KelsonV Social Posts – Page 258 – Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity

Highlights

Last Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.

Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.

Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)

Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new “Diamond Jamboree” center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.

Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)

Protected: Barricaded

Don’t ask me questions, just fix it!

Last Wednesday. Customer sends email to complain about spam. Asks, “Is spam filteirng even on this account? It’s getting 100s of spams a day!”

Actually, it isn’t. But they won’t listen to that. And they won’t give me the info I need to be able to cut down on the spam that does make it through.

Catching Up

1. Finally took the time to finish reading Victory of Eagles. Very good — on a level with Throne of Jade, which had previously been my favorite in the Temeraire series.

2. Also took a bunch more boxes to storage, including 4 comic boxes. I’d intended to put half my comics in storage when we moved back in May, but I wanted to catalog them all first so that I could find them easily. Then my arms fell off after we moved, and I didn’t want to carry the boxes, and then I just kept putting it off. Now we’ve got a chance of clearing a patch from the co-ax outlet to the TV, so…

3. Arranged for cable. I’d been hoping we’d be somewhere more permanent by the time the fall TV season started, but we haven’t had much luck.

They’re coming on Thursday, but we’ve made arrangements for the second ep of Bones and the premieres of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (try typing that three times fast) and Fringe (that was easier!). Seriously considered Time Warner’s DVR package, which is only around $10/month, but it’s only available with their digital cable package… which starts at around $50/month. And there isn’t really anything we’d be watching that isn’t on the $15/month broadcast-only package, at least not until BSG comes back sometime next year.

4. Finally saw Wall-E, in a theater with 4 other people, including a kid who kept making comments and hadn’t yet learned the art of moderating his volume. And a sound system that went wonky during the second-to-last preview and stayed that way through most of the film, even after I went out to report the problem during the short. Fortunately it was just an undercurrent that sounded kind of like a high-pitched refrigerator warble, and not distortion of the soundtrack. Also, the print was rather badly scratched in the middle third of the picture. Despite all that, the movie was still quite enjoyable.

Klotski and Labyrinth

Started moving boxes and furniture around so that we can actually have someone install cable. Moved some boxes into bedroom, made room in the closet for others, and dug out my corner desk from the corner of the living room where it’s sat since May. When we set up our computers in the bedroom, we left enough space for the desk, but never got around to moving it.

As it turns out, the desk won’t fit through the bedroom door.

It took both of us carrying it and rotating it about 3 feet in the air just to get it into the hallway, but there’s no way to get it from the hallway into the bedroom without removing the corner leg… and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without breaking the thing.

So the desk is back in the corner of the living room, under a slightly smaller pile of boxes than before. I guess I’ll put some of them where I intended to put the desk.

Also: Watched Labyrinth. I still like most of the movie, but I can no longer take the goblins singing and dancing with David Bowie.

Catching Up

1. I’ve been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s. They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes. Some of them are total crack, and there’s a web archive with snarky commentary. I got the idea to profile the villains that the Flash fought (even though there’s still a bunch of minor villains and supporting characters from canon to add), so I’ve been looking for pages to get higher-res scans. I found 2 of 4.

The funny thing? It turns out that the Omnivore’s 100 list I posted includes Hostess Fruit Pies because the author was nostalgic for those ads.

2. Dinner with MIL Saturday, after alenxa went to a cousin’s wedding shower.

3. Majorly dehydrated on Sunday, or something. Tried to start going through the piles of boxes against the edge of our living room, but ended up spending the afternoon on the couch reading, sipping water. Read sections from The Flash Companion and a comic book trade, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War. I’d picked it up months ago, before we moved, since it was a sequel to a story I’d liked that came out in 1989 (Invasion!) but hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Not bad, but didn’t wow me either. Fortunately felt better in time to…

4. Hit the Orange Street Fair on Sunday evening. Passed on Abelskivers (sp) this time. Was in line, but realized I just didn’t want them. Agreed we have to explore Old Town Orange sometime when it’s not a fair and businesses are open. I think the last time I did that was more than 10 years ago.

