Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Aaron Bolner's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
7:34 am	9/28/1931 - 11/2/2009 My maternal grandfather died on Monday night after a battle with throat cancer. It's sad, but it helps to know that it was his decision and that he was in control to the end (unlike my other grandfather, who died of ALS 13 years ago). We'll miss you, grandpa. As long as I have a desk at work, the stained glass nameplate you made me will be on it. Current Mood: sad Current Music: Jessica hopping around happily (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
9:10 pm	Catching up, part 1: Billy Joel / Elton John concert, 5/19/09 I have a lot of catch-up to do that I've been steadily working on... I'll be starting with the Billy Joel / Elton John concert from May 19, which deserves its own entry. --- ( Concert-going ) Current Mood: bored Current Music: AC/DC - Hells Bells (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
12:01 pm	Name... that... movie song! Been trying to get notes done for last weekend (a visit from the in-laws), but it's been a little insane; one of my coworkers is filling out retirement papers out of the blue, which has thrown our department into a bit of a tizzy. Instead, for today, I will leave you with a quiz. When I went to see the new "Star Trek" movie with my father-in-law on Monday, I heard three Rock Band songs during the previews and the actual movie itself. The breakdown of which song went where, however, was weird. So, I present the following quiz: --- Which Rock Band songs are in the following movies? The Movies: 1) A film adaptation of "Land of the Lost" starring Will Ferrell. 2) "9", featuring sentient rag dolls exploring a post-apocalyptic Earth 3) "Star Trek" '09 The Songs: a) Coheed and Cambria - "Welcome Home" b) The Who - "Won't Get Fooled Again" c) Beastie Boys - "Sabotage" --- Can you match the movies to the songs? Current Music: The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 17th, 2009
7:52 am	Indians Opening Weekend / Battling the Worm / VP:CP Time to catch up on the previous weekend, as well as some other stuff... First off, from the DSi weekend, I forgot to mention the two traffic incidents we witnessed. As we were coming up on I-65 to go north toward Plainfield, the traffic on I-65 south on the Main Street bridge was at a virtual standstill: falcon815: Wow. I wonder what the deal is. aquahaute: There are red flags on some of the cars... is that a funeral? falcon815: Oh, right; Louisville was playing HERE today. They did say there were at least 20,000 Louisville fans at Lucas Oil for the game... In a way, it was a funeral - the death march to Louisville for the end of their basketball season, complete with red and black Angry Cardinal Logo flags. The traffic had probably jammed largely because I-65 compresses from three lanes to two just south of that bridge. The other incident we ran across was a bit more conventional, though still not what we expected. As we approached 465, one of the electronic signs over the highway flashed a warning: "LEFT LANE CLOSED / I-465 MILE MARKER 7 / ACCIDENT CLEANUP" We had to stay on 465 just past that marker, so when we got to mile marker 5, I moved over from the fast lane to the center lane to be safe. When we got to mile marker 6, we noticed a LOT of flashing lights: at least two cops and at least two wreckers, but no ambulances. There were an awful lot of people scurrying about, as well. The story became clear when we got closer: a double-length UPS trailer had come apart. The back trailer had careened off to the left, hit something, and tipped over, spilling packages all over the place. The 'cleanup', then, was a few guys running around picking up lost packages, and putting them on the backup UPS box truck that had driven to the scene. Anyway. On to last weekend, featuring an Indians game, a new book, and a battle with a worm. ( April 10 - April 12 ) This week's been kind of slow. I spent one day in the Metals lab, learning the lead-in-soils procedure from one of their chemists. Pretty simple, if time-consuming (like many chemistry procedures, really). Spent another day cleaning up the lab, which had kind of gone by the wayside with the mass of metals samples I worked on through February and March. The hoods are looking pretty good now. It looks like the biggest part of the metals project is over; I got a thank-you letter last week that implied the study was over. We're still receiving samples from that area, just in more routine batches that don't require total devotion to that test. --- Gaming-wise... DS: Finished Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume with each ending, in a total of just over 20 hours. Very, very short game. Final boss of A ending was irritating, moreso when I figured out on my second attempt that if I'd just [spoiler spoiler], I would have won easily on the first try. Bah. I dunno. I felt like the game wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun if I hadn't already been a fan of the series. The plot is pretty good, and seeing it from multiple perspectives is nice, but I felt the same way about VPCP as I did about Ogre Battle - with no background as to the world and how it works, the plot and its impact would be severely