My dad and I decided to go on a walk today. Thing is that it was 42 degrees outside with light rain and strong wind gusts -- a problem to say the least. We walked to a convenience store to get my grandfather a newspaper. My grandfather had a mild stroke and is currently residing in the local old folks home (Joplin Health & Rehab) in order to get his strength back on the left side of his body. Well if you read my post "Dirty Grandpa", you can guess that he's groping and playing grab ass with all the nurses there (I'm sure they are just thrilled).

Since we weren't walking the five mile trek to see grandpa, we drove on over with his paper in hand. While he was talking to my dad, this beautiful, blond nurse walks by and smiles at me. "Eeeaaahhhhhhhh" is the noise my grandfather made as she walked by. "Hey, Alex." he said, "lookat that, I bet that'd be good to get a hold of." I look at him with slight disgust as my dad forces himself not to burst out laughing. Then my grandpa had the nerve to say, "Yeah, another nurse I know of here is single and has a six-year old little girl -- boy I'd take either one of those if I could." About five minutes later, we left, and the grandpa trek for the day was done. Another adventure might await tomorrow, who knows?

Change of subject here for a minute. Azumanga Daioh is getting better by the episode. I've watched the first seven episodes and listened to both OSTs. Good listening music, by the way. I will put them up for download (as .tar.bz2) by about 7:00pm CST tonight; I will leave them up for 24 hours. I am feeling much better today, but am still going to watch a few more episodes -- not as a pick me up this time!

I hope you readers have a great New Year's. I will not be posting tomorrow, but will resume Tuesday with a fairly long post. Through the new year, I will keep up my sudden topic-changing ways. Take care and see you all Tuesday! Goodbye 2006 -- found this image off an old blog via google.

Today was a laze day. Throughout the day, I was searching for the Azumanga Daioh manga. If any readers know where I can download all four volumes of this wonderful piece of work, please don't hesitate to drop a comment or e-mail me. I watched a few more episodes last night. I'm up to either episode six or seven, I kind of forgot my spot. Oh well, should be easy enough to get a hold of once I peep into number six. I downloaded the two OSTs from the series, too. They sound pretty good; I've already mashed them on to my iPod. Speaking of great manga/anime, I would like to get some suggestions on what to read/watch next. I was told that Yotsuba&! is one that I'd probably like. I do not like mecha (Neon Genesis Evangelion is the exception); I prefer comedy/ecchi and sci-fi. I'd actually prefer that you e-mail them to me. You could leave a comment, but I don't want my comment box to be flooded with debates on what the next great anime is/should be. I'm also looking for something in the range of 13-52 episodes. I promise that tomorrow's post will be longer and more well-written. I'm just in a depressive state at the moment and feel like watching some more episodes.

Over the past few days, I have been getting into another anime series. In a previous post, I mentioned I downloaded Azumanga Daioh (all 26 episodes). I've seen the first three episodes and I'm totally hooked on it. It has got to be one of, if not the, funniest anime series that I've had the pleasure of watching. I highly reccomend getting the torrent from ISO Hunt. Short post -- I'm ending it here. Here's a screencap I took last night from the first episode.

Ever since I was 14, this time of year got me all worked up. What was I getting worked up about you ask? The answer is right in front of your face if you know the least little thing about my life. The answer is wrestling. There are no matches around this late in December; at the time of this writing, at Parkview High School in Springfield, MO, the Holiday Tournament is taking place. It is the most intense tournament this area knows aside from State up in Colombia, MO.

I first got into wrestling as a freshman in high school. It was a glorious process that transformmed my wild dream into a bloody, sweaty, painful, reality. I remember the date...September 16, 2002. This was the date I asked the rather large and misshapen, but kind and brutal, wrestling coach: Coach White. He was my coach for two years of the sport, of which I learned nor earned anything. I didn't letter my first two years. In fact, the only thing I did earn was a freakish tolerance and demented lust for pain. I love pain so much that, to this very date, at this very moment, I bite my lip just to make myself bleed and relish in the stinging sensation that accompanies it. Fortunately, Coach White retired as a wrestling coach at the end of my sophomore season.