5. Responsible day today. Groceries, Laundry, etc.

6. Interviewed the outgoing writer on The Flash last week!

Goals for this week:
1. Locate cable outlet.
2. Arrange for some sort of TV service. The fall season is starting, and we’ll actually be watching stuff live and not just off of DVDs.

Bees and Cheese

1. House-hunting continues. Just about every place we’ve put an offer in on has gone for ~10K over the asking price, so we’re starting to factor that in. Looked at yet another condo in a complex we’ve looked at repeatedly: fantastic condition (except for the door, which looked like it had been kicked in — alenxa figures it was probably a forced repo), but right in front of the pool. A place that needs work can be fixed up more easily than a place in a bad location can be moved.

2. We have bees again. This time they’re setting up shop in the bathroom wall, crawling in through the handle in the plumbing access panel in the back yard. One actually made its way into the bathroom through the bathtub overflow before we taped it over.

3. I spent the weekend watching the new DVDs of the 1967 DC super-heroes cartoons by Filmation. Fun in a cheesy, over-the-top way. Only ~2 hours (18 episodes at 7 minutes each), but had to spread them out. Plus I was trying to do a write-up of the Flash episodes, which meant re-watching, taking screencaps, etc. I’ve posted a review on another blog.

4. Speaking of cheesy, we finally watched Aztec Rex. We’d been warned, and it was only because some of the Farscape production people were involved It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected (even if the first ~40 minutes were interminable), though that may have been the sidecar talking.

Tuesday Morning, 3AM

After realizing I was still way behind on sleep debt, I decided to go to bed early last night. I think it was around 10:00. Then in the middle of the night, my phone got an alert from our monitoring system at work. I dragged myself out of bed, checked whether I could get onto the system remotely, and saw that it wasn’t responding to anything but pings.

Whee.

So I threw on the first clothes I found and drove in to the office at a quarter to three in the morning so I could get the server running again.

I never assume that I’m going to be the only one in the office anymore. Some of my co-workers tend to keep late hours (though none so late as the guy who actually slept during the day and came in around the time everyone else went home). And once I was in around midnight to deal with another server crash, and another coworker walked in with a bunch of his friends. They were on the way back from somewhere and he’d stopped to pick something up.

I didn’t see anyone last night, but this morning I got asked by another coworker, “So, what were you doing in so early this morning?” He’d been working late and just crashed at the office instead of going home. Apparently he woke up just enough to see me when I walked by.

The Horton Grand

comment on the post “San Diego Comic Con Reflections, Part One“:

My wife and I were also at the Horton Grand. I absolutely agree on that hotel — it’s fantastic.

Except for the fact that we were in a second-floor room that looked out onto Fourth, and the windows didn’t block much sound, so we could hear drunken revelers, motorcycles, and stretch Hummers idling below our window into the late hours of the night.

I wasn’t aware it was supposed to be haunted. I think I would have preferred the ghosts to the street view.

Writer’s Block: Your First Record

What was the first music album you ever bought or owned? Do you still listen to it or have you moved on?

If I remember correctly, the first album I bought was the soundtrack to Glory. I haven’t listened to the album itself in a long time, but the music’s on the instrumental mix.

Current Music: Charging Fort Wagner (in my head)

Drowsy

Finally started getting my sleep schedule adjusted, only to send it completely out of whack this weekend.

Friday I just took a break from everything and caught up on comics. I read the first issue of Madame Xanadu (looks promising), re-read the first volume of Welcome to Tranquility and finally read the second.

On Saturday, we went up to LA to see The Drowsy Chaperone. It was the first time in years that I’d gone to see a play knowing little to nothing about it. It was a send-up of 1920s musicals, structured as a fan sharing a favorite from his record collection. It was fun, but I don’t really have any desire to see it again.

