Busy

Sorry, haven't posted in a while because of everything converging at the same time. But here is an excellent video the media will not publish but my boy Glenn Beck made.

videos

Thought I would post a couple videos for people:
Cover of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy"


Couple videos of the Glengarry Bhoys'


Probably my favorite here:


Links because embedded code was disabled
Video1
Video2

Today's times

I was reflecting today and came to a realization. The entertainment moguls gear things to get ratings and what gains more ratings than the current thoughts and ideas in peoples minds. So far this television season there have been two series to debut with the main plot centered around a nuclear explosion in America. Look back to the depression, the biggest movies were ones about the rich losing their wealth and becoming one of the poor. Movies during WWII was centered about hope, plus many of the comic book superheroes spawned around this time to give the people hope as well. During the cold war we had spy movies. Just in the last few years terrorism popped up and has basically faded away in entertainment. Today, we have the apocalypse. This is what we have on our minds.

Are we repeating serious blunders from history? Are we, America, paralleling the Roman Empire before its sudden fall? I truely think we need to seriously think about this.

There are too many people who are looking at parties when they look to choose who to vote for. THIS IS SERIOUSLY FLAWED!!! As the clouds began to gather around the beginning of WWII the American people talked and did what you should be doing now. They looked at the issues and chose to vote for the person who was right for the job. America is so biased across party lines everyone is loosing sight of this. You turn on the television or walk outside your home and you hear 'a vote for a republican is a vote for safety and a vote against terrorism' or 'a vote for a democrat is a vote for peace and accountability'. That is absurdly stupid to say or to think.

The only way to have a glimmer of hope that we can take back government for the people of this nation is to get familiar with the candidates, the topics and their stance on these subjects. If we continue to blindly vote along party lines and not for the people who is best for the position as the old adage goes 'if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you have always gotten'.

Thanks Glenn Beck for saying this and spurring me to make this post. If you haven't seen his show, it comes on CNN Headline News at 6pm Central. Check it out and be enlightened.

Glass Ballerina

Follow this link to watch two preview videos for tonights episode of Lost - 302 - The Glass Ballerina.

Football roundup

Well, i'm putting off talking about bayfest and the acts I saw until later in the week mainly because i'm too lazy to get the pictures off of my camera right now. So, I will talk about the weekend football games instead.

I do want to cheer on the other team from the state of Alabama but so many of them can be so annoying (this is most certainly not aimed at any of my friends who are Aubies because they are cool). It starts with their coach. He is a weasely no good dirty scoundral. He blatantly runs the score up try and make the voters, who don't see their games, maybe cast a vote for them. Their non-conference schedule is a joke, Washington state, Buffalo (didn't know they had a team), Tulane, and Arkansas State. They scheduled Southern Cal a couple seasons ago and lost, then the next season they lost again then dropped them from the schedule. I want both Alabama and Auburn to schedule good non-conference games like Alabama-Oklahoma or Auburn-USC or like next year with Alabama playing Florida State.

Saturday I was so happy to see Arkansas take Auburn behind the woodshed. During the week leading up to the game, Tubby (Auburn coach Tubberville) spoke out about how he felt that the BCS was unfairly biased against Auburn. Maybe he should have just kept his big mouth shut because now, everyone understands why the BCS wasn't favoring them, because they were overrated. This weekend will be interesting with Auburn hosting Florida who is coming off big wins against Alabama and LSU in the swamp. Can they pull out an upset or will Florida take another step towards the SEC Championship game? I will vote for the latter from what I saw last weekend.

If you haven't noticed or heard I am a die-hard Alabama fan. You cut me and I bleed crimson and white. I would proudly trade in my cap for a houndstooth hat if I didn't think it would make me look odd. But, the way the team has played the last three games has been horrible and the coach has been talking like we are about to turn a corner and that we are competitive up till the fourth quarter. Whats worse, it sounds like something a Duke or Vanderbilt team would be saying not the coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide should be saying.

We have talented blue chip prospects which many teams would drool over landing. We have a quarterback which, arguably, has more composure and presence in the game than Brodie Croyle. We still have Kenneth Darby who has been a dominate force on the ground the last two seasons but cannot get into his groove yet this year. We have talented wide receivers who can be called on at any time to catch a pass for a first down, but have the speed to break any catch for a touchdown any moment. But what do we have to show for it? Two conference losses and a team that trailed Duke (ranked 117 of 119 division I-A schools) 14-10 at halftime at home to a team who had only scored in one of their 4 previous games for a season total of 13 points. If Duke was not a wakeup call to this team then the next stretch of games will be long and tiresome to us die-hard fans.

The way they played they will surely lose to Tennessee, LSU and Auburn and probably in a very sad way. We should have won at Arkansas and we could have won at Florida. This is something that has to be taken care of at the coaching level. Either they have to change what they are doing and learn that they have to be dynamic or get them out of Tuscaloosa (except for Joe Kines, he's the one that is actually doing something).

