I spend most of my time these days applying for jobs, taking skills tests for jobs, doing phone interviews and in person interviews for jobs. Then there’s ancillary stuff, like working out to look trim and fit. I typically see a hairstylist to make sure my do is up to snuff, hair professionally colored, and I always see an aesthetician the day before an in person interview to touch up eyebrows and make sure nose or ear hairs aren’t sprouting out grotesquely. I also make sure my wardrobe is appropriate, if there’s a coffee shop nearby sometimes I’ll stake out the employer or peek around online, to get a feel for day-to-day dress code, and often shop for the interview with a fashion-minded friend if need be to make sure I wear just a notch or two above what my prospective employer-interviewer is likely to be wearing. So in short, it’s a full time occupation, one I’m serious and methodical about. I even tan to look as good as possible. [Read more…]

If you haven’t seen this wonderful piece of Internet goodness, enjoy. That’s the Japanese Hip-Hop death-metal-fusion group called Baby Metal. With 17 year-old Suzuka Nakamoto on lead vocals, Moa Kikuchi and Yui Mizuno screaming, rapping, and dancing on each side. That video, titled give me chocolate, is tearing the toobz apart right now, probably because, in the words of Elton John, “They’re weird and they’re wonderful.” Have a great weekend!

 

These days, you don’t need a boat to wakeboard. There are cable parks, where you grab a handle that’s attached to overhead cables and it pulls you right along. Of course, no boat means no wake to jump. But them young whipper-snappers have come up with a  solution, sliders and kickers. A kicker is a curved ramp, kinda like a half pipe shape to it. A slider is like a balance beam sticking out of the water. Beginner sliders might barely stick out just a few inches, more advanced ones might be three feet tall or more and have A-frame shapes to them. It’s amazing what accomplished riders have learned to do on them.

OTOH, no pun intended, if you’re aren’t a very good wakeboarder, and happen to just pop out of the water next to one of the higher sliders and maybe tap it with your board, just to make sure you can get enough air and control to think about sliding down it for real later on, and let’s just add you have a brand new Ronix Bandwagon board with a triple rocker and camber, so it’s like a flattened, recurved compound bow that launches you into the air with a surprisingly small amount of effort, you might screw up and get too high, you might get generally catty-whompus to the point that a right hand instinctively reaches out to keep you from hitting the top of the slider, and you could just possibly fracture a bone at the base of the thumb called the Trapezium. Which, as it turns out, is a bone you don’t think of much, until it’s messed up. At which time it gets crystal clear just how much that thumb is used on a daily basis.

 

 

 

I know this route, I’ve been on it and I’m still friends to this day with the guys who first established it. The climber may have rehearsed it, inspected it carefully for loose holds, and cleaned it from top to bottom. and it’s still every bit as dangerous as it looks.

A  couple of plug in updates, some other updates, and things seem better. I may be less frustrated and back in business. If this awesome pic posts anyway, that’ll be a good sign.

We’re all flawed human beings. As a single male constantly on the lookout for female companionship, I can readily admit one of the flaws inherent in the hetero-sexual Y-chromosome community is we, that is men, are easily manipulated by looks. It only takes a few months of puberty to go from painting No Girls Allowed signs on our tree forts to suddenly noticing the pretty faces and shapely bodies quickening on the other side of the sexual divide. But we spend the rest of our lives learning, or trying to learn, how to deal with the consequences. That knowledge doesn’t come easy. To this day, at age 51 and even as a hard-nosed cynical skeptic, I occasionally find myself wanting to give a pretty girl a pass for behavior and actions that wouldn’t be available to other ladies and certainly denied to my fellow man.

At least I’m aware of it, I know it’s a weakness, and as any recovering alcoholic or reformed gambling addict can attest, recognizing you have a problem is half the battle. So I wonder, are women as equally aware that they have a similar weakness for jerks? [Read more…]

On the project, a decent desktop PC running two monitors built from donated parts, a reg here was kind enough to send me his old Lenovo laptop, which drastically lowered my desperate need for a new system, any system, real soon. I was limping along on old, failing, slow as shit devices. This donated laptop is fast and clean. On the FTB system being built, I have an AMD Athlon II X2 processor, a Biostar A880GZ motherboard, a Dynex power supply that meets the requirements as listed on power supply calculator, a Radeon 5870 HD graphics card, and an a Hitachi hard drive. Plus I have monitors and stuff.

I need DDR3 RAM and an optical drive, and a case. I’ll probably buy the case locally. And I can swing the rest, too, the laptop really bought me the luxury of time. But if anyone has some RAM or optics laying around, and wants to give them away, lemme know. l

I’m busier than a one-winged bee, but had time to snap this shot of the Spirit of St. Louis, SpaceShipOne, and the Bell X-1 all hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washingfton, DC.