Inconvenient

For the past year or so I have been enjoying the very inexpensive, quasi-legal and deliciously DRM-free service of allofmp3.com and their imusic purchasing and download application alltunes. But our friends at the RIAA and government have been putting the screws to my Russian friends and figured out that if they can't kill the company, then make it impossible for them to get money. As of a month or two ago Visa and Mastercard pulled processing from Allofmp3. The two choices left were Diners Club (with its fun fun $95 fee per year, no THANK you) or a card called JRF which is available to residents of, like five states. Things were looking dark, and just when I had located a stash of Polish punk music I wanted.

But wait! There is an answer! An overcomplicated and confusing answer. First, go to xrost.biz and sign up for an account. xrost is a kind of cashless receipt generating system in use in Europe in place of cash. Whatever, it's not important. Next, you will need to go to clickandbuy.com and register a credit card with them. Once you've set up the account, go back to xrost, fund their weird cashless card with money from clickandbuy.com You will get a serial number and a pin. Surf back to allofmp3 and give them the serial number and pin and Blammo! You're back in business. Fire up alltunes and your balance will show up there. Now, wasn't that simple? Well, no. But it works. Enjoy!

Child's Play

When I was a wee lad, we didn't have any of these fancy game consoles. There were no X-Boxen and PS360's or WEEEEEEEE systems. We used to go out in the yard and throw acorns at each other. That's what we did for fun.

Of course, I never had to spend several weeks in a childrens hospital with nothing to do. Sadly, a lot of kids do. This is where a very cool charity called Child's Play comes in. Founded by the clever mirth-mongers at Penny-Arcade in responce to the accusation that gamers contribute nothing to society the Childs Play charity provides games, books and other diversions to sick tots around the world. 100% of your donation goes to the kids. And the great part is that thanks to Amazon.com you don't have to guess what these childrens hospitals need, wish lists have already been drawn up. You can donate to a hospital of your choice of simply donate via PayPal.

Go ahead and bring some joy to a sick kid. I know you're good people.

I hate them...

The very clever monkeys over at Kropserkel provided some of the costumes for this spoof piece. These are some very talented monkeys. Which is why I hate them. I mean it. If these guys die in a fiery place crash I got dibs on EVERYTHING!

Calls for cthulu

This is some funny-ass Elder god shit.

Strange facinations...

You may just want to skip over this posting. Really. I'm giving you ample warning that it does not involve foreign travel, hot women in corsets of fighting off ninjas. This post is about an obscure 18th century Italian engraver.

Half Price book is a kick ass store. And when we were last there dumping off some old video games and books I picked up a two books dirt cheap. One was 'How to build a Gazeebo' and the other was called 'Piranesi - The Etchings'. I had no idea who Giovanni Battista Piranesi was but one look at the images in the book and I had to have it. Page after page of wonderful etchings of Roman Ruins, Tombs, monuments, temples, theaters and more. The book is in three languages with a short section on Piranesi's life and work in the 1700's. You can cut to the chase and breeze through his wiki page.

Some of his coolest work were his 'prisons'. Massive spaces with soaring vaulted ceilings, chains, raised walkways to nowhere and ancient gears. My biggest regret is that the images in the book are rather small and much of the detail is lost. Luckily a Japansese university has a website where you can zoom into his images and well as see modern photos of some of the places Piranesi drew. What amazed me was the number of locations that I had never heard of or seen before. A great deal of these places must surely have fallen victem to the modern city of Rome but I intend to look into some of the more interresting tombs using the internets. I'm hoping to get a book with larger versions of his work or maybe a few prints but they aren't cheep.

I have no idea why some things grab my attention so suddenly and firmly. I spend two weeks with my nose buried in a book about personal letter written in the Elizibethan era. Facinating stuff which I may have to write about in the future. And now, I must go, I think I hear ninja's in my laundry room.

Run Forrest Run!