diminished. tl;dr: If you're going to play a Valkyrie Profile game, start with VP: Lenneth. It's still the best starting point despite the fact that both the other games are prequels. At least they brought back "Mission to Deep Space", which was not in VP2 and is somehow not on the Star Ocean 4 soundtrack. Seriously, what? Anyway. I haven't spent much time in VPCP Seraphic Gate yet, but I'm sure I will eventually. I started in on Advance Wars DS after finishing VPCP, and I don't like it very much so far. I'm having a hard time figuring out which units are good against which other units; the tutorial information is not sticking with me at all. I feel like they tried to dump way too much information on me way too quickly, as opposed to, say, Fire Emblem (another game in a similar vein by the same developers). I'll try to play it some more and learn more about what's going on with all the different units, but eight battles in, I am confused as hell. PSP: Breath of Fire syndrome is setting in with Breath of Fire III. I'm only about 4 hours in (just got to Wyndia), and I've had a really hard time staying interested. The only game in this series that's kept my interest the whole way through was Dragon Quarter. (I finished BOF after over a year of letting it languish; I never finished BOF 2.) I don't get it. I like RPGs, and I've stuck with games that felt actively worse (Hoshigami, Arc the Lad III) or slower (Legend of Heroes, Phantasy Star II), but something about this series just doesn't click with me. Part of my problem with III is that it has been very bad about telling me what to do. I don't need [blue highlighted text] every three seconds, but give me some clue. I've been having much more fun on the PSP with the demo for Phantasy Star Portable, though it still doesn't play as well as the original PSO. Guys, your lock-on system still sucks, and was better on the freaking Dreamcast. Fix it. You're on what, the third iteration of the game since then? And working on the fourth (PS Zero for DS)? Then again, I'm not sure why I would be expecting improvements in a Sonic Team game at this point. 360: Peggle addiction waning a bit. Basically all that's left to do, achievement-wise, is full-clearing each board. Up to 28 or 29 out of 55 on that. A couple of them will be hard, but it's still fun to try. Rock Band 2 progress was finally made... still have a couple more things to do with challenges, but that's about it. I know we'll never be able to do Endless Setlist on Expert - love how I can full clear "Panic Attack" on bass on Hard, but can't even pass it on Expert - but we'll be able to do it on Hard if we pass bass back and forth some weekend. PS3: Haven't played LittleBigPlanet for a couple weekends. It'd be nice if we could get a decent second controller for less than $40. I'm considering researching PS2-PS3 adapters so we can do some multiplayer without breaking the bank. Current Mood: calm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, March 30th, 2009
4:51 pm	In which we are invited to an exclusive preview Had a pretty good weekend. I should write about it before I forget too much! Friday night, we had a nice night out at Applebee's, where we watched Michigan State take out Kansas. Slept in on Saturday, where by "slept in" I mean "slept until 8". We let Jess out and watched her run for a while, then showered and took off on the hunt for yard sales! Sadly, we couldn't find much advertised, largely due to the impending afternoon rain, but we did find one yard sale along Averitt that had a Mustang model for aquahaute. There wasn't much else there but knives, saw blades, and NASCAR paraphernalia, though. Oh well, yard sale season isn't quite in full swing yet. :p We went from Averitt over to Target, partially to return the abysmal bike pump she'd picked up the weekend before (read the reviews on that sucker, they're highly informative) and partially to pick up my new glasses. I'm reasonably pleased with the new glasses (my first in almost 10 years), though I think the nose pads are a bit too thick and rigid. Maybe I can swap those out soon. They're not a new prescription, but I guess it was about time to retire the others, even if they're still fully functional. Ended up picking up a rather eclectic mix of stuff at Target: - Rock Revolution for PS3 ($5 on clearance, shut up, I knew it was going to suck but at least it was cheap) - a jar of green salsa - a large plastic ball for Jessica to (hopefully) play with - a four-pack of 100 ml bottles of Baileys Irish Cream (our third attempt at some kind of alcohol, after a cherry wine and a Sam Adams both failed pretty hard) I bet the cashier was scratching his head afterward. From there, we went home. I forget what we did for a while... probably Peggle and VP: Covenant of the Plume, since those were our two main games of the weekend. I went back out around 3 to head to Wal-Mart to do some grocery shopping. In the late afternoon, she started LittleBigPlanet (I picked up the EU version for $20), which had some great tutorials. She played the first world and then put it away. We also tried Rock Revolution, which was indeed terrible. The most disorienting thing wasn't even the straight-up-and-down note chart; it was the five-line, four-gap chart with the lines being what the