Random Access

Monday – 07 February 2011
It’s Monday.
And the NFL 2010-2011 championship title has returned to Titletown.  But, more on that in a minute.

It was a good weekend. There was a fair bit crammed into the three days. Highlights include:

1. A trip to Ogden to visit Wonderful World of Trains, The Bookshelf, as well as Almosta Junction on Friday, with .
2. A trip to Jitterbug Coffee Hop for the first time in a very long while.
3. A good HeroClix tournament on Saturday.
4. The Super Bowl yesterday.

Sure, there were other things that happened over the weekend, but those were the big ticket items.

And, tonight, SaraRules! and I are celebrating an early Valentine’s Day by going out to dinner (none of those Feb. 14th dinner crowds for us!) and going to Kingsbury Hall to hear Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s person of note: Althea Gibson

Althea Gibson was a World No. 1 American sportswoman who became the first African-American woman to be a competitor on the world tennis tour and the first to win a Grand Slam title in 1956. She is sometimes referred to as “the Jackie Robinson of tennis” for breaking the color barrier.

Gibson continued to improve her tennis game while pursuing an education. In 1946 she moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, to work on her tennis game with Dr. Hubert A. Eaton and enrolled at Williston High School.

In 1958, Gibson retired from amateur tennis. Before the open era began, there was no prize money, other than an expense allowance, and no endorsement deals. To begin earning prize money, tennis players had to give up their amateur status. As there was no professional tour for women, Gibson was limited to playing in a series of exhibition tours.

According to Lance Tingay of The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Gibson was ranked in the world top ten from 1956 through 1958, reaching a career high of No. 1 in those rankings in 1957 and 1958. Gibson was included in the year-end top ten rankings issued by the United States Tennis Association in 1952 and 1953 and from 1955 through 1958. She was the top-ranked U.S. player in 1957 and 1958.

In 1971, Gibson was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and in 1975, she was appointed the New Jersey state commissioner of athletics. After 10 years on the job, she went on to work in other public service positions, including serving on the governor’s council on physical fitness.

On September 28, 2003, at the age of 76, Gibson died in East Orange, New Jersey due to circulatory failure and was interred there in the Rosedale Cemetery.

On the opening night of the 2007 US Open, the 50th anniversary of Gibson’s victory at the US Championships in 1957 (now the US Open), Gibson was inducted into US Open Court of Champions.

Instant Replay: Football
Yesterday, Super Bowl XLV was played in The Temple of Jones Cowboy Stadium…

Pittsburgh Steelers at Green Bay Packers
25 – 31
The Steelers and the Packers, teams from a couple of blue-collar towns, battled for the Vince Lombardi Trophy. The Packers took advantage of key Pittsburgh turnovers in the first half, establishing a 21 – 10 lead by halftime. The Steelers returned to form in the second half, scoring 22 points and coming within two minutes of potentially winning the game, but couldn’t pull all of the pieces together to make it work. Congratulations to the Packers on their win.

Stray Toasters

• I think that owning these would be fun.
• Killing of Missionary Rattles Texas Border
• I would love to know who at Microsoft and/or Treyarch thought that it was a “good idea” to make this a “Double XP Weekend” for Call of Duty: Black Ops.
• I finally remembered to get screenshots of (the DCUO version of) Nefer-Tem:

  

• Bill Nye on America’s “horrible” science education
• Why Some People Evade Colds and Others Don’t
• 
  (I do own the game and it’s a lot of fun; I just haven’t played in a LONG time…)
• Jos. A. Bank 2011 Spring Style Guide – It may require a Facebook account
• From the “Whoops!” file: Christina Aguilera mangles national anthem at Super Bowl XLV
• I ordered a Superstreets vehicle and a CSX water tower for my layout. I should probably start putting some brainpower towards of the logistics involved with building the multi-level deck that I have in mind.
• Best Art Ever (This Week)

  

• Pharmacies Besieged by Addicted Thieves
• Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Sicily couple murdered man with butter
• Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch

That’s good for now.

Namaste.

Friday – 04 February 2011
It’s my 9/80 day off. Amen.

Today is also World Cancer Day.

Last night, Mary and Matt came over for dinner. SaraRules! made breaded pecan chicken strips, scalloped potatoes and a zucchini/squash mix for dinner. Mary and May brought a cake for dessert. Dinner, the company and the conversation were all very good. After our company left, I finished reading this week’s four-color haul and played a little (a very little) DCUO before calling it a day.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Since it’s the weekend, and it’s going to be “a little” busy, you’re getting THREE entries:

• Dorothy Jean Dandridge was an American actress and popular singer, and was the first African-American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

  

  She performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. In 1954, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Carmen Jones. By 1956, still under contract to Fox, Dandridge hadn’t made any films since Carmen Jones. Fox still believed that Dorothy was a star, but just didn’t know how to promote her. One of the head chiefs at Fox once said “She’s a star, but we don’t have any films to put her in or leading men to cast her opposite.”

