ABC
I'm sure ABC must own all or a big chunk of the USA Network because they have decided to take the series Monk and put it on primetime ABC. It still runs on cable, but I guess ABC needed something to toss up against friends, so...
I happened on it on ABC this evening and decided to watch the show. Turns out it was the 2-hour pilot, which I had seen. Watched again. Maybe the folks who have only seen it on ABC wouldn't notice, but I did after seeing it the first time on USA, ABC must have added an extra commercial break or lengthened the existing ones, because the cuts to commercials seemed abrupt and in slightly odd places compared to my recollection.
West Wing II
This time I paid attention and when it was over I wished it wasn't. Not only that, but it seemed too short. Very fanciful veiw of politics - no way that a presidential campaign debate would shake out that way, but made for good TV. I now know the way they gracefully rid themselves of Rob Lowe after his, what they felt were, unreasonable salary demands. That too was setup nicely. Mr. Sorkin cast one of his "Sports Night" alums, Josh Molina, in a good role. As a bonus, The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar had a small role too.
Guest Rant - Tom Petty
Somehow my mother-in-law started receiving Rolling Stone Magazine. Hey, she's 72 and seems to get quite a few things she doesn't remember ordering. :-) Needless to say, she just passes it to me because she isn't interested. Issue 909 has a one page bit on the 10 things that piss him off. 1 Radio is not even worth listening to "I don't really give a flying fuck about any of it. I've tuned out...
Right on, brother Tom. Read the rest of the article here: Tom Petty Is Pissed
Enetation VIII
The folks at enetation just weren't cutting the mustard. It made the page slow to load and half the time when it loaded there were no comments. So, so long enetation, hello Haloscan. We'll see how long this relationship lasts....
Daylight Standard Time
I don't have the typical gripe about the 15 clocks I have to change. I'm sure some folks have more, some less, but all just as aggravating. I don't like it for the same reason I don't like fall as a season - it means winter is coming. Cold wood floors, dry, itching skin, top up on the convertable...
My Sore Butt
Went for a bike ride for the first time in about a month. Just 15 little miles around town and now my butt hurts. I'm not tired or anything, just my sit bones ain't used to it no more. How the mighty have fallen, as little as 5 years ago a 60 mile day in the saddle would bring not a wimper from any part of my body, as they say, "Use it or lose it." I've lost it.
AMC
Stumbled onto Robocop last night and started watching it. When they went to a commercial I starting surfing again and realized what cable channel I had been on, AMC. Am I losing my mind or did American Movie Classics use to show movies with out commercial interruption? And now they have commercials! Well even if I wrong about the commercial thing, I still have a rant here, Robocop is not a Classic....
Enetation update - their page today said they had a server crash and that everything is now fine. They may be right because the comments are back and as a bonus the page seems to load a lot quicker, but for how long?
Enetation VII
This is an easy one. Tonight both my blogs loaded with lightning speed. There were no comments. When I click on the link for enetation Internet Explorer times out. Mozilla comes right back with an alert dialog: "Redirection limit for this URL exceeded.Unable to load the requested page." The status bar shows "Sending request to parked.studio-51.net..." Looks like another casualty of their popularity.
Repeats
The West Wing was a repeat. Law & Order was a repeat. Whats up NBC? didn't want to compeat with the World Series? Nobody outside California is watching. Pretty much nobody outside the towns invovled are watching if you can beleive the ratings numbers from the past few years.
Hard to Steal Good Stuff II
Friend gave me a CD to copy for him, "Barry White, All-Time Greatest Hits." I find it hard to beleive that a CD from 1994 could be copy protected. Maybe it is just my CD burner or software, but I could not copy the disc, nor could I rip the tracks to MP3s. Thee is more than one way to skin a cat, so off to the 'net I go. There it is the whole CD as one MP3 file, 69Meg, no problem for Mr. DSL. Once downloaded I went to use the wave editor to break it back into seperate songs and lo and behold there are 19 songs in the file. Funny the liner notes I have say should be 20. Not only that but track 19 ends 2/3 of the way through. Did someone just get tired of ripping? And of course there are now like 6 copies of this 95% complete complilation out there....
Blogspot - Enetation - Et al.
My pages still load slow as m o l a s s e s. My archives keep disappearing ( I can get them back, but it is a hassle.) Gotta get my own domain and use MT. I've said it before, but this time I think I mean it.
