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Thoughts on just about everything from rock-n-roll, sports, kids, to geek speak -- by John Bullock About John Subscribe to this blog  |
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February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 September 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 |
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Saturday, November 26, 2005 |
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Thanksgiving Dinner | |
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I know a brown dog who swallowed a bed, he swallowed a bed, surely he must be dead! I came home Wednesday afternoon to a bit of excitement at home. The dog had a cyst on his foot that we had the vet work on so he has had it in an ace bandage for about the last week and a half (he just got it off today). The vets office said that it is very important that the bandage doesn't get wet or his foot could get infected. The back yard gets a fair amount of shade so it had not dried up from the last snow storm so we've been keeping Toby in our bedroom during the day. He had been doing great with this arrangement but I think he finally hit his limit and got bored. When Suzanne and the kids found him Wednesday, he had shredded our down comforter, ripped up the top comforter and shredded the sheets. There were feathers from the down comforter everywhere! My job was to protect the dog from my wife and clean up his mess. Usually when he pulls a stunt like this, whoever is last on the scene gets this role. The dog isn't dead yet, but he is having some stomach problems (nothing worthy of a vet visit yet - knock on wood) but is generally his dumb self. We couldn't salvage anything that he got his grubby little paws on so we had to make a quick trip to Linens-n-Things for a new down comforter. We bought the same bed-in-a-bag set (online as they didn't have it in the store) that we had before as we had just purchased it about six months ago and really liked it. Ahh, the joys of owning animals! |
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Monday, November 21, 2005 |
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God's Debris | |
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As I mentioned in a post last week, I started reading Scott Adam's blog. He posted a link to an electronic copy of one of his books. This book is not a Dilbert book or related to comics in any way. It is called God's Debris. He describes it as "a thought experiment wrapped in a fictional story". He says "the target audience for God's Debris is people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls.". It is a short read that you can cruise through quickly. However, I should warn you that although it is short, make sure you have a couple of free hours before starting it because you won't want to put it down once you start it. Happy reading! | |
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Musical Bliss | |
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I was in musical bliss on my way to work this morning. Not because of a particular song or CD, it was just the fact that I was listening to the radio and there was actually music on it! I rarely get to hear uninterrupted music while driving to and from work in my car (not including CD's). What was the difference today? I finally broke down and got an XM radio. Suzanne's car came with XM and got her hooked. It didn't take long. I think she had a 3 month trial membership and renewed it immediately. It took me longer though. As I do have a few (hundred) CD's, I listen to those quite a bit. However, listening to the same songs in the same order all the time can get old. Sure you can burn CD's to mix it up, but that takes time and money. I also got fed up with never being able to find music on the radio when I wanted. All you can find are DJ's, commercials, and talk shows. Blah, blah, blah. However, I think the straw that broke the camel's back was towards the end of the baseball season when the Yankees were playing the Red Sox and I couldn't find them on the radio. I discovered that XM radio broadcasts ALL MLB games. You tune the radio to the game you want, and on your display it shows inning and score so you aren't stuck waiting for the announcers to tell you. One of the other reasons Suzanne kept XM that influenced my decision was the kids stations. Both of the kids really like the music on them and it helps out when you are in the car a lot. I started doing some research a few weeks back and found a radio on e-bay that would integrate with my car and home stereos. I can also save stock symbols and get quotes any time (not that I will). One of the really cool features that I WILL use is the ability to see what is on other stations without disrupting what you are currently listening too! XM not only has music and baseball, they have news, comedy, other sports, and live events. 150 channels currently! Did I mention that you can listen on-line as well? You don't get the all the normal content (legal/contractualy issues) but I believe you get all the music channels. As this is the second XM radio for the family, the monthly fee for mine was only $6.99/month. Not too bad. I'll let you know how I feel after having it for a while but don't expect me to say anything different. |
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Friday, November 18, 2005 |
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Narrow Escapes | |
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This week has been a pretty tough one for my normal commute. Between the weather, did I mention it has been cold and snowing this week, and the drivers, highway C-470 has had a rough go of it. Luckily for me, I have been able to avoid most of the mess. On Tuesday, I had to take the dog to the vet as he got another cyst on one of his paws. On our way home from the vet, I was traveling east bound on C-470 and I could see that my normal route to work was backed up quite a ways. So instead of just dropping the dog at home and then going to work, I worked for about half and hour at home then went in to work. The highway had cleared up enough so that I breezed right on through. I had to take the dog back to the vet on Wednesday to have this cyst lanced, cleaned and probed (to try and determine a cause). Before I left, I saw on 9 News that there was another accident on west bound C-470. I decided that after I dropped the dog off that I would just continue north on a different route (Indiana) instead of getting into the parking lot on 470. I was not the only person that had that same thought. Actually, so many people had the same thought that it caused another accident on highway 285. Although I lost a couple of minutes getting past that accident it was not a big deal but I only went about another quarter of a mile before I had to get in line to get onto 470 (I thought I was north enough to avoid the accident but apparently not). After sitting and not moving for about five minutes, I realized that I could go a little further west on 285, then take highway 8 over to Morrison and get back on my normal route to work. So although I lost maybe ten minutes or so, I know one of my fellow architects and office mates had a less pleasant trip and was stuck in traffic for about 90 minutes! This AM I had to get gasoline on my way to work. As I was leaving the gas station, I had to stop to let some emergency vehicles out of the fire station. I could not see where they went and was stuck at the light so didn't give it a second thought. Well, I found out what the problem was almost immediately. Just as I got on the ramp to get onto west bound C-470, I saw traffic was backed up. I couldn't very