Progress

Actually felt like I was making progress at work today. Got a lot of things doe that I wanted to do.

I started a task that I completely forget that I need to do every 2 months or so. I hope to have it done before I leave for the day. If I get it done before I leave I will be a happy happy camper.

The big boss has a new laptop. I waaaaaant it. It’s got a built in EVDO card that allows him to be on high speed wireless wherever you would get cell phone reception. Data plans for EVDO packages are getting to be in the range where they are tempting even me.

Good day overall… wohoo!

Too Many Games

So, I woke up this morning with a monster headache and a line of dialogue stuck in my head.

“You get the dinosaur, I’ll get the gun.”

Now, I don’t remember what the hell I was dreaming. I have to think that it was something to do with the game that I play regularly because the game does indeed have both dinosaurs and guns.

What I am trying to puzzle out in my mind is how that particular line could apply to the game that I play. It doesn’t quite fit perfectly.

But I think it’s a spectacular line of dialogue none the less.

It bothers me that Firefox is screaming at me that I am spelling dialogue wrong and wants to spell it dialog.

I upgraded my work computer to Vista to correct a horrible issue that has been happening with the backup on my Windows XP workstation. I have discovered my backup software will not run on Vista. It’s a whole watch chain and the hair comb situation.

In doing this I started thinking of more upcoming upgrades soon to happen at work and thought of a monster problem coming my way. Now on one hand my boss is happy I thought of it before we got slapped in the face 2 seconds too late to do something about it. On the other hand, she is really pissed that it’s one more crappy thing we have to deal with. I’m with her.

This is going out turn out to be a very long week.

Cinco VS. St. Patty’s

Yes, we’ve just finished with our second drinking holiday of the year.

Cinco de Mayo or as it’s know in LA, Drinko de Mayo affects me only in 2 ways. First, we had a free lunch bufet at work… yummy. Second is the day after you got 10 million hung over people on the damn roads.

Seriously, I think it’s the most dangerous driving day of the year in Los Angeles. I can only imagine that it’s this bad in Boston on March 18th.

That being said though, I think we need more drinking holidays. I know Thanksgiving and Christmas have heavy drinking elements involved but that’s only to drown out the misery of having to be in the same room as your relatives for that long.

So in the comments, be creative today and share with us the new drinking holidays we should come up with.

In Canada

In Canada for a funeral. No Blogs likely until May.

Free At Last

On Nov. 20th of last year I wrote about a photographer in Iraq jailed by US authorities.

http://wavemancali.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/serious-question/

He was freed today.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080416/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_photographer_freed;_ylt=AlLk5L2Kl1u4ehfgYWLUzQCs0NUE

2 years. All charges dismissed.

Will he see 2 years of pay? Will he ever be compensated for his 2 years of imprisonment? Somehow I doubt it.

He was working to try and bring you a picture of what life is like in a war zone like Iraq. How are you going to help make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again?

My Results

Well yesterday I showed a web site that chooses your ideal US living location.

Apparently Darlene and I will be not be in the same location

My number one is Hopskinsville, Kentucky apparently. My number 2 Paris, Tennessee is Darlene’s #8 so maybe we can compromise.

Seven in my 24 are in North Carolina. I have been to North Carolina and really enjoyed it but it was humid as hell and one of the few things I had in the strongly agreed column was “It’s not the heat it’s the humidity that kills me”.

What I found interesting is that I have had the, “What is your dream location?” conversation a hell of a lot in the past. I have constantly been told by people who have traveled the US extensively, who’s opinions I actually value that I would love Tennessee and Kentucky.

I have been to both states but only in a passing through drive by type of way.

Funny enough, with the last name of Watters, being close to water seems to be a very important choice of most of the Watters clan and my wife when choosing a place they want to live.

Reader Participation Needed

Ok, I found a web site that is supposed to find the best place for you to live in the US depending on your personal preferences.

I need you all to take the test and tell me where they throw you to see if it’s all a massive real estate marketing scam

www.findyourspot.com

Double Warning. It will take 10 minutes or so to answer all the questions and they do ask your mailing adress at the end of the quiz and don’t let you see the results unless you put it in.

Tomorrow I will show you the place that it chose for me.

Allergies Suck

There is a particular flower in that blooms now and for the next few weeks by our mailboxes that I am dreadfully allergic to.

Unfortunately I think they bloom close to where I work too because my allergy symptoms are not leaving me at work either.

Keeping the windows closed at night in the apartment has helped to a large degree but it gets insanely dry in the apartment if we don’t open the windows at night.

We bought a humidifier for the bedroom but I have to remember to fill it all the time and as I am really old now, the first thing to go was the memory right?

Maybe what’s her face that I live with will remind me to do something or other tonight.

