Strange Things are Afoot

Bizarre things are happening around the (insert family name here) household.  Earlier today I got home and started the dishwasher and everything was honky dory.  Well I do some massive rearranging in Jessy’s room (she’s gone now.  She went home Wednesday) and I go in the kitchen to get a drink of my red cream soda I left in there.  I stop dead in my tracks however when I start hearing music.  At first I thought it was my Ipod station playing but I quickly realized that A) it wasn’t plugged in and B) I had my Ipod on my hip.  I thought I was just imagining it so I stopped to listen to it.  I stood there listening for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.  I thought that maybe it was the dishwasher but the noises in the dishwasher were too inconsistent.  I heard something over the sound of the dishwasher.  To make matters more peculiar I moved 1.1 and 2.0’s beds to Jessy’s room and we put 2.0 down to sleep in it alone to try and get her in her own bed before the new baby arrives (December First is the due date but seeing as the last two have come three weeks early odds are good this one will too) so she’s up there asleep.  I moved the baby monitor in there to watch her (duh that’s a given) and all of a sudden Kat and I hear this strange noise coming from our receiver.  It sounded like a door opening.  I go upstairs to investigate and discover that nothing is out of the ordinary except for one small thing: there is a sound like a baby screaming in searing pain echoing though the two bedrooms and the bathroom.  I stand and listen to it for a moment and it persists and I gradually begin to loose my cool.  I grab 2.0 and return to our bed.  Still the sound permeates the air via the receiver.  I go back to investigate and realize that it is becoming louder.  I also notice that the cat is running back and forth though the house but is refusing to go into the bathroom (could be she’s traumatized because it’s used as a detention chamber for her) and the sound only grows stronger.  I poke my head out the front door and can hear nothing which leads me to believe that the sound is coming from within the house.   I freak out but only internally.  I return to the primary sleeping quarters (which until today housed four of the five members of this home [one of which is now at home across the Atlantic.])  We then hear the sound of dogs barking though the receiver.  I return to Ground Zero and it’s confirmed that there are indeed now dogs barking.  The crying continues.  Finally we shut the door and spend another twenty minutes or so pondering on what exactly it could be.  Kat suggested it may be a cat in heat trapped under the house or right outside the windows on the far side of the house which would explain why I hear it inside the house but not outside.  Sorry sweetie but I’m still not convinced.  I’ll keep posts running about more occurrences like this.

My How Things Have Changed

Well things are certainly different.  My writing is coming along excellently and we’re expanding the family.  Yes that’s right: Kat’s pregnant.  So that’s always a good things.  On a more downward note Microsoft has reinforced my undying disgust and general disappointment for them.  I have a copy of Vista Ultimate 64 and have all the right hardware to make it a killer system.  There’s just one problem: Vista doesn’t support my SATA controller so I can’t upgrade to Vista and use my nice fat SATA Terrabyte harddrive.  Not to mention I noticed something else in installing it on another computer: Windows Vista is not compatable with Windows Software namely the Zune program.  Which is stupid.  If a company makes two products wouldn’t it make sense that those two should work together?  Oh well.  Hopefully Windows 7 will be better.  They started work on it rather early I guess because Vista was such a letdown.  I’ll try to get my hands on a copy.  Wish me luck.

Black History Misinformation (or lies rather)

Nickelodeon has really pissed me off.  I’ve seen three black history segments that have sparked my ire.  The first one started off saying that a black man invented the peanut.  Sorry but the peanut is a naturally occurring plant the has been around for thousands of years before there were black or white people.  The second was that a black man invented water.  Sorry but water was around before there were living creatures on this planet.  It started when we were a burning rock hurtling though space at billion miles an hour and something cooled it down quickly.  Steam resulted from the temperature change and generated clouds which gave up rain which we now know is water.  Sorry but black people hadn’t been invented yet.  The other one was that a black man invented the light bulb.  At last check the light bulb was invented by Thomas A. Edison who was white to the point of pasty.  I swear that if I hear a black man invented the theory of relativity I’m going to kill someone.  I have nothing wrong with eather black people or black history but I do have a problem when they lie about their information.  The theory of relativity by the way was invented by Albert Einstein who was white. Incidentally one of my English teachers told me that I comes before E except after C and when I said Einstein wasn’t spelled that way she proceeded to tell me he was spelling it wrong.  Just some food for thought.

