A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

"I'm gonna cwyyyyyy!" muses Zachary "I'm Out" "Sylar" "Dr. Crybaby-bitch" Quinto

  So firstly, everyone knows I'm a sci-fi fan and absolutely LOVE all movies, even bad ones such as Manos: Hands of Fate, and I watched Star Trek: Into Darkness which compared to what it was inspired by, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and Star Trek: In Search of Spock, was a bit kiddy but still pretty fun and more "Buck Rogers" than "Star Trek" and... a little gay (why is every guy crying in this freakin' film?  Who does that?) 



Original Star Trek: Wrath of Khan was far superior in scope and acting.

 
 The originals were Shakespearean like "Othello" with the grandiose acting and drama while these are little more than Archie Digest Comics but, in this generation, which I call "Generation Twitchy-Gay" suits it just fine, and, honestly, it wasn't horrible, though I could have done without the 3D (actually, I did, because Abrams wanted to install LED flashlights constantly burning your retinas attached to the 3d-glasses for extra lens-flare.. what's up with that horrible, horrible starship-deck design by Apple Inc.?  Really?  Mercury-halide lamps aimed directly at your eyes ON the walls?) 



Abrams, demanding more lens flare from the mercury-halide 1000-watt wall-light fixtures!  "MORE LENS FLARE!" he bitches.

 Also, I watched Iron Man 3 which I prefer to call the film Tony Stark One as it focuses on just about everything but Iron Man, and it pretty much was the movie The Incredibles by Pixar if you think about it too much.  Still, decent if you like dialogue.  So few kids do these days in favor of blinky-lights.

Obama's administration makes people think that this is a good costume.  Children realize parental voting failure early.

  Can't wait till Avengers 2 comes out.. someday.  Joss Whedon's a fantastic director.  Everyone should watch the short-lived major-fanbased Firefly, as well as watch the motion-comic he did in a 4-part series, The Astonishing X-Men (but not until after Wolverine and the X-Men as it's chronological.)



Actual footage of Avengers 2 pre-release, 2015.

  Waiting for any other "blockbuster" to come out, such as The Wolverine or Superman (DC Comics trying to get back onboard while Marvel is doing fantastically) I went to see After Earth since Tom Cruise's Oblivion (not to be confused with Phantasm: OblIVion which I suspect will be better) is not quite out at the "Dollar Theater" at Citadel Crossing yet, nor is it on Netflix or Bluray yet either).  I was warned by Rotten Tomatoes that it was a real loser of a film, getting a 12% fresh rating; still, I went anyway.  So the movie premise is actually very Star Trek-ian in the sense that Will Smith (who I generally dislike due to his extremely brash goofiness and egocentricity in the same vein as Adam Sandler who also is the demigod-like hero in his films) plays as a Vulcan-like character by necessity because the alien enemy feeds off of pheromones for detection of humans.  Over generations, human soldiers begin to be able to control their pheromone production by having less and less emotions to survive, making the massive force of the alien empire (un-named and bug-like so you can't emote with them as does several horror-sci-fi films and books by way of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ender's Game, Aliens, or any other giant-bug movie of the '50s, though failing miserably in reverse with Avatar [I hated those blue, giant, pagan, animal-enslaving, USB-tailed demons!]) not able to see them and losing ground on their (of course) onslaught against the human settlements.  Earth has been abandoned long ago and a soldier's son fails his "ranger" exam so when he comes home he takes him on a simple mission to transport one of the alien beasts (an "Ursa".. ahem.. bear?  Really?  Nice American-Indian coming-of-age angle there).  They unfortunately crash-land on (supposedly) Earth but the ready-to-retire expert-soldier-general "dad" has both his legs broken and half the ship is 100km away (62 miles).  The nose-end of the emergency beacon is destroyed in the crash and everyone but dad and the son are left so he sends the boy to get the beacon in the tail section. The atmosphere has evolved to minimal atmosphere so there's a gel pack that must be inhaled every 12 hours to coat the lungs to absorb more O2 and, of course, there's a limited quantity.. and the "Ursa" is likely free and dangerous.  It is said that every creature has evolved to kill humans on Earth now (for some reason, since humans have been now gone for hundreds of years) and the boy who emotes too much has a bit of a harsh journey ahead of him.  Honestly, not that cheesy and a hint of Adam West in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [which is a sci-fi must-see by-the-way, as is Forbidden Planet (1956) a sort of prequel to Star Trek in-spirit and you can see where ideas were achieved].



