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

This time, it’s Chris(t)? Onstad. He is Lord of the Universe of Achewood, and he brings it to us with a freshness that surprises you with nearly daily updates!

I say universe, because it is not just a comic strip. These characters have been given life, and they live it, and we just get to watch. On top of the nearly daily strip, there are twelve blogs, one for each of the major (or perhaps favored) characters. Add on another blog, Chris’ own, and we see the impetus behind this venture. A force driven not only by an urge to draw cats with funny hats that walk around like people, but to drive a story, a journey, and to become fully immersed in it. I have contributed what I can to his quest, by purchasing a number of books, and pins, and clothing apparel, but it does not feel like enough. I began drafting plans to have the entire arc of the “Great Outdoor Fight” tattooed on myself, but the doctors say I would have to gain approximately 700 pounds to have enough skin to cover the event in the detail that it deserves.
What’s so funny? Well, this is:

Ten years, boy-whoo. The ten years between twenty and thirty. If you are twenty, do what I should have done: start Google. I swear, there was this one day at college where I was equidistant between the Communication department and the Computer Science department, and it was the day I had to choose my major, and this guy sitting outside of the Communication building was eating this great-looking sandwich. Like I said, man—decisions. Think about them.

So here’s what you can do to help.

Read the newest comic.

Read the “Great Outdoor Fight” arc. Please, really do, because it’s an instant classic.

Now you feel a little better, so you can start from the beginning.

Perhaps you’d like to learn a little bit more about the author!

Maybe you can quench your hunger a little.

Sometimes an image speaks for itself.

I discovered today that I have a new mantra:

Any effort that is not wasted effort, is.

I’ll let you think about that for a while.

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.