Nonstandard Deviation

Goodbye Kenny

Andydo — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:45:00 -0800

Kenny Stites - one of the nicest people to ever walk the earth - passed away this morning at 7:55am Mountain time.

Kraft Dinner and the infinite sadness

Andydo — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:44:00 -0800

Kenny and I worked different shifts at HP. This meant that some days, Kenny would be sleeping and I would be up and about. The contrary was also true. People who know Kenny know that he loves Kraft Dinner. Not macaroni and cheese, mind you. Kraft Dinner. This is key, like gloves. Since we were poor, I would argue that the box of Leonardo macaroni from Costco I had come home with was just as good. Kenny's ears bled at this thought and he stared into space as if he'd just faced a damned and abysmal infinity, cracking his mind. How any person could say such a thing was not just beyond his scope of reason, but beyond the boundaries of even the most frightful dementia. As true and eternal as one holds a religion, so did Kenny contend that not only was my heathen box of shame nowhere near 'as good' as Kraft Dinner, but were scientists to categorize it in some future archaeological dig, they would surely denote Leonardo a failed subspecies, doomed to extinction. There is little exaggeration in these words. A fire lit behind his eyes and consumed him. He would evangelize with fervor until I was converted. We agreed that he would be in charge of all macaroni and cheese purchases hence forth. This did not, however, stop me from occasionally bringing up the subject just to see his zen-like baseline quickly spike into a hand waving rage. One day, I may have taken it too far. On one of the mornings where I had a reprieve from graves and Kenny was sleeping until his shift began, I took to - what was later known only as - 'the devil's work.' I emptied a box of Kraft Dinner into a sandwich bag and stowed the contents away; we were poor, as I mentioned, and even a joke was not worth the 75 cents it would cost me to replace it. I then took a serrated steak knife and carved out strategic bits of the blue bastard. A small triangle of cardboard here and there. After about five minutes, the box bent at the middle in a nearly seamless manner, looking as if it had just spotted a quarter on the floor in front of it. Some glue and tape were employed and I fashioned a diorama of sorts. A tall, proud box of Leonardo buttressed against a submissive Kraft. Were there a macaroni Bible, I'm certain the acts in which these two pasta boxes were engaged in would certainly be expressly forbidden. Somewhere in Macaroni Leviticus, between the abominations of Country Crock and the rituals to cleanse a pan in the event you used two types of pepper would read a passage condemning the foul congress of these two boxes to ritualistic spatulaing at the gates of the village. And I taped it to a stand in front of his door. I returned downstairs to play some N64; we were poor, but we were not animals. An electromagnetic whir rumbled from my Pod Racer as I turned a corner and upstairs from me a bellow of such solemn and abject horror as to spur a poet to an epic lament burst forth. A long and low 'Nooooooooooooo' shattered the un-silence of the apartment. All other sound ceased to be heard as the wail of a man who has lost his faith echoed off of bare walls. I am certain I heard the sound of knees striking floor and the sharp snap of hands cupped over tear filled eyes. Kenny had seen evil. He had known pain. His Eden burned around him and the serpent laughed as he fled. I was never forgiven for this incident. It was never laughed at in recollections of exploits gone by. It was a horror unspoken and I had wrought it upon the earth. .

Auspices on full - engage.

Andydo — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:37:00 -0800

Have you ever had one of those days that just worked out really well? They tend to bunch up on the lower-left of the bell curve of fate. But when one comes along, what a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, I can't currently talk about what I'm doing beyond the fact that it's a project with The Dead Gentlemen. I'm not anything close to a crucial member or anything either. I just get to tag along for a small portion of the ride. Additionally, the store cogs are turning smoothly without much input and the machine is humming. Work is going well also, and I solved a problem today that I've been putting off for nearly four months. So that was nice too. Lastly, my business cards for the store came. I have business cards! For a business that I co-own!

I almost want to make a little Japanese/Korean cat face because I feel like a wee girl!

>^__^< -スゴイ！！

Anti-Spam Measures

Andydo — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:34:00 -0800

I checked my unapproved comment log today and found I had over 200 unapproved messages. Of those, ONE was valid. So I decided to take a few minuts to implement some anti-spam measures. We'll see how well they work.

Why do I even bother...

Andydo — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:49:00 -0800

Because I like to be angry I guess.

Happy thought of the day - smile! You're carbon!

