Saturday, June 26, 2010

it takes an annoyingly long time to exFAT32 format a 500GB USB-attached drive.
the good thing about NetFlix streaming is that you get to learn that even europe makes a lotta bad movies
To any guy considering going shirtless in public: if your breasts are similar in size to my wife's, you oughtta keep the shirt on.
the level of my incredulity is high: should it really take nearly 60m to copy a 2:28m DVD to MPEG??
Kings Dominion is always great self-esteem booster
I love standards for things: there's so many to choose from. Fuck you, compact USB
apparently, Grumbles is STAAAARVING
now where teh hell did I put the URL for the FD@KD tix?

Dear Crack-addled Internal DJ:

"The ABC Song"??? Really??

Friday, June 25, 2010

Coolness. Using Picasa plugged into SmugMug.Com might be exactly what I'm looking for!
photo-hosting site choices may have gotten easier: seems only Flickr and Picasa/Panaromio support geotags
nother sad fact of photo albums is the sad certainty that there's no irony in the choice of fashions and furniture pictured
coolness: pet-care is in place for FD@KD, tomorrow. Now, if the weather could turn a little less hellish hot...
mebbe it is
looking at the family photo albums, you'd think the past consisted solely of holidays.
the first thing I want to see cloaking technology applied to is camera wrist-straps.
a wooden-floored house is much quieter when family dogs have freshly-clipped nails
shouldn't they really call them the flat-dog days of summer?
when we go out of town for a couple days, do the cats mostly think "why did they leave us" or "OMG: lots of food!"
Hell... Doesn't going to Hawaii feel like more of a trip abroad than Canada does?
If you live in the US, doesn't Mexico feel more like you're actually going abroad than Canada does?
if you live in the US, does Canada even count as "foreign travel"?
when you're not listening carefully, commercials for Acifex sound like commercials for Ass Effects
simply turning the main breaker for the lab back on doesn't mean everything's back up. fmeh.
Christmas pictures bring the realization that the biggest value of family holidays is teaching you how to tell white lies
looking back at pictures of Xmas w/ my paternal grandparent's, I have to wonder were they just messing with my head
@Grumbles please understand that no one gives a fuck how hungry you think you are: do shut up
now you are the one who is it

Dear StumbleUpon:

What box did I check that gives you the impression I wanted to be a gynecologist?
life force should be voluntarily redistributable. Given the choice of the last ten years (plus the balance of my life remaining), I'd gladly donate it to someone that would make better use of it.
Sometimes, the only thing you can do is just keep slogging forward.
sometimes, I wonder where my tastes in music have gone that a band actually having a keyboard now qualifies as a "real" instrument.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

nothing like "third world" food garnished with "lawn clippings"
nearly 80 pictures into scanning the first of the family photo albums
much as I hate HP, their scanner software was much better than Lexmark's
gotta think Mt. Saint Mary's college wants to distance themselves from this woman who's on "Smarter Than a Fifth Grader"
the suck part about getting older is living with the consequences of the choices you made in your youth
sobering is the realization that you're at least as insignificant as you always expected to be
something sobering to the realization that the trunk full of family photos becomes utterly pointless when you die when you're the "end of the line"

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

had a late lunch, today, so didn't do dinner. Making up for it with pizza rolls as a late snack.
looking at pictures that showed our furniture from the early 70s, I cant tell whether my parents just had horrible aesthetics or if the 70s were just awful
looking back at these pictures makes me remember that I kinda miss the old footie-PJs
giving a child a toy lawnmower is just sick (in an evil genius kind of way, I suppose).
so, would labeling pictures from Easter `74 as "ZombieJesusDay74" in a photo album to be shared with family be a bad idea?
so, looking at these pictures from the 1973/74 holiday season, I guess I can't gripe about the hair atrocities parents perpetrate upon their children, today.
well... also, "what's with all the damned flannel: were we all lumber jacks or just anticipating the 'grunge movement'?"
looking at family pictures from the 1970s, only one thought comes to mind: who the fuck actually liked "harvest gold"
Godon-Biersch's special banana split desert is definitely one of those "good in theory" things.
you're kidding, right? I can only have lowercase and numerals in my password? I feel great entrusting personal info to you.
ok, so the Fail-whale has been on the freaking rampage, today. F-U twitter.
So: I need to find a site to act as a media locker for all these photos I gotta scan in. I kinda like Picasa, but I know there's tons of choices out there. Just want to go with the one most likely to suit my needs. Basically, since these will be photo scans, I want to use a site that gives me big capacity and allows me to keep permanent access to the original, full-sized uploads. Want it to be reasonably priced and allow for a good level of control, tagging, etc. Also want to make sure they're a site that's going to be around for years to come (re-doing this exercise is not something I want to have to do, since I can tell it's going to me a months-long project to scan all these photos in and upload them).
it's always kinda disheartening when you punch an error code into Google and it comes back with "did not match any"

