I mean REALLY! We have been having some cold weather here; not really bad but not good either. Then today comes and we’re getting snow. Not a lot of accumulation, but enough to be a driving hazard and enough to be a mess outside. I couldn’t see across the street for a while, then the sun would be out and it’d be really clear, then it would be coming down hard again. JEEEZ! I wish the weather would make up its mind!

It is an over-the-counter drug. (caution – NOT work friendly!)

Thanks for this one, Ron…

So little time… Well, maybe not the so little time, but I do have a lot to do.

• I need to finish up our taxes today (thanks to H&R Block’s Tax Cut software). Looks like we are going to owe for the first time in years. Of course, we did lose one big deductions as ZDog can’t be claimed as a dependent any more.
• I need to do the typical Saturday things: get groceries, clean house and do laundry. Yeah, I’m a guy and I do these things. Of course, it took years of KC bugging me to get to this point!
• I’d like to go through a bunch of older clothes and take the ones sorted out to Goodwill. We don’t have much closet space and this helps gain some back.
• I’d like to start replacing a table top. We bought a table from our church a while back; it was one of those cafeteria jobs thats 8 feet by 2.5 feet. It really comes in handy for our family get-togethers. However, the trim edging is metal and it is flaking off with sharp edges. I want to replace the entire top with something more modern.
• I’d like to clean up my computer area at home. I have about 5 computers in various states of repair (only one is critical to complete) and it is a bit cluttered, what do you think?
• I really need to clean up the back yard. The willow trees are dying and leaving a mess.

So how is your weekend starting off?

I’m waiting for KC and Breezomatic to call me after they are done with a Mary Kay party so we can go to a late dinner. While waiting, I found this cool meme at Dell’s Diner, so I blatantly plagiarized it! Thanks, Dell!

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

I just stumbled across a VERY cool site. It’s called Prog Archives. Lots of bands of all kinds. More along the lines of progressive rock bands, but they have any kind of progressive music bands listed. The clincher that makes it a VERY cool site? They have free downloads of music available. I have pulled down music from Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, The Alan Parsons Project, Queensryche, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and many more. It’s all laid out in alphabetical by band or by genre and easy to navigate. The downloads are pretty good speed, too. Check it out if you want good FREE music!

This week’s Friday Five is about choices…

1.) If you were in a band (you know, a successful one…), and you HAD to remake an old song, what band/song would you choose and why?
Why limit myself to one? I’d do something like Rush did with their latest CD, Feedback. Make an entire CD of cover tunes.

2.) If you were a Make-a-Wish child, what would you wish for (and why)?
I’d wish that I could take my entire family on an exotic “farewell” vacation.

3.) If you had the chance to learn when you were going to die, would you take it? Would you tell anyone if you knew (either your date of death or theirs)?
I don’t think I’d want to know. I’d spend all my time thinking about how to avoid the situation. Instead of living life, I’d be dreading death.

4.) If you couldn’t die until you helped someone, would you rather live forever selfishly or die earlier?
Depends upon the circumstances. For my family, I’d die earlier. For good friends, the same. For someone I didn’t know it would bemuch harder.

5.) If there’s any goal you haven’t accomplished yet, what is it and what is stopping you?
Well, yeah. I’ve got a lot of goals I want to accomplish. Things like life and job and family are both a part of the goals and yet tend to get in the way of accomplishing those goals.

It’s Thursday and around my place that means Thursday Threesome.

The current book on my nightstand is The Sweet Potato Queens’ Field Guide to Men (every man I love is either married, gay or dead) I thought we’d have a little fun…

Onesome: Sweet Potato – Sweet potatoes always remind me of thanksgiving which brings me to food…what is your all time favorite holiday food that you wish you’d get a chance to eat at other times?
Pumpkin pie with LOTS and LOTS of Cool Whip. I really likes my punkin’ pie!

Twosome: Queens’ – do you follow what Prince Charles and others are up to? What do you think about the Queen not going to the wedding?
I don’t really follow it, but she has her reasons and I respect them. They are faith-based reasons. (By the way, they are the same reasons that GW and Laura Bush refused Prince Charles and his “bride-to-be” a stay in the White House.)

Threesome: Field Guide to Men – when it comes to the opposite sex, do you feel you have a grasp on ‘em – or do they continue to just surprise you?
Women are a constant mystery to me. When I was 12, my dad told me “Son, there are only two ways to understand women…. and no man knows either one.” I thought he was telling me a joke; turns out the joke is on anyone who thinks it is a joke!

Yeah, it’s late. Deltus put it up late. No fault of either one of us. Work is work and it does come before play. Anyway… here is the newest Are you more…

01) Employee or employer?
I’m an employee. I work for “the man” at work and I work for the wife at home.