notes followed, rather than the gaps. Do not want. Back to Rock Band now. I made grilled cheese sandwiches for the first time ever (believe it or not!). They were pretty good for a first attempt. Then again, I guess they're kinda hard to screw up? In the evening, after we watched the rabbit for a while, we each had a mug of hot cocoa with half a bottle of Baileys mixed in. Stunningly, amazingly, finally, we both found a liquor that doesn't completely kill our throats. Both of us quite enjoyed the mix, and we will be doing that again sometime. On Sunday, we slept in again, and watched Jess for a while. At 9:30, I went to Aldi... whoops, they don't open until 10. At 10, I went back to Aldi, and did my grocery shopping in peace. More Peggle, more Covenant of the Plume (which I finished my first run-through of that day), and more Michigan State ownage in the afternoon. At 5, we left for Plainfield, since we had an invitation to the DSi preview event at a Gamestop out there. It was OK, I guess - I'd never pay $170 for a DS, but the cameras had surprising quality for something so small. There were also a lot of filters and options to play with on the cameras (turning pictures into kaleidoscopes, mirroring half the image against the other half, etc.) We had our picture taken with one, and the Nintendo rep printed it out for us and gave us some DSi-themed magnets to stick it to our fridge with. After coming back home, we watched the bunny some more, then had supper and went to bed pretty early. --- Sadly, that didn't help Monday start any better; both of us woke up at 5:15 with headaches, though for different reasons (mine food-related, hers unknown). Since she's caught up at work anyway, it was worth her while to call in sick, and I have 10ish sick days that I won't get paid for unless I use them, so... we both called in. My Excedrin finally fully kicked in around 10, at which point I decided to head out for a bit. Target was kind of fail, though - the headphones we've been watching on the clearance rack hadn't dropped any further. We spent quite a bit of time playing Peggle in the afternoon, and had a tasty lunch (Aldi's Southwest eggrolls are a good buy at $2.50). She's been playing Chrono Trigger for a while, as I've been writing this. No idea what I'm cooking for supper yet. Yeah, it's been a lazy day, but both of us felt like crap, so I'm not feeling very guilty. :p Maybe I'll organize my music some more... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
11:15 am	NCAA '09 Finally almost done with the big work project, so it should get a little less crazy around here. Also have stories to tell about Andrea's truck. However, for today, it's tournament time. ( My NCAA picks for this year. ) Not going out on much of a limb with the final four, or even the eight, but hey. I've got some double-digits wreaking havoc, it's just probably the wrong ones. :p We got permission to run the Butler/LSU game on one of the 47" LG LCDs in a conference room, so from 12:30-1:30, it's go time. :D [Edit 2:00 - Dear Memphis: Are you somehow not skilled/athletic enough to run Cal-State Northridge off the court? Why are you jacking up 15 three-pointers in the first half? And why is anyone else shooting 3s when one guy is 5/7 and the rest of you are 0/10?] (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
12:14 pm	Tuna Pasta a la Falc I am hungry, and I promised a recipe, so here's one that I've been making for aquahaute and myself for quite a while. It's heavily modified from original recipe in my little Italian cookbook (largely because I usually don't keep anchovies or fresh cream in the house), but I feel like I've worked the kinks out. So, I present to you: Tuna Pasta One 3 5 oz. can of tuna in water (do not use tuna in oil!) 1/3 c. olive oil 1/2 c. 2% milk 1 packet of basil pesto sauce mix (Simply Organic, which can be found at Target, is good, but there are others) 1 1/2 - 2 c. dry pasta black olives (garnish) - Drain the can of tuna. Put the tuna in a food processor, and add the 1/3 c. olive oil. Blend together thoroughly. - Add the 1/2 c. milk and pesto mix to the tuna/oil mixture, and blend thoroughly. (I also like adding 1/4 - 1/2 tsp. black pepper, or a clove of garlic, at this step - feel free to add any herbs/spices at this time to let the flavors mix. Red pepper flakes would probably be good additions here too.) - Cook the dry pasta to your preferred taste. When finished, reduce heat to low, drain water, and return pasta to pot. - Pour the blended sauce mixture over the pasta, and stir. Allow the sauce to thicken. When sauce is no longer runny, remove from heat and serve. Add sliced or whole black olives to taste. This recipe goes well with toast, or crusty bread. The Usual at our house is to butter some slices of bread and sprinkle chives and garlic salt on them before toasting them lightly in our toaster oven. Let me know if you end up trying this. Current Mood: hungry Current Music: air vent noise (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
