Trail Run, originally uploaded by crzyrider250.

…without a trail.

Hopefully I’ll be spending some time this weekend doing something similar.

Last Saturday was the run pictured above. My FJ wasn’t able to make it, so I rode second seat in my dad’s jeep. This weekend should give me some wheel time, and be more of a river/mountain run.

I should also be able to break out and do some shooting, so here’s hoping.

Take a glance at the newest installment of The Walking Dead entitle “Homecoming,” posted here.

You get to meet my parents - yay?

The sun was not yet dipping below our western horizon, but it was disappearing from us behind the mountains to the west and the pall of smoke and ash that hung in the atmoshphere farther out.  The little bit of light that remained, however, was too much for my taste.

“OH MY GOD, what have you done to yourself?” my mother shrieked at me.

“Mom, really, I…”

“Yeah Mom, really, he only crashed TWICE today!”  Beth and I were going to have a talk about that little factoid later on.

“Come on, let’s get all you guys out of those dirty clothes and get you inside for some supper.”

This one weighed in at 1500 words, and hopefully I’ll be able to do another one tomorrow.  After I knock a few out for immediate consumption, I think I’ll start setting them to post automatically in the morning on one given day.  We’ll see.

For those of you wondering what I’m planning on doing with this - well, I’ve probably got another 50,000 words easy, maybe more, with a few twists and turns thrown in.  I’m also in “talks” to have some parallel lines intersect here, written by other interested parties.  Not planning on 4-500 page novel sized, by any means, but a fairly hearty chunk of free, Creative Commons licensed internet tomfoolery.

Perhaps there won’t be a TWD update today. I wrote a nice, long addition, a tad non-shooty, but I can’t post it.

Why?

^^^

What the fuck does that mean, and why is it hampering my creativity?

edit: Nevermind - I got it.  Just had to make a modification to the htaccess file and it fixed it.  Why, I still have no clue.

The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123.
3. Find the first five sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

2008 Political News

The Canadian province of Quebec finally secedes after a referendum passes at 53%.  Though hardly a popular mandate, the other 47% seem poised to take the looming secession in stride.

The book comes with a hearty recommendation from me.  Molon Labe!

Via Tam, via les.  Awesome.

That is awesome, with one big “but” at the end…

Let’s say, hypothetically of course, I just woke up…I stumble outside to grab the paper while the coffee pot starts up.  It’s gonna be 10-15 minutes before I’m functional.

And I see…this.  This scene, right there, would chill my blood and simultaneously fill me with glee.  In fact, I would be dollars to donuts that as I pulled a scoped rifle from my safe, I would be sporting wood.

And then, ten minutes later, while enjoying my coffee and congratulating myself and enjoying the pleasant intermingled smells of burnt gun powder, coffee and tobacco, I would be shot or tasered and arrested for shooting a bunch of reenactors.

Seriously, people, for the love of…

Don’t pretend to be zombies if you are unwilling to have your head blown off with a high powered rifle.

Make-up doesn’t show that well thru a scope.

Sign a waiver first…

For the past three days, I’ve done almost nothing but write.  Unfortunately, just about none of it has been for my own amusement, edification or intellectual curiousity.

Which sucks.

The cool thing is that I’ve been spending the time as a commissioned writer, for a few different people, writing about a variety of things.

For money.

Which is what “commissioned” means.

Score.

Also on the positive side, my touch typing speed has probably increased 15 to 20wpm this week, from an already respectable 50wpm average.  My thought-per-minute still goes about twice as fast as my fingers, though.

All told, I put up about 8K words in…probably about 12-15 hours of concentrated effort.

But now thats done.

And I can write for what I want, when I want.

But I kinda don’t want to.

But I kinda do…

Expect a TWD update later today.  I’m going to utilize these newfound typing skillz…

It took a few days, but I have a resolution to share.

I did not have to resort to lawyers, police or violence in order to get some satisfaction in this case, though any of those options could easily have been clumsily wielded in pursuing justice.

I took my moms computer, the build specs, and a printout of what was currently in the case.  I went to the BigBox store and spoke with the manager of the tech support dweebs.

I explained the situation thusly:

You have, or had, an employee in this store, in this department, whom took advantage of my mother.  She brought in this computer, and a second hard drive, in order to have the data from the loose drive transferred to the internal drive.  What your tech did was take out the much larger internal drive with new software and OS, and replace it with the smaller, older drive.

When my mom saw that, yes, the data was now “on the computer” she took the computer home.  This occurred a few months ago, and it was only this past week that I looked at the computer at all.

I want to know what you can do to make this right.

Using my mothers phone number, he was able to look up the work order.  The tech who had performed the “upgrade” was, oddly enough, no longer employed with them.

