States of mind….

So every now and again I hit a point where things just move along swimmingly and I don’t have anything that really inspires me to write. I call these events “life” events with in my “life” as of late drive me to write. You know the occasional trip to wal-mart that generally sets me off in more ways then you can imagine.

Why do I keep going there when I have so many choices available to me that are just as easily reached? Simple you can’t beat the prices on the same high quality name brand merchandise that you get at other department stores. There is no fighting the evil empire, just accept it and move on.

Speaking of evil empires, my coworkers and friends will tell you that I know way to much about cell phones. And to that charge I completely agree. They are intersting bits of technology that you can tell alot about a person from.

Smart phone… either they are trying to look smart (me) or it was issued to them (check for barcode on the back of the neck)

Music phone/Camera phone… I don’t get these they have iPods for a reason people. The nice things about music phones is they are also camera phones and you can tell how naughty someone is by how much they react to their cell phone “disappearing” I know one or two people who are really naughty.

Basic phone…. they use this phone to talk… how quaint.

Anyway I ran across a article about how a quarter of all people under the age of 30 only have cell phones. So I stopped to think about this for a second. I could only come up with 3 people under the age of 30 who had land lines. And if I wanted to get ahold of any of these people I would call their cell phone and not even bother with their land line. So that means that 90% of the people that I know are totally wireless. Granted this is way shifted towards the under 30 crowd. But still you get the idea.

So I started to think about why do I have a land line? Honestly it’s thrown in free with my cable tv and internet (i.e. it costs the same if I have my cable service and internet with or with out the phone option). Granted I have a couple of upgrades to my cable but that is beside the point. Why else do I have a land line? I send all of my credit cards there, you know since you have to call and activate credit cards from your home phone line. I just don’t feel comfortable doing this with a cell phone. I’ve read enough articles over the years to know that cell phones are just as susceptible to cloning today as they were 15 years ago.

Paranoid? you betcha…

Final reason? I send my voter registration to that line. So since voter reg is not under the federal do not call lists I get a million and one calls during election season. Last year I got enough phone calls on my land line that didn’t goto my cell that I was happy to keep it. And that was a off year!

Would I ever give up my land line? Yeah, and probably goto some sort of cheap voice over IP setup (like $5 a month cheap) or cheap cell phone. But since VOIP isn’t exactly that cheap and pay as you go phones are a huge rip off in my mind the land line stays collecting dust.

Lights Make Monkey Happy….

Alright here is the setup…. When I was in Kingman I had a workstation light that I kept on the top of my monitor to illuminate my desk. Why did I have this you ask? Simple there was no light in the room. It was a nifty Eclipse Computer Light that I picked up from Thinkgeek and damn did that thing rock. Sadly I had to retire it to my desk instead of monitor in 2004 after I picked up my first flat panel monitor. You know flat panel being flat and all I really couldn’t fit it on there anymore.

So that was December of 2004 and in July 2005 I left Kingman. In October of 2005 I moved into my current house. And along with me came the eclipse light. When I got the new office setup I had a dimmer switch on my lights so I figured that I wouldn’t need the eclipse light anymore.

And for the better part of 2 years that is what I did. Then my bulbs burned out… DAMN YOU KHAN!!! (I always blame Khan for my light bulbs burning out… mainly because he’s evil like that). So I do what any somewhat socially conscious person would do I head to wal-mart and purchase some Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (Notice that I said somewhat socially conscious, if I were truly socially conscious I would have gone some place else… but that is a rant for another time). I bring home the new environmentally friendly light bulbs and duly do not install them for 2 weeks…

Finally the darkness starts to annoy me and I install the lights… much to my disappointment in my dimmer they have two settings… On and Off… it’s a binary state like Drunk and Not Drunk…. I’m not pleased by my new highly illuminated surroundings. So enter my eclipse light… not only does it fit on my Dell Monitor it fit’s PERFECTLY!

Yes I know it’s sad when the best thing in a week that I have to blog about is my Eclipse Light… but hey at least you get a nifty picture out of it!

Tales from the punch bowl… the punch bowl that is my back porch.

Favorite thing about living in Phoenix? The wind doesn’t blow 100% of the time.

Yes I know, thats pretty lame. Where I’m from though the wind never stops blowing ever… it’s always windy. Here it actually dies at night, to the point where you can sit on your back porch with a beer your work pager (because your on call this week and your a good doobie) and a laptop and just start writing. Actually 5 of the last 7 posts have been made from the back porch.

Wow when you turn down the screen back light it doesn’t hurt your eyes nearly as much… that is so cool.

Diffrent theme tonight… I’ve got “Massive Attack” on the old iTunes and the Moose Drool Beer is going down rather smoothly (thanks again Eve (the woman not the game) and Cody (the mac to my PC)).

A while back I wrote about the “file wenches” at work (as I lovingly refer to them) and how they pretty much figured I hated women. So somewhere between now and then the hot one (Izzy) has made it her personal crusade to get me to stop drinking coffee (currently I’m a 2 cup a day man). To which she has made some inroads (like I’m almost willing to try the mix stuff from Nestle…almost) now this being at work my coworkers aren’t exactly helping her out… I’m a bit nasty when I haven’t had my sweet sweet caffiene fix.

So as I keep asking Izzy “what is the incentive for me to give up coffee?” She and she keeps trying to break me… Risking life and limb to get to me before 9 AM on somedays to try and break me of my oh so lovely habit. To say that the deck is stacked against her is probally understating the challenge in front of her.

So if I suddenly stop drinking coffee and become way more irritable then I normally am I must have found an incentive to give up coffee.

Wind w/ Fire!

So I’ve been dicking around with my Linux server this weekend…

It’s pissing me off.

That is all I will write about Linux… needless to say the thought of lighting several DVD’s on fire to exercise my Linux frustrations is really appealing to me right now.

While dicking around with said Linux box I wandered back to the ole website of long ago (rollingskull.com) which really didn’t come into existence until I moved down to Phoenix but for all intents and purposes it’s the same damn sight I had when I was in Kingman and doing this with Frontpage and Geo-cities.

I got to reading the old posts and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed opening up the old semi-journal to random emails from readers (all 3.2 of you). I got to thinking that I should do something like that again… then I thought if Curtis AND my brother both have a blog then there really is no point.

So while my install of CentOS 5 died for the 5th time in a row I was thinking…

Maybe what I should is something along the lines of that post card site where people mail their post cards in anonymously… it’s sometimes a riot other times really sad and typically it’s both on the same day.

So maybe I should open this thing up to a anonymous emails of whatever? (Thanks to Eve who reminded me it’s postsecret.com is what I was thinking of)

I like the idea… and it gives you (all 3.2 of you) a little bit of interactive opportunity.

So here are the rules (I know always rules)

1. Send the email anonymously…. ideally from a one time use site it’s up to you how you want to do it. If your to lazy to do that and send me an email from your regular address that kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

2. Send the email to cignus20 at hotmail dot com use the subject line “Wind w/ Fire!”

3. I will post received emails (if I get any at all) up here…

If you don’t like the rules you don’t have to email.