After Earth (2013)

  I also installed a Mild-to-Wild footswitch in "Rosie" today [my 2012 Centennial Edition Grand Sport Corvette] (which, as all car modifications [or motorcycle] requires an involuntary blood-sacrifice, and was not particularly as easy as the short instructions suggested, which involved drilling a hole and snaking some wires in a way humans are not supposed to be able to do) where on the "dead pedal" where one rests one foot aside from the clutch I put a toe-switch that turns-off the stealth-mode exhaust normally "on" when not romping on the accelerator pedal, making the car rumble all the time if chosen (and adding an additional 6 Hp).  It's rather impressive.  It simply disconnects a vacuum fuse for you.  I removed that 10 Amp fuse (which makes it rumble all the time) for a day or so to hear how it might sound and it was pretty impressive, but it does, like many aftermarket exhausts, drone a little on longer trips, making you crank-up the radio if you were to listen to music other than the exhaust note.  The burbling, etc., scares children and makes The Tall Man from Phantasm cringe in fear and makes the car far more aggressive sounding with the added bonus of more throttle response.  Still, though I could ditch the fuse and call it "a day" there are times when "stealth mode" (aka standard mode) is preferred, such as early morning commutes, etc.  The fuse controls a vacuum tube which opens two of the four exhaust valves like an electronic cut-out of the 1970's.  Normally, two are closed and the muffler routing goes around an internal bend so-to-speak.  When romped-on, the valves are pushed open by vacuum tubes attached to the engine (somewhere, I forget) and makes a pleasing VRRRORRRMMMM sound.  Why not all the time?  Well, again, you don't want to terrorize your small neighborhood at 4:30 am going to work and force small children (and sweet ladies) to have heart palpitations!  With my left-big-toe-switch, I have the option.  With great power comes.. yadda yadda.

  I also (a bit ago) sanded down some old, gnarly benches and re-stained them so they look nice and moved them around so they're more useful than under the vineyard (lots of grapes coming up it seems, time to learn how to harvest them properly for BOOZE-makin').  Yep, they're Cawtaba grapes, colonial ones for makin' BOOZE.  I think I did a good job with the "rotary" sander.  I did good.  I make good wit wood thing.  I did labor wood duh good!

  That's it.  Just a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.

Say Goodbye to Gravity

 

 

  I think my 2008 Ninja 250R was jealous and fussy.  I sold my 2005 Honda Superhawk 996 VTR1000 and now she has no one to talk to, so I decided to ride the bike this morning to get some breakfast at the "Hop of I" (honestly a truly beautiful morning) and get some "Simply Heinz" (aka sugared, non-corn-syrup ketchup) and some coffee filters at WalMart next door.  It's weird about coffee filters that you buy 'em in packs of infinity or so, but eventually, after a few years, infinity runs out, and you have to get more infinities worth of them.  I think one pack of them could easily cover the Earth and Neptune and two packs could shroud the Sun.  Four packs could contain the Oort Cloud and no one has ever seen five packs of them in existence, though you could probably surround parallel universes with them.  You get a lot for a dollar.

  I take the bike out of the garage and face her nose-towards the end of the driveway and put her on fast-idle to warm up with full choke and turn around to go get my spear and magic helmet.  Then.. Ka-DUDGE!  from behind me.  I turn around and the bike had vibrated enough such that the downward angle had nudged the kickstand forward and, well, Ka-Dudge.

  I profane like a Mormon, "ah, frack!" and go over and easily pick up my ultralight, the vintage smell of gasoline pouring through it's innards in ways it shouldn't, being on its side, and through the vent hose now horizontal.  I assess the damage.