4:29 pm	Other unrelated stuff Catching up on gaming stuff: DS - Mostly Animal Crossing. Today, I finally got the last regular Nook item. Wasn't from his shop, though; it was from a present I shot down at 11:34 today. Up yours, Nook. That's what you get for not stocking a radiator when it's cold outside; you lose business. :P PSP - Finally finished Wild ARMs XF yesterday. Word of warning: this game isn't just long, it's Arc the Lad 2-caliber long; it took me 39 hours. I really liked the varied win conditions as opposed to normal TRPGs, and I also liked the variety in class abilities. What I didn't like was the railroading that some battles did (i.e. "use X class or you're basically screwed"). It doesn't leave a whole lot of room for variation in strategy, particularly in the larger maps. Music wasn't terrible, but only one track made me say "wow, I need to get that track" (the pre-battle formation music). Voice acting was bad. Plot was just kinda there, but had a couple nice moments. That, and battle 2-4 can go die in a fire. The playtesters either didn't get that far in the game or had selective memory when giving their feedback, because that battle is straight-up unfair. Ridiculous win condition, stupefying loss conditions, AND a time limit? Choose any two and the battle would be annoying enough, but all three? Ugh. It's no wonder that at least 3 hours of my gameplay was JP-building by stomping Hayokontons Hyulkontons Creeping Chaoses until I'd mastered some broken skill combos (a finite, but potent, speed setup that tended to give my party about 20-30 consecutive actions). I did not try to fight Ye Standarde Wild ARMs Optional Boss. When I started the battle, the turn order was Ragu - Ragu - Ragu - Ragu - Ragu - Levin - Ragu - Ragu. Uh... yeah. I'm not trying a battle that I can't even get a turn in without putting together the next best thing to The Quickening. 360 - Finished Lost Odyssey right before my 360 red-ringed. Better than Blue Dragon in just about every way. Not a stellar game, but it was worth playing. The load times for random battles really sucked, but the plot had some nice moments. PS3 - Gaming? I've been running Folding@Home on the sucker... I saw Fallout 3 Collector's Edition for $40 at Meijer a couple days ago and thought about it. If anyone has thoughts, let me know. (360 version's still $80, so no go on that.) Wii - I keep getting stuck at the final boss of Castle Shikigami III. At least, I think it's the final boss. Also, finished Ys I&II and Phantasy Star IV from Virtual Console. Tasty goodness on both. The only VC game I haven't finished now is Mario RPG. On PSIV (c/p'ed from an earlier, locked entry): Wow. I knew it was short, but damn. My total playtime was 9:20, and that includes a loss in the Air Castle (at least 10-15 minutes getting back to the midpoint) and a little bit of unnecessary sidequesting. I'm really surprised there's no speedrun of this game up on SpeedDemosArchive. I really need to update my List-o'-RPGs... it's been at least a year and a half. --- In Real Life stuff - sort of - I signed up for Facebook and have had some communications regarding my upcoming 10-year high school reunion; looks like it'll be in early May. I know I could cover more, but I'm kind of burned out on writing right at the moment. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: The Offspring - Come Out and Play (Comment on this)
Monday, January 19th, 2009
2:00 pm	Quick weekend breakdown: Saturday: Awesome. More detail later. Sunday: Awesome. More detail later. Monday: $400 alternator / etc. repair job on my truck, and the 360 red ringed when I turned it on after getting home from the truck repair place. Welcome to the internet, little PS3 - you'll be the one hooked up for a while. Current Mood: uncomfortable (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
11:31 am	News of the Weird: Hitting Home Edition I don't think this is the kind of news my old church/school wants to be making. [ETA: Found it on MSNBC and the AP, but this one seems to be the most robust article.] There are other things to post about, of course. The path looks clear for that this afternoon. Current Mood: weird Current Music: AC/DC - Hell's Bells (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
12:45 pm	In which my thought process quickly devolves into Rock Band 2 grumblings I've got some notes down for Thanksgiving weekend, but I (mostly) haven't had the time and (sometimes) haven't had the desire to fill them out. Last night made me a little sad that I'm not as good at keeping this up as I used to be. There was a pretty fantastic weekend that aquahaute and I read both our entries on last night, and it reminded me of how fun this used to be. I'll try to nudge the chatterboxes away as much as I can to get back to writing. Spent some time on the 360 last night. I'm close to the lifetime achievement award on Gin, and finished off a couple of challenges in Rock Band 2. The more I play RB2, the more I miss RB1 - it's like Harmonix forgot how to pick songs that are fun to listen to or play in 2. I can pick out at least ten songs in 2 that I dislike more than any non-indie song in 1, and I'm not even through half the tracklist yet. Part of the problem is that they're succumbing to Neversoft syndrome. This was evident in some of the DLC for Rock Band 1; see, for example, "Snow ((Hey Oh))". You couldn't throw in some hammer-ons in the Expert Guitar line to make it, y'know, playable? The "making things overly difficult" problem is showing through a bit in the second game, both in song