It’s a boy!
Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 5:37 pm
The first pictures of the future Jhonen Blount are below. 
And yes, look at the size of the weenie on that one!!! He’s definitely my boy.
EDIT: From the family members I emailed these pics to, apparently the “it’s a boy” pic is rather ambiguous. This pic was taken from the side of Lisi’s stomach - basically, it’s a perfect upskirt shot - or it would be, if it was a girl who wore skirts, which it’s not. So, without further ado, my very own Photoshop commentary on the clincher pic. View what follows in conjunction with the previous image, and it will become patently obvious exactly how much of a man my little boy is. That’s right. I said it.
1 Comment
Foo Fighters, go away. Please.
Posted on Monday, August 18, 2008 at 10:57 pm
No, but seriously. I can’t fucking turn on the radio without hearing the bloody Foo Fighters.
I mean, it’s getting ridiculous now. I know they’ve been a fairly big band for the last 10ish years or so. But I swear to God, I’ve never known them to be this big. I mean, they sort of went out of style like 3 or 4 years ago. And then all of a sudden they came back, and it’s like every goddamn single gets played every 30 seconds on the radio. Seriously, how much damn money is their label paying the radio stations now?!
I am absolutely not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that, a couple weeks ago, I was flipping between the two big rock stations in Dallas, and both stations were currently playing the same Foo Fighters song. And they were both within maybe 15 seconds of each other. It was seriously the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. I simply cannot drive home from work without hearing a damn F.F. song on the radio. And it’s driving me batshit crazy.
I mean, it’s like they’re trying to make me hate them. Because, when the song first comes out, I don’t seem to think it’s all that bad. Really, I don’t. But then apparently someone from the record label is sucking a TON of dicks to get the song played every damn 30 seconds, and after a couple weeks, I’m wanting to stab myself in the face every time the song comes on. I just can’t take it anymore.
Yet again, I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that I would rather listen to commercials than a F.F. song. Hell, I would rather listen to 3 straight hours of a handshaking modem than 3 minutes of a F.F. song. Please, for the love of everything sacred and holy, just stop playing it. It’s just horrible. Absolutely horrible.
3 Comments
Ah, much better.
Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 5:39 pm
All nice and back to normal. Themes are back up, and the spam filter has been re-activated. So at least there’s that.
1 Comment
Umm… whoops.
Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Apparently the new Wordpress update was a bit too ambitious, and borked up the rest of my themes. Goes to show my luck… I tried to upgrade with my Macbook via Transmit, rather than my normal process, Windows via FlashFXP. Apparently when you tell Transmit to “replace existing files,” it means “replace absolutely everything”, rather than “replace the old stuff with the same name as the new stuff, but leave the old stuff alone that is otherwise unaccounted for in the new stuff.” My themes have apparently disappeared. So, temporarily, we are back to the standard Wordpress theme. My bad. I’ll get all the themes uploaded again here in a bit.
Anyway, um, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, so here’s a post. Yeah.
I recently celebrated my 26th birthday. God, I’m old! That’s seriously kind of not cool.
Anyway, with my birthday money, I bought my very own mini-fridge, with which to store beer. Just beer. Nothing other than beer. And so begins my new goal in life: to try lots of different kinds of beer. Several stores near where I live have what amounts to a “build your own six-pack” thing going on… (Target has a 4-pack, but hey, it’s better than nothing). Which is cool, because it lets me sample stuff without having to invest in a full six pack of something I may or may not like. So since I have a small fridge out in my garage, whose sole purpose in life is to do nothing but keep beer cold, I figure it’s about time to start branching out a bit - expand my horizons, as it were. I’m admittedly American, so Budweiser is, so far as I’m concerned, the end-all-be-all of beer. But I want to try some of the foreign stuff, some of the local microbrewery stuff, some of the stuff with a stupid name or a cool logo.
If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to comment. I’m really up for trying pretty much anything. If you like it, please let me know. If I can find it around here, I’ll try it too.
8 Comments
Some random crap.
Posted on Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Wow. Lotta stuff has been happening lately. I’m busy, I don’t update my blog, yadda yadda yadda.
So yeah, my Xbox definitely bucked the kicket. Called the support number, dealt with some chick from India try to walk me through reviving it for 20 minutes before she finally gave up and decided that, yes, indeed, it had given up the ghost. They actually returned it pretty quickly this time… took about a week and a half or so, much better than the month it took last time. I was actually halfway hoping that they’d just trash it and send me a refurb unit, one with the newer motherboard design (which has HDMI output, and much more resilient heat dissipation). But no, they just replaced the board/heatsink and sent me back my original unit. I really hope this one doesn’t die on me again.
