I was definitely right about the learning curve. I started by not even being able to figure out how to prime the pump. The manual says it should take a few seconds, but it took several minutes. But, I didn’t know what to trust, so, it was unnerving to have it sitting there pumping with nothing happening, so, I kept switching it off and staring at it, scratching my head. This took almost an hour of switching, staring, scratching, reading, Googling. Then, when I finally got all that figured out, I had to flush the system several times and that was at least another half hour. All of this would have sucked on Christmas morning, when I want to be enjoying Christmas with the family.
I won’t go through all I did last night, but, I ended up with very hot water spewing all over me and the bar at one point, hitting buttons in the wrong order and getting very unpleasant surprising results, and plenty more staring and scratching, asking myself just what the heck I was thinking getting such a nice espresso machine for a hack like me who has only ever used a $45 Mr. Coffee and a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Bodum Granos.
This is just a whole new world for me.
On top of everything else, I have no tamper that fits the group handle (that’s a REALLY big deal) and the frothing wand is little bitty – a fact I admittedly knew when I purchased it. This machine is well-known for lacking when it comes to steam, but I decided that good coffee should be the primary consideration and I’d figure out the rest as I go. Doesn’t mean I’m happy about it, but it is a price issue – a machine that does everything perfectly costs quite a bit more. And besides, I’m used to working with far-less-than-perfect equipment and getting results that probably exceed what anyone would think the equipment is capable of.

I should note here that I have no good beans, and am waiting until money is a little better to place an order. As with anything, you want as few variables as possible and all I pretty much have at this point are variables and no constants, so it’s hard to know where in the process I am going wrong. I hope to order some good beans in the next couple days.
Anyway, when I finally worked up the nerve to pull a shot with my substandard beans, I was STUNNED! I have a VERY cheap grinder, lousy beans, a tamper that is too small, and I’ve never used a machine of this quality, and the shot was almost pure crema pouring from the spouts! I says to myself “It can’t be this easy – it may look great, but how will it taste?”. Well, the mouthfeel was sweet and almost syrupy. That faded almost immediately into a very smooth, albeit thin yet pleasant taste! Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t a great espresso shot, but, as I tasted it, I marveled that, if it comes out this good when so much else was wrong, what will it be like when everything is right?!
For so long, I have used equipment that, even when you have made what should be your best shot ever, it can still come out flukishly bad. It seems that even this thing’s bad shots are acceptable shots! So, maybe I no longer have to worry so much about getting a decent shot – it will pretty much always come out decent and I can now focus on the variables that produce perfection instead of constantly worrying about safeguards against potential disaster. After how ever many years of being a hobbyist barista, I am THRILLED at this prospect.

Well, I spent about six hours last night trying to learn it. This morning, I attempted to make Terra a vanilla latte and then a cappuccino for myself.
Um. Hm.
Ok, the frothing is as bad as I feared. Her steamed milk came out ok. But, apparently, you have to switch over to brew mode and then pull straight water BEFORE you try to pull a shot immediately after using steam. And I found out the hard (MESSY) way. The manual DID say to do this, but I thought it was just a helpful tip for people who didn’t know what they were doing. Hrmph. So, while her milk is sitting there getting cold, I now have to start over with the shot – beans, grind, dose, tamp, load, pull, etc.. A five minute drink turned into a ten minute or worse drink.
With my new found knowledge, I then proceeded to attempt a cappuccino. Well, the milk was hot, but, no foam (a cappuccino should be 1/3 foam). And I know I’m not that bad – it’s that little nub of a wand. So, mine was a latte in a cappuccino cup, so the drink turned cold really fast. Blech.

Eleven hundred words already??? I knew I shouldn’t have written this after having so much coffee :P

The bottom line so far is that this machine knows a helluva lot more about making coffee than I apparently do and I have to get up to it’s standards before I can even think about refining my own technique.
And therefore, I am SO glad I didn’t wait until Christmas morning to open it. I have a couple days to try to make passable drinks before Christmas morning.

I would now like to give some public credit where public credit is most certainly due.
Firstly, thanks SOOOO much to Terra’s parents. They did make it financially possible for me to get this. I have wrestled so much with their wish that this be a present opened on Christmas day, but if they read this, I think they may understand. Plus, this is a gift not only to me, but to Terra as well – we have concluded that she is one third owner of it and that math would take too long to explain :P And, speaking of Terra, I owe much thanks to her as she is the one who pushed me so hard to actually order it when I fought so hard that it cost too much and the money could be better spent. In fact, I was so humbled by the gift of her parents, I didn’t want to accept it and Terra (and my mother) pushed me on that, too. And I want to thank my mother who also fought me, for different reasons, to go ahead and get it. She has to wait on her biggest, most-coveted present so I could get this at the holiday sale price. It is safe to say that my mother paid the highest price for this. And, finally, I thank my brother and sister-in-law who, like Terra’s parents, have come to our aid when we didn’t know if we were going to be able to have a Christmas after Terra lost her job in November. Knowing there would be gifts for mom coming from them has helped me to make the decision to spend a little extra Christmas money on the machine.

And that’s it for now. I will get some pics and video up soon. You are ALL invited for coffee :) You, uh, may want to wait a few days, though :P

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and here is a video of the actual moment of the hugely controversial event…

this is october of 2008…

and a vanity shot taken in march of 2008…

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first i want to point out that this is on a 42" lcd hdtv in the living room and i use a wireless kb and mouse…

second, pretty much everything you see is Yahoo! Widgets, Rainmeter, ObjectDock, and Stickies… if you want your desktop like mine, just google those names…

on the left is our budget for the month using Stickies, but, if you look, it is a bit transparent and you will see it is actually the top sticky atop a few others, but this is the only open one – they roll up… (i hide windows desktop icons under my sticky notes…) you can see i have another little note in the middle of the screen, at the top…
beneath the budget are a couple icons of stuff i need to do – check out the PlayOn app, put Iron Man on my mom’s psp, etc…. it’s sorta’ my to-do stack… and the bottom left hand corner – that little blue thing – i can drag a file onto that and it will auto-magically upload it to the ‘stuff’ directory on my website…

ok, at the bottom edge is ObjectDock – ya’ know, like the dock on a mac… it is hidden until i hover my mouse at the bottom of the screen and, as my mouse moves, the icons under it enlarge… in this pic, i clicked on ‘APPS’ and it opened the assortment of apps i keep handy… not pictured is the other ObjectDock, which i have set up as the system tray/task bar – it’s hidden on the left… i have used ObjectDock (paid version) for years and can’t live without it… it does many more tricks i won’t get into here…

ok, the news headlines are Rainmeter – which is like a widget engine, but not for the faint-of-heart – it is very complex to customize and you need to have some coding knowledge… as you see, i have rss feeds from home-barista for coffee geek discussions, playstation lifestyle for ps3/psp stuff and google for "real" news…

in the middle, since i love love love photography, a Yahoo Widget showing recent popular photos posted on DeviantArt on the left and another Yahoo Widget on the right with recent popular photos posted to Flickr… they are set to change every few minutes… i leave room since the photos come in all shapes and sizes… both have very impressive customization settings as far as what kind of content to show… for instance, the deviantart widget, of course, has tons more types of art than photography and the flickr widget can show your own stream, favorites, photos from groups and/or contacts, and you can even use it to upload to flickr…

at the top, pretty obvious, Yahoo Widgets for date/time, cpu usage, and upload/download speed…

which brings us to the right edge… i have been a webcam junkie for years and this is a Yahoo Widget called WebImages – several instances of it, of course… i have used several methods for desktop webcam monitoring and this one blows all the others away… the depth of options and customization can be intimidating at first and there is a bit of a learning curve, but it is SOOOO worth it… the radar is the local weather radar, of course… the rest are cams that update once a minute… i have each set up to sort of a theme and each contains more than one cam – when it updates, it switches to the next cam that one monitors… for instance, the top is local – alternating between a cam in cloudcroft and one in las cruces… the next down is home – albuquerque – four different cams and once a minute, it shows a different view… the next three are assorted cool/interesting places – cams in las vegas, italy, california, and others – all three contain a list of all my favorite cams around the world and, once a minute (or whatever i choose to set it to from once a second to once a day) it cycles to the next cam in its list… or, if one of them has something really interesting going on, i stop the cycling and set it to update in near-real-time and each one has a button when you mouse over it to enlarge it as big as you like… you can hit another button to save the current image, even…
but, now i’m gushing ;P
oh, and the very bottom one is NASATV – the widget can stream the video, but, i just have it set to show a still every 15 seconds…

anyway… that’s my desktop…

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but, i say it was for the whole world to see and, in reality that wasn’t the case… i mean, i’ve had a website for years and very low traffic and i like it that way – i’m not selling anything or benefitting in any way from traffic and it also keeps me off the radar of hackers, spammers and other trouble-makers so there are several reasons why i’m happy with a low traffic site… the main traffic i get – and my webcam got – was friends and family… my dad had a widget on his desktop that showed my living room cam and it meant a lot to him be able to see me on a constant basis… the point is it wasn’t “for the whole world to see”, i knew almost nobody was watching but i did it anyway…
i have loved webcams for years and to this day, i have a widget on my desktop that displays four cams – i have three set to the only live cams i know of in albuquerque (ever since the wonderful abqcam.com shut down) and one i change – sometimes to the cam that points at a spot at the pier where i used to hang out in Hermosa Beach, California – sometimes to the cam at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas that pans around casinos i used to spend a lot of time at – or just to a cam i come across that is a place i find interesting…

anyway, i don’t know where my urge comes from to broadcast my life, but i always got a kick out of it… i miss my webcam… i wish i had one now, but it isn’t just my bachelor life on display, i live here with mom and terra and wesley – so, i have to settle for ‘again someday’…

but, see, that’s where twitter comes in… i’m not so unusual anymore – tons of people are “broadcasting their life for the whole world to see”, so to speak…
my webcam was an answer to the question “what are you doing right now?”…
my cam was never off but the software i used had a mode to just take a snap and upload it, rather than have it on all the time… well, twitter is like that snap-not-stream mode…

twitter is one of those things that someone can describe for an hour to you but until you actually have it, you can’t really see the point… as soon as i was on, i took off and haven’t stopped… it was just the next broadcast medium for me… and i dislike a lot of what twitter has become… for instance, it is very rare i go to the site or use a twitter client — twitter is almost purely a cell phone experience for me… i am following maybe a hundred people and for quite a while just kept changing, every few weeks or so, who i got updates from to my phone… now, i have turned off pretty much everyone except people here in alamogordo — i have every single one of them set to sms delivery (i use the indispensible http://twuzzer.com to keep an eye out for new twitterers in my area)… throughout the day, my phone beeps and there is a twitter and every one of them is local, except for my sis-in-law in vegas and one or two other very infrequent posters…
remember in The Dark Knight when he had everyone’s cell phone providing surveillance around Gotham? yeah, that’s kinda’ what i’m doing… if a twitterer posts in the alamogordo area, i get it to my phone… and almost no other tweets…
so, it’s kinda’ like getting webcam snaps from all around alamogordo… that’s why web-only/client-only twitterers are people i can’t relate to… twitter is many things to many people and ok fine, but i would love to see what it would be like if twitter was phone-only… the way they intended it, i suspect… and one reason i like http://zannel.com so much – almost all of the posts are from people’s phones, not the site or a desktop client – and actually delivering answers to the “what are you doing right now?” question… most of the non-local updates i get on my phone are from the handful of people i follow on zannel…

btw, see, this town is tiny and i’m a big city boy having lived in/around L.A., vegas, dallas, orlando (i loved albuquerque – big enough to have everything but small enough that nothing is more than half an hour away) and i go crazy because there is just nothing at all to do here… so, while i’m here i have lately thought hey, there’s only so many twitterers here – maybe 20 active currently – so, why not continually hear from them what they do? and, sure there are a couple that use twitter to advertise (*spits*) and a few that are what i called above “web-only/client-only” but it is the best chance i have of continually seeing into the lives of a truly diverse cross section of locals… where they go, what they do, etc…. i’m curious… i’ve always loved webcams and now i also love twitter, for the same reasons – when people actually use it that way – as a text webcam…

i twitter and formerly webcam’ed for those who were curious about me and i love being able to get, in real time, the ‘text webcam snapshots’ from people i’m curious about…

once my time here is done and i move back to civilization, i’ll change out whose tweets hit my phone to keep my finger on the pulse, as it were, of people in many cities… but, the webcam mentality is my favorite kind of twitterer… tell me where you are right now, what you see and hear, what you’re doing, and i’ll keep doing the same – whether by cam or twitter or whatever comes next…

[posted from my mint metallic green MotoQ 9c]