selection (see: "Panic Attack", "Pinball Wizard") and in charting (see: "Ramblin' Man"). "Ramblin' Man" is probably the best exhibit for me. See, Harmonix used to match up the Expert chart beat-for-beat with what was happening in the music. Play along with something in RB1, GH1, etc, and you'll see. Now, boot up RB2, and play "Ramblin' Man" on Hard Guitar. You'll note that the solo is dumbed down a bit, but the verses seem to be note-for-note what goes on on the lead guitar. Now crank it up to Expert. The solos? Pretty fun, actually! But where did all that extra stuff in the verses come from? I sure as hell can't hear it in the guitar line no matter how I go over it, and it is not fun to play - my wrist starts hurting even when double-strumming, and I don't have any joint problems. Guys, seriously. Don't succumb to the robots who worship GH3, or the Youtube Dragonforce armies. Keep going after songs that were at least fun to listen to ("Dani California", "Green Grass and High Tides", "Don't Fear The Reaper") or play ("Gimme Shelter", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Reptilia"). GH1 and RB1 were both home run tracklists. RB2 is trying very hard to stretch a single into a double, but I'm afraid a Delmon Young-caliber arm is waiting in right field to throw it out. Current Mood: cold (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
10:38 am	From the election to picture printing - 11/3 - 11/16 Ugh, I was doing pretty well for a while, but now I have to get some catchup done again. Thing is, I'm not sure how much has really happened over the past couple of weeks... I'll see what I can come up with as I go along. ( November 3 - November 16 ) There. That turned out longer than I expected, and pretty much takes care of things for now. Current Music: stuck in my head: Coheed and Cambria - Welcome Home (Comment on this)
Monday, November 17th, 2008
3:26 pm	Trip to Detroit - 10/31 - 11/2: The Quest for the Peanut Butter-filled Hershey Bars So... catching up. As a prelude and side note, we both picked up copies of Clubhouse Games for DS after the recent reprint. Fun little collection, and if anyone else has it, let us know. Wireless is something we do, and you can play games with us. On to catching up with the weekend we spent up in Detroit (10/31 - 11/2). ( October 31 - November 2 ) --- To be followed up later... Current Mood: bored (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
6:45 pm	We're Open 'Til We Close / Baby Cows Are Fuzzy Time to catch up on the weekend! Skip this post at your own risk, as this is the most robust picture-post I've made in quite a while, and most of them are cute and/or hilarious. ( Friday 10/17 - Sunday 10/19 ) --- End of weekend writeup! I'll try to finish off the catchup soon. Current Mood: pleased Current Music: Ys VI - The Ruined City, Kishgal (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
12:45 pm	Massive catch-up, act 2 (10/5 - 10/10) And now, for more catch-up - though I doubt I'll be able to cover some of this stuff as fully as I would have been at the time. ( Sunday, October 5 - Friday, October 10 ) Saturday the 11th will take more time to cover than I have right now, but that and the 12th are pretty much all that's left for me to catch up on. I have this past weekend written up, but I need to tool with some pictures I took first. Current Mood: busy Current Music: Rush - YYZ (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
12:25 pm	Massive catch-up, act 1 (9/23 - 10/4) OK, it's catch-up time. Not quite all the way finished yet, but this is very tl;dr as it is, so I'll go ahead and get this segment posted. 9/19 through 9/21 are covered in locked form. --- ( 9/23 ) --- ( 9/24 ) --- ( 9/25 - 9/26 ) ( 9/27 - 9/28 ) ( 9/29 - 10/3 ) ( 10/4 ) --- Not bad for now. I'll do my best to work on more today. Given the fact that Mira will be out to the movies from 4:00 to 5:00, I think I'll forego the usual DS gaming to get more catch-up done. Current Mood: calm (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
4:10 pm	Refrigerator: Death and Rebirth I've been working on a catch-up entry, and it's been going fairly well. Was going to get more on it done this morning, but I got bogged down in paperwork and had a nasty headache. The headache finally cleared at 12:30, and the paperwork is done, so now it's time to do some writing. Not doing the catch-up entry right now, though - instead, I'll go with yesterday, since it was a rather interesting day. --- Monday, October 13 I got up with Andrea around 6, despite the fact that I had the day off. I had a lot of stuff to take care of, and had a rough plan for doing so; I'd go out early to change the oil in my truck and do some early-bird shopping at Target, Borders, and Michael's, then head down to Columbus in the afternoon for my 1:30 dentist appointment. A wrench got thrown into that as soon as we walked downstairs to leave around 6:50, however: aquahaute: "What's that noise?" falcon815: "What noise?" *pause* Noise: *click* [two second pause] *click* falcon815: "Did I leave the water running last night when I came down to rinse a glass...?" *check* "Nope." Noise: *click* [two second pause] *click* falcon815: "Oh. It's coming from over here [behind the refrigerator]." Something - I couldn't tell what - in the back of