Shattered Reality

I carved up Yoda on the right, Cassie did the bats on the left.

I wish I was as cool as Josh Scanlan. Check out his brutally sarcastic posts, laced with an asshole preservative, and topped with a layer of “I don’t give a shit.” Oh, and sometimes he has polls. Go check it out, I’ll wait here… Back? Offended yet? Don’t be; he just says what you’re thinking and you’re envious of that, so you take it out through misdirected anger. Not quit crying and go read some more.

I had one once, named it Ping. Started chewing on my cords. So I got rid of it. Replaced it with a flash drive. Also named Ping. It was a win-win situation.

Arrived home this afternoon from our annual family vacation to the Wisconsin Dells. Probably the coolest part of the trip was getting to stand in the now-empty Lake Delton. On the Ducks tour, I learned that the lake was drained in just four hours, causing an area of the Wisconsin River to go from 65 feet deep to a mere 6 feet, due to all the sand Lake Delton washed out. I ended up taking a number of pictures, as that’s something I’ll probably never get to do again; I’ll process and post those when I get some time.

Being able to walk in a lake that I’ve visited and fished at almost every year since I was a little kid was a very surreal experience. The lake was largely overgrown in many areas with patches of grass, and the rest of the parts were sludgy, unstable expanses of sand and dirt. Stepping in many of the areas, you could look down and see the whole bed of sand shift under your feet. My foot got sucked down in more than one place, and, not surprisingly, apparently a woman wasn’t careful enough and was sucked into one of the sinkholes at some point after the flooding.

We also caught a walking stick.

Pretty quiet on the blogging front these past few months, “pretty quiet” being a huge understatement. I haven’t been keeping up with my blogroll either. Could go on and on about why that is, but all that matters is I’m writing now.

Let me just say this: Whoever says Macs are more stable than PCs are full of shit. I purchased a MacBook a few weeks ago, and while so far I’m enjoying it, programs crash like I didn’t believe possible. As Seth W. said:

My iBook is giving me more beach-balls than a holiday weekend… at the beach.

Speaking of Seth, he recently plugged my Warped Tour shots on BuzzGrinder. About that: this year I was approved for a photo pass for Milwaukee’s Warped Tour. I have to say, it was easily one of the coolest things I’ve done. You can check out my photos from the event on the Warped Tour page I put up.

I just switched from Helio to T-Mobile 10 days ago. Maybe I’ll write more about my overall experience with Helio later, but the reason for the switch wans’t exactly voluntary. Helio recently merged with Virgin Mobile, which I thought to be great news (although I’ll miss the Helio name) because it would bring much-needed mainstream support to the company, among other things. Unfortunately, approximately two weeks prior to the public announcement of the merger, their service took a fast nose-dive, so bad that I could no longer make calls in my house (used to get around 80% of full reception), my text messages would constantly fail, and my 3G connection was intermittent at best. The phone I picked up with T-Mobile is the BlackBerry Curve. It has wi-fi, but no GPS. Oh well, otherwise I love it. Next stop? Android.

Just moved this site over to Media Temple. Let me know if there are any issues.

Here’s something I haven’t done in a while: talked about video games. Erich convinced me to pick up WoW?????? two months ago, and, while I’ve been more or less enjoying it, it definitely doesn’t feel like it has that “hold” potential where I won’t get bored with it soon.

An upcoming game that never really held my attention but is starting to now is Age of Conan. I like the unique classes and the potential that’s there, but I don’t know how I feel about not being able to craft until later in the game. The game looks a little bland in regards to everything appearing to be in a desert setting (kind of reminds me of Tabula Rasa in that sense). AoC does have the potential to really do well with its player-run cities, but those can be hit-or-miss. I’m still hopeful, though. If I pick it up, I’ll probably end up with the collector’s edition like I usually do- I’m a sucker for art books and in-game bonus items.

MMO’s aside, I have a slew of other games I’ve yet to finish: Doom 3, Final Fantasy III DS, Bioshock, Tony Hawk Project 8, Overlord, Dead Rising, Lego Star Wars II, and others I’m sure.

I just found out about a Firefox Add-on called ScribeFire thanks to Firefox 3’s Add-on recommendations. ScribeFire opens a pane at the bottom of your browser (or a new tab or window) allowing you to create a post to one of a number of blogging services, with the ability to edit multiple blogs and switch between them instantly. Check out their getting started page to learn more.

On top of full post writing and editing, you can open up your del.icio.us bookmarks in the pane and add the current page or search your existing bookmarks. Now, I never get hooked into del.icio.us, preferring ma.gnolia, but there are still so few tools and add-ons available for it that I may go back to my old del.icio.us account. Then again I don’t really use either all that much, so maybe not. ma.gnolia just looks so much nicer.

I just enabled Akismet so let me know if there’s anything goofy with the comments.