Backup!

January 7th, 2007Blog0 comments

I am pretty paranoid when it comes to backups. I back everything up. My computer is filled with backups from the last eight years.

I just got a new external backup hard drive — the LaCie Porsche-designed portable drive, looks kind of like a little silver monolith. Very neat, 100gb for a pretty cheap price. Someone should design a portable hard drive that has a fireproof, crush-proof shell so that if your house explodes your data will still be safe. I think I might get my materials division right on that!

The grand total of all my writing equals about 660 mb. It just about fits on a CD. It’ll be interesting to see how it grows over the course of my lifetime. Maybe by the time I die it’ll be about 2gb?

Out of Luck

January 4th, 2007Blog0 comments

And out of Giant Pocky! I ate all of them, so now I must go back to killing hobos with hammers.

I want to mention here a really useful book my brother gave me for xmas: Schott’s Almanac.

Schott’s Almanac.

It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at 2006 complete with statistics, facts, and news stories of the year. Example: Worst Ten Dictators of 2006, with analysis of facial hair. Also, the obit. of Harriet, the 2nd oldest tortoise on record (and rumored to have been originally collected by Charles Darwin).

Harriet.

Harriet must also be filed under Cuteness.

Guns and Butter

January 3rd, 2007Blog0 comments

DEFCON is a PC nuclear war RTS / simulator.

This is the Christmas Mod, which re-skins the game so that the objective is to deliver “presents” to good girls and boys in your opponent’s country. ICBMs are replaced by reindeer, and it appears that Boomers become sleighs. Ho ho ho!

Check and Mate: Representative-elect Keith Ellison, first Muslim in congress, to take oath on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran.

Two birds with one stone: To show that freedom of religion equals respect for all religions, and to show that this nation was founded on diversity and inclusion. Well done.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” — Thomas Jefferson.

Recommended Proot

January 2nd, 2007Blog0 comments

California Clementines. When I was home for the holidays I went grocery shopping with my dad and he bought a box of these at Safeway.

“Cuties”.

They’re really good. I try to eat fruit with or after most meals, and these are pretty wonderful. Plus you’ve gotta love the graphic design on the box. When you anthropomorphize fruit, it makes me want to eat it. Maybe because then it appears to be a form of meat.

Also: I’m about halfway through this box of Giant Pocky (see below). They’re awesome. Each one is individually wrapped, and they taste even better after you smash someone’s skull in with them. Plus afterwards you can eat the murder weapon.

Lost in Yonkers

January 2nd, 2007Blog0 comments

One of my favorite playwrights is Neil Simon; “Biloxi Blues” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” are plays that I grew up with, and a study of Neil Simon’s work is a study in the old phrase, “Make them laugh a lot and cry a little”. The reverse is also said and is also true.

I just read “Lost in Yonkers”, which is darker than Brighton Beach Memoirs but shares a lot of its DNA. The original NYC production had Kevin Spacey as Uncle Louie, which is a perfect fit. You can hear his voice as you read the play, just like you can hear Al Pacino when you read “Angels in America”.

I think the most important thing to take away from Neil Simon’s work is how accessible his plays are. The guy is a true populist writer, a writer of the people. In any story, the audience needs to find an opening to climb in so they can live in the world of the story. His characters are so good at beckoning us in, welcoming us with humor.

Happy New Year

January 1st, 2007Blog0 comments

I hope you had a fun and safe one!

I like to treat the first day of the year as a model for how I’d like to treat every day of the coming year. So today I got up early to a clean house (I cleaned it all yesterday). I want to read more this year, so I’m going to spend a good chunk of time reading. And then I’m going to eat a #2 pencil. Because that’s my goal, to eat more pencils this year.

“He… He ate my pencil!”