The second half of my career was coached by a great man by the name of Shawn Finch. I just called him "coach"; I didn't use his last name. My third year was the first year I was on varsity. It also happened to be the year I learned how to wrestle "Oklahoma-style". My junior year was botched by asthma and the persistence of my mental condition, but I still managed to seize a good season. I was so happy, my wild dreams had finally become reality after three years of blood, sweat, and tears. My last year, my senior, the year that everybody remembers you by....was ruined by schizophrenia. I only wrestled three matches that year, and got injured in my last one (my knee blew out in the middle of the match). I didn't get a bar to put on my letter, but I chased the dream down to the bitter end.

I cried and cried, and still cry to this day (I feel like crying writing this all out) about what happened to my wrestling career. My next wild dream was to go to Stillwater, OK and walk on to Oklahoma State University's wrestling team. However, this dream was shot before it could even be announced to the public. Wrestling was my only love in high school. I never had a girlfriend for two reasons (in order): Wrestling and lack of confidence; the latter has been fixed. Some people may ask why I love(d) wrestling so much that it impacts my social life. I can't answer that question in any right way. Things used to be so big back then; now they're so small, so very small. I guess the point of this post is just to let out a little steam about this time of year. I miss wrestling, but I must move on. Hey maybe I'll put a picture of me in my letterman's jacket on my photography page. It's loaded with all the medals I got my sophomore and junior years.

Well I have a solid 20/200GB filled up on my new HDD. Where are all the bytes at? The long and short of it is, I am downloading massive amounts of anime to store on it. I have what I mentioned yesterday plus Trigun and Outlaw Star. I'm pretty happy that I found a copy of the Trigun series in Japanese (with subtitles). Any other time I've seen it, it was dubbed over in English. I like the subbed version much better . I believe the next series I get will be Midori no Hibi, and after that, who knows. I'm trying to fill up on the small series shows; I don't want anything over 52 episodes. This Naruto fad is ridiculous, and Bleach is slowly becoming the same way. Far too many fans and far to many episodes. Oh yeah, I think I'll download FLCL; the more I watch it, the more I understand of it.

Along with the anime I've been nabbing, I've been getting the OSTs to all the series I watch. Put that along with some other JPop and consider my mp3 player happy. The beauty of obtaining this music is the fact that it's free because it's not licenced in the United States. The same goes for most of the anime I am getting. I'll probably buy the DVDs anyway since I can't seem to create my own . To answer a question that an anonymous reader sent to me, I will not give you any of this stuff that I am downloading -- download it yourself. If it's a little mp3 or something, I won't mind a bit. I will not however, send you the whole Azumanga Daioh series, or any other series that I have .

I didn't look for any jobs today. Instead I called Crown Video back and talked to the manager. They said they had no openings, but that they put a stamp on my application. Now I'll be the first they call if there's an opening, or so they say. Tomorrow I am going to a temp. employment agency and putting my name on a list for part time work. I'll go back to a factory if need be. I just want money...no wait, I need money. Money is what makes the world go round, and I've only got ~$120.00 to my name. A few months ago I had nearly $1000.00. That's what money does though, it flies away.

It's official, I have quit playing World of Warcraft. I offer my conformation letter as proof to you,

Hello there Alex-- This message is being sent to confirm that all credit card information has been removed from the World of Warcraft account **********, effectively cancelling its recurring subscription as of December 23, 2006 11:26 PM UTC. The account will not bill or renew any further unless new payment information (credit card or game card) is manually entered in. The account will remain playable for the remaining time it has already paid for. This account's current prepaid time will expire on January 12, 2007 11:51 AM UTC. To check your account status at any time, you can log into your Account Management page at this link, using your account name and password: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account At this time, Blizzard has no plans to delete or "expire" characters, even if an account is deactivated or cancelled. This means that all of your characters and their progress will be retained on our servers. Should you decide to return to World of Warcraft and reactivate your account, you will be able to pick up your characters again wherever you left off. In the event you have any other billing questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our Billing & Account Services team for support. You can reply to this email directly, or call 1-800-59-BLIZZARD (800-592-5499) for live phone support between 9am and 6pm Pacific Time. Users in Australia should please call 800-041-378, if the standard 800 line does not work for them. Regards, Billing & Account Services Blizzard Entertainment billing@blizzard.com

I replaced my account name with ********** as an act of privacy. I will not be giving my stuff away nor will I be selling my account. The account had a 60 human priest with epicced out gear and epic mount; a 60 night elf warrior with epicced out gear and epic mount; and a 57 gnome mage with decent blues. Those are just the three that I played. The 2.0 patch kinda did it for me. I've been at this game for almost two solid years and have just gotten bored. I might pick it up again later, but for now I'm going to work and save up for a Wii. If you have any questions/comments/reasons to still play World of Warcraft, please leave a comment for me to read. I leave you with a picture that will shock the masses and perhaps kill the soft of heart. Parents do not let your children see this image of a little girl sitting on a dead santa with a bloody box cutter knife.

