My God, It’s Full Of Stars*

I am slowly (and somewhat reluctantly if you ask my wife) painting the middle bedroom. We have painted the walls in there a couple of times before, but never the ceiling. I decided to change that this time and give the ceiling a nice fresh coat of pink paint. But first, I had to prepare the surface, and that meant scraping off the seemingly thousands of glow in the dark stars we had stuck up there several years ago.

* Bowman actually says, “The thing’s hollow ? it goes on forever ? and ? oh my God! ? It’s full of stars!”, but not in the movie 2001, its in the novel by Arthur C. Clarke and does make it into 2010, the sequel.

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Serenity

Along with our Netflix membership, we are also members of a couple Movie Gallery video stores here in town, due mostly to our TDTVS addiction. Every once in a while one of them will call us and leave a message on our phone answering machine to say they haven’t seen us in a while and to bring us back we are entitled to a free movie rental. We got one of those calls on Thursday. A while? Ha! The last time we were in any of their stores was when Season 3 of Lost was released or the last time they offered a free rental.

Having just finished re watching the Firefly DVDs on Friday we decided to see if we could get the Firefly based movie Serenity as our freebie. Luck was with us as Movie Gallery had a copy on the shelf, so today we had “Lunch and a Movie.”

Well, both the Mrs and I love Firefly, but were disappointed with the movie — there goes our nominations for the Browncoat Hall of Fame… Part of the appeal of the show was the character interaction among the crew with the plot of each episode serving as a vehicle to move the developing relationships along. The movie, as I explained to someone (Hi Rae), was too movie-ish. Everything had to be bigger, faster, more and it was jarring. On TV they used what they called the mule, basically a tarted up ATV, to get around planetside. For the movie they had some sort of hovercraft with giant jet engines and seated four comfortably. Why? During the run of the show when ever there was encounter with another spaceship it was always just one, for the movie they pulled a George Lucas – Industrial Light & Magic with a final battle consisting of hundreds of vessels crisscrossing and dodging and weaving. Why, when a dozen would have done the trick? There were several other instances with over the top gun battles, hero vs bad guy one on one epic hand to hand battle on the edge of a precipitous drop and and some sappy feel good Hollywood romancing.

Fortunately the movie, when it was released in 2005, didn’t make a lot of money (according to IMDB it almost made back it’s $40 million budget), so they didn’t make any sequels. Unfortunately, it didn’t make enough at the box office to revive the TV series.

Started down, went up, still up.
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Every Man Has His Price

And apparently mine is pretty small.

I didn’t vote for players for the baseball All-Star Game this year. Matter of fact I have never voted in all the years they have let fans do it. I don’t think it should be a fan based popularity contest, the players should be chosen by the league managers. They can vote for anyone they like except their own players.

The last couple of years they have even allowed the fans to vote on an extra player for the bench, pretty soon the fans will get to vote on what kind of pitch the pitcher will be throwing.

Anyway, I broke down and voted for the extra player this year because they were giving away a week’s worth of MLB.TV. Which is kind of a smart move on their part, because with the All-Star break in the middle of the giveaway week you only get to see like 4 games.

So right now I’m watching Baltimore put the hurt on the FRS in a small window while I blog. The video quality is not bad in a tiny window, but full screen it is very pixelated. Not something I want to pay $80 a year for. Besides I like the whole listening thing much better, it is easier to multitask.

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Gully Washer

Literally.

I went out and took off the cockpit cover, so I could put the top up around 2:00 PM. I had checked the radar and it looked like we might get passing thunderstorm in the next half hour. I was right about the storm, but wrong about the time, it took about an hour and a quarter to get to us. I was also wrong about the passing part, that sucker stopped over us. It was still raining hard at our 4 o’clock quitting time. We decided to wait a while, the way it was pouring we would have gotten soaked getting to the car, even with the umbrella.

It was still coming down in buckets at around 4:30 and there must have been a dozen or so front office types hanging out by the door waiting for the break in the rain that seemingly might never come. Not being able to take it any longer, one of the QC engineers shouted, “I’ll show you how it is done!” and sprinted into the rain, disappearing front sight within 25 yards. Next a woman from HR removed her shoes and walked out under her umbrella. The exodus began.

At the end of the sidewalk at the the edge of the parking lot there are the storm drains, but they were not keeping up and causing a section that was under 4-6 inches of water between everyone and their cars. Our feet got soaked right from the start. Because of where the Emperor is always parked we had a long walk across wind swept pavement while some extremely large, unseen, being sprayed us with his garden hose.

I don’t even want to talk abut the drive home, there were several places that we almost floated….

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My New Keyboard Is Here! My New Keyboard Is Here!

Both it and the B & W printer cartridge were tucked inside the front door tonight. Now home looks almost like work, all I need is a 22″ wide screen monitor and both places will seamlessly meld into one thrilling computing experience.

Monday at work there was a giant pile of new Aiken phone books in the mail room and everyone had a shiny new edition in their mail slot. Of course, as I am compelled to do each July, I screamed inside my head, whilst imagining myself self jumping up and down and running along the hall like Navin R. Johnson.

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

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401

With last Sunday’s trip I now have photographed 401 of South Carolina’s 461 Post Offices. Flickr and Old School Galleries have been updated. The new fangled flash gallery hasn’t been updated because it is kind of a pain and I’m thinking of just dumping it until I’ve finished the whole project.

Bought a Logitech EX110 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo last Thursday to replace the aging and increasingly stiff OEM Dell. It was sort of an impulse buy, so it wasn’t until I got home and hooked it up that I read some reviews. XP had no problem working with the combo right from the get go and that was a good thing because I wanted to avoid loading the Logitech software as I suspected it might be bloatware. The reviews were correct in that the mouse was a little cheap feeling and noisy, but I liked the keyboard feel. One thing that was mentioned frequently was that the mouse went through batteries quickly (sometimes in as little as 3 weeks.) Hmmm.

When Donna tried it out and the first thing she noticed was there were no lights (Num, Caps or Scroll.) Turns out you can get some indication of those statuses on the monitor, if you install their software. That coupled with the battery issue makes me box it back up for return. We are back to stiff keys until my new Dell wired keyboard shows up in a couple days.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
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Little Old Lady Entrepreneur

A little old lady is walking down the street, dragging two large plastic garbage bags with her, one in each hand. Unfortunately, there is a rip in one of the bags, and every once in a while a $20 bill falls out onto the pavement.

Noticing this, a policeman stops her. “Ma’am, there are $20 bills falling out of your bag.”

“Oh, really? Damn!” says the little old lady. “I’d better go back and see if I can collect them. Thanks for the warning.”

“Well, now, not so fast,” says the cop. “How did you get all that money? You didn’t steal it, did you?”

“Oh no,” says the little old lady. “You see, my back yard is right next to the parking lot of the football stadium. Each time there is a game; a lot of the fans come and pee through the bushes, right into my flower beds! So, I go and stand behind the bushes with a big hedge clipper, and each time someone sticks his little thingie through the bushes, I say, ‘$20 or off it comes!’ ”

“Well, that seems only fair,” laughs the cop. “Ok, good luck! By the way, what’s in the other bag?”

“Well,” says the little old lady, “not everybody pays.”