Has anyone heard from Dave? Is he still alive? Did he fall victim to Wilma?

I would also like to take this opportunity to express my disappointment that hurricane names don't go to Z. I was looking forward to hurricanes Xavier, Yvette, and Zelda.

Demotivation.

Despair.com has the first four designs of their 2006 calendar up.

Checkitoutcheckitoutcheckitoutcheckitout.

Of particular humor is this one: Effort. Be sure to read all their links, for proper demotivation.

Also, if someone wanted to get me this calendar for my Birthday/Christmas, it would be appreciated. Or not. I'm too demotivated to care.

*Yawn* I'm lazy.

I'll try to get posts up with my pictures from Blizzcon, Miramar, and the 50 hidden Mickeys of Disneyland later (now that Blogger finally has a way of posting more than one picture at a time).

In the meantime, here's a few pictures from Blizzcon website to tide you over:

Piccy 1
Piccy 2

Skymall.

This is from my flight to England earlier this month. I swiped one of those Skymall catalogs because some of the items interested me. I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe a disgruntled employee who was getting fired set the layout for the magazine. Maybe it was a soon-to-be-ex-employee who had been hitting the booze a little too hard. Anyways, following are several images I scanned in and I swear are not altered in any way.

New Evidence Indicates Sky Actually Pink

OAK RIDGE, TN - Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found new evidence confirming Cuban scientists' discoveries that the sky is actually pink. According to Mark Morheim, a leading scientist at ORNL, "light from the sun, reflected off Venus and refracted through swamp gas gives the sky a bluish appearance, but in reality it is a lovely shade of pink."

In other news, genetic experiments have successfully created a pig with wings. Also, leading theologians have indicated that there may be some truth to Dante's description of Hell being frozen at the center.

-----------

It looks like I may have to take back anything negative I said about Rie's mom. In the end she came through for us, as our "rock bottom" bid of $265,000 for a condo was accepted. What made me most happy was how she recommended we go for a one bedroom instead of a two, as the two bedroom condos did not meet the requirement that we be able to afford them on my income alone "when Anne Marie stops working when the baby comes." And I was on the verge of giving up on the idea of Rie being a stay-at-home mom as an unrealistic and unachievable ideal.

So for details, the condo is 740 sq. ft., one bed, one bath. It's located at the corner of MacArthur and Bristol, near South Coast Plaza (one of the largest shopping centers in OC). From the living room window, you have a great sniper position where you can see down the alley of the complex behind it, all the way to the parking lot for the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Will post more details later.

Comic strip of the Day/Week/Month

http://comics.com/comics/pearls/archive/pearls-20051023.html

Stephan Pastis has a knack for creating long, improbable, drawn-out set ups for really bad puns. Perhaps the greatest was the strip where Pig takes a girl golfing on a date. The girl shows pig a golf tee that she won in the Virginia Open. During the course of the date, the tee gets lost, and Pig and the girl spend hours looking for it, until it's too dark to see. Finally Pig takes the girl home to her angry father. "Sorry we're home so late," Pig explains, "but your daughter lost her Virginia Tee." In the last panel, Pig is walking away, bruised and beat up, and says to himself "you'd think he thought I took it."


Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I promise more content is coming soon. I've just been too busy with other things (like getting myself ranked 29 of 1400+ on [Bay] 32 Sluts DOD:S server; I think that clan has a website, but I'm too afraid to Google the server name).

From Dave Barry's "Are You a Guy" Quiz.

When is it okay to throw away a set of veteran underwear?

1) When it has turned the color of a dead whale and developed new holes so large that you're not sure which ones were originally intended for your legs.

2) When it is down to eight loosely connected underwear molecules and has to be handled with tweezers.

3) It is never okay to throw away veteran underwear. A real guy checks the garbage regularly in case somebody -- and we are not naming names, but this would be his wife -- is quietly trying to discard his underwear, which she is frankly jealous of, because the guy seems to have a more intimate relationship with it than with her.

I thought Rie might appreciate this, seeing as how several pairs of my underwear now qualify for #1. I personally would never get rid of a pair of underwear, but only did so under direct threat from my wife's pointy new Elven Hunting Knife which she got for BlizzCon. I believe she is merely jealous of my underwear, seeing as how I've had it longer than I've been married to her, and it spends more time near my privates.

More Crappy Movies.
Subjecting myself to potentially dain-bramaging crap so you don't have to

Ah, another international journey, another opportunity to view all the crappy movies I'd never go to the cinema to see.