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

time to put water in the electric water dish: it's beggining to murmur; soon it will be screaming "DIE! DIE!"

Lonliness

I don't know that you can, in the strictest sense of the feeling, say that the sense of isolation and disconnectedness that I feel, on a nearly constant basis, is "loneliness". It's simply a recognition that I don't feel very well connected to my fellow man. I don't feel like there's anyone out there that truly gets or understands me. Hell, I'm not sure that even I do, fully, I'm just the closest to someone who does.

When my dad first died, the most salient thought was "the one person with whom I could actually really talk and who 'got me' has died". That was a lonely, empty feeling. That said, in the months since he's died, and, in particular, this past father's day weekend, it struck me that that initial feeling wasn't quite accurate. It wasn't so much that my dad 'got me' as much as he was of a similar enough mental makeup that he was closer to getting me than anyone else I've know. I've realized that he probably didn't really get me, he just came close. The source of this realization being that, much as we were similar, I didn't really know my dad.

While I've never had a sense of having a place to call "home", my dad apparently felt that Mahanoy City, PA was his "home." I'm not certin, however, that even that's quite accurate. If my dad truly was of a similar mental outlook to me, then no place was really home because there was no one, anywhere, who really knew him. Mahanoy City was just some place he could hang his head on as an idea of "home".
may be in the middle of some Chrome-FAIL: someone's trying to use a site's chat tool to talk to me, I can hear it, but nothing's popped up.
who needs an intercom when you can talk to your wife via cell phone ...when she's only 20ft away on the front porch
now, this is a mashup I can get behind: http://ping.fm/475V1
the world would likely be a very different place if everyone was functionally-oriented. probably better that they're not.
it's hard to feel "older" when you've felt old all of your life, but, somehow, I manage
All I can say to this nonsense is "suck a whole bag of dicks you corrupt fuck" http://ping.fm/ofOUb
hmm... listening to Flyleaf Radio on last.fm might be only slightly smarter than listening to the "nihilistic tag" radio, right now

I Am a Connectionless Protocol

So, this past weekend, Fathers Day weekend (of all weekends to choose), my mother and I took my father's ashes to be scattered nearish (Google Maps says 12.6 driving miles) to where he grew up. I've already previously posted links to the picture.

In his waning months, my father had been increasingly pining for "home" and for his deceased family. My dad grew up in Mahanoy City, PA. It's a town I've never really understood why anyone would want to go back to. It's dreary. It's ugly. It's claustrophobically small. It's dirty (as are most towns in mining areas or other areas of heavy industry). But, there was some kind of pull about it for him.

What I find so weird (well, that's not exactly the right word, but it will do for now), isn't that he would be attracted to there as much as the concept of "home". I've never felt it. I was born in Bellefonte, PA. Spent the first months of my life in State College PA, while my dad finished school and prepared for life in the Army (he was an ROTC scholarship student). Moved briefly to the midwest (Oklahoma) and then spent two years in the Nürnberg area of Germany while my dad did the Army officer thing. We came back to the US, when I was two, and settled in Carlisle, PA. I remained there until I went away to college at age 18. I then spent, pretty much continuously, the next four and a half years of my life at Penn State's University Park campus. I came back to Carlisle for about six months before moving to the DC area. In the seventeen years I've now been living in the DC area, I've lived in (order) Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax City, Falls Church and finally back in Alexandria (bought a house in Alexandria in late 2002, so, all those other places in NoVA happened in a less than nine-year span).

I've not felt a sense of "home" in any of the places I've lived. They've all been just that, "where I've lived." I've had no particular sense of attachment to the towns, the areas or the people in them. I've no tug to return to any of them.

