Gods it’s been hellish here the last week or so. Everything seems to be broken including my ability to find my computer long enough to blog. Last Sunday there was one of those freakish summer storms that we tend to get here and the power went out. But of course it didn’t just go out for a few minutes or an hour or whatever, it was out for seven fucking hours! By the time things came back up it was midnight and 80 degrees in the house. It sucked much ass.

The only thing I’ve really found time for is podcasts. Listening not creating although I desperately want to create one with violet but we keep forgetting to do it. We usually remember at the end of our amazing conversations. It goes something like, “And that’s what we need to do to fix the world. Why the hell didn’t we record that? God dammit!” This weekend I swear.

Work has been crappy this week and at this point I don’t care. Yesterday the pipes on the A/C unit froze so the house was 80 degrees again when I got home. Today things didn’t suck quite so heavily but Violet came home with an upset tummy which ruined her evening. Yes, I said “tummy,” fuck you if you snickered at that.

Anyway, new stuff. Go to digg.com and register and start diggin’ stuff. Digg is a kick ass news site from Kevin Rose where all of the stories are user submitted. Other users vote for (digg) the stories and the highest rated ones show up on the front page. If you want to add me as a friend my nusername is Vale (which is cool because it’s usually taken).

I keep meaning to post an OPML file of the podcasts I listen to but it seems to be ever changing so I’ve been holding off on it. I tend to add four to five new ones a week in a search to find enough so that they fill up my day with podcasty goodness. Most of the new ones I add tend to suck so things are moving slowly on that project. Maybe I need to just add the good ones to the links section.

More on what I’ve been doing later, seeya.

P.S. The podcast will be called the CRT Dispatch, of that I am certain.

Since we’re on the subject of robots, check out this robot cat from Sega.

http://www.segatoys.co.jp/nearme/

I find it highly compelling and slightly creepy.

From Digg.com

check this out(you may have already seen it)

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15163650-13762,00.html

Time to start saving up! haha

From Ars Technica: Scotty beamed up to the big starship in the sky

I’m going to propose a national geek day of mourning. Everybody stays home and watches old episodes of Star Trek.

Wow.

That was a really busy weekend. Fun was had, projects got completed, work was done, emergencies were handled. Let me break it down for you.

Friday
Last day of the work week, got paid, went home, went to the mall for dinner. From there we headed over the Barnes & Noble for the Harry Potter release thingy. Arrived at about nine and sipped coffee while the kids raced around getting their faces painted and making wands. After midnight chaos ensued and we barely escaped with our lives and our copy of Harry Potter 6. Violet is reading it next to me and gasping on a regular basis (I hate it when she does that). Once we got home we found that the cooler had been off for several hours so we finished up Firefly while things cooled off. Fucking amazing is all I really have to say about it.

Saturday
We didn’t get up until around ten in the morning after crashing at three. I came out and finished Pronoia after which I had to head in to the office for a few hours. Violet read HP and did laundry (damn her).

Sunday
Didn’t get up till around eleven this day (still recovering from Friday night) and proceeded to read Art of Intrusion for several hours. We then embarked on a shelving project in our pantry. It went very well and looks really good. We also picked up a pole lamp for out side which I mounted in the umbrella pole on our patio table (pics of both projects soon). As we were re-arranging our kitchen and pantry my father called and asked me to go to his house and check out my grandmother’s A/C. Seems is keep popping the power strip that it’s plugged in to. Leaving the house in a mess we head out there and take care of the problem. Get back home at around fifteen after nine and eat dinner (on a work night…I hate when that happens). We finish up the re-org of the kitchen and finally crap out at around eleven.

All in all a nice productive weekend.

I have a confession to make.

I’ve been cheating you all recently.

Rather than having it look like I haven’t been updating every day I’ve been changing the times on my posts so that they look like I posted them a day earlier than I actually did. I don’t feel particularly bad about it but I thought you should know.

I mostly don’t feel bad because of the things I’ve been doing in place of blogging (look in the post just prior to this one). A couple of good books and some kick ass Sci-Fi makes everything better. ^_^

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out this Saturday and I am totally not ready for it. Despite my best efforts (i.e. no efforts) I haven’t been able to finish the various media that currently holds me. Violet and I still have three episodes of Firefly to watch, I’m only half way through Pronoia, and I’m only like 50 pages in to Art of Intrusion.

I think my demands that I be the first to read HP6 may become impossible to heed. Looks Like Violet gets this one first…like she did HP5…I’m still bitter about that.

I think it’s time to do this again. I have 50 Gmail invites to give away right now. If you want it come and get it. The service comes highly recommended by me and, lets be honest, what more do you need?

Densoro and I were having a conversation this evening and the topic turned to Internet Enabled appliances. At issue was the usefulness of say a microwave that was able to connect to the Internet. I laid out the following scenario for him.

Imagine that you have just un-boxed your new Internet microwave. It comes standard with a touch screen LCD, Wi-fi, 10/100 Ethernet, and a 128MB compact flash card. You connect the power and the unit finds your wireless network and confirms the connection. Next it asks you for your street address including zip code. Now your new microwave knows where you are, what your elevation is, and what the weather is in your area at this exact moment, perhaps even what the temperature is in the room if it’s connected to a networked home climate control system. This information will allow it to adjust cooking times to suit the environmental and atmospheric conditions of your location.

From that point the device will begin a download of all current cooking temperatures and times as well as macros for starts and stops and rotational speed of the carousel. There will be generic times for things such as chicken and ground beef as well as times for name brand items which means that you’ll never fuck up your ramen again.

Just some thoughts for the future. I hold no claim on these ideas and you may use them as you will as long as they are used for good.

If you’ve never played Animal Crossing then you are stupid and I’d like you to go away now. Not really but you should check it out since it is one of the single most original gaming experiences ever. Anyway it’s coming out for the Nintendo DS and it’s looking awesome. That’s the only word I can find for it. Portable Animal Crossing = awesome. Wifi internet play = awesome. Custom hats and hairdos = awesome. Communicating withe stylus and touch screen = awesome.

I’m really looking forward to it. Read more about it here while I go figure out a way to get a DS by November.