My agent is going to eyeball some condos out in Hollywood for me today… With any luck, tomorrow morning, I’ll be able to get a good look-see at a few nice ones, after chores get done.

Zuma… a fun little marble game.

Damp, Dark, wet, chilly day. Florida is playing at being Seattle.. or Stereotypical London, perhaps. I have been quite enjoying it.

Well, I’ve seen a couple episodes of Firefly, now, and it’s a cute series. Elements that I especially like is the western feel, and the majority of the characters are nice enough. Also nice is the lack of aliens… Humans have plenty of drama to go around on their own…plus, I’m a sucker for western-style space stories.

• The Captain (Malcolm) – Kind of bland, but an ok guy. My idea of the best “bland leader guy in a pseudo-western” is Brisco County, Jr. Hard to live up to that.
• The Combat Chick (Zoe)- entertaining, but I keep seeing her as the backup girl from Cleopatra 2525. I’m sick of the name Zoe, too.
• The Pilot / Combat Chick’s Husband (Wash)- I like him. He’s got a minor part in the series, but it’s a good one. May be my fave. Like me, makes little rubber dinosaurs play out melodramas when otherwise bored.
• The Prostitute (Inara) – bores me to tears. A romance between her and boring captain is boring². I don’t feel any tension there.
• The Mechanic Girl (Kaylee)- I like her. Hard not to like a cheery, cute, sort of shy redhead with a brain. Also may be my fave.
• The Thug Guy (Jayne)- entertaining lines, but a super-stereotype. The actor doesn’t have a lot of room to maneuver.
• The Doctor (Simon) – Haven’t seen enough to get a vibe.
• Smartie/Emotionally Fragile girl (River)- Haven’t seen enough to get a vibe.
• Priest (book)- Even though it’s Detective Harris from Barney Miller, he’s aged and different enough that I can split him into another role (unlike combat chick). He’s the third member of my “big three” characters.

All told, it blows away the last two Star Treks.. Voyager and Enterprise. Though that’s not really saying much. It’s on a par with Andromeda. Not uber-great, but better than most of what’s on TV.

Making Danny a DVD of Lost In Translation today, my first real test of WinMPG Video convert on a large file. (I’ve fiddled with little movies of Alligators and other stuff I’ve captured with my camera, but never some 700 meg gargantuan.) If it works out, I’ll try a VCD of Time Bandits for him, to. I’ll give it to him when he takes me out to dinner on Monday. (Handy burning hints are at DVDRhelp.com… even handier is just using Nero)

Just got an email update – Federal return 1/31/2004 6:07:59 AM Accepted – That’s that!

Also got my first in the wave of PIF virus-attached emails. I knew to look for it, but my web interface is nice enough to scan before downloading, too.

I don’t know why, but Newt is interested in taking bites out of the line of my left bicep this morning.

I wonder which of the RenFaeries will be at the show this year?

Via President Match (via argumentplease )

1 Kerry Score: 100%
2 Edwards Score: 95%
3 Clark Score: 93%
4 Kucinich Score: 91%
5 Dean Score: 90%
6 Lieberman Score: 88%
7 Sharpton Score: 85%
8 Bush Score: 31%

These scores are a little misleading, but overall, it seems fairly accurate.

A history of Early Motive / Pop-up books. The Illustrations on some are great.

Friends will miss editor – as will Bat Boy

Eddie Clontz died early Monday in Salt Springs, near Ocala. Complications from diabetes. Only 56, he was one of the most creative guys in the business, although you won’t find his brand of journalism in a daily newspaper. Until three years ago, Eddie edited the Weekly World News. Continue reading 6437 Making vids, prez quiz, Farewell Eddie Clontz →

I’m pooped. I’ll sleep quite well this evening, methinks. Lovely long dreams of being snowed in with my beloved, telling stories that I can’t remember the plots to, but entertaining, and being entertained nonetheless.