02) Likely to charge your cell phone every night or likely to charge your cell phone only when the battery reads as low?
Only when the battery reads low. Of course, it is almost every night…

03) A “rent a moving truck and move your own things” kind of person or a “hire a moving company” kind of person?
The last time we moved (20 years ago) the company my wife works for hired a moving company. After three moves in the previous five years I thought I was in heaven not having to move the major appliances!

04) An avoider of junk food even though you’d love to dig in or an avoider of junk food because why would anyone want to eat that crap?
AVOID junk food? If I didn’t eat it, I’d probably be mainlining it!

05) A half-decent artist who can draw a pretty good face or a stick figure drawer?
Hell, I can’t even draw a straight line with a ruler. I am NO kind of artist.

06) Driven by bursts of inspiration or driven by approaching deadlines?
Bursts of inspiration… of course, I’m usually inspired by deadlines!!

07) Xbox or PlayStation 2?
Not much of a gamer. I think the last game station we had in the house was NES.

08) Upbeat or downtrodden?
Upbeat. Man, you gotta look at the positive side of things.

09) Proud of your belching or proud of your flatulence?
BOTH! My wife says all I have to do is breathe and I’ll have gas.

10) “Modern black and white movies are sooo artistic” or “Modern black and white movies are crap”?
Crap, definitely crap. Hell, colorize ‘em all. People aren’t pasty. Doors are not all shades of grey. Life is in color, why not all movies?

So I was looking at my photo gallery and was trying to incorporate the new skin into the old gallery. The more I did with it the more frustrated I got. Then, I came upon a stroke of genius. Or maybe I just got hit on the head with the right apple, eh Newton?

I downloaded and am now using a sort-of plugin for WordPress called Simple PHP Gallery; it has a version that is sort-of customized to be incorporated into WordPress. Shane Sweeney has a nice tutorial on how to use the WordPress customized version and incorporate it into your WordPress 1.5 blog. Very nice, Shane! Very easy to do. Look, ma, mine’s done! The nice thing is that when I change skins, the gallery will change skins with me. I LIKE IT!

So I’ve been stuck here at work all day today. I’ve handled about a dozen calls all day. You see, we have some business units that are not off today (President’s Day), but most are. So we have to have a skeleton crew working in order to handle any calls that come up. Mostly the calls are “I can’t log in” or “My email doesn’t work” or “I forgot my password”. Translation: The end-user can’t remember their password over the weekend and now after three incorrect tries their LAN account is locked out. Translation of the Translation: The end user forgot where they put the sticky note where they wrote their password down.

I’ve had one “challenging” call and it was because the end-user did not have our standard equipment. She had slightly non-standard equipment and the call lasted about 10 minutes. (or long enough for me to figure out that she needed to power cycle both her Linksys home router and her ORiNOCO wireless access point in order for her to connect wirelessly at home)

Oh, and if you are reading this, Chris (my boss), I’ve been working my fingers to the bone keeping our users connected. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Haven’t done a movie review in a really long time, so maybe it was time. Or maybe I watched a movie that was worthy of a review. Or maybe it’s Sunday and I’m bored before playing basketball tonight. Any way you cut it I’m doing a movie review on the movie Constantine.

When I saw the previews the first thing I thought was, “Oh, good?!? A Matrix clone with a religious slant.” I couldn’t be farther from the truth. The movie is based on the DC Comics character HellBlazer, a.k.a. John Constantine. It stars Keanu Reaves and John Constantine and Rachel Weisz as twins Isabel and Angel Dodson. Both turned in excellent performances. Also doing a great job with their roles were Tilda Swinton as Gabriel and Gavin Rossdale as Balthazar. Many of us know Gavin Rossdale as the former lead singer for the group Bush. Also, I thought Peter Stormare did an excellent job in his portrayal as Satan.

The story centers on John Constantine; he is rude, crude, chain-smoking, hard-drinking and generally uncaring. As with many DC Comics heros, he has all too many human flaws. What makes him special was a death experience; he was clinically dead for 2 minutes as a teen and now can literally make trips into hell to gather information. He uses this “inside info” to send demons inhabiting humans back to hell. This is his “super” power. Angela Dodson is a police detective who is investigating the alleged suicide of her twin sister Isabel. The two have a shaky start but end up with what seems to be the start of a romantic involvement. I’m not going to go into plot details here, I don’t think it would sway anyone (like my movie reviews would anyway!!).

I liked this movie. I thought all the main characters did a good job with their roles. I thought the writing was good; being based on a comic can be a detraction to this. I also thought the directing was tight; it didn’t seem that we spent a lot of time on scenes where some innocuous fact was brought out after much deliberation. (Man, do I sound full of myself there!) While this movie isn’t a “must see”, I’d definitley rate it a strong 7 out of 10.