The journey home wasn't as eventful as the journey there. No emergency landings, but the flight out of Manchester was late enough to make me miss my connection in Chicago, forcing me to wait another 5 hours in that gosh-forsaken heck-hole. Yeah, don't fly United. On the flight from Chicago to John Wayne, the reading light for the seat I was in (14F) was broken and the headphone thingy wasn't working properly. Also, some airlines have the decency to PAUSE THE MOVIE when the pilot/flight attendant comes over the PA, so you don't just miss the dialog for five-minute segments of the film while he rambles on about whatever pointless thing it is he's talking about. Also, United just doesn't seem to organized with their whole magazine thing. On the flight out to Chicago on October 2nd, my seat had the October issue of their in-flight magazine, but apparently every other seat had the September issue. This became a problem when the flight attendants announced that meal choices could be found on page 135, when in fact in my in-flight magazine page 135 listed the radio entertainment. Also, they were showing the movie from September, instead of that for October.

< /rant >

Anyways, now for the crappy movies:

Kicking and Screaming: 1.0
This journey could also have been entitled "How much Will Ferrel can Joe take before he becomes a homicidal psycho?" Not much to say about this movie.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith: 8.0
Not at all crappy. This is actually a good action/comedy. I had wanted to see it in the theaters, but Rie wouldn't let me take her to see it.

Fantastic Four: 5.0
Not particularly bad. Not particularly good either. Just a so-so comic book movie. My main gripe is they spent too much time on Ben Grimm's (The Thing) whining and crying about how no one likes him because he looked funny. Y'know, if I had some sort of radiation storm mutate me to turn me into a super-strong, giant rock, I wouldn't CARE what anyone else thought. Actually people would run up to me and tell me how cool they thought I was because the last guy who didn't do that ended up as a smear on the sidewalk.

Herbie: Fully Loaded: 4.0
I was board. What can I say? Just a couple things about this move: 1) I'm pretty sure NASCAR rules don't allow a '63 VW bug to be raced at the California 500. 2) I doubt a 1.5 liter flat 4 could really compete against the monsters they use in NASCAR anyways.

Betwitched: 3.0
Part 2 of Joe's attempt to use Will Ferrel to drive himself insane. The funniest part of this movie was the Family Guy joke it spawned where Stewie's watching the movie and at the part where Kidman says "I'm a witch" and Ferrel responds "I'm a Clippers fan", Stewie sighs, gets out of his seat, leaves the theater, goes to the airport, buys a ticket, gets on a plane, flies to LA, hires a taxi, goes to a hardware store, buys a ladder, goes to Will Ferrel's house, sets up the ladder, rings the doorbell, and when Will Ferrel answers, Stewie kicks him and shouts "that's not funny!"

Batman Begins: 9.8
At least we end on a high note. One of the best super-hero comic book movies. The only thing holding this movie back is that I'm not a fan of Katie Holmes. Fortunately they play to her best talents by not having her in it much. It's interesting to note that a Pirate super-hero could defeat Batman, because Batman is a ninja, and as we all know, Pirates are cooler than Ninjas.

Area Man's Still Got It

Ok, after a year-long absence, I've finally returned to my old love. The one game that could pull me away from WoW is new and improved.

For those of you (everyone except Dave) who don't know what I'm talking about, this is of course Day of Defeat (DoD), a Half-Life mod. I got hooked on it my senior year, and couldn't get enough. Gradually, my interest waned and then I stopped altogether when Blizzard began extracting my soul one level at a time.

But now, with Half-Life 2 and the Source engine, they've given DoD a much needed face lift and using HL2 graphics and physics, we have Day of Defeat: Source.

Is the game everything it was expected to be? Will it provide you a satisfying online WWII multiplayer experience? Will you make new friends and kill new enemies? Yes. All that and more.

This game will cure cancer. It will reshape the interior of your microwave oven to harmonicly balance it so it always heats evenly. It will vacuum and shampoo your carpets, while leaving your hair shiny and full-bodied, and eliminating split ends and dandruff. It will walk your dog twice a day, clean your cat's litter box, and tutor your children to improve their grades in math. This game has already balanced the Federal budget deficit while negotiating with North Korea and Iran to destroy any nuclear capacities they've been developing. This game, to put it in lay man's terms, is da bomb.

But the one prevailing thing about DoD and DoD:S. It's hard. It's a very, very hard game. This is the type of game where you die three times on the way to the store to buy it (or while downloading it and installing it, as the case may be). Back in my day I got pretty good at it. One of the best measures of DoD skillz is your Kills to Deaths ratio. K:D of 1:1 is average, and if all players on a server were equal skill, they'd all have a ratio around that. I could usually get around 1.5:1. On a good day I might even get 2:1. So my big concern was how much was I going to suck after my year-long absence?

Well...