The past two days have been very, very good to me. I am going to talk about many a thing in this post, so here goes. As I mentioned in a previous post, our family does the whole gift-opening thing on Christmas Eve. There was a mesh of gifts under our "tree" this year. Here is a quick overview of what I got for Christmas. I received a new wallet, two hoodies, a surround-sound system for my iPod, the Rocky DVD collection, some clothes, and $200.00 in cash. All I really wanted was the Rocky DVD collection, so I consider the rest a very nice bonus.

My grandpa gave me the $200.00, and I spent $107.31 of it on an external HDD. I looked for an internal one, but they had no Ultra ATA drives there. The external drive I purchased is 200 gigabytes; I am going to use it to store anime videos and backup my data. The box it came in said that it was for WinNT+ only. "Bull," I said to myself, "I bet if I format it just right, I can enjoy the drive in both my Linux and Windows partitions. Scrambling for the right command to enter in bash, I remembered mkdosfs. Feeling fairly happy, I typed mkdosfs /dev/sdc1 into the console. Five seconds later, it was formatted and I could finally write to it. I immediately backed up my "pictures" directory and moved my Azumanga Daioh folder on over. Next I'll pile on my Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episodes on over, and be content with speedy viewing and massive amounts of data storage. I am putting the remaining ~$93.00 in my bank account tomorrow.

I have needed a new wallet for quite some time. My old one was...well...old. Approximately 6 years old to be exact. This new one is awesome though. It is a trifold, which of course owns; it has a clear slot for your drivers licence, which is nice because I won't have to drag it out each time people need a photo ID. It has less card slots than my previous wallet, but it is still way more awesome as it can hold more cash and there are plenty of places to stash crap inside. It even came with a little dooflingy for photographs--one of those little booklets.

I am a big, big, big, very big fan of hoodies. I also like the boxer shorts and shirts that I got . I will even wear them in the summer on certain occasions I love them so much. I got two of them from my parents, and one from my aunt and uncle. I usually wear hoodies for 2-3 days before washing them since they are like jackets. So I got over a week's worth of hoodie-age for Christmas!!!!

The surround-sound system I got for my iPod looks awesome. Though I haven't decided where to put it yet, I can tell that I am going to love this. You plug the iPod in at the top, and use the wheel to select a playlist. Then you just sit back and enjoy. At least....that's what it appears to do. I'll be sure to post if anything's different. I will look for a place to lay it down today. Getting a free plug in might be the tricky part. Both extension cords and both surge protectors are totally full (I eat electricity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner n__n). I'll post more on this nifty widget as soon as I get her hooked up and everything's flowing.

Last, but certainly not least on the gift list, was the Rocky DVD collection that my parents got me. It contains every Rocky movie ever made. Over the past few days, that's all I've been watching on the TV: Rocky. In this fictional world of boxing, he just shows that heart and desire can overcome any obstacle a man may face. That's what my wrestling coach told me, and that's what this movie series portrays.



Now on a totally differnet subject...I decided not to go job shopping today; I'm going to go at it tomorrow. The traffic wasn't bad at 8:00 this morning, but as the day progresses, the traffic flow is bound to increase. Tomorrow I'm going straight for Blockbuster, then to the Movie Gallery that's a few blocks down. Then b-lining all the way over to the other side of town and put in an application to the Movie Gallery there (provided they're looking). Thursday I am going to the local Radio Shack and see what I can conjure up there in terms of an application. Then on Friday, I'll be going to EB Games and Game X Change to put in applications there. As I mentioned earlier in my blog, I am going to get a job before the month ends. If not then, soon after the new year starts.

Well I had a goal to go over 1000 words this post, but seeing as I can't do that right now, I'm just going to flat out end it right here, although I am getting pretty damned close here, I'm just gonna let it lay to rest . Here's your end of the post picture, take care and I'll write to ya tomorrow!

Today is the day that I decided to go out Christmas gift shopping. I spent 2 hours and went to 8 stores and still didn't find what I was originally looking for! Oh and don't get me started on the crowds out this time of year. It took me 10 minutes to cross a street >:|, Two hours looking for a gift for my mom. It was just a baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad day, tater.

