I'm back....

Ok just a quick little post to let everyone know I am back and that the vacation was pretty darn fun. (We won't talk about the sunburn I got or my wife's sunburn in an interesting location. I also won't mention how I actually had a {gasp} good time shopping [at downtown Disney]) Is it my imagination or does California have the highest restaurant food prices in the nation (or am I just spoiled living in Vegas) Oh well be back later for more details.

Disneyland

Is it me or does the thought of Disneyland not bring as much excitement to your heart as it did in days gone by? I actually am not that excited about going to the Magic Kingdom this week. I am looking forward to going to California Adventure more than seeing all my old favorites at Disney. Now don't get me wrong, I will still smile as I cruise on down Pirates of the Carribean, and I will chuckle as I see the cheesy special effects on the Haunted Mansion, but these are probably the only two rides I still get up for at Disneyland. For the rest I will wander around and go on rides that have short lines, or an indoor ride to get out of the heat. However, when we head on over to California Adventure there are 4-5 rides that I enjoy going on. Oh well, maybe I am just getting too old for the Disney Magic, or maybe Disney itself hasn't kept up with the times. I could be a little jaded after all the special effects we see in movies nowadays. What do you think?

Vacations

Ok I have a question for everyone. Its about vacations. For the last few years I have not gotten a vacation, well thats not totally true, I have used the few days off that I have had to take time off around Christmas and then sporadically throughout the year to make a 3-day weekend here and there. In addition to that, since I always seem to be switching jobs every three years or so (no stability in the tech support field or else I just have a bad case of wanderlust) I never seem to accrue any significant amounts of vacation time. Unlike my wife who worked at Mirage Resorts for 13 years and had 4 weeks of vacation and now is a teacher and has summers off.

The long and the short of it is the fact that my wife has always had the time to take vacations with her parents and still take time off when I do. Meanwhile I am always stuck working and calling her while she is off in Disneyland or Reno or Greshim Oregon or wherever. I was just wondering how many people actually get a lot of vacation time and how many are stuck with a week or maybe two if they are lucky (like me)? Does life just suck or am I not negotiating vacation plans very well.

Evening star...

I thought I would share a little of my life tonight, you know just give a low down on how I spent my evening, even if it was just a boring Sunday night.

4:00 - 5:00 pm Went to the grocery store with my wife amd mother-in-law. Usually I go alone, or my wife will go with her Mom, sometimes the wife and I go but we usually don't have the time together. All three of us shopping was a trip, my mother-in-law in her scooter zipping around the store getting her own stuff. My wife and I stocking up on the essentials since we have even more company showing up tomorrow.

5:00 - 6:00 pm Dinnertime. Well at least for them, I have been nursing an upset stomache since yesterday so I didn't eat.

6:00 - 7:00 pm After dinner conversation, mainly about the in-laws futile attempts to find a house for under $250 and then the ice cream conversation started.

7:00 - 7:30 pm The wife and her sister went out to get ice cream from Baskin Robbins for everyone. I decided I would risk a smoothie on my stomache.

7:30 - 8:30 pm Everyone sat outside enjoying the Vegas night (85 degrees, no wind) drinking my smoothie and watching the hummingbirds in the garden.

8:30 - 9:00 pm Decided to light a fire in the outdoor fireplace, slowly lost people as it got later and darker. Finally, as the fireplace burned down to embers only me and the wife were left.

9:00 - 10:00 pm Cuddled in the hammock with the wife watching the fire burn itself out. Peace, quiet, tranquility.

10:00 - 10:10 pm Posted this, went to bed, wife is waiting.

Good night...

Is it yesterday yet?

New model 'permits time travel'

By Julianna Kettlewell BBC News science reporter

The concept of time-travel is laden with uncomfortable paradoxes. If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated. Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind. The new model, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics, gets rid of the famous paradox surrounding time travel.

Paradox explained

Although the laws of physics seem to permit temporal gymnastics, the concept is laden with uncomfortable contradictions. The main headache stems from the idea that if you went back in time you could, theoretically, do something to change the present; and that possibility messes up the whole theory of time travel.
Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don't suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births - that much is obvious.
You go back to kill your father, but you'd arrive after he'd left the room, you wouldn't find him, or you'd change your mind. So either time travel is not possible, or something is actually acting to prevent any backward movement from changing the present. For most of us, the former option might seem most likely, but Einstein's general theory of relativity leads some physicists to suspect the latter.
According to Einstein, space-time can curve back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to double back and meet younger versions of themselves. And now a team of physicists from the US and Austria says this situation can only be the case if there are physical constraints acting to protect the present from changes in the past.