Burn Microsoft Burn

You know I despise Microsoft.  Unfortunately being a gamer guy I have to have it because there are some games that just don’t come out for consoles (Diablo, SimCity, the Myst games just to name a few) yeah SimCity was ported to the playstation many years ago but that was just one game.  Riven was too but once again it was a very long time ago.  Anyway, I digress.  What I was wanting to say was that Microsoft gave me another reason to hate them.  I’ve been trying for the past few weeks to download the new Windows 7 Beta and just have gotten it working a few hours ago.  Alright that’s great right?  My feedback may actually influence the company and cause them to create a good product.  Well not so fast.  The download was terminated at about 12:30 today.  That was pretty bad.  To make it worse I tried to redownload it and now you can get a product key and read the instructions and so forth and so on but the download has been removed from the server.  So that just tells me that Microsoft really doesn’t want the feedback it needs to produce a leading operating system.  98 was the best of the early bunch and they did about half as well with XP but they still have never gotten to that level of ease of use and convenience.  Not to mention 98 was small and stable (second edition anyway).  XP takes quite a bit of tinkering to get stable but does get there eventually.  Vista is large, clunky and I can’t seem to get it to do what I want it to do.  And I’ve only had the experience of installing software and setting up the network.  When you have to confirm three of four times that you do in fact want to install software then there is too much redundency built in and it becomes a problem.  Not to mention that all the processes used to run the enlarged kernel drags the best of processors to it’s knees but add to the fact that the visual graphics will make a 256 graphics card hardly function then you don’t have a winning combination.  Add in the extra times for reading the hard disk and optical drives (dvd’s for those who don’t know what an optical drive is.  It’s called an optical drive becauses it uses light to read and process data) and put those in a videogame that can’t load the graphics properly because the system can never install the video drivers properly because they haven’t been approved (because testing and certifying takes lots of time and money and then haveing to pay programmers to actually write the kernel well enough to actually use the drivers) then you severely limit the number of devices you can actually use on your system and add in the fact that the drivers become corrupted because the system keeps reading then rewriting them so they have to be reinstalled then you have a recipe for a total failure.  What Microsoft needs to do is redo the kernel to be smaller and more basic then add in some pretty but simple graphical effects and create a driver program that allows the kernel to be distributed to hardware creaters so they can develop the driver to the OS then you may have a pretty decent operating system.  But unless they cut costs then XP will remain the new 98 until something stable comes along that can actually be used and maintained by the amature computer user.  In the mean time I think I’ve figured out how to use VirtualBox to run XP well enough to play F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 on Linux.  Now I swear by Linux but it’s not without it’s problems too.  The newest driver for my graphics card is not entirely compatable for the kernel that Ubuntu 4.10 runs so I can’t even get my card to work long enough to get to the options to change it to failsafe mode but when it does work it’s stable enough to run for months on end with the only updating when it comes up with them.  It’s ideal for a server.  I’m still considering putting mine and Kat’s blogs on a home server so we could have our domain names back.  Just don’t go with who I had.  They sold it to a spam ad company before my service was up and even though I paid for it to be renewed they never did.  I’ll find out who it was and post them later on.  In the mean time I have to go.  I’ve ranted enough for one day.

New Year’s Eve Post

Well New Year’s will probably suck.  I’ll have a headache at midnight and still have to tote heavy babies down stairs.  But it could still be worse.  I could be stuck in NYC at Time’s Square where’s about one or two degrees Fahrenheit.  Laundry’s not done all the way and there’s a fork in the sink and the bed’s not made up which means that I’ll spend the year trying to catch up on laundry, barely caught up on dishes, and crawling into twisted sheets as well as having copious amounts of cranial pain.  And I still get to hear my father at midnight saying Happy New Year and I get to call my step-sister and tell her happy birthday.  I think I’ll be sleeping in through 2009.  Wake me next December.

Bad Start to the Week

So far the week has been pretty bad.  Sunday I got a cold which I am still nursing.  Monday I broke the news to my mother about our vacation which started her condescension towards me and my family because she believes we should pay off all our bills first (but when you think about it bills come around every month and there’s no way that you can ever finish paying them because the house will always have bills like power and water until the day you die or sale the house which gives you a new house with the same bills but anyway I digress) and yesterday we had a full fledged fight about it and also on Monday I found out my dad was back in the hospital with chest pains.  He said yestereday the doctors think his stints are clogged which could have lead to another heart attack (but did not).  On the plus side though we have lots of money saved up in the bank so we don’t have to worry about our bills or anything such as that.  So hopefully it’ll all resolve itself before Friday when we leave for St. Augustine.  Wish me luck.

Bad Week for Money

Yesterday the Dow dropped over seven hundred points costing stock holders 1.1 TRILLION ($1,100,000,000,000) in losses.  That made now the only time in my life that I’m glad I don’t have stocks or a 401k.  The drop affected global stocks too with London and Paris reporting loses in the aftermath as the global econemy gets pulled into the toilet with America.  The drop was triggered by the announcement that congress (specifically the house of representatives i believe) shot down a bill that would spend 700 billion dollars ($700,000,000,000) to give to companies that gave over priced loans to underpaid people that would never be able to afford their 250 thousand dollar ($250,000) homes on a 50 thousand dollar (50,000) annual income before taxes (average going tax rate at the moment I believe is around twenty percent [20%]) which would be about 10 thousand dollars ($,000) leaving only fourty thousand dollars ($40,000) which then has to be divied up on house payment to add six percent (6%) interest rate tallying up 150 thousand dollars ($150,000) in interest there for making the house payment 400 thousand dollars ($400,000) divided by thirty years and then twelve months to make a monthly payment of $1111.11 dollars per month leaving only $2222.22 dollars to spend on gas ($4.09/gallon) with average MPG being 20 miles per gallon or 5 gallons per hundred miles and over two hundred miles per week to work equals 10 gallons per week or ($40.99/week or approx $175.67 per 30 day month) and then groceries of atleast 100 dollars a week or $428.57/day it all and then car insurance and health insurance if you have it and that all adds up to cutting it very close.  Given that most people still splurge and eat out a bunch of about 100 dollars per week then you come up with too little money when you take everything into account including electricity, gas and water and sewage bills.