~Roll Tide~

Replacement

Well, I got one of my replacement hard drives in the other day (a few months ago I had not one but two Maxtor model 7L300R0 300gig hard drives kick the bucket). In the past, I had been sent larger hard drives than what I had but this time I got an identical drive, much to my chagrin. When you have two identical drives die within 3 days of each other you just want to drop kick them across the road. Well, its installed and formatted but Maxtor will have to earn my trust back. I know its been purchased by Seagate but even the name pisses me off right now.

The Chili cookoff is slated for December 1st hopefully in the Student Center quad. Proceeds to benefit the ACM Scholarship fund.

Bayfest starts tonight but there's nothing interesting for me to go see tonight, especially Michael Bolton. I would much rather wait till tomorrow and enjoy the lineup on the Pepsi stage. Saturday Top of the Orange (saw them last year and they were really good), Evans Blue (bio sounds good), 10 years ("The alternative-metal group, 10 Years was formed in Knoxville, TN in 2002. The band has created a huge following with their Tool and Incubus induced, energy driven melodies."), Hinder (has a recent song that sounds pretty good), and Shinedown (staring down the barrel of a .45 is pretty good).

Then on Sunday Hamelin sounds pretty good with lots of acoustics and catchy melodies, Ugli Stick seems pretty cool, Sister Hazel whose show at soul kitchen was disappointing but their show before that at the Mitchell Center was great....hopefully this will make the 2 for 3, and finally The Wreckers....all you need to know is this group consists of two hotties, "The Wreckers were formed when Michelle Branch recruited her longtime friend and backing singer Jessica Harp, who, at the time, was en route to signing a record deal of her own on a new musical venture, incorporating elements from both Branch's pop-rock style and Harp's classical style to form a unique-sounding ensemble. Thus, The Wreckers (short for "homewreckers") were formed, and they were signed to Maverick Records." Unfortunately, the sample music on their website sounds more country than the pop music I think of when I hear 'Michelle Branch' but oh well, two cute chicks playing music....i'm there.

BTW, one year later and Bo Bice still sucks. Thank goodness he has fallen out of the spotlight, hopefully this will be permanent. Taylor Hicks can't dance and can barely sing but he has a ton more talent than you Mr. Bice.

Peace

Review and stuff

Well, last nights episode of Lost was really good. But I have been asking myself several questions such as what is the significance of the song at the beginning of the episode? The name Ben? What is this community? Why did they force the kid to appologize to Sawyer? What happened to Kate from breakfast until she was caged? What did Ike mean when he said 'You're not my type'? There's more questions lingering but I think I want to begin with these first.

Battlestar Galactica starts this Friday on Scifi and for you fans out there, on the website there are a number of webisodes which span some of the time between the season 2 finale and the season 3 premiere so go check them out.

Additionally, Doctor Who series 28 (David Tennant) began airing on Scifi last Friday.

Well, its official. I am team coach for the ACM Regional Programming Contest which is going to be held at two sites. The primary is Georgia Southern and the secondary site will be South Alabama. Alabama, Auburn, and Birmingham Southern are the schools that I know are going to be present at USA thus far. So between now and the programming contest I have lots of preparation to do, both for hosting and the team. All of the participants wanted to practice so they are not embarrassed at home, thus for the last few weeks we have been running some problem solving practices. Some of the more serious ones are showing good progress, others tend to be more distracting. This week, I plan to seperate the distracting team from the teams who are trying to concentrate and see if I get better results.

Oh, one last thing. We are having a fundraiser for hardware for the ACM Office. Our printer is on its last leg, we have two computers which can barely run Eclipse, and hopefully we can beef up the server as well. So for this, we are having a Chili cookoff. We have not decided on entry fee yet so if any of you have a suggestion please feel free to shoot me an email. This will be open to anyone who wants to participate. The leftover proceeds will be donated to the ACM Scholarship fund. I think the date is sometime in November so start getting your chili recipes out cause you will have to compete against mine as well.

Peace

Tonight's crack

Well, season 3 of Lost starts tonight. It will be interesting to see what happens with everything that was (or wasn't) resolved last season. But, something has stolen some of the glee of Lost returning. South Park, yes the new episode of South Park is going to be taking aim at all of the World of Warcraft crackheads out there. WOOO! Anyway, if you want to see the teaser for the South Park episode head on over to Comedy Central and check it out.

Two quick teasers for Season 3 of Lost while i'm at it:




I'm out...

The saga of BEST and the semi-flat tire

Well, what a weekend. Thursday, was the picklefish adventure with much yelling about 'GO COCKS'. Twas good with Admiral Skrubby.