Andydo — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:21:00 -0800

As a man gets older he becomes more aware of mortality. Not just his own, though that is the specter working the rudder. The mortality of the world around him occupies much of his daily thought. The profoundness of a noun coupled with a being verb that is the opposite of being. People, places, and things which had made up the objects in a person’s reality serve as mile markers of personal mortality as they cease to be. A dog passes, a store closes, a show is cancelled. “What is” suddenly becoming “what isn’t.” Significant to trivial, these small ticks on the clock remind us that permanence is an abstract used to describe something in a finite timeline. A timeline of perhaps seventy to one hundred years should we avoid fast moving busses and foods conceived by carnival folk. Permanence begins to tatter when challenged by generational time. A span of only a few hundred years holds very few examples of permanence. A building here, an heirloom there. Expand that to anthropological time and permanence is an attribute which can be attached to only a handful of items. The Pyramids and the bits of miscellany within. The occasional pot or tablet. Stretch the timeline to a geological scale and nearly all things tangible in a human scope lose permanence. The stars and the landscape are busy telling their stories, caring nothing of navigational charts or brass sextants. Only the very very small holds onto any sort of permanence. Expand farther still and protons begin to decay. The bonds that hold the smallest structures together give way to entropy and the nearly non-existent concept of permanence disintegrates with the last sigh of a dying universe. We don’t comprehend anything on this scale of time. The concept of even a decade is hard to keep in our minds. We shrink it down into a more consumable chunk. An extension of the ‘Now’. We key off of a handful of events and the rest is fabricated as needed. We are very much creatures of the ‘Now’. Now is where we are comfortable. Now is what we have evolved to navigate. The little ticks on the clock – the ones that you hear when your favorite baseball player retires or when the first rated R movie you saw shows up as a 20^th anniversary DVD near the checkout of a grocery store – these little ticks give us a glimpse of the decay of permanence on a timescale larger than we comprehend. They remind us that there is a finite number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds in which our consciousness will operate. The louder the tick, the more we are forced out of the ‘Now’. The more permanence loses its own meaning. The easier it becomes to imagine the sound our own casket will make as it bumps its way down eons of strata. A psychological barrier we keep to prevent ourselves from going limp with futility is stressed as we realize that we will one day be forgotten. When viewed from the vantage point of geological time, our entire species will, at best, be an epoch marker on a study aid for another race. There will be no Jonathan Westons. No Susan Lafayettes. No Guro Takagawas. There will just be a blip on a chart – if we’re lucky – somewhere between a planetary cold snap and, most likely, a large gamma burst. At a geological scale, those pondering our little slice of existence will not be human. Whether or not they are descended from what we are now, they will be no more human than a human is a Devonian leviathan. But for most of us, it won’t take more than a few years. The memory will fade on the scale of a decade. It will be gone completely within a century.

I loved my grandmother Gertrude dearly. I developed my first few years of memories with her as a major character in my life. She was deeply important to me. In the ‘Now’, the neurons holding together what is left of my grandmother fire about as frequently as the people around me die. When I die the last record of who she was as a person – the last firsthand account of her existence – will be gone. My children never knew her. Nor did I know her mother. I don’t even know my great grandmother’s name. She is very nearly gone. She will die with my mother. I could look up a few details if I wanted to spend the time, but it wouldn’t tell me anything about who she actually was. That is the price of being human. The price of being aware of our own mortality. Sentience is a bitch. So why do we carry on? Why do we continue when, as the curtains close on this giant physics experiment, nothing any of us has done will matter? Because we live in the ‘Now’? Because we’re programmed to carry on? Yes, but also because we hold on fast to the chance that one day someone will rise from the ranks and find a cure to the futility of existence. Until then, we do what we can to keep our minds from spinning out of control. We attend funerals and weep into tissues. We promise we’ll never forget and promptly file memories away under special occasions. We pull them out like a dusty box of photographs on Christmas or Mother’s Day. We swish them around in our heads until we feel we’ve satisfied our promise, then we throw them back into the closet until the next trigger fires in our cerebral spaghetti and the process is repeated. Fidelity is lost in the retelling, sometimes for the better. Our memories yellow and gain a warm glow. We celebrate the dead to celebrate ourselves. We remind ourselves through our rituals and ceremonies that we are still here. We aren’t mourning the body in the box, we are mourning our own inevitable bow out. When our ‘Now’ ceases and we become nothing more than a ‘Then’ to a few close people. Finally we aren’t anything at all.

You know the one about the construction worker?