We ate at a restaurant called Tesoro, which turned out to be at the base of that amphitheater-like area below the Omni Hotel. I got lost earlier trying to get to it, because I got off the parking lot — excuse me, the freeway — a couple of exits before Grand, and figured that if I took 3rd I’d be able to catch up with where the directions said to be. Somehow I’d never noticed that there were multiple levels of streets with the same names. So instead of catching up to 3rd and Grand, we ended up in a tunnel underneath where we were supposed to be…

Today we went out to see Hellboy II, which was quite good. One of the things that makes it work is that, like Iron Man, it takes itself just seriously enough…no more. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a scene near the middle of the film that is absolutely WTF-worthy and hilarious, but it works. Also dropped into Borders to pick up the new Temeraire novel, and walked out with 3 books…

I also finished a novel, Ringworld’s Children, the fourth volume in the Ringworld series. I think my favorite of the series was probably the second one, The Ringworld Engineers. This one looks structured to be a final book, but then I suppose the others were too. It’s a series in the “Hey, I have another idea for this concept!” sense (or, in some cases, “Hey, fans pointed out scientific implausibilities, let’s see if I can come up with a story that fixes that”), not an arc sense.

Current Music: Close To You (Mirrormask version)

The Fourth

Went out to see the fireworks at Laguna Beach on Friday. I started the day reading comics, including the new House of Mystery issue — Vertigo is not making it easy for me to cut down on comics purchasing — and the first two issues of Gemini, about a super-hero who doesn’t know he’s a hero. (There’s a second personality, activated remotely by a controlling agency. And the hero personality doesn’t know about his civilian ID.) Also read some old Flash comics, originally to prepare for a couple of profiles on my website, but got distracted by Silver Age wackiness.

Ended up sleeping half the afternoon, since I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve been trying to adjust to getting up earlier for alenxa’s new job. (Annoyingly, I discovered the next morning that a server problem came up on Friday — if I’d been my usual Internet-addicted self, I would have spotted it much earlier.)

Anyway, since Katie didn’t want to wait around for hours on the beach like we did last year, we aimed to arrive around 8:30, during twilight. Again, we made good time down the canyon and parked up at the entrance (across the street from Laguna Playhouse and Tivoli Terrace). It’s amazing how much more expensive it is to park just a few blocks closer to the beach.

We found a good spot, and this year the wind didn’t blow the smoke toward us, so the view was clear, both of the fireworks launched from the base of the cliffs and of the fireworks launched a mile or two farther up the coast. Someone was selling cheap blue lightsabers on the beach. We saw a bunch of them. Unlike the good ones, you could really see the individual bulbs/LEDs along the length of the blade.

We let tradition win out over annoyance at Starbucks, and went to the place that used to be a Diedrich Coffee. That, and I kind of needed the caffeine to get us home. On our way back to the car, we stopped at a gelato place, and I had a really good combo of cherry and chocolate.

Saturday morning I was stuck going into work, then afternoon was mostly errands. Then I let myself get caught up in a flamewar, wasting time I intended to use finishing up on that reading. Finally made the time for it on Sunday, as well as reading through the PDFs of The Flash Companion (I’ve made arrangements with the main author to post some excerpts online to promote it). Discovered that in the Contributors’ Biographies section, my website got hyphenated. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it’s the domain name, and some domain squatter owns hyper-borea.org.

Current Location: car dealer

Running Around

Sunday was mostly errands — replacing the lost rice cooker (In the rush to clear things out of the old apartment, I walked into the kitchen 3 or 4 times to grab or check things, saw a box sitting in an open cabinet, thought “I need to grab that on the next trip,” and promptly forgot about it each time), getting stakes to train the morning glories in the backyard to curl around something other than the patio furniture, getting a new welcome mat (which of course was missing a label, the last one on the shelf, and wasn’t actually on the shelf, so we had to guess which empty bin it was and convince the clerk that it was the correct one), etc. Groceries.

I also launched a new comics-focused blog to go with my Flash website. I’d started posting news on the front page, and wanted to simplify management, and realized I was basically building a mini-blog already. And then there was that domain name I picked up last year and couldn’t figure out what to do with. I had some other stuff I wanted to finish first, but I kept running into news items I wanted to post, and figured it would be better to have them on an actual blog. So I set up a new copy of WordPress, pointed SpeedForce.org to it, picked a suitable theme and and put together a few posts to get things started.