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see, back home, i got to the point that i didn’t even leave the house with them… and the only time i REALLY felt like smoking was at the end of the night… but, here, i’m just not busy like i was back home… so, i ended up smoking more and more and then, when i tried to cut back — well, it was unpleasant… that was, what? may?
but, see, this time i am doing the cold turkey thing…
i last smoked friday night, say, around midnight, maybe? and it is 7p on tuesday… and, so far, i have been a jerk to all the important people in my life…

i have refrained from reading up on info about quitting (that’s worse than not smoking) but i did look up a couple things and i have classic symptoms… i am, well, irritable hardly even begins to describe it, more like transmogrified into some sort of werewolf… i have this terrible taste in my mouth and everything smells funny… i think the world stinks too much to not smoke… you say cigarettes stink? i’ll come back to that in a minute… and i am having the damndest time keeping a thought… i lose my train of thought continually and i don’t notice it nearly as much as when i try to talk to someone… i find that words don’t come out the way i was thinking them and that i forget what i was saying…
that’s just weird…
the others are one thing, but, don’t mess with this dude’s ability to cogitate and communicate… anything but that…

i mentioned something about cigarettes stinking…

i agree…

see, i don’t smoke these nasty american things like camels and marlboros, i have, since i was about 21, smoked only kreteks, as they’re known in their home country – their friends here just usually call them “cloves”… you know, the things the goth kids smoke… though, they usually smoke the american variety… see, kreteks are a product of indonesia… i order mine over the internet straight from there… and in indonesia, they do make some just to sell to americans and canadians… they are nowhere near as good as the real thing…
yes, this is one of those many “snob things” with me… kreteks are a sort of gourmet item… the short version of what they are would go something like cigarettes made with very high quality java tobaccos (american tobacco tastes like cardboard) and ground cloves (like your mom put on ham) and frequently a “flavoring sauce” – kind of like what they do with cavendish pipe tobacco…
the bottom line is they have very little in common with what 99% of people in this country think of when they think of cigarettes… they actually taste GOOD and the scent is kind of ‘incensey’ and, most nonsmokers would say, not offensively unpleasant…
i, for a long time, have been devoted to Wismilak Diplomats… the flavor is everything i ever started smoking cloves for… they are very different from every other variety i’ve ever had, but quite reminiscent of the much-loved but long-lost Sampoerna X-Tras…

anyway, what they DO have in common with a run-of-the-mill yankee cancer stick is the stuff that’s bad for you… and therein lies my problems right now… indonesian kreteks have a good double dose of the nicotine – you know, the addictive stuff in there… and more than double, sometimes triple the amount of “tar”… ahem, it is the tar that makes ‘em taste so good… it is a very moist, flavorful smoke… i mentioned the made-for-american varieties that the people who have seen cloves have seen – the Djarum Specials, the Djarum Blacks, etc. – those are made to american specs; e.g. they make the levels of nicotine and tar acceptable by non-indonesian standards…
unfortunately, i gave up the americanized ones long ago because the indonesians are so much more flavorful… so, here i am having REALLY bad withdrawals… i didn’t mention the trembling and depression before, but, yeah, i got those, too…

btw, even the americanized ones are illegal in this state… yup, three states have outlawed the sale of cloves (maryland and utah are the other two)… there are many urban myths-sounding stories why but the most believable is that they are allegedly attractive to kids – flavored cigarettes, “candy cigarettes”… and there has been a rumor for years that people are pushing for this to be a nationwide thing…
anyway, i get mine directly from indonesia… i think i mentioned that…

hey, i said i’m writing this instead of smoking and already made clear i’m not able to concentrate, so, this will be a long-ish, rambly kinda’ post…

i’m sitting here with a glass of water, with a straw in it as per someone’s advice…
do the math… detoxing, water; straw, oral fix; etc….

i don’t like water…

this is when it would be nice to have a 9 to 5 like back home, so i have a routine to just go get in…

and, jeez, what a rotten time to have an espresso bar as my big hobby!!!! the moment i even SMELL coffee, i want to smoke! coffee and cloves – it’s just a given… so, if i go play at my bar to take my mind off of it, it will just make me want to smoke more than i did before…
and, when i do feel like eating, which isn’t often, i have to have it pretty much bland… see, i love everything spicy… i add lots of black pepper to everything, hot sauce, etc…. well, i love eating spicy food, then popping open a (diet) coke and drinking that bubbly, acidic drink with all that spicy, acidic sensation really bringing home the rich, nutty, chocolatey, coffee-ey, taste of the clove… oh, it’s amazing…
sigh…
so, now i don’t want anything spicy!!!

no coffee, no spicy food…

and have i mentioned that i’ve never really done this before? i mean cold turkey… not that i can remember anyway… i started smoking the usual age – you know, sneaking them at like 14 or whatever, moved out in the late teens, had a few months i could have walked away from them but i didn’t and been hooked ever since… well, sort of… most years, i wouldn’t DIE without them… i could make it a long time without one, in fact… erm, long time in smoker time – like half a day… iow, i wasn’t usually one of these smokers who would go nuts if an hour passed and i couldn’t smoke… sure, there were times i was that bad off (my couple of years with amy comes to mind), but, most years i could go a few hours pretty easily…
it all started after my wife left that i started smoking hard… but, after two or three years, even that subsided and the last few months before i moved here – as i said above – i was down to one or two a day and fine with it…

so, what happened here?
well, stress, sure… being a caregiver for your dying father is not a carefree life… and he was a smoke-once-an-hour kinda’ guy (hey, i wonder if he’s got a forgotten pack of smokes around here?) and i would help him go outside and so i would usually smoke with him… so i guess that increased my frequency a bit… then, he died in december and there were a few stressful months… and the last few have been only two gears – either full-speed stressful or sitting here… i think the sitting, boredom part makes me want to smoke more than the stress…

i need to call billy… but talking on the phone makes me want to smoke… anytime i call someone or answer the phone, i always light a clove…
driving, of course, makes me want to smoke… you know – i remember that was my first real test, quite a while back… when i had convinced myself that i was down to minimal smoking, i had to drive down here to visit mom and dad – about a four hour drive – and i made that drive no problem… that’s when i knew i had it under control…

ohhhhh, i can hear some of you now…
the kind who say there IS NO acceptable kind of smoking… that if i REALLY had it under control, i would have quit altogether… that is the american/canadian/whatever concept of smoking… that it is merely a delivery method for nicotine… well, that is a consequence of the trash that passes for cigarettes in this part of the world… you have to LEARN to enjoy the taste of those things… force yourself is more like it… no one every smelled a burning marlboro and said “yum, that smells nice”… well, no non-smoker anyway… (btw, in a move i predicted, there are now marlboro cloves in indonesia…)
many pleasures aren’t particularly good for you – and one who takes pleasures to an extreme are the ones doing true harm to themselves…
more than that later…

and i have heard it all, especially from the church crowd… telling me about defiling the temple and addiction… these are the same ones who drink legal speed all day and openly joke that they have headaches if they go too long without a cup…
no, i’m talking about hypocrisy, i don’t believe in it – “do as i say, not as i do” is perfectly acceptable to me, as long as you are right… my point is they don’t notice that they are equally as guilty with pretty much clear conscience but don’t see how i could be… yes, i have a clear conscience about enjoying a clove…
and that’s part of why i decided to quit… because it is controlling me – i am thoroughly addicted… if i could have one, once a day, after dinner, i would go right on… and i MIGHT be able to bring myself back to that point, but, as i said wayyyyy above, i tried that back in june… and as much as the addiction is screaming in my body and brain right now, i know i’m doing the right thing… same as with a child, if they are so spoiled that they scream when they don’t get their way, you need to take all reward and pleasure from them until they regain perspective…
in fact, one reason i DON’T want to quit is because it will make the wrong people happy… there are people who are going to say that i am getting right with god by giving up cloves and that just irritates the heck out of me… i went through the same thing when i cut my long hair off… people saying i looked so much more godly now… man, i tell ya’, that made me want to invent a time machine and go right back and not do it… and i am likewise preparing for all the comments now in the church… it is one of a few reasons why i am not telling anyone except terra, sarah, and you reading this… (fortunately, almost no one reads my stuff, so, i’m not really running a risk of people i know finding out…) i don’t want them scoring one of their self-righteous, being-more-like-me-is-being-godly points off of me…

yes, i know that’s pride…

on the subject of not telling people and there being more than one reason, it is also a humility thing, as well as a pride thing…
let me explain…
see, god says we are to “be excellent to each other” and i don’t see him make exceptions for people quitting smoking… he says that his grace is sufficient for me and that his strength is made complete in my weakness and that definitely sounds like it applies to trying to quit smoking… so, if i go around telling people they need to cut me some extra slack and expect the worst because on whatever date i am going to quit smoking, i really feel that i am making excuses to be a jerk when god says i should be kind, tender-hearted, forgiving, etc. and again, i don’t see him make exceptions for people quitting smoking…
i know there are other arguments, but, i’ve prayed about this and that’s what i feel god has told me i need to obey…

now, i like to bring a little something to offend everyone and here is one i know will get most people… i refuse to say i will never smoke again! i will someday once again have the pleasure of smoking… same as i have freedom to have a drink now and then and that is coming from a former drug addict… and, before you even think it, i am not just saying this to make myself feel better and cope with the feelings of finality – no, i will have the luxury of smoking a fine indonesian kretek again… perhaps with an espresso or after a particularly excellent meal… and i fantasize that i will smoke less than i have ever smoked in my life… that it won’t even be a daily thing… it will be a special occasion… though, once you open a pack, they go stale in a matter of days…
but, as i have used my one-of-life’s-simple-pleasures argument to myself, it occurs to me that i am NOT here to have a good time… this is supposed to be a missionary-type thing, my being here… i have a job to do and i have gotten way too comfortable and am making way too many excuses for “simple little pleasures”… i think i can live without one that has certainly gotten out of hand and ain’t exactly cheap…
and, all my friends right now are church friends and they complain about it, each in their own little way… so, it will shut them up… and, i usually live right on the fringe of what is “acceptable” in the church with my dislike of xian music (and probably my use of the abbreviation “xian” :P ) and my long hair (now fancy hair) and my painted toenails and my smoking and all this stuff that makes them say all the things about how i’ve “got one foot in the world and one foot in the church” or whatever, which is a refrain i heard ad infinitum in the old baptist church i grew up in but never expected i’d hear so quickly at a calvary chapel… so, anyway, i could certainly use the points…
of course, i’ll lose more points than i gain when they read this post :P

anyway, i have dealt with depression all my life and i have sort of become attuned to feeling those brain chemical tides turn and i predict i will be feeling better about life in general tomorrow…

in fact, i feel better just writing this post…

but…

i still wish i could smoke…

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so, let’s say my friend jennifer tells me i absolutely must see The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Pieces of April or Garden State… ok, i trust her taste – she has good taste… she knows my taste – she loves Silence of the Lambs and i don’t, i love American Beauty and she doesn’t… she knows me well enough to be pretty accurate about what i will like and, if she says i will love some film, i trust her…
AND SINCE I TRUST HER, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW A THING…
just give me the title, i don’t want to know what it is about, i want to go in completely clear minded… i don’t even want to know if it is a comedy, romance, western, nothin’, i trust you – just give me the title…

and there are some directors that i have seen enough of their work to know they do good, pretty much every time… so, i don’t want to know a thing…
Darren Aronofsky, PT Anderson, the Coen brothers are three great mainstream examples… i have pretty much loved everything they have done, so, when i know there is a new film coming, man… i spend month avoiding reviews, dodging trailers, steering clear of conversations, etc…. it is really hard sometimes…
of course, within a year, all three let me down… The Fountain, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men really left me scratching my head… they all deserve more viewings – i never make up my mind about a well-made film after only one viewing, but, i unreservedly love Aronofsky’s previous two films, and only PT Anderson’s Hard Eight was less than breathtaking – his others were nearly perfect, and while i would not say the Coens acheive perfection on a regular basis, i always like their films much more on a first viewing than i did NCFOM…
i will add that Pixar really let me down during the same time period, too, with Ratatouille… sure, it was beautiful, but, the hair-control thing stretched credulity to a breaking point and i thought the story as a whole was kind of insipid… weakest Pixar offering ever, i said at the time and still do… but, i still avoid any info about every Pixar film and they more than made up for it with Wall-E, which is nothing short of a masterpiece…

imagine if you went to Spiderman (blech) and had no idea what the movie was about… or Wall-E or Alien or The Notebook… i didn’t know anything about From Dusk ’til Dawn when i first saw it and nothing could have prepared me for the last half :P

annnnyway, there are so many films/movies out there that i know all about, i read the review sites, i hang out at the message boards and read the discussion, i listen to the podcasts, sure… but, there are the people who i trust and i try to do the impossible with their work and know absolutely nothing, but life is too short and popular media is too pathetic to “blind buy” everything, which is why i am always keeping my eye out for directors i can trust and people whose taste i really trust…

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” – W. H. Auden

yeah, that’s the stuff Terra and i watch on our “slumber party night” on friday nights – movies to eat junk food to… when i know i have a trusted source of exceptions to the rule, i want as pure an experience as possible…

so, i haven’t lost all trust for Aronofsky, i’ll still go see The Wrestler (and i’ve avoided finding out anything), but as i said on twitter a little bit ago, he needs to win my heart back, i’m going to be guarded after what he did on our third date… and i know i’ll like There Will Be Blood a lot more the second time… as for No Country For Old Men, some Coens films only work once you know the rules of the universe the film takes place in… and i could write a whole lot about that… i even really like The Ladykillers – the one no one else does, it seems – but, i had to see it a few times and get comfortable in the setting before the characters made much sense to me… and that could describe most of their films… they create self-contained mini-universes and, if you expect the rules of the real world to apply, the films don’t make sense… sure, all art does this to some extent, but, the Coens are one (of many) example of this idea taken to a sky-high extreme…
the thing that bugs me, i guess is that i didn’t see any juice in NCFOM… let me explain… i said i like The Ladykillers, but it took me a few viewings… while i didn’t like the film, i liked some of the moments and a lot of the dialogue… i kept putting it on while i cleaned house and such, just to catch those things enough times to really get them in my mind, since i had every expectation that i wasn’t going to see the movie again after these few viewings…
see, i was sucking the juice out of the orange and then was going to throw the orange itself away…
but, next thing i knew, i loved the movie, even though that wasn’t my intention…
so, when i watched No Country For Old Men, there was no juice to make me want to come back and suck out… i can’t think of anything i want to go back and see for fear i never will again… that being the case, it may not get the chance to grow on me like The Ladykillers and a couple of their others have…
but, i will still go see their new one, Read Before Burning…

when did this turn into a post about the Coen brothers???

