It’s been pretty busy since my last post.  There is a lot going on.

First thing is the weather.  It has been a Dr. Jekel and Mr. Hyde thing.  We had a pretty cold streak that lasted about a week (cold enough I actually turned the heater on) followed by a heat wave.  It hit 70F-something today.  It’s December; it’s not supposed to be that hot.  I’ve turned the A/C back on.
Kitty is losing some weight.  I’ve put her on a restricted diet with Shinta gone and when she came back she said Kitty looked skinnier.  I’m not starving her by any means, but we’ve cut back from giving her food at every meow to something much more structured and regulated.  When she gets down to “healthy” we’ll increase the flow a bit.  I bought a bag of the “light” food too, so hopefully we can up the volume enough that she doesn’t feel as hungry.  We’ll see how it turns out.

I’ve been out to the airport 3 weekends in a row now.  It’s kinda nice just sitting there watching the planes and listening to the traffic on the scanner.  I’m gonna be real used to radio traffic again when I start back flying.  Heck I might even get to know “the guys” fairly well by then too.  It’s cool to have such an active little airport so close to home.

With Shinta gone, I had to occupy my time more than normal.  I decided to go ahead and try listening to a podcast I’d seen postings about, but just never gotten around to listening to.  It’s BSD Talk (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/). Somehow, I managed to listen to ALL of them.  Yes, an entire year’s worth of podcasts in a little over a week.  I’m caught up and loving it.  Will does a really great job covering the BSD’s and related things.  I find myself checking for more postings daily now.

The TV show season is winding up.  We just watched the Survivor ending tonight.  It’s cool that Yul won, but really any of the final 4 was fine with me.  I’m a little disappointed in the Amazing Race ending.  I really didn’t want any of the top 3 teams to win.  I’d have liked the Alabama team to win from the 3 that got to the top, but I really wished Kentucky or the Cho brothers had made it.  I think the Cho brothers had more of a chance, but they shouldn’t have played so stupidly.  It’s one thing to help the other teams in the “six pack”, but to constantly draw themselves down in order to help the others was just dumb (in my opinion).  Oh well, it could have just been how the producers edited things.  I’m looking forward to the Amazing Race All Stars coming next year.  I’m starting to wonder when Stargate is going to pick up again.

I took a couple of work buddies shooting.  Introduced them to “the dark side”.  It’ll be interesting to see if they want to go again.  I think they enjoyed it.  It’s hard not to enjoy blasting 5.56 down range.  No recoil, lots of noise, and an evil looking toy.

I finally added a slide show to my photo gallery.  It’s certainly not the most full featured slide show.  It’s not pretty, very intuitive, or even that elegant, but it functions without javascript.  That’s a big deal to me right now.  Maybe when I code some sort of AJAX solution, but not right now.  Right now I want it all done in a way that supports a wide set of browsers without the need for javascript.  I’m about ready to write the captions parser, but I may wait and redo the entire back end first to make it a bit more of a media asset manager with web browser accessibility, than just a dedicated photo gallery.  We’ll see.

Work seems to be kind of winding up for the year.  Looks like there are a lot of people disappearing for vacations and our last release of the year out the door.  Time to start working on some infrastructure changes for next year.

I haven’t posted in quite a while and a lot has happened. I don’t know where to start and I’m sure I’ll forget something, so here goes:

We’ve continued our restaurant tasting. Since the last update we’ve been to Erling Jensen’s, Ruby Tuesday’s, Lulu Grille, and Bhan Thai (twice). We went to Eriling Jensen’s in celebration of my birthday and getting a job. The full-fledged review is where to find the detail (not written yet), but it’s quite probably one of the best restaurants in Memphis. Bhan Thai has the best Thai food we’ve had in Memphis (Chao Praya being a close second). Ruby Tuesday’s has buffalo burgers. I’ve been missing my buffalo fix and I’m finally finding some here. Incidentally, I found out about Erling Jensen’s while looking for buffalo meat here. We went to Lulu Grille today for lunch (more buffalo burgers). And since we’re on the topic of food, I should mention that the little cafeteria at work has an excellent tasting Italian sub sandwich for CHEAP.

