Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Just so the point is clear

Ok, just so the point is clear, I am against any law discrimates between citizens, regardless of how those laws are worded. Keep marriage straight, No on 8.


Keep Marriage Straight, No on Eight!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Mark Walberg Talks to Animals

This is one of the best SNL skits in a long time (not counting the Palin thing, which landed in their laps): Mark Walberg Talks to Animals. This is so dead on!

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Vroom vroom Ren Ren

So, I dragged poor Allie to the Renaissance Faire at Casa de Fruita. This is the first time she's been to one. She was a good sport about the whole thing, and I'm sure found it to be a bit over the top. Though she didn't get into it, she was taking in all the sights.

In the past, the quality of the headliner events at the Ren Faire have degraded. There was a time when they had actual knight melees held by the local reenactment groups and actual jousting. Then, main event become a show where the players would pretend to joust and battle. It turned out to be a silly WWE style show. I wanted to go this year to see if they got be on track. Though they didn't have the melee's of olde, they did have full on jousting again! It was more fun to watch than the fake show in years before.

The show that Allie liked best was a juggling show with a guy and his kid brother. The kid knew how to sell it. They put on a good show.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Car hunting

Allie and I have been car hunting for a long time. We’ve test driven a multitude of vehicles. We’ve given a second look at a myriad more. The reason for all this is the fact that I currently have a rather nice car, with a rather nasty habit. My Acura TL-Type S 2003 is a great car except that it needs a new transmission every 11,000 miles or so. Not good for the long run once the warranty is up. At this point, I don’t mind the nickel and dime costs associated with the average car once off warranty. I just don’t want to get hit with a $4000 repair bill and a week long car rental every 10 months or so. So, we need to trade in my TL for something else.
While car hunting, I’ve discovered features that used to be special only to the higher end cars are now included in the average cars. Of particular note, the high trim of 2009 Chevrolet Malibu has more features than my old TL, all for 10K less than what I paid for my car 6 years ago, and for nearly 15K less than the current price for a new TL. The level of quality across the mainstay brands keeps going up. Reliability is something that fluctuates, so it’s a good idea to always keep an eye on Consumer Reports and other sources. Right now, it appears some GM brands are doing well, while others haven’t quite got things figured out yet.
Given what I’ve been looking for, GM cars have been attracting my attention more than others. This surprizes me. Then again, I pretty much hate all the car brands for one reason or another. In general, I tend to gravitate towards American and Japanese, and show less interest in Korean and European cars. OMG, have you see the Smart Car? How dumb is that? Anyways, we think we know what we will end up with soon.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Weeks are flyin by

As October approaches, it really seems the weeks and months of 2008 are flying by. It dawned me recently while I was reading something terribly unimportant that I was literally wasting my time. I could be reading something more important, or doing something to improve my self, skills and what nots. I'm not wasting all of my time. I'm glad to spend time with my family.

This week, my cuzin is in the hospital awaiting labor. I visited her and her new husand in their room. It's funny I call him that. Her sister, myself and her all got married within the past year or so. Funny how that works. We were all in long term relationships and it just all kinda turned out that way.

On my way to a business type meeting thing, I visited my aunt and her husand yesterday. He was also in the hospital a recently for a serious matter. He was released quickly, so I didn't get a chance to visit him at the hospital, so I stopped by yesterday to see how he was going.

Man, why the heck did my parents move to some place that is literally more remove that the infamous Bumfuk, Idaho. I haven't seen then in aeons now.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

What? Someone is VP pick for McCain?

