing up, or doesn't need to change, she'll still go upstairs, just to come right back down, so that the dogs have their routine.

The boy isn't much better. It doesn't matter how much he's eaten during the day, at 5, he's ready to eat dinner. He may not eat a blasted thing, but come 5ish, he needs to be put in his chair and be given something. Sometimes, to take the pressure off of me while I'm cooking dinner, we'll put him in his chair and give him some fruit. His undeveloped toddler mind doesn't see this for the ruse that it is, he gets to eat "dinner" and everyone is happy. Again, it's the routine. Kids absolutely need routine, and shit, I can't blame them. If I learned as much in one day as he does, I'd be pretty happy to know that I don't have to worry about what's going down at bedtime.

Also, having a kid and dogs makes it nigh impossible to be spontaneous with things like travel, or outings past 7 PM, so routine becomes an eventuality. After all, how exactly would we break our routine? Go to Target before, instead of after lunch? Ooooooh, that's living. If I sound like I'm complaining, I can assure you I am not. I fear change like, well, like someone pathologically afraid of change. The routine is good. The routine is life.

That being said, I do find it necessary to spice things up now and again, and here's how I do it.

Video Games
Part of the reason I play games so much is that it provides me with a new opportunity for both stories and activities every few weeks. This year alone I've been a Persian Prince, a Splinter Cell, Riddick, a gladiator, a Thief, the list goes on. It doesn't matter what my day entails, or how much I can map it out with relative certainty, come game time, it's all new.

Music
When I buy a new cd, I'll fucking play it into the ground. Linda gets soooo sick of my music, because for weeks I'll play the same cd over and over and over in my car. I need to hear every part of the album, every part of the various songs before I get bored of it. It may not seem like a lot, but for around 12 bucks I can get hours of newness. Beat that!

Cooking
I do all of the cooking around the house. Partially because I love it, partially because I'm good at it and partially because I am the polar opposite of Linda in those past two instances. I have a shitload of cookbooks (most of them grilling and/or smoking) as well as a subscription to Cooking Light. By the way, The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook is, hands down, the best cookbook you can own. The recipes are easy, varied and quite healthy for you. Despite the "Light" in the title, they're really good too. If you only own one cookbook, I highly recommend this one. I also subscribe to the magazine, so between the cookbook's recipes which I've barely scratched the surface of, and the monthly influx of new recipes, I always have something new to make. Summer is grilling, winter is crockpots, spring and autumn fall somewhere inbetween. Having something new to make every week lets me learn something new about cooking (two summers ago was the summer of corn, Jesus did we eat well), make something interesting and give me new leftovers to eat over the week. Besides, when it's on, it's fucking on and you will not eat better than at my house. Believe that.

Reading
For as long as I can remember, I've been reading. Every night, despite how tired I may be, I can not fall asleep if I don't read first. Aside from being a chance to let my mind relax, it gives me some time, even if it's only 10 minutes, for myself. If I teach my kids anything, I hope it's an appreciation of reading. That and an ability to get a job, so that they're not sponging off of us for their adult lives. I can't imagine not having a book to read, hence my shelves and shelves of books that I haven't even touched yet. Fantasy novels that span 10 volumes, short stories that are only 5 pages long, crime fiction, horror fiction, noir fiction, I read it all.

Marital Arts
I've gotten a big kick over seeing how happy Phyxie is with being married. Fucking A, that's how it should be. Linda and I have been married for 8 years now, and in October will have been together for 13 years. All I can say, is that what we have now totally overshadows what we had when we first got married. It's fucking amazing. Ever since I can remember, we've traded off who gets up first in the morning. The lucky one gets to sleep in for an extra 10 minutes while the other one gets up, lets the dogs out and feeds them. Every morning that I have to get up, when I leave the room I kiss Linda and tell her that I love her. It doesn't matter how pissed off we may have been with each other the night before, or how much I'm dreading my day, I still do it, because every morning I need to tell her. I think that love helps turn routine into ritual, and ritual is sacred.

