Category Archives: Real Life

Murray Christmas

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We don’t have a tree, and we don’t have any decorations, but we do have a little cheer. We’ve been able to spend a little time with friends and some of our family. Not having many days off and our self imposed “busy” made it difficult to have my mother out this year, but we’ll visit her for Easter.

Christmas Tree 2007

I didn’t grow up with much tradition, especially around the holidays. Scrooged has been my favorite holiday movies for a long time, but since using it as a vehicle for my proposal Bethany and I have made it a point to watch it around this time of year. This is one of my favorite of Murray‘s post-Ghostbusters movies until Lost In Translation.

If you haven’t seen it in a while Netflix it or get it at the bargain bin of Evil-Mart like I did.

Real life in Second Life

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So, you know how much time I devote to my various websites out there. Much like those endeavors, my Second Life project has fallen by the wayside. As has been my mood for the past few weeks, I’ve logged in and dusted off the, well, dust.

in.dustry in Second Life

There are a few paintings up on the walls and a video screen in the back. Plans were put into place to have streaming audio and video in place to allow bands to perform live both is real life and to an audience in SL simultaneously.

If you happen to have to have Second Life loaded log in and visit.

Why look back?

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I’ve not been at all prolific lately. Not at all. So for some reason I’ve become introspective, looking back on old work and dusting it off. I don’t really have any rhyme or reason for it, but check the archives for transplanted blog entries from several different attempts to keep something going. Also, check the fiction Category for some old bits of text that I’ve decided to bring in as well. I’ll be putting their timestamps to as close to their original post date as possible.

Let me know what you think…

[EDIT:] By the way, as you go through some of those older posts, you’ll notice that I have a tendency not to capitalize or run any sort of spell check. I have left both of these idiosyncrasies in place for posterity. That and there is a lot of fucking swearing… Sorry.

7 days in N.O.

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I’m on day four of a work related trip to New Orleans. The details of the trip are not that interesting, I’m just running video conferencing sessions between here and three different hospitals in China as part of a larger media presentation of a booth at a medical convention down here. What is more interesting is that while I’m here my cousin mentions his fondness for the city. On top of that, I have a friend down here that I still haven’t managed to get a hold of. (Mostly through my own fault.)The show has kept me busy and this short lull (I had to show up at 6am) has given me a little time to chill and catch up on few little things.(Plus, I wanted blog something from my iPhone…)

A poke and a prod…

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As usual, my blog has gone dark for an extended period of time. I wish it was merely a function of how busy I am. Laziness, distraction and apathy weigh large on the fact that I can’t keep it going for too long. Various applications and devices were meant to facilitate my keeping up with it, but the one to fall short was me. It may be that I just don’t have much to talk about.

If I’m in a crowd of people, I’m usually more interested in listening, only adding my opinion when I feel particularly passionate. (The occasional snarky comment does escape my lips on occasion.) I am much more the consummate consumer when it comes to information rather than a content generator.

I have, in fact, been accused of being a obsessive reader, which I’m told it is possible to diagnose via the DSM4.

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Playing with myself.

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While blogging on my MBP is quite the pleasant experience, point and click typing on the Wii is as much fun as a laser pointer and a cat. Normally this would be loads of fun, but my cat is fat and slow. In the case of Wii blogging, its more slow than fat. Immensely frustrating is the built in dictionary that wants to add a ‘com’ at the end of each sentence.

While I’ll never be able to live blog from the Wii, the U.S. release of the DS browser will make any hotspot a potential blogging location. The dual screens make it easy to tap and read at the same time.

Granted once we have the iphone live blogging will really come into its own. Snapshots and video from the built in camera and the Safari browser will make it almost too easy. Who will be the first to have an iphone optimized portal? You’ll even be able to pull in location data to tell where you are writing from.

In the end, do we really need blogging to be easier? My own hypocritical stance against blogging says no, but my gadget lust says ‘f*$% yeah!’

blogged on a Wii.

I am an addict.

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In the evenings, I have been without my computer for the past week. I have been letting Bethany use my MBP to work on several projects that are all coming to a head at the same time and her trusty Mac mini (G4) doesn’t quite have the speed she needs. While I could be using her computer, I find it very limiting to be stuck in one place while I work. Well, stuck in the wrong place at least.

So, because of my stubborn nature I’ve just gone without. In the mean time, I’ve finished several books and graphic novels, something that I’ve not had a chance to do recently. I’ve had some good alone time with my Wii. My new MyTunesRSS feed from my server to my Wii lets us listen to out *vast* digital library from the comfort of the living room.

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We destroy everything…

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I’m not a crazy, vegan, crash-my-environmentally-unsound-protest-boat-into-yours, tree hugging hippie, but this story makes me fairly sick. I’m all for the base slaughter of innocent chickens and cows for my gastronomic pleasure. Somehow, the following story just made me feel more than a little sad about the state of things.

From: Boing Boing: Ancient weapon discovered in whale

Cory Doctorow: A 115-130-year-old “bomb lance” fragment was found in a 50-ton whale killed in Alaska last month.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale’s neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping…

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting

Link (Thanks, Jennifer!)

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Like I said, Mostly Good Spirits…

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Now that I am going to be keeping up on my RSS feeds I’ll be up on the important stuff. I can’t even imagine what it is like to be going through what John is. The fact that I haven’t set foot in a hospital or in front of a doctor in a good ten years doesn’t help. (I’m not counting the time I spent working for the hospital in Pittsburgh… That was so unpleasant that it only makes things worse.)

John’s latest update is still tinged with his wry humor and thats good.

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I don’t check my RSS feeds for a few months and someone gets cancer.

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For the past few months I’ve been living off of a very stripped down version of my normal setup here on my trusty MacBook Pro. Occasionally I’ll dig through my backup image to get an Application, a file or some preferences. One thing that I had not transferred back was NetNewsWire, my RSS reader.

Among my normal feeds, like slashdot and gizmodo, was a feed to my cousin John Kauffman‘s blog. In an abstract way it kept me close family in Florida more than I had in the past and John’s sardonic sense of humor follows closely to my own.

I still haven’t transferred NetNewsWire back, but on a whim I checked it’s online version at NewsGator. Glancing through some of the posts I found some disturbing references. I quickly found the root of the issue:

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