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  • freaks and geeks soundtrack 🙂

    well, i know that i am going to have to run out and get this as soon as it hits the stores on the 14th of september… this is my absolute favorite tv show in the world, and for those of you that know me, know that i do not watch tv, i watch movies instead…

    we have the limited edition yearbook edition that we pre-odered and paid exuberant amounts for, but it was sooo worth it… i can not say enough how much i LOVE this show and will try to get as much stuff for it that i can…

    i am wanting to try and finda poster for the show but have not come across one yet but i am always looking…

    so, check it out if you get the chance…

    this is just a quick post and i have plans on making a huge post in the next day or two about amazing and beautiful white sands… 🙂

  • missing calendar… grrrr

    well, i have more to post about later but this is something that is bothering me right now…

    we just got back into town yesterday from a long extended stay down at his parents place…

    i go down to my car this morning to get our daily starbucks, that we have been missing so much, and the calendar that has been in my car is missing… i am so frustrated… it is strange but i can not think of anything but that i happened to park in the same place that i had when my car was moved out of its parking space a couple months ago…
    i love the apartments here but i hate almost everything else… the maintenance is the worst that i have ever seen and the office management is not the best either… i like the lower management people (leasing agents), but the upper management sucks…
    we have lived here since march of this year and have had things that were broken when we moved in and they have not gotten fixed yet…
    it just seems like a steady stream of things that are making me more and more frustrated with living here each time i come home… i love the apartment itself and the grounds but the other things that we have to live with are insane and i will not be renewing the lease… i wish things were better and thinking that if they had a total overhawl on management things would be better but i have read online that this is just the way things happen around here… i just do not understand it and for $800 a month i think they could do something about this, but they do not and all 3 properties owned by this company are the same…

    i don’t know…
    grrrrr… just when i thought we had found our perfect place to live, we have yet another thing that makes us question it…

    well, tonight is the first night back to work and i am glad to be back but at the same time it was nice to be away and not have to think about the stupid high school mentality that comes with working in food servce… we will see how things go tonight… one thing is nice that i am working in the bar and not the cafe… 🙂 always good money and even off 2 hours early since it is sunday…

  • Fw: The Phone

    The Phone

    A man decided to write a book about famous churches around the world. So he
    bought a plane ticket and took a trip to Orlando, thinking that he would start
    by working his way across the USA from South to North.

    On his first day he was inside a church taking photographs when he noticed a
    golden telephone mounted on the wall with a sign that read “$10,000 per call”.
    The man, being intrigued, asked a priest who was strolling by what the
    telephone was used for. The priest replied that it was a direct line to heaven
    and that for $10,000 you could talk to God. The man thanked the priest and
    went along his way.

    Next stop was in Atlanta. There, at a very large cathedral, he saw the same
    golden telephone with the same sign under it. He wondered if this was the same
    kind of telephone he saw in Orlando and he asked a nearby nun what its purpose
    was. She told him that it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 he
    could talk to God. “O.K., thank you,” said the man.

    He then traveled to Indianapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, and
    New York. In every church he saw the same golden telephone with the same
    “$10,000 per call” sign under it. The man, upon leaving New York decided to
    travel out west to see if western states had the same phone.

    He arrived in New Mexico, and again, in the first church he entered, there was
    the same golden telephone, but this time the sign under it read “40 cents per
    call.” The man was surprised so he asked the priest about the sign. “Father,
    I’ve traveled all over America and I’ve seen this same golden telephone in
    many churches. I’m told that it is a direct line to Heaven, but in the east
    and south the price was $10,000 per call. Why is it so cheap here?” The
    priest smiled and answered, “You’re in New Mexico now, son – it’s a local
    call”.

  • great, there goes our email

    Dear EarthLink Subscriber,

    We’re improving our network security as part of our ongoing efforts to fight spam — so you can enjoy a hassle-free Internet experience.

