BunkBlog

We spent a rather long day at Disneyland, waiting in a lot of lines. This is the first time I’ve been to the park during tourist season, and it will hopefullybe my last. We got to see the big 50th Anniversary parade twice, and went on the big rides.

Alex and I started out with the Astro Orbiters – he only wanted to go up, never down. 🙂 We all went to Star Tours, which is just as cool now as it was nearly twenty years ago when they put it in. Always worth the wait, especially with the cool waiting area you get to hang out in. Space Mountain is closed until next month, so we went on Autopia, which reminded us that the FastPass thing Disney does is essential for some rides. When did Autopia become a popular ride? It was always a short line when I lived in SoCal, but definitely not this year. Hooboy.

Armed with the knowledge that the park was substantially more crowded than any other time I’d been there and that Alex really wanted to go on Splash Mountain, we headed across the park to get our FastPasses for that ride. Amazingly, at 11:30 we got passes to return at 4:30 that afternoon! While I waited in the line to get the passes that would allow us to not wait in a longer line, Angela and Alex went on the Pooh ride. He was very happy.

Then we had to hit the Tiki Room, which is just as over the top as always, although it is prettier now.

As the day progressed, we hit the Matterhorn, watched the big parade, met up with Dave and family, hit the Matterhorn again, attempted to go on Pirates (closed as we walked up, darnit), and shot Zerg with the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. All told, a pretty fun and busy day. We stayed through the final fireworks show, which is fantastic.

Alex and Nathan met a princess.

Time to give all the expectant readers a recap of our funfilled two weeks away from San Angelo. First up, Tucson…

We went to the Tucson Zoo, which is pretty nice. The peacock put on quite a show for us.

And, of course, we spent a lot of time talking with my Aunt Bette. Alex liked playing with her Roomba vacuuming robot, and the dogs thought Alex was an alien creature.

Lots of photos were taken the past two weeks. It will be a while to get a substantial number of them uploaded, but a starting set are up now, and more will come soon. Keep checking back, or hit the Gallery to see when new pictures are posted on our site.

Ok, everyone, play nice while I’m out of town.

We’re heading to Arizona and California for a two-week vacation, hitting Disneyland, Grand Canyon, San Diego Wild Animal Park, and as many missions as we can find. We’ll also be visiting family, including some members I’ve not seen in decades and others I’ve never met, not to mention none of them have met Ang and Alex.

We’re outta here.

I pre-ordered the new Foo Fighters double CD set when it was first listed on Amazon over a month ago, and it showed up today. Wanting to listen to it on my Rio Karma, since that’s what I usually listen to, I tried to rip the CD. It wouldn’t rip because it’s been “protected” by Sunncomm’s digital restrictions. About five minutes later, I found exactly what to do to rip the CDs that I paid for so I can listen to them.

Of course, it’s faster to just go to Usenet and download them after someone else has gone through the trouble of reconfiguring their system to use their own music on their own computer, and then shared it illegally with the world. Interesting that it’s faster and easier to do the wrong thing than it is to exercise the fair use rights that I’m told are mine by legal precedents and Constitutional lawyers. Great.

Oh, and did I mention that the copy protection didn’t protect it from being copied? Just want to make that perfectly clear.

Ang’s Rio Chiba, after getting a replacement batter cover, appears to be suffering from a well known defect – its circuit boards are somehow not lining up right and this causes it to be stuck trying to upgrade its firmware (which is the most current version thank you very much). Naturally, the player has a 90 day warranty (the shortest in the industry) and it’s 6 months old.

It’s too bad this is such a delicate player, since it was so neato. Anyone know of a durable flash-based MP3 player? Cheap is good. 🙂

Update: Thanks for all the suggestions, but the board is physically loose, so no amount of reflashing the firmware or reseating the battery will help. The actual printed circuit boards are disconnected in a physical electrical way.

We had our court date this morning for finalizing the adoption. Alex is now officially and legally my son. Naturally, we got one more dose of “you should have paid thousands of dollars for a lawyer” this morning, but not too bad. Apparently even the judges aren’t sure what to do without lawyers leading them along. Weird.

I finished archiving my digital music onto DVD (replacing the dozens of CDs I’ve got lying around). It took up fifteen DVD-ROMs, all 12339 tracks. As of this afternoon, I’ve got 12782 tracks on my hard drive, since I found a 12-disk set of Sinatra songs and a few other albums that seemed like I might like ’em.

Now to teach the woman how not to delete 3000 tracks from my Karma to add 150. Geez. Took me two hours to refill the darned thing.

The semi-return of the Friday Five.

1. How far do you currently live from the place where you were born?
About 5000 miles.

2. How many times have you moved in your life?
18

3. What was the shortest move, in terms of distance? The longest?
Shortest was probably moving from the apartment to the house in Sierra Vista. We just cut through a parking lot and drove half a block. Easy. The longest was moving from Korea back to Texas – almost 7000 miles.

