a hiking we will go?

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It’s weird because for the most part I don’t really consider myself to be an outdoors person at all these days, and yet oddly enough there’s a very small part of me that finds the idea of taking a very long hike through the wilderness to be intriguing.

And by long, I’m talking about weeks and weeks long… 😯

The thought came about once again this afternoon when I stumbled across this blog from a guy who hiked the Appalachian Trail from Maine down to Georgia. It reminded me of A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson that was recommended to me years ago by my biology teacher back in college … if I remember correctly, Bryson didn’t actually end up finishing the trail, or maybe he did it in sections by coming back, but the tale was really funny and would make for a fun story to write if it hadn’t already been written before.

There are a lot of logistical things that would probably hold me back from ever doing something like that – first and foremost, I’m not sure if I could physically handle walking 2100 miles even spread out over the course of a couple months! Hell, I woke up with sore arms after carrying Christopher around Disney yesterday, though I suppose it’s something that you probably have to condition yourself for. God, I haven’t been hiking in ages…

And then there’s the responsibility factor – I’m not in my 20’s anymore … I have a mortgage, and a wife and son, and bills to pay, and hilarious things on the Internet to write. Being gone for a month or more straight would put quite the strain on all of the above, not to mention if I somehow managed to accidentally get eaten by a bear or something throughout the process!

Plus, I don’t think that I could go without Internet for that long, although that blog guy seemed to post every day so maybe sporadic cell signals every so often would be enough to keep up on things, and writing is typically more productive to do offline anyways.

I don’t know … it’s an interesting idea for someday in the future, I suppose. Maybe once I get in a little better shape and responsibilities are a little more flexible … it’s funny that although the idea of camping isn’t really appealing to me, I think just the idea of getting that far away from people is what sort of draws me to the notion. Nothing but miles upon miles of open trail and the wilderness to entertain you along the way. I’ve always wanted to put together a proper travel blog to journal about my life’s travels – the blog series that I did for my and Sara’s big road trip a couple of years ago was like that and turned out to be a lot of fun.

Hmmmmm…

remembering the Power Glove…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

This video amused me when I came across it late last night because I totally had a Power Glove myself and like 100% of other Power Glove owners, unfortunately these teens’ experiences were pretty much par for the course!

I didn’t get mine when it first came out – in 1989 I had only had my Nintendo since the Christmas before, so I was much more interested in getting more games than a peripheral that costed nearly as much as the console itself did at the time. I want to say that my Power Glove was a birthday gift from one of my aunts 5-6 years later, mostly because they had found it on clearance at KB Toys back when they were still around, so for $20 it was worth a try…

And even though at the time the controller was pretty god-awful, it’s still kind of neat to look back and see where an attempt at motion controls first started because now here we are 25 years later and not only is the Wii pretty darned good at it, but you can even plug in a Kinect to your Xbox and use your whole body as a game controller! It doesn’t apply to all, or even most games, but the technology is still cool.

If only Lucas could see us now! 😉

Slapstick for Babies…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

20150210_182617772_iOS

I hope that it’s always as easy to make my son laugh as it is right now, and vice-versa!

Being the aficionado of humor that I am, I find myself particularly intrigued to watch Christopher’s sense of humor developing because right now it very much beckons back to the times of slapstick comedy and silly voices and situations, as opposed to more complex forms that take the form of actual words. He loves The Muppets, and to an extent Sesame Street – I think at this point simply because the characters are big and colorful, and sometimes they flail around crazily like Kermit the Frog.

And hearing somebody else laughing is almost a sure-fire way to make him laugh, almost as if the laughter itself is contagious!

I often feel like I’m channeling a bit of The Three Stooges because it’s such a simpler form of comedy and it’s so much different to explore. I’d sound like a crazy person if I were to talk in random voices and “disappear” around doors in the adult world, yet to an 11 month-old all of those things are hilarious, and I might be biased but my little guy has a wonderful laugh that just makes the whole experience very rewarding.

Maybe it won’t be as much fun in a few years when he learns how to heckle, but even then I suppose that’s just another opportunity to teach him something new… 🙂

Why copy editing is important…

Posted on by Scott / 1 Comment

Because there’s a considerable difference between:

“Eminem wins 6th best rap album Grammy Award for sequel to 2000 release”

And:

“Eminem wins 6th Grammy Award for Best Rap Album for sequel to 2000 release”

My first thought when seeing the former … What an award – 6th Best Rap Album of the Year?!

Dream Journal : The Blaze

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I was still living with my Mom when we came home to find that our house was on fire.

I frantically called 911, but the operator was aloof to the point where I started screaming at her when she just mumbled monotonously through my questions.

“How long is it going to take them to get here?! My house is on fucking fire!!!”

While we waited out in the driveway, I briefly considered running in to try to save some things, but ultimately I realized that it was a bad idea and a few minutes later, the fire trucks rolled up and began to get to work.

The next evening once everything had been cleared, I looked around and found that the damages hadn’t actually been that bad. Despite burning for what seemed like forever, the fire was almost completely contained to the roof and although there were numerous areas where you could see right through to the starry, night sky, most of our belongings were still ok.

Plus, I lived in the basement, so my stuff went relatively untouched.

Nonetheless later on I found myself scrambling to pack up my things as some people from my old Boy Scout troop helped carry boxes up the stairs – some of them just went out to my car, while the bulkier things were packed into a big moving truck.

The last thing I remember packing were several bankers boxes full of Nintendo Power magazines, followed by a bevy of old industrial batteries destined to be recycled. Not really sure where I was moving to, although when I tried to look up the story about the fire online, my browser kept diverting to news about Tampa instead.

So close! Then oops…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I thought I’d take a quick break right now to do what should’ve been a simple maintenance on my new media server. My latest hard drive added was still setup as an external USB drive, so now that I’ve got the cables that I needed I figured that I’d simply power everything down, move the drive into the case, and that’d be that!

Oops.

When I booted back up, instead of the OS seeing a 4 TB disk that’s about half full, somehow it managed to see a 500 GB partition that it thought was my old drive and a 3.5 TB partition that was completely foreign to it. 😛

A quick Googling suggested that the USB adapter that I have probably has something in the controller that serves as a boot manager, so whereas I thought I was being all smart and formatted it to ext4 a week ago in preparation for today’s task, in effect using the USB adapter to do so kind of hosed up that little plan something fierce!

So here we are now…

usb_oops

(USB adapter plugged in while hard drive is still mounted inside case!)

Thankfully I’ve still got just barely enough free space between my other three drives to split up all of the data that’s on the “external” one, so now I get to wait another umpteen hours to copy everything over to those drives, only to as soon as it’s done swap out the cables one more time, reformat, and copy everything back again!!!

screenshot

😐

movie thoughts … Guardians of the Galaxy

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

MV5BMTAwMjU5OTgxNjZeQTJeQWpwZ15BbWU4MDUxNDYxODEx._V1_SX214_AL_Ever since I saw the trailer, I really thought this was going to be a stupid movie.

I hated the stupid raccoon.

I hated Chris Pratt.

After watching so many great superhero movies lately from Marvel, I just didn’t get how this weird, seemingly mockery of the movies I’ve been loving lately was going to work … and yet the other night after a particularly long and exhausting day, we put it on TV … and it was actually really, really good!

😯

Don’t get me wrong – Rocket the raccoon is still kind of weird, and Groot the weird, tree thing is really weird … in fact, just about all of the characters from Guardians of the Galaxy are weird, and I think that’s actually why it works because it’s kind of an endearing sort of weird that grows on you over time. Not to mention I’ll be completely upfront and admit that 100% of the reason I didn’t think I was going to like Chris Pratt was because I absolutely hated his character on Parks & Rec for the first few episodes that I watched, but this movie was kind of a reminder not to let one single character typecast the actor because he actually did a pretty great job with the Star Lord role.

The movie also left us wondering all sorts of things about the Infinity Stones and how they’re all going to come together in Avengers 3, which was a surprise because I honestly didn’t really realize that Guardians was intertwined at all until Thanos made his appearance on the screen.

Also, I totally didn’t realize that the Aether from Thor 2 counted as one of the stones … explains how that one ended, though … so apparently we’re actually closer to assembling them after all.

Anyways … so in conclusion – I was wrong, Guardians of the Galaxy was actually quite good, and I’m now looking forward to the sequel for this one just as much as all of the rest!

…the Guardians of Ga’Hoole still looks stupid as all hell, though… 😛

Get Stuff Done.

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It’s easy for me to start new things, unfortunately to a fault when I’ll have a to-do list filled to the brim with no plan in sight of how to actually finish any of them.

This goes for pretty much everything in my life – writing, work, personal stuff … my life is more or less run by to-do lists, to the point where I often find myself spending more time managing said lists than I do actually completing and getting things off of them.

And that’s a problem! But it’s a problem that I’m aware of, and I’m trying to do better at it.

It’s especially painful when I look at some of my lists now and can single out a dozen or so tasks that might take less than five minutes a piece … reason asks why in the world I didn’t just do the task when I was putting it on the list! Of course, there are some valid excuses – like maybe it’s a writing idea that I literally got at 3:30am and noted down from the comforts of my pillow, or maybe I was in the middle of working on a much larger task at the time and didn’t want to interrupt myself.

Either way, now it’s going to take me an hour to blow through all twelve of them in one shot, which is a much grander feat than simply knocking out a few simple things here and there.

I think a bigger part of doing this better in 2015, though, is simply in identifying one or more of the larger tasks in a given list and saying, “I’m going to get one or two of those done today – no matter what.” so that in theory at the end of the day I can always look back and say that at least I did that as opposed to a few random things here or there, but nothing really of any substance that’ll make me feel good about circling back to the list to begin again tomorrow.

There have been far too many days in the past couple of weeks when I go to bed feeling that I was completely and utterly unproductive with the time that I was given, so maybe instead of just incessantly making lists and getting a little done on a few of them, my time might be better spent just honing in one less things and following them through all of the way ’til the very end.

Dream Journal : Biker Scott and the Really Weird Bridge

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So I was riding around the state on my … wait for it … motorcycle?!

It was hard to tell whether I was in Florida or Michigan – it might’ve been Michigan in the summertime, though, because it was really nice out. I think it was a holiday weekend because lots of people were around and about, and I was getting frustrated with all of the traffic trying to get where I needed to go so I decided to take a detour off the highway through some little resort town.

The town was on the waterfront and had the most bizarre bridge imaginable, in that now that I’m trying to describe it in reality there’s no way that it would actually work! After sitting at a light on top of a giant hill, I rode down onto one end of the bridge while instantly opened up into like six or eight lanes all going in the same direction. It was a drawbridge, but they didn’t seem to stop traffic before the bridge started moving, so it was on the drivers on the bridge to slow down and wait until the gap was closed … or if it was close, they could just try to jump it! 😯

Anyways, that wasn’t even the weird part…

The weird part was that this particular bridge actually went in two different directions at the same time! It was shaped kind of like a sideways T, in that I came down off the hill and then could either drive straight (which bypassed the town) or turn right (which went into the heart of town).

Clearly it was very confusing to everyone because you had a lot of people driving diagonally across multiple lanes to get where they were trying to go, and then you also had the jumpers who made a game out of not waiting for the drawbridge to drop back down on the one side!

Also, did I mention that there were walkers in addition to vehicular traffic on this bridge?!

So I ended up taking the more scenic route and decided to ride by the bay. On my way off the bridge, I ran into a guy and his family who I used to work at scout camp with … noted by him wearing one of the boisterous pink camp staff shirts that we used to wear way back in the day! They were very tired from all of the walking and were jealous of my wheels, but I slowed down and rode along with them to a small picnic area where we stopped and ate and talked about going swimming.

Never did find out where I was actually supposed to be going, or why I was riding a motorcycle to get there, but at least it was a nice day! 😉

The Lack of Respect in Politics…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

A few hours ago when I first sat down to write this, I wanted to talk a bit about educating the political process and how difficult it is to bridge the aisle between two parties when people are implored not only to choose their own news sources, but even choose their own facts these days.

Then I came across this video posted on House Speaker John Boehner’s YouTube account as a House Republican commentary version of the State of the Union address and that spun me off in an entirely different direction…

I’m not even going to address the fact that they decided to edit out the President’s comments about climate change, ridiculous as it is, because instead watching these comments unfold painted for me a picture that was more concerning than just doctoring a simple video. The problem is bigger than that, and I think a prime example is the fact that after the President gives his State of the Union address, the opposing party sees fit not only to give their own contradictory speeches, but even worse so to go through the President’s entire speech line by line so that they can interject their catty, “Nuh uh”‘s after every last thing that the President says.

There’s no respect in politics right now, and it comes from both sides, and it shouldn’t really be a surprise when these clowns can’t manage to get anything done when the majority of their time in office is spend jeering each other like they were kids on a playground. But these are adults … who we’ve all elected to office … to represent us.

It’s clear from a simple glance that it’s the President vs. Congress and Republicans vs. Democrats and even ultra-conservatives vs. only kind-of conservatives – there are so many different divides and everyone is so entrenched in their own politics that they have no desire to get along with the other side, much less reach across the aisle to actually come to a consensus on anything. The outbursts, the pouting and failure to accept a verdict and then move on, the holding of a bill hostage over something else that got tucked in that really has no business being associated in the first place.

It’s all just embarrassing, and it’s why before I think we’re ever going to get any real progress from our government on a respectable scale, we need to see some changes in the people who are put into office to make sure that they’re actually committed to working for the people instead of just bickering back and forth like a bunch of Real Housewives. Stricter term limits, performance expectations, hell, maybe even abolishing the whole party system altogether because seeing important legislation just fall to party lines makes it seem like our congressmen didn’t even do the reading in the first place!

If we want to see change, we need to start holding our politicians to a higher standard, and I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being embarrassed whenever *I* read about whatever they’re supposed to be doing in the news. 🙁