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Yesterday

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since i brought up dad in the last pic, i wanted to show another that means a lot to me…

that is cheryl, a nurse with hospice… hospice nurses are amazing people – dad didn’t like anyone much but he liked cheryl… she did so much to help him and take care of him in his last days… she and the other nurses (but especially her) did so much to help us…

this pic was taken as discreetly as i could, trying to keep the camera semi-concealed, or at least not calling attention to it so i could get a genuine moment… i am shocked it came out as good as it did, but, focus, etc. is far from perfect… but, the moment is captured and that’s all that matters to me…

i love the accidental composition of mom looking so concerned yet distant – evocative to me of helplessness or powerlessness – we often felt that way… just watching his life drain away and not in a hospital, surrounded by disconcerting devices and ominous terminology where you expect sickness, but here at home where he hangs all his hats, in his living room, in his favorite chair, the place he probably felt safest for many years… while home i’m sure is a more pleasant place to die, my point is one doesn’t associate home with death… i’m not coming up with the words to fully express what i mean, but if i could always SAY what i felt about what i see or experience, i doubt i would have the desire to do photography…

so, just look at the picture again with all i said in mind…
as i said, it’s one that means a lot to me…

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this continues to be one that is very meaningful to me… the description on flickr is: “this is where i used to sit with my dad and smoke before he died… i haven’t had the heart to take his last cigarette butt out of his snuffer…”

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so, it got me to thinking about what i WISH i could change them to and i came up with a couple ways of looking at it:

since i have a large movie collection, one way i thought was in terms of what i might say about a film as a collector:
5 = “I own every release ever put out on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray”
4 = “I have the Criterion DVD, is there a Blu-Ray release date yet?”
3 = “I’m waiting to come across it on sale”
2 = “I have a badly compressed file i downloaded off BitTorrent sitting on my media server, but that’s good enough”
1 = “It’s been on my NetFlix queue for months…  Near the bottom.”

and, being a home theater enthusiast and loving to watch movies with people, i was also thinking of how i might rate movies as a host, so to speak, if someone were to suggest watching a certain movie:
5 = “Great idea!  Here, have the best seat!”
4 = “Sure, it’s been too long since I saw that one”
3 = “Um, ok, that’s cool, but make sure you’ve looked at everything else first”
2 = “Hmm, well it’s in the sell stack, but, I could dig it out if you really want to see it”
1 = “WHAT???!!!  NO I DON’T OWN THAT!!  WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?!  GET THE HELL OUTTA MY HOUSE!!”

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    yes, the bible clearly says that homosexuality is a sin…  the bible also lists adultery, fornication, and christ went as far as to say that if you look upon a woman  with lust, you have already committed adultery with her in your mind…  overeating is also listed as a sin, as is disrespect to parents…  the bible makes it clear that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of god” and that no sin is worse than any other but that sin is that which keeps us from a relationship with god…
    while the bible clearly says that sin is not to be taken lightly, it also says that we cannot outright avoid everyone who sins because, again, all have sinned and continue to…  nor do i see the bible commanding me to feel or think a certain way about sinners (except myself, to whom it gives much instruction and wisdom) and certainly not to condemn them…  the bible records that jesus had occasion to eat with prostitutes, tax collectors, and other people whom much of society shunned and, if he had openly condemned them, i don’t think he would have been welcome at their table for long…
    and i said i have had many gay friends and that my best friend in albuquerque was gay…  she and i spent a lot of time together…  and, if it had been a ploy to get her to convert, she would have known it…  and she was not my only gay friend in albuquerque and they were friends – people i valued and shared much with and they with me – not people i was subtly trying to make converts of…  i said that i am firm and outspoken in my faith – well, she knew that i believe what the bible says and that the bible says she commits sin and that i do, too…  i believe the bible and am compelled to live my life according to it…  she does not…  there were times she asked me questions about what the bible says, but, mostly it didn’t come up…  we were both film snobs and art snobs and music snobs and most of our time was spent persuing those things…  i was in leadership in the church back home and i would talk about things going on in my life and she would ask questions about why things were done a certain way and sometimes she might think it was a bit silly to feel compelled to do what the bible said, but, i thought some things she did were silly and we could both talk about it light-heartedly…
    i have never been a “manly man” (i have no interest in football or cars and, right this very moment, my toenails are painted) and rarely fit in well with my peers and spent my youth with those that also didn’t quite fit in with the “normal” people of the world…  so, i may be the wrong christian to address this issue…  i don’t see gay people as a separate category of human…  i have biases and prejudices that i endeavor to work out in my life, like anyone else, this just isn’t one of mine…

    now, i said that no sin affects my relationship with people and i made a caveat and i just want to clarify…  there are people who take part in activities the bible calls sin that i am tempted by…  as a former drug addict, it would probably be a mistake for me to hang out with drug users, as i may very well get weak…

    so, the last question you asked me was if i thought being gay was a sin…
    you already know i will say what i think doesn’t matter, it is what scripture says that matters…  so, do i think it is sin?  i KNOW it is sin, according to the bible, as is many things i have done/do/will do…  and, as i said, the bible doesn’t tell me i have to treat anyone any different because of their sin…  i had no opinion on the gay marriage issue…  when i heard the ruling, i neither smiled nor frowned…  i think christians waste a lot of time and make a bad name for themselves when they get involved in certain issues…
    so, perhaps you meant to ask if i am at all repulsed by gays and i use a religious dogma to justify it and i think i have answered that…

    my view on gays does ruffle some feathers in christian circles…  i am used to “them” while most others still see them as some distorted kind of person that they cannot relate to and are even disgusted by…  i think that is a prejudice or perhaps a distorted attempt at morality… and i take some ribbing or even complete disapproval of my relationships with “them”…  even this post will get me some comments, i’m sure…  i bring this up because you certainly are not getting a fair sample of the popular christian consensus on this issue when asking me…  but, no one has yet to show me scripture that clearly proves me to be in the wrong in my view and scripture is the final court of arbitration…

   i also want to point out that, in another sense, i do represent the current christian worldview…  i pastored the addiction recovery ministry back home for several months, hosted a devotion in my apartment every weekday morning at 6am for a year or so, taught bible studies, did work with the homeless – all under the leadership of and accountability to calvary chapel rio rancho, and the worldwide calvary chapel movement is one that most christians would agree is a solid bible-believing church, and has been since its start in the 1960s…  they believe what c.s. lewis called “mere christianity” – the essentials of which have been believed by most christians, most of the time, since the time of christ and, as he puts it “is what it is and was what it was long before i was born and whether i like it or not”…  there are secondary issues i disagree with them about and they with me, but, my point is they are not renegade or radical and they did not consider me to be… 

    so, anyway, there you have it…  there are many kinds of “christianity” and the wild ones make the news and there is an unfortunate prevalence of what i can only see as unbiblical christianty and that is where the problem is…  my friend did not want me to know she was gay because i was christian and she expected me to judge her…  it gave her a whole new view of christ and the bible and those who follow him and it to know me…
    and perhaps i have similarly put you at some ease that not all christians are the same…

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yes, i am living in alamogordo, i moved here in october to help take care of dad when they put him on hospice…  and he died on december 16…  and now i am living with mom, helping her…  i have every intention of moving back the abq and bringing her with me…  but, that isn’t going to happen any time soon…  she has a lot of medical catching up to do, so, there are a lot of doctor visits and such, plus, she just isn’t ready to move yet…

a gal named terra, and her 2-year-old son are living with us…  she was the best nurse with dad when he was in the hospital for a few days a week or so before he died…  she did a lot of above and beyond stuff, even coming to the house to help with him…  she moved in with us shortly after dad died – she helps me with mom, she helps me with a lot of stuff, and she had a few disasters hit her, so living here is very helpful to her as well…

i am very involved with calvary chapel alamogordo here, including hosting the proverbs devotion at the church, every weekday morning at 6am…

i miss home very much and my friends and church and disc golf and real coffee shops and my apartment, etc. etc., but, i have to be here for mom right now…

and, yes, as of march 24, 2008, my divorce from mary is final…

i have tweaked a few things here on the site…  if you look over at the side bar, you will see i have added links to every place i have an online presence, such as netflix, pandora, del.icio.us, and twitter…
twitter is a fantastic way to keep up with me – it is sort of a ‘micro-blog’ service where, a few times a day, i make a post from my cell phone, sometimes with a pic, briefly telling you what i am doing at that moment – or a scripture that spoke to me, or a quote i liked, or whatever…  no, it won’t give you major details of things in my life, but, if you keep an eye on it, it certainly gives you little snapshots and sort of a wireframe of what my life right now is like…  the feed is on my sidebar, you can subscribe to the feed via rss, or, you can sign up with twitter yourself and get the updates to your phone, live, and you can make posts and we can get glimpses INTO EACH OTHER’S LIVES…
wouldn’t that be cool?  i think so :)

anyway, that is the quick version…

i have really come to dislike talking on the phone, but i do email sometimes, i text message, and of course, i keep up with a few people on twitter, and they with me…  so, your choices for actually having a conversation are kind of few…  you could still trying calling and see if i answer, but, even when in the mood, i am one busy dude…

so, look at the sidebar on the right, you will see all my contact info and, below that, some links to find me if you have a playstation 3 or see how rarely i update my photos on flickr or see what movies i’ve been watching lately on my netflix profile and what i thought of them, my taste in music on last.fm and pandora, some links i think are interesting on del.icio.us and, a little lower, see live updates to my twitter…

that should keep you busy awhile :P

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here is the original word document for those who want it…

“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” — NASB95

Theopneustos is the Greek word translated “inspired by God” — literally “God-breathed“. And this sets the Bible apart from any other document. Indeed, an ‘extra-terrestrial message’ sent to us from outside time and space, written by the One who created time and space and all that is in it. Everything else this passage says is because of those first few words; that Scripture is God-breathed. The same breath that He blew into the nostrils of Adam to cause him to have life causes the word of God to be alive (Hebrews 4:12).
However, there are many Scriptures that refer to God’s breath in terms of judgment. In Nave’s Topical Bible alone, I find several passages to this effect. Like 2 Samuel 22:16 (quoted in Psalm 18:15) where David seems to equate the breath of God as “the rebuke of the Lord”. In Job, Eliphaz speaks in 4:9 and 15:30 of people perishing by the breath of God, yet interestingly, in 32:8, Elihu speaks of the breath of God giving man understanding.
So, with the facets of God’s breath I have referred to so far, it is no surprise that we are told that His word is profitable for teaching, reproof and correction. And Elihu was obviously onto something, as in 2 Timothy 3:15, we are told that these sacred writings are able to give “the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus“. As has been well said, we must first know “the bad news” of man’s guilt and the penalty of sin if “the good news” of the Gospel is to mean anything to us.

Now, since the Bible is from The Creator of All Things, it is most certainly the only truly accurate manual for the human condition and the Christian walk. As the summary of divine revelation, it contains everything we need to know to for “training in righteousness” and to be “equipped for every good work” that God will call us to do. As Matthew Henry put it, “whatever duty we have to do, whatever service is required of us, we find enough in the Scriptures to furnish us for it“.

All of this being the case, we as Christians, ought to fill our minds with the Word. Through prayerful reading, devotions, study, and memorization, we “renew our minds” (Romans 12:2) and conform it to His will that we may be “doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Ephesians 6:17 speaks of the word of God as the sword of the spirit, the only offensive weapon in the Christian armory, and we need to practice our swordsmanship so that we may battle the enemy the way christ did with “it is written” until the devil flees (Matthew 4:1-11, et. al.).
Since the Bible is how we learn the will of God and equip ourselves for spiritual battle, the Scriptures need to be our obsession, our hobby, spending the rest of our lives searching them, learning them, studying them. There is no pastime more worthy of our attention. As one of my favorite passages on the subject says “…commit yourselves completely to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands as a reminder, and wear them on your forehead. Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away on a journey, when you are lying down and when you are getting up again. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 11:18-20). If we spent every moment of the rest of our lives in the Scriptures, we still would not know all there is to know, so, we should fill as much time as we can with our minds on the Scriptures, “making the most of your time, because the days are evil“, endeavoring to “understand what the will of the Lord is” (excerpted from Ephesians 5:16-17).