He looked at the build spec, and looked at the spec printout from PCWizard, and immediately saw that there was a missing RAM stick and a 40x less capacity drive.

He then did something that, frankly, left me completely speechless.

He made it right.

Using the only parts that they had in the store, he added the components that were taken out.  Well, not really.  He asked me if I’d like to leave it for a couple of days, and I asked if I could have the parts instead, and take care of it myself.  This seemed amenable.

The parts that had gone missing were an 80GB IDE drive, and one of the DDR PC3200 256MB RAM modules.  The parts that he handed be were a 250GB IDE drive, all that they had, and 2x 1GB DDR PC3200 RAM modules.  He apologized that they didn’t have the parts in to keep it at original spec, but gave me kind of a wink and nod when he did it.

I am more than happy to do the work myself, especially since I can format the drive and ghost the software and OS from my own machine.  Plus theres a huge capacity and memory boost.

Those benefits have swayed me from wanting to buy a bulldozer specifically to take out their foyer, but I’m still left with a sour taste in my mouth.  That some fucking douche decided to make my mom a target…well, I’m glad he wasn’t the one who was at the counter.  I may have beat him about the head with the tower, and strangled him to death with a piece of CAT5.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Red Shouldered Hawk, originally uploaded by crzyrider250.

After breakfast yesterday, we were just getting ready to head out for some afternoon Mother’s Day shenanigans when we spotted this guy hanging out in the front yard.

This is great news, since we have recently had a gopher immigrate into the front yard.

What?

I’m fascinated by birds of prey. They’re nature’s own smart-bombs, and they’re absolutely amazing to watch in action.

One of these days I hope they’ll make a kill while I have the camera in my hands. It’s not exactly one of those things you see often, and it’s not something that takes enough time to go and grab a camera once it starts.

Been a bullshit day, and when I went to lunch, I scoured IMDB for a good quote and deployed it as the screensaver for an entire computer lab.

“And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you’ve known for years. Someone very, very close to you.”

Still love that movie after all these years, and I notice all the screens are blanked…

I’m trying to convince my mom that she needs to upgrade her computer.

It’s not going well.

Part of the problem is that she thinks she already did.  Not being exactly tech savvy, and not wanting to “burden” her son (thanks for the guilt trip, mom) she had taken it to a national retail outlet to have the work done that I could have done for free.

Now, she want’s to add some functionality.

“Why can’t I install this program?”

Because you have a 2.2GB HDD, and you need a bigger one to install…anything.

“How much do those cost?”

$50 will get you 40GB, or $100 for 500GB

“OK, 40 gigs, then.  What about memory?  Can we make it faster?”

Sure.  You have…*clickity*…256MB of RAM.  You could probably stand another…gig, in two sticks.  Or more. That’s weird, theres only one stick in here when there should be two…

“How much is that?”

Wait - mom, who put this computer together?  Why is there Windows 98 on a system you bought in ‘05?

“JohnnyXYZ, over at BigBoxStore.  Why?”

JohnnyXYZ took my mom literally when she said she wanted the data from her old computer on her new one.  Instead of burning a DVD, he took the old 2.2G hard disk out of the old-old computer, and removed the 80G disk from the new-old computer, and installed the 2.2 in it’s place.  What happened to the 80G, which is listed on the purchase order but not in the case, I don’t know.

What I do know is that now I have to convice mom not to burn BigBoxStore to the ground.  Or she has to convince me.  I don’t remember which.

And I have to put in an order to Newegg, get some images and software and shit in order and spend some quality time with her not-that-old 3.0Ghz P4, which has apparently had the chop-shop equivalent of being put up on blocks.

What precipitated the discovery, you may ask?

I wanted to check to see if her vid-card supported DVI, so I could get her a nice, big, bright LCD for mothers day.  I guess that’ll teach me to try and do something nice…

or The Continued War on Some Drug (dealers)

I’m sure that most of you have seen this, as it’s been National news for the past 24 hours…

SDSU Drug Sting

96 individuals, including 75 students, we arrested on drug related charges after a year-long undercover investigation, sparked by the overdose death of a “customer” a year ago.

The thing that kills me, the thing that I hate about this situation, is that it is ultimately going to solve nothing.

Think about this for a minute.  Police seized “4 pounds of cocaine, 50 pounds of marijuana, $60,000 in cash, three handguns and other drugs and paraphernalia.”

That isn’t a “wholesale” distribution network.  That’s strictly retail.  These kids had suppliers, who now have ample warning that their network is compromised, and aren’t likely to be found, or if found, they aren’t likeyl to be convicted.

And rather than run down and arrest the drug cartel mules and coyotes who ferry the illicit materials up from Mexico and points beyond, they chose to bust a bunch of students at a State university.