They're getting smarter. The turkeys, not us humans. We're still dumb as posts. Apparently a group of wild turkeys, in a last ditch attempt to escape the murderous rampage of the humans, tried to take a train out of Jersey.

Good luck guys, many have tried to get out of Jersey. Most didn't make it...

Slacking towards turkey day

The past few weeks have been...well...we haven't had much to DO. And thats kinda wierd. Last year at this time we were down in Bolixi and New Orleans. It was trip I am glad I made. If you missed it, you can read about it here.

This year we finished up the shows, came home, put everything away and worked on the house. Now most of the big stuff it done and we have....spare tame! It's wierd. There's still a list of stuff that needs to get done (there is always stuff to get done) but its getting shorter and the things that are left I am finding easier to ignore. I need to get work done on my friends website, but I've stressed over his site every time its broken down. I've driven all over gods green acre to find a wifi spot to fire off emergency emails and try to figure out what broke while on the road. Sigh. I'll get back to it tomorrow.

We now have two cats. The Great Cat of Reh (Ray) who is a regular feature in the house. And a female who now lives in the garage. We call her "Little one". Destructo (or Dumas) went missing while we were at Pennsic. Its very likely that Little One is from the same litter as Destructo, they're practically twins. The two cats do not get on well which has turned out home into a french stage comedy. When one cat wants to come in we have to boot the other out their particular door.

Thanks to my friend Grimm I now know how to service my rear brakes AND swap out struts. Grimm had planned on doing his struts too and we managed to get both vehicles into the shop. But in the end all he needed was a couple of rubber washers to completely fix his front end problems. Total cost? $2. Me? I spent about $400 in parts. Next time I want to be the one who spends two bucks.

My rig is pretty much set up the way I want now. I drove up to Detroit last weekend for a LAN party of my friend Monkey's house. I had a great time. There were 20 people crammed into his basement blasting the hell out of each other. It was different from the Ohio LAN crowd. These guys are pretty quiet. Focused. Our local group is far more vocal with their smack talk. And since my FPS skillz are not exactly 'leet' (after all, I do have a life) I need to make up for it by distracting my opponents with taunts and trash talk. At one point, after having been killed for the umteenth time by a guy with the nickname ded_god I threatened to slash his tires, tear his head off and crap down his neck. Now THAT'S sportsmanship.

Meltdown

Yesterday my wife casually mentions that her computer isn't working.

"What's it doing?" I ask.

"Very little".

On booting up a cryptic message flashes on the screen telling me that LSASS.EXE can't initialize and I have to terminate it. Hmmm. Off to google.

According to the allmighty googletron LSASS.exe is a common file used by Windows to load account settings and should not be tampered with. However ISASS.exe is a trojan, a worm, a virus that will cause all manner of harm to my wifes computer and will likely herald the birth of the antichrist. Of course, because of the way fonts are displayed in Windows, A lower case 'L' and a capital 'I' look exactly the same. In any case the antivirus installed on her system might have missed something. Time to pull the hard drive. After 10 minutes of concentrated swearing and several cuts I get the drive out and scan it on my system. My antivirus finds 14 evil creatures living on my wifes hard drive. I perform deletions and exorcisms and re-install the drive. Still no boot, but as a bonus its giving me random blue screens of death.

It's off to the windows XP recovery console. Which finally 'repairs' her installation of windows. Except that again, it doesn't. I am forced to do a re-install. I pull the drive and put it back on my system, pull off all my wife's email and other files. Pop it back in her system and start the clean install.

Once its done I find I'm missing all kinds of drivers. I crawl around in my wifes closet to find the Dell drivers disks. Then there's the missing wi-fi drivers that must be downloaded, then a download of Thunderbird, Firefox, Avast Antivirus and an attempt to restore the email.