the refrigerator was making the noise. I opened up both sides of the appliance, and could tell that both had failed. Great. Frustrated, I decided to go ahead and go do some of my morning stuff to clear my head before I dove into the problem. We both left the house around 7:10. I turned left on Main as she turned right, then I went to Wal-Mart. They've changed how they do the tire and lube center at the Emerson and Co. Line store; now, you just drive up to the line-o'-cars instead of walking inside to wait for a rep to show up. I did so, requested the oil change as usual, then went off to do some grocery shopping (for non-cold items only, considering the issues at home). I combed the clearance racks first, and found a two-pack of LED night lights for cheap. This is a Happy Thing, and one that's been something aquahaute has wanted upstairs for a while. Cruised over to the grocery section after that, then went back to automotive to pick up an upper brake light replacement for my truck. Sat around playing Etrian Odyssey II for a little bit after that, then was informed that my truck was ready to go, so off I went. I got out of there around 8:15, and decided to head over to Smith Valley and 135 to hit up Target. Sadly, there wasn't anything interesting, so I went back home to dump off my Wal-Mart stuff and to see what I could do about the refrigerator. I copied down the model number and serial number from a sticker on the inside, and punched "GE refrigerator [model number]" into Google. The first page that came up was a do-it-yourself site with an entire topic dedicated to this particular model number of GE refrigerator. Apparently they were manufactured with low-quality motherboards (why does a refrigerator need a motherboard?), which prompted a class-action lawsuit similar to the bad PS2 laser thing from a few years back. In reading the thread for more detail, I found that if the fridge were under 3 years old, the repair would be free; if 3-5 years old, it would be $100 (where the cost of the motherboard alone is $140, let alone the service call charge); and if 5+ years old, no discount would be given. I was a little miffed that my fridge's motherboard had died at the 3 year, 4 month mark, but eh, $100 is a lot better than the $320 or so it would have been otherwise. So, I made the call to GE service. Got a guy in South Carolina - he was friendly enough, but we had some issues understanding each other despite the fact that we were speaking the same language. Eventually, I verified all the relevant information, and he informed me that I could have a service appointment made "sometime between 1 PM and 5 PM". I was ecstatic that it was possible to be done the same day. I made the appointment at the expense of the dentist appointment - the fridge is kind of important, y'know? I called up the dentist and couldn't get back in 'til February, but oh well. It was about 9:30 by this point. I decided that since I'd be stuck in the house - potentially, anyway - from 1 to 5, it was a good idea to get my shopping out of the way in the morning, like I'd planned. So, off to Borders first! Looked around a little bit there, but eventually used the 30% off coupon on [spoiler]. Then, it was back a little bit south to Michael's, where I used my 50% off coupon on an extended spacer platform for aquahaute's Sizzix die-cut machine. Finally, I dumped off some recycling at Madison and Edgewood. Hit up Taco Bell on the way home for quick eats, then took said eats home to have over an episode of The Price is Right. That's always fun to catch once in a while; it's not quite the same without Bob Barker, but it's still just as entertaining to yell at the shopping-challenged now as it was when I was a kid. ^_^ At 12, I left it on channel 8 to watch the noon news while I did some basic cleaning downstairs. When the news ended at 12:30, I popped UHF into the PS3 and played it over some more heavy cleaning and rearranging. About 1:30, I got an automated phone call from GE saying that I was next on the serviceman's schedule. Did some vacuuming and throwing-out-of-stuff in the next 15 minutes, then the phone rang again. It was the actual service guy this time: falcon815: "Hello?" Service Guy: "Your address is [Street Name], right?" falcon815: "Yeah." Service Guy: "Well, I'm over here on [Street Name That Shares One Word But Isn't Quite Right]. I'm just off of Stop 18." falcon815: "Oh, okay, you're in Barton Lakes. You need to turn east on Stop 18 and come across 31... [more detailed directions, etc.]" Service Guy: "Well, at least this thing put me in the right area. I'll be right over." A couple minutes later, I saw a white van zoom by the house, then fly back in reverse until it could see my house number. The service guy brought in his laptop, chatted with me for a minute, listened to the sound the fridge was making, and immediately knew what the problem was. Five minutes later, after a quick trip out to his van to pick up the right part, the problem was fixed and my fridge was humming along as if nothing had happened. Thankfully, the information I'd found on the internet was correct, and he only charged me $100. Considering that would have barely covered the cost of the service call by itself, I was pretty happy to pay that. I finished watching UHF over