June 2005 Archives

Did extremists in airplanes cause the towers to collapse, or was it some other agency, using carefully coordinated explosives?

Some interesting snippets from the article:

• No jet engines were recovered from the rubble of the North Tower (in spite of their extreme mass and density)
  
• The holes in the sides of the buildings were at least 40 feet narrower than the planes that entered them. No large sections of wing were found in the street.
  
• Pictures show vertical supports bent outwards around the impact hole.
  
• The entire site was dismantled and removed, without a chance for criminal investigation
  
• No black boxes were recovered from the planes, something unprecidented in all major airliner crashes to date.
  
• The flight that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania apparently left no wreckage.
  
• Several Insurance companies involved in the insurance of both planes and buildings involved lost greater than 20% of their stock value the week before 9-11. (as would happen if several major investors liquidated stock at the same time)
  

Makes you think, anyway.

I opened my current bank account in Detroit. I chose a nationwide bank, so that I would have access to it from anywhere. Well, now my bank is merging with another national bank. They are changing their computer systems over, one region at a time. So, as fate would have it, Indiana and Michigan are in different regions. Indiana is already converted, Michigan won't be converted until the end of July.

So, while I can still remove money from my account via my debit card or checks, I cannot deposit money into my account without driving all the way to Detroit (although the bank manager informed me that if I drove to Dayton, I could probably bank there...).

As you can imagine, this annoys me to no end. So, out of all the widespread banks out there, do any of you have recommendations? Do any banks have any particularly good checking accounts, etc?

This morning on my way to work, three women were in a newish Monte Carlo (still had paper dealer plates) in front of me. They had several children in the car with me. Most cars travel parallel to the road surface. This one was tracking at about 15 degrees off of parallel. Looking closer, I noticed that both rear wheels were at bad angles. Something was very wrong with the car's rear end.

I pulled up next to them at a stop light, and tried to tell them that they should not be driving the car. They looked at me blankly. I tried again, thinking I had spoken too softly to be heard over the road noise around us. Still just blank looks from the women. Apparently they spoke no English at all.

I couldn't recall enough spanish at the time to get my point across. Mostly, I couldn't think of a word for car. If I could have thought of a word for car, I still wouldn't have been able to be very precise, but I could have at least told them that their car was a danger to them.

*sigh*

Good old language barrier.

• Got the new CV axle installed in the car. Have about an hour's worth of a work to do tonight getting the rest of everything put back on, I estimate.
• Accidentally drank a soda with nutrasweet in it this weekend. Ended up with a horrible headache because of it. (I only realized what that bad aftertaste was when it was too late)
• Melissa and I were going to put an offer on a house, but someone else beat us to the punch. Guess that wasn't the house for us.
• This video convinced me of two things that I know, but don't often admit. First, soccer is an incredible sport. Second, rap may actually be music. (by the way, what song is that, and who sings it?)
• Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a fun movie. Mel and I caught it as a matinee.
• Long John Silvers is not tasty. ::shiver::

So Laura Henderson was kind enough to stop by and leave a comment last week, asking about how life was going spiritually. She wondered out loud if my lack of posting about it reflected a lack of spiritual happenings....

Unfortunately, that's mostly the case. Ever since I've left school, I've been just visiting churchs. None have ever been home. Go, listen to the sermon, go home. No friends, no real attachment. Partly, this is my fault for being very picky. Partly this is because we've been moving around so much.

Personally, my belief is still intact and as strong as ever. This isn't enough though. I've really been neglecting my Bible reading. In order to improve that, I'm going to try to read at least a little every day. Today I ready Genesis 1. Some people believe that Genesis 1 describes a very large amount of time. I just don't see that. Then again, I'm pretty dumb.

With these shoulder pads, I have the power to destroy villages, homes and crops!

(cleanse your pallet with this or this when you're done)

Went up and visited my parents this weekend. Melissa and I looked at five different houses on Friday after work. We're considering placing an offer on one of them. I lubed and changed the oil in the jeep. Pulled a stereo out of an older truck to put in the Exploder.