  In 1957 Dorothy’s luck came back when Darryl F. Zanuck cast Dandridge as Margot, a restless young Indian woman, in his controversial film version of, Island in the Sun, co-starring stars such as Joan Fontaine, James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Collins, Michael Rennie, and Stephen Boyd. This film was a success which brought Dandridge back to the public eye. Determined to reinvent her career, she decided to wait on Fox to call for her to make a film.

  In 1959, Columbia Pictures cast Dorothy in the lead role of Bess in Porgy and Bess; Dorothy was again nominated for a award, this time for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Dorothy was again eager to see if she was to win the award, but she once again lost. A few weeks later Dorothy was released from her 20th Century Fox contract.

  Dandridge was married and divorced twice, first to dancer and entertainer Harold Nicholas (the father of her daughter, Harolyn Suzanne) and then to Jack Denison. Dandridge died of an accidental drug overdose, at the age of 42.

• Ralph Waldo Ellison was a novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer.

  

  Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap.In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee’s music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor William L. Dawson. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics.

  During World War II, Ellison joined the Merchant Marine, and in 1946 he married his second wife, Fanny McConnell. She worked as a photographer to help sustain Ellison. From 1947 to 1951 he earned some money writing book reviews, but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison’s longhand text and assisted her husband in editing the typescript as it progressed.

  Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is “invisible” in a figurative sense, in that “people refuse to see” him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel, with its treatment of taboo issues such as incest, won the National Book Award in 1953.

  In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.

  Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer, and was buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

• Ella Jane Fitzgerald, also known as the “First Lady of Song” and “Lady Ella,” was an American jazz and song vocalist.

  

  Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia. In her youth Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer, although she loved listening to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She idolized the lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, “My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it….I tried so hard to sound just like her.”

She made her singing debut at 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. She pulled in a weekly audience at the Apollo and won the opportunity to compete in one of the earliest of its famous “Amateur Nights”. She had originally intended to go on stage and dance but, intimidated by the Edwards Sisters, a local dance duo, she opted to sing instead in the style of Connee Boswell. She sang Boswell’s “Judy” and “The Object of My Affection,” a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters, and won the first prize of $25.00.

In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. She met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb here. Webb had already hired singer Charlie Linton to work with the band and was, The New York Times later wrote, “reluctant to sign her….because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough.” Webb offered her the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.

She began singing regularly with Webb’s Orchestra through 1935 at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including “Love and Kisses” and “(If You Can’t Sing It) You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)”. But it was her 1938 version of the nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”, a song she co-wrote, that brought her wide public acclaim.

With Decca’s Milt Gabler as her manager, she began working regularly for the jazz impresario Norman Granz, and appeared regularly in his Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts. Fitzgerald’s relationship with Granz was further cemented when he became her manager, although it would be nearly a decade before he could record her on one of his many record labels. Fitzgerald left Decca and Granz, now her manager, created Verve Records around her. Fitzgerald later described the period as strategically crucial, saying, “I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was ‘it,’ and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman….felt that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life.” Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, released in 1956, was the first of eight multi-album Songbook sets Fitzgerald would record for Verve at irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964. The composers and lyricists spotlighted on each set, taken together, represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great American Songbook. Fitzgerald’s song selections ranged from standards to rarities and represented an attempt by Fitzgerald to cross over into a non-jazz audience.

Plagued by health problems, Fitzgerald made her last recording in 1991 and her last public performances in 1993. Miss Fitzgerald was generous throughout her career, and in 1993, she established the Charitable Foundation that bears her name: The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, which continues to help the disadvantaged through grants and donation of new books to at-risk children.

Stray Toasters

• MarknTyme sent me a link to an article about a “skin gun,” used as a treatment for burn victims. The accompanying video isn’t for the squeamish… but the results are rather impressive.
• 
• A Super Bowl oddity: No cheerleaders for Packers or Steelers
• No Easy Fixes as Internet Runs Out of Addresses
• Today in rock ‘n’ roll history: The day the music died
• 
  
• Gunman hijacks Greyhound bus in North Carolina
• The King of Cool’s Motorcycle Is for Sale
• Yesterday’s amazing house of tomorrow is today’s boring house of today

And, on to the day!

Namaste.

Thursday – 03 February 2011
It’s my NBN Technical Friday. Amen.

Last night was D&D (4.0) game night with and company. We almost team-wiped twice. It wasn’t pretty. But, we finished two encounters… and everyone survived. Barely. One neat, but unrelated thing: Jack and I noticed a Justice League Chess Set for sale for $50 (USD). We were intrigued. We pondered it for a bit before realizing that we could just “build” a chess set, using ‘Clix figures for the pieces for a lot less, should we decide that we really couldn’t live without one.

I also played a little DCUO last night. I’m still having a lot of fun with it. Last night, I was sent to a new (to me) part of Metropolis, Chinatown, to meet Zatanna for my next set of missions. Let me just say that this part of the city looks simply amazing.  The DCUO team also released another teaser video that portends ill things…

AND… new information has been released about new content being added to the game, including their Valentine’s Day event content, as well.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is: Stokely Carmichael

Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and later as the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements. He popularized the term “Black Power”.