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the weather is finally agreeable and, in my experience, this place is not without decent playing spots…
here is a site that has allegedly all the new mexico courses: nmdgc.org (new mexico disc golf courses dot org)… and here is a little thing i put together on windows live local, showing the abq courses: well, all but roosevelt :P… you might also have a look at pdga.com’s new mexico course page…
vista hills on rockaway is the obvious quick-game choice, centrally located for most people i know, just a couple minutes from the church… a really simple 9-hole course that can easily be played in under an hour…

i’m able, ready, and more than willing after work (4:30, 5-ish) on mondays, thursdays, and fridays… i’m always up for grabbing a quick round at rockaway (the earlier the better on mondays or else the third hole has to be skipped because of the soccer kids) and, if time permits, ladera would be great… i’d love to play the baca, but when is a huge question mark… (weekends are not exactly ideal…)
just gimme’ a call me on my cell – 328.1406

i have enough discs for two people… if you want to buy, it has been too long, i don’t know where to go except online or try ‘head shops (ya’ know, where you used to buy incense, pipes, and tie-dye)… over at Big 5 sporting goods on coors near paseo, i bumped into a very small, basic selection of drivers and putters (no mid-ranges) for $10 a piece, but, maybe some local players will read this and post a comment letting us know where to go for the good stuff… i’m looking your direction, matthew bohnsack :)

and, for that matter, anyone interested in getting a game can hit the comments and make it known… never played? no problem, i play like i’ve never played, so, it’s all good… just a nice way to waste a bit of time after work and maybe get hardcore on the weekends or something…
it’s free and it’s fun, so, let’s get out there…

.

UPDATE – April 9
forget what i said about weekends not being ideal… we have had a couple great saturdays out at Ladera and it looks like i/we will be doing it every saturday, hopefully getting there about 10am, 11am, somewhere in there and counting on spending 3 hours or so to play the 18 holes… yesterday, i was on the course EIGHT hours, so, i think the window of opportunity is pretty much all day if anyone else wants to join me/us…

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Bird’s Eye Tourist

From the site:

First Google brought us Google Local and Google Earth. Then Microsoft followed suit with Windows Live Local, featuring stunning new imagery. Bird’s Eye images provide a high-resolution, low-angle aerial view of a small area.

This website is the definitive guide and repository for the coolest Windows Live Local locations.

with a blog format and links divided into locations (where i found the sandia peak tramway) and categories (DO NOT miss “our favorites“), this is a very cool site…

at the moment the front page includes “the bat cave from the old TV show Batman“, “the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park in Buena Park, CA”, “numerous hovercraft at the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia, “The Simpsons mural at Fox Studios”, and “the fake McDonalds”…

oh, and they also have a list of all the cities covered by windows live local…  very cool – even microsoft doesn’t offer that anywhere, as far as i know…

this is one to keep an eye on…  (btw, they DO have an rss feed!)

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ok, next, since i get a lot of comments/questions about it, i would like to publicly let everyone know that my webcam sucks (hey, it was $15, you get watcha pay for)… it freezes up quite a bit, so, yes, when you view my webcam image, it might not be live… the program that uploads the images does just fine, so, it will have a current timestamp, but, it doesn’t realize the cam has frozen, so, it just keeps uploading the last image the cam provided before it froze…
the way it usually works is that after a few hours, the cam just freezes… so, while i’m at work, or when i am out for the day, at some point or another, the cam stops giving new images, and i don’t fix it until i get home…
BUT FOR THAT MATTER, keep in mind that, when i have it off, i have it set to just leave up the last image it took… i like that better than something that says “cam currently offline”… but, you can tell by the timestamp when i’ve done that…
anyway, maybe i’ll buy a new cam soon… buuuuuuut, the cam software i use is a bit of a resource hog, so, sometimes i shut it down intentionally when i have several progs open at once… if anyone wants to recommend a lightweight cam app that has ftp, feel free to hit that comment link below and lemme’ know…

and speaking of new progs, i am now playing around with SCWebCam and am lovin’ it…
it does something a little different… it takes a snapshot of my monitors and uploads them… soooo, when you look at my sidebar over there, you will see a new image below the webcam thumb and that is a live shot of my computer monitors… click on it and i have a full page set up for it like my webcam page, with the chatterbox and everything… plus, the two pages are also now cross-linked to each other…
since i am running two monitors and am letting the image be at 80% of actual size, it is pretty large… it may be a problem for those on dial-up… but, i have it auto-refreshing once a minute, so, that will hopefully be enough time for it to download completely…
(oh, and, in case someone might point it out, yes, SCWebCam also provides webcam features, BUT, it doesn’t have a feature or two i love on ConquerCam, like the dynamic caption that i can change in seconds from a button in the system tray (it’s the blue text at the top of the webcam image)…)

anyway, that’s it for now… oh, except that i was graciously donated a scanner by manuel, so, perhaps i will start uploading scans of photos from the old days…
we’ll see…

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ah well…

couple new things again this month…
like last month, i have a folder of panoramic pics made with AutoStitch…
this month, there is a new folder called “WebCam” and it has a very few notable moments caught on my cam… this will continue from here on out, assuming there are things worth posting and i actually hit that little ‘archive’ button on my cam when those moments happen…
i have also done something that was much-needed and actually made thumbnails for the vids this time around…

i think that is all there is to tell, right this way to the January 2006 pics…

oh, btw, i am playing with the settings in JAlbum to figure out how complicated it would be to start posting my pics semi-live… see, it can generate an album and then, you can add more pics to it and it re-generates all the pages and such… then, i could just continually post pics throughout the month, rather than doing one huge batch every month… just not sure if that’s what i want to do or not…
we’ll see…

anyway, site news…

first, briefly, i’ve changed the way the photos directories display and you can now read the full descriptions of all the folders… that’s awesome, take my word for it… sooner or later all the people who have complained in the past will see it and will no longer complain…

secondly, since no one else is around to do it, i spend a lot of time cleaning up people’s computers, installing new software and such, and, on my usb swiss army knife i carry my “Christopher Pack” (if google and lifehacker can have one, so can i), so, this all inspired me to add a list of links to info about apps i cant live without… you’ll find said list on the sidebar, under Links, the list is called “Apps I Can’t Live Without”… now everyone can be as 1337 as me :P
ok, next, no, i never officially announced it in a post, but, yup, i gotta’ cheapy webcam here in my living room earlier this week… it’s on 24 hours a day, except when it’s not, refreshing every 10 seconds, unless i have it set for every 30 seconds :P :P :P
needless to say, there’s not much in the way of alwayses and nevers with it, but, it’s already been fun…
it sits atop my monitor (erm, the primary monitor, the one on the coffee table) and shows me and everything behind me… of course, it’s often too dark to see much… some day i may just point it out the window for the cool view… in the webcam folder of this month’s pics, you can see an example of the view i have in mind… for now, i’ve been having too much fun waving to people and putting little “hello!” messages on it… it has a quick access dynamic caption feature, plus i have it set up to show my foreground window as well as what’s playing on winamp… man, from decade-long recluse to webcammer…
anyway, over on the sidebar, under “My Stuff”, you’ll see a thumbnail image from it and you can click on it to get to the full webcam image view page thingy… also, i have inserted the chatterbox into it so people can leave comments and, boy have they… never had so many chatterbox comments in the three years or so i’ve had one…

(btw, as of feb14, i have been back on the internet five years, here’s a little post from a couple years ago about it…)

oh, almost forgot… huge thing here… i upgraded to WordPress 2.0 here a little while back and it has an import wizard… so, i thought and thought and thought and finally decided to do it, i imported ALL my posts from my old website… that caused me to jump to 170 posts, dating back to april ’03… you can see a month-by-month list on the sidebar under “Archives”, which is right under my webcam thumbnail image… i still need to add category tags to all of them and that is a big job… (my “uncategorized” category grew immensely when i did the import…)
i wasn’t going to import the old posts and just leave the old site as sort of an old abandoned building to be explored by the venturous… i may still undo the import (if i can figure out how) and stick with that plan… BIIIIIIG difference between the christophercornelius.com website/life and the insidiousplots.com website/life and i have never thought it was a good idea to mix the two…

ok, anyway, one last thing, as you will catch hints of in the pics, i now have a new computer… the old one died a horrible death… i have a bunch of new pics of it in the upcoming february batch, it is integrated into the home theater system, with dvd, optical digital audio, and everything… i’m lovin’ it, it is so much better than my last one… you can check out more info about it than you could ever care about, i have uploaded the main page of my belarc advisor profile of it, it is the big bold link under “My Stuff”, the very first link, it says “Truman”… you see, i named the computer “Truman”… that’s my dad’s middle name and my dad is the one who got me started in computers when i was 10… he also gave me most of the parts to build this computer and much technical support… THANKS, DAD!

anyway, whew, what a long post, but, i think i’m done…

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1. feb pics posted and more new stuff
2. november pics posted (and site fixed!)
3. a couple site-related notes

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99% of the readers of this post have no idea what i’m talking about, but, to those of you that do, this is truly the end of an era, even if that era ended for us long ago…
no more Ch@bTalk, URL Chat, and, if i read it right, no more MyRooms… all those things we spent so many late frustrating hours for months trying to figure out… i remember clearly Curtis announcing he had finally figured out how to get it to work, even making a long-distance phone call to japan (jeez, that was almost five years ago)… then, months later, after everyone had given up on it, Vegitto figured out the way to open Ch@bTalk to the masses… the controversy over the selling of ISAO ID’s, people stumbling through the programs to create them for everyone… and, speaking of frustrating, trying to teach people how to use it… they were certainly our most used guides… then came DreamPassport Premier Ch@bTalk and all the amazing features and having to feel around in the dark all over again to work out all the buttons (the definitive exhaustive guide created by the guy at this keyboard)… JavaCh@b and then DPPC and no one believing Danny that he got it to work until he finally posted a screenshot of it running on his machine… hours spent on the URL Chat at ISAO, trying to get someone who could translate for our guides… months of trying to carry on conversations with people who spoke little to no english, but, needing their knowledge so continuing to try… and several times that it was declared that it was now impossible to create new ID’s, yet, someone always found a way… and, of course, several Ch@b directories, just so you could actually find people to chat with…
Drobb was the first person to Ch@b us… minutes after posting our number in the original DCBG Ch@b listing…
when i installed ICQ on my psion, i even switched out all the sound files with Ch@b sounds… and, here a few months ago, i dusted off my old generation 0 dreamcast and logged into Ch@b to check my messages and just see who might be on…
man, i can hear that god-awful music that played on DP3 when the client would open and close when you went in and out of the email client… sometimes blaringly loud because you turned the volume way up to hear the quiet VoiceCh@b someone sent you…
and who can forget “HALLO! HALLO!”, no matter how bad we want to…

those glory days were great while they lasted… and now, one more piece of those days is about to expire…
glad i was there for it… we really did make a bit of history, even if no one knows but us…

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for the record, at that time, i was in the early stages of my techie journey with a TI-99/4A (with the 128k (?) memory expansion, disk drive, voice synthesizer, 300 baud modem, printer – ah, what i wouldn’t do for a pic of my old desk), i remember reading computer magazines back then and hand-typing basic programs they had in there (they did NOT come with disks, though, you could order cassette tapes with that month’s programs on them, as i recall)… some progs were so big, they would publish them in parts, so, you had a month to type in all that stuff and then wait for the next issue… i guess i was eleven years old when dad bought me a book called something like “Beginning BASIC For Kids”, which taught me about strings, variables, boolean – i still remember some of the little visual aides and such from that book… after that book, my fate was sealed… for years to come, my notebook full of programs and notes was my best friend… i remember many junior high lunches spent with a mile-long print out of some program i had written, scrutinizing every line, command, subroutine, trying to debug the thing, comparing my original notes, looking for typos, looking for incorrect goto line numbers, any clue as to why it isn’t working…

a misspent youth, to be sure…

i spent most of my non-programming time playing scott adams text adventure games, but, i did my bbs time, as well… on one local bss – i wish i could remember the name – i had been caught cheating at tradewars… selling secrets back and forth – had three accounts, one for each opposing faction and one to collect my hush money payments :) neither team ever figured out who their rat was, but, the sysop did… somehow it all worked out that he gave me co-sysop access and i eventually worked for him at the computer shop he ran… dick scheffler was his name…

on a bbs called “the twilight zone”, there was this little game where you could win more access time (you see, folks, you connected to a bbs using a phone line, so, they limited access to users, usually starting at a few minutes a day for new accounts, and there were things you could do to earn access minutes), this was a “guess the number” game… so, i had, say, 30 mins access time per day… so, i would log on and go straight to that game and try to win more time… but, in 30 mins, i could only guess so many numbers and may guess the same one more than once (it was a three digit number), writing down each number i tried ate up even more of my precious time… sooooooo, i wrote a little prog that could try out numbers WAY faster than i, a mere human, could punch them in, read the results, try again, etc., and would never repeat the number it had tried since i started it…
as i recall, i got busted using that, too…

and, you know, bbs’es live on, both dial-up and via telnet… when i got my psion 3c here just 3 or 4 years ago, i didn’t have any internet software for it, but, i did have a modem and a comms program, so, i got some bbs phone numbers, dialled them up, searched their files sections, and, after trying several bbs’es, eventually found an ftp client that i downloaded, then used it to get the rest of what i needed from the ‘net…

annnyway, fun article… the “oh, let’s make fun of 80s tech” joke gets a bit tired, but, this one is not too offensive…

btw, my brother got a “petster” for christmas one year, more like ’87…

oh, and, before i go, it would be a crime to bring up bbs’es and not mention textfiles.com and the bbs documentary… which bbs documentary? well, THE bbs documentary, of course :P

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i just couldn’t stand it anymore, it was too catchy, i’ve thought about it long enough, and domain names are cheap…
it will point here and all email sent to it will forward to my regular account…

it will be a couple days until that link works, btw – these things take time…

and people will no doubt rejoice that i finally have a website address that EVERYONE can actually spell :P