Weird laws

The researchers say these constraints exist because of the weird laws of quantum mechanics even though, traditionally, they don't account for a backwards movement in time. Quantum behaviour is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured those possibilities shrink to one - uncertainty is eliminated. So, if you know the present, you cannot change it. If, for example, you know your father is alive today, the laws of the quantum universe state that there is no possibility of him being killed in the past. It is as if, in some strange way, the present takes account of all the possible routes back into the past and, because your father is certainly alive, none of the routes back can possibly lead to his death. "Quantum mechanics distinguishes between something that might happen and something that did happen," Professor Dan Greenberger, of the City University of New York, US, told the BBC News website. "If we don't know your father is alive right now - if there is only a 90% chance that he is alive right now, then there is a chance that you can go back and kill him. "But if you know he is alive, there is no chance you can kill him." In other words, even if you take a trip back in time with the specific intention of killing your father, so long as you know he is happily sitting in his chair when you leave him in the present, you can be sure that something will prevent you from murdering him in the past. It is as if it has already happened. "You go back to kill your father, but you'd arrive after he'd left the room, you wouldn't find him, or you'd change your mind," said Professor Greenberger. "You wouldn't be able to kill him because the very fact that he is alive today is going to conspire against you so that you'll never end up taking that path leads you to killing him."

 

Since you wanted Oompa-Loompas 

Oompa Loompa Doompity Doo

Roald Dahl museum set to open

Friday, June 10, 2005 Posted: 8:29 AM EDT (1229 GMT)

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- A museum dedicated to the life and writings of author Roald Dahl opens Saturday in the British village where he made his home.
The museum in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, houses drafts of some of his most famous works and a mock-up of the interior of the garden shed in which he created some of the best-loved characters in children's literature. Many of Dahl's works -- such as "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "James and the Giant Peach" -- have become classics. Dahl, who died in 1990, was also an accomplished writer of short stories for adults. Compilations such as "Kiss Kiss" and "Switch Bitch" were best sellers. Many of Dahl's books were turned into films and his "Tales of the Unexpected" television series -- with its distinctive theme tune and opening sequence -- became a viewing staple. The museum opens a month ahead of the release of the new movie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, starring Johnny Depp. Dahl who was born in Llandaff, Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, got his first break when Walt Disney took a liking to a story he had written about mythical creatures which RAF pilots thought had sabotaged their planes. The story, "Gremlin Lore," was turned into a picture book called "Walt Disney: The Gremlins (A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl)."
 

Lt. Give-porn-er

Found this article and thought it was so outrageous that I had to post it. Following in the footsteps of the 'Arnold' and Las Vegas Mayor attorney Oscar Goldman.



Porn star attending GOP fund-raiser




Mary Carey plans run for lieutenant governor
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 Posted: 9:05 PM EDT (0105 GMT)




WASHINGTON (AP) -- Blond porn star, political candidate. And now you can add one more line to Mary Carey's resume: Republican booster.

Carey was in Washington Tuesday to attend the President's Dinner, an annual fundraiser put on by the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A few hours before the dinner, Carey met with reporters to show off her evening gown and talk about a Republican lunch she and her boss, adult film executive Mark Kulkis, attended.

"I met a lot of nice people," Carey said of the lunch, where presidential adviser Karl Rove spoke. "I met some people who talked about helping me with donating money to my next campaign."

She plans to run for lieutenant governor of California next year as an independent. But her trip to Washington has swayed Carey's political leanings. She says she's been a Republican "for a couple of days."

Anyone expecting her to cause a scene with her attire at the President's Dinner might be disappointed.

She was wearing a black, floor-length gown. The only color added to the outfit was her red, white and blue Republican elephant lapel pin and similarly patriotic fingernails.


 

Worn Out...

Well, I noticed today that I am starting to get run down a little bit. I actually took a nap today at 2 pm (Don't say anything Teri about me always napping thats only during the work week) I think I am taking after my wife and trying to do too much this month. I am taking two education classes this summer semester, which is a full load, I am still working my 6-3 schedule, and I am still trying to get the massive backyard projects done. Not to mention dealing with the moved in in-laws, shudder. At least I have two vacations planned at the end of this month, hopefully I can relax during them, I tend to get keyed up while vacationing. I am actually going up to Reno-Tahoe for the first time in my life. Teri has gone up twice with Josh and her parents and they love it. Then right before the 4th we are going to sneak in a quickie Disney trip. The only problem is that the vacations are right in the middle of my classes. Ah well, I can always relax in July.

