School started, the stock market went in the shitter, I played music with my friend Tom and I’ve spent as much time reading, watching and listening to the news as I can in the last two weeeks
First, I found this awesome picture on wikipedia while I was doing some research.
A 500 lb bomb fell through that dome and exploded inside the building. I was researching geodesic domes when I found the picture in the article about monolithic domes.
I’ve been reading thisars technica forum thread about the ongoing “mortgage armageddon” and I’ve found it to be a really interesting read. I particularly enjoyed the following photo. It really tickled my black-humor funny bone.
And then in this thread about the 2008 us presidential election, someone posted this video which made me cry.
Here is the page on youtube where this video lives.
Moving on, there was also posted a link to http://www.moral-politics.com/ which is an interesting idea. It purports to be able to place your moral/political orientation within a matrix of the larger population.
There is my result. Turns out I’m a dirty social democrat. Suddenly I understand why I cant; even talk about politics with my family who are all *very* conservative.
Interestingly, here is the chart showing all of the respondents who live in the US.
And, for comparison, here is the chart for all world respondents.
Yep it’s tuesday. Not a lot happening. I did a bunch of laundry today. And I washed the dishes.
Nisa is returning to her normal self as she starts to feel better. In fact I think she has been feeling crappy for a while because she seems like a different dog in a lot of ways. She’s making different facial expressions and her ears are pointing out at the top rather than straight up. She’s also only peeing like three or four times a day which is TOTALLY awesome. I was getting tired of running up and down the stairs 15 times a day.
Jeez, I probably need to start some kind of exercise now that I’m off the Nisa’s bladder plan.
I don’t have my grades yet but I’m sure that I did very well.
I’ve been playing eq2 lately and I really enjoy it for the most part but it seems like there are fewer people playing it now than I’ve ever seen. Most nights on my server there are only 10-20 people playing that are in the 20-30 level range. I haven’t been able to get a group together for anything at all since I came back two weeks ago. It’s pretty depressing.
I am also getting original EQ for free until august and I started playing that last night. It was amazing how many people were running around in tha game in the lowbie areas let alone how many were talking in chat. I saw more players in 30 minutes in EQ than I’ve seen in the last week in EQ2. That’s just sad.
I’m downloading the 14 day free trial of Dark Age of Camelot because I suspect that I’m just burned out on Norrath. Basically I just need a change of environment. I can’t afford to buy the game if I do like it though. Ah being poor blows.
I was going to say something about Blooms Day but I don’t really have anything. I’ve started to read Ulysses three or four times and I’ve never made it more than about half way through. I really like Joyce’s earlier writing, in Dubliners especially, but Ulysses and Finnegans Wake pretty much just leave me cold.
I much prefer Celine to Joyce. He writes about retards and whores. My kind of guy. Except for the whole Nazi collaboration thing.
Our dog Nisa has been sort of sickly for the past while. She’s had bouts of vomiting and has been drinking extreme amounts of water and has had problems with having accidents in the house. Over the weekend she seemed to be getting a lot worse. I was taking her out to pee every 45 minutes and she was drinking truly huge amounts of water. On Sunday night we noticed her shaking. On Monday morning she was shaking even worse.
So I called the vet and made an appointment for her. After x-rays, blood work and a urine culture the vet came to the conclusion that the blood test might indicate Addison’s Disease and so we gave him the go-ahead to do a test on her that would confirm his suspicions. So yesterday we got confirmation that she does have Addison’s and I took her for her first shot. For the rest of her life she needs one of these shots every 25 days.
She seems to be feeling better now but she’s mostly sleeping. She was wagging her tail this morning though. And she had enough energy to chase the birds too.
On a lighter note, June 10 was my half birthday and Angela made me an awesome card.
My piano final is tomorrow. Then I’m done with school until the fall. I’m going to miss my classes though.
No lolcats today. Instead here are some pictures of Nisa that I took a few days ago.
And this is whats she’s spent most of the day doing today.
So for the last few days Nisa hasn’t been eating much of her food, she’s been shaking a lot and she’s had to go out for bathroom breaks like every 90 minutes. Yesterday it got so bad that I took her to the vet. After an hour and some pretty expensive tests we really don’t know what’s wrong with her. They took some blood and urine samples and the vet is calling me back today to tell me if there were any bacteria in her urine.
The vet gave her a prescription of pain drugs and antibiotics. So she’s doped up.
He’s worried that she might have diabetes insipidus. But he was careful to warn us that at this point it could be any number of things.
Finals week is this week. I have my theory final tomorrow and my piano final on Friday.
Angela and I played EQ2 together last weekend for the first time in a few months. We had SO much fun. We have very similar play styles and enjoy the same parts of the game so we really have a blast when we play together. We made new characters. I made an Ogre inquisitor named Dennika and she made an Iksar necromancer named Stierska.
I’m doing something different with Dennika. One of my goals is to make as much of her gear myself as I can. Right now she’s a level 21 weaponsmith and is only a level 13 adventurer. I’m also trying to do as many quests as I can and to that end I’ve turned off combat experience so she only gains experience points from turning in quests and discovery of new areas.