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the security screen had my website address, so, there is a chance you are reading this… the screen also has my cell number, so, call me and arrange a meeting, a drop place, tell me what you did with it, whatever…
i have years of info, email, notes, and more on that device and i need it back… it is worth nothing to you, it is a very old device, no one uses them anymore, you cannot pawn it, no one will buy it, if you want a pda there are many out there that will do what you want, you don’t want my outdated machine that they stopped making in the mid-90s…

it is valueless to you and priceless to me…

you left the contents of my wallet; photographs, notes, id, maybe because you understand and sympathize with the value of them, and i appreciate that… but, what is on that handheld computer is worth far more than the contents you left behind…

so, just call me and let’s work this out, seriously, no questions asked, i just need it back…

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2. Fernando and Renee’s second wedding photos
3. LifeStream issues

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anyway, i just started a new route/schedule at work, so, maybe i’ll have more time to actually make posts…
or maybe not…
we’ll see…

(of course, you can always check out my old blog from back when i posted stuff all the time…)

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no, i don’t either…

and, honestly, i am sick of the story…

those who were readers of my site know i didn’t really get into my personal life, anyway, so, no reason to start now, let’s just move on to the current status of this site…

yes, after a long absence, i am back with a new isp, new host, new hardware, and, finally, DSL… due to a new schedule that is overflowing with commitments, my online presence will only be VERY part-time, but here i am again…

firstly i should say that much of the site probably won’t work right… the chatterbox, the search, probably some links, entire sections of the site missing… oh, and speaking of, due to circumstances WAY beyond my control, all the photos and media files are gone… yes, every pic from the last four years is gone forever, if anyone out there happens to have any copies, make my day and let me know… a while back, i suspected there was a possibility of an impending loss, so, i was able to make a backup of my blog and a couple other text sections of the site, so, they survived… and photos from the last six months will be uploaded next week some time…

it is going to take some time to get everything up and working again, so, if you go poking around, expect some surprises… i still have to poke around myself and see what does and doesn’t work… and, i just installed the latest wordpress on my server, so, i may switch over, we’ll see…

anyway, great to be back, even if in a somewhat limited capacity…

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you can read all about it here…

we married seven months later, to the day…

btw, since she brings it up in her post, yup, this is what we looked like when we met…

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the last place we went was a cam shop at the mall across the street from us (after spending some seven hours running all over town) and the guy was great and got us exactly what we wanted… we just told him our requirements, he thought a long moment, reached in the case and pulled out one cam and it turned out to be perfect…

so, firstly, we want to loudly say BIG THANKS to Wess, the store manager at the Cottonwood Mall Ritz Camera!
if we had started there, we could have saved ourselves several hours of driving all over town… he was a huge help, very knowledgable, no pushy sales, a real pleasure to do business with!
he even let us test compatibility with our psion… he took a pic of us on his card, i popped the card in, and it loaded right up…

ok, so, the camera we got is the Nikon Coolpix 2000…

everything we wanted (like cf, jpg format, auto-timer, optical zoom, video out) and even does video clips in quicktime format and can make thumbnails of the pics…

all for NINETY DOLLARS!!

the next best we were considering was at target, not nearly as good, for $150…

it is a discontinued model, and we bought their damage protection plan, he claims we can hit it with a hammer and bring it back…

and we already have two 128mb cf cards for it… (we currently use them in our mp3 players, so, now they will have to do double duty until we get some even bigger cards…)

but, enough talk, how about some pics, eh?

i got up at 7:30am (after staying up until 4 playing with the thing) and went downstairs and started getting pics and vids of some of the mountains and balloons and stuff…

so, to start with, how about that balloon i took pics of yesterday… it went by again today, so, it makes for an excellent comparison example…

firstly, here is probably the best pic i got of it with the dreameye…

that was the old and busted, now behold the new hotness…

and, a close-up using the tightest optical zoom (3x)…

and those are on the lowest quality setting (1:16 compression) and smallest size (vga, 640×480)…

and here is a video of it as it vanished from site [QuickTime]…

now, since this page is pretty heavy already, i am not going to post a bunch of pics here, and i have not yet started using the thumbnails feature it offers…
sooo, here is where the rest of our first pics and vids are from last night and this morning…
http://insidiousplots.com/photos/2004-sept-NEWCAMERA/
i am still uploading stuff and probably will be all day…

mornings around here are gorgeous with the balloons all over the place and the mist over the mountains and across the city, so, the pics are very much worth taking a look at… there are also a couple vids from last night, like coming down the hill from rio rancho, looking out over abq, which we thought turned out very cool…

currently, there are pics in all three quality settings, and i took one huge one at the max size and max quality to show what the best this thing can do is (at least, in my unskilled hands)… it is nearly 600k… dpp will not even attempt to load it…

i see space becoming an issue very soon… however, we will probably be using the lowest quality and smallest size for 99% of the pics…

btw, speaking of space issues…
   VERY IMPORTANT:
these vids are like 4-6mb each, they will NOT stay for long (only a few hours), see them while you can, save them if you ever want to see them again, they will be deleted before tomorrow… we are keeping a copy of everything on videotape, but, not the files themselves, we just don’t have the room…
and remember that they will be trickling in probably all day… i am uploading something like 30mb of vids at this very moment… on dial up :( (so far, it has been taking about 40 minutes each…)

as you may have noticed, i have created a special directory for all these test pics and vids (/2004-sept-NEWCAMERA)… starting tomorrow, pics and vids will be going in a /2004-oct directory and all balloon fest pic will go in /2004-oct-AIBF, and there should be tons of them as i expect the next ten days we will be taking hundreds of pics of the balloons… who knows how many will be kept, but, the uploading will be probably almost constant…

we got our first DreamEye on may 25th, 2002, and have used it to take literally hundreds of pics, it has served us well and we loved it so much we even bought a second one a few months ago… but, owning and using them has taught us a lot about digital cams and taking pics, and we simply outgrew it…

this day is way overdue…

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2. AIBF, day 3, first event
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• September 24, 1999
  Salon Arts & Entertainment | In with the out crowd

  “One of the most promising new series of the fall season.”

• September 28, 1999
  The Eyepiece Network: The Darker Side of Those Not-So-Wonder Years: High School

  “Because of its insistence on aiming for realism, Freaks and Geeks has a thin veneer of bleakness”

• October 8, 1999
  TeeVee Archive – Fall ’99: “Freaks and Geeks”

  “Let’s get this out of the way up front: Freaks and Geeks is [...] a show that has a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving to see its second season. Locked in a brutal Saturday night time slot by an apparently uncaring network, adjecent to series utterly unlike it in tone or substance, and brining a light touch to a TV line-up populated with the crude and the crass. Doomed. Gone.”

• October 29, 1999
  freep.com – Give ‘Freaks’ show a chance to shine

  “We have a homework assignment for the weekend. [...] All you have to do is watch “Freaks and Geeks” [...] Despite rapturous reviews from most TV critics, the low-rated “Freaks and Geeks” (no. 82) is teetering on the brink of trouble.”

Warnings

• February 10, 2000
  IGN FilmForce: Transcripts of FilmForce’s Chat with Paul Feig

  [and be sure to go back later and follow the "Related Articles" link on this page for many many more interesting-looking pages than i felt like counting]

• February 21, 2000
  Marylaine Block – My Word’s Worth – Freaks and Geeks: reminding us what adolescence was like

  “Network execs who haven’t figured out exactly who its natural audience is are letting it die because they don’t know when to run it and how to promote it. They obviously think that because it’s ABOUT adolescents, this show is FOR adolescents, but it’s not.”

• March 6, 2000
  salon :: Give “Freaks” a chance, By Joyce Millman

  “[Y]ou will say “How come nobody told me this was so awesome?” And I will gently remind you that I (and every other TV critic in the country) have been telling you exactly that since September. You could have listened. But, no.”

• March 23, 2000
  TeeVee Archive – Freak Out

  “When it comes to the untimely, undeserved demise of Freaks and Geeks, i will blame you. Because you didn’t watch.”

Cancelled

• May 12, 2000
  LA Weekly – Too Good and Weird – The Happy Life and Inevitable Death of Freaks and Geeks

• July 5, 2000
  CNN.com – Entertainment – ‘Freaks & Geeks’ leaves NBC with three-hour finale

• July 8, 2000
  Final ‘Freaks and Geeks’ will air tonight on NBC

• July 11, 2000
  Geeks win… and lose – Final episodes of cancelled show take their timeslot

  [and keep scrolling the page for earlier stories about the show from may 24th, march 22, and two stories from sept 25, 1999, the premiere...]

2003 – The Petition

• Feb 1 rec.arts.tv: Freaks and Geeks DVD official petition
• Feb 12 17,518 signatures
• Apr 2 17,518 signatures
• Jun 3 24,601 signatures
• Aug 1 27,435 signatures
• Dec 3 35,923 signatures

And It Actually Worked

• January 15, 2004
  tvshowsondvd.com – Official Press Release: April 6 is the day!
• January 27, 2004
  listology – “The Freaks & Geeks Limited Edition 8-DVD Set is now available!”

• Jan 29 39,180 signatures
• Feb 7 39,213 signatures

2004 – Satisfaction

• TVZone – The Freakiest: Henry interviews producer of the new Freaks & Geeks DVD

• DVD Verdict Review – Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series
• DVD Talk > Reviews > Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Series (8-Disc Fan Edition)
• washingtonpost.com: Bonus Points
• USATODAY.com – DVDs resurrect ‘Freaks and Geeks’ and everyone in between [incl. interview with Paul Feig]
• The Onion A.V. Club | Video Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series
• RUTHLESS REVIEWS: TV – Freaks & Geeks – Whoa… Good TV?
• dvdmg.com – Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series [incl. synopsis of every episode]
• selectflicks – “Dodgeball is Kind of a Stupid Game” ["There is a single spot on selectflicks.com reserved for a televison show, and this is the one."]
• eye – Don’t look back
• dvdmg.com – Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series (Limited Edition Yearbook)
• tvdvdreviews.com — Freaks and Geeks: Deluxe Collector’s Edition DVD Review
• IGN DVD: Freaks and Geeks – The Complete Series

• Freaks and Geeks Panel at ComiCon 2004
• Blogcritics.org: Freaks and Geeks vs My So-Called Life

Today

• Sept 26 40,298 signatures

More Stuff/Info/Links

• Talk to Us [The Official Freaks and Geeks Message Board, home of the revolution]

• imdb.com – “Freaks and Geeks” (1999)
• Freaks and Geeks@Everything2.com
• RetroWeb Classic Television: Freaks and Geeks
• ~welcome to mckinley high: freaks and geeks fan site~
• Yahoo! Directory TV Comedies > Freaks and Geeks
• Google Directory – Arts > Television > Programs > Dramas > Dramedies > Freaks and Geeks
• Open Directory – Arts: Television: Programs: Dramas: Dramedies: Freaks and Geeks

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i am standing at my espresso machine, waiting for it to brew, and i look up out the kitchen window and there is this HUGE blue hot air balloon… i mean, this thing was CLOSE and LOW… MASSIVE…
it looked like maybe the pilot lived here and he was looking for a parking spot…

i picked up my jaw, dashed into the bedroom, “mary! mary! hurry! come look! you gotta’ see this! it’s better than goofy golf!”
poor girl probably got to sleep about 5a, but, she managed to stumble to the window, i look out the living room window and there is another balloon a little ways out, in the place where i usually see a balloon or two in the early mornings (somewhere around here, you can take rides between like 7a and 10a)…
i go look out our bedroom window, and AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!, one very low, floating right above our bedroom! dark dark blue, almost black, HUGE, and just hanging there almost right above my head…

then i come to my senses…

CAMERAAAAAAAAA!!!!

so, i run and grab my camera, run out on the balcony, point at the blue one and beep beep beeeeep…
NOOOO!!!
so, i run inside, and grab her camera, run back out to the balcony, the blue one is seriously getting away and is nowhere near as close, turn the camera on, sight it up, and beep beep beeeeeep…
NOOOOOO!!!! DAMMIT!!!!

run inside, fire up the software, hook up the cam…
EMPTY???!!! other one, also empty!!