    We’re committed to offering the highest level of protection against online nuisances and security threats. This upgrade will help us keep spammers from using our network to send you junk email.

    As a result of our security upgrade, you must update your email settings to continue sending email on our network.

    this is, of course, the day i have been dreading for a long time, our isp going with secure smtp, which no device/software we use is compatible with…

    so far, i see only four options: get a new isp (they will change eventually, too), find an alternative smtp, or, sort of a sub-choice of that, see if i can set up smtp on our host (and i bet this is not really an option), or, of course, break down and get a desktop…
    changing isp’s and losing our old addresses would suck, paying for a seperate smtp service (eg. smtp.com) is not desirable at all, i have no idea where to start with running smtp on our host, and i am still clutching to my “you-don’t-need-a-pc-for-the-‘net” concept that i have spent so long shouting about, so, i am going to explore the pros and cons of all the other options first…

    on top of all this, i have no idea when the change is taking place over at earthlink, i just got this notice, so, i have yet to do any info-collecting…

    if anyone has any suggestions or an angle i am not considering, i am all ears, click on the comment link or the chatterbox link…

    UPDATE – reply to comment – July 24, 12:00pm

    i know earthlink has absorbed many many other isp’s, maybe northstate is one of them?

    anyway, secure smtp is something fairly new-ish, at least compared to the time of the dc software, so, the authentication step is not there, and impossible to fake… i suspect many a dc’er will have a problem with this, if your isp is also doing it, i fear many others will, too…

    not good…

    (hmmm, maybe if the call was sent out at dcbg, and it turns out many dc’ers are facing this, perhaps someone might have a suggestion of smtp for dc’ers to use…)

    as for my own solution, i just got an email back from tech support at Zianet, a local, independently owned isp, the one my dad has used for years, and they said all the right things, including that they do not see ever going to secure smtp only… (though, they DON’T have a network status page and that is NOT a sign of a good isp…)
    so, i may very well switch to them…
    zianet only covers this region, but, i have gotten some useful info googling for things like “choosing an isp”, and a few pages on findanisp.com…

    switching isp’s is a biatch, but, i have actually kind of meant to switch to a local isp anyway, and so this may very well be how i deal this…

    (and, btw, damn, i need a different comments system… MUST be thin-client-friendly, MUST archive the comments to my own webspace, and MUST email me when a comment is made, and so far i can’t find even one… which is why i have the chatterbox for everyone for whom these comments do not work… a very lame, very limited subsitute, i know, but, i am stuck… i have thought of going with an entirely different blogging package, like movable type or something…)

    UPDATE – reply to comment – July 24, 6:08pm

    yeah, our telephone company also does isp service, and i liked the idea of one bill, so, i went and checked them out, aaand…
    the crummy bastards just have a deal with msn…

    blah…

    and speaking of web-based, for a few seconds we actually thought about yahoo, since their deal just improved immensely and i am pretty sure the deal includes smtp… i don’t recall how much it is, but, whatever it is, i doubt it is justifiable when switching isp’s is not a bad idea in our case anyway…
    for anyone else with this problem, though, it may be a way to go, since they are a long-term, fairly reliable name… and i love their spam blocker, which counts occurances of an email over their network and therefore easily identifies and re-directs bulk mail, with excellent accuracy in my experience… works hella’ better than earthlink’s, which is only a white-list affair with a domain-blocking feature… after a few months of using it, i feel confident declaring it nearly useless…

    UPDATE – reply to comment – July 24, 8:30pm

    it is the thought that all isp’s will do this soon that makes me wonder how much good just switching isp’s will do… as i indicated in my original post, i have seen this coming a long way off as people kept encouraging it as the standard, and i have basically just been crossing my fingers about earthlink not doing it… for once, their reputation for doing little to nothing to stop spammers using their network was a good thing… plus, it means rendering useless so many devices and i assume isp’s know that and i had hoped that they might wait until someone had a better idea…
    but, it seems it is gaining the popularity i feared…

    and the email promise from the guy at zianet does little to comfort me, he may have no knowledge about it…

    i can’t get over the coincidence in timing… makes me wonder if there was recently some official widespread agreement about it that i somehow missed in the internet news…