I was originally going to get her a couple of books from one of her favorite authors, F. Paul Wilson. Well it turns out that one of the books is in such high demand that the only way to obtain it would be to order it. The other book is out of print and was therefore also unavailable. I did not know this until I reached my fifth location. Finding this out, I had no idea what to get her. "Music would be too cheap and cliched, plus I can just download what I'd buy" I thought to myself. Searching and searching for the perfect gift. I had it! Star Trek DVDs! I'm not talking about the movies, but rather the original series. You know the one with Kirk, Spock, Scottie, etc. I went to Vintage Stock and Eccentrix to look for them. I can offer one wee bit of advice to those who have an Eccentrix in their town. Do not go to Eccentrix. The staff are rude, they smell funny, and the selection is rather limited. One could almost say the same about our local Vintage Stock, except there are some hotties that work there and they do not smell funny. Getting back on topic here. I gave up on the Star Trek series and started thinking more modern. I then went to the local Best Buy to get some ideas. I saw complete series of Friends and M.A.S.H., but both were more than my bank account could afford, and my credit card (even though it's empty) couldn't handle it because of my credit limit. Distressed, I turned to one last thing. She watches Sex and the City on a nightly basis. "Since it's so crappy, it's gotta be cheap enough even for me to afford!" I thought with joy. I could only walk away with the first two seasons though, for the same reasons as the other series. Besides, two seasons ought to keep her busy enough while I sneak out and buy 3-6 and give it to her for mother's day or something.

Then I got pretty bummed out. Spending all of this money and I don't have a gift for my own dad. I might have to roll up some pennies and change that tomorrow . There is this book that he's wanted for quite some time and I just might get it for him (if I have the green to do so). Getting off topic here for a little bit, on Tuesday I am going to apply to Blockbuster and both of the Movie Gallery's that we have in town. I am going to get a job this month, dammit. I'm so flat broke that I cancelled my WoW subscription in fear of overdrawing my acct. Oh well, the holidays aren't about money are they. Merry Christmas to those out there who celebrate it. I won't be updating my blog on Christmas Day either. I will be in Windows mostly on the 25th, so the server will be down. Gonna clean my windows partition up and get some things ready to copy to Linux, some games that perhaps WINE can run. Plus I have to patch WoW for when I start playing again. Again, have a good holiday and I will post again on the 26th after I go job hunting! Take care!

I just saw the new Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa. I am just going to briefly talk about it with hopes of not spoiling it for people who still want to see it. I would rate the whole series on a scale: 3, 1, 2, Balboa, 4, 5. The movie really grabs at you with flashbacks from the original Rocky. The movie in combination with the flashbacks almost made me cry at parts, and when the film was complete, I had an adrenaline headache; it's really very easy to get into these movies. The end fight wasn't quite what I expected it to be. I'm not going to talk about the movie anymore though save for the fact that it is well worth the price to get in to see it.

I had to drive up to Nevada, MO again today. I had an appointment with the therapist, but there wasn't really much to talk about. The hour long session was cut in half due to lack of topics. I'm glad it was cut short there because I don't want to start bull shitting with this therapist like I did with my first one. Yeah my first therapist and I used to talk about all sorts of shit, seemingly avoiding the issues at hand. I met my current one last year during a hospitalization up in Heartland (a facility for the mentally-ill youths in Nevada, MO). This was back when I was 17 and in a hell of a lot worse shape than I am today. I'm beginning to digress a tad though, so let me get on this one last few topics.

As the days trickle on by, I get closer and closer to making DVDs with menu selections with the Linux operating system. I almost had it today, or so I thought... Irayo says that he's gonna give it a shot this weekend. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to stop. It is probably some sort of "duh" thing that's right in front of my face. I'm going to try a couple of other things tonight and perhaps utterly waste a few more DVD-Rs. The local stores apparently don't believe in purchasing DVD-RWs for their customers, so I'm just sacrificing DVD-Rs in the ongoing struggle toward making the "perfect" DVD!

