Want

Nerf chain gun, fully auto, belt fed. Want.

Teh Werk

Sorry about not posting. I've been slammed for the last two or three weeks at work. Starting to calm down a bit. Getting ready to go to LA in August.

Promo

Just a quick news flash. I was given a field promotion to CG Supervisor on my show. It doesn't really mean anything more than recognition for the job I'm already doing, but it's official, so it's nice to be appreciated.

Rules

I'm not usually one to pass on e-mails, but this is pretty funny.

Rules for Men.

• Men are NOT mind readers.
• Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don't hear us complaining about you leaving it down.
• Sunday sports It's like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.
• Crying is blackmail.
• Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!
• Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.
• Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.
• Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become Null and void after 7 Days.
• If you think you're fat, you probably are. Don't ask us.
• If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one
• You can either ask us to do something Or tell us how you want it done. Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.
• Christopher Columbus did NOT need directions and neither do we.
• ALL men see in only 16 colours, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not A colour. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.
• If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.
• If we ask what is wrong and you say 'nothing,' We will act like nothing's wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.
• If you ask a question you don't want an answer to, Expect an answer you don't want to hear.
• When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine...Really.
• Don't ask us what we're thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as instant replay or the designated hitter.

Same Old

NAACP head: Obama win won't solve racial injustice

The head of the NAACP, Julian Bond, makes a valid point.

Julian Bond, a veteran civil rights leader, said Obama's candidacy doesn't ''herald a post-civil rights America, any more than his victory in November will mean that race as an issue has been vanquished in America.''

He follows that up with this bit.

But he drew loud applause when he said the country, and ''all of us here,'' are taking pride in the success in this year's campaign by a candidate who couldn't have stayed in some cities' hotels a few decades ago.

Yeah, when people would have looked at Obama and seen A Black Man. Like Mr. Bond can't look at Obama and see anything but ... A Black Man. How can Bond expect anyone else to see Obama as just a person if he doesn't?

South: Part IV

Did you think I was never going to finish? Hell, I didn't know if I would ever finish.  When we last saw our intrepid group of two wheeled maniacs, they had just barely beaten the rain to Hanmer Springs for lunch .......





We're in Hanmer Springs for lunch ... and it's raining, and it's raining, and it's raining.  We eventually figured out that it wasn't going to stop raining, so we better get moving if we wanted to get to Murchison before it was dark. We'd only come about 130 klicks so far, and we had about 200 to go, and we were going to have to do it in the rain.







View Larger Map





It's really too bad about the rain. It's not that any of us minded riding in the rain. Obviously we would've preferred for it not to be raining, bit it was what it was. The scenery was pretty even in the pouring rain, I would've like to have seen it in the sun.



If there's one thing the rain does, however, is separate the men from the boys, so to speak. When I say that none of us minded riding in the rain, I mean that some us didn't mind less than others. We had a tendency to get a little more spread out on this leg of our journey, meaning the two of us on the sportbikes were waiting for everyone else a bit more than usual. This included one main stop about halfway so that everyone could catch up and get a bite and wring themselves out as much as possible. Here we are in all our drowned cat glory.

Yes, we made endless fun of that pink and purple rain suit.



There's not a lot more to say about the rest of day two other than any motorcycle gear that claims to be water 'proof' eventually becomes water 'resistant', water 'logged' and finally water 'fucking useless' when subjected to a South Island summer downpour. We all managed to not die in the rain and finally pulled into the place we were spending the night, just past Murchison.

This lovely home was actually owned by an American  ex-pat from Hawaii. And when I say 'American' I mean 'Hippie' and when I say Hawaii, I mean 'Outer Space'.  I don't know where the grow house was but I'm sure it couldn't have been too far.  Here's some shots of the view from the front porch, left to right.

I was plesantly surprised.





I'm not going to get through all of Day Two tonight, so stay tuned for part five.

Yuppie?

Let me start off by saying that I like our Land Cruiser. When everyone was going to school right near home it was great. When they switched schools, it became not so great. It became, Holy Christ We're Filling Up The Tank Every Nine Or Ten Days At $150 A Pop not so great. The thing is, I'm at work most of the time and at least ninety percent of the time the car is in use, it's only for five people, but we do need a car that seats six for the times when we all are going somewhere together. Soltion? Buy another car! Problem solved with our first BMW

1994 525i. Gets a lot better milage than the Cruiser. "Just" 220,000 klicks. Only $2700 dollars. That is a crazy bargain. I really like it, which is good, since I will never get to drive it. BMW gets no love here. I don't get it. That car would easily be five or six grand in LA. It's in great shape. It's been well taken care of. All the Kiwis say "won't it be expensive to maintain?". Well, not as expensive as a car that breaks down every five minutes which is the NZ idea of a bargain. Of course, now that I've said that, it will probably fail to get me home tonight.

Pussies

Andy Orstoy gets one exactly right

Quarrantine

Got to see the dogs yesterday for a little while. I don't think that I've ever seen them quite that excited before. When we had to go, Chewie ran right to the door like he's saying, "OK guyz! Let's go!" They didn't quite get why they weren't leaving as well. The place seems nice enough, but it's not very big, and they don't have anywhere to run about. It sucks, but only one more month.

Post

Hitler as producer, classic.

Move

I just switched offices again at work, hopefully the last time for a while. At my new desk was a shiny new HP computer. Dual 2.66 GHz quad-core Xeon, 8 GB RAM and a Nvidia Quadra FX 4600. Oh yeah. That is a seriously bad ass desktop computer.