In 1960, Carmichael went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black school in Washington, D.C., rejecting scholarship offers from several white universities. His apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964.

He joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard campus affiliate of SNCC. He was inspired by the sit-ins to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement. In his first year at the university, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was frequently arrested, spending time in jail. In 1961, he served 49 days at the infamous Parchman Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi. He was arrested many times for his activism. He lost count of his many arrests, sometimes giving the estimate of at least 29 or 32, and telling the Washington Post in 1998 he believed the total number was fewer than 36.

Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class mainstream.

The Black Panthers and Carmichael disagreed on whether white activists should be allowed to help the Panthers. The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Carmichael thought as Malcolm X, saying that the white activists needed to organize their own communities first. In 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea’s official delegate to theUnited Nations. Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July 1969, he published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning the Panthers for not beingseparatist enough and their “dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals”.

It was at this stage in his life that Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré who had become his patrons. At the end of his life, friends still referred to him interchangeably by both names, “and he doesn’t seem to mind.”

Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements and in 1971 collected his work in a second book Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he seemingly retained for the rest of his life. From the late 1970s until the day he died, he answered his phone by announcing “Ready for the revolution!”

Stray Toasters

• This LEGO video was sent to my by angstd:
• Shippers Concerned Over Possible Suez Canal Disruptions
• The White Stripes Call It Quits
• The Super Bowl is Sunday. As the Ravens (and Dolphins and Panthers) are not in the game, I guess this means that I’m a Packers fan… at least through the weekend.
  • Even the Avengers are choosing sides… again:
    
• Ad banned for simulating drug use
• MTH has announced a locomotive that I now covet.
  I specifically want it in the Army livery.
• Reprogrammed stem cells are loaded with errors
• LEGO Mystery Box
• 
• Dispute Over Jewish Archives Derails Russian Art Loans to U.S.
• Classic Teen Heroes Boogie Down in the Art of Bill Walko
• This is a very cute commercial:
• The time has come for child seats on airplanes
• Foreclosed Homeowners Go to Court on Their Own

Namaste.

Tuesday – 02 February 2011
It’s Groundhog Day; be on the lookout for Bill Murray.

It’s also new comics day and D&D (4e) night, to boot.

Last night was D&D (3.5) night with and company. When we weren’t behaving like twelve-year-olds – and derailing the game – we managed to come up with a course of action… most of which we won’t get to until next gaming session. But, it was still fun. (A good corollary is found in Wil Wheaton’s blog entry: In which we play Cal & D).

After I got home, I played DCUO for an hour or so. One of the missions repeatedly kicked my trash. Nothing like getting swarmed – and defeated – by higher-level H.I.V.E. Troopers…repeatedly. *sigh* After what felt like eleventy-kajillion times, I finally got through it. I did a couple of Brainiac-related missions, as well.  Those weren’t quite as painful, though.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s person of note is… actually going to be TWO people:

• James Baldwin

  

  Baldwin was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet,essayist and civil rights activist.

  Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and  homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

  During his teenage years in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Baldwin began to recognize his own homosexuality. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States and departed to Paris, France. His flight was not just a desire to distance himself from American prejudice. He fled in order to see himself and his writing beyond an African American context and to be read as not “merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer”. Also, he left the United States desiring to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and flee the hopelessness that many young African American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

  In 1953, Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, an autobiographical bildungsroman, was published. Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. Baldwin continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

  Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, stirred controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin was again resisting labels with the publication of this work: despite the reading public’s expectations that he would publish works dealing with the African American experience, Giovanni’s Room is exclusively about white characters. Baldwin’s next two novels, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, are sprawling, experimental works dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual characters. These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the 1960s: they are saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage.

• Gwendolyn Brooks

  

  Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

  Brooks published her first poem in a children’s magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. Aged 17, Brooks stuck to her roots and began submitting her work to “Lights and Shadows”, the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city.

  Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945 by Harper and Row, brought her instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, which won her Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first given to an African-American.

  After John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began her career teaching creative writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1967, she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where, she said, she rediscovered her blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca, a book length poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago housing project. In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

  In addition to the National Book Award nomination and the Pulitzer Prize, Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. In 1985, Brooks became the Library of Congress’s Consultant in Poetry, a one year position whose title changed the next year to Poet Laureate. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors for American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. In 1995, she was presented with the National Medal of Arts.

Stray Toasters

• Consider this: There is almost always enough time to exchange a pleasantry with a coworker before asking a question or setting them to a task. It amuses me how often I have to “gently remind” people of this fact.
• Flowchart: What Facebook Comment Should You Leave?
• I considered making Avery Brooks (1, 2) this morning’s Black History Month personality… but then I figured that people might not want to read my gushings over my man-crush. So, I didn’t.

  But, guess what: You’re reading about him, anyway!  So, I guess that means I still win!

• Punxsutawney Phil celebrates 125 years of Groundhog Day
• How to Use “Who” and “Whom” Correctly
• 
• Fees for home mortgages increase
• Crime Scenes: No break for cops caught on camera
• A Hacking Case Becomes a War of the Tabloids
• 
• Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante
• Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their worth.