    UPDATE – reply to comment – July 24, 10:00pm

    wow, yet another great find, karl…
    AND, they address the secure smtp issue…

    this may change everything…

    UPDATE – reply to comment – Sept 11, 2004, 10:30am

    since the comments still do not work on dc, i posted a reply in the chatterbox…
    limited, i know, but, the only easy choice i have…

    and btw, see, this is why i don’t switch comment providers… i got an email that a comment had been made here, no other service offers that and i never would have noticed this comment, since the post is buried…
    at least the chatterbox is always on every page…

    still need either a new comments provider (must permanently archive comments, hopefully in my own space, must work on dc and psion, must have email notification, and i am probably forgetting a couple requirements) or i need new blogging software…

  • a morbid day at our place

    so, yesterday morning, we looked out our bedroom window, and discovered that our beloved little corner of upscale paradise was in the news…

    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…

  • movie-related amusements

    i have been meaning to post these for quite awhile… will probably add them to the side bar at some point…

    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

  • optical illusion

    Wow
    (and be sure to click on the ‘proof’ link…)

    btw, this is a great example of the frailties of perception…
    magicians and con men (from salesmen to psychics) exploit weaknesses in perception and cognition, therefore “mind hacking” is a good description of what they do…
    or perhaps “reality hacking”, since our faith in our own perception and cognition is the foundation of how we establish and experience reality…

  • new gamecube… no life again?

    well we just got back from visiting his parents again last night… i love his parents, they are the coolest people i know and can not say enough good things about them… i am glad to know them as people…

    while we were there, he went with his dad to el paso for a doctors visit (that took all day, poor guys), but i was lucky enough to spend all day with his mom… they got to the va at 2pm and did not get in to see the doctor until 7:30pm and then it was only a 20 minute visit… geesh… but, mom and i sat around and talked about all kinds of things and i got to play with some of her favorite gba games…
    she loves her games and has multiple gbasp’s and 2 gamecubes… just as we were saying that we were going to b heading home she mentioned that she loved the way we played final fantasy tactics advance on her cube and player and that we were having so much fun with it that she wanted us to have that much fun all the time…
    so, they handed us a handful of money and said that she only wanted the final fantasy tactics advance game and wanted us to use the rest of the money to get us a gamecube and player for ourselves… we had not mentioned to her once that we wanted them to buy us one and so we felt pretty bad when she said that they wanted us to have one… we obliged… we had been wanting one for awhile but just like us, we want to find our price before buying anything and this has saved us grief of trying to search and search and never get anything in the end and tons of frustration in the process…

    so, since we have a new gamecube we are trying out all the games that we have oohed and ahhed over the past year… we are not planning on picking up our ABSOLUTE favorite game in the world (PSO – Phantasy Star Online), since the last time we did that we did not do anything but play the game for months and months…

    i am keeping this as short and sweet as possible since i am having to leave for work here in a couple minutes… but, when i get home tonight we are going to be trying out final fantasy crystal chronicles…

  • too many mp3 links

    a couple huge lists i came across, including many personal collections…

    http://forum.o2.pl/temat.php?id_p=1293507&start=1440 (the posts by deserted)

    http://www.sitewrench.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27

    better bring a lunch…

  • When DVD Spells B-A-D

    When DVD Spells B-A-D
    Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
    November 12, 2003
    By FRED KAPLAN
    The New York Times

    a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…

    for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…

    Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
    So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
    This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.

    while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…

    If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
    Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
    “The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”

    well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…

    Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
    The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
    Most studios don’t bother.
    Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.

    and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…

    i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…

    laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
    what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen…