twenty-two seconds to live

I’m out of the world for awhile, see you cats later.

A few cursory Google searches will show that a lot of people, both at home and in the media, are asking this question.  It would be irresponsible of me to not pay attention to this fact.

I’m not personally saying Glenn Beck did in fact rape and murder a young girl in 1990, I just want to know the truth.

Why hasn’t Glenn Beck denied the allegations that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990?  Why has Glenn Beck failed to produce evidence that he did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990?  What is Glenn Beck afraid of?

As of this writing, both Glenn Beck and FOX News have remained silent – all while a storm of epic proportions grows around the question.  Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?

I’ve seen a lot in my life, and thought I had reached a point where nothing short of global catastrophe could surprise me.

Then I came home from watching G.I. Joe yesterday (more on that later) to the first actual surprise party I’ve ever had in my life.  My mother, Cory, Ben Moore, nearly everyone from my office that I like, all of our local friends, and my kids were all waiting in my living room.  Streamers, balloons, cake, snacks, presents, the yelling of “SURPRISE” in unison, the works.

I was, for the first time in a long time, completely stunned and speechless.  It was amazing.  Virtually everyone I care about was wedged into my house.  There was a keg in the backyard.

I got presents!  A propane grill was the Mjolnir smash.  Beatrice got a top case.  I also got a rechargeable drill, an Iron Man book, a case of Hoegaarden, and 12 months of Xbox Live Gold.  Several people tossed Best Buy giftcards my way as well – and today I piled them together and got a soundbar speaker system for downstairs with an iPod dock in it.  It will see a lot of use during video games, movie nights, Rock Band parties, and cleaning the house (especially since Cox has taken away the bluegrass music channel.)

Marissa managed to coordinate and pull this off over the past MONTHS without me even having a hint of what was going on.  I will post a picture in this article of my complete kernel-panic shutdown face a bit later.  I swear, there was even a tear.

Thanks to, in no particular order: Ben Moore, Cory, Ben Patterson, Kristin and PJ, Angie, Tom and Amanda, Dave and Felicia, Lee, Cydney, Andrew, Dozer, Noah, Alex, Chris, Casey, Lissa, Mom, Jake, Veronica, Milo, and of course Marissa.

I have the most amazing wife ever – she continues to find new ways to blow me away on a daily basis.  I just hope her birthday next weekend is palatable, since there’s no way I can compete with this.

Inspired by and mostly cribbed from Truppenführung (Hammerstein-Equord, 1933)

Fourth of July, sheesh!

July already?  2009 is half over!

Time flies when you’re having fun, they say, and lately it seems my life has been relativistically accelerating toward some notable fraction of c.  The thing is, however, that this doesn’t bother me at all.  I figure that sometime next week I’ll be 50 years old, sitting on the front porch with Marissa, some old dog, and a glass of weak lemonade and that’s just fine with me.  Maybe I’ll have some sort of walking stick that I can shake at kids as they pass in front of my house.

The rest of 2009 is going to be pretty full, as well.  Jim Gaffigan, Coldplay, Kings of Leon, the kids visiting in August, Paris, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then 2010.  Wow!

I took off an hour early to meet the Cox technicians at the house – the phone jockey dosed out a little epic fail trying to activate the new DVR and sent techs over.

They took exactly ten minutes to do the job, agreed that an on-site was a bit of overkill, and that the phone tool was just that.

Of course, Marissa didn’t get off early so I was stuck at home for an hour which is way worse than being at work.  I miss her, so I programmed the DVR to record every episode of Maury ever so she can watch trashy dudes be the father (or not the father, as the case may be) whenever she wants.  That’s kinda like flowers – right, ladies?

PS the new photo gallery is up and running brilliantly so check it out.

After catching some really sketchy RDF metadata in my posts, I realized that wordpress 2.1 had some major holes. I upgraded the whole site to wordpress 2.8 which, honestly, has made a ton of other things much easier to deal with as well.

I added a photo gallery using ZenPhoto and made Marissa the administrator of it, so hopefully she’ll be migrating over from Flickr soon.

I may try to do some more advanced Twitter and Facebook integration, and I have some ideas for some more capabilities for the site to better justify my owning it.  Mobile services, anyone?

It’s been requested that I begin work on a small text adventure game based on this news story, so that might happen.  Morbid? Yes, but also hilarious.

I’m still pretty puffed up about doing my own valve adjustment on Beatrice, so now I’m thinking about a custom aluminum retrofuture Fallout3-style skin for her, LED light replacements, and maybe even an audio system.  Something like this.

That’s all for now.

Guess I should write something here once in awhile.

Riss and I spent our first anniversary in Santa Barbara.  Kayaks were paddled, horses were ridden, musicals were watched, and a huge in-room jaccuzzi was basically lived in.  Awesome times all around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikuhF-0AAjc

Click.  Watch.