  Of course, the turn signal on the left side is toast and snapped-off as it should as a sacrifice to The Wicker Man of entropy.  Entropy, She wants to make motorcycles fall down and be on their side.  It's only Mankind's defiance that keeps them up.  Side plastics were scratched pretty good but not cracked.  I inspect the left mirror and it's now adjusted in an owl-spotter-of-an-angle, but the engineers at Kawasaki did a nice job allowing a ball-joint for the mirror allowing it to move upwards instead of also snapping off.  The bike is still on and thankfully it stalled instead of some expensively comical rear-tire spin so just the electrics are engaged.  I realize it's not in neutral anymore so when it fell it pushed-in the gear shifter to 2nd from neutral, understandably.  It seems that the vibrations of the bike in warm-up mode was enough to pull the bike forward just enough to allow the kickstand to jiggle backward with the added weight of my dorkiness of angling the bike downhill (the kickstand is kicked backwards when it's put in-place).  I go to put the bike in neutral and it won't budge.  I realize the kickstand is markedly shoved inward.  Classic.  Both the blinker, shifter, and mirror are classic fall-down breakages on a bike, usually costing $100 each.  I was spared the mirror-damage.  I attempt to manually wrench the shifter back from its inward bent angle but it's really not budging so I go get a hammer with a crow's foot and pry it back to where it needs to be with a good amount of careful force.  I pick up the exploded parts of the blinker housing and see if it's salvageable.  It's not, as it's cracked severely in several places, two bare wires exposed on the left side.  No left turn-signal for a while.



  I get the bike started-up and it idles a little roughly at first and then it seems fine enough and I ride to IHOP and WalMart.  During breakfast a small crowd was walking around my bike for some reason, the damage, aside from the missing turn-signal is pretty un-noticeable, but they were smoking and I figure my parking spot right near the door was a convenient walk-around place for them.  I get that a lot, people checking out my stuff.  Shrug. I guess it's because I take care of my things (except when I let them fall kaplooey on the cold, cold ground).   I get back on and go to WalMart across the parking lot, get my groceries, put them in my tankbag, and speed off home.






  On the way back I stop short at a changing light, locking the rear tire and sliding a bit past the stop-line and walk it backwards.  No cars around, I probably could have sped through the yellow.  I realize I'm too clumsy today and should not ride a bike anymore today.

  I get home and realize I'm missing the clear lens cover for the blinker I had semi-salvaged and find it under my Saturn Astra XR some 20 feet away in good shape, it having snapped off nicely and cleanly, screw still in-place.  At least I have that as a spare part, and I carefully park the bike, giving it a once-over one more time (so, I guess a twice over).  Seems fine enough.  I realize the logistics of the situation a little and that when the bike was facing downhill, the handlebars were nominally facing left so when it fell over, it angled left and fell topside uphill so the damage was minimal-ish.




 I go online and check to see how much a new blinker will cost while making some humbled Kona coffee and most places are selling them for $97 but eCrater was selling them for $31 on-sale with free shipping!  I love online shopping!  SOLD!  Not worth getting insurance involved on this one.  In the meantime, left will require an extended arm 1930's style.


  So, overall, pride hurt, and I know the kickstand is not sturdy enough to handle a downward-facing bike at full-choke-idle.  Plastic scraped a tad on the side not too noticeable.  Overall it could have been worse for sure, but these things happen.  Guess I could replace the whole damage with coffee filters.

 

Hand of Fate is moving and the finger points to you.
He knocks you to your feet and so what are you gonna do?
Your tongue has frozen now you've got something to say.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is calling you his way.

You watch the world exploding every single night.
Dancing in the sun a newborn in the light.
Say goodbye to gravity and say goodbye to death.
Hello to eternity and live for every breath.

Your time will come, Thy will be done.
Your time will come, Don't turn, don't run.

The Ferryman wants his money you ain't going to give it back;
He can push his own boat as you set up off the track.
Nothing you can contemplate will ever be the same.
Every second is a new spark, sets the universe aflame.

You watch the world exploding every single night.
Dancing in the sun a newborn in the light.
Brothers and their fathers joining hands and make a chain;
The shadow of the Wicker Man is rising up again!

Your time will come, Thy will be done.
Your time will come, Don't turn, don't run.

Desperate Windows

  I have to watch a lot of commercials, thanks to the money-grubbing folks who post on YouTube (I'd like to point-out that though my content is not really worthy, I don't monetize anything on YouTube or otherwise) and the corporate demons on other online-TV sites.  There's no escaping it.  It's on over-the-air channels as well.  Subsequently, I have to endure quite a bit of it if I want any media these days.  Thankfully, CD music is still void of it, though Bluray discs and movie theaters are shoving it in our faces as well.  I'm at the point where I see the same commercials over and over again.  Some companies are trying too hard.  It's rather sad, really.  Microsoft is batting a fat ZERO with current product releases.  Let's recap, starting with Windows 8...

Worrisome Microsoft uses an emoticon and knew that there'd be problems beforehand and made this screen at-release.

