Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Glonk.

I have a fear. I fear that I am going to lose my gay card. That’s right ladies and gentleman, I walk that fine line of being a card carrying gay and just being a down low geek that likes guys. I have done two things this week that brings this fear to the surface, but I am going to be a big man and admit these two things in public right now.

1. I am no longer a Mac boy. I am a PC. I replaced my MacBook Pro with a brand new Lenovo Y560 running Windows 7. Using my Microsoft TechNet subscription, I was able to upgrade it to Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s pretty sweet and I have loved this computer right out of the box. The configuration of this computer in a Mac would have cost me $2650. I paid $1310 (including tax) for my Lenovo. I think the savings was worth it.

And! Not only am I no longer a Mac boy but this has been compounded by the fact that I jumped AT&T ship and am now thoroughly enjoying my Motorola Droid on the Verizon Wireless network.

And! I bought a Zune HD. The Zune HD does not get the credit it deserves. The device rocks and I totally recognize it for the good solid piece of equipment that it is.

2. I can’t get into “Glee”. I mentioned this last fall during the first half of the season and one would think that I should truly enjoy “Glee”, being an ex-band and chorus fag but I just can’t muster up any energy about the show. I’m sorry. I have tried. Last fall I talked about the Sue Sylvester character being excessively frightening. Either they have softened the character up or I have mellowed out because she’s pretty much the only thing I look forward to now. The auto-tuning of the musicians is making me insane and I have to admit that I enjoy the fact that the fake pregnancy story line has seemingly been dropped.

Earl, Jamie and I usually watch “Glee” courtesy of the DVR on Wednesday night. During the actual broadcast of the show, Twitter and Facebook are both breathless explosions of, well, glee, about how great the show is but I’m just not seeing it. I do find Puck mildly enjoyable on the eyes and as I said before I’m enjoying Sue Sylvester this time around but other than that I think the whole series completely jumped the shark with ~~Joan Rivers~~ Olivia Newton-John. And I know, I’m going to lose even more gay points with the Joan Rivers/Olivia Newton-John joke in that last sentence but I can’t help it, Ms. N-J looked shellacked.

12 May 2010 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 1

Phrase.

In celebration of Mother’s Day, Mom joined Earl, Jamie and I for a nice dinner. Earl cooked up one of his usual feasts and we used the fancy plates, the dining room and everything. It was a very nice experience for everyone involved. I even kept my elbows off the table.

As Earl cleared the plates and gave Mom and I a chance to just chat a little bit, we caught up on family stuff and got into a little bit of a discussion about how time marches on and how things have changed. I casually uttered something during the conversation that I have said a few times over the years and it wasn’t for a few moments that I noticed that tears had welled up in my Mom’s eyes.

I had said, “I wouldn’t change a moment of my childhood. For better or for worse, the good or the bad, I wouldn’t change a single thing. It made me who I am today and I think that that’s a good thing.”

It’s the truth. I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m a lucky man to be able to say that and I recognize that. My mom thanked me for that wonderful Mother’s Day gift to her.

No Mom, thank you and Happy Mother’s Day.

9 May 2010 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 2

Sounds Like A Geek.

This is sort of like the fact that every Star Trek movie utilizes a different transporter effect, but as you probably know, just about every version of Windows uses a different set of sounds, including the startup and shutdown sounds. On the various Windows and Linux computers I use both personally and professionally, I often modify the sound schemes to the one from the Longhorn Beta, which ultimately turned into Windows Vista. Unfortunately, the Longhorn Beta sounds didn’t make it into Windows Vista (or Windows 7, for that matter), which is a shame because quite frankly I find them to be the most soothing of the Windows sounds.

Yes, I am soundly a geek when it comes to sound. (There’s some of that wit!)

Here is a YouTube clip of the Longhorn Beta startup and shutdown sounds. I really like the ethereal sound of these. I have the whole Longhorn sound scheme and someday I’ll post instructions on how to make these beta sounds your default on your computer. I hope I’m not infringing on someone’s copyright by doing that.

