For about the last year and a half I’ve been watching the Sunday Comics for good FoxTrot comics to put up in my classroom. Little did I know Bill Amend has been making them since 1988! Holy cow I have a lot of catching up to do!
Apparently there are “treasury” books full of the comics, so I might have to start collecting those. I love that they’re nerdy, about math, computers, video games, and all things geek.
As I was browsing through some older ones, this one caught my eye.
I need to not put so much importance on blog posts. They don’t have to be long or earth shattering…just there. 
I’ve got a new band I’m digging called Valencia. Check them out over at purevolume.com. I highly recommend the two last songs on that list…”The Space Between” and “3000 Miles.” And no, it’s not a cover of the Proclaimers.
Looks like I finally need to update my theme. Been using the same once since around WordPress 1.5, and now something is broken over on the right side. I’m sure GeekyWeekly could fix it…but this thing needs a slight update anyways.
Luke has discovered the flashlight, and it’s COOL! You can point it all over, and it makes this circle of light appear! Oh my gosh! I should probably find something a little less dangerous than a maglite though. Yeah…we just hit the desk with it. haha. Pictures of him soon, I promise.
…and another Christmas album! This one was made by yours truly and my best man Kurtiigeek! I can’t remember the year exactly…but I’m going with early 2000′s…perhaps 2002 or 2003? Kurtii might know. Enjoy!
Now that I’m waiting on book edits I’ve turned into a lazy bum. I felt so much more productive when I was spending a couple hours a day working on it.
I’ve been playing a lot of Mario Kart on Wii. Too much. It’s addictive, and a ton of fun.
We finished watching all the TV shows we had recorded. I’ve been recording reruns of the Big Bang Theory, so we started watching that tonight. It’s super geeky and funny.
I watched the show “Wanna Bet?” and it was absolutely terrible, but Tom Green was on. It reminded me about his website, www.tomgreen.com, and when I went there I started to watch episodes of the Tom Green Show. I’ve only seen a handful of them, but they’re super funny. They’re totally stupid, but still very funny. After that it reminded me that I was going to buy The Jamie Kennedy Experiment on DVD, another funny show. Maybe with my DVD profits I can get those.
I saw The Dark Night on Monday with my brother and sister-in-law. Heath Ledger was super good. Even if he wasn’t dead people would be talking him up. The movie itself was entertaining, and without spoiling anything I think it just went a little long. The story got sidetracked and wasn’t as tight as Iron Man.
Another movie I saw a little while ago was Wall-E. Like all Pixar movies it was breathtaking and a technological marvel, but there was something that bugged me the entire movie. Without spoiling anything, the premise of the movie is that humans have ruined the earth with trash and are now living in a space “cruise” ship. I couldn’t help but feel like I was being slapped in the face the entire time. Humans are stupid and ruining the planet, and it’s all the fault of evil corporations. I understand we need to take care of the planet we call home, but the movie builds on the stupid belief that we’re years from all being dead, and we’re not. The anti-capitalist message is almost laughable considering Pixar is making tons of money because of capitalism.
For whatever reason we have Monday off, so hallelujah for that.
The hard drive in my HTPC died tonight. It was during the Dodger game, and I’m sure the death of the hard drive and the Dodger loss were related. For all the geeks, it froze, I rebooted, and could never get into windows again. Chkdsk kept freezing (a good 12 times) trying to startup, and even gave me an “unknown error has occured.” Tried to repair vista, but when it tried it said it can’t (because of a bad disk). I took the drive out and put it in my external usb drive on the upstairs computer, and even that is terrible. It showed me the contents of the HTPC drive for a minute, but then I started to get all kinds of errors trying to access it. Not sure why it went down, but I think it could be because of heat, so I’ll take a few steps to deal with that. It could be a completely random thing too, so who knows. Luckily it’s still under warranty, so the new one should be here soon. Only sucky part is I have to set it back up. I never got around to making a norton ghost image of it for precisely this situation. Oh well.
Baby is crying. I go.