But the best part about friday was when I walked out to my truck and saw I had a flat tire. I go to get my trusty floor jack from the shed and noticed the wasps to which I sprayed a liberal amount of anti-wasp lifeforce spray on them and their nest. Killing most, a few were not on the nest and was spared by wrath. So, again I go in to try and retreive my trusty floor jack and again was thowarted by yet another wasp nest. I again load up and spray some anti-wasp lifeforce spray again killing most but a few lucky ones survived. Third time was the charm in retreiving my trusty floor jack.

I get my colapsable four way lug wrench out only to have one of the colapsable arms fall off. So I quest to find my phillips head screw driver and repair my lug wrench. Then, I happily jack up my truck to exchange the flat tire with my trusty spare only to find out when I let the truck down that my trusty spare was quite untrustworthy (IE it was flat). So, again I jack the truck up and put the original back on and give up. I bum a ride to school since by this time I don't have the time to walk to school before the scheduled lab is supposed to begin. After that Dr. R.D. told me that the ACM could plunder one of the rooms upstairs that he is going to make into the SI room. Thus we walk away with plenty of booty in the form of PC speakers. I finally get home around half past sevenish. Then it was pretty good to be waited on at El Toro by Blue himself, even though it was rumored he was dead he works here in Mobile. Then to Doug's for the jam session...i was on the egg-like moracca's until I came to the realization that this white boy has no rhythm.

Saturday was the big day. Woke up at 10 till 5 that morning to shower and stuff for the BEST kickoff stuff. kc and Kenny didn't wake their butt's up till quarter to 7 those lazy bums. Since I didn't have any personal transportation I sat here twiddling my thumbs waiting to be chauffeured to Waffle House for breakfast. We finally arrive at that destination to find Big Joe Duke and Ryan there already finished. They leave, we order, food is consumed, yada yada yada.

We then arrive at Davidson HS to help finish setting up etc for the event. We looked over the nifty field, BJD was being all orderly like. I was put on distribution of kits with Ryan, thus we exit stage right to the awaiting Penske truck with the stuff. We proceed to organize stuff together in such a way that it would be orderly when the kids come screaming at us for their stuff. We then go back inside for skit. BJD was great at cutting a fake lawn with an edger BTW. (skip ahead) So, we realize that just myself and Ryan would not be enough to distribute the kits so we enlist the help of Kc and Vicki. This proved to be most profitable, they did the face to face work with people and we ran around the inside of the hot penske truck getting their stuff.

We then adjourn to Ruby Tuesday for lunch. Bama game started at half past two and we left RT at three. So I was like a cat on a hot tin roof. I was anxious and nervous to go and watch the game. Maybe I shouldn't have watch cause turnovers killed us, but it was good to see Shula be more aggressive instead of conservative. I see John Parker Wilson being a very good quarterback, but his lack of starting experience does show up from time to time.

We then go to BJD's for smoked meat on bones and boy was it delicious. He claimed it was overcooked and dry. If it was I happened to get three of the finest pieces in the pile. Casey made some awesome mac-n-cheese and kc came through with some great banana pudding. We posed for pics with Katie (Wisc) to show her Wisconsin friends that she does have friends in the Southland and yes we are like team-uber-awesome-coolness. I also remembered to give her an important piece of wardrobe for her halloween costume.

So, I got home around half past midnight and crashed. Kc went home earlier because she had to work Sunday. I wake up on Sunday with nothing to do again because of two flat tires. I considered taking the tire off and walking it to the Shell station near the house but thought that would not be good since there is a nice slopy hill between point A and point B. I then go out and survey the possibility of driving on said 'flat tire' (it wasn't completely flat but for all intents and purposes it was flat with 5 lbs of air pressure) and I decided against that. I had made semi-plans to go watch a movie while being accompanied by Vicki but I had to cancel due to my tires being flat on one side. Eventually, I get ahold of Matt and he brought over his fathers air compressor and aired up my two flat tires (thanks again Matt).

So, I lounge around the house doing little other than washing my clothes and watching either History Channel, Discovery Channel or Animal Planet. Monday comes along and I get up at 7 so I can get to Fausak's early and get my tired fixed ASAP. They open at half past seven, which is the time I arrive but a mongolian hoard apparently arrived the 60 seconds before I did and set me back an hour plus worth of reading Time magazine. Should have brought my GBA blast it. I finally get home and chill again, watching more History Channel about WWII and the nazi's.

I again awaken at seven this morning to get an early start on the day. I was supposed to fill in for Dr. M.D. for real time and AI but he somehow got off jury duty (I wouldn't want the putz on my jury either). So, real-time we had them work on their project and AI I gave a semi-presentation about robocup (yawn).

Had class talking about database normalization when inheriting a database like a flat file. Pretty cool stuff. Came home and watched the season premiere of Veronica Mars. AWESOME SHOW!! Kristen Bell is smokin' hot!! She could solve my mystery any day LOL.

Thats my story and i'm sticking to it....