Monthly Archives: November 2006

not much to say…

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Sadie nipped at Michael’s face this afternoon.  Michael is fine, but Sadie got his nose and lip, and though nothing serious, physically, it is serious with Sadie’s behavior.  Unfortunately that was the last straw, and Sadie has left our house.  Angie is taking her to the Animal Control where she’ll be euthenized, and then her remains will be shipped to Austin to test for rabies.

The kids are taking it hard.  I’m glad that Sadie found our home, and that she brought us some happiness.  I don’t know what her life was like before we adopted her, she has a scar on her face, and her behaviors exhibit actions that she might have been abused.  We probably weren’t the best home for her, but we did our best for her.  I hope she finds peace.

I voted today…

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| == straight R.

L == straight liberal because liberals are all crooked. 😀

I hit the R button, because I actually liked my choices, even including Gov. Perry.  I want my grandmas to be grandmas… regardless of their toughness.  And celebrity Governors have a mixed record.  Better the devil you know.

Sam Johnson is a good Representative, and Kay Bailey Hutchinson is a good Senator.

So do you civic duty, and go vote.  And remember liberals vote on Wednesday. :p

Heroes – Nothing to Hide

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This week we start to see the cracks of having a large cast, geographically separated and lots of storylines open. Cracks start to appear, and favorite cast members get forgotten and strands of the stories get left on the editing floor.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still loving me some Heroes.

Last time we had Niki left lying on the floor while DL takes Micah on a father-son outing. Matt fainted holding a gun in a convience store, from the overbearing loudness of other peoples thoughts. Issac was met by pixie-HRGG-collaborator Eve to be ‘brought in’. Claire got to meet her ‘birth parents’ in a meeting set up by Daddy HRG. Hiro and Ando get on with their quest after getting interrupted again.

This time, well we don’t find anything out about what happened to Issac, and Matt is back home with his wife without any talk of his breaking up a store theft then passing out holding the gun. *wave hands* These are not the stories you are looking for.

Spoilers and the rest below the fold. Continue reading →

Sunday Afternoon blahs..

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Upward evaluation day, so the afternoon is shot, I don’t get to watch any football, the live update on Yahoo! Fantasy Sports has my football team leading, barely, and I need a lead going into tonight Pats-Colts games.  I have Brady, my opponent has Peyton.  Do the math.  *sigh*  my only consolation is that the Pats D can usually handle Peyton.  Since I’m here at the church, I can’t take my nap, so I’m grumpy… My laptop is low on battery, which means.. well better hit Publish and get my nablopomo committment taken care of, I hope this had been edifying.

Survivor – Buh Bye Flica

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We are getting down the the merge, and it appears that people finally got tired of the c’est la vie that was Flica.  She certainly couldn’t be trusted in any alliance.

For the remaining 12, the numbers are interesting.  Four of the original asian tribe (only Cao Boi has left), four of the original white tribe (only Flica gone), three of the original black tribe, and only Ozzie is left from the Hispanic tribe.

So who will make the merge, and start playing for individual immunity?  The big four alliance of Yul, Becky, Sundra and Candice will probably make the merge, the two Aitu outsiders are Jonathan and Ozzie.  I think if Aitu goes to tribal, they’ll probably pick Ozzie to go if they council before the merge.  He is too dominant in the challenges to risk survival part the merge.  If he does make the merge, he’ll have to run the table because he is such a big challenge risk.

On the once powerful Raro, they have shifting alliances, since Pavarti looks out for herself, her vote is for sale.  Adam’s challenge acumen is highly over-rated, and I think he just expects to move on based on his physical talents.  Brad, Jenny, Nate and Rebecca may make a good alliance to challenge the Aitu alliance, but as the last reward challenge showed, Rebecca is extremely lacking in the physical challenges.  Add Pavarti to the group and you have in interesting alliance, should they all make the merge.

Will the tribes end up at even strength come the merge, it will make some interesting game play strategy wise.  This season hs shown that they aren’t afraid to mix up the formula to make the game more spontaneous, I wouldn’t be surprised with an early merge with even strength teams, and another two people must leave at the next tribal council.

Yeah… this is just NaBloPoMo fodder. 🙂

Looking over your shoulder…

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Have you ever wondered about God’s angels?  Or guardian angels?  Some type of angelic host that protects us from trouble?

There was a friend at our church that had a really bad bicycle accident, fell 15 feet from the top of a jump.  Landed on his face, and was really torn up.  He will be going through several oral surgeries.  But he will be okay, bruised and banged up, but okay.

The cynic might say, ‘Where was God when that happened?’  Or, ‘Why didn’t God do something to prevent that?’  Maybe even, ‘If an angel were physically present that would never have happened, because it never would have been attempted.’

I’m not equating x-cross biking with sin, but using it as an example.   Would things be better if God physically, manifestly intervened to prevent us from sinning?

Short answer, been there done that, didn’t make a difference.  Longer answer and mindless prattle and preaching after the break. Continue reading →

Frontiers of Flight Museum – Anousheh Ansari

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A while back I posted about Lauren being able to talk live to space astronaut/tourist Anousheh Ansari. Tonight she is in town at the Dallas Frontiers of Flight Museum and has a special hour put aside simply for the kids that were invited to the previous event. It is really cool that they are putting the kids first, and making sure that they can all be seated, while the old fogies get stuck waiting outside. At least they have free internet so I can make this report.

If I’m lucky enough to be able to get a seat inside, I may try to live blog some of the event… if not… well this will be it.

I’m in!

UPDATE:  Here are some pictures of Anousheh Asari signing Lauren’s book and of her and Lauren. (click to embiggen)
ansarisigning.jpgansari-lauren.jpg

Click the Read More button for the rest of my post. Continue reading →

Dusty tadpole

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For the past few months I’ve been a disgruntled laptop owner.  My beloved Dell Inspiron 700m was having the case of the freezes, and was verily unstable.  It was so bad that even booting the machine was hit-or-miss, and letting it stay on, or do some heavy processing was too much for it.  It is out of warranty and I had just changed out the motherboard in the last week or so of the factory warranty, so it should be working better.

I suspected faulty memory module, but the errors never mapped to a memory problem, and memory problems if they are present are usually consistent, and this was hit or miss.  I spent a few hours on the phone with Dell trying to get them to replace my memory module (lifetime warranty on that) but since the problem wasn’t consistent they couldn’t swap out modules.

So I’m stuck with a laptop that can’t go an hour without simply freezing, or if I moved it a bit here or there, it would freeze… I’d read here and there about dust and heat causing this kind of behavior, so I tried to change my processor throttling (easy to do in Linux) and use my fans more to blow the heat out.  Accoring to dkrellem the normal heat was over 50 degrees celcius and if it popped in the upper 60s or over 70, then a freeze would happen.

That worked for a while, but last night the latop (tadpole I call it) really hit the wall, couldn’t get it to boot up normally, to either Ubuntu Edgy Eft, or Windows Vista Beta 2.

This morning, I started to disassemble the laptop to get to the fan and see if I could make that work better.  A little daunting taking apart a laptop rather than a desktop.  But I got it apart, and the fan… she was DUSTY.  Blew it out with a can of air, and reassembled it… and ended up with the right number of screws…

Did some torture testing and normal temps are now dow in the low 40s, a full video transcode (100% processor for about 25 minutes) brought the processor into the low 60s, then it came back down to the low 40s.  It is mucho stabler, and I can even move it around while working on it.  The true test comes with booting up at home, on the couch.  That will be later tonight.