Marc's Musings

My life for Aiur

For those of you (and I know you're out there) that are as excited about the new release of Starcraft as I am, take a look at this. Apparently someone was bored and used their mad origami skillz...

Four Things

I've seen this meme in several places, and I thought it was interesting, so here goes...

Four Jobs I've Had

Four Movies I can Watch Over and Over
* The Fifth Element
* Blues Brothers
* The Negotiator
* LOTR (the whole trilogy)

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
* Alias
* West Wing (until recently when they started to suck)
* Illini Basketball
* Illini Football (away games, of course)

Four Places I've Been on Vacation
* Bahamas (and surrounding waters)
* Jamaica
* Vail, CO
* Ireland

Four Favorite Dishes
* Green Curry
* Pizza (chicago style, of course)
* meatloaf
* any grilled carcas

Four Places I'd Rather Be
* 5000' up
* 50' down
* Rockies (in the winter)
* Any place I haven't already been

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
* Dave
* TK
* Zigzag
* Beth

Morning Person, Day 4

So far so good. I have actually been getting up at 6a without having to snooze or anything. This morning I have run into some difficulty, though. I'm bored. I'm sitting here in a hotel room with some friends, but they are ALL asleep. And it's really cold outside (-6F). It's supposed to get up to 12F today. At least it's warmer for skiing than it was yesterday.

Morning person, day 1

For those of you that have the joy to know me personally (my condolances, seriously), you probably know that I'm not a morning person. I'm happy sleeping in until the sun is in the middle of the sky. These same people were probably the ones that were shocked when I linked to a blog about getting up early.

Well, I didn't do the insane 5a thing mentioned in that page, but I got up at the dark hour of 6a--about 2 hrs earlier than normal. I even did it without snoozing the alarm. You're probably wondering what I did with my extra time, eh? I'm going to tell you anyway. I got up, showered, took the dog for a loooong walk, dodging the crazy high school kids, caught up on my news, etc. Mostly the stuff that I do at 10a, just shifted early.

That same guy talks about doing multiple short naps in a day, but really being awake for about 21 hrs. I don't know if I will get there, but this is a start to sleeping a lot less.

Airplanes

I think that I am going to close out my flying blog and aggregate it all here. I just don't have enough content (some might argue that I can stop there) for both.

So, on that note, What Airplane Are You?

Here's me... Pretty fitting since I would absolutely love one of these. I wonder if I could put it onto my Amazon wishlist.

You are a DEHAVILLAND BEAVER. You love
adventure. You are a person of the outdoors,
very in-tune with nature and your surroundings.
You enjoy communication between people, and
also your alone time. You are not afraid to
take risks. You aren't afraid of sucking up
some of the pleasures that life can offer. You
are a well-rounded individual, who puts your
passion in to almost all you do.

Happy Birthday

No, it's not my birthday, nor the birthday of my blog, nor the birthday of my car. Yes folks, it was the birthday of my lovely bride. She has now ventured into her upper 20's--don't you dare call it her "late 20's" or she will give you a verbal smackdown like you've never heard before.

I had started a blog entry tonight at the concert we went to, but when I was about to post it I reread it, and boy was it terrible. We (my lovely wife and myself) met up with a handful of our friends, and some other people, at Ravinia to watch the musical talents of Ben Lee (not bad--first time I've heard him), Rufus Wainwright (of The Stamp Traveller fame--I still think TLEMK made it up), and Ben "I used to have five" Folds. My wife even convinced my boss to kick me out of the office at 1 (she says thanks, Matt) so that we could make it up to the concert and enjoy her birthday.

Great concert. I enjoyed Ben Lee as an opener. Rufus, on the other hand, was more annoying in person that I realized he could be. At least he closed with what many know as "the Shrek song"--Hallelujah. Ben Folds played a decent set--mostly newer stuff. I would have liked more of his older music, but it was still great. I think one of the highlights was the cover of Dr. Dre's "[female dogs] ain't [poop]." It was definately something else to hear rap lyrics sung by Ben with his classic piano melodies in the background.

Now it's back to work my dupa off for the next few weeks--so expect fewer updates. Hopefully I don't die before then.

Who are you?

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Tony pointed this out to me. Good thing I'm not Saddam or Hitler...

Bloglines

For those of you who aren't using Bloglines to manage their newsfeeds, I urge you to give it a try.

For those of you that already are using Bloglines, I noticed something today that seems new, and you probably haven't noticed. If you have, good for you.

One thing that was nice, although somewhat limited, was the ability to mark an entire feed as unread. The downside was that if you were a little behind on a feed, and it had 20-30 articles, but you wanted to look at one later, you would either have to clip it, or something else. Now there is a little box next to each article to keep just an article as new.

Props to Mark and friends for making a great news reader even better.

Gmail invites

I've got some (they are a dime a dozen these days). If you want one, let me know what email address you want the invite to go to.

Olympics

I am rather disappointed by the olympics coverage this year. NBC has definately done it's best to control the US media market (print, web, and of course TV), that's for sure. I cannot speak for the HD coverage, but from some of the comments I've heard, it's pretty bad, too. Sure they have 5 channels of olympics coverage, but they hold everything until they want it played--and don't really tell us what is when. In the current age of TiVo (and dare I say other PVRs), they should give us a schedule of when every sport is going to be aired, and then we can TiVo the ones we want to see. 2 hours of gymnastics interspersed with 5 mins of swimming is not my idea of good programming (not that I am downplaying gymnastics, but my ADD mind doesn't want to see 2 hours straight). Where are the highlights from other sports?

At least they put the Men's basketball on at the right time--7a when nobody really wants to watch them anyway.

I found this funny little flash that gives me all the highlights I need....

http://www.infonegocio.com/xeron/bruno/olympics.html

enjoy!

Fun with bubblewrap

Everyone loves a little fun with bubblewrap.

Try maniac mode, it's cool.

Spam Cartoons

If I had a linkblog (one of these days), this would go in it, but instead I will have to put it here...

Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

Scale B-52--It flies!

From our friends over at Boing Boing....

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/27/flightcapable_b52_pl.html

The Simpsons

For those of you that don't read Slashdot, Jerry Lerma and Terry Hogan have devoted a considerable amount of time to mapping Springfield, USA.

Now you will know how far away Troy McClure (you may remember him from such shows as ... ) lives from Mr. Burns.

Cool.

These are fun ...

I'm happy with the Rubik's Cube... (Thanks Dave)

You're Rubik's Cube!! You may think you're
popular, but you're actually extremely
annoying. Seriously.


What childhood toy from the 80s are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

31337

Kenny pointed out to me something very interesting regarding the market orders for SCO. I guess someone has a nifty sense of humor as to the quantity of market orders for a penny right now...

OS/2 Warp?

There is something wierd about this quiz... At least I wasn't WinME!

Which OS are You?

Jokes, Blogger, Gmail

So I decided to start a joke blog. It uses Blogger which is owned by Goooooooogle. I don't like their interface for blogging, but really, this is all a cheap ploy to try and get a gmail account to see what it is about.

SO ( I was ....) go ahead and look at it, and help me get a gmail account :)...

(Found this out via the kiddiez at /.)

Chicken

If I had a "link blog" this would go in it. Tell him to do stuff, and most of it he will do... pretty cool...

http://www.subservientchicken.com/

Welcome to my blog

I just installed movable type and am in the process of configuring it. I don't quite know if I like it yet, but figured that enough people are using it, so it must not be too bad. I have noticed off the bat that it is very slow. Perhaps there are some things that I can do to speed it up.