BATTERIES!!!!!!!

to the cabinet, stuff falls out, dig up the AAA’s, dump the dead ones on the floor, load up two new ones, run outside and…

gone…

run down the stairs, look west…

nothing…

south…

nothing…

run around the building, look east…

nothing…

look around for an animal or something to kick…

nothing…

(nothing i feel like getting in trouble for, anyway…)

go back upstairs, mary is back in bed, sound asleep, i look out every window, nothing…

like i had only dreamed it…

so now i sit typing this, going and looking out the windows every couple minutes, drinking my espresso, which is cold after all that…

next time, dammit, next time…

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in our case (large-ish, much loved laserdisc collection and seven players; less than a hundred DVD’s and a progressive scan DVD player; multiple video game consoles; almost nothing VHS; small space, modest home theater system), we decided to go with EDTV (Enhanced Definition TV, 480p) and wait for HDTV to be worth the trouble…
specifically, the Samsung TXN2745FP (if that page redirects you, just hit back and it loads fine), which is definitely a step up from a standard interlaced image and flatscreen is great, but, though there are days we love it, we aren’t very satisfied with it most days… the choice to go EDTV was probably a sound decision (again, in our case, ymmv), but, the model we got has what appear to be power supply issues that are very common for this model from what i read online from other owners…
and thus far, we have not gotten around to doing much about it but complain amongst ourselves…

and for anyone who is wondering what the big deal is, here is a fantastic article that explains video definition differences pretty clearly and defends EDTV as a better choice than HDTV at this time…
ProjectorCentral.com – The Difference between HDTV, EDTV, and SDTV

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anyway, i will comment on some, but not all of the new pics, so, to see them all, follow the links above…
more importantly, this will be a two-part post… i am posting one part and miss mary is posting the other, so, be sure to read her post as well… (i will remind you of this again at the end of this post, btw…)

firstly, from the mayjune subdir, the laserdisc turtle…

i cannot find this image on the net, oddly enough, so, i took a pic of it on our tv… for those not in the know, laserdiscs that only used one side of a disc had this turtle on the other side, as the message in the pic suggests…

and now on to the more recent pics…

this is the view from my parents’ back yard… these are the sorts of pics that make me crazy that i still don’t have a real digital camera…

the reason i went down was to help out while my mom was in hospital, all the pics from the hospital are in the photos/2004-aug subdir and are labelled “GCRMC” (gerald champion regional medical center), but, here are a few i wanted to comment on…

she did not have a private room like dad did, and there was usually someone in the other bed… that can really ruin your day… one was a woman in moaning pain, the next was a woman with gasping-for-air attacks… mom does really well in the hospital and surgery, so, at times we were more concerned about the person in the next bed…

the smoking patio… i have spent much time here during my now two hospital visits… smoking is not really allowed on the grounds of the hospital anywhere, but, this is where staff sneaks away to and a nurse pointed it out to me during my first trip…
you get to meet staff and other family members who are visiting, so, needless to say, you hear some very sad stories…

this is mom on the last day, waiting to be released… she had her gall bladder removed (same as dad did back in march) and, as usual, bounced back remarkably… she’s a real trooper…

waiting to be released is boring… they say you are leaving today, then you have to wait for paperwork to be done…

i think that was all the ones i wanted to comment on, you can see the rest of the pics at the links at the top of this post… or just go to our photos, which are all grouped by date…

i was there about two weeks and miss mary was there with me for the last week or so, and, on our last day, we went to white sands national monument and took a couple pics…
as i said above, this is a two-part post, miss mary will tell the white sands story and show the pics, it was her first time there and it was a magnificent experience…

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anyway, with no further ado, i give you…

Our LDDb LaserDisc Wishlist

(once there, you can click on “view all by title” for an easy overview…)
i may add this link to the sidebar, or maybe just to our shared homepage…

btw, yes, miss mary and i are working on what will be cross-linked posts about our recent trip, but, that is not ready yet…

UPDATE

GRRRRAAAAAARRRRRR!!!!

so far as i can tell, the wishlist feature is private and cannot be changed to public… for now, i will leave this post and look into it…

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to explain, here are the three articles google news found, and there is video at the links…

Woman’s body found in vehicle at apartment complex

A man walking his dog today discovered the body of a woman in a vehicle at an apartment complex in northwest Albuquerque.
Albuquerque Police Department Lieutenant Trish Ahrensfield says the woman’s death is being investigated as a suspicious death.
She had no further details.
Apartment complex resident Kelly Baste says he noticed a smell from the vehicle yesterday but thought it came from trash.
He says this morning, his dog wouldn’t leave the area around the vehicle.
He says he went back to his apartment and told his brother he thought the dog had found a body.
Baste says he brother checked and noticed flies around the windshield.
They then called police.

Woman’s Body Found Inside SUV

Police are working to develop leads in connection with a body found on Albuquerque’s west side.
A man walking his dog Thursday discovered the body of a woman in a vehicle at an apartment complex in northwest Albuquerque near Cottonwood Mall.
APD Lt. Trish Ahrensfield said the woman’s death is being investigated as a suspicious death. She had no further details.
Apartment complex resident Kelly Baste said he noticed a smell from the vehicle on Wednesday but thought it came from trash nearby.
Baste said his dog wouldn’t leave the area around the vehicle alone, and that he went back to his apartment and told his brother he thought the dog had found a body.
Baste said he and his brother checked it out and noticed flies around the windshield; they then called police.
“I kind of knew already (Wednesday) something was in there, but I was too afraid to go look inside of it. So, that’s why I had my little brother look inside of it this morning,” Baste said.

APD investigating death of woman as suspicious

Albuquerque police were calling the discovery of a body in a car Thursday morning on Albuquerque’s West Side suspicious.

The woman’s body was discovered in the back of an SUV parked at the Cottonwood Ranch Apartments near the Cottonwood Mall.
Kelly Baste, who walks his German shorthair dog Nickel in the area, says the dog has been alerting him to the vehicle for several days. Thursday morning, Baste had his brother look into the car, and the body was discovered.
Homicide investigators were called to the scene, but APD spokesperson Trish Ahrensfeld says the incident is being treated as a suspicious death.
Police say the body may have been there for days, or even weeks.
Neighbors had reported smelling an odd odor for days.
One said that he had searched a nearby ditch because of the odor, but found nothing and concluded that the smell must have been from decomposing garbage.
When police pulled the woman’s body out of the vehicle, they asked nearby residents to stay inside because of the disturbing sight.
Police have towed the vehicle in for investigation.
The woman’s identity will be released after an autopsy Friday.
Eyewitness News 4 has found that the vehicle is registered to a woman who has been missing since June 23, but it’s not known whether she is the woman whose body was found inside the vehicle.

the suv:

i took a couple dreameye pics, but, they are awful as usual… i only bothered to take two, because i knew they would not show much, especially because the big ugly stupid tree in front of our bedroom window that we hate so much blocked most of the view…
i might as well post them, no matter how bad they are, though, i used the visualpark software to try to make some sense of what they show…

if you compare with the news pic above, you can pick out the suv… the suv is light grey, then, there is a darker vehicle parked next to it, closer to the foreground, then, a little grey car and a couple empty spaces…

then, in this one, the suv is behind the tree leaves, you can only really see the two closer vehicles, but, this also shows one of the APD patrol cars, and the mobile crime lab they brought in…

needless to say, there were plenty of police, onlookers, and tv people… the entire area was blocked off, from further left than you can see in my pics, including the dumpsters (the little walled area in the foreground of the pics, the trash referred to in the articles), to just beyond the mobile crime lab…
and yes, we had walked past this vehicle more than a couple times in the last few days, though, we never noticed any smell that we can remember…
this entire thing started early in the morning, and, in the early afternoon, they were still waiting for a warrant to open the vehicle… it was getting to be evening when they finally opened it, we stopped watching so closely then, we already had a feeling this event might be making guest appearances in our dreams, no need to add more details…

speaking of horrific events that haunt us, someday i will have to post the story of the last time death was right outside our front door, some six years ago or so in california, when it was a guy attempting to gun down another guy running away from him across the parking lot, and mary right there in the cross fire, with me inside, peeking out the window desperately trying to figure out where she was in all the action…
for that matter, i could relate the time in dallas when we were going out the doors of fryes electronics, just as the three masked gunmen were coming in…

but, those stories can wait until another day…

UPDATE – July 20, 2004

KOBTV – Authorities identify body found in SUV in Albuquerque
[thanks, google news alerts]

and we have been noticing how hesitant people are to park in that spot and it is now marked with a wreath… i will take a pic and post it…

UPDATE – July 23, 2004

ok, i guess “wreath” wasn’t correct, but, here it is…

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2. oh. my. god.
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first, there is Invisibles…
fun little thing where a frame from a movie is shown with the actors in the frame removed, but with their clothes still standing, ala the invisible man… name the movie…
new group of them every week…
a nice mix of really easy and really tough…

then there is movie trivia on funtrivia.com…
fun site, user-made trivia quizzes, a huge range of topics and specific movies, and it keeps score of how you do to rank yourself with other players… (nothing to download, btw…)
funtrivia.com has a lot more than movie trivia, but, i have yet to try anything else out, too many good movie quizzes…
i am playing as “i_plots” and i cannot figure out a way to link to my stats page, but, it says:

You have played 74
quizzes and have scored 7470
points.

Your score ranks you as # 43,083 of
300,000+
players

You have answered 747 of 940 questions
correctly.
Your accuracy is therefore 79%

You are a Trivia Rookie

Renton: Well, he’s always been lacking in moral fiber.
Swanney: He knows a lot about Sean Connery.
Renton: That’s hardly a substitute!

/trainspotting

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it is a gorgeous set, great high-res cover, three discs, the film on three sides, and three sides of extras… in fact, the documentary runs 140 minutes and the movie is just 137… this is the laserdisc upon which the Collector’s Edition DVD is based, (which we also have, of course) and so far as we can tell, it has almost all of the extras that appear on the dvd…
got it off of ebay for just over $20 and it is in excellent condition…

this was the last ce3k item we wanted, we already had the dvd, the CAV Criterion set, the CLV Criterion set, and a couple releases of the inferior “Special Edition” version of the film… and, we also have the collector’s edition versions of the theatrical one-sheet poster and soundtrack cd, both released at the same time as the laserdisc set…

so, this set fills a gaping hole in our collection…

we will watch it tonight or tomorrow, but, we popped on side three (which is cav) and it looks fantastic, you can tell it is the same transfer used for the dvd… released in ’98, dolby digital 5.1, thx-certified, surely this is going to be on our list of the best looking laserdiscs ever made…

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allow me to explain…

and since i am in no hurry, i will start from when we met…

in 1995, i was living in an apartment on hermosa beach, california… (btw, i hated it, the smell and noise of the ocean were horrible…)
late on november 6th, my best friend, skully, came over with his girlfriend at the time, jade, and her best friend, mary…
mary and i took to each other immediately, and she even wrote in her diary that night, “tonight, i met the man i am going to marry”…

in the following months, the four of us did a lot together and it was not long before mary and i started saying we would get married at our nearest opportunity… being from vegas, i kept us reminded that all we had to do was take the four hour drive and shell out a few bucks…

so, since we were open about this, a pact was made… skully made mary and i swear that if we ever ran off and got married, we would page him with a special code, “77777″, immediately after, no excuses… he introduced us, he demanded to be the first to know and we agreed he deserved it… if we had a normal wedding, the plan was for him to be my best man, but, that never came up…

it was around june 1st that we finally got around to deciding to go to vegas… there was a day or two of preparation and, if i recall correctly, we arrived in vegas, in a rented plymouth breeze, about the 3rd…

on the night of the 6th we were deciding what to do with the evening and one of us said to the other “how about we go get married?” and the other said “well, it IS what we came here for” and off we went, down to get our license… there were an awful lot of people in there, considering it was probably 10 or so at night… vegas is the only truly 24-hour city i have lived in, you can do pretty much anything, anytime… even 24-hour wedding chapels… though, i think the license place was going to close at 11pm…
i remember the clerks did not have the burned-out look i expected, they looked like they were dispensing miracles… somehow, they had not lost the romance of it all, it seemed…
to this day i wonder how many other couples that were in there that night are still together…

after the license, it was time to decide where to get married… skully always said we should do the drive-thru elvis impersonator wedding… and we always said ummmm, no… however, as we looked around, the cheapest and easiest was “the world famous little white chapel” on the strip and they had a drive-thru…

we just wanted to be married (though, elvis need not be involved), so, we went there…

we pull up and the window is on the passenger side (my side, some people are born to drive, some people are born to work the radio, and i am the latter) and there is a bell… so, i ring the bell and eventually a woman came to the window and started us on paperwork… after we filled out a few forms and gave them their money, we had to sit a bit and wait for a minister…

as we sat there, i had a revelation…
“you know what? we are GETTING married! no, i mean, for months we have been INTENDING to get married, and here in a bit we will BE married, but, at this moment we are GETTING married!”
then, suddenly, all the traditions made sense…
“this will only happen once! geez, i kinda’ wish someone was here to see it, maybe take some pictures! in fact, we could have dressed up for it! or maybe even been well-rested and sober!”

i decided i would at least put my cigarette out…

so, as we waited, we noticed it was getting late… see, we met on the 6th, so, we thought it was going to be cool to have been married on the 6th…
the preacher (Pastor Jesse Diaz, the certificate says) showed up a few minutes before midnight… he leaned quite a bit out the window and asked if we had rings… well, in fact we did, but, we had already had a private and special moment of putting them on each other’s finger months before, so, we told him we would not be re-exchanging rings, as it were… he seemed to think this was odd, but, continued anyway…
he told me to look on my bride and repeat after him and i said my vows to mary…
and then it was her turn and then he pronounced us man and wife…

and we noticed the time…
it was a few minutes after midnight…
so, the pastor jesse diaz leaned out and began our wedding some time before midnight, june 6th, and he pronounced us some time after midnight, june 7th, and this dawned on us and we thought it was actually pretty cool…
we decided at that very moment to forever celebrate both days as our anniversary…