Andydo — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:13:00 -0800

That old joke about the guy who ends up on the wrong side of physics while playing see-saw with a barrel of bricks? Well, I'm feeling his pain. On Friday night I went to my cousin's house to enjoy an evening with some old friends in from Denver. As newly converted priests of the holy order of Dead Gentlemen, Dennis and I began proselytizing the virtues The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. After a bit of prodding and a lot of vodka, our friend Joe agreed to watch it. As is ritual now, the room was readied. Darkened and arranged with the care of a blood rite. We began the film and bowed our heads in appreciation. There were quite a few more bodies (one) in the room than at a customary viewing, so I gave up my traditional spot on the couch and stood to the side. After a few minutes, I scanned the room to find a comfortable spot to sit for the remainder of the film. In the corner of the TV room at my cousin's house is an ever-present stack of blankets. Tradition held that under this pile of downy sirens was stored a pillow. Not just a pillow, but a sort of giant human-sized dog bed. Concave and welcoming. A demi-womb of plaid flannel and faux lamb skin. I took my position in front of this monolith of comfort and threw myself back. What I didn't know is that my cousin had, in cleaning and preparing for the arrival of our friends, moved an old footlocker to the spot the pillow normally occupied. I hit my back about two degrees off tap dead center from my spine. A gnarled hand of distress grew from that single point of contact on my back and squeezed at my insides. My breath sputtered out of me and a galaxy of newborn stars sprayed across my vision. My sympathetic nervous system went into protective overdrive and I was involuntarily in a fetal position with my legs twitching within a second of making contact. It was unpleasant.

The next two days of the weekend were uncomfortable to say the least. Riding in a car or sitting back on my hair sent waves of pain through my torso. Sleeping was constantly interrupted by spasms. So I decided to stay home today so I could ice and heat my back as needed. After putting in my time virtually, I started dinner since Erin was waking up. Standing felt better than sitting, so it was practically a vacation. We ate and I put the dishes in the sink. I should have rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher right away, but bending kind of sucks so I figured it could wait. I came out of the computer room and found Linux on the counter, standing inside the cooking pan, eating the remainder of the ground turkey left in it. Now, he's on a strict diet. So I go to shoo him away and put the pan in the sink. I grab the pan and twist to yell at the cat which starts a spasm. Involuntarily, my left leg kicks up and when it comes down it's twisted in a most awkward way. My knee sends a signal to my brain something akin to 'help, I'm on fire and am also filled with angry ants. Those ants are carrying glass to a nest made entirely of barbed wire and gasoline.' So here I am with a spastic back, a throbbing knee wrapped in an ace bandage, and a sense of dread that the barrel is about to descend again.

Now that corporations run the country...

Andydo — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:15:00 -0800

Corporations are now unlimited in the amount of money they can use to get the candidates they want elected into office. If you don't think this will severely impact our world, you are wrong. You are dead wrong. Welcome to the future of America. The singularity of corporate interest, church, and state.

This was 9th grade math reading in 1997 -

This is News Corp. sponsored math reading in 2011 -

Cheap? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.

Andydo — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:09:00 -0800

When I paid off all my credit cards, I still had some money left over. So I figured I'd pick up a second video card to SLI for PhysX support in games like Batman and... well... Batman. The card arived and I was excited to get it hooked up. That's when I realized I had an 850W power supply to drive two 280GTX OCs, four 1TB Western Digital Black drives, 12GB of memory, and a Pentium Core i7 Extreme. It was rated sustained load, not peak, so that was good...but my sustained load is somewhere around 1050W with 1300W peak. That's no good. I started looking around for a new power supply in the 1200W range. Everything is either very expensive or very crappy at that wattage. The two I narrowed down to were the ThermalTake modular 1200W ($300) and the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1200ESA ($560!!). I don't want to shell out more money on power supplies if they die, and they do die often if they are store brand. So...what is a kid to do? I don't have the cash for either right now, but I don't want to risk running my system on 850W. I guess I could take the second card out. Nah. That won't happen.

So I headed down to Fry's and picked up a 500W ThermalTake with a dedicated 12v rail for PCIe. I jumpered the ATX and POWER_OK pins and ran the PCIe connectors through the water cooling slot on my case. It's a little McGhetto but it works!

Pin 8 jumpered to a +/-5vDC, pin 16 jumpered to ground.

PCIe power ran through the watercooling grommet on the back of the case.

Connected to the card and humming along...

Threadless

Andydo — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:54:00 -0800

I've made my first Threadless submission. I'm hoping it gets approved, but who knows?

The description:

Intel surrounding the Rebel attack was brought to the attention of Vader and his puppet master, Palpatine, months before the Jedi extremists began their suicide mission against the military and economic hub of the Empire. Knowing that media pressure for inclusiveness and the fading need for war were feeding a growth in sympathizers for the Rebellion in many systems, it was decided an attack would be just the thing to light the fires of patriotism across the Empire. A blank check would be written by the Senate to rebuild, funneling untold billions into the pockets of military contractors, many in which Palpatine has controlling interest. Wake up people! Don't be herded like lowly Nerf!