Category: friends

Don’t you trip like I do?

You know I really need to do something about all of this crap on my floors and all of the tripping that then follows the crap around. It’s bad enough I’m tripping lord forbid the roomba trip over itself…

Oh yeah I got what could only be called two of the most throughly awesome xmas gifts one being a 30 pack of Coors light (individually wrapped (thanks Scott)) and a Roomba (Thanks Grandpa, people are going to have to work hard to top that gift) The roomba is a awesome little piece of technology while it does not replace traditional cleaning it makes the time between cleanings a little less dirty. I’ve actually been very surprised at how well it works, and it has a 5 pin serial port so we all know what that means… roombas with chain guns and rockets.

I may have to put a lift kit and beer cooler on the thing to just to complete the redneck motif.

Oh and I need to find a Tony Stewart bumper sticker for the roomba too!

Hopefully everyone had a quiet and pregnant new year where no streaking or feats of mass quantities of alcohol were consumed… Hell I was just happy that I didn’t spend this year curled up in a ball sick like I have 3 of the last 4 years. I did break with one tradition this year and watch Dick Clark on ABC… uh yeah… he’s going on the top of my death pool this year or at the very least most likely to end up cryogenically frozen in Scottsdale.

What does 2008 hold in store? Who knows thats why linear time is so cool! My only hope is that 2008 holds more quality strippers then 2007 did (for the record the # of quality strippers in 2007 was 8 one night in April)

And world peace… but honestly I would just be happy with more strippers.

A message….

Not directed at anyone person in particular… mostly… don’t think these messages are for you? Print out this blog post and write in your name, instant personal message from Tom!

Hey ___________ I picked up the new TOOL DVD today… I basically paid $10 for a 8 minute video and a 45 minute documentary. Yet I don’t feel ripped off! You should pick it up or borrow it next time your in my neck of the woods.

Hey ___________ I heard this line and thought of you…. “finally I get to save the earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slide shows” (al gore)

Hey ___________ They hypnotoad commercials aren’t nearly as good as the hypnotoad show… all hail hypnotoad!

Why only three? Well if you read more often you would know that now wouldn’t you.

Ok just so you don’t feel left out you big baby…

Hey ____________ Catch this movie trailer before it’s taken down from the site it’s posted to!

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…

And now another word from a really good bottle of scotch.

So the writers strike, it starting to suck for me… I’m lacking my John Stewart fix. I mean I’m lacking my John Stewart fix to the point that I’m actually watching CNN. It’s kind of weird to watch the news and not have a montage of some sort pop up where people are saying things that are 180 degree’s from what they were just saying.

So this distinct lack of John Stewart pushed me over the edge, what the hell is this strike about?

The internet is a wonderful thing.

I landed on everyone’s favorite Star Trek wonder kid, voice of Aqua Lad and in my world “A” list blogger Wil Wheaton Oh hey he has a couple of links to something called “unitedhollywood.com” WAIT WAIT HE HAS A VIDEO! IT’S FROM THE COLBERT REPORT!!! Oh wait their is no Stephen Colbert, but it’s a writer from the Colbert Report. That is good enough for me.

I watch the video and finally decide I wonder where I go when I click on “Unitedhollywood.com“

Oh it’s the blog for the writers HEY LOOK MORE NOT JOHN STEWART BUT HIS WRITERS! I got my John Stewart fix finally and then way down at the bottom of the page is a link to a video that talks about what each generation of writers has gone through to get where they are today. It’s actually a start contrast to the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert combo.

I read, I watch, I ponder… I ask “What does Ronald D. Moore think?” I check the Scifi.com blog, nothing there since June, check Wikipedia and BAM! Their is a link to to rondmoore.com
and it’s my personal fiction writing hero of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica. The blog is new and done in iWeb but it’s Ronald D. Moore uncensored, the only thing better is Ronald D. Moore with a bottle of Scotch, the smoking lamp turned off, and a podcast recording under way.

Cody as a side note, remember the poker table with the midget from the show “Carnival” when we were in Vegas? This is the guy who wrote the first season, he left before the second season to do Battlestar Galactica!

So I’ve read and pondered for a while now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we should all find a good book/game/hobby and snuggle/curl up/next/to our very bearded/pregnant/sleepy loved ones because this folks is going to a very long haul and we need to do everything to make sure the writers get everything they are asking for.

And for the record yes, I’m a Ronald D. Moore fan boy (didn’t know screen writers had fan boys did you?)

Where were you?

So 2.5 years ago I went on a little rant about how downloading TV shows would be the savior of television and gave an example using Star Trek:Enterprise. The things I talked about were merely the logical extensions of a business model that had become wildly popular in the music arena (i.e. tv shows via iTunes)

So after 2 years of itunes goodness of tv shows how many have I downloaded? A total of two, both of them free. What gives? I of all people should be all about watching TV shows off of iTunes. True, however their are a few things that have pretty much stopped me.

1. I got a DVR aka TiVo
2. I got a big screen (like bigger then any computer monitor I will ever have big)
3. I already pay for cable.

So with these three things in place the $1.99 of iTunes just doesn’t hack it for me… I will pay <$.0003 per program and fast forward through the commercials myself. Apple TV doesn’t hold up compared to my TiVo (in both price points and performance). So where does this leave the whole tv on the internet market?

Kind of in a pickle, people aren’t flocking to internet TV, well except for High School Cheerleader Coaches who did a tame routine compared to what she’s teaching the girls to do on the field in front of hundreds of people. And even then she didn’t post it one of her students did!

Honestly trying to predict the future of television is like reading animal entrails… I’m going to leave that euphemism to you the reader.

Where was I going with this?

Oh yeah, go outside and read a book.

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.

City by the sea….


Flashback to the summer of 2004…. Young Tom had just gotten involved with a little project at Kingman Regional called “PACS” he was playing Star Wars Galaxies way more then was healthy and his girlfriend had dumped him earlier that year because he didn’t want to join her during grad school rather choosing to build a life in Kingman and join her once she finished. That was in late January early Feburary.

It’s July 2004 the dark side of Catalina island. The first day of what would be 4 day stay on the dark side of Catalina. Young Tom is sitting under a palm tree drinking a Guinness Irish stout that he bought earlier in the day for $9.00 at the two harbors general store (which really amounted to highway robbery with sales tax). It’s late in the evening and Tom is talking with his friends Sabrina and Tim about “What makes you and adult?”

Among the ideas bandied about between the three while Tom drinks his Guinness while Sabrina and Tim drink something that involves rum are… a mortgage, children, car payments, thinking about retirement, and marriage… ultimately all rejected because one of us can name one person who has one of the above items but yet we considered them to be not adult. I barely considered myself an adult at the time I was 25 job, mortgage, and thinking about investing but honestly I still thought of myself as a kid.

Why were we drinking? Well that part is easy there were 7 adults and 6 kids. And someone was not having any part of the kids (his name rhymes with mom). Sadly the 6 Guinness wouldn’t make it through the night as I shared with Brandi and we were dry by the morning. It was a long 3 days after that.

Flash forward to 2007 young but slightly older Tom is sitting on his back porch thinking about his life. No girlfriend but friends he wouldn’t trade the world for and thinking to himself as Rage Against the Machine plays in the background (Renegades of funk) am I an adult? Young but slightly older Tom would say yes only because as he was grilling a steak earlier in the day walked through his grass and pulled up weeds.

Young but slightly older Tom doesn’t know if that makes him an adult but it makes him alot more like his father then he would would care to admit to.