Couple of last things to talk about here. One, I will not update my blog on Christmas Eve because that is when this family usually does the most celebrating. I will however, post an update on Christmas itself. Tomorrow, Monday, or Tuesday is when I am going to head south to the Ozark Mountains to take photographs. I expect to bring home at least 30 photographs, 10-15 of those will be ones that I keep. I will be posting all the ones that I keep in nerd photos for everyone to look at. I will be doing a large server cleanup on Christmas from 12pm-1pm. I will also be editing up Nerblog's source code as I have found some things that may bog the site down. I will "spiff" things up a bit all on Christmas Day. I am also considering switching from PHP to PERL for the site as I have heard reports of PERL being able to handle large amounts of data more efficiently. I know there are programmers/scripters that read my blog on a regular basis. So please leave your input as a comment, or e-mail me. Most, if not all comments made on instant messengers will be ignored. I will respond on IRC however. To connect to me on an IRC network, scroll on down to the contact information page. I leave you with a screencap of the new movie Rocky Balboa. Oh yeah, my linux desktop got a little bit sexier (mostly males will find it enjoyable). You can view it here or on the link in the crusty panties section. By the by, 10 brownie points goes to the person who posts a comment about the obvious title of the post.

Over the past few days, I have been experimenting with DVD creation on the Linux operating system. It's very simple to create a DVD with no menus, no intro, etc. with many, or one, file(s). The tricky part, the one that I haven't quite figured out just yet, it creating it like a normal DVD. I found a great tutorial page, but it's still all Greek to me. Here is the tutorial page I'm talking about: http://mightylegends.zapto.org/dvd/dvdauthor_howto.php. Everything seems easy until it comes time to authorize the DVD. "dvdauthor" is a tool that I am struggling to find help with. Either way I am sure that by next Monday, at the latest, I will have created a fantastic DVD. Then I can put all the episodes of SaC on it. Speaking of that, apparently episode 2 was "corrupt" and wouldn't encode correctly. So my DVD collection, when I get it completed, will be lacking episode 2

I got an application for a video store known as Crown Video yesterday. I filled in the app last night and turned it in this morning. The guy seemed pretty optimistic about me getting hired there. I sure hope I get on. I've wanted to work at a video store for so many years now; ever since I was a little kid, I have been fascinated by them. If I don't get on there, then there's always Blockbuster and Movie Gallery to try. Either way, once I get a job my first $80 are going toward this bad boy right here. I'm going to use it to keep backups of my server, pictures, and music. I'm also going to store any videos that I can't successfully put on a DVD there as well. The guy said that I'd know by around Tuesday (he said "late this week or early next week") if I'm going to get hired or not. I really don't care what the wages are, I just want to work at a video store. Plus, any wage is better than sitting on my ass here making no income at all .

I was downloading more anime last night, and my bT program suddenly crashed. "The application KTorrent (ktorrent) crashed and caused the signal 6 (SIGABRT)." This occurred rather suddenly and got me pretty darned pissed off. While I'm looking for a new way to leech anime from the internet, aka. another torrent client, I'm gonna keep fiddling with this DVD thing. Also I'm going to remove the "Reccomend to Friend" link from the posts as they no longer work. When I feel like dicking around with sendmail more, I'll put em back up. In the meantime, enjoy this picture.

Imagine a world where fiction is reality. Take yourself and journey into this world. You have fear? Don't worry, fear is a constant medium in reality. This world looks normal to you, but others deem it "abnormal" or "crazy". No I'm not talking about a parallel universe or anything of the sort; it is a world that only your mind knows. Others perceive this world as fiction, but it is all you know--therefore it must be reality.

In this world, you see things. Others can not see them, but they are living in a fictional world. Some people visit you more frequently than others. Sometimes it is a one-time only visit; other visitors are old hats. Wait. Stop. Do you see him? Do you see the man with the trenchcoat and big hat? His hat. His hat is his marker. It looks like the one Al Capone used to wear back in the day. He motions to you--your time has come. You walk toward him as he unveils his face...Bundy...Ted Bundy. You can't escape it now; reality is inescapable. Books, video games, music, they are all meer diversions to give you an illusion of escaping out of your reality. You are within the grasp of the man in the hat. He reaches out toward you--

Stop.

The man is now gone from your field of vision. All that is left of his presence are voices. You hear them, but your dreams can not. What do they know? They are just dreams; they are living in a world of fiction--yours is the true reality. The voices, some recognizeable but most foreign, seem to be getting louder? Are they getting closer? No. What are they saying? "Alex.""Alex.""Alex.""Alex.""Alex." Your name gets thrown at you in a barrage of voices you don't know. Then suddenly, a familiar voice comes from the sea of loneliness. Mother? Yes, it is mother. You see mother, you hear mother, you smell mother, you can sense her presence...it is indeed her. "Go, go and run. Run until --"

Stop.