Speaking of work, I’ve completed my first three weeks. My luck seems to be holding up not only in finding a job so quickly, but also finding a good one. I really enjoy it there. The people are friendly, and there doesn’t seem to be the pervasive flow of people jumping ship you find in some companies. To me, that’s a good sign, and I’m excited to see how this goes. That reminds me to complain about taxes. My god I hate taxes. I was looking at my paystub and realizing that I’ve now paid more in taxes from this new job than I use to even get paid over the same period of time. And we don’t have state income taxes, that’s all federal.
Also, I don’t think this has happened since my last post, but I seem to have neglected it. I finally got to go shooting again. We went to RangeUSA for their Carbine night with the Krinkov. Those frangible rounds they require weren’t 100% in feeding, but they were also so light that accuracy is probably pretty bad out my 1/7″ barrel. At the cost ($0.35/rd) I’m sure I’ll probably go again out of necessity, but it won’t be too often. I’ve got some more Makarov ammo coming in, though. The drought on 9x18mm seems to have been helped a bit. I’m gonna need it for the HCP (aka CCW in most places) class coming up.

No new movies yet. Kind of surprising, considering how many I usually see. I rented Clerks and Pirates of the Carribean so that we’ll see them before their sequels. Miami Vice is out this weekend, so maybe that one. Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis have started up again (and I completely forgot). We spent last night catching up. Gonna be good new seasons.

Memphis has had it’s 100th murder of the year. Actually, by now it’s probably beyond that, but last week I saw it on the news. Washington DC is complaining about their 18 or so murders, but they don’t have a clue. Did I mention the HCP class? Also, pretty freaky, some dude went on a stabbing spree at a grocery store. He was stopped by a dude with a pistol (not a shot fired). The news mostly skipped that little fact. That HCP is sounding even better. Also, in unrelated news, Todd Bailey (Special Weapons) posted pics of his upcoming MWS that he’s been working on for a couple years. I like it. I want it. We’ll see how long it takes for it to really be available. The SP-10 .40 caliber he said would be ready “in two weeks” (4 months ago) aren’t ready yet. Maybe I’ll be able to afford them when they come around, I just need to find an FFL I like.

Okay, it’s been a while since my last post. A lot has happened, but my web presence has been pretty limited. Two words: Moving sucks.

Let’s see what all has happened…

Well, I graduated. I really wondered about my grade in my Theoretical Foundations of Computing class, but I did manage to pull it off. It was a little stressful waiting for the grades to get posted, but all was well.

Graduation Day was interesting. We got lucky in that the weather was cloudy and cool. I’ve been to plenty of graduations out in the sun and that sucks. Heck, it even rained on us, but they gave us rain ponchos as we walked out onto the field. President Bush made quite an entrance with the helicopters flying over the stadium. They (“they” being the President and his entourage, filling 4 or 5 helicopters) landed on the practice football field just east of Gallagher-Iba. President Bush’s speech was a good one. It was short at about 20 minutes, but that’s not such a bad thing. Many keynote speakers drone on forever. It was pretty much non-partisan and very much a graduation speech; not a political speech. It really made those protesters seem stupid. In effect, despite what many of them claimed, they were protesting our graduation and not the government’s policies. I didn’t walk down to the protesting area, but from the signs I read, and the stuff I heard from their PA system, they were pretty pathetic. They assumed the speech would be political and wound up making fools of themselves. The media gave them a heck of a lot of coverage, though.

After the preliminary speeches were done, everyone left for lunch and got ready for the 2 graduation walk ceremonies in the afternoon. We went to Pat’s apartment for a little gathering Pat and Mom put together. They did a real good job. Pat’s apartment is pretty small, but we managed to just fit.