Next item on my agenda is swapping that CV axle on the car. I've been putting it off... I need to just do it.

• My truck is for sale
• Excellent new (to me) serial webcomic
• 20% Dreamcast overclock
• Mercury Theatre oldtime radio broadcasts (via boingboing)

Gamefest was once again a success. I think the venue this year was the best yet. Jerry and Elizabeth's current house has a finished basement that is perfect for lan parties. (:

Lots of good friends from college showing up for the weekend is always fun. We played Rainbow Six, War3, Quake3 and a few others. Most of our time was spent between rainbow six and war3 though. Fun times.

Thank-you all for coming. My goal for next year is to have a viable method for remoting people in... We'll see how I do. Someone remind me about this goal a few months before gamefest next year. :P

As promised earlier, an update on my keyboard cleaning effort. The keyboard came out of the dishwasher very clean. I hooked it up last night, and it worked perfectly. If anything, it works better now than it did before, as a couple of the keys had gotten a tad sticky.

After the gamefest hullabaloo dies down, I'll run my MS keyboard through and see how that goes. (:

Apparently the early dev kits for x86 Apple machinery are standard beige-box compatible hardware. They can run windows. If the mac developer machines can run windows, then a windows machine with correct components (no ATI/Nvidia drivers yet, for example) would be able to run this release of OS X.

Interesting times, these.

(and for a chortle, read this article where the writer compares an intel-mac running PPC binaries via Rosetta (an emulation layer that doesn't support SSE/Altivec) to a top of the line dual 2.5Ghz PPC Power Mac. Could there be any more useless comparison?)

As per an article that I noticed via BoingBoing the other day, I decided to try putting one of my older keyboards in the dishwasher last night. It came out very clean, but still very wet. I put it in the explorer for the day. The extremely hot, dry air in there should cook the rest of the water out.

I'll update this tonight after I find out if the test keyboard still works. If it does, then my grody microsoft keyboard is going in the drink tomorrow. (:

If I'm extra motivated tonight, maybe I'll even do before and after pics of my MS keyboard.

Hey y'all. If any of you feel like criticising a blog layout/skin, I've been working on a blog for Melissa lately. I'm searching for a better background image, since the lion isn't exactly what mel would like.

Any thoughts on things I could do in order to make it a better layout?

Also, for my all those poor fans out there who just knew that I was hiding such, I present to you Avril Lavigne's Feet.

It was somewhat funny to see a very large (height and muscle) man leaning on a shovel and shoveling away debris with a shorter, far less muscular woman running the jackhammer. She seemed to have a strong command of the machine though, regardless of stature.

And yes, in case you were wonder, Indiana has firmly entered the season of "construction". Our other season, recently finished, is known as "winter".

-washed and waxed the exploder
-took pictures of the exploder, in preparation to sell online
-washed jeep

All-in-all, those activities tired me out something fierce!

I know that a lot of you out there in blogland have spawned offspring, and I also know that you just love feeding them loads of preservatives in a meat of questionable origin. This being the case, I present to you the Octodog Frakfurter Converter. Turns hotdogs into seafood, yo!

• Very tired and sore today. Played more ultimate yesterday.
• I need a new disc, my Rose disc is getting pretty chewed up.
• Mikey plays better war3 against me than with me.
• Melissa and I shaved her cat this past weekend. Talk about interesting tasks.
• I can finally make discombobulators. w00t!
• Saw Tim and Amy on Monday. (also known as T and A) (:
• Am looking forward to gamefest.
• The exploder is running very smoothly these days.
• Still haven't worked up the gumption to replace the CV axle in the car. Bah.
• Skype is awesome telephony/voice chat software. Very good sound quality, very easy to use. No servers, no firewall adjustments, it just works.
• Melissa and I have been leveling two new characters in WoW. It turns out that druid and rogue do excellent together.