Let’s patronize women in the 21st Century because it worked so well in the 20th Century. McCain’s pick for his running mate is one of those things that says, “See, I listen to you women. I know what you want because I’m smart like that.” It is an idiotic move that may have already backfired. For all the phony praise Palin got for her convention speech, in reality, she came off as seeming like she doesn’t really belong there. Her energy was strained and her message was without substance. I noticed very few people talking about the message itself. Most of the praise was about her poise. Joy. It weakens the McCain bid for the presidency.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Los Gatos Fiesta de Artes

Allie and I ended up having an enjoyable weekend. On Saturday, we got out into the fresh air and did a little cycling. I've been threatening to do it for a long time. The goal was to go down the path I would take if I rode my bike to work. I thought I could use my street bicycle because one leg of the trail is paved. Unfortunately, I discovered that a significant portion of the path is very gravelly, covered with rocks that are far too big to be safe for my street bicycle. So, in order to ride to work, I'm going to have to brave some rather dangerous city streets, or change the tires on my bike to handle rough terrain. I guess I can borrow Allie's bike (which is a "man's" type too), though it will need some adjustments. Anyway, I'm not cycling to work any time soon.

Instead of continuing down that path, we opted to head down to the local shopping center for a relaxing after-lunch smoothie break.

On Sunday, we meet up with my mother-in-law for some Dim Sum (and 'den some) at her favorite rest'rant. I can never comfortably eat Dim Sum on an empty stomach, so I ate some cereal before going. I don't know how good of an idea that was since I ended up eating too much Dim Sum.

Allie and I planned to head over to the Los Gatos Fiesta de Artes. We invited my mother-in-law to join us. A co-worker's son was at one of the booths that I was interested in (WinePod), so we planned to at least meet up there with them.

The day was warm and sunny. Maybe a little too warm. After going around the faire twice, I finally found the booth. My co-worker had just arrived as well. My wife used to work with us, so there was some catching up him and his wife.

Afterwards, Allie and I took her mother to a rest'rant that we hadn't tried yet, called Steamers Grillhouse. We had a rather expensive, yet tasty lunch. Of course, at this point, I had not yet fully processed the Dim Sum earlier in the day, so I ended up getting somewhat uncomfortably stuffed.

After we headed out and dropped my mother-in-law off, we went home to watch a rental, There Will Be Blood. In case you haven't seen the movie yet, here's a spoiler: Someone bleeds at the end. The rest of the 2.5 hours of the movie don't really lead up to that moment very well. It was about as organized in thought as my blog taken on the whole. The movie needed some serious editing.

Sometime around when we started watching the movie, Allie asked if I wanted dinner. My emphatic "No!" surprized her a little bit. The moment pasted quickly. In fact, I still feel kinda stuffed just thinking about how stuffed I was Sunday evening.

She didn't really watch most of the movie because a friend of hers called up to do some catching up. She talked to her about an hour or so. When she came back, she asked what happened. I was like, "It's too much to go into, and yet, it doesn't seem like anything at all." I didn't feel like going into detail since it didn't really interest me all that much. She asked again, and I relented, telling her about some of the uninteresting events that lead to nowhere. It almost didn't matter since there was such a big jump in time during the last scenes, it was like watching a whole other film; perhaps an independent short film that itself wasn't edited enough. Did I mention that There Will Be Blood of boring?

Well, I'm glad the bulk of my weekend was enjoyable, regardless the movie.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

I'm am a Search Assist search item

It appears that I am now a Search Assist item on Yahoo! I was a little surprized at this discovery. The search item is "fcsuper rebel". This is completely unexpected. I wonder how often a term has to be searched before it is added as a search item. More amazing is that "fcsuper rebel" is a Search Assist item, yet "fcsuper" is not. It might seem more likely that just "fcsuper" is searched more often rather than "fcsuper rebel". Weird.

The term still gets a "do you mean" statement at the top of the page with a suggestion for "fc super". I still own the top spot of that search too. It's a little lonely at the top, as the gaming product "FC Super" now dominates the search of that item. I have to wonder if someone at that company named it after me. :) What are the chances of something as unique as FC Super showing up twice in the our world in my lifetime? I got a feeling that I should be glad to get the website http://www.fcsuper.com when I did. At least I own my name sake's web address.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Mastication

Last night was a night of serious discussions about the importance of mastication. It all started with four of us in a SUV on the way to a sex toy shop, after dinner. Miriam was offering gum for the purpose of mastication. She's all, "Ya'no, that [masticate] is latin for `to chew'". Secretly, I knew it is actually English based on the latin word and I now know that it was derived from Greek, but I digress.