Sex part 2

Ok even though I skipped a day, here is part two to my sex blog. If you remember from part one I had an epiphany about the stages of sex and also rambled on about sex and society. I then promised to dwelve into the seedy underbelly on my next blog. Ok get ready for the hard stuff. Here is my mystifying questions, how come people are afraid to try new things when it comes to sex? I am not saying that you are going to like everything that you try, but maybe you will and you just don't know it now. I am nearly 40, have been married for 16 years, and have a wife who cares about what I want, all of which is a good recipe for a healthy sex life. Even with that I have not tried everything, but we have had some fun and are willing to give a lot a go. Can you say whipped cream and chocolate pudding? What I don't understand are people who are afraid to go outside of their normal boxed in existence. Or even worse people who consider anything outside of their normal box to be abnormal or unhealthy or perverse. Ah well, live and let live. I have another question, this one for the audience at large, has anyone dressed up as or had someone dress up as someone else to live out a fantasy? You know something as simple as Tarzan and Jane, or Gone with the Wind, or something as complex as dressing up as the next door neighbor or a burglar or school teacher...

Sex?

I got to thinking today about how your views on sex change as you get older. As a child, sex is that big mystery that you know nothing about. Then you hit teenagehood and sex becomes the source of all your anxieties and dreams. Suddenly you make it to early adulthood and everything in your life revolves around sex. It influences what you do, what you eat, who you see, and even when you do things. Pretty soon you hit midlife and sex is still great, but other things start to become more important. Sex takes on the flavor of a party; something you do on special occasions and get dressed up for. Then after awhile you start to get old and sex becomes something that gets in the way of more important things like getting 8 hours of sleep or watching a favorite TV show. My point to all this is by the time you have the wisdom and experience to get rid of all your hangups about sex, you have probably gotten past the urge to do it anymore. I see some wierd inverse law here based on the frequency of your sexlife and the neurological hangups you have on it. Why can't people just say screw it and do what they want? (Pun intended by the way) Why are things like menage a trois or fetishes frowned upon by society? How did this nudity taboo get started anyways? Didn't everyone race to get out of their clothes as fast as they could when they were young? Well its too late for me to rant on any more so I will have to continue this tomorrow and get into the slimy underbelly of this blog...

BBSer

I read an article today at Wired online's website. It was a history article, well a computer history article. It dealt with the history of the internet, well it at least dealt with its precursor, BBS's. Kind of old home week for me and mine. My wife and I got married after meeting on a local BBS here in Vegas back in the 80s. Martin ran his own BBS back in the day also. Ahh memories. Here is the editted and condensed article from Wired.


Remember when there was no e-mail or instant messaging? Reaching out to touch someone digitally once meant you had to dial into a phone line through your Trash-80 PC, type a message, post it to an online bulletin board and then wait weeks -- or more often months -- to get a response.

Before America Online, Friendster, forums and blogs, geeks communicated with one another in a clunky and pedestrian way that was the precursor to all subsequent forms of online communication.

It was called a bulletin board system, or BBS, and was essentially a virtual living room where people hooked up remotely to chat, exchange freeware or play computer games, albeit at a really slow speed.

Anyone nostalgic for those halcyon days can now thank digital archivist and filmmaker Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary, a five-and-a-half-hour paean to the era when computers were named Stacy and Lisa, and tech loyalists fought bitter battles over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas.

Filled with interviews of the founders of the first bulletin board, the creator of Fido software, internet patriarch Vint Cerf and many others, the surprisingly engrossing documentary grew out of a project Scott began in 1998 when he started collecting text files posted to BBSes over the years and published them at textfiles.com. He just wanted to preserve a bit of tech history that meant a lot to his teen years, but he was soon inundated with BBS artifacts that other people sent in.

BBSes were the blogs of their day and began sprouting up in the late '70s, after the appearance of the Hayes modem, with names like Aladdin's Lamp, The Puzzle Palace and Leprechaun Heaven, each one devoted to a different topic. Users and system operators, or sysops, compiled directories of BBS names, phone numbers and their topics. Scott culled the names he could find and composed a list that has now grown to 105,000.

When he posted the list online, it gave old BBS users a blast from their past.

"They would type in their name on Google and here would come up the name of a BBS that they had run 20 years ago when they were 13," Scott said. "I had a guy tell me that he was dating a girl and she asked him, 'What was the Wizard Castle?' It was the name of a BBS he had run for only a few months in 1983."

People began sending Scott personal essays reminiscing about their life on the boards. So Scott, who studied film in school, decided to make a documentary. The four-year project, begun in 2001, was just released as a three-DVD set containing eight episodes and bonus material. Fans can see various aspects of the BBS story, such as the birth of boards, the creation of FidoNet, the appearance of online porn and the digital art medium called ANSI art.

