musings of a back porch – Page 3

The song remains the same….

It’s not often I get a text message that says “fuck you, I’m going home” it’s even less often when I get that very same text message from my own phone. Needless to say my liver is not real happy with me and hasn’t come out from under the bed for a couple of days now.

The reason?

Oh that’s easy, I spent the weekend in Californa for Kinsey’s wedding. Which I have to say as weddings go is one of the better ones I have been to. The personal highlight for me was the “Super C” theme as done by the “Minibosses” which if you haven’t checked out well you will know very quickly if you will like them or not. As always the groom looked his damn goofy self and the bride looked stunning… Congrats guys.

And is true for all people in their late twenties when someone gets married it’s a reason to spend money and abuse your liver… Which is why mine is snoozing rather soundly under the bed. Along with the drinking there was much discussion on everything under the sun, but the discussion that sticks with me the most is the one about music.

Basically it went something like this….
Nick… I usually give the iTunes store $12 a week, but I haven’t been lately since nothing good has come out.
Tom/Scott/Cody…. it’s not you nothing good has come out recently.
Curtis was there but he was more interested in the either the magazine or the basketball game it’s hard telling with him.

That one conversation sent me down a deep dark path of thinking of what have I bought recently that is good?

The last album I bought was Bauhaus, which is a 80’s new wave band that has put out their last album ever. It’s ok I don’t like it as much as I thought I would. This was all in the last two weeks.

Before Bauhaus, the last album I bought was the remastered Led Zeppelin Collection “Mothership” which I have been listening to alot since I bought it in November.

And as I look at the iTunes emails from the last year or so with very few exceptions I have mainly been buying “Bests Of” Talking Heads, Social Distortion, Led Zeppelin. Along with some older stuff… Pink Floyd and a couple of missing pieces parts in my Soundgarden/Pearl Jam collection.

The new music I’ve picked up has been real hit and miss….

The Raconteurs… not as good as I expected, but not bad
Silversun Pickups…. Crap
Chris Cornell’s new album….. mostly crap
Chemical Brothers…. weak compared to their older stuff
Smashing Pumpkins…. weak and completely forgettable (in the interest of full disclosure I find 98% of Pumpkins stuff to be crap)

Mind you I had to look through my old email receipts from iTunes to tell you what I bought. So on the whole pretty forgettable.

The only band I have nothing bad to say about is “The Yeah Yeah Yeahs” and that is pretty much it.

Of course looking at the new music on iTunes I saw that “Fall Out Boy” has covered “Beat it”

I really hope that works out as well for them as it did for that band that covered that other Michael Jackson song a few years ago.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to go try and coax my liver from out under my bed.

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!

Imagine if…

Rich didn’t care for me all that much… instead of being a side note in part of his contest I would be the target of the contest.

Let this be a lesson to you folks don’t piss off a security geek.

P.s. check out the contest since I think there are a couple of you out there that may have a story that qualifies.

Rich’s rather cool contest… at least I think so.

Oh and for the record I did not call Rich a slacker, I said I was looking forward to him typing while drugged up. Ok same difference.

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.

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.

Many times I’ve wondered how much there is to know…

In France the “Full Time” work week is 32 hours…. that means that the average French man has a 3 day weekend every week.

When one is spolied like that I think they may lose sight of just how great a 3 day weekend truly is. I’m pretty sure that is why we Americans like to pick on the French so much. All I know is I get 3 guranteed 3 day weekends a year. I may take a day off on my birthday and other then that I’m not really one for taking much time off. So when I take a 3 day weekend for no reason other then I worked a Saturday and I’m taking the time that is due me from work it is a glorious weekend indeed.

This weekend has been made all the sweeter by the following items…

1. Super Mario Galaxy; when your old 8 bit friends come back afte a 10 year hiatus…. it’s been a good year for us old school Nintendo gamers; Link, Samus, and now Mario (strangely Luigi is hinted at but is not to be found as of yet)

2. What can only be desctibed as one of the best Saturday’s ever…. 5 gallons of beer in the fermenter, a exceptionally good time at Rula Bula, and perfect weather for both events.

3. The Cardinals hitting 5-5 on the season and the playoffs being more then just a distant dream (hell at this point a winning-ish or .500 season would be good).

Oh yeah a good Nascar race to end the season and Elk for dinner.

Yep our French breatheren may get a 3 day weekend most every weekend, but we americans truly appreciate it.

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.

And with out of the ashes rose a “Pegasus”

So when I got home from hunting I came home to a desktop rig that would not turn on, after 3 hours of dicking with it I still couldn’t get it to post. This is the 5th time this year it’s done something like this to me and 3rd time since August.

So I did what any sane normal person would do, I ordered the parts for a new PC.

So 3 days and a bit of money later I now have a desktop rig and laptop rig that are truly on par with each other in almost all aspects except for one.

After screwing with Vista for 3 days to finally get it where I want it I am no longer of the opinion that those Mac vs PC commercials were were advertisments… THEY WERE WARNINGS!

Vista vs MAC OS X, hands down no contest MAC OS wins and I’m not saying that just because I have special place in my heart for Unix based operating systems either. It truly is the better OS, except for that whole playing games thing… Steve Jobs, hell Fake Steve Jobs even, if your reading this GAMES ARE NOT BAD THEY ARE GOOD!

So yeah I’m on Vista but it is nice to have a desktop rig that can play all of my games again. I guess that is why I bought a MAC so I could do work on it and not be bothered with all of the games.

Two final thoughts…

1. I know a few of you (Clint) are probally kind of curios as to what I got for a rig, The general specs are a…. Intel E6850, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD (main system drive), 8800 GTS 320MB Video Card.

2. I also upgraded from Tiger to Lepoard on the Mac over the weekend… I found the icon for a PC file share server to be how you say… Intersting : )

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.