By the time most of it was over it was 2am. Fun Mcjoyjoy. Today I got her email restored and working again. I almost wish it had been a real hardware failure. Computers are so inexpensive now it's almost cheaper just to chuck one and get another. Wouldn't that be great? Your rig starts to slow down and you decide to get a new one. At the comp-u-mat you select B7 and rub your hands in anticipation. Then the new computer get stuck on that stupid spiral wire thing. You end up smacking the plexiglass front of the machine and trying to shake it for 10 minutes to no avail.

Of course, once you stop your rant the computer magically falls off the wire and you are able to pull it out the bottom and take it home. The old system? You throw it on the compost heap (because in my work computers are biodegradable).

Wow

I've been up to a lot recently, including a ghost hunt at a decommissioned prison and using tools to fix things. But the bigger new is that we won. We fucking won! Control of the House AND the Senate. And just as I was enjoying that sweet savory taste I hear on the radio today the Rumsfeld has "Retired". I haven't read the transcript of his announcement, but if he uses the term "Spend more time with my family" it means he was fired. Fired or quit, I don't care. He's gone. I believe i did a little jig in the NAPA parts store.

It's been said by conservatives that the Democrates don't have a plan, well it's better than the Rebublicans who's plans have all been bad. I am inclined to agree with some of the pundits, that America didn't vote for Democrats so much as vote against the Republicans. Whatever, the glass is half full, the glass is half empty. I don't care so long as the glass has less than 50% Republicans, child predators, thieves, secretly gay homophobes and war profiteers.

I stayed up late to watch the results, but the more I watched, the worse my stomach felt, until I realized that I did the same thing in 2004. I stayed up and the news just kept getting worse. What were those people thinking??? I truly felt in my heart that once the American people got into that voting booth, that they could finally have their say without fear of retribution, that they would soudly regect Bush and his ilk. But they didn't. They still believed the lies. This should have happened two years ago. We might be out of Iraq by now.

And to put some numbers behind that:

We might have not have lost 1,472 U.S. and coalition lives
18,540 fewer coalition casualties
20-100,000 fewer Iraqi casualties/fatalities

Of course this is all speculation. But you know the old saying 'Fighting for peace is like fucking for viginity'. I'm wondering how many more kids are going to pay the ultimate price for this failed venture. How many more 'casualties' before we pull the plug. Remember, being wounded in combat can be anything from breaking your leg to having your arm blown off by an IED. And given the nature of this occupation, there are a LOT more amputations. There are also a lot more head wonds. The incidences of PTSD will be skyrocketing over the next few years. We will start to see a surge in the number of homeless vets.

I love my country and I support the men and women who serve. So I consider it my sworn DUTY to make sure that they aren't needlessly put in harms way. To fail in this is to fail as a person. I meet a lot of people in my job. I likely talk to several thousand people a year person to person. One day some young man or woman is going to buy something from me and hand me their credit card. Only they won't have a hand, or even an arm. It will be a prosthesis. I like to shake the hands of almost all my customers. Am I going to be able to shake this persons appendage, the stump thats left over after a mortar killed his friend and wounded him? Only if I know in my mind that I did what I could to prevent it from ever happening.

Uhgg. I know this isn't written very well. But I get worked up whenever I talk about this. It's off to bed.

Our usual table please...

Last night I met up with Bob, Cat and Ed (along with their significant others) at a Denny's in North Olmsted. We meet up on this date every year. It's an anniversary of sorts, and we've been doing it for 22 years.

A looooooong time ago I met Ed and a girl named Kim at a small Ren Fair in my home town of Bay Village. We hot it off and they invited me to a Halloween party. After the party we went to Lewis woods in the Metroparks in costume. As we tromped through the dark woods we talked about Tolkein and magic and a thousand flights of fancy. Then we went to Denny's. Over the years we have somehow managed to always meet up. Even when Cat moved away to Washington, she would go to a Denny's there and we'd talk on the phone.

This year our waitress hadn't even been BORN the year we first met up. How's THAT for making you feel old! We didn't stay as late as we used to. There's work and all. But we did get together. That's what friends do.