beer flavored – Page 3

3 More to go….

So Christmas was a while back and as is tradition in the Kern household we gave each other gifts… Parent’s get the kids junk, kids get the parents junk, and the cycle perpetuates itself. This year was a little bit different as the junk count was down, but the at the time percived awesomeness factor was up.

My little brother got me a ice chest filled with Coors, now the gift was the ice chest but he couldn’t give it to me empty so he gave it to me with a 30 pack of Coors in it. With each CAN being lovingly wrapped by himself and his assistant.

Did I mention there were a few that were double wrapped? No? They were….

So for the better part of the last 2 months I have had all of this damn beer in my fridge slowly working my way through it. Because as we all know I like fat tire and Guinness, in a pinch or when I’m on call I will drink Coors.

Why not throw it out? Well first off it was a gift that is just rude, and second you don’t throw out or cook with beer (except keystone it’s ok to cook w/ keystone just replace all water wth beer). So I’ve been “suffering” through getting all of this damn beer drunk.

I’m down to my last three and two of them will be gone in the next hour and after that I only have one more to go.

Finally….

And what did I do to extract revenge on my brother? I bought him “Call of Duty4” for his birthday. He gives me coors, I give him something that will suck the social life out of him. I’m just evil like that.

Happy leap day!

Ramble On…..

Must be a presidential election year… sure as the tides change, the moon has an eclipse, and our country goes into the bowels of a of yet another election cycle I look up from whatever the hell it is that I’m doing and go… “shit I’m tired of how I’ve been blogging for the last 4 years I need to change some things up.”

So if you’ve been wondering where the hell I’ve been at for the last six weeks other then a couple of sub par posts most of my time has been spent in fierce battles of Team Fortress 2 or honing my skills as a interstellar space pirate. Which is to say I’ve picked EVE (the game not the pregnant blogger we all know and love (but not love her, like her husband)) in between my fits of flights of fancy I’ve also managed to keep my thoughts coherent and focused long enough to put together two websites. One of a professional nature and the other… well we are just going to have to say that it’s the natural evolution of what I do at night when I’m not doing what I do so well during the day.

The professional site is azpacs.org and is geared to be a site for the busy informatics professional. It’s a work in progress and I’ve enlisted some help that and my TG-WOW said I needed to get another tax write off. So I went and built me another tax write off. Just hope it pasts muster with the TG-WOW next year.

The other site is a honest to god serious attempt at a word press type blog.

So your probaly asking what the address is… well I’m not going to tell you, but I will give you a hint. I’m not a terribly creative person and the main content of the address is already contained within the address of this pile of drivel.

Now why start a word press type blog? Well two things really 1. I’m always up for experimenting with new apps and I’ve heard generally positive things about word press. 2. Cody told me how much he was paying for hosting and when I looked at what I was paying and not getting from my old provider I decided to move… and as with most things that involve me a few beers and rainy weekend it just kind of snowballed from there.

For the time being I will be keeping both blogs going updating one and then the other. I’m not totally committed to the idea of moving the blog. I’ve figured out a few things that I can do to help make the transition easier, but I have to get other pieces parts working.

And just in case your sitting in your jammies with a rocky mountain high going on around you I’m writing this email on my back porch at 8:00 at night, it’s 60 degrees, and not a snowflake to be found.

Of course come July we will see who’s laughing last.

Provided I haven’t spontaneously combusted.

Beyond tunnel vision…. like shadows into the light

If your a new reader you’ve probally never read my reasons to get a TG-WoW do yourself a favor and go read that post right now. For the rest of you who continue to not listen to my advice I don’t want to hear any whining.

You know who you are.

The weather has been excpitonally warm this weekend and as a direct result I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the backyard. This has led me to a revelation of sort. Why on earth are pine trees planted in the desert? It’s not like we have ton’s of water out here yet I have two 30 foot+ pine trees in my back yard. The house in Kingman also had two giant pine trees! Really what possesses someone to plant these giant water sucking trees? You know if you could make beer from the things I could understand. Still that is just stupid ya know?

I think I’m just bitter I have to clean up all of those pine needles and don’t get any of those Rocky Mountain Views.

Yes, I like Phoenix I just have to question some random person’s motivation every now and again.

I believe in miracles….

I believe in Eli Manning and the New York Giants, they can and will beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

What gives me this confidence and insight?

I’m a Cardinals Fan! We had a not losing season this year therefor the NFC team in the Super Bowl must win when playing in a NFC teams home field! If nothing else I do feel that the Patriots should be taken down a rung or two on the old totem pole.

What more can you ask for?

A hail Mary or three and hope the either Tom Brady or Randy Moss trips over a Playmate at the Playboy party.

The one with alot of words…

No I haven’t been watching friends… there is no gratitous nudity in that show. And I’m on a Led Zepplin kick so it’s kind of hard to use a line from one of their songs.

Why?

