Channel Zero

Posted By Zero on August 27, 2010

Yup, next week at this time Dragoncon will be in full swing.   Nikki and I are the only ones going in among our greinds from  Dallas this year. Everyone else is broke or just lame, I blame the economy.   Nikki and I have only missed one year (2007) since we started going in 2005.   We really regretted not going  so we make plans early  to go every year.   I made our hotel reservations a year in advance and we bought our plane tickets months ago. There are a ton of people I want to see this year, and we’ve already over-booked ourselves on evening festivities so I’m sure it will be a blast.  I’m especially looking forward to seeing Jim Butcher, Brent Spiner, and Johnathon Frakes. They haven’t released a schedule yet which everyone is waiting on.  Usually it’s out by now so I’m not sure what’s holding it up.  My guess is Trektrack.

The con just keeps expanding,  it started out in 2 hotels when I first went way back in 2001 and now it’s expanded to five!  The day we get there gets rolling back as well.  The con used to start on Friday evening so we’d plan to get there on Friday afternoon.  Now the con gets rolling on Thursday afternoon/evening and we get in on Wednesday evening.  It is nice to have at least some time to see friends before trying to rush around and see all the cool stuff at the con.

For some reason, every year right around this time, I get slammed at work.   I think the last 4 years I’ve had to travel the week before or the week of Dragoncon.   I haven’t had to travel for work in months and now last week I was in Chicago and next week I’ll be in Washington, DC.  In fact, I’ll be on a plane Monday, Tuesday and Wenesday next week. I also have a meeting I have to go to Wenesday morning even-though I’m supposed to be off that day.  Ah well, it pays the bills right?

We haven’t done too much since we got back from our cruise.   We did squeeze in a trip home to Tulsa last weekend to see the family.  We hadn’t been home since April so we were due a trip home.  We already have something going on every weekend in October and almost every weekend in September, so once again they year is about over.

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Posted By Zero on August 10, 2010

We’re back from vacation now.  We had a great time on the cruise.  We had almost 3 days on the ship before we got to our first port.  I was pretty much tired of the ship by the time we got to our first stop.  There’s only so much drinking and hanging out by the pool that you can do.

Jamaica wasn’t all that nice but we spent the day at the Sandals resort which was fun. We tried out a Sea-kayak while we were there and I think we may be getting one.  We live right near a lake and I don’t think we would use a full size boat all that much, taking a Kayak out sometimes sounds like fun.

In Grand Cayman we went out on a catamaran to Stingray city, a sandbar where you can interact directly with the Stingrays.   Nikki was a little freaked out at first by the stingrays swimming around but she came around an eventually petted a few.  Cayman islands are much nicer than Jamaica, we might even go back there for a whole vacation.

Our third stop was Cozumel in Mexico.  We spent most of the day at the Dolphinarium. We got to swim with the dolphins, pet them and even ride one.   One of the Dolphins that we got to interact with was the mate or father of all the other dolphins, a large 25 year old male.    Nikki was much happier with the Dolphins than the Stingrays.

Nikki has pictures up on facebook, I’ll see if I can wrangle a public link to them.

In other news, it is just way way too hot here.  It will be over 100 again today and my car thermostat recorded the temperature at 115 one day last week.   We’d really like to go cycling some, but right now it’s just way too hot.

Coming up this month we’ve got a trip home to Tulsa on the 20th and then off to Dragoncon on Sept 1st!

I updated the sidebars, which I hadn’t done in a while.  I’ve got way to many games to play right now.    I got a PS3 for my birthday and that just opened up a whole new set of games to play.   I have a few sitting on my shelf that I haven’t even gotten to play more than a couple of minutes.

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Posted By Zero on July 23, 2010

This past weekend, I went along on a great bachelor party trip for Dan.   I flew to Albuquerque on Thursday, then we got up and drove 8 hours to Lake Powell, UT.  We camped on Friday night and then picked up a houseboat to spend two days out on the lake.    It was a great time.  It did not change my firm belief that camping sucks, but I am willing to do it if it enables other fun things.   Here’s a list of the things I learned while on this trip:

There are only 2 kinds of signs along the mountain roads leading up to Lake Powell:

This one means “Warning Cows”

This one means “Road does crazy shit.”

If you are being pulled behind a power boat on a raft and you let go of the rope you will skip across the water approximately three times before you begin to sink.

If I sleep for only 2 hours and then swim and drink all day, when I fall asleep I will snore really loud.  Nothing will stop this snoring, including being poked by a mop.

If you have to do a physics problem to determine if its safe to jump off of a rock, it’s not.

All houseboats come with a button on the control panel that will completed disable your engine.   This button will be labeled something completely innocuous, like “trim up.”

The fridge in a houseboat is propane powered and works slightly less well than an ice chest.

If you soak the potatoes in soapy water, they will fire much further out of the cannon.