Anal Sex
OK, I've never had anal sex. I just had to throw that one in for Keggy.

What do I do to break routine?

I could use a little something to break the routine right now, I guess that's why I chose this topic for today. Either it's the new workout or I'm just being incredibly apathetic today but I feel wasted sitting here, after about my 5th coffee and zoning out. However! When I'm not in this type of mood I try to keep things interesting. What is a routine anyway? What's normal for one person might be completely different for another. Example - I have a friend who works out at 4AM, and seems to think that this is nothing out of the ordinary. Me, I think he's got a screw loose.

So, my 'routine' consists of cyclic activities, such as commuting, working, exercising, playing video games. You know, the typical late 20 year old stuff. As Kim and I matured in our relationship we wanted to get out there and do something a little bit different, keep life interesting and not fade away, ya know? So we came up with some goals for ourselves that we could pursue over the course of that particular year. It keeps you fresh, interested and who knows you might discover a massive hidden talent or ability? Breaks in the routine could be major events:

Martial Arts
I took Shorin-Ken Karate for a year and really enjoyed it. It was something completely new for me and though I found that flexibility is a bitch when your body has been fucked over by 10 years of skateboarding injuries, I really enjoyed the sparring, general body conditioning, sense of strict discipline and mutual respect that they teach you. Unfortunately with other heavy demands on my schedule I had to drop it as I couldn't find time for the gym, my job, karate, keeping up with friends during the week. 2 hours on Tuesday and Thursday nights just killed me the next day as they were seriously ballbusting routines, drills and exercises. I tried it, I liked it, but I don't think that I have the requisite time or body adaptability to pursue it to a high level.

Marital Arts
Haha, just my little joke. Getting married has to be one of the most deep, profound life-changing experiences ever in terms of where it takes your relationship. However most people get married so this is nothing out of the ordinary. I just needed a pun, pardon me.

Shark diving
Last year we finally got off our asses and got scuba certified. This was because I'd always wanted to go shark diving. Amazingly enough I actually managed to talk Kim (terrified of sharks.. or was) into it. That summer we spent an amazing 7 days in Nassau, Bahamas diving some seriously cool reef walls, wrecks, night dives - but the highlight had to be the shark feeding dive. Strike one from the life goal list, bitch! I think the photos speak for themselves. Sitting around while 15 or 20 sharks bump into you, tear fish off a stick, and generally be fucking hard is a very humbling experience. It also cured Kim of the shark fear. Hooray!

Motorcycling
I'm a relatively recent rider -- this is something Randy and I had always talked about for years but never got around to. In the end we decided to finally put our money where our mouth was and sign up for the MSF course, just so we could try it and see if we liked it. Needless to say after passing the course next week I had a bike :) It's such a nice break from the usual commute to see the world passing by without being cage-restricted. Another life goal scratched from the list.

The little things
Breaks in the routine could also be smaller things. Date night on a Thursday night where you eat tasty kabobs and watch movies with your loved one. It could be pigging out over the weekend. Getting drunk on a random day with champagne just because you can. Lying on the couch all day reading old magazines. Measuring your max strength and trying to better it. Getting up before sunrise and riding into the East (easiest during winter, heh..). I would say calling an old friend on the phone and catching up on old times, but I'd be lying because a) I hate telephones and b) I've lost touch with almost all of my mates from uni. You move on, ya know? I'm still in touch with the important people.

So what's on the cards for this years fresh-and-interesting list? Well, I've always wanted to go clay pidgeon shooting, although now we're married and have a house I might find a lot more time tied up (happily) with home improvement and stuff. I'd still like to visit a firing range. I made some new riding friends, I want to ride more with them. I want to take my bike to a track day. I want to .. Hmm shit, I need a new to-do list. Answers on a postcard please, I'm running out of time and goals that don't include 'jack in the job and travel the world for the rest of your life'.