You feel something warm at your feet. You look down just in time to find Cat. Cat knows that you are confused. He tells you not to worry, for this is life. Life can be hard at times. It is how we perceive life and its details that makes us who we are. Cat is wise, wise beyond his years. He tells you not to fear reality, but to accept it for what it is. "What is reality?" you ask Cat. His response is simply, "Reality is not what we are, but rather how we live life." This can not be....it makes no sense, a Cat saying that. You pick the Cat up and begin to stroke your fingers through his fur. Just then, you notice another Cat....a clone Cat of the one you are holding. You hear mother again. She says to put the Cat down...he is not real. You know this can't be true because you are in reality. She must be a fictional character--a figment of your imagination. You sit down with Cat. You feel a cold chill run down your spine....somebody is watching you. It has to be him You see him in the shadows, the man in the hat has returned. He is after Cat. He charges at you with a knife--

Stop.

"Mommy........help me mommy.......reality is scary. Don't let the man in the hat get me, please. Mommy......daddy........save me from myself....."



This post briefly summarizes a day in my life. I had a very bad day yesterday. Nearly all of these things happened yesterday. They have all happened at one point or another. Just in case my readers thought I was joking about being schizophrenic (schizo-affective), now you can read this post, close your eyes, and put yourself in my shoes. It can be pretty frightening at times. It is very difficult to tell the difference between reality and fiction during these episodes. Thankfully I got put on some new medication yesterday and within the next few weeks, it'll kick on in and these episodes will subside. I would offer more to the story, but I'm not quite that comfortable writing down everything that has happened to me in the past. I still have the mood swings of a bipolar, so while I am hallucinating like this, I could get really hyper or really depressed.

CHANGE OF TOPIC: Heres the usual end-of-post picture in hopes of lightening the mood.

The musical style and lyrics of Lacuna Coil just flat out fascinate me. I have always, since I first heard them, loved the band. The flipside to this is that I only own two of their albums . For those who haven't heard Lacuna Coil in action, they sound like Evanescence, but only a billion times more hypnotic. I don't do acid or anything of that sort, but I''m pretty sure that they'd sound even better with a good buzz going on. If you don't like goth-female singing though, then you probably will not have any interest in this entire post. If that's the case, I encourage you to just listen to one of these songs by Lacuna Coil (my "favorites" list, in order): Heaven's A Lie, Purify, Senzafine, and Comalies. I'm not going to go into a full biography. If you want that, check out Wikipedia's article on Lacuna Coil

To add to the mix, the lead singer, Christina Scabbia, has to be one of the world's sexiest women alive. So combine exquisite looks along with a hypnotic singing voice, and this siren gets a full 10/10 in my book. The male vocalist, Andrea Ferro, makes up for a great addition to the band. His voice does nothing but add to the hypnotism of the band's singing. Like I said in the previous paragraph, I'm not going to give you a rundown of the band (that's Wikipedia's job ).

If I get any money for Christmas this year, I'm going to go out and purchase a copy of Karmacode, their latest album. I have only heard one song off the whole album, and I forget the name at this moment . Lacuna Coil is easily my new favorite band; it used to be Sub Dub Micromachine. Since SDM hasn't come up with a new album since 2002, their album (Rabautz!) has started to wear on me because I've listened to it so much. I like heavy metal more than I do rock or punk, I'll be the first to admit that. I not only have a taste for goth girl groups such as Lacuna Coil, Evanescence, Kittie, etc.; I also like stuff from Seether, Dimmu Borgir, Cannibal Corpse, and Killswitch Engage. Let's not forget that even though it's not number one on my list, rock and punk are still sweet on the ears. Bands such as The All-American Rejects, Nickelback, and Hinder are favorites of mine too. Pretty much anything but rap and country music I'll listen to--I can make allowances on rap. The music listing I have posted on my blog is about nine months old, so don't go by that; my music collection has more than quadrupled since then. Some of it I have on my iPod, and some I don't, but I'm getting around to ripping em all to my iPod. I'm not above downloading tunes, either. If any of my readers likes the same genres as I do, please let me know via comment or e-mail and we can get together to exchange tunes.