Yesterday we went to see a pediatrician for the first time on the recommendation of our OB. We didn’t know much going in, but decided to give the doctor a try. Man were we disappointed. The waiting room was trashy, no one was speaking English, we had a 2 o’clock appointment but they still had the door locked at 1:55 for lunch, there were at least ten appointments scheduled in a one hour window, it took an hour to see the doctor, and even when we saw her she wasn’t friendly. The heck with that.
After that disappointing visit I went home and checked to see if MY pediatrician was still practicing, and he is! Today we got up early and headed out to Long Beach to see the same pediatrician that saw me (and my brother and sister) from the day we were born. He’s a little older now, but still amazingly nice. I didn’t get a picture of him with the baby, but one of the ladies that works in the office is still there from when I was a boy. She even found my picture on the wall from when I was two! Overall we were much happier with this visit.
Now on to geeky stuff. My brother has a fancy speedflash that mounts on the top of his camera, and he showed me a cool one that is only $100, but it can make your flash pictures look so much better. It’s the Nikon SB-400 speedflash. It mounts on my D-50, and the coolest part is that you can aim the flash. The built-in flash points straight at your subject, and often times that overexposes their skin, and it has a tendency of making the background look super dark. The result is something like this:
It doesn’t look terrible (ignore Stacie’s drunk face), but her skin doesn’t look very natural, and the background is really dark. The nice thing about the speedflash is that you can angle the flash UP. What that does is the light bounces off the ceiling, and creates a much more natural looking image.
So much more natural, and for only $100! If you want another cool example visit the link above. Thanks bro for letting me know about this flash. I need a slightly bigger camera case now, but it’s so worth it.
I’m not sure I can make this a completely non-baby post, but I might be able to go half and half.
Last month we drove up north to Turlock for my Grandmother’s 89th birthday. This was a place we went several times a year for my entire childhood, and I have very fond memories of those trips and the people we went to see. I bought my video camera just in time to take it on this trip, so I shot some video to help me remember the place. If you’d like to watch it then go here:
For the geeks out there, I’ve decided to render all my videos twice. The first is a super high quality 1080i AVC/264 that can be played back beautifully on the PS3 (or the htpc if I can get 264 material hardware accelerated), and the second is a smaller 720p version that can easily be played back on a modern computer using quicktime. That should give me the best of both worlds with just a little extra rendering time and storage space.
So this baby of ours is a fussy little booger. He likes to eat all the time, and rarely sleeps for big blocks of time. He also loves to be held, and 9 times out of 10 if you lie him down to sleep he’ll wake you up with his cries a few minutes later. The worst part is that it means very little sleep for mom because she is getting up constantly to feed him. She’s upstairs sleeping right now and I’ve got the baby entertained (and quiet!) downstairs.
I think God knew he had to make little babies cute so that people would put up with the lack of sleep and crying. Every time this little man poops it is fart city. It’s like he can’t poop without making massive amounts of noise, it’s great. And his little sneezes are the cutest thing in the world. How they go from cute little baby sneezes to obnoxious adult sneezes I have no idea. His mouth even made a smiling motion this morning, but I think it was more of an accident than anything. Shortly after though he sounded off with a loud fart, so maybe the two were connected.
I still have some more Turlock video to edit, but after that I’m on to some of the baby footage.
Made a short visit to the hospital this morning. Baby and mom are both doing well. Doctors said that Stacie can come home tonight after dinner, so that’s a positive. He gave her the option to stay another day, but they’re moving a new person into her room, and at this point she’d rather sleep at home. Baby Luke is doing well. He’s eating better and they haven’t put a tube down his throat. The last jaundice test came back fairly high, so they’ve got him under the super cool UV lights. I was thinking of running to Frys and buying some UV case lighting to make him feel welcome once he finally comes home (the geeks will get that one). It sounds like the baby will be there for another 2-3 days for them to monitor/improve the jaundice and his feeding. My job today is to go to Babies R Us and get the breast pump that we don’t have yet, and then straighten so mommy can come home to a clean house. Dave came by this morning to see us and pray with us and that was really nice. It’s great knowing there are so many loving people in his life and he’s only two days old.
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