Month: June 2009

Damn It Jim, I’m A Doctor Not A Porn Star

Star Trek XXXPerhaps hoping to capitalize on the popularity of this summer’s new Star Trek movie, Hustler Video has released a Triple X movie parody using the characters from the original series. They even loosely base it on the episode Space Seed which introduced us to Ricardo Montelban as Khan. So if you have the newly remastered TOS on DVD, a giant collection of ST:TNG on VHS tapes, you should probavbly buy this, you know, just to complete your collection.

A review is here, but it is on a site that is definitely NSFW or homes with small children. At the bottom of the article is link where you can buy the 2-disc set (including a blooper reel?) for $25.

If you do follow the link (hey, I was just curious) you will find that, whatever your age, there is a XXX parody of a TV show that will fulfill your adolescent fantasy, from Gilligan’s Island to Happy Days to the Office.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 251

Sleeping Beauty

After a fitful night of sleep when it came time for me to get up and go to work, I refused to do it. Donna, who actually sounds a lot worse than I did, decided that she was going in.

After she left I went back to bed, but I couldn’t get right back to sleep, so curled up on the couch and turned the TV to the digital music channel called Soundscapes (Relax, energize, and expand the soul with this rich mix of new age, atmospheric, and world-positive music.) I closed my eyes and woke up 4 hours later.

I ate lunch and took a nice hot bath. As I lay down to take an afternoon nap I heard the garage door go up. Donna’s boss had sent her home because she sounded so bad. She went to one room and lay down and I went into another, 3 hours later we woke up.

She still sounds worse than I do, but I think tomorrow we’ll both make a full day of work.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 250

My What A Big Eye You Have

This afternoon Donna came in to use the computer and was greeting by nothing, She shouted to me, “When did you turn this off?” “I didn’t,” I replied.

Earlier in the week we both had been experiencing random brief blank screens. I figured it was either the monitor or the video card. Thinking maybe the card was over heating, on Thursday I got out the vacuum and sucked a couple pounds of dust out of the case. For the next two days we didn’t have any black outs, so I though maybe that was the problem. Until today.

The monitor’s power light wasn’t even on, but I went and got the laptop and hooked up it’s external VGA port with the monitor cable and was greeted by the same nothingness. The monitor was a goner.

In our Fair City if you need computer bits you have two choices, Walmart or Staples. Staples is a 1/2 mile closer, so off we went. They have about 5 choices in our price and size range and I picked one out. Off the associate went into the back room to retrieve it. About 5 minutes later she came back out empty handed, “Sorry we don’t have one.” “How about this one?”, I asked pointing at the runner up. Less than a minute later she emerged from the back victorious.

Back home I plugged it up, flipped the switch and was greeted by a horizontally stretched desktop. I went to set the video to the native resolution of the LCD and I couldn’t, the numbers didn’t go that high. Crap, am I going to have to go back to the store and buy a new video card? Let me see if I can update the driver first. Must be be my lucky day, a 20 meg download later and I am staring at a shiny Samsung SyncMaster 2233SW in all its 1920 x 1080 goodness.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 249

Bricks ‘n’ Bars

Bricks 'n' BarsBoth Donna and I are battling a cold/flu thing and for the last two days have not really been doing too much except staying indoors and resting. We have been making brief forays into the real world though, but only in the morning while it is still cool. Today we headed over to Augusta for a second attempt to buy some shirts for me from J.C. Penny.

At the end of Silver Bluff Road where it intersects SC125 there is an abandoned building that has bars on the windows and no door (or roof for that matter) and we have always wondered about it. The other month we did learn something about it, not any history mind you, but that there is a geocache hidden there – Bricks ‘n’ Bars.

Thinking it would be therapeutic we decided to stop and look for the cache on the way over. After about a minute and one brief peek under a bush, we could tell we didn’t have are hearts in it, so we gave up and got back in the car. The only way we would have found this cache today is if it was a large fluorescent orange ammo can in the middle of the building with a flashing neon arrow pointing at it.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 248

Missed Sale

JC Penny had an ad in the paper promoting $9.99 polo shirts. There was also a $10 coupon if you spent $50. I haven’t had any new shirts for work in about 3 years, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to update my closet for cheap, buy 5 shirts and get them for only $40.

We hit the mall in town early and at Penny’s they only had one style marked at $10 instead of the flyers four with most of the polos there marked at $12.99. That didn’t seem right, so we left the store and checked the other major stores in the mall looking for deals on shirts. We had no luck so ended up back at JCP. I picked out 3 shirts I liked, another that would do and headed for the checkout.

There were two women at the counter talking to the sales clerk as they checked out, they must have known each other. He kept reaching to one side of the counter into a large pile of clothes and scanning an item. Looked like he was going to be at it awhile, so we headed over to the other side of the store to the only other open register. There were two separate woman in line there and the girl was finishing with one as we walked up. The clerk looked at the remaining woman and said, “I’ll be right back. I’ve run out of register tape.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I put down the shirts and we left the store. We’ll probably go to Augusta tomorrow and try their JC Penny.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 246

FTF

One of the “desired” goals for a geocacher is to be the First To Find a cache. There are people that get the emails publishing a new cache on their cell phones and spring into action. We on the other hand, take the Doris Day approach, Kay Sera Sera. If one happens to get published and is located where were were going anyway or is a suitable alternate location for caching, we’ll give it a try.

It almost happened while we were out west in Colorado, there were two that had not yet been found along our route one day. Unfortunately we ended up second on both finds, one by a day (hadn’t been logged online yet) and another by mere hours.

Last night a little before 11:00 PM a new cache email came in, it was only a little over a mile from home. We figured we’d got get it this weekend because we just knew somebody was probably on their way to go be the FTF right then.

This morning we looked at the logs for the cache, called “old ting,” and no one had rushed out last night to find it. We briefly thought about looking for it on our way to work, but it looked like it was on a dirt road and I had just washed the car…

At the end of the work day, no one had logged the find yet, so we drove by the spot to see if it was an easy spot on a drive by. There were some trees and a few bushes along a right of way, but we couldn’t spot it.

After dinner and because it is so close our house and to get there it meant a walk along the dirt roads of the horse district, my wife and I headed out to see if we could find it.

Wen we arrived at the corner our GPSr was indicating GZ about 20′ into the side lawn of a house. Realizing that the first 8-10 feet off the road is a right of way and not necessarily homeowner property we poked about along the tree line + and – 40′ to no avail.

Didn’t find the cache, but I did find a cell phone in a bush on the north side of the property’s driveway. For a second I thought, “Oooh, clever hide,” but the phone had no contact called “old ting” or “geocache” or “GC1TH5W”, just a bunch of back and forth calls between the owner and Deidre…

My wife, the shy retiring person she is, knocked on the homeowner’s door and asked if they had ever heard of geocaching. Either A) he genuinely didn’t know anything or B) he does and is in on it. I had my own question, “Did anyone in the household lose a cell phone?” The same A & B possibilities applied for this as well.

When we got home and checked the logs to see if someone had found it, there was a note from a volunteer geocaching reviewer marking the cache as unavailable, because of experiences similar to ours from other people.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 245

David Webb’s Dog Tags

Dog TagsA couple weekends ago we were suffering from a lack of Red Envelopes on the coffee table, so we broke out the Bourne Trilogy and watched all three over the course of the two days.

At the end of the third flick Jason Bourne gets confirmation on who he was before the CIA mind wiped him and turned him into a killing machine. We get a brief glimpse of Captain David Webb’s dog tags and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I get get a set of those to add to my collection of esoteric movie/TV replica props? Turns out you can and for under ten bucks too – Dog Tags Direct.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 243