That much. This is a screen shot from one of my first games after I started playing again. It's the score list at the change-of-level rotation. My score is the highlighted one in red. First column is player name ([OCIBTYC] Joe Cool), second is class (Axis Support; uses an Stg-44 assault rifle), third is flag captures (30), fourth is kills (81), fifth is deaths (28) and last is latency (ping; 23).

So my K:D is 81:28, which is 3 kills shy of 3:1. Other good final scores I've had are 72:25 (again, 3 kills shy of 3:1), and 62:32 (two shy of 2:1). So no, I haven't lost my touch.

If you're familiar with the game (Dave), then you'll also notice that we (the Axis) won 14 out of 15 times. In the Allies defense, I think they were actually a team of chimps organized by an Orangutan. So 1 win is a pretty good record for them.

I think my favorite part of the new DoD:S is how after one team wins, the winners keep their guns and can still fire, while the losers can't fire, so the winners try to find as many people from the losing team as they can to brutally gun them down and run up their kill count. I also like how the BAR is now a playable gun, how you can look down the sights of the K98 and M1 Garand rifles, but I don't like how the K98 lost its bayonette and the M1 lost its rifle butt ability.

Oh, and a shiny new donkey for whoever can tell me where and on what map that screen shot was taken (Dave).

BAY AREA WOMAN PICKS UP FRIEND AT AIRPORT

I am picking up Tom from MacDill AFB today!!! He's home safe--hurray! Wahoo for Tom, the insurgent-whalloping marine! We are planning the most ginormous bbq for him--everyone's invited!

Greetings from Warrington.
Wi-Fi is awesome

Ok, rule #1: Don't fly through Chicago
Rule #2: Don't fly United Airlines

Follow those rules for air travel, and you're pretty much set. I don't think I've ever had a United flight that wasn't delayed and I don't think I've ever gotten in or out of Chicago on time. But since the only time I fly United is when I'm going through Chicago and whenever I fly through Chicago, I fly United, I don't think those events are independent.

That being said....

My flight out of Orange County left an hour and a half late, largely because the plane coming in from Chicago was late due to thunderstorms. Considering I only had an hour and a half layover, that pretty much guaranteed I'd miss my connection in Chicago. Add to that that the flight had to fly more slowly going to Chicago to time their arrival in between thunderstorms, and I arrived about 30 minutes after my flight to Manchester left.

So, I run from the arrival terminal in Chicago (concourse B) to the British Midlands ticket counter in Terminal 5. They rebook me on a flight through London to Manchester. But the flight to London leaves from Concourse C, so I have to run all the way back (for those of you who know Chicago O'Hare, you know that I've gone from one end to the other and back). Fortunately, I had a couple hours before the flight to London left.

Of course, the plane that was going to London was coming from Washington D.C. and was also late because of the Chicago thunderstorms, so the flight to London left about 2 hours late. I didn't think it too much a problem because I had about a 3 hour layover in London.

About a couple hours into the flight, a flight attendant came over the PA "if there are any licensed medical professionals aboard, would you please identify yourself by pressing your call button." A while later, "again, if there are any doctors aboard, please identify yourself to the flight attendants. There is a passenger who is very ill."

Flashbacks to Airplane. I wondered if eggs were coming out her mouth. I kept looking for Leslie Nielsen.

Anyways, they had taken the sick woman to the back of the plane, but the flight attendant right in front of me was on the phone (with a doctor on the ground I think). I could hear her talking about the passenger's symptoms, then running to the back of the plane, then running back to the phone and giving the doctor updates. This kept up for a while, then suddenly, I heard the deafening roar of the engines start to die down. The map screen on my personal entertainment thingy showed that the airplane was slowing down and losing altitude. I opened the shade on the window and saw a huge stream coming off the wing which I initially thought was a contrail, until I realized it was too big and it wasn't coming off the wing tip. I quickly figured they were dumping fuel which meant...

The pilot came over the PA "ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the inconvenience, but we're making an emergency landing so we can get medical attention for our sick passenger." The pilot and flight attendant later said that in their entire careers, they'd never had to make an unscheduled stop.

For those of you who don't know, when a plane makes an unscheduled landing, it has to dump fuel. This is because the added weight of the fuel puts excess stress on the landing gear. I was able to get a few pictures of the fuel being dumped, but unfortunately, I forgot the USB cable for the camera, so I'll have to wait until I get home to post them.

So, at around 3:00am local time, we landed in Gander, Newfoundland, Canada. Paramedics came and took the woman off the plane. After about 30 minutes to an hour, (after they refueled the plane), we resumed our journey to London. This stop was just enough time to put us into London just as my connection to Manchester was leaving.

So I had to run to the BMI ticket counter in London to reschedule my flight. In the end, I got to Manchester a little after 6:00pm, 10 hours after my scheduled arrival.

Thank goodness I hadn't checked any baggage.