At that point, it was the word of the evening. Almost every other sentence made reference to mastication. We discussed the woes of over-mastication, including the threat of blindness. Also, the dangers of deprivation from under-mastication were brought up. Someone mentioned that mastication should be done in private, while another extolled the virtues of doing it openly in public.

Later in the evening, we relaxed at this other restaurant at an outdoors table. I'm masticating my second piece of gum for the night. I ordered Coke, and immediately realized I needed to demasticate it. The napkins where the fancy reusable ones, so I couldn't expel my gum there. Cor suggested that I demasticate it under the table, then he preceded to look under to see if others had already thought of this (and they had...yuk). In the end, the waiter brought out some restroom paper towels. I demasticated rapidly, to the amusement of both Cor and Miriam.

I can say that it was an evening filled with a healthy and open discussion regarding mastication. Someone should did a public service announcement on TV about masticating. Oh wait, they have!

Monday, July 07, 2008

Testing the Publishing Waters

Here's my start at writing and publishing on Amazon for the Kindle and Mobipocket for Palms and such:

Amazon: My Start as a publisher

Mobipocket: My books so far for Palm

Written times

Writing isn't coming easy to me right now. It's not for any particular reason, just that I've been doing a lot of it. Not on this blog obviously, but in other venues. So, even now there's nothing really on my mind. I mean, I had another pretty good weekend and all, but reading though my past entries, I find that I talk a lot about weekends. I don't think I will stop. Just not in the mode today for that. Other topics that interest me are being covered in other areas, such as my SolidWorks Legion website. It's been taking of much of my writing energy. Even now, I'm have a couple of article projects that are waiting to be penned on that site.

At this point, I'm mostly rambling, but then again, that's what a journal is for sometimes. As I write in this blog over time, I've discovered things about myself, and my writing style. I talk about myself a lot, but that's a given since this is about me. Also, I tend to write in contrasts. I'll make a statement, then mitigate or offset it with a "but". I wonder how many "buts" I've writing, not just on this blog, but in all my works, and even in my daily speech. As someone famous once said, "But, there be no buts." Not true here.

That's really all the thoughts I have today, other than to say this is likely one of the few truly personal thoughts diary-like posting I've ever made on this blog. Well the inner thoughts be surfacing here? Hmm...

Saturday, June 28, 2008

My Wife is a funny one

So, Allie gets a week paid vacation for the whole week of the 4th of July. I've had this in mind for quite some time. Few months ago, I asked her, "Do you want to get away or do anything the week you have off in summer?" Her response was, "I don't know." A couple of months ago, I ask "What would you like to do during your time off this summer? I can take the week off with you." Her response was, "I don't know." A couple of weeks ago, I inquire yet again, and yet again, "I don't know."

I wake up this morning and snuggle a little bit with Allie. She turns to me an asks, "Do you want to take some time off next week to spend together?" Arg!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Miriam's BD and such

Welp, there was some fun last week. Allie and I met up with Miriam and some of her girlfriends at PF Changs for a diner for her BD. Save for her older neighbor that joined us with this wife, I was the only guy...something that Allie made sure to point out.

Afterwards, we all headed up to SF to a club to meet up with some more people of various varieties that one might expect to meet in SF. Thangs where fun. We were at this one roof top club with a fairly ok view of the city and a large number of drunk people, and some not so drunk people too.

Allie and I headed out home around Midnight, as did several others. Miriam and several of her girls partied on and didn't get home til about 6am.

On the recent movie front, Allie and I have seen The Happening. Funny how nothing happens in a movie with that title. It was OK. Save for rental.