I would say its time to update links/blogrolls.

This site will stay here for the time being, until I change all the ref links on the other side.

In the mean time, new content is over there.

Ballistic De-Animation

http://ballistic-deanimation.com/blog/

Seems to just be getting its feet under it, but it looks like it might be pretty good in the near future…

Ballistic Deanimation

Which is odd, because that was what I wanted to rename my Walking Dead series…

Hmm.

Well, I would strongly advise readers here to check it out.

A young woman by the name Blake
Fights forces of evil for all our sake.
Vampires tried to eat her,
But none of them beat her,
So she finished them off with a stake.

Apparently, being sick gives you enough time to both read 5 (and counting) books, and dabble around on LimerickDB.

Thankfully, I’m feeling better.  A combination of prescription strength anti-histamines and a sinus enema will do that.  I don’t think enema is the right word.  There were snot rockets.  Enough said.  Thanks Jason.

I’ve been sick as a dog the past couple of days.  When I can breathe, I’m trying to work on some posts and projects that I’ve back-burnered.

Most of the time though, I can’t breathe.

Congestion sucks.

OTC meds don’t seem to be able to touch this thing.  Unfortunately, the only medication that seems to work is a stiff shot of Bushmills.  I say unfortunately because it clears the sinuses for only a short while, and I can’t dose myself at work or before I choose to drive.

Fuck.

Perhaps monday will bring some comfort.

Perhaps.

Oddly, the title of an old PA comic.

I’ve just started the Anita Blake series.

I’m still waiting for the lycanthrope sex.

It’s odd that I usually shunned the sci-fi/fantasy genre as a lad and well into college.  It was only when I discovered graphic novels that I thought “Ok, this may be alright…downright awesome, even.”  And I was right.  Had it not been for my newfound love of the archetype, I never would have thought to write my own, never would have ordered Correia’s book, never would have found the real The Walking Dead, or World War Z, or any of the multitude of other great books that have sprund up to fill the ravenous, never-satisfied void that is a reader’s brain.

With the Anita Blake series of books, I feel like I’m getting the perspective of one of the newer Monster Hunters but with some of the same romanticized concepts of vampires and werecreatures that I may disagree with, but find fascinating.  Stake, then chop.  Shoot the fuckers in the head.  It’s simple.  Not seduce, befriend, stake and chop.  I maybe don’t get it.

But I was promised lycanthrope sex.

So far, I’ve read only one of the books but I’m starting another one today.  I started the first one yesterday.  That’s right - just like when I received MHI, I just read.  Nothing else.  Sure, there were a few more distractions allowed than if it was written specifically for guys, by a guy, who is a shooter, and has a compelling protagonist.  Anita Blake is a badass in her own right.  I’m not detracting anything from the series at all, mind you, but I’m not exactly one of their target demographic.

And I was promised lycanthrope sex.

So, I will continue reading and keep you posted.  Especially if any werewolves start boning.

Heh.  I said “boning.”

Who wouldn’t love a song about cryptography?

Lyrics after the jump.

My friends told me I was making a mistake when I switched to you from ATT back in ‘07.  I told them they were crazy.  What cool phone did ATT have, I asked?  Certainly not one as cool as the Helio I was getting.  What about an unlimited data/txt/talk plan?  Oh, burn! I told them.  But I should have listened.

Helio, you have a problem.  The problem is not with the phones, which are never updated or refreshed.  It’s not with the service, since it’s Sprint’s backbone.  It’s not the features - there are plenty of them.  It’s the attitude.

Yeah, I get it, you were founded to try and be the hip, young alternative.  You failed.  At peak, you only had a couple hundred thousand subscribers, and those have been jumping ship as fast as they can.  Then, you got bought up by Virgin, your friendly Scientologist CSR’s were shipped off and outsourced to fuckin’ Jamaica or someplace, and you’re an asshole.

Thats correct, Helio - You.  Are.  An.  Asshole.

Your CSR’s are rude, demeaning and speak to customers in a degrading manner.  Your rate plan “pro-rating” is the opposite of what it should be - you don’t charge TWICE for the same month if I have the nerve to switch my minutes, moron.  And the billing.  Let me start with the billing.