(for the record, our marriage certificate says june 6th…)

now, if only we could buy that rental car we were in at the time…

anyway, if you have been paying attention, there is still something left to be done…
yes, we left the little white chapel and went over to the excalibur hotel and casino, my favorite place of employment ever (and the place where my brother married his bride), and went to the payphones just inside the back entrance… i dialled skully’s number, put in a whole bunch of change, and entered 77777…
skully was watching tv with his parents when his pager went off… his voice in the darkness said “oh my god!” and he looked at his mom and dad and declared “zane and mary just got married”…
we were well-liked by his parents, so, there were a total of three people happy for us that night, not counting us…

and no one else in the world knew yet…

so, anyway, yes, we got married eight years ago, in the middle of the night, in a drive thru, in a rented plymouth breeze, on the las vegas strip, and since our wedding spanned midnight, we have two anniversary days…

and we think that is pretty cool…

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so, we have the criterion laserdisc of halloween and a standard laser release of the omen and we watched them both the other night…

first up was halloween, the film credited with starting the “slasher” genre…
and, it was not long until we were wishing it would hurry up and end…
of course, after starman, the thing, escape from new york, and now this, i think we are ready to really and truly give up on john carpenter…

the only good thing i have to say about it is that the music was very good…

one interesting device i noticed was that, as the movie built up to the climax, it seemed to me that the director was intentionally using a lot of shots to show the time of day… no indoor shots without plenty of windows and most shots prominently showed the placement of the sun, like a ticking countdown to nightfall… in fact, at one point, it is suddenly and abruptly night, which gave me a feeling of “it’s night already!? they’re out of time!”…
while this kept me (almost unconsciously) estimating how much time was left, i really could not care less if these people were actually going to survive or not… we were hardly told anything about them, so, they really did not seem like real people, just actors doing what the director told them to…
and, as is always the case, the characters seemed to behave in very unbelievable ways… i know this is a staple of the genre, but, that is one of the things that alienates me from the genre… too much of having to give up reason to follow the story… not that there is usually much of a story… i often hear horror described as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but, to me it seems more a sub-genre of action… any film where you can relate pretty much everything it covers as just “this happened, then that happened, etc.” is an action movie… no concepts to ponder, no characters to get to know better, no reason to care WHY things are happening, most of the time… all of that comes in scarce tidbits, which is why, to be totally coherent, you need a whole series of films… maybe by die hard 3, i might care what happens to john maclaine, maybe by halloween 9 i might know why michael myers killed his sister and all these others…

if they were better movies, i might take that journey…

or maybe i will listen to the commentary on halloween and see if john carpenter can reveal to me the subtle intricacies…

then, with a bad taste in our mouths, we took a chance on the omen…
this one was much better, but, there was very little action, just lots of dialogue and concepts… it was more like a mystery to be solved…
now, i must say i thought the dialogue was very weak… it got the point across, but, there was no personality, no cadence, no art… with good dialogue, you can take a line out of context and, if you know the characters, you can usually deduce who said it… and this is true of life as well… the omen is one of countless movies where you could have mixed and matched the dialogue between characters… the characters were definitely not defined by how they said what they said, they were just telling us what we needed to know to advance the plot… in a movie filled with dialogue, you need more personalized speech to really carry it, or at least to keep it interesting… (cf. david mamet, btw…)
but still, it was a good movie… pacing was good, i was never really bored, the material was great, and the music was superb, even though it was mono… the actors were varied; the kid was great (not that it was a demanding part), the various clergy were good, and the nannies were great, but, too many other parts seemed totally interchangable…

we liked it… it does not go on “the shelf”, but, i will definitely watch it again sometime to look for other nuances… i just don’t expect much from donner in that area…

i just have a hard time calling it “horror”… it was more of a mystery, as i said above… yes, there were horrific IDEAS, but, again, that makes it a movie of IDEAS, not actions…

as far as “horror” goes, we have only really seen a few and disliked most of them… (btw, remember, we pretty much only count what we have seen since we started into the world of dvd and home theater, since we now “see” movies differently than we used to… i have seen literally thousands of movies, but, i know a lot more about movies now and feel i need to give them all another chance…)
i will briefly touch on a few and try to avoid sci-fi horror, like alien, forbidden planet, or event horizon, just to try to prove we are capable of contemplating another genre…

we have seen a nightmare on elm street and wes craven’s new nightmare and only new nightmare was any good to us… i guess because it was likeable even if you scoffed at the genre… hell, it scoffed with you… but, even new nightmare is in “the pile”, not on “the shelf”… it was good once, may be again, but, we are not in any hurry… the next viewing would probably be for the commentary…

poltergeist IS on the shelf… now that is one creepy film… the chair-stacking scene chills me every time… in fact, there is so much good about that movie, i will not even get started lest i go three paragraphs…

then, there is that “m. night” dude or whatever… we have seen both signs and sixth sense and disliked both of them… and there was very little that we found disturbing, creepy, and very very little that was anything like scary… sure, a few disturbing concepts, no action movies here, but, still, they are old concepts and the films really brought very little, if anything, to the genre that we had not seen before…
and, btw, we generally despise surprise endings… in fight club, it explained a lot, in sixth sense, it seemed just a gimmick… (iow, with the former, you want to watch it again more to understand the symptoms better now that you know the cause, in the latter you want to watch again to see if the film is internally consistent with the ending…)
[must've re-written the last two sentences twenty times to ensure it was spoiler free :P]

now, one horror movie we really liked was the others (and, no, not because it had our beloved nicole in it, though that doesn’t hurt it any)…
that was one SCARY frickin’ movie!
i mean, it was disturbing!
and, one of the best uses of surround that we have ever heard…
we were jumping, cringing, hoping that what we knew must happen next would not happen; i think the others, so far, is the only movie to actually put a fright in us…
it was just plain well-directed… the kids, the rules of the house, the cinematography, including the overall look, the time setting, it just starts pulling you in to an alternate reality, so, you already have no idea what to expect and it unhinges your mind from the everyday, emptying it, so it can fill it up with what the director chooses, hopefully freeing you from expectations of normality… like misdirection… and the unfamiliarity
means it will be more unpredictable, which means it has the potential to be scarier… and the director did not disappoint, though, admittedly, the first half of the movie is much much better than the second half…
it is a dvd, not a laserdisc, so there is no “shelf vs. pile” issue (all our dvd’s are in one place), but, if there was a choice to be made, it would go on the shelf…

so, anyway, next in our horror education will probably be clive barker… we have nice laserdiscs of the serpent and the rainbow, hellraiser, and lord of illusions (or is it the frighteners? can’t remember)… i read the great and secret show and loved it (though, more fantasy than horror)… i found it to be very original, creative, and interesting, so i figure i will like more of his stuff… having seen some clive barker long ago, i think it is safe to assume it will be truly horrifying stuff, with more in common with event horizon than the other stuff i have been covering here…
hopefully in a good way…

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for those not familiar with the concept of feeds, it is a way to gather
content from a site, without going there… this blog of mine has an atom xml
feed, so, you could get my posts in your favorite “feed aggregator” (along
side feeds from other sites), rather than stopping by to see if i’ve posted
anything new or signing up for the email notification…
at livejournal, people set up xml/rss/etc. feeds for various sites, or use
feeds already offered and you can add those feeds to your lj friends page for
a public online aggregator… there are hundreds of choices, everything from
daily comics like garfield and dilbert, to news, weather, movie reviews, all
sorts of stuff…
you just have to see it to appreciate the sheer coolness of it…
since i have few lj friends, i fill it up with these feeds and then i get
stuff from sites i would not otherwise go to everyday, in one convenient
trip… so, you can see the stuff i am interested in and, if you share those
interests, it can make for a good daily visit…

here are the feeds i have on there currently…

some post several items a day, some once a day, some once a week or once a
month, some post rarely, which makes it even handier to have it appear on my
feeds page… and some may be broken, so, i am still waiting for them to post
something…

firstly, i get posts at “syn_promo”, where people publicize cool feeds they
have found or have made…

astronomy photo of the day

ask yahoo
answering trivia and imponderables, using yahoo

blog of death
sort of a big, far-reaching obits page

boingboing blog

coming soon
a movie news site

dictionary.com’s word of the day

engadget
gadget news, reviews, etc.

filmadd
news of movies added to the Internet Archive

filmtease
an unusual movie trailer review site

found magazine’s find of the week
unusual objects people find

aaron swartz’s googleblog
a blog about google

googleblog
the official blog of google.com

penniphile
the writings of penn jillette, mostly new entries to “road penn”

word spy
dealing with new terms, slang, etc. as they enter the language

quote of the day
not as good as refdesk.com’s quotes of the day, but, they have more than one
per day, so it sort of balances out

snopesrecentadd
one of my favorites, posting urban legends as they are added to snopes.com

thinkgeek
various merchandise of interest to those involved in modern technology

and wordsmith’s word of the day

oh, and almost forgot, i also get “ljnifty” where people post various fun
things you can do with livejournal, such as adding feeds to your friends
page…

and i add cool new ones as i find them… and occasionally remove the ones
that get annoying or boring…

anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, as i said, the link is on the menu
on the left side of this page… “My LJ Feeds”
i stop by at least once a day and it is a pretty good collection at this
point, after some tweaking…

now if only i could get scifi.com’s “today in sci-fi history” on there, which
is almost always interesting to sci-fi buffs… (there is a link to this, as
well, over there on the left…)
i would add the fark.com feed, but, it does not have comments links and the
comments threads are at least half the fun of fark…

btw, geez, it seems today is list day on my blog…
admittedly, i am trying to come up with posts to make so i can knock that huge
“april pics” post off the front page…

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ok, so, the story is something like this…

may 25th, 2002, we got a free dvd player… at this time, our tv was mainly
only used for video games and nasatv during shuttle missions, we had a vcr but
didn’t use it for much…
coincidentally, this is also the day we got our first dreameye, so, the dvd
player was ignored…

then, some time in november 2002, someone loaned us three dvd’s (reservoir
dogs, a beautiful mind, zoolander)… we decided to see what all the fuss was
about…
eventually, we bought a couple of our own (fight club, the matrix, wargames,
which is also the first commentary we listened to), later on, we got a
“ht-in-a-box”, then in june of 2003, we started seriously building a home
theater…

just on a whim, back in the first days of all this, we started actually
jotting down each movie we watched… we have continued to add to this list,
every movie we watch, then, at some point, we started dating each entry…
this is all kept in a database that we each have a copy of on our psion…

so, here is the list… there are about 250, a little less or a lot less,
depending on how you choose to count them (different versions of the same
movie, etc.)…

and, btw, i will refrain from adding other comments in the database this list
came from, such as what we thought of the movie, why we saw wanted to see it,
what format and aspect ratio it was in, which ones we own, etc…. you will
also occasionally see one labelled [him] or [her], which means we did not
watch it together… and there are one or two marked with the name of a movie
theater in brackets, which means we actually went out to see it…

the dated entries come first and the rest are alphabetically listed…

2004.05.06 – caddyshack
2004.05.06 – vacation
2004.03.30 – AI
2004.03.29 – the big lebowski
2004.03.29 – mixed nuts
2004.03.26 – better off dead…
2004.02.22 – hard eight (aka Sydney)
2004.02.15 – lost in translation
2004.02.15 – love liza
2004.02.09 – raising arizona
2004.02.09 – star trek 7 – generations
2004.02.09 – time after time
2004.02.08 – back to the future
2004.02.08 – back to the future 2
2004.02.08 – back to the future 3
2004.02.06 – jerry macguire [her]
2004.02.05 – a few good men
2004.02.05 – rush
2004.02.05 – true romance
2004.02.01 – biloxi blues
2004.01.25 – fargo
2004.01.25 – pirates of silicon valley
2004.01.20 – arthur
2004.01.20 – fletch
2004.01.11 – hook
2004.01.08 – the apostle
2004.01.06 – seven
2004.01.05 – the life of david gale
2004.01.04 – alien 3
2003.12.27 – the american president
2003.12.25 – a christmas story
2003.12.23 – it’s a wonderful life
2003.12.21 – lord of the rings 2 – the two towers
2003.12.20 – star trek 10 – nemesis
2003.12.17 – braveheart
2003.12.16 – 28 days later
2003.12.16 – frequency
2003.12.14 – scrooged
2003.11.13 – conspiracy theory
2003.11.09 – alien – director’s cut [amc grand, dallas, theater 8]
2003.11.08 – truman show
2003.11.05 – shanghai knights
2003.11.02 – ed wood
2003.11.01 – matrix reloaded
2003.10.18 – spaceship
2003.10.16 – galaxy quest
2003.10.16 – trekkies
2003.10.13 – Magnolia
2003.10.11 – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
2003.10.10 – spawn – director’s cut
2003.10.05 – book of shadows – blair witch 2
2003.10.04 – addams family
2003.09.28 – shock treatment
2003.09.27 – event horizon
2003.09.23 – city of lost children
2003.09.12 – the jerk
2003.09.11 – blair witch project
2003.09.11 – stargate – director’s cut
2003.09.10 – 12 monkeys
2003.09.10 – outland
2003.09.10 – psycho
2003.09.08 – from dusk til dawn
2003.09.07 – leviathan
2001: a space odyssey
2010
9/11
the abyss – special edition
Addams Family Values
Akira
alien
aliens – director’s cut
almost famous
almost famous – untitled director’s cut
Amelie
american beauty
apollo 13
as good as it gets
backdraft
basketball diaries
batman
beauty and the beast
being john malkovich
the black hole
blade runner – “director’s cut”
boogie nights
boyz in the hood
brazil
a bronx tale
buckaroo banzai
a bug’s life
the cell
Chicago
chicken run
Citizen Kane
close encounters of the third kind
close encounters of the third kind, collector’s edition
close encounters of the third kind, special edition
clueless
contact
dances with wolves
Dark City
the dark crystal
Darkman
the doors
dr. strangelove
dune
e.t. – the extra terrestrial
escape from new york [him]
eyes wide shut
finding nemo [parks mall amc]
far and away
fear and loathing in las vegas
the fifth element
fight club
final fantasy: the spirits within
a fish called wanda
flatliners
forbidden planet
Forrest Gump
friday
full metal jacket
get shorty
the game
gattaca
ghostbusters
glengarry glenross
the godfather [him]
the godfather – part two [him]
Goodfellas [him]
the grifters
Grosse Pointe Blank [her]
harry potter 1
house
the hudsucker proxy
the hunt for red october
i spit on your grave
independence day – director’s cut
Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Iron Giant
It
jackie brown
Jacob’s Ladder
Jaws
jfk
k-pax
krull
L.A. Confidential
l.a. story
labyrinth
ladyhawke
the lawnmower man – director’s cut
leap of faith
legend of drunken master
Little Shop of Horrors
Logan’s Run
lolita
lord of the rings – fellowship of the ring
mars attacks!
memento
men in black
minority report
monsters inc
monty python and the holy grail
the mosquito coast
Moulin Rouge
mulholland drive
murder by death
natural born killers
night of the living dead
nightmare before christmas
a nightmare on elm street
the one
oscar
the others
phantasm
pi
pink floyd – the wall
poltergeist
the princess bride
pulp fiction
Punch-Drunk Love
Quiz Show
red dawn
requiem for a dream – director’s cut
reservoir dogs
the rocky horror picture show
Romeo + juliet
the royal tenenbaums
rushmore
say anything
secret of nimh
the seven samurai [him]
Shadowlands
Shanghai Noon
signs
silence of the lambs
Silverado
the sixth sense
Sneakers
south park movie
Spaceballs
the spanish prisoner
Sphere
spiderman
spirited away
The Stand
star trek – the motion picture – director’s cut
star trek 2 – the wrath of khan – director’s cut
star trek 3 – the search for spock
star trek 4 – the voyage home
star trek 5 – the final frontier
star trek 6 – the undiscovered country
star trek 8 – first contact
star wars
star wars 2 – empire strikes back
star wars 2 – empire strikes back – special edition
star wars 3 – return of the jedi
star wars 4 – phantom menace
star wars 5 – attack of the clones
Starman
Strange Days
suicide kings
Taxi Driver
terminator
terminator 2
the thing
this is spinal tap
three colors – white
three colors – red
time bandits
titan a.e.
titanic
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
trainspotting
tron
uhf
unforgiven
wag the dog
the War of the Roses
wargames
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
what dreams may come
who framed roger rabbit

