HerdingChaos

As you can tell I have not updated this blog for 5 months. The super abridged version of the past five months follows.

Early July: Loren became potty trained.

Mid August: Celebrated 11 years of marriage.

Late August: Went to Sea World San Antonio with the family and had a blast.

Mid September: My beloved dog of 8 years is diagnosed with splenic hermangiosarcoma.

Three days later: I have to take him to the vet and say goodbye because he cannot breathe without pain and cannot eat or drink.

Late September: I spread my wings and complete my bi-annual flight review allowing me to execute the privileges of my pilots license once more.

Early October: Took Andrew and Tracy for a flight in a rented plane. They loved it.

Late October: Tracy turns 6.

Halloween: We all dress as pirates!

Mid November: I bought a plane.

Late November: Andrew turns 8.

Which brings us to this month. I have been working more crazy than normal the last couple of months. Not that work is a good excuse to miss out on other stuff, but that’s what was happening. After tying up a few milestones at work, I took vacation from the 7th through today and did PIC’s 10 day instrument rating course. Today at 2pm I did my check ride and I am now an instrument rated pilot. I am also tired. In the last 10 days I have flown 30 hours in the plane and 9 in the simulator. Probably would have been more but the weather was really bad for three of the 10 days and we focused on ground instruction. Regardless I am looking forward to going back to work for a break from this intensive course. I think the course was great and would recommend it to anyone. But do not fool yourself, it is a lot of work.

I have mostly finshed the OS X side of the install of the Macbook Pro. I need to update the windows side that I am going to run under bootcamp and parallels, but I need to do that from work tomorrow.

However, I just found something pretty cool. There is a dashboard widget that allows you to add entries. This entry was made with that widget. Therefore this post is a bit of a test as well.

This game has some of the best graphics I have ever seen. It looks very close to what you would see out of a plane. I have flown places in the simulator that I have flown in real life and was actually able to find an airport based on the landmarks in the city. Not big landmarks like you would find in a major city. I mean the little landmarks that I know where they are because I grew up here. It was creepy.

However, all that beautifulliness is not a word and not easy I guess. I have a pretty fast machine. X2 4400+ with a Nivida 7900GT. I can run most games out now at full settings and still get 40 fps. I did that with FSX and got 1.3 fps. I have dialed a ton of crap down and I now am getting around 16 fps. I would prefer 20 or 25, but at 16 most of the really cool looking stuff still looks really cool. I just hope they release a patch with something in the readme that says “Oops, anyone with an AMD and Nivida system was getting one third the performance they should have. We have it fixed now.” But somehow I doubt that will happen.

Sequels and formulaic crap is all we seem to get out of Hollywood lately. We have not had a really compelling original story in quite some time (remember I am talking about Hollywood and not the indie scene). Recently the best story/character based movies have been adaptations of books or a remake of a classic film. Of all of them I have only really been pleased by the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Therefore I spend most of my entertainment time buried in books or at the one of the local theater companies or reading interesting blogs online.

One of the blogs that I have always found very entertaining is Jessica Stover’s blog at JSDC. Jessica is a screenwriter/actress/performer living in LA. I originally was sent a link to her blog entry describing her visit with the Star Wars nerds. Many hours later I am sitting up in front of my computer when I should be in bed and I realize that I have read all of JSDC.

So why I am going on like a little fanboy about Jessica? Well she is different.. the good different. She self published a book called Aidmheil that is a collection of short stories, poems, and entries from her blog. Of course I bought the book and I loved every page. I read a ton and I love a good story. I read Greyfeather in Aidmheil and badly wanted more. Usually that type of reaction only happens when I read well established authors that are considered “one of the greats”. Normally I go to the local bookstore and buy the rest of everything they have written and read it all. But with Jessica I have to patiently wait to see what type of awesome she is going to do next. This time is different. This time she needs me to help make the awesome happen. This time she needs you.

Jessica has completed a screenplay codenamed TSL. The story is an original fantasy feature trilogy that has already garnered good feedback from Hollywood. But not enough good feedback for taking a chance on something that is not American Pie 5. The story is not well suited for a small independent production so Jessica is taking another approach. A new website called Eventful allows fans to request a performance in their town. One of her fans made a demand on Eventful and it has slowly been building. The Hollywood types pay attention to numbers. Jess was told that is she could show interest from 100,000 people she would have a good chance of making this movie. So all two of you that read my blog have to go right now and demand a screening of Jessica’s movie. Instructions are provided on JSDC, or you can just click the demand button below. With the power of all those tubes that make up the internet I am sure we can get the demands to 100,000.

This is free and will only take 30 seconds (or 4 min if you are still on dialup). So get clicking!!!!

Well, the comment spam has really picked up and I thought that maybe I should actually post something here so that my only actions were not marking all 100 comments in the mod queue as spam. Comment spammers should die by belt sander.

It has been forever since my last post. I have wanted to post about quite a few things, but never get around to it. I think I have been suffering a bit of burnout and have not really felt the urge blog. In the time since my last post quite a bit has happened and I think I will break them all up into a few posts clustered together instead of one superginormous post.

If you thought that Gilligan’s Island was just a stupid show, then you need to take a look at the real story. Mike Watts was the one that deserves all of the credit for the find.

Another post from the phone. Here is a pic.

Okay. This is a test of sending a camera phone pics when posting.
This is the second try with a link to loren’s pic

Found myself with some downtime after work today so I have upgraded the blog system to 2.0.1. This might also allow me to use a cooler palm app to do updates to the blog. This in turn might cause me to post more. Who knows?

So I have moved into the modern era with my treo. I upgraded my old trusty 300 for a new 650. It is working well so I thought I would try posting from it. This post was made via my treo650.