Another nifty “Universal translator” – Translate this Page! (Nice thing about PHP referencing… it’ll translate whatever page this is pasted on.. a friend’s page, my journal, my homepage… whatever.) 49 languages, not including dialects.

The Orgulator – cool website manips in MSIE … Load a URL into this window using the entry field above and then click the buttons at left to flip, blur, invert or otherwise muck about with the look of the page. via waxy_org (Lots of other toys/tools here, too.)

See also – http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/reference/reference.asp

Investment banker vacationing in Key West reports theft of marijuana from his hotel room Continue reading 6435 Key west, Antarctica dollars, new matter, noting some filter styles for the heck of it. →

Dinner with Kev and Bheesh was nice, we shot the breeze over IHOP orange juice. Kev’s thickening up.. he’s working out, it seems. Stuff still seems to be pretty much the same there… some drama, some long work hours. I’m glad that I’ve moved on from there, but I’m also happy that we still gab, too.

I haven’t really heard from Sappho lately… I called a few days ago to say howdy, but she’s been busy with travel, work, and the house. She’s not really interested in getting together as pals like Kev is.

I’m just about ready to let MM perform without a net. after this week, my load will be lightened a bit. Now, to convince the Big Kahuna to let her take a weekend day, and I’ll be set.

I made sure that I have 2 days off call in a row for my B’day… I’ll still go in for daily duties despite my fondness for having it off… I still have to decide what to do for my beloved for vallie’s day… amazon is nice, but I want to supplement that with something else.

Song Poems – What is a song poem?

=====

PT – 3:30 – 4:30/5ish

Launch community meeting info at 5pm (job 3718), via cell (don’t be late!)

IHOP dindin with Kev @ 6pm – bring donna reed cereal! Meet him at FMM. Get XP pro donation for ACIM.

Polish up the documentation for training for SF,MA & ADP tomorrow.

Get some good snugs in with Newt!

=====

Ah, lovely rainy morning… A pity I can’t sleep in and cuddle up to the kitty. Well, it makes me appreciate the days I can do so that much more.

Jethro Tull’s David Palmer has Sex Change… now “Dee Palmer”. Sort of surreal, considering she’s in her mid to late 60’s.

via ldy

Hmm… it seemed so unlikely, I googled around, and it appears to be true.

BBS profile of the Queen Mary 2, in port just a block or three down the road. A cruise ship that’s 23 stories tall.

Groovy XP speed tweaks.

dabadaba music. “You know that 60s music where everyone’s singing “dabadabadaba dee, dabadabadaba, doo’? ”
found via – lileks most groovy! I’ve already downloaded most of the mp3s. I have an almost unhealthy enjoyment of these.

Con’s hoax backfires; ‘dead’ girl alive, well

“Hollywood police spent two days digging in a vacant field, running a backhoe, sifting through dirt by hand and leading a cadaver dog named Chico around on a leash — all because an inmate at Florida State Prison felt homesick.”

USF scientists solve Chilean “blob” mystery

“When a huge, unidentifiable, gelatinous blob weighing 13 tons and measuring 41 feet long and 19 feet wide washed up on a beach in Chile in July, 2003, many speculated that it was the remains of a giant sea monster.”

I woke up in the middle of the night last night feeling sort of overheated… the feeling progressed well into the morning… I took a Tylenol cold and sinus and the fever (if that was what it was) broke about 11am. My forehead was beading with sweat about 10, and body aches were continuing into the morning. If I hadn’t started feeling better, I’d have gone back to the apartment.

This morning, it was very difficult for me to wake up, as well. While I was coming out of the fog of my steam-shower, my mind cycled through a number of thoughts, many of which dissolved by the time I had toweled dry.

A sleepy guy on the bus. I have no idea why anyone would need a knit cap in Fort Lauderdale. (Maybe it was cold out, but I wasn’t feeling it.)