Register.com says Brian-the-red is wide open, but also offered these other interesting choices:
brian-the-red
brian-the-cherry
brianthecherryred
brian-the-cherry-red
brianthecerise
brian-the-cerise
brianthecrimson
brianthereddish
brian-the-crimson
brian-the-reddish
brianthebloodred
briantherubyred
brianthescarlett
briantheruby
brian-the-blood-red
brian-the-ruby-red
brian-the-scarlett
brian-the-ruby
briantheredder
brianthescarlet
brian-the-redder
brian-the-scarlet
briantheruddy
brianthereddest
brian-the-ruddy
briantheruddier
brianthecolored
brianthecherrier
brian-the-reddest
brian-the-ruddier
brian-the-colored
brian-the-cherrier
brian-the-rubyred
brian-the-bloodred
brianthecarmine
brianthecoloured
briantheincolor
brian-the-carmine
brianthecolorful
brian-the-coloured
brian-the-in-color
brian-the-colorful
briantheruddiest
brian-the-ruddiest
briantherubier
brian-the-cherryred
briantheredest
briantherednet
ebrianthered
ibrianthered
brianthecherries
Microtek Scanmaker 3750i
A friend let me borrow his scanner so I could try it out. I stumbled on some slides a while ago and thought it nice if I digitized them. This Scanner comes with a "light lid" that allows you to do slides. Instead of illuminating from the bottom, the lid lights the slide from the top allowing it to be scanned. When I got it all hooked up I ran a test scan of a piece of paper....YIKES, it's loud. Ran Donna right out of the room. I have an older Microtek Scanmaker III at work that I thought was noisy, but this thing makes that one sound positively silent. I'll try some slides in the next day or two and let you know with another rant if they stink.
Hard to Steal Good Stuff
Downloading some music of the net for someone. Downloaded a whole album from several sources and burned it to a CD. While listening to my newly pirated music I am surprised to find track 5 has got several beeps and clicks in it. How annoying. You just can't trust thieves to get it right. Now I have to go get that song from a couple of different sources and listen to each one to make sure it isn't the bad song propagated elsewhere.
Poke Me In the Eye With A Sharp Stick
I never did have conjunctivitis. The redness had cleared, but it still felt like there was something in my eye. Well, that is because there was something in there. Called the Doc and he referred me to an opthamologist. While examining me with that high powered slit light she actually said "Uh-oh." I had a speck of something lodged near the perimeter of my cornea. I got some anesthesia drops and with some highly tricky scraping of the surface she got it out and showed it to me on the end of her finger, about half the size of a pepper flake. Now I have different drops for the next 5 days.
Friends
Is it my imagination, but does it seems like Friends is just going through the motions at this point? I watched tonight's episode and it was like I'd seen this all before, not this episode neccesarily, but this feel, Seinfeld in it's last couple of years had it too. Sure the characters are still likeable, but it seems like it has been done.
Still Icky II
Still out of it with body aches and a fever. Got up and got dressed like I was going to work and even ate breakfast like normal, but after that I was so whooped I went back to bed and slept for 2 hours. Watched movies and napped.
Still Icky
The eye looks a lot better because of the drops the Doc gave me, but I felt so crappy otherwise I stayed home from work. I don't know whether I feel crappy because of a reaction to the medicine or it is just a coincidence that I got the flu the same time as the pink eye or maybe whatever virus I got caused both.
Conjuctivitis
It's Pink Eye - stay away from my blog - it's contagious.
Cold or maybe Flu
What started this morning as a slight ache in my left eye has now morphed into a runny nose and watery eyes and slight aches and now I want to go to bed...
Super 8 Motel
For $90 a night you should get a better TV than one that is 19" and slightly out of focus and a bonus of adding snow to the picture above channel 24 with a numberless remote control that the only way to get from channel 17 to channel 39 is to push the up button 21 times.
For $90 a night you should get more than one operating ice machine on the second floor all the way in the back for a 100 until place.
For $90 a night you should not get a toilet that rocks back and for so much that it threatens to dump you on the floor when you lean over to get some toilet paper.