Also, while the Xbox was being repaired, my best friend called me and said that his nearest Best Buy had Wiis in stock, and wanted to know if I wanted him to buy me one. I live in the Dallas, TX area, which is (obviously) a rather large market. And here it is, a year and a half after the Wii was released, and I have yet to actually see one in stock, anywhere. He lives in a smaller market that has apparently been saturated, so one could actually purchase one without having to fellate the nearest Gamestop clerk. Needless to say, I jumped on it. I was currently sans one Xbox, and needed something to do with myself.
Turns out, the Wii apparently has a really fucking touchy power brick. I was seriously about to go ape shit last weekend. Not 2 weeks after my Xbox was returned to me, I’d invited a friend over to play some games. And we go upstairs to play Super Smash Bros. (which I had bought for the occasion, since I really didn’t have any other good multiplayer games, Wii, Xbox, or otherwise). And the Wii won’t turn on. At all. It just sat there, looking at me. Mocking me. We unplugged it, plugged it back in, let it sit there and think about what it’d done. Nothing. We ended up playing Gears of War for a bit, and going to a movie. While we were there, my (lovely|pregnant|puking) wife did a bit of Googling, and figured out that if you unplugged everything for 15 minutes or so, the power brick would reset itself, and if that was the problem, it would fix it. Luck was with me, because that ended up being the problem. Our power had gone out for a couple minutes earlier in the week, and it had apparently just overloaded the power brick. Said power brick had been behind (what I thought was) a fairly good surge protector, but apparently that didn’t matter. Either the surge protector didn’t work, or the power brick is retarded. Anyway, everything is good now. Which is good, because I was about to get super pissed. Postscript… if the power brick is really that touchy, why in the hell did they not put a hard reset button on it?! Why do I have to unplug it and wait 15 minutes for it to reset itself?
One last thing. We have yet to go to the doctor. Our appointment is scheduled for June 24. But there’s no longer any question that we’re preggers. She still hasn’t done her girl-bleed thingy, she’s having mood swings, she’s having morning sickness, and she’s having fucking cravings. So yeah. Barring something bad happening, I am indeed procreating. So, hey, I gotta make light of some part of this, right? With that in mind, here we go, with the first installment of Craving Watch 2008!
-
Blueberry muffins
Chicken pot pie
Egg McMuffins
Cheese popcorn
Strawberry shortcake
14 Comments
Oh, by the way…
Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 8:18 am
I think we’re having a baby.
No real details as of yet. Lisi is coming up on 2 weeks late, and a couple drugstore pee tests said she was preggers. Her lady doctor said they would do basically the same pee test to confirm it, so there was no reason to come in right now, but she’s got an appointment scheduled for late June which should be far enough along to see a sonogram.
So there’s that.
13 Comments
Well, that was fast.
Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Praline: Never mind that my lad, I wish to complain about this parrot Xbox 360 what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Shopkeeper: Oh yes, the Norwegian Blue. What’s wrong with it?
Praline: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it.
Shopkeeper: No, no it’s resting, look!
Praline: Look my lad, I know a dead parrot Xbox 360 when I see one and I’m looking at one right now.
Shopkeeper: No, no sir, it’s not dead. It’s resting.
Praline: Resting?
Shopkeeper: Yeah, remarkable bird the Norwegian Blue, beautiful plumage, isn’t it?
Praline: The plumage don’t enter into it : it’s stone dead.
Shopkeeper: No, no : it’s just resting.
Praline: All right then, if it’s resting I’ll wake it up. Hello Polly! I’ve got a nice cuttlefish for you when you wake up, Polly parrot Xbox 360!
Shopkeeper: There it moved.
Praline: No he didn’t. That was you pushing the cage.
Shopkeeper: I did not.
Praline: Yes, you did. Hello Polly, Polly (bangs it against counter) Polly parrot Xbox 360, wake up. Polly. Now that’s what I call a dead parrot Xbox 360.
Shopkeeper: No, no it’s stunned.
Praline: Look my lad, I’ve had just about enough of this. That parrot Xbox 360 is definitely deceased. And when I bought it not half an hour ago, you assured me that its lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out after a long squawk.
Shopkeeper: It’s probably pining for the fjords.
Praline: Pining for the fjords, what kind of talk is that? Look, why did it fall flat on its back the moment I got it home?
Shopkeeper: The Norwegian Blue prefers sleeping on its back. Beautiful bird, lovely plumage.
Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot Xbox 360, and I discovered that the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there.