A recently taken undated hand out photograph received on January 25, 2004 shows a fake baby dragon encased in a 30 inch (0.76 meters) jar which was discovered by David Hart in a garage in Oxfordshire, southern England. A metal tin found alongside the dragon contained paperwork written in an old-fashioned German style of the 1890s, a time when their was intense rivalry between Britain’s and Germany’s scientists. The documents suggest that Britain’s Natural History Museum turned the dragon away and sent it to be destroyed, only for the jar to be intercepted by David Hart’s grandfather, Frederick Hart, who worked as a porter. REUTERS/Allistair Mitchell

Went with for a walk with Ol’ Danno to the Cheesecake Factory for a meal, conversation, and to pick up some fudge at Kilwin’s (Where I saw Val, Rhonnie, and the Swedish volleyball team a few weeks ago)to bring in to work tomorrow. Danny got some mini dark chocolate-dipped pretzels for himself, but I’ll be content to sneak a bit of turtle fudge later on. The propane-bridge restaurant (Van Gogh’s) was closed once again, and in the daylight, we could see renovations going on inside.

Los Olas looks a lot different in the daytime… I can say that I really prefer it at night. There were a lot of helicopters overhead, checking out the port, scoping out the Queen Mary 2 out there. I expect that ship will be all over tonight’s news. Seriously, that’s one big honking cruise ship (Queen Mary 2 is the largest (151,400 tons), longest (1,132 feet/345 meters), tallest (236 feet/72 meters), widest (135 feet/41 meters) and most expensive ($800 million) passenger vessel ever built. She is the first true transatlantic liner to have been built since the line’s famous QE2 entered service in May 1969.)… it makes that yacht I photographed on Monday look like a toy.

I’m still waiting for my letter of credit from the phone company. I’d really like to see it make it through soon, so I can move forward with this condo buying thing..I was hoping to make it a birthday present to myself, but I don’t think it’ll happen in a week.

GrayPumpkin sent me this….

This silly game though very White-Wolf in approach reminds of something Marvel would have put out in the sixties. It would have been written by Jim Starlin or run for about 6 issues before being rightfully canceled.

That’s about as an accurate summation as I can make, too.

Something is drying out my skin a lot this winter. I wonder if it’s just the air, or if I’m having a reaction to something else.

I dreamt that I was in a late-night office meeting… wearing a suit and smoking cigarettes. A collection of things that I’m not comfortable doing, just because. There was a line of ants on the meeting table going to the coffee and sugar. I don’t remember for sure, but I wonder if I was shorn and chin-shaved, too. Heck, I don’t even much like wearing long sleeves with cuffs unless it’s cool outside. (The last time I had a short haircut was to manage the Cobb theater at Sawgrass, way back when. Best thing about that gig was that management got a cut of the concession stand profits… I was getting $.02 on everything sold, the big boss was getting $.05… that added up, fast. )

The office was mostly dark, and light was coming from a projector, showing some sort of powerpoint presentation… the air was hazy with that smoke, like a pool room. I didn’t recognize the other people in my dream… faceless corporate folk, I figure. Silhouettes with minor backlighting. No paper anywhere… bad form for a presentation… nobody was taking any notes.

Didn’t do much productive yesterday… was on call, and basically sat tight at home. Going out for a short period with Danny tomorrow, not too late, because it’s a “school night” and we both have some chores to get to before Tuesday rolls around. I figure we’ll spend an hour or two over conversation and a evening meal.

Hey, Kids! A Free McGruff comic book sent to your home! U.S. Residents only… but you can browse it here. Oh… the horror. (via msterling)

Babies with Beards – your window to the world of bearded babies.

Some of the guys over at Microsoft Research have been working on a tool which makes the human eye believe its seeing a 3D image made out of plain 2D images. Apparently it works on computers, video material, magazines and plain photos.

The cool thing is, is that they have put together a demo using some of NASA’s material from Mars, and a good article explaining it over at Blink.nu

It’s pretty keen!