Namaste.

Tuesday – 01 February 2011
It’s another sunny, but cold, day in Paradise.

Today not only marks the beginning of a new month, but also the start of Black History Month. (More on this below.)

Last night, SaraRules! and I had a fairly quiet night. We had dinner at the local Cafe Zupas, then we did a little errand-running before locking the world outside our door. We even managed to watch an episode of NCIS from the DVR. After that, I played a little DCUO before heading to bed. As a test, I fired up City of Heroes; I wanted to see how it looked with the graphics settings dialed up. The visuals were good, but the framerate was… less than fluid, which I found disappointing, when juxtaposed with DCUO. Maybe I need to tweak a few more settings in CoH to increase the framerate.  *shrug*

Chew on This: Food for Thought
As mentioned above, today is the beginning of Black History Month. As with last year, I think that I’ll do another “ABCs of Black History” this year. We’ll start with Dr. Ralph Abernathy:

Abernathy, the grandson of a slave, was born in Linden, Alabama (March 11, 1926). Ordained a Baptist minister in 1948, he studied at Alabama State College and Atlanta University. Abernathy met Martin Luther King in the early 1950’s, when the two were ministers of congregations in Montgomery, Alabama. They became widely known after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts in 1955-56.

In 1957, King and Abernathy formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King as President and Abernathy as Secretary-Treasurer. After King’s assassination in 1968, Abernathy assumed the presidency, leading the Poor People’s Campaign later that year. Abernathy also presided over SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, which used economic pressure against companies that did not provide equal opportunities to blacks. In 1977, he resigned from the SCLC to run unsuccessfully for Andrew Young’s Atlanta seat in the US House of Representatives.

After the election, he served as pastor of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta. A year before his death, he published his autobiography, entitled And The Walls Came Tumbling Down.

For more information, see: Ralph Abernathy

Stray Toasters

• A Harlem Cultural Hub Is Threatened by Debt
• Android System Overtakes Symbian
• Tolstoy’s “10 Rules of Life”
• 
• What’s Happening in Egypt, the Action Movie Explainer: “Raiders of the Lost Mubarak”
• Further reflections on discrimination
• Maine Bill Would Allow One-Armed Men to Use Switchblades
• 
• Apps Alter Reading on the Web
• Study puts spotlight on red-light cameras

Namaste.

Monday – 31 January 2011
Another week begins. And this one starts with Mother Nature’s frozen, mocking laughter blanketing the valley. That’s okay. It’s warm in the office.

Yesterday was a lazy day. SaraRules! and I lounged about the house all day. We filled a little bit of the afternoon catching up on a couple episodes of Young Justice. After that, I tinkered with my new game PC for a bit. DC Universe Online was still locking up at random, making it… difficult (read: “damned near impossible”)… to play. *sigh* I headed to the local Best Buy to put a hypothesis to test: Maybe using an off-board graphics card in the system would help. I picked up an new nVidia card (GeForce 210) to be tested out after dinner.

We went up to the in-laws’ for dinner and to watch the Pro Bowl. I’m not sure if it is because of the new schedule or the changes in rules, but the game just wasn’t “good.” Sure, it was football… kind of… but, the AFC just didn’t seem to have their usual fire or passion. It looked like they were just “there.” It was disappointing. I’m glad that it wasn’t the last game of the season this year. We turned from the game at halftime to watch RED, which the in-laws hadn’t seen; it was also far more entertaining than the game.

Back at home, SaraRules! and I started watching last week’s Fringe. Until the recording just went blank. Laptop to the rescue! I hooked up the BlacBook to the TV, surfed to Fox.com and finished the episode. After that, SaraRules! called it a night, while I installed the new video card…

…and, lo and behold, it worked! I logged into DCUO and played for about an hour. It didn’t cut out once. It’s a beautiful-looking game. The texture maps and environments look really nice. And, I also appreciated the fact that I didn’t have to run everywhere to get around, working my way up to Hover, the second-most useless superower (See: “Adventures of a Novice Hero,” in this post); I picked Flight as a travel power to start and it was immediately available.

Stray Toasters

• Israel Shaken as Turbulence Rocks an Ally
• For SaraRules!: For Ernest Borgnine, career has been an eternity
• Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List
• 
• emmet swimming
• I just ran across this, from an old post, while looking up the “Hover” reference above:
  

  Juan: Shall we dine?
  Squee: NO! NOOO!! I don’t wanna eat the toasty souls of the damned!!
  Pepito: I thought we were having Stove Top? I want none of this soul-toast.
  Mother: Souls? What are they talking about? I didn’t cook any souls, Juan.
  Juan: Ah, darling, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. You see, I am Satan.
  Mother: Hmmm… That explains the basement. But… I’ve always been such a good Christian woman.
  Juan/Satan: Well… then let’s both be thankful for irony. So, Todd, my son tells me you wish to join my soulless army of darkness?
  Squee: No, but once I wanted to be a giant monster.