Because there are 3 other posts in the last 4 years with some sort of Led Zepplin refrence. Ok here’s a game for you, find two of the three titles with lines from Led Zepplin songs and you will win dinner on me… and when I say on me I will meet you at like a Chilli’s in a strip mall some placy buy you a beer and dinner. I’m not really going to let you eat dinner on me unless you 20 something cute and female in which case goto town.

Now your probally asking yourself why only 4 years for this game Tom? Well that’s easy that is about how long I’ve been on blogger you don’t honestly expect me to expect you to search all 8 years of this shit do you?

Wait 7 years? Oh good lord it has been 7 years… December 1, 2000. I started blogging in the 20th century! There has to be some sort of award for that. “And now to present Tom with the award for the most pristine and occasionally amusing pile of shit on the intertubes is Kate Beckensile” (and if Kate Beckensile isn’t around snag Cylon Model Eight aka Boomer aka Athena to present the award) This pile of crap is older then some of my friends kids and is defitnaly older then all of their marriages.

I wonder if it’s time to graduate from blogger to a honest to goodness domain name and some sort of open source web2.0 social networking esque website with a content managment system that would allow me to blog in real time as I thought of something, post pictures when ever I saw something that was amusing to me!

Or I can have another beer and go get some books packaged together for more friends having their first peanut.

I think I’m going to do that, personal jesus would be proud.

With his mind he says…. “NO MORE”

Hmmm I guess I should explain my title this evening. I’m listening to music as I often do when I write. And in the case of this evening I happen to be listening to a playlist I call “Seattle Sounds” which if you can’t figure out from the title contains mainly music from Seattle like Pearl Jam.

So when I start writing I write the line that is playing when I open the page… and in this case it happens to be what amounts to a Pearl Jam protest song, against President Bush.

Why do I feel the need to explain this? I have alot of knuckle dragging republican family members that read this drivel… And I mean knuckle dragging in the most positive sense of the word possible 🙂

Ok now that I’ve offended 2.8 of my readers lets get on with it already.

So a loooooonnnnnnngggggg while back I was having a beer with a coworker and her husband who had just started his own I.T. consulting business. As we sat their drinking our Fat Tires in the late Arizona summer the subject turned to blogs and other thing web 2.0. At which point Rich (the coworkers husbands name) tells me about his blog Securosis. A couple of weeks later coworker and I are talking and I mention I’ve been reading Rich’s blog and mention what I like and don’t like… Ok I mainly like everything I’m an encouraging person like that.

A week or so later coworker comes back and says something to the effect that Rich liked the feedback and if there is anything I want to ask him I can and he will publish it on his blog. Several weeks pass and I can’t come up with any thing good, finally I come up with this little gem

Yeah it’s not much but I think it’s cool and Rich is respected in the I.T. security blogger circuit. At least I didn’t ask him about the best ways to find new and intersting p0rn… I’m pretty sure I have that one covered.

What was that scar? Situated from afar….

So I upgraded to Leopard the day it came out on my Mac. Yeah I know I’m adventurous I also downgraded to Vista on the same day. In the almost 7 weeks and change I’ve been very happy with Leopard as compared to Vista. I have had one gripe though, the performance is not what I was expecting Leopard has been kind of chunky at times for me. I chalked this up to the fact that I did a upgrade instead of a clean install.

Why on earth did I do that? Simple, every piece of literature I read on upgrading MAC OS X said you could do a straight upgrade and not have to worry about a clean install. I bought it because I had done several upgrades on Linux boxes rather then do straight reinstalls.

So I broke down the other night and popped the Leopard disk in the drive and did a clean install. Holy crap talk about the easiest install I have ever done. 4 clicks of the mouse to get it kicked off. Three more clicks to start the restore process from my Time Machine disk. Total time the old “Aluminum Falcon” was out of commission? One hour forty five minutes. And when I was done everything was back in place and worked just like it had before. Programs, Play lists, Pictures, Passwords in both Safari and Firefox everything worked perfectly!

This joy was tempered by the experince earlier in the week of talking to a vendor support person for a application at work. While we were chatting and waiting for things to happen on the machine at work I mentioned in passing I was thinking of buying a MAC (I do this to gauge how friendly people are to the idea of other operating systems and ideologies other then windows). I got a 10 minute talk on why Windows was better. And honestly most of it was the same crap that I’ve heard for years. Sad and she sounded kind of hot too.

Yes I just completely rejected a woman based on attitude to a Mac.

And just to make sure the universe did right it self at some point Cody and Eve (aka Mr. & Mrs. Content) have pegged my envy meter yet again by a new and redesigned death-by-blog.com blog…

A trip down analytical lane….

Back when I did this blog on Geocities while using Frontpage I would from time to talk about various stats regarding the blog… As I go back and read those entries I pretty much deride the one or two “dirty mac users” out there and was pleading with them to change operating systems.

My how times change.

I stopped doing that kind of entry because I lacked a tool in blogger to measure traffic. That is until Cody told me about Google analytics. You people have no idea how hard it has been for me to not talk about what and who comes here on a regular basis. Tonight your no longer that lucky.

Ok here is the setup… I’m looking at data for the last 30 days, so basically since I got from vacation to now. I’ve had 256 visits total…. these stats are pulled from those 256 visits.