Woof II

Doggies are in Los Angeles and are set to fly out tomorrow night and arrive in Wellington Friday Morning. They'll be in Quarantine for thirty days. Those of us that don't have jobs are going to rent a bach ("batch" (stupid name for a vacation house)) ,in Levin where the dogs are, for two weeks so that they can see them every day. They only have to be isolated from other dogs. Fingers and paws crossed all around please.

Review : Price Caspian

NOTE: I don't know if anyone's noticed but the images of the posters for the movies in the reviews are links to the page for that movie on imdb.com. Now, starting with this one, the post title is a link to the page for the movie on rottentomatoes.com

I mentioned in my review for The Hulk that we managed to see two movies that weekend. On Sunday, the girls were both invited to a birtday party that kicked off with all the girls going down to Island Bay to see Prince Caspian. The boys are friends with the birthday girl's older brother and we occasionally hang out with their family and we wanted to see the movie anyway, so the rest of us sort of tagged along. The Island Bay Cinema is a 'boutique' movie theatre. I'm pretty sure that there's only two screens and each one seats maybe ... fifty people?

We took up about a quarter of the seats for that show, I think.I've read all of the Narnia books more times that I can remember and Price Caspian was never my least favorite, that honor is reserved for "The Silver Chair", but it's probably right above that. So I haven't been really geeked out to see this or anything. Since it's nearly my least favorite, I can't even remember the last time I actually read the book, but from what I remember, the movie was pretty faithful to the sounce material. The film, like the book, is a little darker and a lot more action oriented. I just don't find the material terribly engrossing. It's my understanding that this book had to be next since it's the only other one besides The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe that has all four of the kids in it and for the sake of continuity, the studio wanted to make the movie before the kids got any older. That does mean, however, that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is next, since it has Edmund, Lucy and Caspian in it, and I am totally geeked for that as it was always my favorite.

So, the kids liked it, and they're the target audience so it couldn't have been that bad. I got exactly what I expected so I'll have to give it ...

Three Stars.

Harbor

OK! I updraded some software on the PC. New version of PHP, new version of Apache, got rid of some old stuff, and, the web server seems to be working OK. So if you go to

www.thisoneparticularharbor.com

you should get the gallery.

Woof

If everything stays on target the doggies will fly out of the Atl tomorrow. We're all quite worried about them and just want the whole thing to be done with. Many props to STFU&GWTW-in-law for putting them up and putting up with them for six months.

TED

Queue

Tired : coming to work Sunday night.

Wired : no one else is here, so I'm making the render queue my bitch. My job is on about 600 cpus. Muhahahahahah.

Top Five

You can't see it, but it's there. Right down at the bottom of the page below the posts. It's a little tiny bit of html. A couple of lines really. They just archive a little bit of data every time someone reads this blog. Yes, big brother is watching, never fear, it's all anonymous. It does, however, let me know where my traffic is coming from. And that's the thing, I have no explanation for some of the traffic I get. I wrote in here for years as a sort of diary, never telling anyone about it. When I moved to NZ, it seemed a good to keep people up to date on how we're doing. The thing is, here's the data for the last week

51 Visits
22 Absolute Unique Visitors
77 Pageviews
1.51 Average Pageviews
00:02:04 Time on Site

Twenty two? Holy fuck, who are all you people? Twenty two!? in one week. I can't even begin to imagine that there's twenty two people that would be interested in what I have to say. Here's the last three months

371 Visits
145 Absolute Unique Visitors
535 Pageviews
1.44 Average Pageviews
00:01:28 Time on Site

Cool.

Well, since it seems like I get, if not a lot, then at least more traffic then I expected, I'm going to see if I can't make this a bit more interesting. I'll be playing around with my layout. So keep your eyes peeled, I don't want you to miss anything. You're probably still wondering. "Top five what?".

Things

that make us laugh.





I don't know why, but I can't look at this picture without, well, maybe not quite laughing, out loud, but it always makes me chukle.

Review: The Incredible Hulk

I'm going fairly flat out at work, we've got some stuff that has to deliver on Monday so it been a long week. We did get out to see a couple of movies last weekend, on Saturday we wen't out for dinner and a movie with Guy and Di. We went to Matterhorn for dinner, which, considering we usually just grab a kebab or thai or some such thing at the mall where the theatre is, was quite the deviation from the norm. The food is very good, but a bit on the pricey side. Well north of two bills for four and during the paying for dinner phase of the evening I insited on splitting it 50-50 and then made the mistake of letting Guy go first, since he the promptly paid for the whole thing. We ended up seeing the big green guy. I obviously, and ever so graciaously, paid for all the movie tickets. There wasn't a lot of quality cinema to be had last weekend and The Hulk was the least of all evils. Hulk was never one of my favorite comic book characters, although I remember watching the tv show a fair bit when I was young. It's a pretty good comic book/action movie, but in the back of my mind the whole thing just served as a way to get the viewer to the inevitable fight scene between The Hulk and The Bad Hulk at the end of the movie. It was a 'reboot' as Marvel, just like everyone who saw it, tried to forget the first Hulk movie had ever been made. There's and interesting cameo by Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, as well as several "Stark Technologies" labels on military equipment throughout the movie. It seems like Marvel's trying to keep all their properties in the same universe, which is nice. Decent movie, far better than the first.


Three Stars