• The Dutchman Flies Right Off the Wall
• I’ve long thought that Closer and Come Together should be able to combine, fairly easily, in a remix. This morning, I discovered that someone had made that remix (NSFW… just for the record):
• Some Boomers ‘retire’ to jobs that allow them to help others
• Totally “been there, done that…”
  



• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Republican school board in N.C. backed by Tea Party abolishes integration policy
• Guy Named Potter Survives 1,000-Foot Mountain Slide

Namaste.

Sunday – 30 January 2011
We’re almost done with the month and my fingers still want to type “2010” half the time…

Yesterday was a long and event-filled day. I started the day by volunteering at the Salt Lake City Habitat for Humanity ReStore. I did a mix of things from some retail-prep work to organizing (yet more) doors to helping to unload donations.

Leaving the ReStore, I met SaraRules! at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center for our final movie of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Salvation Boulevard (1 , 2):

Pastor Dan is a charismatic preacher who has captivated a city with his charm. Ex-deadhead and recovering hippie Carl is one of the loyal sheep in his flock. When Dan finds himself in a compromising situation, Carl is called into service in a most unconventional way. The megachurch is cast into shadow, and a hellish storm begins brewing that could jeopardize its entire existence. The road to hell—in this case, Salvation Boulevard—is paved with good intentions—gone hysterically wrong.

This movie cast a very satirical look at mega-churches and their followers. I liked the movie; SaraRules! didn’t. I stayed after the credits for a brief Q&A with the director, George Ratliff, and his co-writer, Doug Stone. An audience member asked:

Friday – 28 January 2011
It’s finally Friday. Granted, it’s my “on” Friday, but that’s okay… I’m cutting out of here a little early and heading to Thanksgiving Point with to check out the Ophir-Tintic &Western Model Railroad Show.

Last night, SaraRules! and I – along with about 18 other people – went to The Bayou to celebrate ‘s completion of coursework for college. It was a fun evening out. I had an Epic Brewing Imperial Stout, along with dinner, a bowl of Gumbo and a bowl of Crawfish Etouffee. The food and the company were both quite good.

Back at home, I called it an early evening. To say that I slept “poorly” would be an understatement. I first woke up – screaming – from a very odd dream around 0100. After managing to get back to sleep, I woke up again, around 0415; this time, it was from a raging heartburn. I set a couple of Tums on the job and drifted off again. When the 0630 alarm went off, I was in the middle of another disturbing dream and was in no mood to get up. 0700 wasn’t much better. At 0725, I decided to drag myself out of bed and start the day.

Here’s a little something to help kick off the morning:

Stray Toasters

• HOWTO be a well-dressed office dude
• Astronaut’s Brother Recalls a Man Who Dreamed Big
  The Engineering Building at North Carolina A&T State University (I attended this school after Purdue) was renamed after Dr. McNair – who had attended A&T – following the Challenger disaster.
  • 25 years after Challenger — inspiring the future of space science
• The Geopolitics of “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?”
  



• Sundance Festival Thrives on More Than Just Money
• “aww…”  != “awe”
  Conversely, “awe” != “aww…”
• Predictions for 2011
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Beaten, concussed man finds video of his assault on YouTube, care of his attackers
• What’s Happening in Egypt, Explained
• 
• 8-bit Funding Helps Kick-Start Indie Games
• LEGO Haunted House

And with that…

Namaste.

Thursday – 27 January 2011
Another No Bad News Thursday is upon us. This one greets us with sun and the hope of a (reasonably) warm day.

Last night, SaraRules! and I met downtown for dinner at Settebello Pizzeria Napoletana. I had been there twice (I think) before, though I’ve been to Capo, the gelato shop next door, a few times. SaraRules! had the Margherita; I had the Quattro Stagioni, which was quite good. After dinner, we walked to the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center for our fifth Sundance movie, Perfect Sense:

When Susan (Eva Green), an epidemiologist, reemerges from an affair gone sour, she encounters a peculiar patient—a Glasgow truck driver who experienced a sudden, uncontrollable crying fit. Now he is calm, but he has lost his sense of smell. Susan learns there are 11 cases like him in Glasgow, 7 in Aberdeen, 5 in Dundee, and 18 in Edinburgh. In fact, Great Britain has 100 cases, with additional ones reported in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and they all appeared in the last 24 hours.Although Susan’s encounter with Michael (Ewan McGregor), a local restaurant chef, holds the promise of new love, the world is about to change dramatically. People across the globe begin to suffer strange symptoms, affecting the emotions, then the senses.

This description doesn’t really do the movie justice. While it does touch on the epidemic, it focuses mostly on Susan and Michael, their relationship and how it changes as the world around them changes. It was a dramatic piece with very human comedic moments interspersed through it. I’ve noted before how I appreciate movies that use silence – or, more aptly: the absence of sound – well, like Contact and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. This movie joins the ranks of those films in its excellent use of silence.