Digital Radio
Oh boy, CD quality sound from my radio. Well, new radio, if I buy one. This technology that is available elsewhere is supposed to be available here in America soon. I ain't buying. I rarely listen to the radio any more, if it wasn't for a couple of shows on NPR I could probably do without a radio entirely. I'm sure the younger crowd will applaud this, but the last thing I need the upgraded sound quality of canned disc jockeys announcing the next 60 minutes of commercial free music, only to have them break in between every song with station promos and other crap. Radio today is as homogenized as fast-food restaurants. Drop in on any small to medium sized market and everything sounds the same, I'll bet the playlists are so similar that the same song is playing at the same time. Long live broadband internet access and mobile MP3 players.
Rain, Rain, Go Away
After what seems a fortnight of no rain, it has been drizzling to dripping to raining off and on for two days now. Quit it! Of course the weather people will be glad to quote you the fact that we are 20 or whatever inches of rain in deficit for the last two years. I know if I was a farmer I'd be complaining, but hey, I drive a convertible, make the wet stuff stop.
West Wing
Man I love this show, but you can't just watch it and try and do something else too, you miss stuff. I was watching tonight's episode and trying to rearrange my computer desk to make room for a scanner someone is letting me try out and something happened that judging by the character's expression and the background music was significant, but I didn't have a clue. Oh well, there is always reruns because I'm sure there will be no catching up next week.
The Augusta National Golf Club
Home of The Masters has been under pressure to let women in as members. This issue is probably only a big deal here locally and to chauvanistic golfers, but it caught my attention this morning when there was a little piece in the Augusta Chronicle with a picture of the front runner to be the first female in, Darla Moore (wife of the guy who owns Rainbird sprinklers.) She's a babe and for that reason they should let her in.
Cheap Windsheild Wipers
Bought a set of wipers at KMart a while back and I had a chance to use them on a misty morning drive to work today. They left streaks! Looking through the windsheild after a pass made it look like the side of a vinyl LP (you remember those things, where music came from before CDs) only with lots of glare. Of course the packing and receipt are long gone, so I guess I'll just go somewhere else and spend another $12 on another pair.
Windows 2000 II
First time I tried the Internet this morning the system locked up, had to use the power button the reset it. Then windows wouldn't restart. Format C: again, this time I formatted the drive with NTFS instead of FAT32. I seem to be up and running fine now. Just one major setback though, managed to format the D: drive by mistake right along with C:, oops! The only catstrophic thing about that was that is where I kept my Windows Address Book and the Outlook Express Stores files which I hadn't backed up. So if you don't here from me, it's because I don't have your email address....
Windows 2000
Or is it Gateway 500 or is it me not holding my tongue right? Took me three attempts to get it loaded after the PC's hight colonic. It is back up and running now, but I have an uneasy feeling now, waiting for the next lockup.
Lockout/Tagout
Because I work in a manufacturing plant, every year I have to attend an annual training session on Lockout/Tagout. Every year, even though I work in the front office and will never have cause to lockout/tagout my keyboard. I have worked here for going on 16 years and I have seen the same film 16 times. Pretty much got it memorized through osmosis, after like the 3rd time I started closing my eyes and listening and after about 8 times I started daydreaming I was on on the beach somewhere being fanned by topless nubile madiens while someone read me the proper procedure to control all hazardous energy....
Dead Grotty
I received a DVD copy of "A Hard Days Night" for my birthday last week and finally got around to watching it tonight. Back when I was growing up you were either The Beatles fan or a Roling Stones fan, but rarely both. I liked The Beatles. In junior high school I wanted to be one of them, I wore pointy boots and grew my hair into a mop top. I bought all their records and practiced a Liverpoolian accent behind the closed door of my bedroom. No matter how good their music was, if they were just breaking into the business now, they'd have a rough go of it. At least until they could get their teeth fixed. George's were dead grotty.
Enetation V
The Miata Diaries just took a minute and a half to load, the background images came up, but the posts and all....When it did come up there were no comments! Went to the enetation page and all that is there to see was, "Enetation is currently offline for a short while - no user accounts or user sites are affected by this." HA!
I wonder why removing the script the other day had no effect?
Damn Yankees III
They are in the playoffs while the Red Sox are all at home doing what I'm doing, watching the playoffs on Fox and rooting for Anaheim. And I'm sure just like our regular season hopes, our post season wishes will be squashed by the boys in pinstripes.