Anyways, here’s the sounds I was just talking about.

3 May 2010 by J.P. Geek 0

J-Town

So tonight I am spending the night about two minutes from the office because I need to go back to work and run some network tests with a colleague at 23:00. (That’s 11:00 p.m. for you non-geeks). The tests shouldn’t last too long and I opted not to work the night shift but instead just go in for an hour or so and then sleep at the hotel; I’m actually excited about this because I’ll get to sleep in in the morning. I haven’t done that on a workday in a few months. It’ll be a nice change of pace.

I haven’t done much to celebrate this little bachelor thing I have going on tonight. I’ve spent most of the time on the computer catching up on blogs, reading laptop reviews (I’m buying a new laptop) and other various mayhem. Johnstown isn’t the liveliest of places on the planet but I like the sleepy feeling they have going on here. This Microtel seems to be quite new and it’s comfortable. I feel like I’m in a dorm room with the yellow and lime green walls and the couch built into window box and over the air conditioner/heating unit. I have noticed that the walls are thin; this may prove interesting later this evening.

I went to a Chinese restaurant for supper and that was a rather disappointing experience. The food was mediocre at best, the waitress didn’t speak English (every time I said something to her, she looked at the hostess on the other side of the restaurant, who screamed a translation back to her and then smiled and said to me “so sorry”.) To keep things interesting the couple with their rugrats across the aisle from me let their kids play a game of “let’s fake vomiting”. Nothing adds to a Chinese meal and ambience like a screaming hostess sounding like she’s just found Pearl Harbor (yes, I know it wasn’t the Chinese that attacked Pearl Harbor and yes I know that I sound racist with that statement but it’s funny and you must admit that you snickered, even if just a little bit) and the sounds of a four and six (or so) year old making pukey noises into their fried rice. I think the whole experience turned me off of a Chinese food permanently and now the only way that I’ll eat something from the Far East is if it’s at a Hibachi Grill with my closest friends and a lot of what they call “Saki Bomb”.

I haven’t been blogging much lately and that’s because I’ve been too damn busy. I usually come up with the best blog entries when I’m getting ready for work. I recite them in the shower, I recite them whilst shaving, I mumble them around my toothbrush. None of these recitals aid in getting the damn entries into the computer and since people scold me for typing whilst driving I guess I’ll just start making videos from the shower, whilst shaving and whilst brushing my teeth in the future. That way you can see me in all my morning glory and hear some fascinating wit.

Now, if I could just find my camera.

3 May 2010 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Shopping.

So Earl left for Las Vegas this morning and Jamie is in Buffalo until Wednesday night. This leaves me alone at the Manor for a few days and it’s been a long while since I have been in bachelor mode for this many days in a row. To keep it interesting, tomorrow night I spend the night near work so I can do some middle of the night testing again. It’ll be a good gig.

To pass the time this afternoon I decided to go to the local Best Buy to see what they have in the way of computers. I have been itching to buy a new computer lately, though I’m not really in the mood to buy another Apple product. I wanted a laptop that could work on either Windows or Linux so I spent a good hour or so looking each over each system on display. I typed a lot on each one of them to see if I liked the way the keyboard felt and I looked under the hood to see if the specs were really as good as the shelf placard stated. Keyboards on laptops are not as good as they are on MacBooks, and I was expecting that, but some of these keyboards were just downright mushy.

I am curious about this recent trend to put a full sized keyboard on a laptop, in that the keyboard has a number pad on the right as if you were sitting at a desktop. This is strange to me. I have a hard time typing if the keyboard is off center from the screen and because of this peculiar layout, this would most definitely be the case.

After looking over each model on display at Best Buy I decided to skip the whole Best Buy experience altogether because nothing there really tickled my fancy. I then went to the adjacent Wal*Mart to see what deals they had but every computer on display there was in a sad state of affairs; smashed screens, broken cases, missing keys off the keyboards. I guess there’s a lot of animals shopping at Wal*Mart. I was there less than five minutes.