  So Windows 7 is a decent operating system.  It's a bit big, particularly the "professional" or "over-inflated", "unabridged" version that actually makes your PC or desktop weigh more because of all the bits weighing down your SSD or hard-drive (sic).  Windows 7 Professional is fat and unnecessary unless you run a server farm of sorts, then it makes sense, otherwise, Windows 7 Home is quite fine and non-buggy.  Even Internet Explorer 9 it comes with is decent and quick, though you have to tweak it a little in the user interface.  Some people don't like IE9 because of just that fact, but then again, these people also use 85 octane gas and then ironically drive massive SUVs and go to Starbucks for hot corn syrup in a cup, negating the savings on an infinite level.  These haters also prefer to "not think" or set up a computer in any way and prefer iPads so they can mash the picture with their greasy nubs.  Show me the thespian who can navigate a DOS-based game's installation to adjust one's autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get it to work, then adjust the DMU and IRQ settings in their BIOS to avoid their 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard conflicts with a PCI port to play music and have sound effects!  Ah, those were the days of men who knew their stuff!  Still, some had to install the latest and greatest OS, thinking it'll be better in some way, what way they don't know, nor could fathom, but it's new so the dummies who are computer illiterate buy into the newest stuff.  I call these folks, "heat seekers", a nice name for "sucker".  By now, everyone on Earth should know to never buy into the newest technology, like the new Chevy Stingray comming out with cylinder shut-off and direct-injection (thereby clogging valves quicker for the sake of gas savings).



We early gamers earned the right to listen to sound and the prize was rich, 8-bit audio goodness!  When you got it right, and that music started on the game when you loaded it up, such a REWARD!  We EARNED that music by-Jove!

 
Anyway, Windows 7 is easy and it was a good product, but because of the iPad and tablets flooding the dummies market who thrive on low-qual audio and are afraid of keyboards, some very very stupid execs at Microsoft thought to get on the band-waggon and make a tablet-based operating system.  Worse still, instead of calling it Windows CE8, as WinCE has been around for a long time (16 years) made just for hand-helds, they come out with simply, Windows 8.  Even worse still, they shove the whole iPad-like smeary design for tards onto PCs.  This works like crap.  It's a nightmare of a system with retarded giant squares to navigate like some bad PS-One game.  It's not faster in any way, just clumsy and ugly.



Windows Bob was not included in the numbering system as Microsoft was so embarrassed by it.  Imagine an OS ran entirely by Clippy the Paperclip?  Yep.  That's the real Microsoft Windows 4.

 
Most folks are wise to this (ie. never buy an even-numbered Microsoft OS, such as Windows Bob (above) or Windows Vista) [though, grudgingly there are some fans of it, oddly] and do not install it.  Several that did install Windows 8 quickly called the product-support center.  A friend of mine's wife called-in to Microsoft's customer-support asking how to revert back to Win7, to which they obviously hired a team to retort, "Why on Earth would you want to do that?" hoping to get people to stick with Win8, lauding it's abilities and "ease of use" to thwart the strange, new layout phobia, etc.  Ultimately, most low-level formatted their hard-drives and got a copy of Win7.  Indeed, sales of Win7 Home has gone up quite a lot recently, about as much as the sales of pre-installed PCs with Win8 and those who actually bought Win8.  Dell insists your PC come with Win8 as a sort of evil-alliance with Microsoft.  Still, you can format your drive and escape that crap.  I expect an apology from Microsoft with a free option to revert back to 7 in a few months, but they're obviously waiting it out.  I can only imagine the amount of money spent to try to make Win8 and the advertising is horrendous.  Take this vid for example which includes IE10 and Win8 and its Touch feature:

  Ooo!  Is that dubstep?  Kids like that, right?  It's trendy and new, right?  That's that robot music all the movies are doing now in the trailers!  Ooo!  It's so awesome!  I love the dive-bomb subwoofer tone!  That's so cool and new! 

  Ugh.  Okay, firstly Dubstep died last year in the same, sudden way disco died in 1981. Corporations are slow to realize it's a done-deal already, and it's sad. DubStep = modern-day disco. Cheesy and cheap and already spent, and pathetic.  What's with the Don Johnson dude in the commercial above, all by himself like some DJ at an empty club?  No one thinks he's cool.  I bet the actor was only happy he got work, but you know what?  He'll never find work again.  DJs are not musicians.  I admit that XM Radio has a bit of talent in timing one song to the next by matching the previous song's key, scale, and mode with the next and matching mathematically conflicting time signatures to make Holy Diver by DIO match-up with The Whisper by Queensryche (something FM would never play, nor Pandora, because it's too badass) but besides that, it's not cool.  It's sorry and sad, and those guys get fat and think they're heroes and they ain't and eventually the music they spin doesn't match-up with their tastes and they die alone in a U-Haul's truckbed with a pint of Popov Vodka and an emptied prescription of Mirapex. 