An inflatable dolphin can withstand many trips down the water slide but cannot hold up to a close range shot from a potato cannon

An inflatable sheep cannot handle even one trip down the water slide.

That’s all for a bit, Nikki and I head out for our vacation tomorrow.  We’ll be cruising to Jamaica, Cayman Islands, and Cozumel!  I’m sure I will learn a lot there too.

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Posted By Zero on July 14, 2010

Well for those of you waiting in anticipation (for uh two weeks..), we did get the A/C fixed, for the low low price of only $2400.   It’s working now, as well as the A/C ever does in the middle of summer in TX.

After my birthday Nikki and I headed out to Arkansas to see her family and celebrate the 4th.  Her Aunt and Uncle live outside of Hot Springs, far enough that you can shoot off fireworks.    We ate lots of bad food (by which I mean really really good food that was bad for us), and shoot off our share of the fireworks.

Last weekend was our one weekend “off” in July.   We spent Saturday running errands, met Marc/Shannon for dinner and spent Sunday hanging out in the pool. I also watched some of the World Cup Final, and I have to say I just don’t get it.  I know its really popular and all but dang was it boring. There was an exciting part where one of the players from the Netherlands dropped-kicked a Spanish player in the chest.  I think that’s just me though, I can’t sit and watch basketball or hockey on TV either.    I can sit and watch football no problem, and sometimes baseball but that’s about it.  I’m just not a “sports on tv” person.

This weekend starts my whirlwind of vacations.   I leave tomorrow for Albuquerque, NM to join my friend Dan and a bunch of his buddies for a weekend of Houseboating on Lake Powell, Utah.   It’s gonig to be quite the trip.  Fly to ABQ tomorrow, drive 7 hours out to Lake Powell, 2 days on the house boat, and then 7 hours back to ABQ to fly back here on Tuesday.

Then we’ve got 3 days till we leave on our cruise of Jamaica, Cayman Islands, and Cozumel.   Nikki and I sat down this morning and decided on most of our excursions.   We’re doing a Catamaran with snorkeling and stingrays in Grand Cayman and a “swim with the dolphins” in Cozumel.   We haven’t decided what we are doing in Jamaica yet. Possibly some kind of beach party or snorkeling expedition.

Whew, and that pretty much finishes out July, and then we have DragonCon and  Dan and Betinna’s wedding.

I agree with Ninsianna, I think the year is almost over.

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Posted By Zero on June 30, 2010

Well yes…I’m not quite sure why either… but here goes. June was very busy for us. Nikki’s family including her Aunt and Uncle were hardly ever see and both our niece and nephew came to visit the weekend of the 12th.  We mostly just hung out at the pool.  There were quite a few folks here so the only trip out that we made was to the Bavarian, and that required 3 separate cars.  The Bavarian was great and everyone had a good time.

The next weekend was our weekend “off” so we went out to see Cherry Crush and the Lollie- bombs perform with lots of friends in tow.   We did dinner at Urban Taco, then hung out at Trinity Hall, then the show, then back to Trinity Hall till they made us leave.   Nikki “won” the drawing.  I’m not see she really wanted to win, since she had to go up on stage but she managed.

I flew to Chicago on Monday the 21st for a training class.  I got back on Friday and lots of people had already arrived for my birthday party on the 26th.  (My birthday isn’t the 26th btw, that’s just when we had the party, my birthday is July 1st.)  This was the 6th annual cancer-free party so it was the big one and everyone had a great time.   People were still swimming in the pool long after the sun went down.

Nikki bought me an awesome PS3 for my birthday.  I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption and Valkyria Chronicles so far.  She also bought me White Knight Chronicles and Lost  Planet 2 but I haven’t even had a chance to try them out yet.  Of course, since the ps3 is also a blue ray player that means I need to update my receiver to HDMI now.   It needs to be updated anyway, the old one doesn’t have enough plug-ins for all he video game systems.

This week was less exciting so far.  Monday I determined that the downstairs A/C wasn’t working properly.  The evidence being that it wasn’t cooling the downstairs and a large block of ice had formed on the lines on the outside unit.  So far the repair hasn’t gone well. The first repair guy couldn’t fix it after replacing the freon and a capacitor and referred it to a second crew.  They were supposed to be here today but have yet to show. It’s a good thing the upstairs A/C is functional or the house would be a sweatbox.

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Posted By Zero on June 8, 2010

As you can see it did not take me a few days to get Channel Zero back up. It took maybe 2 hours, and most of that was spent fighting with Movable Type to get it to export my old blog entries. I am a total Word Press convert now. Every time I had to upgrade or install Movable Type it was a nightmare of broken templates and cryptic fixes. Wordpress was easy to install and even easier to covert my blog over from the old software. Alright so that’s enough about blog software.