a little more cleaning and fixing our storm door, then decided to relax for a bit with Beautiful Katamari, which I hadn't played since about March. Found a couple presents that I'd missed before (cruising slowly through Eternals was a good way to do it), then went off to Aldi for some cold-stuff grocery shopping. Came back, played some more Katamari, and found the rest of the presents, snagging the last one (Achievement unlocked - 80G - All Presents) just after aquahaute got home. We chatted a bit, checked up on our usual Internet bookmarks, then I finished the last of the eight bosses of Mega Man 9 (something else I need to cover) before we had some tasty Papa Murphy's pizza (I was lazy and didn't feel like cooking after all the work I'd done during the day). Then, we played some Rock Band. Since we still don't have our replacement Stratocaster yet (something I'll cover in the catch-up entry), I played drums on medium while aquahaute played Bass on Hard/Expert. I can play drums on medium pretty well IF I can get my brain turned off, which is harder than it sounds. I have trouble braining three things at once (left hand, right hand, right foot), so usually my foot pedal 'skillz' suffer the most. After that, it was off to relax, or so we thought - instead, we got distracted for a good half-hour by "Cake Wrecks", which was good for a ton of laughs. And such was my day 'off'; Sunday was the only day of the weekend that I really sat back and relaxed. --- Time to go home! Current Mood: relaxed Current Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Snow ((Hey Oh)) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, September 15th, 2008
4:11 pm	Actually, my good man, I am not quite ready to rock. Busy day at work, though most of it was busywork. An unfortunate side effect of the lead analysis is the dirtying up of a ton of glassware; knowing that I had enough dishes to do all of my samples, I saved all the cleanup for today. So, that was an effective and useful timekiller. Got the results back from run 1 at about 3:00 PM (i.e. too late for me to do anything useful with the numbers); reporting those will be my project for tomorrow. It's not my turn to grind meat samples anyway. Carlos Zambrano finally threw a no-hitter last night. I wish I'd checked the baseball scores when I woke up at 1 AM instead of checking the football scores - that's really neat. It's the first no-hitter for the Cubs in my lifetime. I'm glad it was from a career guy like Big Z, and doubly glad that it was him in particular. He's had lots of flirtations with the no-hit game, but has usually been derailed by throwing way too many pitches; he walks too many people to throw many complete games. In conclusion, woo! Also from the realm of baseball: WTF Milwaukee? Firing your manager now? Seriously? Then again, with the Mets collapsing and the Phillies primed to take that division away, Milwaukee still has the best shot at the wild card... A quick summary of yesterday: Went out to pick up drum pad covers and Rock Band 2 from Gamestop a little after 11. Also stopped at Half-Price Books and bought the eighth book of 'Sword of Truth' (hey, it was $2), and a $1 copy of part 1 of The Tale of Genji. I forget who did the translation; I'll post it when I get to reading it. I've got a bit of a book backlog thanks to the clearance rack at Half-Price. Now that I'm done with John Irving's Until I Find You (ugh), I'll probably work through it pretty quickly. I watched the first half of the Colts game, then listened on the radio for most of the rest. I started watching again when Bob Lamey (the radio play-by-play guy) nearly had a heart attack on the air when Anthony Gonzalez lateraled to Reggie Wayne after a 58-yard gain. Desperation play, but they needed it; the Colts had done nothing on offense up to then. Ugly win, but a win, and it puts them in good position for now. We played Rock Band 2 for a little bit. My initial impression is kind of meh. Haven't had much fun with the new tracklist so far, but we're not that far in yet. I loathe the opening song (Cheap Trick's "Hello There"), both as an opening song and as a song to play. And what happened to solo tour? I guess that's too 'old school'. On the plus side, Band World Tour no longer has the millstone of 'one player must play this instrument for all songs' that Rock Band 1 did, which forgives quite a bit. Haven't tried any "challenges" yet - maybe those will be an acceptable substitute for solo tour. Time to get out of here. I'll try to write more soon. Current Mood: bored Current Music: Get this Cheap Trick song out of my head please (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