Shopkeeper: Well of course it was nailed there. Otherwise it would muscle up to those bars and voom!
Praline: Look matey, this parrot Xbox 360 wouldn’t voom if I put four thousand volts through it. It’s bleeding demised.
Shopkeeper: It’s not, it’s pining.
Praline: It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot Xbox 360 is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot Xbox 360. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot Xbox 360.
1 Comment
Seriously, just, yeah.
Posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 9:53 pm
No new posts in a good long while. Yeah. Sorry about that.
The new app at work, that I’ve been writing since October, has been winding to a close. And if you know anything about coding (and if you don’t, you’re about to), you know that the end is always harder than the beginning. It’s been hell. Working 12 hour days, working weekends, trying to fix random shit that pops up at the last minute, et cetera. It’s not necessarily that I don’t like this… I mean, finally seeing the end result of 7 months of non-stop work, and letting the end-users fawn over how utterly awesome it is compared to the previous app (not written by me, and therefore sucks large amounts of ass), is a pretty awesome pay-off. But at the end of the day, I’m just so entirely tired that the only thing I can do is sit on the couch and read Fark until I fall into a very short coma, then wake up to do it all over again.
So yeah, no new blog posts. I’ll try to be better about that. *cough*
In other news, I’m fairly certain my Xbox is dying again. This is the second Xbox 360 I’ve gone through - the first one started having issues with the DVD drive, so I sent it in for repair and got a refurb unit returned to me. My in-laws are visiting this week, so I took Monday and Tuesday off (Lord knows i needed the rest!). Given my long weekend, I bought GTA4 since I knew I’d have a bit of time to play it, and there’s nothing quite like beating virtual hookers to death with a baseball bat to relieve stress. And after I’d had a couple of play sessions with it, the console started acting up - it would completely lock up everything, with a red checkerboard pattern splashed on top of the last frame the game had displayed. This seemed to be completely random. A couple times it happened literally within minutes of cold-booting the console, and then I could play for 2-3 hours with no issues whatsoever. At first I thought this was because of the game - apparently GTA4 is causing a bunch of console freeze issues for both the 360 and PS3 versions. But then the same problem happened when I was playing a game of Tiger Woods 07 with my mother-in-law, which definitely means it’s not just a GTA4 problem.
Another quick Google search revealed that the red checkerboard freeze is almost certainly the precursor to the Red Ring of Death (RRoD). Apparently it’s because the older 360 motherboards tend to flex under heat, but the heatsinks on top of the CPU and GPU don’t flex with it, ergo after a good long while of playing, the heatsinks separate from the CPU/GPU and cause the chips to overheat. Based on the results of the Google serach, best as I can tell, the red checkerboard means “I was perfectly fine, and then I was in the middle of doing something, and I got so hot I had to stop,” which comes shortly before “I couldn’t even start myself because my innards were so massively fucked, so here’s 3 red lights because this is the absolute last failure mechanism I have.”
So yeah… now that my console is 1.5 years old, the only warranty I’ve got left is Microsoft’s extended 3-year warranty for the RRoD. So now, it’s kind of sad, but I’ve actually decided that my best course of action is to play the hell out of the game until I can force the RRoD to happen, which will mean my console can be repaired/replaced for free. Here’s hoping that if/when it finally gives up the ghost, and I send it into the warranty center, they send me back a console with the newer Falcon motherboard design that is significantly less prone to complete and utter hardware death.
Ok, I’m done typing now. You kids have fun.
P.S. If you couldn’t tell from the first couple of paragraphs, any and all coding which is not directly related to my employment (and thus amply compensated for) has pretty much stopped for the time being. So Autumn hasn’t really progressed much since the last update. Nor has the new revision to Se7enet. I’ve piddled around in Photoshop a little bit, but even after I’m done with the Photoshop part, there’s still code that must be written… and I’m just really not feeling it. Sorry.
No Comments
Umm… I guess I should post something…
Posted on Friday, April 4, 2008 at 9:36 pm
It’s been awhile, eh? So long, in fact, that I’m starting to sound Canadian! So here we go with ye olde Friday-night-been-drinking-a-little-bit-need-to-update-the-website-so-here’s-some-random-bullshit post. Dammit, now I’m sounding ancient British, too!
One.