The first BBS was launched in 1978 by Ward Christensen, an IBM mainframe programmer who developed Xmodem, and Randy Suess. It was born during a snowstorm.

When a blizzard struck Chicago where Christensen lived, he couldn't go to work one day, and he decided to fiddle with an idea he and Suess had discussed for their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange, or CACHE. The plan was to replace the group's answering machine that announced meetings with a computerized message board allowing people to leave messages on the board using their computer. It took Christensen two weeks to write the software while Suess assembled the hardware.

The board launched Feb. 16, 1978, as CBBS, for the Computerized Bulletin Board System, using a 300-baud modem. Only one caller could connect to the board at a time (eventually someone developed software to allow multiple phone lines to connect to a board at once), and the system could transfer only about five words per second. But it was a hit.

Months later, Christensen and Suess published an article about the board in Byte magazine and distributed free copies of the BBS software. BBSes began popping up everywhere, but callers to them were scarce since few people owned modems yet.

Within two years, 200 to 300 BBSes flourished, and eventually more than 150,000 existed in North America at the peak of their popularity.

Unlike the nascent internet, whose use was confined at the time to researchers and the military, BBSes were populist to their core, available to anyone who could afford the hefty $3,000 to $10,000 price tag for a computer. All it took to establish a BBS and become your own sysop was to install the software on a home PC with a modem and connect it to a phone line that remote users could dial into and leave messages.

On the surface, the BBS was, perhaps, a ridiculous idea. Conversations took an eon to unfold. And a game of digital chess or Battleship played on the boards would take days to progress because a player had to wait a day or two after making a move for an opponent to dial in and take a turn.

Tom Jennings, creator of the Fido protocol that allowed hundreds of BBSes to network with each other, recalls describing the concept to friends and getting blank stares.

"With this program you'd have on your computer you'd dial a number, you'd enter your name and password ... and then you could go to the messages so you could read the messages. And then you could add one," Jennings told friends. "And if you waited long enough, and I had to say months, other people would have called in and left messages. And after a few months you would have a conversation.

"And they're like, why?... It was unbelievably stupid."

And yet more and more people signed on. Scott said "BBS" became a code word for passage to a revolutionary underground society.

"If you mentioned the term 'BBS' to someone and no spark of recognition appeared in their eyes," one user told Scott in the film, "you said screw them, they're not worth your time."

A number of sysops interviewed in the film described watching the lights on the computer next to their bed flash at night as they lay in the dark and feeling awe that technology had brought the world to their bedroom.

Often the information superhighway came at a hefty price, however, because cross-country calls to BBSes not in the area could cost $1 a minute, leading to $600 phone charges for heavy users who frequented half a dozen or more boards daily.

Lasting friendships were forged, and marriages were made and broken, as the online medium offered new ways for people to meet and cheat. The boards also saved lives.

One woman told a sysop that finding his board led her to abandon a plan to commit suicide, while closeted gays expressed relief at finding alternative lifestyle boards for communities they never knew existed.

Although board communication could be laborious, its nature changed in 1983 with the appearance of Fido, a protocol that allowed BBSes to communicate with one another to create a FidoNet for wider distribution of messages. Instead of posting a message to just one board, a user could post a message and have it fan out to hundreds or thousands of boards at a time.

In 1984, FidoNet had only 132 nodes; by 1995, the number had grown to more than 35,000 worldwide.

"FidoNet really felt like it was changing the world. And it was," Scott said. "The idea that you could send a message and it would filter out to a thousand BBSes within a day or two was intoxicating to a person. It's easy now when people can send messages instantaneously. But at the time nobody thought this was something that was ever going to fall into the hands of regular people."

The ills that hit the internet later struck BBSes early -- from innocuous but annoying flame wars to pornography and pirated software, which drew the attention of law enforcement and critics who hated the free-for-all nature of the boards.

"I found quotes online ... a person was talking to a librarian at a BBS convention and the librarian said it would be a lot easier for librarians if these BBSes would just go away," Scott said. "Here's all this stuff going out and nobody knows where it's from. People are transferring information willy-nilly and there's no protection. You could see all of this fear."

And there arose a philosophical schism between free and fee-based boards, leading purists to accuse the fee-based boards of violating the open-source spirit of the community.

"That's where the real fights started," Scott said. "For a certain group of people ... the minute you started charging money, you lost them. You made it uncool."