For the walk part, we were inside Gallagher-Iba. I was far from the last person to line up for the procession from the A&S gathering site to the arena, but lots of people pushed forward so as not to look like they were late and I wound up at basically the end of the entire walking process. It took so long I think I might have fallen asleep waiting for my name. I’m sure glad that is over.

The next day was a moving day for me. I intended to move out before noon, but it wound up taking until nearly 21:00 for me to get done. That was a long day. I then spent the week with Pat.

The next weekend was for moving my stuff out to Memphis. That was one heck of a drive. I hate driving. Have I mentioned that? I hate driving.

My next week consisted of me catching up on a season worth of TV shows. Except for Survivor and Grey’s Anatomy, I had Beyond TV recording everything I wanted to watch for the semester. Wow was that a lot of shows, but I did get caught up.

When Shinta got back to Memphis, we went to see Mission: Impossible III. It’s a fun action film. I don’t get all the negative press over it. I thought it was about as good as the second film. I particularly enjoyed the action. It was constantly moving forward. They had it cram packed with HK weapons too. I also noted that some of the mercs in the bridge scene were carrying Krinkovs. Gotta give props to the great AKS-74U.

The next day (Saturday) we caught Over the Hedge. It’s a really funny film. I enjoyed it. I didn’t exactly enjoy the little kids and the huge mess they made in the theater, but it was a good film. I recommend it. As intended, it’s good for all ages.
Then, Sunday, was Marrina’s graduation. So, I made the long drive back to OKC for that. While there I picked up the grandparents so that they could spend the week with us in Memphis. It was a wonderful week. It has been a long time since I’ve been around them for such a period of time and it was great. We took them to the Wat Buddhasamakeedham for the yearly memorial of my dad’s death and Uncle O took them back to OKC with him. I hope it wasn’t the last time they stay with us.

When we got back to Memphis, we went to see The Da Vinci Code. It’s a good thriller. I never read the book, but the story was really good. Most of the twists I didn’t expect and they were interesting. I don’t understand why the critics didn’t like this one either, but I did. Maybe it’s because I didn’t read the book, but it was good.
Last night we went to see X-Men: The Last Stand. That was a good film too. At least in the summer blockbuster sense. It thought it was about as good as the first film (the second was the best of the three). It was well done and I think well written. The special effects were mostly good. There were a few things that the special effects could have improved on, but for the most part it was fairly seemless. No spoilers here, but there were a couple of interesting twists I didn’t expect.

I think that catches things back up.

I just saw a little clip of Senator Coburn on “The Beltway Boys” and that with their little discussion following it made me happy to hear that he is keeping to his campaign promises.  I certainly agree with what he’s doing, but I just love the extra little bit in that he’s actually trying to do what he said he’d do.  It’s not even an election year for him, so this would seem to be more of a genuine effort and not just positioning for a nearing campaign.  Keep up the good work, Senator Coburn!

I finally finished watching all 10 hours or so of Showtime’s Sleeper Cell. Wow what a powerful show. I don’t know what the political critics are saying about shows like this. They say it portrays Americans fighting terrorism in the same light as the terrorists themselves. They say it makes terrorists sympathetic. I don’t understand how they can say that. I think shows and movies like this help to show the American public the complexity of this war on terrorism. You can only fight an enemy you don’t understand. To know your enemy is to better fight them and this provides a little more insight on what might be (and likely is) going on. Sure there’s some dramatization; sure there’s some racy scenes, but that’s just Hollywood for you. It isn’t a huge part of the story and in some part it just goes to show the hypocrisy and mindset of those we fight. What I most hope people can take away from this show is the war within Islam itself. Most Americans have absolutely no exposure to Islam and I think it does well to give them a touch of insight into moderate Muslim’s religion with a direct contrast to the militant fundamentalists that wish to do us harm. This mini-series is not for the faint of heart or young ones, but if you aren’t in those two categories I highly recommend it.