Owning a house ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s primarily the reason I haven’t updated in so long. We’ve just been so busy with getting moved in, getting unpacked, and getting everything set up the way we want it, that I haven’t had time to do much of anything else. My sister and her husband came to visit this past weekend, and it was the first time I’d played my Xbox since January. That’s how busy I’ve been. It’s terrible. But it’s been nice. No more college fucktards throwing parties at 2am above our apartment keeping us awake. No more hunting for a parking spot. No more treks across the parking lot just to take out the trash. No, sir, no more of that indeed! We’ve traded it for… um… the yippy little dogs next door going batshit crazy every time I go out to smoke, and calling the warranty department because the cheap labor illegals that built our house forgot to seal the living room window, so every time it rains, we get treated to the unintended and unadvertised “Indoor Waterfall” feature of our new house. Wow, that was a pretty awesome run-on sentence, wasn’t it? Anyway, yeah, the severe lack of blog updates can be pretty much chalked up to all the joys of home ownership.
Two.
I’ve noticed something over the last year or two. In car commercials, the vast majority of the featured vehicles used to be driven around and shown completely void of license plates. Is this right? I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s the way it used to be… though I suppose maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, what I’ve noticed recently is that the advertised cars all tend to have fairly real-looking plates, but they have been painted to match the car. Did some law change that said car commercials had to use real license plates? It can’t be that the manufacturers are going for a “realistic” commercial, because no license plate exactly matches the paint color of the car it’s attached to. So obviously there’s got to be something going on that I don’t know about. Because why would you make a car commercial and take the time to not only (a) register for a new license plate, (b) affix it to the car you’re about to film, and (c) paint it with the exact same paint you used on the car???? It confuses me, and I feel like bitching about it.
Three.
I’ve got a couple things I’ve been working on lately. You’ve already seen the early drafts of my new logo for Se7enet. It’s fully 3d, rendered in 3dsmax. It’s nice. I’ve got the final version of the new logo already done (and yes, it’s slightly different than the two I’ve already posted here). The problem now is getting a full page layout to match it. I’ve had several ideas, and I’ve gotten part of the way through them before deciding they’re crap and starting over. So really at this point, it comes down to me being too much of a perfectionist and wanting something that looks good and fits with the new logo. It’s not easy going, really. The other thing I’m playing with has a working title of Project Autumn. And really, at this point, I’ve said too much. But if you’ve been paying attention in the forums, you should probably have an idea of what that is. So I won’t talk about it anymore for the moment.
Four.
Um, yeah, I’m done. There is no four. You go away now.
1 Comment
Umm… yeah… whoops…
Posted on Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Um, so that previous post? Yeah, um, it didn’t quite work out like I’d planned it.
The 2nd, 3rd and 4th items in the list worked like magic. We did indeed get the appliances ordered (they’re being delivered tomorrow), get the tile/grout sealed, and dumped off a carload of stuffs. In addition to all that, I was able to successfully hang and install a ceiling fan. I’m amazed, personally, as it’s quite possibly the first mechano-physical task I’ve ever been able to complete.
Unfortunately, I underestimated the difficulty of the first task. That is, hanging blinds.
Oh God, did I underestimate hanging blinds.
You know, one would think that sticking four screws into a wall wouldn’t be all that hard. But please, let me assure you, it is. No, but seriously.
I spent approximately 4 hours (badly) attempting to get the first one hung. I tried with a power drill (it stripped the screws), I tried with a screwdriver (OMG I can’t fucking turn this thing any harder), I tried drilling a leader hole first (seemed like it worked for a bit, but still resulted in the same endpoint… failure). I gave up. Let it be known that blinds and me don’t mix. I think it’s the tight corners and no room to maneuver the fucking [screwdriver | drill | magic voodoo blind installer].
Long story short, after the aforementioned 4 hours attempting to get the first one hung, I decided that $118ish ($4.30 times exactly 26 linear feet of blinds) was absolutely worth it to have Lowes’ installer guy do it for me. I’m done. I have been officially pwn3d by my blinds. I am not ashamed to admit this. I gave it my all, and I failed miserably. There comes a point when you simply must defer to the experts. That’s what I’m doing.
Like I said… I did hang a ceiling fan. So that’s a step, right? Sweet mother of God, if this is homeownership… just kill me now.
By the way, the connector plug between the fan base and the light fixture underneath looks suspiciously like a motherboard power connector. That made things a lot easier. I can deal with that. Because seriously, if it plugs into a motherboard, I can make it my bitch.
Also, the screw holes were already done for me because the home came with standard-issue light fixtures. Take those off, insert ceiling fan in place, rinse, repeat.
Home ownership… um… not all it’s cracked up to be, as it were. I’m sure I’ll change my story in a few weeks when everything is done and we’re living nicely and comfortably in my new house… but for now… God I wish Management would take care of this shit.