Stray Toasters

• We had an “all-hands” meeting this morning, kind of a “state of the company” address. It went well… I personally think that it may have been made a wee bit better, thanks to the Saint Brendan’s Irish Cream in this morning’s coffee.
• Homeland Security to replace color-coded terror alerts



• I have a new personal goal: To make at least one person per day smile or laugh.
  I liberated this goal from Matt, last week at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.
• A Reservist in a New War, Against Foreclosure
• If “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” how do you think this guy feels?   (Courtesy, )
• ICV2 interview with WizKids Games’ Justin Ziran
• 
• At the suggestion of Thom Zahler, I am adding this book to The Covet List.
• Finding Tomorrow’s Jobs
• Thanks to Liz for this morning’s email amusement: Blue Panties (Totally work-safe, despite its title.)
• Lessons Linger 25 Years After Challenger Tragedy
• Museums Draw Scrutiny When They Sell Artworks
• I just received my new business cards!  Woot!

Namaste.

Wednesday – 26 January 2011
Midweek is upon us once again. Of course, that means that it’s Comics Wednesday. Additionally, it means that SaraRules! and I have another Sundance movie to attend; tonight’s movie is Perfect Sense.

It’s grey and foggy outside. I half expect to see creatures from Stephen King’s The Mist appear at any moment…

Last night, we had a quiet night in. I cooked dinner – chicken over rice (all cooked in cream of mushroom soup) with green beans – and we knocked out another couple of hours’ worth of DVR fare. After TV-watching, I went in to have another go at playing DC Universe Online.

I’d gotten another couple of responses from Sony’s Support Team, so I figured that I’d see what worked. The solutions worked better than before, but I still wound up crashing… but not before I got out of the introduction/tutorial. Finally. There are a couple of other things that I need to try before emailing the Support Team and telling them that their suggestions only partially worked.

Stray Toasters

• Straight out of the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Man fired for wearing Packers tie is offered new job
  So, let me get this straight: You fired a guy because he doesn’t like the same team as you…?  Idiotstick.
• F.D.A. and Dairy Industry Spar Over Testing of Milk
• Dubai’s World of Islands Is Sinking into the Sea
• 
  • • 10 Guinness Gaming Records You Didn’t Know Existed
• BBC World Service cuts outlined to staff
• Jos. A. Bank is having a sale on suits, sportcoats and blazers. I could use a couple of new blazers…
• “It’s the music that we choose…”
• For rent: Kennedy Space Center facilities, launch pads
• To Add Appeal, Olympics Borrow (Again) From X Games
• Coming soon: Wide Nose Dash-8. And it will come in CSX and Norfolk Southern livery.  *covet*

Namaste.

Tuesday – 25 January 2011
We’re almost a full month into the new year, but my fingers still want to type “2010.”

Today is my sister-in-law, Chelsea’s, birthday:

It’s snowing again. It’s not a heavy snowfall, but it is constant.  The snow doesn’t appear to have affected drivers in this part of the valley too much… but we’ll see how it goes as the morning progresses.
UPDATE: It’s gotten a little worse:

With that in mind, the Council for Better Driving: Utah would like to remind drivers to exercise caution when traveling today.

Last night, SaraRules! was kind enough to pick up the engine, tender and boxcar that I was having repaired at The Train Shoppe:

The locomotive now goes like the proverbial “bat out of Hell” — I hitched it up to a nine car consist and opened the throttle… and off it went. With the quickness. I am happy. I am also happy because I now have three (3) fully-functional locomotives.

SaraRules! fixed a very tasty recipe of stuffed peppers for dinner. As we ate, we cleared another couple of episodes of NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles off the DVR. Then, it was time to catch up with a few coworkers for CoD: Black Ops online. It was fun; I even tacked three more levels onto my character. After the group broke up, I tried to play a little more DC Universe Online. Once again, it locked up on me. (I’m going to be Level 30 before I ever get out of the introduction, at this pace…) I have a support ticket logged with Sony. In the past 12 hours, I’ve had two responses on it – one was a request for more information; one was a possible solution to the problem. I’m going to test it out this evening.

Chew on This: Food for Thought
This morning, Marvel’s latest event, “Fantastic Four: 3,” kicked off.

In this event, a member of the Fantastic Four dies. There’s been great speculation as to which character it would/could be. Comics news sites announced, as early as last night, that some mass media sources were spoiling the news of which member died.

*sigh*

It was bound to happen, I know… but I still held out a glimmer of hope that I would be able to make it until tomorrow – when I pick up my books – without hearing who the doomed person was.

Nope.

This morning, on the drive in, an announcer on a local radio station just blurted it out. There was no “Hey, if you’re a fan of the FF, you might want to turn the volume down for a minute” warning or anything.  Just “BAM!”

Monkeys.