4. Have you ever moved for school? Love? Work?
Sure.

5. Did your family ever move when you were a child? How did that make you feel? (either moving or not moving)
Where do you think the first ten moves came from? Didn’t particularly like moving, especially the “new kid” syndrome at school.

Want some blackberries? We’ve got a ton of ’em again this year. Thanks to the relatively heavy rainfall and reasonable temperatures (for the most part), we’ve got a bumper crop of blackberries – we’ve made a half-gallon of jam, a largish cobbler, and the Boy has eaten a ton of fresh berries. They’ll be gone soon, though – one of the shorter harvest seasons for our backyard garden. Next up – tomatoes!

I can’t help but assume that Microsoft is adopting XML as the default file format, not because they love open and interoperable formats, but because OpenOffice has received Oasis certification of their open and interoperable XML formats already.

I think it’s good that Microsoft feels threatened. I think it’s bad that they are offering their XML schemas with “royalty free licenses” to all and sundry, because that just encourages further lock-in to MS products. We’ll see how it plays out, I suppose.

Nine Inch Nails Drop Out Of MTV Movie Awards Over Bush Dispute

bq. “While we respect Nine Inch Nails’ point of view, we were uncomfortable with their performance being built around a partisan political statement. When we discussed our discomfort with the band, their choice was to unfortunately pull out of the Movie Awards.”

What I find amazing about this is that MTV can, without any hint of irony, refer to a simple photograph of the President of this country as “a partisan political statement.” What does that say about the bizarre extremism that has gripped our public speech, when a photo of our leader is considered partisan?

Trent Reznor made this post on his site, NIN:

bq. Nine Inch Nails will not be performing at the MTV Movie Awards as previously announced. We were set to perform ‘The Hand That Feeds’ with an unmolested, straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me. See you on tour this fall when we return to play in America.

I guess MTV doesn’t trust their viewers to have opinions that aren’t spoonfed to them. If it’s not approved by AOL Time Warner Viacom Twentieth Century Paramount, it’s not a viable point of view. And, more importantly, the American people are apparently so stupid that they can’t decide what parts of a performance to pay attention to and which to ignore. I’m sure there are plenty of Republicans who like NIN, just as there are a number of Democrats who do. Who freakin’ cares what political party you belong to when you’re watching the MTV Video Music Awards escapes me, though.

As reported in What’s New:

bq. It’s been traveling for 28 years and is now 8.7 billion miles from Earth. It just reported that it has entered the region of the heliosheath, where the solar wind begins to dissipate. It may be in this region another 10 years. Its Pt-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) should keep operating until about 2020. When Voyager 1 crosses that final boundary, becoming the first human artifact to enter interstellar space, Earth won’t know. Communications with Voyager will be cut off to save $4.5M of NASA’s $16.5B budget (.025%), for Bush’s Moon/Mars “vision.”

Why has The secret Downing Street memo received so little (some would say no) coverage in the United States? Is there perhaps something to the theory that our entire news media are corporate shills afraid to upset the administration?

Ferrett’s ruminations on comic books reminded me of the two longboxes I’ve got sitting in the closet. Most of what I bought was purchased because I liked the artwork or stories in them. A few were bought for possible collectibility (some Batmans of the late 80s and early 90s mainly). And then there’s the book I didn’t remember I’d bought.

I was a big fan of the miniseries “Black Orchid” – authored by the now-famous Neil Gaiman. After that run, he came out with a permanent series, and I purchased the first issue of that series, found it had pretty pathetic artwork, and never bought another one. Want to guess which Gaiman book I have? That’s right, sports fans, “Sandman” number one. The only Sandman I ever bought, and it’s a first edition of the first issue. If I’d known Gaiman was gonna be more famous than Eastman and Laird, I probably would have the first ten issues in nice polybags.

You must drink this.

That is all.

Because Jenn tagged me and I’m a sheep…

Total books owned:
Somewhere upwards of 300, but I’m not counting them!

Last book purchased:
V for Vendetta (if non-comic book, Year’s Best SF 9)

Five books that mean a lot to you:
Ender’s Game
The Long Run
Foundation Trilogy
Lolita
Ape and Essence

Tag five others who you’d be interested in having do this meme:
Mike
Lysa
That’s all the people I want to torture. 🙂

Thank krishna, thank buddha, thank allah, thank anybody – I’ve completed my last final test for my Bachelor’s Degree. Now I just have to wait anxiously for the tests to be graded, then wait for them to send my diploma. There’s a nice spot above my Army shadowbox for another piece of “I love me” swag. 🙂

Only took me (looks at calendar) too damned long to finish it, but a milestone nonetheless, right?

Fox News Alert! Bizarre Sex Habits of The Extreme Right-Wing

Radical anti-abortionist assists in killing doctors, and admits to past beastiality. Also, hints at past gay sex. Oh, the hypocrisy! The humanity!

Hehe

Court has ruled against the broadcast flag, making many pieces of hardware legal again. Yay!