I have doctor appointments to get ready for. One with my psychiatrist and one with the family doctor. I will be back online around 6:30p-7p CST at the latest (I hope). I will leave you with pictures of Lacuna Coil that I found on Wikipedia and Google--enjoy

Ray Bellman. I don't mind putting his name on the internet because half the jail house walls in Missouri already have it on (thankfully he's my maternal grandfather so I don't share his last name...what a shame that would bear on me). This is my grandpa; be thankful I'm not posting a picture of him. I won't however, save you from the details of his latest and greatest adventures. If you read my previous post, I briefly mentioned that he's as bright as a lamp post and a total cockbite. These words just scratch the surface of his true personality.

I'm not going to tell you all about how he bailed a 19 year old prostitute out of jail and tried to live with her. Oh no, this next piece almost takes the cake for dirtiest old man award. In my last post, I mentioned the whole scenario of him having to get tests done for his heart. Well, they decided not to do the tests today, so he was coherent throughout the day. Around 2:00pm he calls the house wanting a bottle of aftershave (even though the man can't grow facial hair if his life depended on it). Around 5:00 I finally decide to bring him the bottle. While I was in his room he tells me, "Hey Alex, you see that real pretty nurse out there?"
"Yeah, what about her?" I inquired.
"Well I asked her and she's got a boyfriend, dammit!"
Now by this time I'm thinking, "Who the fuck does he think he really is?.....Fabio?.....she's only 24 for Christ's sake!" I asked him how he knew and he replied simply with, "I up and asked her." A few years back, he was hitting on one of my mother's best friends, who was about 40 at the time. I was told by my parents that 40 was a little "too old" for Ray Bellman. Apparently he was nearly arrested on statutory rape charges awhile back. Yes, my loving, caring, great to fish with grandfather is an A-class pedophile. I always heard stories of him and the young ladies, but never really believed any of them. Now that I've seen it straight out of the horse's mouth, I can't stop laughing. To sum all of this up, an 81 year old man who shits his pants and can't wipe his ass on his own anymore was trying to flirt with a 24 year old RN who was minding her own business. Stay in school, kids, and you won't wind up as dumb as Ray Bellman.

I acquired a new CD a few days ago. Comalies by Lacuna Coil. Updated my favorite song in the personal section to boot. As with any of my music, if you want some, just e-mail me or drop a comment...or even send me an instant message! Until tomorrow, pax et lux.

My lust for the series of Ghost in the Shell grows as the days pass by. Now I'm not much of a reader, but there are two books that I would love to take a gander at. They are both by J.D. Salinger; the very controversial The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. This book and collection of short stories closely tie into GITS:SaC. If you're from the Jcink forums, you know that I quote Salinger in my forum signature: "I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes." I believe this quote comes from Nine Stories in the short story "The Laughing Man"; please correct me if I am wrong on this. If I don't get them for Christmas, then I'll go and blow some dough myself for them. Either way, I am getting my mangy paws on these two pieces of literature.

Last night, I watched GITS again for the fourth time. It just keeps getting better and better. I seriously doubt that in the year 2030, we will have cyborgs running around. You really never know nowadays, though...cloning has advanced to the point where they can duplicate humans (which seriously creeps the shit out of me), but I digress.

Today's workout got botched and I didn't get to do any aerobics because my asthma and schizophrenia were toying with me. At least I got most all of the anaerobic crap done; I sure do hope that I'm sore tomorrow . Only one let down today that's worth talking about. My grandfather is back in the hospital with cardio problems. He gets to have some tests run tomorrow. I feel sorry for him; this is what he had to say, "I sure hope they don't operate on me again." To my knowledge, he has had 3-4 open heart surgeries, undergone several heart attacks, and has a pace maker shoved inside his chest so he'll keep tickin. Now he's not your ideal grandpa that you'd go fishing with. Matter of fact, I did go fishing with him once...I outfished him 6 to 1 and he got all pissy. He's also bright as a lamp post and should have died years ago. Even though he's a total cockbite, I still feel obligated to love him simply because he's my grandpa.