Ear Candy
I heard this on the way to work this morning…

…which, for some reason, made me think of this:

Stray Toasters

• I finally got to introduce Kristen to iChat’s video chat option last night. It was nice to not only talk with her, but to see her, as well. I also gave her a “walking tour” of the house.
• The Sartorialist
• Bethany Sew and Sew: Character Aprons
• Chopin ‘probably had epilepsy’
• Test find high levels of lead in reusable bags
• Updated version of yesterday’s comic:



• Documents Open a Door on Mideast Peace Talks
• Jan. 25, 1921: The Robot Cometh
  • All Hail Our Robot Overlords! Sci-Fi’s Best Bots
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Flier goes ‘berserk’ over blocked lav, punches attendant
• 2011: A security manager’s wish list
• Unusual Wave of Violence Strikes Police Officers

And with that… on to the rest of the day!

Namaste.

Monday – 24 January 2010
Well met, work week. Let us see what we can accomplish.

Yesterday, I met up with Chris and Jeremiah for a HeroClix game. We played 800 points, per player. Chris fielded his X-Force team, Jeremiah brought five White Lanterns, and I played the Teen Titans. The game lasted almost three hours and, in a rare twist, didn’t involve two of us ganging up against one player. It was probably one of the most balanced three-player games I’ve ever played. In the end, Jeremiah lost his team first, I came in second, with Chris winning.

After the game, I met SaraRules! at her parents’ place for dinner and football. Later in the evening, the two of us headed downtown for our fourth Sundance movie: Benavides Born. The movie told the story of Luz Garcia, a high school senior in a small Texas town. Her dream is to get put Benavides in her rear-view mirror. Her means for doing so is to secure a powerlifting scholarship to the University of Texas. The movie follows Luz as she competes, in hopes of winning a scholarship, and as she interacts with her family and friends. This is also a coming of age movie, as it deals with Luz learning what it takes to achieve her goal and dealing with the obstacles and setbacks that arise, making her dream seem unattainable. It was a very “human” and very good movie.

Instant Replay: Football
There were some only two games over the weekend: the AFC and NFC Championship Games. I only watched the AFC game:

New York Jets at Pittsburgh Steelers
19 – 24
The Jets flew into Heinz Field, coming off a big win against the New England Patriots. I don’t know what happened to the Jets in the first half, but they were completely shut down by the Steelers. Their run game was ineffective. There was almost no pass game. The were just… there. In the second half, the Jets remembered what they were there to do and played ball. Their game wasn’t perfect, but it was fairly solid, they posted sixteen (16) unanswered points, but their last defensive stand failed to stop the Steelers from attaining first downs, allowing them to run out the clock. And so, the Super Bowl game will see the Steelers taking on the Green Bay Packers. Guess I’m going to be a Packers’ fan.

Stray Toasters

• American Icons
• Art Exhibit Stirs Up the Ghosts of Zimbabwe’s Past
• Thanks to for pointing out the Model Railway Layouts Blog to me.
• Fitness guru Jack LaLanne dies at 96
• Why Papa Johns, Intel, others said no to Super Bowl ads
• 
• Frank Gehry’s Home for New World Symphony
• In Pursuit of Qubits, Uniting Subatomic Particles by the Billions
• Wizard and Toyfare magazines fold
  (Which really seems about 3 to 5 years overdue…)
• 
• This is a good multi-genre mash-up: The Walken Dead
• Comics Code Authority is dead

Bang. Zoom.

Namaste.

Sunday – 23 January 2011
It’s a quiet, but sunny (and cold) Sunday morning.
I haven’t looked outside… at least not beyond the immediate neighborhood, so I have no idea if yesterday’s snow flurries managed to clear any of the haze out of the air.

Over the past couple of days, SaraRules and I have attended three movies that are part of the Sundance Film Festival: I Saw the Devil, Sing Your Song and Knuckle. Trying to compare the movies would be like trying to compare apples to elephants, so I’ll just cover each one on its own merits:

• I Saw the Devil – This movie follows agent Kim Soo-hyeon as he pursues the man who killed his fiancee. His aim is not to bring him to justice, but to torture him… repeatedly. This was a straight-up revenge movie. Unlike other movies, it was more of a game of cat-and-mouse, with Kim Soon-hyeon tracking the movements of his prey, waiting until he was about to commit another murder and then ruthlessly and mercilessly attacking him. It was a good example of the Nietzsche adage: “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.” The director, Ji-woon Kim, pulled no punches in showing the savagery and brutality of the murders or of Kim Soo-hyeon’s actions against the killers. And, at the movie’s end, it’s hard to say whether “good” truly triumphed over “evil.” All-in-all, it was a good movie… but I am not sure that I really need to see it again.
  
• Sing Your Song – This has been my favorite movie, so far. (We still have three more movies to see…) This was a documentary about Harry Belafonte and the journey his life has taken, from a poor boy born in Harlem to an international crusader for civil and human rights. His work as an activist was interestingly juxtaposed against both his career as an entertainer and as a husband and father. Belafonte spoke, rather candidly, about his life and work and detailed the things – good and bad – that have driven him. This film presented an interesting counterpoint to last year’s Freedom Riders, in the way that it showed one man’s struggle with the hatred around him, as opposed to the organization of a group of people to fight injustice.
  