Checking out TouchGraph Google Browser – allows you to type in your site/blog URL and it draws a visual representation of that URL’s related neighbors…ie. a map of sites Google considers similar to yours.

current music: Flowers on the Wall – Statler Brothers (all this talk of cigarettes and Cap’n Kangaroo)

current mood: still a lil sleepy

Dr. Strangelove is even better than I remembered it to be… I think its one of those rare goodies that lets you find new stuff with every viewing.I don’t remember the last time I saw it… maybe a decade and a half ago? Maybe longer. It was on Channel 29 (WFLX) before it was a Fox station.. back when they could show horror movies and not have to cut out the gore. The specialties there were Doctor Nausea (in the Elvira’s Movie Macabre / Commander USA’s Groovie Moovies vein – Saturday bad movie horror or kung fu with costumed wise guy host) and the “8-o’clock movie, with only 2 commercial intermissions” (The First time I saw Zardoz in full.. bored poor Pam half to death… She and I never quite saw eye to eye on bad/cheesy entertainment… We both tried, but her own bad-fandom lay elsewhere. She liked Seaquest DSV, for example… while I liked Roger Ramjet cartoons.)

I really miss some of the old independent stations.. cable pretty much wiped them out. That Channel 29 was where I first caught Videodrome, too, oddly enough.

Random Scotto factoid: I called it Dr. StrangeGlove for about a year before ever seeing the movie. I think it was because of this promotional picture.

Ping-Pong Ball Avalanche Homepage

Japanese researchers drop 320,000 balls down a steep ramp, with videos

via lj_nifty –

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/sixdegrees.bml

memcache makes this really fast (and just gets faster the more people use it) so we’ll probably stick this at the top of userinfo.bml by default later…. if you’re logged in, you’ll always see the path from you to the user you’re viewing. And maybe a little icon beside the path (footsteps?) which link to the above URL where we could add some extra options… showing multiple paths, etc.

It’s a lot faster than the lj_connect tool, but doesn’t have all of the nifty toggles. The upside is that it’ll be integrated into userinfo.

Who knew Crayola had a database of colors? This one links to Burnt Sienna, and includes a cultural history of brown, and historical information on this Crayola crayon. What a fun reference tool!

RSS Reader from Yahoo (in beta). If you are on MyYahoo, you can have it add RSS feeds from blogs, news sites, etc. to your page.

My life has been rated:
See what your rating is!

What does this mean?

Found while searching for the proper spelling / origin of Murgatroyd.

“I do not know whether in those days there was only one Constable for each Township, appointed by the King or whether there was a small body of men holding office. Judging by the fact that the Constable for Midgley had the same name as the Berewick I imagine that there was indeed only one and therefore that our oldest known ancestor was the ‘King’s man’ for the Township and consequently a powerful figure. Moor-gate-royd lies near Warley, Halifax. The secluded mansion, formerly known as “Murgateroyde” now called “Hollins”, is built upon the demesne granted to the Earl of Warren by William the Norman, and is, from its families and the historic incidents connected with it, one of the most interesting of houses.”

or….

In 1887 Gilbert & Sullivan brought the operetta – Ruddigore or “The Witch’s Curse” to the Savoy Theatre on January 22nd for the first time.

One of the characters, Sir Roderic Murgatroyd, a “Bad Baronet of Ruddigore” had a generational curse on him: His ancestor Sir Rupert was cursed by a witch to “do one crime, or more, once every day, for ever” or face an agonising death.

So, basically the word “murgatroyd” has everything to do with a cursed existence, and unfortunate circumstances and situations.

Note, via ldy (who assisted in my search) – be careful doing any research… if you search for “murgatroid” on Google, you get porn! (and not gay panther porn, either!)

Mildly chilly today (was feeling like 40 this morning. I had a cat under the covers.) I wonder if temperature has an effect on kids going missing, considering Mona’s good fortune last night.

I can only imagine that’s it’s snowy-snowy in points North today. Hopefully, folks are staying safe.

Reduced-fat Triscuits are yucky. Don’t bother.

Human clock: Click the pics for up-to-the-minute accuracy.