What the hell was I talking about?

Oh yeah, kids today.. no damn respect and that’s all I have to say about that.

Idiocracy

If you haven’t watched the movie Idiocracy, leave now and watch it or be prepared for spoilers because I am going to ruin it for you.

Ok run along, I’ll wait…..

In Idiocracy Luke Wilson plays an average guy in the army who never takes charge and is essentially wasting his life away with no drive or ambition.

He gets volunteered for an army medical experiment for long term hibernation of humans. It’s supposed to last a year. All the women in the movie end up being too smart to get volunteered as the female test subject I suppose so they end up just hiring a hooker.

The project gets scraped while Luke and the hooker are in the hibernation devices.

500 years later the building that the pods are hooked up to gets bulldozed and the pods get opened. Luke Wilson and the hooker are now the most intelligent people on the planet. Life has become automated and the average person sits in front of the TV all day watching OW My Balls, Monster truck rallies and wrestling. All Starbucks are brothels, and the Costco is the size of a mid to large size city.

The difficulty is of course is after decades of neglect all the automation is starting to break down and there is no-one smart enough left to fix it all.

Why did I just ruin this movie for you or recap it if you have already seen it?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/deteriorating_water_pipes;_ylt=Agn8uYCkhIzF.JD0n8O0TXWs0NUE

This article caught my eye and all I could think of was that movie.

Weekend Phone Calls and Turning 40

So this weekend, the phone rings and as usual when it’s a recorded message you get 3 hello’s out before the recording starts. Just before I hang up the recording starts.

Normally the second I hear that it is a recording I hang up, but since I’ve been annoyed of late by telemarketers I’ve listened occasionally in hope of getting whoever called me a nice $25,000 fine because I’m on the national do not call registry for telemarketers.

So, quite quickly I learn that the call is a collect call from an inmate in the California penal system.

I’m about to hang up when I think, hey, I’m the friend that a lot of my friends would call for bail money if they ever got into a jam. I’d better wait for the part where I find out who’s calling.

Well, ends up it was a wrong number. Sorry Havier, I don’t know you and I’m not going to accept a $5 charge to let you know you have the wrong number. I almost changed my mind on that decision the 3rd time you called, but in the end I hope you got whoever you were looking for.

As for the second part of my title, yup I am officially ancient today.

My mid-life crisis is scheduled for around 6pm when I intend to clean out all the bank accounts, hop a flight to the Philippines and live on a beach in a grass hut for the next 30 years.

Actually I jest, I could never do that. Grass huts have documented issues with shoddy high speed internet.

So today in the comments you get to answer 2 questions. Outside of immediate family, who is your jail phone call going to? And what is the destination you are going to when you decide you’ve had enough of society and run away from your life?

Avast Ye Scurvy Dogs

A large French luxury yacht has been seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

While I feel for the 30 crew members currently held hostage, I have to admit I greatly question the series of events that led to it’s capture.

The prices to take a 10 day jaunt on this ship start at $3465. It holds 64 passengers and crews 30 people. We’ll go with the base price for the income of the ship ( I am sure the big cabins probably go for 10k for the 10 days but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). We’ll assume 80% of the time they are carrying passengers and not moving the ship with crew only to different locations.

This gives them roughly 6.5 million a year in gross income. With a crew of 30 we’ll average the salaries out to 50k a year. We all know the captain is getting 100k+ but we also all know that the cabin boys are only making 25k, let’s get real.

This takes the ship down to 5 million a year coming in.

Port fees, maintenance, food, fuel (it is a sail based ship but they will run on motor a fair bit) , registry, insurance and overall ship expenses I am going to be generous and give them 2 million a year. (I’d be surprised if the amount exceeded 1.2 million to be truthful , but I want to flesh this out.)

So this leaves the ship bringing in 3 million a year profit when all is said and done.

Now I have to say that if you coughed up a half a million a year, you could hire appropriate security to fend off the pirates, or conversely, for probably half that with a decent shady contact you could pay off the pirates to leave you the fuck alone when traveling through their waters.

On the flip side, I just priced a 288′ sailboat similar to the one captured and it cost 180 million dollars. At only 3 million profit a year you’d not finish paying off the boat in your lifetime. But still I think I’d be scheduling my jaunts in pirate waters to closely correspond with passing warships.

Don’t you wish you lived in the lifestyle where you had to be worried about pirates? Man that would be awesome.

Casting Call

So, Deal or No Deal is doing casting calls where my wife works Saturday.

I am thinking of going.

I am also thinking of not going.

The +’s would be appearing on the show and maybe winning a million dollars, maybe winning some money on a horse race.

The -’s would be standing in long lines, low, low chances of being picked.