Protected: Temeculee, Temeculaa

Weekend: Concert & Home

alenxa and I went to see Aimee Mann at the House of Blues on Friday. Rather than trying to eat somewhere in Downtown Disney, where no one takes reservations and everything is crowded on a Friday night, we just ate at Taco Rosa and drove up after dinner. It worked out pretty well — we ended up there after the doors had opened (so we didn’t have to stand in line), but early enough to secure a spot on the main floor, putting us closer to the stage than we’ve ever been before. The concert was good, but a bit strange in that her new album had only been out for 4 days, so most people didn’t know the songs. Older songs got cheers as soon as people recognized the intro, but the old songs were met with silence until she finished and the audience applauded.

And she told a funny story about how one of the songs started out as a sort-of commission for Shrek III. Unfortunately they wanted a happy, encouraging, “Come on, you can do it!” song, and she said she’s not very good at that kind of message.

House-hunting on Saturday turned up a few prospects. Meanwhile, did some cleanup at the apartment. Finally arranged the front of the living room so that the display case doesn’t block access to the window.

As for the goals I set for myself:

Sort through old magazines. – Done. Tossed 2 bags of magazines & one bag of old papers (seriously, brochures for wedding services for a company we didn’t use?) into the recycling.
Find desk lamp. – Tried, no luck.
Put some actual content on Facebook profile. – A little, but not much.
Finish website update on the Silver-Age Flash. – Wrote a lot, but didn’t finish.

Current Music: Tori Amos, Blood Roses

The Accidental Beekeeper

A follow-up on the bees we found in the kitchen last Monday. Management brought in exterminators on Tuesday, and aside from a half-dozen dead bees on the floor, they were all gone by Wednesday morning. Well, except for the ones alenxa found when she opened up the cabinet above the stove today:

Great, so there were several dozen bees in the cabinet by Tuesday. It’s a good thing we didn’t open it.

Current Music: Tori Amos: Sleeps With Butterflies (which, appropriately, is on “The Beekeeper”)

This is not my idea of a good time

At this point, none of the desktop computers have made it through the move completely unscathed.

1. Katie’s desktop, when we set it up after moving, couldn’t open the CD/DVD tray. It tried, but after whirring for a few seconds, it would give up. Because of the way the case is set up, I had to open it up and pull out the drive in order to get at it with a paper-clip, manually open it, move it a couple of times, and blast the whole thing with compressed air.

2. The transmitter for the cordless mouse went on the shared Windows box. So we went down to Best Buy to get a new mouse. The next day I found the 10% off coupon I’d printed out when setting up mail forwarding with the post office.

3. My computer, after working fine for a week and a half, suddenly stopped displaying a desktop. Instead I got flickering rectangular fragments. Flaky video card, obsolete hardware, and 64-bit decisions.

Current Music: Helicopters, Barenaked Ladies

Day Off

After spending Friday night and most of the daylight hours Saturday and Sunday moving furniture and boxes around, putting stuff on shelves or in closets, hooking up electronics, sorting stuff to keep/sell/donate/take to storage, and generally trying to make the new place liveable, I decided to just relax on Monday.

That morning I finally got around to reading The Stardust Kid (which I volunteered to index at the Grand Comics Database last summer when I figured I’d pick it up any day now. Oops). Then in the afternoon, after a quick grocery run, I finished rereading Ringworld. alenxa made purple potato salad from scratch, and we watched “Once More With Feeling” with dinner. We followed is up with an episode of Bones (which is decidedly not dinner material, as far as I’m concerned).

Today: back to work, trying to remind myself that it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.

Starting to feel like home

It’s been slow going, but we’ve cleared out enough of the living room to set out the coffee table, making the couch usable, and set up the TV and DVD player.

One thing we’re doing, since we hope to find a place to buy within a few months, is not getting cable for the time being. Sure, we were only spending $15/month for the broadcast channels, but all our shows are going (or have gone) on hiatus for the summer. Why pay for something we aren’t going to use? When I explain this plan, people are often very confused. The AT&T tech actually started to say, “Well, you could watch…” Why? I don’t watch TV just to have the TV on. If I’m interested in a show, I turn it on. If I’m not, I turn it off. If I’m bored, I’d rather pick up something from my backlog of books or comics, or go to the internet.

After I set up the TV today, we popped in our DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We’d gone out to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean, which was fun (both the hanging out with friends and the movie), and we found ourselves quoting the new film to each other at relevant points in the original.