well backup on the ramp so just prepared myself to wait it out. I think because I was so close behind the emergency vehicles, traffic had not started backing up too much so I was only delayed a couple of extra minutes. I really get angry with other drivers. Not road rage angry or anything stupid like that. I just wish people would realize how stupid they are acting and if if they just pulled their heads out of their asses we wouldn't have these types of problems. I can almost guarantee that all of the accidents were caused by people driving too fast and following too closely. When will people realize that getting 3 cars ahead is not going to get them to work any faster? I know most of the time these jerks that going zooming past me, I just pass or catch up to later at a stop light or when traffic slows down. Take the accident this morning as an example. It looked like a series of three or four cars that all rear ended each other. If they weren't driving too fast they could have stopped in time. And if they weren't on the bumpers of the cars in front of them, when they got nailed, they would not have hit the person in front of them. Why is this so damn hard to understand? Grrrrrrrrrr! Man, good thing it is Friday and we are planning on going to my favorite Mexican restaraunt, Moosehill Cantina. I can almost taste the margaritas and rellenos already! |
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Double Dante | |
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I've recently started reading Scott Adam's, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, blog. I have really enjoyed it as he and I both think the same things are funny. The nice thing about the blog is that he deals with things in the real world versus the stuff he creates for his comic strip. He actually has inspired me to write this particular blog entry and hopefully more. He takes his everyday experiences and shares some of his inner thoughts about them. Things most people just keep inside. However, the way he does them is a hoot as he is constantly making fun of himself and life around us. So, I wanted to share an experience I had yesterday at work and some of my less than normal thoughts about it. Although I'm still not going to let you get into my head to crawl around and see what makes me tick, I will let some more of myself out so you might have some clue what is going on inside the little brain of mine. Yesterday, I was sitting in a meeting room talking to my fellow software architects waiting for our meeting to start. Unfortunately I don't remember the context but somebody described something as "big ass". One of the other architects said that it was not just "big ass" but it was gargantuan. After this, I blurted out that my wife would call it a "double Dante". Unfortunately I was not able to explain this to the group but I think one or two of them may have picked up on it. Dante Bichette was a member of the Colorado Rockies and one of the Blake Street Bombers. Suzanne used to always make fun of how large his butt was. As I've made her watch a baseball game or two, she has seen players with ever larger rear ends so she started calling them double Dante's. I know Cecil Fielder was her favorite target when using this expression. It is still a favorite term between the two of us. This got me thinking though, where do terms like "big ass" get their start? Is it the same way that "double Dante" originated? Or do people sit home at night that are tired of using the same old expressions think of new ones? Or are there people that get paid to come up with these things? If so, how do you get these types of positions? How much does it pay? What kind of background do you need? How do you explain to friends and family what you do for a living? Well, I pretty much sit around thinking of new ways to say "big ass". It is very important job and if I can just find three more ways to say "big ass", the President wants to have me to the White House for dinner. So instead of focusing on the task at hand during the meeting yesterday, my brain aimlessly wandered off pondering these types of critical questions. What keeps your mind busy at work? |
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Friday, November 04, 2005 |
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RSS Feed Change | |
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Although pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things, I have changed my RSS feed. Blogger finally has worked out their issues with the feed they produce so I am no longer required to use a third party (FeedBurner) to do this for me. I had no issues with FeedBurner, they did a good job, it is just something I don't need any longer. The only difference between the two feeds that I have seen so far in my RSS reader is my name is properly pulling through now. For example, before it always showed as noemail@noemail.org (JB) but now pulls through as just JB. The new link is http://home.comcast.net/~john.bullock/atom.xml. A couple of other trivial items of note. First, I have over 300 posts on my blog now. Blogger had a post counter on your login/maintenance page but it appeared to be broken as it was stuck at the same value for quite a while. My hit counter is also over 900 now. Be looking for more changes in the future. A couple of things I want to add are links to friends blogs, update my links listings, and fix my title graphic so that when I have larger pictures, the graphic does not repeat. Although invisible to you the end user, I think I am about to run out of space on Comcast again so I will be creating a third E-mail account that has another 25MB of storage. As much praise as I've had for Comcast, it annoys me that you cannot get more space (even if you are willing to pay!) for your personal web page. Maybe I will just have to get my own domain and server and host it myself :O Nah, too much work. |
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Changing of the Guard | |
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Over the past four days, the New York Yankees have made four coaching changes/replacements. The first was on Tuesday when the Yankees announced that they had hired Larry Bowa as their third base coach. The next was Wednesday when they announced that they hired Lee Mazzilli as their bench coach to replace Joe Girardi who was hired as the manager of the Florida Marlins. Next, the Yankees announced they hired Tony Pena to be their first base coach. And finally, Ron Guidry was announced as the new pitching coach replacing Mel Stottlemyre who left because he was fed up with Steinbrenner's bullshit. All in all, I am pleased with the selections the Yankees have made and look forward to seeing them in action next year. Three of the four have all been managers of other teams before joining the Yankees so they obviously know their stuff. The fourth, Guidry, is a former AL Cy Young Award winner and three time twenty game winner. Some impressive credentials for somebody who will be instructing the entire pitching staff. | |
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FoxTrot | |
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My Cousin Vinny | |
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Vinny Castilla, one of my favorite modern day baseball players, has found yet another new home. He was traded from the Washington Nationals to the San Diego Padres. Vinny was quoted as saying he would not play in a backup role. As much as I like and root for Vinny, at 38 years old, he has to realize that his skills are starting to diminish. If he wants to keep hanging around, bad idea Vinny, then he needs to live in reality. Good luck Vinny! | |
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