3:46 pm	Meet the new boss, same as the old boss Got some slowdown today on two fronts: the lead samples are in a limbo stage today, and Mira called in sick. Thus, I should definitely post. ( Work - Meet the new boss, same as the old boss ) Reality As aquahaute has already posted, we have baby peppers now! The first one's getting pretty big - it's bigger than a jalapeno now. One of our other plants has two peppers on the way now too, and there are tons of buds going on. We are very pleased. I'm dumping some stuff on eBay. Got to get the electronics and books sold before October, when eBay's fees will become worse than Amazon's. They're cranking the final value fees for fixed price books/electronics to 15% (same as Amazon), AND requiring PayPal for all transactions (i.e. can't dodge that 3% fee by taking money orders anymore). Oh, and they're capping shipping values for video games and video game accessories, too, in a blatant play for more cut of the final value fee on stuff like Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, etc (because let's face it, you ain't shipping Wii Fit or GH or Rock Band peripherals for under $6). I understand what eBay's doing from a profit perspective, but I just don't get why a company like this would actively go out of its way to make its fees equal to or worse than a major competitor. You're asking to lose sellers, guys. Tack on the inability to say anything but gushy praise about buyers, and you're begging sellers to go. --- Andy came over for Labor Day. He finished up the Penny Arcade game, and we played a positively awful round of Scattergories. I think the card we used needs to be banned - the highest total score we had for the three-round game was something around 16. A horrible performance for all of us. While Andy was around, we booted up the Wii to show him the crap that's been slung around on WiiWare for the past month or so. To our great surprise, Mario RPG was up - we bought it on the spot. I love how that got through with no fanfare or hype whatsoever; that's hard to do nowadays. I never gave that game the shot it deserved, but I'll try to rectify that now that we've picked it up. Oh, and we made some tasty new pasta sauce while Andy was over, but aquahaute already covered that. ( Gaming ) Sports - Congratulations to Chad Johnson! By legally changing your name, sir, you now have what is quite possibly the stupidest name on the planet. At least, for example, Moon Unit Zappa did not choose to be called Moon Unit. --- And now, time to 'leave'. Can't wait for the weekend... Current Mood: awake Current Music: The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (Comment on this)
Friday, August 29th, 2008
4:09 pm	Bullet Point Mania I really wanted to cover last weekend well, but I've been wrapped up in rewriting some of the meat methods manual and taking care of all the meat tests this week as Mira worked on the quarterly vitamin samples. Last weekend deserves to be told, and told well, so I'll try to give it the writeup it deserves. For now, instead, you get little bullets. - From the world of politics - Mira came up to me today and wondered how I'd guessed that McCain would pick Sarah Palin as his VP (I told her this a week or so ago). It's very simple: picking Palin was the only way to generate significant news coverage in the wake of the Democratic National Convention. In the constant fight for free advertising via the media, picking a relative unknown will work wonders; viewers will have questions about her that the media will need to answer to maintain their ratings. Beyond that, it's a blindingly obvious ploy for additional votes from disaffected Hillary supporters. Sure, most of them will have the brain cells to rub together to go ahead and vote for Obama, since his views are far more in line with Hillary's, but there are some quite shallow people out there that it might win over. I think it's a remarkably savvy pick, especially for one that smacks of desperation. The one thing I'm sick of already, just 4 hours in, is the whole "lol McCain can't use the inexperience card anymore" argument. Um, Palin's not running for president, guys. Besides, it's not worth getting worked up over; Biden will destroy her in the VP debate anyway, so let him take care of it for you. - From the world of sports - Good news / Bad news. Good news: The Cubs are virtually guaranteed a playoff spot, and might win 100 games doing it. Bad news: They'll probably have to play Arizona, the team that swept them out in the first round last year, again in the first round this year. Great. At least the games will be in Chicago this time, which means they won't start at freaking 10 PM every night. - From the world of gaming - Repeat after me: 'ambiguity in writing does not equal depth'. I finished Braid last night, and it was a wonderful combination of visuals, gameplay mechanics, and puzzles. (Between the two of us, we got all the puzzle pieces without help.) However, the writing is on the same plane of pretentious ambiguity as Evangelion, which is not a good realm to be in. I found a great thread on this on Gamespot (of all places) that I might link to if the discussion doesn't devolve in the next couple of days. In any case. Well worth playing, if you have MS points to spare, but don't bother paying attention to the "plot" - it's not worth the effort. - Also from the world of gaming - I hate the final boss of Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology. Hate hate hate. I might finally be able to beat him this afternoon, given the new equipment I just harvested, but the very fact that I had to undo the first 16 hours of gameplay to powerlevel as a different class to get this equipment is irritating. Dear Namco: a little more balance in your job system, please. Time to head off to a baseball game with aquahaute. Enjoy the long weekend, everybody who can. Current Mood: calm (2 Comments |Comment on this)