All in all I decided to skip the computer purchase experience and stick with the MacBook Pro for the time being. The though trackpad is starting to die on this computer, it works well for what I need it to do and so I’ll just carry a little mouse with it or something.

I did discover during this excursion that I have a low tolerance for ignorance: people not turning right on red because they’re too busy chatting on the phone, people not watching where they are walking, parents letting their kids run on TOP of the shelf in better home furnishings at Wal*Mart (I wish I was making that up). I don’t know if I’m getting older or if the the general populace is getting more and more stupid as time goes on but I feel like I am firmly out of step and marching down a different boulevard from the rest of society these days.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

2 May 2010 by J.P. Geek 1

Connect.

I’m struggling with this blog entry. I don’t know why. I think I need to go to sleep. But someday I might write something worth reading again. In the meantime, I could dance or something but that would just be a cheap shot at entertainment and increasing hits and I’m not really into that. So instead I’ll just call it a night.

Thanks for stopping by. We’ll chat again soon now, ya hear?

27 April 2010 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 1

Clouds.

I am sitting aboard a Continental regional jet looking out the window and admiring the tops of the moonlit clouds. The date of this entry is inaccurate and moreso unimportant and the same goes for the destination. What is important is that I know I am the luckiest man in the world and I count my blessings everyday.

I have been desperately trying to shake the cynicism I have learned over the years. I looked at an old yearbook the other day and noted that I was referenced as a complainer, even back in 10th grade. That’s just awful. I don’t want to be known as the guy that was forever complaining, and while personal blogs sort of enable this behavior there isn’t a mandate that I have to be that way. So I keep conscious of these things.

The internet has afforded me the opportunity to meet some amazing people over the years. I have met those with a really positive outlook and I have known those that are having a hard time at it. I joke with Earl about the fact that we got together before the whole dot com thing and here we still are all these years later. This shows me two things: what is meant to be will be and life is what you make of it.

I mentioned earlier that I know I’m the luckiest guy in the world. It’s because I invited that luck in and was showed how to nurture it.

And then when I looked out, I noticed that the clouds had dissipated.

25 April 2010 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept 1

Scheduling.

So last night I worked my first overnight at my new job. In addition to the usual graveyard shift workers, I joined two of my colleagues to do some very technical-like testing that could only be done during a very important sounding “maintenance window”. Yes, I’m trumpeting it to be much more than it really is. It’s all quite routine in the circles I tend to hang out in.

Because I worked from 11 to 7, I have had most of the day off today. It’s been a while since I’ve been home during the day and the change of pace has been quite nice. It wasn’t needed, mind you, but the change has afforded me the opportunity to get a lot done around the house. Laundry might actually be caught up when all is said and done tonight and now I remember what the kitchen counter looks like!

I also took the opportunity to go to my old workplace and see how all my friends are doing. Big changes have taken place in the past two months so I left but it was good to see everyone. I miss them. I don’t miss the job, but I do miss the people. I look forward to seeing them when Saranac Thursday nights start up.

22 April 2010 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept 0

Fun.

I stumbled across this video on YouTube this morning and I think it’s pretty cool. This is the first time I have heard this song as well and it has made it into my music collection.

This is a simple music video made using a Mac.

20 April 2010 by J.P. Geek 0

Guilty Pleasure.

In an effort to kick the Monday blahs, I played one of my favorite songs from the 80s on the ride home and it perked me up considerably.

This song is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, because I don’t recall it being overly popular in the states back in the day, but it is one of my favorites. Bonus points to whomever can name the group these ladies sang backups in prior to the release of this song. (They’re even on a couple of this group’s videos).

Here’s Pepsi and Shirlie with “Heartache”.

19 April 2010 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept 0

Glonk.

Phrase.

Sounds Like A Geek.

J-Town

Shopping.

Connect.

Clouds.

Scheduling.

Fun.

Guilty Pleasure.

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