Around 1995, just as the mention of BBSes on an episode of Law & Order signaled the phenomenon's entry into pop culture, the reign of boards came to a crashing end. That's when the internet took hold and, like vinyl records and 8-track tapes, bulletin boards quickly faded to obscurity. Some BBS owners morphed their systems into the first internet service providers but most disappeared. Only a few hundred dialup BBSes still exist, Scott said.

Now he laughs at the people who feared the BBS.

"I just say to them, oh yeah, BBSes went away. I hope you're happy with what you have now," Scott said. "And let's see what comes next."

Slave to the Girl in Leather

Ok everyone, every now and then I try to get a little cutting edge, or sometimes I just get lucky and stumble across something before everyone else does. About a month ago I was channel surfing before going to bed and I was bored waiting for Teri to get off the phone and come to bed when lo and behold in the dregs of Cox Cable's channels I surfed by the Fuse Music Network and saw a girl on a bed clad in leather with a whip. Being the red blooded male that I am (and not so old that my libido is dead yet) I promptly stopped channel surfing and turned up the volume to find out what the hell I had stumbled across. A couple of minutes later I wiped the drool off my mouth and had a new 'show' to watch. Its called Slave to the Metal and is just a VJ offering advice about anything and everything and answering phone calls and email questions and playing heavy metal videos. The thing that makes this show is the VJ herself, Juliya. She dresses up as a closet dominatrix, brandishing her whip and bad mouthing the 'Momma's boys' who call in. She gives advice to girls, telling them to dump their boyfriends and find a real guy or girl. Talk about over the top, sex sells, video voyeurism! This show is on in Vegas, M-F at 9:00 pm PST and is definitely something you should check out at least once. For those of you in less fortunate areas of the country Juliya has her own website here.

Q..R..S..T..U.F.C.

Ok time for me to play fan and babble on about this Saturday's entertainment, Ultimate Fighting PPV at an80snut's house. Martin and I take turns hosting the UFC pay-per-views (well ok the last several have been at my place-I have the bigger house, Martin the bigger TV (see Martin there I go comparing sizes again)but I digress) and for the two of us and our significant others its the sports highlight of the moment. We talk about it and analyze it almost as much as we do football (he and I are also fantasy football addicts), but seriously we have a blast. I have already rambled on in an earlier post about comparing UFC to Roman gladiator sports so I won't do that and I cannot say anything about how the significant others pick the winners based on who is cuter or has less back hair. So I guess I will just give an overview of the best combat sport on the planet. Two competitors enter an octagonal ring and using a variety of martial art skills try to pulverize their opponent. The thing that makes this sport so interesting is the intense training that these athletes go through. All of them are multiple black belts, some of them have even won Olympic wrestling medals, and they are in tip top shape which leads to exciting matches. So to paraphrase the announcer of UFC -- "Bring it on baby!"

Allergies

Ok this is a warning, this post is gonna be a rant. I need to vent out some frustration and figured why not do it in a post. I HATE ALLERGIES! I am 39 years old and have gotten comfortable throughout the years with who and what I am. However, there is one thing about myself that I would love to change, I have allergies. I don't have them bad, they don't lay me up or anything (I have sisters who get migraines that last for days), but mine are persistent little devils. Its like having a low grade fever for days, it just makes you feel miserable. I take maintenance medicine for them, Allegra is wonderful, but I still can be set off for a few hours by the littlest thing. Dogs bother me bad, I am ok with cats. Cigarette smoke is the worst, it gives me the sniffles and then I have a headache for hours. Paint, dust, nail polish, anything that is a fine particulant bothers me. I hate it, it crimps my lifestyle. I cringe at people who smoke; I avoid my smoker coworkers because they reek and don't know it. I have relatives who have pets and I go over to their houses only when absolutely necessary. I am a social recluse not by choice, but because I can't stand people's annoying habits and such. I have actually had dreams about taking over the world and executing all the smokers. What can I do.

Ok I feel better now.

Peerflix

Ok I figure this post will be a tribute to my friend Martin, since he is the king of CDs and DVDs. Many a day Martin has been out hunting out of the way movies that nobody has heard of on DVD. In addition, Martin has this passion for Japanese anime. So this service would be a natural for him (are you reading Martin?) Let me introduce you to a new service that I just read about today. It combines Netflix with the versatility of a peer to peer network (think Bit Torrent). Basically the way it works is you sign up with the service and get to look through a list of available DVDs. Ones other users have put up for trade. If you find one you like you use your accumulated Peerbux to purchase it. How do you get Peerbux you ask? Well you put up your old DVDs and when someone buys it you get Peerbux (or you can purchase them at a rate of $5 for 1 Peerbux) which you then use to get the DVDs you want. Sound easy? Sound like fun? Great, go visit their site located here. Happy hunting.