Helio, I just got off the phone with you, and I want to punch you in the neck.  Starting yesterday, 20 January 2009, I’ve received three phone calls from (888) 435-4693.  The first was at 9:34am yesterday.  Then again at 9:34am this morning.  Then again at 10:35am this morning.  Since I generally have meetings in the mornings, I was not able to answer the first two, and no messages were left so I had no idea what this was about.  I answered the third.

Helio, why must you be so curt with me?  Upon answering my phone, I found myself talking to a rude woman with a Carribean accent.  Yes, I am Josh.  Yes, this is my phone.  What?  You’re calling about a Past-Due balance?  Of how much?  Do I want to make a payment?  What?  Fuck you!  When was it due?  1/19?  And it’s 1/21?  And maybe you haven’t received the auto-pay because it was a bank weekend?  Oh, you’ll ‘make a note’ huh?  I’m making a note, too.

Fuck you, Helio.  I used to like you.  I used to think we had a lot in common and that we got along fine.  But now…Where’s the trust?  Have I ever missed a payment?  Have I ever even been late?  Have I?  NO?  Then what the fuck?

Companies like you can’t afford to alienate your remaining clients because, let’s face it, you’re expendable.  If you vanished tomorrow, I would actually be happier to get out of the contract without the ETF than if you just shaped up.

This is it.  I’m putting you on notice.  Come the expiration of my two year committment, I’m gone.  No more chances.  I won’t be treated like some goddamn delinquent because you can’t pay your light bills and need the check on a holiday weekend.  Oh, I just checked my bank account - the payment came out this morning.  You fuckers.

Your Dissatisfied Customer,

Josh

Ballistic application for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Whoa.

Now, what are the chances I get my hands on a new iPod before Boomershoot?  I’d say…low.  -Ish.  I’ll most likely use my laptop to come up with rough ballistic calculations the day of the shoot, taking temp, elevation, etc into account.

But this?

DO WANT.

Who wants to donate an iPod Touch?

I am, as the title indicates, apparently made of fail.

On an otherwise beautiful, sunny SoCal weekend when I was enjoying temps in the 80’s and virtually living outdoors, I proved my fail to myself.

First, I apparently forgot how to shoot.  How my groups went from sub-MOA a few short months ago to 2-3 MOA this weekend, I’ll never know, except to say that I need more practice and/or a whole-body transplant into a vessel that can simultaneously control trigger squeeze, breathing, sight picture and flinching without fail.

Then, I suddenly and inexplicably forgot how to hike and climb rocks.  WTF?  Is this not man’s base instinct?  I wasn’t doing anything too technical, just bouldering, when I tripped and fell and triggered a failolanche of epic proportions.

After that, I seemingly forgot how to play disc golf, having my scores explode from my regular one or two over par to a gigantic ten over par.  Oddly, I was still in it until the back half, and whilst attempting a 12 foot putt to win a hole, I threw the disc three feet in a completely different direction.  On a day I should have dominated, I proved that I loved viewing the world thru fail-colored glasses.

Fast forward to a football game on Sunday, and I fail again.  Not in sports betting, but in playing.  I haven’t played on turf in years and I don’t have the right spikes for it, but my ankles and arches shouldn’t hurt as much as they do.  Then, to make matters worse, I was forced to play corner back for half of the day.  I’m a big fucking guy to play corner.  I make my bones on the pass-rush, not the zone coverage.  Luckily, my opposite was gassed, so I got to run some zone blitzes and got a couple deflections and a sack.  Also, I scored a TD playing from the TE slot on offense.  But I should have had another touchdown and a handful more tackles in the game were it not for failing so hard.

I very nearly failed at offroading.  That would have been really, really bad.

I did fail at bowling.  81?  Eighty-fucking-one?

And now, as I write this, I fail at failing.  I just wanted to point out that we had weather in the 80’s on this three-day weekend, when much of the rest of the country is dealing with teens and negative degrees F.  I figured it might get lost in some self-deprecating humor, so I hid it.  I did all those things this weekend, and really did fail at football, but the rest are examples of exaggeration.  Exaggeration in summer-like weather!  Oh!  Burn!