I'm going to start my photography up again soon. I really should have taken pictures of the ice storm we had a few weeks ago. I know Accius did on one of his blogs (they turned out pretty nice, too). I'm probably going to wind up going out of town into the boonies and take some farm pictures. Maybe shoot a few horses (for all you saying "WTF", I'm talking about with my camera, not a gun ). After I get a solid 20 decent photos taken, I'll add them to nerd photos. My goal that I hope to achieve with this photography is to get snapshots that rival Irayo's . I'll probably, as Kelly says, take some more "myspace" photos of myself because the photo of me I have in my personal section is getting rather old. Around 4 months old to be exact. I don't know when I'll do this, but eventually it will get done. Now I am off to work some more on this wallpaper. I'm making it in 1600x1200 and then downsizing different copies all the way to 800x600. Anyway, take care, leave comments, send me e-mail, stay alive and most of all, don't forget to flush the toilet . Oh, and grats to Nerblog for making it to its 50th post!

So here's a big letdown. I get all psyched up to go to the gym today, leave at the usual time of 4:30pm, then find that they close up at 5pm on the weekends! I took my gym bag and jump rope and slowly walked back to the truck with my head down. I really was looking forward to a nice two hour workout, too . Just means I'm gonna have to be at the gym at 12:00pm sharp tomorrow! Which also means no sleeping in tomorrow

I've been running into problems categorizing things on this blog lately. I have noticed one thing that the majority of blogs have that mine does not: multiple categories. I added the categories just fine. They display properly and everything, but there is one tiny problem I've run into. The secondary categories just "don't count." Here's an example of what I mean. Say this post were "personal" and "anime". Well it would file just fine under personal since it's the first category; it wouldn't file under anime at all. This problem has a few obvious fixes, but each of them has a danger of defacing Nerblog. Therefore I'm going to work on the test site for a little while and see if I can get them working there. Expect to see the feature within the next day or two (unless something else pops up!). Well, you'll be able to view multiple categories, but only the first category will be filed. In this case, it's going to be "personal". Again, this will change within the next few days after I make my wallpaper D:

Anybody who knows me at all knows that I'm one of the biggest fans of Ghost in the Shell on the face of this planet. Well I was browsing Amazon yesterday and found this little piece of candy. I started to drool when I saw it, but the price of it scared me away! Being resourceful as I am, I hunted down a torrent of the exact same thing. Sucks though because the downstream seems to be capped with my upstream. So I've been downloading 5.86GB at about 10-80kbps. At the time of this writing, there is an estimated 1 day 12 hours left on it (2.1/5.86GB). So if the website is slow for you today, this is the reason why. I'll leave you with a random picture as I skitter off to GIMP and make a wallpaper. I'll work on the multiple categories in a day or so. Oh yeah, gotta make a backup of some data, too :o

"Makes me so mad."

I am still stuck with this stupid bot I've been working on. Only one problem remains: fix the segfaults! I run the program and everything seems to do fine until the bot gets pinged. I swear this thing must have a touch-phobia or something. All of the commands seem to be working just fine, but this PING event just utterly kills my poor lil' bot . After I finish this one up, my next project will to get better in PERL and write a plugin for XMMS so the music section of my blog will be "live" rather than random tidbits from a .txt file.

Plus after I finish this P.O.S., I'm going to have to make a Windows port for the majority of folks out there. As of now, it's dependent on UNIX shell functions. By the by, the legendary quote at the beginning of this post is from none other than Accius. Also, I seemed to get one little bit of "hate mail" as to the pic of Sadie Jones I posted in the previous entry. So for my friend, who shall remain nameless, here you go

If anyone knows me well enough, they know that I am very athletic and enjoy the pain and rush I get from working out. Well after eight months to soften up and get out of shape, I revamped and made my own workout program. I made it online so it would be easier for me to maintain. If anyone wishes to view it, it can be found right here.

If you do decide to give it a looksie and have any questions at all about the way I labeled anything, feel free to leave a comment. As I just started this up after an eight-month leave from the gym (god I missed it), I am very sore. So sore that, at the moment, I can't even pick up my cat . Well I have to get some shut eye and let my body heal up a bit; I've got an appt. with my therapist tomorrow up in Nevada, MO at 2:30, so I gotta leave at about 1. Got work to do before hand as well. I leave you with this hot picture; <3 Sadie Jones.

Long time no post. Over the past month, I have been had three hospital stays. Nothing physical going on, just some mental illness to worry about. In a previous post I believe I mentioned that I was bipolar. This past week I have been in a hospital that decided to change my diagnosis. I am now labeled "schizo-effective". This is a very severe condition of bipolar plus schizophrenia (to the best of my understanding).

I'll make more posts this next week, but for now I'd like to give my hand a chance to heal up (concrete walls don't bust down easily).

By the way: 5 browinie points to the person who understands the title of this post.