  The video is sad and uninspiring, and the Mad Planets video-game arcade controls are annoying at-best.

  Microsoft also released a Touch Tablet that goes something like this:

  Okay, so I see that the band Stomp is working in an office, getting nothing done.  They have a trendy Japanese young dude jumping around like a pansy bitch while various and carefully selected demographics and age genres are represented.  It's so sterile and corporate it hurts, and it's not cool.  No, it's sad, and it comes off as desperate as Dr.Evil trying to do the Macarena dance.

 

  No, Microsoft.  You've over-thought it.  I can just imagine the death meetings some of the guys had to go to, the "oh so smart" higher-ups thinking this was a good idea.  One or two younger fellas might'a said, "Hey, uh.. that whole "Stomp" thing is um.. well.. I.."  They got fired, and it shows.

 

 

Lastly, though I'm a PS3 fan, the XBox 360 was pretty okay a system.  Not great, but fairly popular enough.  There's a new version coming out soon called (no, not the 720, though the 420 might have been a better choice..) XBox One.  It's pretty retarded and doomed from-the-start.  The main feature is that you can watch TV from it..



  This is an incredibly, massively, bad move.  It almost stings the nostrils with it's pungent scent!  It reeks of a corporation wanting to buy-in on the Netflix/Hulu wave.  Dish systems are all but dead, and some folks only keep cable-TV because of the "bundle" they get with internet access, but most people have moved-on to watch TV via Hulu and movies via Netflix.  Even the Redbox kiosks are gathering dust, frequented by no one but the lowest-common-denominators out there.  There's rumor there's even a solitary Blockbuster video rental shop somewhere on this Earth, but I haven't been able to locate it via Google Earth.  Now be advised I give kudos to VHS rental stores still defiant in existence, and I was delighted to find one that even rented-out BetaMax tapes, which is pretty badass, as well as Laserdisc, so there's that novelty, but unless you're somewhere that internet doesn't exist, there's no excuse to not have Hulu Plus and Netflix by now.  Netflix has been around since 1997 (Now) and Hulu has been around since 2007.  That's 15 years and 5 years respectively.  In technology terms, that's about 10 lifetimes.  I hear some people still have old DVD players as well.  Bluray discs were available in 2003, some 10 years ago.  It's amazing some people hold-on to ancient technologies.  Still, vinyl aside (apples to oranges here), the Compact Disc has the highest bitrate quality available (along with Bluray and DVD-A discs which are scarce) so having a CD player makes sense quality-wise.  Oddly, people embrace MP3 players, preferring additional lo-fi compression for convenience over hi-fi quality.  Too bad, but whatever.  In my heart, I know storage size will increase until people will start putting WAV files on their players or other lossless formats over time, which is good.

 
So the XBox One also requires you have constant, online connectivity.  Per my previous argument, there's still an abnormal amount of folks in the US who don't have this.  Some still even use dial-up modems (somehow).  The map here: MAP indicates how many humans have access to broadband internet.  About half the US or so, population-wise.  This limits the XBox sales, as dial-up will be horrible because you have to buy online and download your game to the XBox One.  Yep.  Mandatory.  The PlayStation 4 was considering this move, but Sony wisely avoided it, making it an option, but not required.


So, Strike number THREE with XBox One, already a done-deal.  Microsoft stock will soon plummet, I suspect.  Crap-o-la.  Let's watch it fall together, shall we?  It's obvious Microsoft felt they missed the mark on Apple's simple design and is desperately trying to mimic a lot of it.. badly.  Microsoft, listen to me, just listen.  I'm your friend.  Keep making software for PC users just the way you have been with Win7 and XP.  People who actually use a keyboard and computers who actually do real things are going to still buy it.  Sure, you missed-out on the trendy stuff for the consumer crowd.  That's Apple's thing, for the consumer, but the folks that are creators of things, people who actually do something, folks that make things people consume still use desktop PCs.  Stick with that.  It's what you do best.