The whole thing reeks of publicity stunt more than anything else.  If the authorities in this case had gone after some of the people who regularly machine-gun police in Tijuana (when they can’t simply be bribed) or assassinate their business rivals, they may have made a difference.

If they had gone after the gangs that traffick in drugs every day of every week, on street corners and back alleys, they may have made a difference.

It certainly raises some interesting points.  A thought exercise, if you will.

As much as it pains me to do so…

Next week I’m starting a class, title mentioned above, that I’m hoping to get something out of.  The problem, of course, is that I learned photography at a young age.  I still remember when “ASA” was in the lexicon.  I know what it was to use a non-autofocus lens set.  Hell, I didn’t have a camera that had an automatic light meter in it until I has in high school and got an old Canon AE-1 for Christmas.  I carried a large “book” of filters, for when I wanted to do artistic things with my B&W film.

My first camera was a hand-me-down Canon FTb that was my mom’s, purchased new in the early 70’s.

I learned how to develop my own film, something that few people will likely be exposed to again.  I learned to do neat tricks in the developing process, and tricks in the shooting process, too.  Double exposures - none of that “File > Photo Merge” and “Opacity = 50%” BS.  In my day…

That’s funny, coming from a 24 year old.

Anyhow, I’m taking this class.  And I hope I get something out of it.  Something besides “Leave it on AUTO mode,” or “Always shoot in RAW+JPEG” or “Get a good flash” or “Well, I can sell you one of these…”

Hopefully, a new camera and learning to use it plus hundreds of dollars worth of Adobe’s fine products will mean that a) I have some cool pictures to show around, or b) I have less money than I did a month ago.

I vote “a”.  We’ll see.

Would it be too much to ask of the vending machine world to make just this one little dream come true?

Just one…little…dream.

All I want, and really, it’s do-able, is to be able to walk up to a vending machine, skip all the Coke’s and Starbuck’s and Red Bull’s and punch in the code and have the machine dispense a nice, cold, can of

Guinness.

Or something else.  Maybe a Rolling Rock would go down smooth right now, or I could get a Rogue Dead Guy, or a Young’s Double Chocolate Stout.  I don’t care if all it can dispense is Coors Light, Bud Light, Natural Ice and PBR - it would still make me feel better to have it there, just in case.

But I want a damn beer dispensing machine, I want it outside my office, and I want it there yesterday.

In other news…

The children are our future.

If that is truly the case, and the robots don’t take over soon, then we are well and truly fucked.  I caught this frosh kid picking his nose this morning.  It was just like in Caddyshack, first he picked, then he ate.  And this wasn’t in an environment that was secluded or dimly lit, with a reasonable expectation of privacy - this was in the waiting area of the Counseling office, in the midst of a couple dozen other students.  A real Epsilon Minus Minus.  I figure he’ll get socially promoted and become a Senator some day.

That was when I started day dreaming about beer machines.  Hmmmmm…beer…

83 years ago, on this day:

John Scopes, a high school teacher, was charged on May 5, 1925 with teaching evolution from a chapter in a textbook which showed ideas developed from those set out in Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species. The trial pitted two of the preeminent legal minds of the time against one another. Three time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan headed up the prosecution, while prominent trial attorney Clarence Darrow spoke for the defense.

And that’s why everyone drinks Corona and eats tacos on May 5th.

Wait…

What?

This raptor that I saw yesterday has been tentatively identified.

Thanks to GeorgeH for actually setting me on the right path.  It’s not a falcon at all, but a diminutive relative of the Goshawk and Cooper’s Hawk, known as the Sharp-shinned hawk.

It stands to reason, too.  One of the habits of this particular bird is to hunt in back yards where there are bird feeders, as there obviously are in mine.  Another is to pluck the feathers from its prey, which would account for the huge pile of feathers near where the remains of what was once a large pigeon were found.

The markings, the eye color, the beak and head shape all add up, and the bird is resident to this area.  I’m hoping that it will breed, though all the maps I’ve seen have their breeding grounds either North or South of us.

The proliferation of birds of prey in the neighborhood is heartening.  I know for a fact that I’ve seen a Peregrine falcon, and there are now three kinds of hawks that we’ve seen.  The neighbors had a Golden Eagle roosting in their garage last summer.  The only birds that we don’t seem to have much of are owls, for some reason, but I do hope that eventually I will get some.  We feed the smaller birds and tree squirrels and ground squirrels, and they in turn draw in and feed the big, majestic hunters.

When I draw in something big enough to carry away a golden retriever, I may have to start thinking about shotgunning the bastard, but until then it’s fun to watch natures smart-bombs in action.  If only I could catch, tame and train one to hunt off my fist…