I gave in to TV marketing and tried the new “spicy” offering from Burger King on my lunch today.  I don’t generally eat fast food, but it was supposed to be hot, according to TeeVee.

Can we just stop this charade?  Again, I am insulted by a foodstuff that is tailored to the lowest common denominator of taste.  Could this burger be considered “angry”?  Uhm, maybe.  It may be angry that it is being marketed as something that it is not.  It may be angry that patrons will look at its weak attempt at “hot” with disdain.  Maybe it should be the “Embarassed Whopper” or the “Conflicted Self-Image Whopper.”

Spicy foods are enjoyed by a large segment of the population.  Let’s not attempt to make something that is supposed to be spicy pallatable by a larger portion of your fast-fooding public by removing the only thing that it has going for it.

Or better yet, make it like Thai food.  Every time I walk into a Thai place and place an order, I am asked “how hot?” and told to use a 1 to 10 scale to gauge my answer.  My answer is generally 10.  Walking into a sportsbar and ordering hot wings is the same - how hot?  How hot can you make them?

Let’s put in a scale.  Or give me the option of more peppers or hot sauce.  Something.  Anything.  Anybody?

Hot food should singe the nostrils.

Hot food should loosen the sinuses.

Hot food should make you sweat.

Hot food should make your tongue burn.

There should be a little tickle in the back of your throat.

Your nose should run.

You should immediately think of the esophogeal pain and bowel instability that will follow.

You should not be scoffing at your meal, asking “Is that all you got?”

Otherwise, it’s not “hot” nor is it “spicy.”  Don’t come up with a euphemism like “Angry” and then put out a product that is “Meek.”

Do you hear me, marketers?

CAN YOU HEAR ME?

You pantywaisted little fucks better give me something that will make my eyes bleed and my brain swell.  I want something where the taste is measured in Scoville heat units.  I want a Brimstone Burger.  Sulfur Salad.  Give me a raw ground-beef patty, cooked in the juices of lemons and pure habanero drippings.

I guess it was my fault, for succumbing to TV advertisements.  But still…I expected better.

DO WANT!

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to give you a more accurate list this year, but I was a tad busy.  Anyway, I wanted to thank you for all the awesome stuff, but also to try and convince you that you should bring me this now, and not wait until next December.

In exchange, I’ve worked out a barter system that I think you will find equitable and fair.

For bringing me the guncon, I will shovel out your driveway and/or runway at the North Pole for three months, beginning on June 1st 2009 and culminating August 31.

For bringing me the guncon with updated firmware that supports Left 4 Dead, I will make sure that you’re reindeer are groomed and fed for the rest of the year.

I’ll be good, I promise!

Actually, I lied.  I have Mrs. Clause and four of your elves.  GET ME THIS NOW, or you won’t see them in one piece again.  Seriously, don’t fucking push me, fat man.  This controller, down my chimney, now, or the elves start losing digits.

You want to push me?  OK, fucker, that’s it.  How about some poision kibble for your asshole deer?  Yeah, those bastards fucked up my roofing tile, and I never said anything about it til now, but give me that controller and they live.

Srsly.

Norly.

You have one week.

-Josh

PS - The workshop gets firebombed if you try anything stupid.

Windows 7 Beta is available for download today, to the first 2.5 million people who can click ‘download.’

I can’t remember anything like this happening with a proprietary operating system in the past.  Sure, you can get yourself whatever flavor of Linux you want, you can pirate OSX all day long, and you can find an old Win95 box at the dump with a license key on it and just apply updates until you’re on XP.  There have been ways around the OS rights management for sometime.  Maybe MS realized this.  Because they’re just handing out copies of a new OS…for free.

I screwed around with earlier pre-beta builds a little bit, just because I could.  I like the OS.  It’s light.  It’s fast.  For a pre-beta, it was surprisingly stable.  More stable than launch-day Vista was.  So, obviously, I got in on the Beta this morning and installed it to a new partition on my primary RAID.