DVDRhelp has Region-free hacks.

Van Helsing… So cheesy. You know, Bruce Campbell could’ve pulled that role off, though Jackman looks the part, too.

Random Scotto’s dad factoid: He referred to my (or his, or my brother’s) teeth as “snags”. As in, “Don’t forget to brush your snags after your shower!” Where he picked up that from, I may never know…none of use are really snaggle-toothed…Heavens to Murgatroyd, no! He’d been using it since I could recognize speech. I’m guilty of using the term myself, now.

I’m glad to see something positive there…

Sarmad talks about how the US Army is rebuilding schools and what that means to Iraqi children and their nation. His English is a little rough, but it’s from the heart, and it lets us know that despite the carping of the liberal press, we continue to do good work in Iraq. It isn’t all about bombings and body count.

-via bandicoot

Don’t hesitate on this one: This bootleg mash-up is a virtuoso 39-minute musical journey in which dozens of pop tracks from the past several decades are sampled, layered, spliced, time-stretched, edited and compiled into one utterly amazing sonic blast. Warning: It’s a 53MB file; so dial-up users you’ve been duly warned! (Bottom line is get it while it lasts.) Oh yes, be sure to print out the full track list.

Torrent Reactor – another lovely bittorrent site.

Ah, I’ll miss you, Cap’n Kangaroo. I got an extra-long dose of your show growing up, with a younger brother who was into “picture pages” starring Bill Cosby and his trusty pencil “Mortimer Ichabod Marker”, complete with follow-along workbook. I liked the old regime of Grandfather Clock, Dancing Bear, Mr. Moose and Mr. Bunny Rabbit (who I thought was a girl, despite the Mister… those Granny glasses convinced me at a young, young age.)

Well, Mona got off easy last night… *no* calls at all. that’s got to be some kind of record for a Friday. I hope the same luck continues the rest of this weekend.

Robert E. Howard, the grandfather of sword and sorcery fiction, would have been ninety-eight years old yesterday. The creator of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and several Cthulhu Mythos stories died far too young after losing the battle with his personal demons. If you’ve never read his work, you’re missing out on a lot. The Robert E. Howard United Press Association has a lot of resources about him and his work. (A lot more than just Arnold lopping off James Earl Jones’ noggin, and rolling it down stairs.)

I’m evil …I edited out Sally (like Stalin did to Der Commissar) to economize on my dancing Linus icon. The Hey-Ya Charlie Brown link moved *fast* over LJ.

Top 100 Usenet groups, by bytes posted

Robot Belly-dancer Continue reading 6424 So Long, Cap, & robo-dancer. →

Ah, I’ll miss you, Cap’n Kangaroo. I got an extra-long dose of your show growing up, with a younger brother who was into “picture pages” starring Bill Cosby and his trusty pencil “Mortimer Ichabod Marker”, complete with follow-along workbook. I liked the old regime of Grandfather Clock, Dancing Bear, Mr. Moose and Mr. Bunny Rabbit (who I thought was a girl, despite the Mister… those Granny glasses convinced me at a young, young age.)

Well, Mona got off easy last night… *no* calls at all. that’s got to be some kind of record for a Friday. I hope the same luck continues the rest of this weekend.

Robert E. Howard, the grandfather of sword and sorcery fiction, would have been ninety-eight years old yesterday. The creator of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and several Cthulhu Mythos stories died far too young after losing the battle with his personal demons. If you’ve never read his work, you’re missing out on a lot. The Robert E. Howard United Press Association has a lot of resources about him and his work. (A lot more than just Arnold lopping off James Earl Jones’ noggin, and rolling it down stairs.)

I’m evil …I edited out Sally (like Stalin did to Der Commissar) to economize on my dancing Linus icon. The Hey-Ya Charlie Brown link moved *fast* over LJ.

Top 100 Usenet groups, by bytes posted

Robot Belly-dancer Continue reading 6424 So Long, Cap, & robo-dancer. →