blog of testiclese this is where the shit went down, but before you got here

I saw this link on memepool for something about balloon hats.

Those of you who know me don’t know my love for balloon hats.

Neither did I, until today.

From the looks of it, two guys decided to travel round the world, making anyone they met a balloon hat, and taking a picture of them.  The pictures are stunning, probably on so many artistic levels that I don’t understand, but an art student could explain to me with about nineteen hours, and a series of power point slides.

Peep their site here.

Peep the pictures here.

Peep the upcoming documentary here.

Vince:Fix these bugs.

Me: Fixed.

Vince: There is one more, hold on.
Me: BZZZZZZTT!!

(choose your own adventure here.)

Vince: Don’t get all Fifth Element on me. (this is what actually happened.)

OR!

Vince: Don’t make me go Corey Feldman on you. (this is what I heard.  it is consequently much funnier.)

And I had a forty. Shout outs to Satchmo, we had a forty ounce friday.

Schulte and I then spent the next ninety hours trying to set up MythTV.

Some things that I learned from the process:

• Networking device company Linksys hates Linux, freedom.

We spent the first four or eleven hours trying to set up the wireless card, to no avail. Ever. As it turns out, most of the walkthrough’s require an internet connection to set up an internet connection. This seems counterintuitive at first, and continued to seem so once we moved the computer into the basement where the router is. My basic plan for the evening was to read the walkthrough, copy paste things, and if nothing happened, it must have worked correctly. Basic theory for using Linux is, if you didn’t get an error, you did it correctly.

Here’s an example of a successful initialization of the TV decoder card:

# /sbin/depmod -a
# /sbin/modprobe ivtv
#

Success!

Usually you get an error. We used yum to install some stuff, and eventually I got tired and went to bed.

On Sunday I worked up the courage to go and work on it again, keeping the principle stated above. I hadn’t really tested anything, and I wasn’t really sure if any of my devices were set up correctly (see above).  I tested some stuff, and it turns out that I got audio and video back from the TV, at which point I shit my pants.

Post cleanup, I installed MythTV, set up my channels, downloaded listings, etc, and booted it up.  Everything worked mostly smooth, the config for MythTV is pretty painless if you can pay attention, a difficult task for me.  All that’s left is moving it upstairs and seeing if it’ll hook up to the tv.  Then I’ll break it in having it record every episode of Hogan’s Heroes ever.

I had a radical idea the other day, in which I came up with the greatest band name ever, for a fake band. That name is Hot Awesome. I was going to make a fake review, and fake album, and then post it. It was going to be incredibly hysterical, at least for me. The sad news comes when I go to try and find some images for the album cover, and I do a search on “Hot Awesome.” It turns out that some Canadians already decided that “Hot Awesome” would be a sweet name for a band, and they took it. It’s your standard Canadian indie pop, but it’s crisp, and clean, and I would probably be caught listening to it at some time. The track titles are not as funny as mine would have been, except for maybe “Holy Pants.” In any event, I have to give those Canucks credit for coming up with a band name that is clearly spectacular. So I am saddened that they have stolen my thunder, but happy for our neighbors in the north.

I guess you could go check them out, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Their myspace page

Something interesting happened today at work. The power shut on and off. This was not the interesting thing. In the hubbub amidst running around turning computers back on, and rebooting servers, an interesting smell was found to be emitted from a vent near my desk. I am not a fireman, but I would describe this smell as “some sort of electrical fire.” This is a smell that I have created a few times in my own right, to the destruction of several pieces of personal electronics. I feel safe in saying that I was not at all responsible for the smell this time. There was however, the concern that there may be something on fire above our heads. To the closet someone with more motivation than me went, to pull out the ladder, which could then be used to investigate the smell; something I suggested that we leave to professionals. As a non-professional, I have found first hand the error of trying to create a controlled blaze, or the pain of attempting to control an uncontrolled blaze. Needless to say, one of my co-workers had his head stuck up in the ceiling, long enough for me to take a picture, on top of my already busy schedule of watching a co-worker stick his head in the ceiling to investigate a possible eletrical fire.

[Before the start of this anecdote, there is some knowledge that needs to be shared, please read over the facts, and then continue down to enjoy my tale.]

Definitions:

• Ultimate Frisbee – a game for hippies involving a lot of chasing a spinning disc and smoking drugs.
• Swing / Dump – a maneuver in the game of Ultimate Frisbee in which the disc is thrown not forwards into risk, but backwords, towards safety and control.

[Thus begins our tale.]

I was at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament this weekend, on a team full of hooligans. While we weren’t running amok on the field, we were cheering on our teammates from the sidelines, offering suggestions of “HAMMER!” and “SWING!” or perhaps the occassional “CHILLY CHILLY!” These are all moderately helpful, or at least appropriate suggestions for the game of Ultimate Frisbee. I am not certain as to how the following events started, but I can say with a fair amount of shame, that I found myself caught up in the bedlam, instead of perhaps attempting to settling the raucous crowd. The second most commonly shouted phrase in Ultimate Frisbee is the call of “swing.” This first most common phrase is, “pass that shit over here!” In any event, one of the cohorts on the team of JJ’s Dynomite in a relapse to the third grade, suddenly realized the connection between the phrase “use your dump” and “take a dump” — with disastrous results. Soon everyone, or at least, three of us, were yelling at every opportunity, to “take a dump.” I apologize if there were any sensitive ears present, but I place full blame on the public school system.

Over the course of the last eight or so years, I’ve been amassing a collection of digital music.  In the days before mp3’s, I would listen to albums (cds) in their entirety.  I find lately that I spend more time skipping through randomly shuffled tracks, either on the iPod, on in winamp.  I think a touch of radness would be an app that brought back the album feeling, where you can visually scan your cd’s, grab an album, and give it a spin.  Otherwise, I worry that this song shuffle could progress, and I’ll be spending more time skipping songs than actually listening.  At the end of a long day of skipping tracks, I feel tired, and worn, not at all entertained.  Each new song that comes up aggravates me more than the last, until my Ritalin rattled brain decides that there is no music worth the bits it’s shifting, and I feel like I hate music, and I notes, and I especially hate singing.

1. New Job
2. New Commute
3. New Cube
4. New Mug
5. New Phone

I’d say I’m happy to be here, but I hate you.  This blog has been recreated, by hand, and keyboard, and a little bit of elbow grease.  Much obliged to Mister Schuler, without whom none of this would be possible.

Holy crap that’s a big hole. The heat is really getting to the parking lot by my work. Apparently, smaller hole was made a few years ago, enough to get some water down there, and over time wore out this hole. The hole itself was probably only a foot and a half feet across, but it was about eight feet deep. It also connected to a tunnel, or a container of some sort that no one knew about. They put about three quarters of a ton of rocks, without making a dent in the hole.

The rest of the pictures are here.