• Knuckle – This movie, another documentary, related twelve years of feuds between Irish families in Ireland and England and the manner in which they (temporarily) settled them: Bare-knuckle fights. The movie mostly focused on two of the clans involved: The Quinn McDonaghs and the Joyces. The curious thing about it all: The families are related. The feuding had a very strong Hatfield vs. McCoy feel to it, with the origins leading back to the 1980s, when a member of one clan was killed (manslaughter) by a member from another clan. There was also a level of honor (upholding the family name) and an odd kind of one-upsmanship (“No [Family A] will ever beat a [Family B]…”) that was heaped onto the fights, fueling the animosity between clans. After a while, I found myself mostly feeling sad for the families, as there seemed to be no way to end the cycle.
  

Stray Toasters

• Yesterday’s HeroClix tourney went well. Even better, when I announced the format for the next event – a 1,000-point, one-round, “Generals” brawl – it went over as well as I had hoped.
• This was a cool and interesting mash-up, courtesy of :
• Sam Cooke at 80: The Career that Could Have Been
• 
• Designer Michael Kors sticks to reality

And with that, I’m off to have breakfast with SaraRules! and then on to play some ‘Clix with the guys.

Namaste.

Friday – 21 January 2011
Hello, Day Off!
I greet you with coffee and Irish cream!

Today is also ‘ birthday:

Last night, UPS finally delivered my copy of DC Universe Online.

Oddly, I didn’t immediately bound downstairs to install it. No, instead I waited until after dinner (I cooked burgers on the grill; SaraRules! fixed Tater Tots and green beans). It was one of the longest game installations I’ve dealt with… well, at least since playing games on my Commodore 64. Yeah, it was that long. But, it installed.

And then it patched.

And then I had to update the .NET Framework on my computer.

And then… it started.  Finally.

For the most part.

There still seem to be “a few” problems with the game. But, I have it. And that’s a start. I… recreated (sort of)… Nefer Tem. This version is a little different than his CoH counterpart. I’ll have to see how his power set progresses and how close/different he winds up.

After I got the game going, SaraRules! and I headed to the gym. Having come to the conclusion that I need more of it in my workout routine, I did… cardio. Well, a little. I spent 15 minutes on the elliptical, maintaining roughly a 5.5 MPH pace.

• Elliptical: 15 minutes, ~5.5 MPH
• Bench Press: 3 sets/8 reps, 185 lbs
• Shoulder Press (dumbbell): 3 sets/10 reps, 30 lbs
• Curls (dumbbell): 3 sets/10 reps, 30 lbs
• Sit-ups (incline): 3 sets/10 reps

Not too big a workout, but it was still a good one.  And I don’t know what I was thinking, but I completely forgot that my last bench press weight was 165 lbs, not 185. Nothing like jumping 20 lbs in weight… after nearly 2 weeks out of the gym! UGH!

:::INTERLUDE:::
Here’s a little something for your Friday morning:

Stray Toasters

• Investigators search for woman in connection with 1987 abduction
• 10 Most Popular Autocorrects from December 2010 (courtesy of )
• How Creed Saved a Norwegian Boy From a Pack of Wolves
  This story would have been 500% better if it had been Apollo Creed.
• F.D.A. Sees Promise in Alzheimer’s Imaging Drug
• 
• For itemizers, IRS has set tax-filing date of Feb. 14
• By way of my friend, Marie: What’s the Longest Word in the English Language?
• A Path Is Sought for States to Escape Their Debt Burdens
• Jump in de line…
  Rock your body in time!
• 12 Robotic Garages Worthy of a Bond Villain

Up. Out.

Namaste.

Thursday – 20 January 2011
I almost typed “Friday,” as today is NBN Technical Friday. Wishful thinking, I guess.

Last night’s D&D 4.0 game was cancelled. That meant that my Wednesday night had a gaping hole in the middle of it. So, after collecting this week’s four-color haul from Dr. Volt’s,  SaraRules! and I capitalized on the free evening and turned it into Date Night! We went to Pawit’s Royale Thai for dinner and then headed down to Jordan Commons to see True Grit. I’ve not seen the original, but this one was a very good movie. I have heard a number of people talk about how good the main actors’ performances were, especially Hailee Steinfeld‘s… and am happy to report that they were correct.

Stray Toasters

• Higher Taxes Wouldn’t End Some Deficits
• Malware Warning: New Kookface campaign hits Facebook
  • Koobface exploit for Macs circulating in the wild
• This was a horrible movie, but I like the music video…
• Hello Kitty’s Borg-like Assimilation of the World Continues in Awesome Mashups
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Undercover policeman married activist he was sent to spy on
• American Express to cut 550 jobs as service needs shrink
• 
• Wonder Woman Teams Up with MAC for Super Makeup
• From the “No, I never would have thought that something like this was needed” file: Has this ever happened to you?
• A Racy Show with Teenagers Steps Back From a Boundary
  I find it interesting that they waited until Paragraph 12 to note that MTV’s Skins is an Americanized version of a British show of the same name, or as the article states: “…a country that has historically displayed a higher tolerance for TV eroticism than the United States.”
• Batman vs. Bruce Wayne
• Tricks of hotel marketing photos

Namaste.