When I go back to Carlisle to visit my mom, it's appealing from the standpoint of being relaxed and could have a yard for dogs and gardens, but that applies to many small-town types of places I've been to, over the years.
Two years ago, I finally made my way back to Penn State (at the urging of my father). This first return to PSU, 16 years after I'd moved away, felt utterly alien. I looked around, and though much was the same, it felt completely cold, to me. Many PSU alumni seem to be inexplicably drawn to return. I've no such feeling. In fact, I kind of felt the opposite. It made me feel old and lonely. Everything that had felt good about the place felt like it was gone.

Ok.. That was a bit of a tangential way to say I don't understand how one can want to go "home" as I've no feeling, recollection or understanding of what it feels like to be "home."
In the end, I'm not sure my dad truly had such a true feeling, either. I mean, there's many aspects about our respective personalities and mental makeups that are similar. So, if I am an accurate yardstick for my dad's motivations, then it's entirely likely that my dad's desire to go "home" was based on the idea of going home more than an actual feeling of being "home".

In the end, I don't know that I am an accurate yardstick for measuring my father's motivations. While I feel our similarities may give me an insight into the man, I realize, at this point, that I never really knew my father. I knew him by his thoughts and actions, but I didn't know him. He wasn't an easy person to get to know - another way in which we are/were similar.

Overall, I don't feel like I'm that easy to get to know. I'm not sure that anyone really knows me. I know that, most times, I feel like I don't fully know me. I know that, for the most part, I feel very, very isolated. Many times, the more people are around me, the more isolated I feel. I don't really relate that well to people on anything approaching the kind of visceral level that would allow me to say "I know you". There've been very few people in my life that I've felt comfortable really talking to. While there's many people I've been able to have other than superficial conversations with (especially during my PSU years), I can count on one hand the number that I've felt any level of connection with. Now that my dad's gone, none of them are in my everyday life (and, in truth, since moving to DC, even dad wasn't in my "everyday" life).

I guess, for the first time, the finality of it all, the utter isolation that I've allowed myself to fall into has come crashing down. I've temporarily suspended my FaceBook account, because I don't want the type of shit I'm writing in this posting to end up reflected there. I'm comfortable being the dark-humored, cranky guy. I'm not comfortable polluting my friends' news feeds with this emo bullshit that this funk has caused to dribble out of me.

Fmeh.
glad I keep my phone tracked via Google Maps. Helped me locate a misplaced cellphone!
"Come on Eileen" seems like the perfect theme song for a gangbang or bukkake party
in case I've never said it before (though I'm nearly certain I have), "being an adult sucks"
Unlike Corey Hart, I do *not* wear my sunglasses at night
I'd really rather be able to watch Price Is Right than only having the Metro Memorial new segment running
I'm thinking that if you need a GPS in your golf cart, you probably really suck at golf
The bed... It calls my name.
I do loves me some reading about iPhone issues

Monday, June 21, 2010

it's kind of amazing that, as awful as the 110mm cameras were, they took better images than most modern digital cameras
scanning old photos at 1200dpi to a laptop with only 2GB of memory is kinda teh sux0rz
It's not because you're not deserving that I don't hate you - it's because you're not worth the effort
opening a 1200dpi-scanned image file into gimp on a system with < 2GB of RAM is patience-trying
so... on the third day of my FaceBook account deactivation. How do I get some files to people I only have FB contact info for?

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Why movie theatres will die: financial risk for consumers is too great. I can spend $5 for PPV for an "unlimited" number of viewers. To go to the theatres, I'm spending twice (or more) that per viewer. I'm willing to gamble $5 that a movie will suck. I'm not willing to gamble four times that (or more). My money costs me too much and there's too many other things out there to do with it. Fuck you, AMC, Lowes, Regal, etc.
thus far, Legion hasn't been an awful movie - certainly far better than much of the recent NetFlix fare.
Sometimes, I wonder if my colorblind friends were ever able to play things like Simon, Twister, Rubic's Cube, or the like.
I love the Internet... http://ping.fm/vXQgB
Sifting through the wreckage of a very dark father's day weekend.
hard not to feel like the world is winding down when you're the end of the line and those before you are dead or approaching their ends
spent an hour (or so), last night, looking at the new trove of family pictures. Also dug up a bunch of college pictures.