It boots fast.  Really fast.  Granted, this is a new install with no programs or background processes to eat memory on a high spec’d (Q9400, 8GB 1066 RAM) box, but I was at a usuable desktop from the boot loader in 20 seconds.  Vista x64 SP1 takes about 30.  Ubuntu 8.10 takes about 25.  I just have to gunk up the startup  enough to see how it really handles it.  I’m also going to put it on an old

My first impression a couple of months ago was that it was a pretty cool OS.  Not as cool as a Linux that boots in 5 seconds.  Or an OS that operates in the “cloud.”  It’s Windows.

The new Beta release has all the things that I had to “unlock” in the pre-beta.  The Aero Peek and Shake features.  I really like the improved taskbar, but would also like to see it come with a standard option for displaying virtual desktops, much the way the Ubuntu/KDE desktop works.  But that’s just preference.

Be aware though that the Beta expires in August, which is right around the target release date for retail copies of Win7.  Which means you aren’t going to be using this as a replacement for your current OS.  Partition, use a virtual machine, use a separate hard drive and make sure you do a data backup of your primary…just in case.

In any case , if you’re so inclined, participate in the Beta trial and send the feedback to Microsoft.  You can prevent another disaster like the Vista roll-out.  Well, that and the OEM’s branding everything as “Vista Ready,” but thats beside the point…

Update:  Aaaaand…it’s down.  Server Too Busy.

They’re not just people who are good at invading other groups anymore!

alternate link title:

God perfects gyroball; signs deal with Red Sox for humanities souls; World Ends April 6

Having one of those rogue stars saunter into the solar system would seriously fuck up my millenium.  It’s bad enough we have all these things that can kill us on Earth, like zombies and transfat and Chinese toys, but adding to the universe’s arsenal of ways to kill us all is A Bad Thing.

I’ve only once seen something similar to these photographs.

A handful of years ago, my brother and dad and I went out on a family friends boat, heading toward Ensenada for a weekend fishing cruise.  We decided to do a little night trolling for shark at the end of the first day.  All the blood and guts from the days catch were tossed overboard, the heavy rods were broken out and fitted with big marlin jigs with chunks of skipjack.

When the jigs went into the water and the boat picked up a little speed, millions of tiny phosporescent phytoplankton were being disturbed and creating crescent shaped wakes of green in the otherwise pitch black water, kinda like this.  Coupled with the darkness associated with being at sea miles from any other light sources and only having the dim glow of the cockpit and running lights  reflecting off the water, that scene imitates the Hubble pictures pretty well.

Only problem that night was that something was higher on the food chain than us and decided to take the bait and most of the line off the reel.  The deeper, muted flash of green when a powerful tail disturbed the plankton (shark? whale? whaleshark? monster?) was eerie and mildly disconcerting to say the least.  I sincerely hope a stellar joyride doesn’t come this way and create that same awesome sight coupled with the feeling of dread that accompanies it.

To sum it up, “Respect the home underdog.”

This affirms that sports “analysts” know exactly jack and shit.  They were almost all to busy sucking up to Peyton to notice that the Colts just don’t match up with the Chargers.  A one point (1!) favorite,

I just got home from Qualcomm stadium after witnessing, live, one of the burliest NFL games in recent memory.  Nevermind the fact that the score should have been 31-10 barring three plays, that was an intense, frustrating, gut wrenching, nail biter of a game.  And my Bolts emerged victorious.

I won money on the Cardinals game.  I won on the Chargers.  Now, I just need the Vikings and Ravens to pull it out and it’ll be a clean sweep.  And only one analyst picked the Vikes.  I’m picking the Ravens simply because, should they win this week, and both the Chargers and Ravens win next week, then I’ll get the chance to watch the AFC Championship live and in person in Mission Valley.

John Ross wrote in Unintended Consequences an exchange between characters Henry Bowman and Tom Fleming:

“A few gun guys drink, but I don’t know a single one that goes to football games or even watches
sports on television. Do you, Henry?”

“Nobody I know.”

This gunnie spent all day drinking, swearing and watching sports instead of going to the range.  And you know what?  I’d fucking do it again.  We’re not all the same.  We’re from different walks of life.  We have other interests.  It’s the single unifying interest that is important, not making sure everyone is a homogeneous, symmetrical, identical muted gray colored puzzle piece.  How boring would that be?

I think I need sleep.  And water.  In no particular order.