I also did my second real bike ride of the season last Saturday. Nikki wasn’t feeling well enough to go, so Marc and I went and rode the 47.5 miles of the Mesquite Rodeo Ride. It was great ride but boy was it hot.

Nikki and I have been in home-improvement overdrive the past month. We have people staying with almost every weekend in June. Last weekend Grady and Crystal came down again before flying off to Playa Del Carmen and this weekend Nikki’s whole family is coming for a visit.  The last weekend of the month is my birthday party and a whole host of people are staying with us.

In preparation for the visits, I installed 2 new outdoor ceiling fans on the patio, one of which maimed me.  I had it hanging on the mount to wire it and the mounting broke. Causing the fan to gash my arm and smash itself all over the patio. I’m fine the fan was not. Lowe’s got more of my money for a third fan.  I also fixed 2 of the 4 toilets in the house. The other 2 had been repaired previously, or I probably would have to had fixed them as well.

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Posted By Zero on June 7, 2010

This is the new Channel-Zero.  The site will have a “work in progress” look to it for a few days.

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Posted By Zero on June 7, 2010

I’m converting the back end blogging engine from Movable Type to Word press today. This probably isn’t interesting at all unless you are into blogging software, movabletype has just become too cumbersome to use. The site will probably have an “in progress” look to it today as I get the new software setup. If you read the site through RSS you will need to update those links. I have the new RSS link up as soon as possible.

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Posted By Zero on June 1, 2010

The wife said “You need to blog, you haven’t written anything in a while.” Actually, I’ve written quite a bit. It’s just all been for my Serenity game.
I’ve been listening to Will Wheaton’s “Memories of Futurecast” podcast while cycling latley. It’s pretty funny especially if you are a Star Trek fan. The last episode was his recap of “The Long Goodbye.” You know the one where Picard dresses up as private eye Dixon Hill and plays an interactive murder mystery on the holodeck. As I was listening it struck me that, according to Star Trek at least, the future of entertainment is LARPing. At the time, that seemed like a pretty big leap, but with interactive entertainment (video games) rapidly over-taking non-interactive entertainment (movies) it doesn’t seem so futuristic now. Bottom Line: Holodeck RPGs would be awesome.
We had a pretty busy Memorial Day weekend. Grady and his family came down and we went to Scarborough Fair on Saturday. Our nephew Aiden is a little bundle of energy so we had a great time. I think he rode every animal and pirate ship there was to ride at the fair. That night, we had a cookout/pool party. This is the first Memorial day weekend in a long time where its been warm enough to swim in the pool. Looks like it’s shaping up to be a hot summer, it’s supposed to top 100 this week.
Sunday afternoon we went over to Phlome and Ninsi’s house for another cookout. I feel you can’t have too many on Memorial Day. That evening we went out to the Church in Dallas. We seem to make it out about twice a year, Memorial Day and Halloween, which, really is more than enough for me.
Monday morning we managed to drag ourselves out of bed and go for a 30 mile bike ride before it got too hot. We probably could have done more this weekend but I’m not sure how.

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Posted By Zero on May 17, 2010

Yard work seems to be what we have been doing lately. Nikki and I have spent at least 3 weekends now working to get the yard in shape, mowing, trimming, planting etc.
We set aside money every year to do some kind of home improvement project. Last year it was the game room remodel. This year we decided to replace the fence on the east side of the house. Unfortunately, when I went to talk to the neighbor about it, he pointed out that our yard was sorta “flowing” into his, and we would need to build a retaining wall before a new fence could really be put in. He also said he couldn’t pay for any of the fence, but I didn’t really expect him too. Splitting a fence with your neighbor is kinda like a game of chicken. Which one of you can stand to look at the falling down fence before one of you offers to fix it. Since he had already reinforced his side with 2×4 bracing to keep it falling down, making his side look like crap, I declared him the winner and decided to get it replaced myself.
Step one was to get a retaining wall built, which after 3 weeks of wrangling with fence and wall contractors got done today. It looks pretty nice, of course once the fence is up, you won’t really be able to see it from our side. The fence will go in later this week.
The pool is now open as well, though its still a little to cold to swim in. This year was the easiest pool opening I’ve ever had. Usually it takes about 3 weeks for me to get the pool in shape but I was able to do it in just a few days this year. With the torrential downpour last Friday its a little green right now but that’s normal. Hopefully it will warm up some towards Memorial Day and we can swim in it.
This past weekend we did our first bike ride of the year, The Wild Ride, in Richardson. Pretty late start on cycling for us, 3 years ago we had already done the MS-150 by this time. It was a great ride though, and neither of us had too much trouble with the 40 mile route even though our training has been slacking this year as well.
We also went to the Hot Rods and Heels Burlesque festival Saturday evening. It was a great show. Our friend, Cherry Crush, who needs a website so I have something to link to, was in the show, so we always have fun going to hang out.

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