All that in mind the banks ran out of money.  When it was discovered that the banks were running out of money people made panic withdrawals and created runs on the banks.  Now the washington bill was to buy all the overdue loans from the banks so they could keep that from happening and then sell the loans to other banks for a nominal profit.  Therefore using tax payer dollars to change mortgage companies and keep the people in the financial situation above in their nice big comfy over priced homes which they can’t afford so they can keep the vicious cycle going for another year and have to bail the banks out again.  It’s a good thing the bail-out bill as it’s now called was shot down.  It would just allow a vicious cycle to continue and prolong the problem for just a little while longer while spending the tax payer money and generating more debt.  Oh well.  Atleast we weren’t affected by it.

*UPDATE*

As most of you surely know the bail out bill was indeed passed on the second try.  As of this point in time nothing has changed.  Foreclosures have climbed even higher since it was passed and credit companies are charging higher rates to try and recover the money causing people to have to choose between their bills or food and utilities forcing them to let their bills run higher with interest that they won’t be able to pay because so many companies have cut back on hours so people aren’t making as much money but are forced to spend a lot more.

Vacation Time

Well not really.  The girls are off from school which means Jess, our exchange student, gets to help me clean house.  It’s day two of the vacation and we have done nothing but watch television.  1.1 is in florida with her father doing whatever it is that his parents want them to do but she did get to go swimming even though it was in a pool and still enjoyed it.  I wish I could say I have some extra time and could do something like learn to play my guitar or learn how to write a video game but I really don’t have any time to spare.  I’m taking time out to do this before I go back to cleaning the living room and cleaning the kitchen.  I’ve noticed myself taking on traces of my mother’s OCD and am getting quietly fanatical about keeping the house clean.  Fortunately she’s on medicine for it so you can’t eat off the floors anymore but it’s still remarkably spot-less especially considering that she and my step father work all the time.  She’s actually in Boston for a class with her job (I think anyway, on second thought I think she’s repairing more computers up there) and gets to get away from keeping up the house and such atleast for a little while.  I on the other hand have to worry about it everyday.  No matter how much I clean it gets messy again.  I just wish we could go somewhere this week since school’s out.  I may take Jess to the High Museum of Art downtown to see what all’s going on there.  Through next year they’re supposed to have exhibits from the Louvre and starting in November they’ll be playing host to a selection of the Terracotta soldiers from China.  Rui, our other exchange student from last year (who’s staying with us when she’s not a boarding school this year) wants to go when they get here.  I’ll say that I’m quite interested in it too.  Anyway.  I digress too much.  Now I’m not even sure what I was wanting to write about when I started but it looks like I have a pretty good entry anyway.  So Farewell and good bye.  I think I’ll take the rest of the day off and do a little writing on one of my numerous novellas I’ve started.

Wiiiiiii Fit

We finally found Wii Fit today.  After doing the initial startups and all it gave us an age of 20 for me and 45 for kat.  After a couple hours of playing and training we ended up with an additional four pounds of weight for me, an additional one pound for for kat, and increased BMI (body mass index) for both of us and an age of twenty four for me and thirty nine for kat.  So some how I got older and fatter after running a mile or so and doing yoga and lots of exercise.  Just goes to show what I always said: A sedentary carefree lifestyle will give you longer life than exercise and worry.  Saying exercise will extend you life is like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster.

The Vortex

Many things have been lost to the Vortex.  Perhaps you have heard of it.  It’s the place where things go and are never found again.  I have only witnessed one item return from the vortex.  Sunday we lost another one.  After a trip to the hospital for 2.0 after she fell off the arm of the couch and landed on the top of her head (to which the doctor said she would be fine but she is now syptomatic of a concussion) we climbed in the car to return home and prepare for Monday.  Right when we got in the car Kat reached for the cell phone in the little nook above the radio.  Needless to say it fell.  On the way down it hit the cup holder and bounced off but never touched the floor.  The Vortex caught it in midair.  I managed to make phone contact with it once to search for it which is when I discovered it was not in the car.  That’s how I knew the Vortex had it.  The phone rang on my end but was nowhere in the car.  There was only that one phone line connection before the phone was out of communication forever.  Perhaps in a year or so we’ll find it.  Just to make sure I plan to strip the interior of the car this weekend but I do so hopelessly and in vain as I know that the Vortex will never relinquish it’s hold on my treasured cell phone.  The worst part is that that was the best cellphone I have ever posessed.  The moral of this story: Never underestimate the Vortex.  It could come calling at anytime.