My extreme hatred of long lines and rude crowds are making the minuses seem to weigh heavier. I have tried to audition for 2 other game shows and the casting calls have been not too horrible. Because they were not over advertised the crowds were not as bad as they could have been.

But Saturday I’d have to deal with the regular crowds + the crowd going only to audition.

Decisions, decisions.

Policing the Police

Currently I am a law and order type of guy. I have been in the past too don’t get me wrong, but I do see the appeal of a life of crime when it comes to white collar crime like the Enron executive type bastards.

I mean there are probably 80 people skimming funds illegally in business for every 1 that gets caught. Damn fine odds for some of the bigger pay offs. But with so many ways to make the money legally I’ll stick with the safe and sound methods methinks.

But you have to look at the role of police in our lives. I respect the hell out of 90% of the police out there. They’re doing a job that I don’t know if I could do. Unfortunately, my respect of the police diminishes a little bit every year. If you had asked me what percentage of police I respected say 10-15 years ago I probably would have said 99%.

What has changed you ask?

A few things. With media trends we are starting to see the citizen type journalist with access to a camcorder and a computer able to show us things we’re not seeing on TV via YouTube or other internet video sites.

Also in the US, we’re seeing an increase of abuses of power in upper level agencies like the FBI and the CIA because of the Patriot Act. For example, I think Mark Spitzer the disgraced former Governor of New York is a dick and deserves all the punishment he got. But if it had not been for the Patriot Act he would not have been caught. You see, what got him was a SAR, or Suspicious Activity Report from his banks.

When he was moving funds around to pay for his hookers, his banks saw that the activity was outside the norm and reported it. Various law enforcement agencies got involved, surveillance was put on him and he got caught.

Now here is the thing. The Patriot Act was supposed to protect us from terrorism. I’ve got a real problem with it being used to root out prostitution rings. If someone is moving money in a suspicious manner and they are investigated for terrorist activities and they find out he’s not a terrorist, it should be case closed.

The Patriot Act gave police special powers for a purpose. Once those powers are used for a different purpose they will be used again and again in the wrong way. The parallel is the Iraq War itself. Supposedly we went to Iraq because they had WMD’s that were an imminent threat to the US. This has turned out to be bullshit and we’re pissing away billions upon billions of dollars to “maintain stability” in the middle east. The bogus reason has been usurped just like the initial Patriot Act investigation of Spitzer.

The other reason I’ve started to lose respect for police is the increase in secrecy in trying to investigate when police operations go wrong or bad. I understand that it is a hard job and respect the people who do that hard job, but they are given powers that ordinary citizens don’t have and therefore must be held to a higher standard of accountability. It’s like we learned in Spider Man people.

OK I Lied

I said no blog until the 31st but I just read a fascinating article that I had to share.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The New York Times has a great article today about scientists discovering work by a French typesetter working to create visual representations of sound.

Now an accurate visual representation of sound is a recording just as much as digital information encoded on to a CD. Scientists from Berkley discovered how to reverse engineer as it were the visual representations made by the French typesetter back into the sound that was recorded.

The result is a 10 second audio clip from 1860 of a woman sining Au Claire De La Lune, A classic French song that I’ve heard countless times growing up learning French in the Canadian school system.

The French typesetter called his invention of recording the sound a Phonautogram and it predates by 17 years the first known recording of sound by Edison, when he recorded Mary Has a Little Lamb in 1877.

Now this article sparked a sci-fi idea in my head, like most cool stories do.

What if we started creating instruments sensitive enough to pick up patterns on everyday object that were nearby when you and I were talking in a room? Sound waves bounce off everything around them, our eardrums vibrate when the waves hit them. What is to say there isn’t a perceptible change in the atomic structure of your desk whenever a sound hits it?

What if we could take a painting that has hung in the Oval Office and listen to all the conversations that it has witnessed?

What is we could analyze the Mona Lisa and hear what DiVinci told his model while she was posing?

The price of antiques would rise I think, but so would the value of some every day objects.

Blogcation

I am taking a blogcation for the rest of the week. No new posts until the 31st at the earliest.

I shall leave you with some movie quotes to try and guess.

“You can never go home again, Oatman… but I guess you can shop there. “

“Anything so innocent and built like that just gotta be named Lucille.”

“In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.”

“I always knew some day you’d come walking back through my door. I never doubted that. Something made it inevitable. So, what are you doing here in Nepal?”

“By the authority vested in me by Kaiser William II, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution.”

“I told you to keep away from that radio. If that battery is dead it’ll have company.”

I’ve seen all 6 of the movies above at least 3 times each. They are some of my favorites.

PS. No cheating by just Googling them, take a stab at them first. If you know all 6 off the top of your head obviously we have similar tastes in movies. Name 2 movies that you think I’d like but may have missed.