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i know i am still missing a few off this list, maybe quite a few, but, this is
something i was mentioning to someone the other day and wanted to put this
list up, even if it is not totally compete…
i still know most of these movies by heart, could probably quote most of them
beginning to end, and the images and sounds are an indelible part of my
subconscious to this day… (darth vader is still in my nightmares to this
day!)

growing up in a house of hardcore movie interest is an interesting
experience… in our house, movie quotes were almost non-stop, life was
constantly compared to movies… in fact, the staff noticed this when i was
at the hospital with my parents… mom said to one nurse something to the
effect of “we are a movie family. we use them to teach lessons of life.” by
which she means, for instance, i was talking about how magnolia inspired me,
both phil parma and the change t.j. mackey made in his attitude toward his
father were things going through my mind non-stop in the hospital… they
were the inspiration that helped me to keep a better frame of mind through it
all… so, if i want to explain to my mom how i saw my responsibility in that
situation, she would have to watch magnolia…
in fact, my mom’s online handle, for as long as i can remember, is “Ripley”,
the heroine of Alien… and i am sure she would relate ripley as the
embodiment of a strong woman…

my childhood heros were not historical figures or otherwise “real” people,
they were movie characters…

but now, i am straying way off the topic of this post…
back to the list…

btw, very important…
THIS IS *NOT* A LIST OF MY FAVORITE MOVIES…
more than a few of them are movies i cannot stand today…
these are also in no order, except maybe the order in which i thought of
them…
i would also add that it is best to take most of what i said above as not
relating much to the list… most of the “background movies” around the house
were not the deep ones, those demanded too much attention…

and now, a partial list of movies i saw/heard/overheard COUNTLESS times
growing up…

close encounters of the third kind (special edition)

btw, ce3k reigns supreme TO THIS DAY as the one i have seen/heard/overheard
more than any other…

better off dead
ghostbusters
star trek 1-4
star wars
caddyshack
vacation
2010
aliens
raiders of the lost ark
murder by death
wargames
secret of nimh
spaceballs
time after time
the money pit
spaceship
pete’s dragon
cloak and dagger
romancing the stone
fletch

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well, most of the stuff has been situated, a few things still need to be tackled and then the decorating… this place is so big, we seem to not have enough stuff to fill it… last night, we put up the movie posters, but, i took a few pics before we did that to show the layout of the living room…

check out the pics…

we are going with all of it sort of wrapping around the room… i also left about a foot and a half behind the shelves to have access to all the cables and such…

on the right is most of our laserdiscs and all our movie books… center is components, console software, and our favorite laserdiscs on the bottom shelf, like we had it before… the left is all other stuff, like dvd’s, movie soundtrack cd’s, some audio stuff like audiobooks and “audio theater” stuff, game magazines, and more… speaker stands on either side, subwoofer on the floor between the main center and the “various media shelf” over there…

so, the shelf with all the media and print stuff on it… it has two sides… from the back, it is the big collection of hand-labelled, hand-recorded stuff on vhs, like nasa tv, court tv, and audio-on-video stuff like art bell… we own almost no original vhs (yuck!), but, the couple things we have (like our freaks and geeks emmy submission tape) are on the front side of the shelf…

above the tv there are the ps2 games… in the background, you can see the other bookshelf (for non-media-related print stuff) and the beginnings of her new corner…

and finally, all our movie posters needing to go up… we found places for them all, but, that is another batch of pics… and we like to keep those photos subdirectories at 30 pics or so and /2004-march is around there, so, we will probably wait until the /2004-april subdir is started to post more…

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Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Punch-Drunk Love soundtrack

and the few pics i snapped while there are now online…
http://insidiousplots.com/photos/2004-march and i used a “gcrmc” prefix on all the filenames that are pics i took while there…

the only thing i will bother to explain in the pics, atm, is the ones taken of the three of us, seven days after the hospital… the objects we are holding up are radios they use around the house, especially for emergencies… long story, i suppose, but, it makes you sort of an integrated, hard-wired part of the household to have one…

i plan to eventually post some notes about it all and excerpts from emails and messages exchanged during the time…

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after all that has been going on, my mom, dad, and i had a long talk last night telling him all we did during his hospital time, he does not remember anything but the the last couple days of it all… we have had a bonding experience that i could not begin to explain or describe, so, i will not bother… check miss mary’s lj for some of it… maybe when it is all over, i will post excerpts from emails that i sent and received during it all…
so, anyway, this morning, my dad said it was time to give me something he had planned for years to give me, but, had never told me about it… it is his father’s wedding ring… his father gave it to him and now he is giving it to me… i said i felt bad because it seemed more logical to give it to my brother, jeff, because he has a son to pass it to, since i plan to never to have kids, but, he said he wanted me, the first-born son, to have it…
i am floored… i don’t know yet what i will do with it… obviously, my wedding ring is totalled and i want another, but, it is not the same and, more practically, it does not fit my wedding ring finger anyway… apparently my grandfather had larger hands than me, it only fits on my largest finger, my right middle finger…

not every day you get an heirloom, and i am very thankful he gave it to me… the three of us have been through a lot recently and i am very moved to know that he sees all this that has gone on as so important as to decide this was a time to give me something he was waiting on the right time for for thirty years…

an experience i will never be able to fully relate… reminds me of two lines… tom hanks in ‘saving private ryan’, about how he doesn’t know how he will ever tell his wife “days like today” and the american beauty line, “you have no idea what i am talking about, but don’t worry; you will”…

hopefully, everyone is involved enough in their family, at some point or another, to experience something like this…

i could probably come up with something more meaningful to say, but, i have had two drinks and i don’t drink, so, they went straight to my head, so, i will leave it at that…

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well, here in a bit, we go pick up the truck… as luck would have, all the nice weather terminated today and it is raining…

pretty much everything is packed and ready to go, a first for us, we usually just shovel it in as is or pack as we load… miss mary has turned out to be a little workhorse, packing up the whole kitchen and even cleaning it rather well, running and getting boxes, she is outdoing me… until loading time, i guess… we bought good boxes for the laserdisc players (5 of them!), mummified the players in bubble wrap, and surrounded them with styrofoam peanuts… the drawing stack has been divide up into two brand new boxes, we will see if this work out any better (but, they are weak boxes)… we are laying blankets and taking the 8 feet of laserdiscs loose rather than pack them in boxes… they would be too heavy to carry down these four flights of stairs… the ugly couch and coffee table will be a major bitch for just the two of us, tv won’t be fun…
and the real bitch is going to be apt shopping whe we get there, especially since we are picky…

and, btw, the damn truck is like 700 bucks (!!!!), no tape/cd, and a 10 to 16 hour drive or so, depending on which way we go…

this is not fun and doesn’t feel all that exciting yet…
what happened?
i used to love moving…
i guess i had a lot less stuff and didn’t care where i lived as much…

btw, we spent a few bucks and had some contact cards made to hand out… just plain business cards that say “http://insidiousplots.com“… since i love the “never have to say good-bye” aspect of being online, i have been handing it, using a line like “if you ever want to find me, this is where i’ll be”…

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here is the latest version of the same post i have made the last two years on this day…

on this day, three years ago, we went online with our dreamcast and little junky planetweb 2.6 browser on the feb ’01 ODCM demo disk for the first time…

of course now it is 2 online dc’s and japanese browsers and our Psions are also online, of course…

unlike probably most people, we actually have a videotape of our first time logging onto the web… we just let the tape roll… really fascinating to see yourself klutz around the web for the very first time…

for the record, first site we went to… google

we have our first irc chat on tape, our first time in an online game (PSO) and several other firsts, like when we signed up for hotmail and could not use a space in “insidious plots”, which led to the handle being the way it is to this day: insidious underscore plots…

heh, weird little collection… but, interesting to look back on from 3 years later…

sort of like our own little wayback machine…

(when i fast scan forward on the tape it makes me think “so… this is what broadband would look like…” :D !)

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Current Mood: nerdy
Current Music: the keyclick (and screenclick) of my palmtop

so, here am i, posting to my livejournal, via my new Psion 5…
so far, this browser is not near as bad as i expected… and i am d/l’ing opera in the near future :)…

screenshots will be posted eventually…

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well, all the half-price books stores are having their 20% off sale, so, we hit a couple in fort worth and grabbed a few new LaserDiscs, including some of the first Criterions, all movies we care nothing about (39 Steps, The Magnificent Ambersons, High Noon, and The Third Man), but, they were only like $6 a piece and in pretty good shape…
at this point, we have mostly what we want on laser now, except a few rare ones, so, there is rarely any stuff that makes us say ‘wow’…

our collection looks a little something like this…

and that is before the new ones, which are about 15 or so… (our favorites are on the shelf, the rest are on the floor until we get some new shelves :P)

so, this latest buy brings our LaserDisc Database total to 310, and there are 10 or more that have no listing there yet, so, we need to submit the entries…
our database we keep on our Psion palmtops tracks our DVDs and LDs and it says we now have 404… sooner or later, i will put that db on the web…
we used to keep pages where we listed all our DVDs and LDs, but, when the inheritence came, we started buying them so fast it was work to keep them updated…

in other news, i am reading Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold and it is pretty amazing so far… i was with it word-by-word up until the 12th chapter where you build a binary calculator in your head… but, i am going to back up and come at it a bit slower (no pun intended), must have not grasped all the prerequisite knowledge or something…

anyway, damn fascinating so far…

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Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: some weird version of “god rest ye merry gentlemen”

behold the Pioneer Elite CLD-97 Reference LaserDisc Player…

it actually says “reference” on it, how cool is that… (not that you can see it in these pics…)

got it at Marvin’s Electronics in Fort Worth for $270 after tax, which is a damn good price… (btw, the guy showed me the bluebook and it is $288, so, even when not comparing to ebay prices, it is a nice deal…)

we tried parts from our DTS Toy Story, CAV Toy Story, THX Wow Disc, The Stand, and our anamorphic The Fugitive, and then we watched It’s A Wonderful Life, and so far we are extremely impressed… obviously, we wish it had AC-3 out but we are leaving our Yamaha CDV-W901 (Pioneer D503 clone) in the system and it does have it… this elite may now be our favorite player… the D704 goes over to miss mary’s corner, and that leaves our pioneer 980, our D503, both unused and another D503 at my parent’s house…

our only other complaint with the 97 is how it displays a frame during side flip and that sucks… if there is a way to disable that, i wish we would find it…
for another point on the good side, we finally get to use the 704 remote we love, we never use the 704, but, prefer the remote to any other…

so, it looks like today is movie-watching day, we picked up A Christmas Story the same day we got the It’s A Wonderful Life, a couple nice LD finds for xmas…

so, anyway, merry christmas to us!

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Current Mood: indescribable
Current Music: KVIL

well, when i posted a comment at sam’s livejournal, it gave me an option to start an account, so, uh, i did… may use it, may not… miss mary would probably love one to play with…

hmm, no choice of “insidious” for the current mood…

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