Top browser OS/Combo — IE/Windows (It should be noted I do not use windows at home… so for all I know this site looks like crap in windows)

Mac accounts for ~16% of all visits with the overwhelmening majority using Firefox

1 person is using Linux… and since it’s only person I’m willing to bet I dialed up this page while looking at something on one of my Linux boxes.

And now for something completely different… I can now see what networks visitors are coming from… The top two are “Frontier Communications of America” and “Cablevision of Kingman” which means my parents and brother have hit this site way more then any else… actually of the 256 hits… 96 are directly from Kingman, seriously get a life. (Average time on site 13 seconds)

#3 is Comcast cable at 35 and when I do a map overlay of who comes from where I see I get 35 hits from Colorado… So Eve and Cody are keeping up with me (Hi Guys!) (Average time on site 6 seconds)

#4 is cox communications with 34 hits…. That is folks down here… average time on site 1 minute 59 seconds… Is their porn posted on this site I don’t know about?

among some of the more interesting network locations that have viewed my site or whatever reason in the last month….
bay area rapid transit district (bart)
hampton inn oklahoma city (I have no clue on this one maybe a GE field engineer?)
state of nebraska / office of the cio (is their something the state of nebraska wants to tell me?)

Ok that’s enough…. next time I do this I will find some othe wierd and unusal facts… in the mean time I’m going to go try and figure out why people are spending minutes at a time on my site.

Pay no attention to the Moose, the Squirell, or the Wapiti

As is tradition for me since I’ve moved to blogger I take the month of October “Mostly off” to do whatever it is the fuck that I do when I’m not working.

This year has been no different. From the 10 year high school reunion to a successfull elk hunt to spending money like I have a endless supply (which for the record I don’t… I get paid next week, two weeks after that I should be good though).

A while back I talked about my indecsion on going to my HS reunion, well the stars aligned and the truck drove true and I went. I had a great time until Jack D, showed up… it was all down hill from their. My brother provieds a nice synopsis on his myspace… you should go their and read it yourself. Of course you need to be my brothers friend to read it, so you probally need to friend him while you are at it.

Anyway the reunion was fun I only did the main Saturday night dinner and dancing thing. I once again confirmed that I can’t dance nor do I have rythm. On the whole it was a good experince it was good to see some folks I haven’t seen in a very long time and catch up. And if anyone from KHS97 is reading this feel free to drop a line.

So after two days of recovering from the reunion Dad and I went elk hunting, much as we have done for the last 15 years. Unlike the last 15 years we actually have something to show for our efforts. If you would like the full story drop me a line, since I don’t want to bore the general public with the tails of my hunt.

So since the hunt ended 4 days earlier then we planned I actually had a couple of days of downtime, man that is a unique concept for me. With 5 days of straight downtime I planned on getting a ton of crap done… and as is so often the case with everyone I only got a very small fraction of it done. Eh oh well.

I now return to work, and I’m almost scared for what awaits because I know the next month is going to be rough.

It’s a battering ram….. OYE OYE OYE

Ok so 88 degrees is a bit much to be sitting out on the back porch and type, at least it’s not as cheesy as 98 degrees.

Sorry bad boy band pun, bad blogger bad!

Every now and again I like to reflect on where I’ve been and what I’ve done. And if your a regular reader you know that those two things main consist of drinking beer and consternating myself about Linux. So I thought I would take a real change of pace tonight and wander down memory lane.

Turns out that memory lane has been bought by a rather unscrupulous developer and is now a 10,000 home subdivision renamed “Best Times of our Lives Acres” which is really a misnomer since everything out there is measured in Hectares.

If you don’t know what a “Hectare” is you should probably brush up on your metric system I hear all the cool countries are doing it.

Honestly though it’s been two years since I bought the house in Mesa, it feels like home. Three Years since I switched to blogger from my own perverted system of frontpage and yahoo. And 10 years since I started college.

Speaking of 10 years since I started college, I got the invitation to my 10 year High School reunion in the mail a while back. Yes my parents are officially old! I on the other hand have always found the concept of a 10 year reunion dubious at best. Add on to that how much I “love” large gatherings of people that I have no vested interest in whether or not I care what they think about me and then add a 200 mile one way trip along with a dash of $30 to get in.

And oh yes, it’s in Kingman too… and we all know how much I love Kingman. I love my family but I am really starting to understand why certain Aunt’s and Uncle’s only visited during the holidays.

Take the other side of the coin, I can see how I’m doing compared to other people I went to school with which will either completely inflate or kill my ego… and since my ego has been on life support for the last 9.5 years I’m not really that worried about it. I also know that I can eat and drink my way through $30 with not allot of a problem.

Which leads me to my final question, when people ask me what I do for a living do I tell them…

1. “I work in health care IT on a group of systems known collectively as PACS. Think of it as Flickr for the body, and with big magnets.”

2. “I’m laying my final plans for world domination, you will be calling me ‘Lord Zod‘ by the end of the year”

hmmm decisions decisions.