I’m really enjoying playing this way. Dennika has some totally awesome gear and has almost as many AA points as she has adventure levels. She looks awesome too Angela gave me the rare ingredient that I used to make the armor pieces.
And her’s a lolcats for you. This one made me laugh out loud.
Next week is finals week and I’m busy practicing the piano so my post isn’t going to be very long.
I’m struggling to set up my linux box for audio recording and midi work. After trying a bunch of specialized distros that just didn’t work that great I’ve gone back to mandriva because there is a community repository of packages for audio work. I’ll report back here on how that turns out in a few days.
So here’s some more lolcats to make you laugh this friday afternoon.
It’s damn hot here in Seattle today. 83 according to that link and tomorrow is supposed to be 88. Thank god that global climate change is a liberal conspiracy.
We spent all afternoon driving around going to yarn stores. We went to west seattle, belltown and madison park. It was *awesome*.
I aced another music theory test this morning. It was 50% of my grade for the class. Now that two tests account for the entire grade I’m wondering if people are going to skip even more than before.
I emailed angela some cute / funny pictures this morning to cheer her up. I found ‘em on icanhascheeseburger.com Here they are:
I was supposed to make a post yesterday but I forgot to do it. So here you go
My friend Phil has lured me back to eq2 to join his guild as they begin to build a raiding group. It’s only two days a week for a few hours and I love playing with Phil and Andi. The only issue is that the guild already has 30 wizards! So I may end up betraying Denaso and changing classes to a warlock.
So far everyone in the guild has been really friendly and welcoming. I’m looking forward to this quite a bit.
Of course I’m still playing wow too. Kobi is lvl 65 now. I’m doing at least one battle ground a day on him. My goal is to have enough honor when he reaches 70 to be able to pimp him out in some nice pvp healing gear.
School is going really well too. The piano is making more and more sense to me and I keep getting excellent scores on tests in my theory class.
This summer I would like to start playing with some other people again. If my tax rebate is enough I’m going to buy a fretted bass, mostly because I still don’t feel that confident about my intonation on the fretless but also because I miss the sound of a fretted bass.
I may be Mr. Computer but I’m actually not a very sophisticated user. Honestly my usage patterns haven’t really changed in the last 7 or 8 years.
Also I post from my cell phone a lot
I was reminded again this week just how much I enjoy http://www.achewood.com If you haven’t read it you really should go check it out and start from the beginning. Roast beef is my favorite character.
I am only rarely able to come up with a snappy title for my posts. “Stuff and things” is something that a guy I worked with at Dick’s used to say to people when they were being vague in their descriptions of something. He’d look at ‘em and be like “Oh and stuff and things?” and his tone of voice was high test liquid dismissal. It was awesome.
Angela asked me to post a link to this for her. I’m not going to explain it to you before you clink on the link though. It’s best experienced first hand as it were.
In the World of Warcraft front (I know you were all dying for an update on this topic) Kobifora is coming along nicely. Thanks to my brother and our awesome guild mates I went from level 62 to level 64 and a half this weekend. I also got my +healing bonus from around 260 to 544 from gear upgrades.
School is going well too. My piano teacher tells me that she can tell that I’ve been practicing and she gives me pointers on how to do things better but hasn’t had to correct me for doing anything wrong yet. I’m really starting to get a feel for the instrument too. It doesn’t feel as alien as it did even three weeks ago.
After we saw I am legend we went to the book store and bought a copy of the book. I just finished it this afternoon on my bus ride to work. And I’ve got to tell you that this book really confused the hell out of me.
We have the promotional version with Will Smith on the cover. I didn’t realize until I got to the end of the entire book that “I am legend” is only one of many short stories in the book. Nowhere on the book do the words “short story” appear yet the book is in fact a collection of them and “I am legend” is merely the first and longest of them. Here on the Amazon listing for the version we own you can see that it isn’t mentioned that the book is a collection of short stories either. Thought I was losing my mind there!
As is usual with these things, the story is better in written form than in movie form. In fact the movie barely resembles the story in the book at all. Sure the general outline is there but nearly all of the details have been changed, most for the sake of “Hollywoodizing” the story. The dog is a minor character in the book that appears for only a few pages. The woman is, well, you should read it for yourself.
No pictures from me. Angela’s the multimedia lady.
Angela seems to be feeling better but I’m still pretty miserable. I went to school today because I’ve got a test in my piano class. I’m going to go home and sleep after the test.
I had a blast this weekend even though I was the only one not knitting.
My wow character is 62 now. Over the weekend I got my pvp mount (+100 percent movement speed!). I also respec’ed from enhancement (melee dps) to resto (full healer). I did that because I was getting destroyed by the lvl 70s. After a few rounds in Alterac Valley where I spent more time waiting to rez than playing, I threw on my healing gear and not only did I only die a few times but I was in the top five for healing out of all 80 people in the battle ground! After that I respec’ed to full resto and I did even better! I’ll post a screen shot later.
Anyway, time to play “when the saints go marching in” on the piano for the next hour in preparation for my test.
Abe
edit: Here are a few shots of some of my better rounds. Keep in mind that I was lvl 61 and 62 when these shots were taken. Kobifora is my name, its in yellow.
Angela gave me the rare ingredient that I used to make the armor pieces.
