3/29/2005

Okay - that’s enough….

“Lord of the Peeps?”:http://www.lordofthepeeps.com/ Lord of the PEEPS?! These people have way too much time on their hands…seriously…where do they get all this extra time to do these things? Do they not have kids? Do they just not work? What? Anyway - there it is…..

sparta at 9:59 pm

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3/27/2005

A new meme, or at least a new game for parties!

“There’s a new music format”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/28155.html?page=1#comments brewing….. songs in list format. This is surprisingly cool. Some of them are easy to spot - some if you don’t know the song well, you aren’t going to figure out. So, in the interest of continuing this newly begun tradition. Go for it! Post your favorite songs in list format. Challenging for some songs….. Enjoy. I will post one in the comments later.

sparta at 8:21 pm

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3/26/2005

Your own short animation film fest

Okay, so if you go to this “iFilms”:http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/1338636?htv=12 page, you are going to find some interesting things for your viewing…er…pleasure. First up, is the Lego zombie movie, All of the Dead. Next, check out the Lego Monty Python clip. Afterwards, look for This Place Sucks. Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars is actually kind of lame, as is Les Pantless Menace. Alien Song is cute. But I really loved BERT. It’s very well done.

After those, go touring around iFilms. The “Shorts” section is nice because they load quickly - and don’t take much time to watch.

Enjoy!

sparta at 1:36 pm

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3/25/2005

Well, I did come up with something to post…

I have posted abou the Peeps before (somewhere), but it seems they’ve updated the page. The one about the Peep quintuplets is interesting.

sparta at 2:15 pm

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Sorry I haven’t posted in a while…

There’s been some mild mayhem here at the ol’ ranch. Hopefully something thought-provoking, interesting, exciting….etc…..will come up and I can post it here. I am not going to blog about the whole Schiavo thing. There are many many many more (better connected) folks who are blogging on that. Ta-ta, kiddos!

sparta at 2:02 pm

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3/18/2005

YAY! HOORAY!

Here’s the best news I’ve had in a while: NO SURGERY NEEDED ON MY KNEE!!!!! I was SOOOOOOOO worried. Turns out that my fracture while healed according to X-rays is still healing according to MRIs. We could see this bright spot on the bone. So, the good news is that I won’t need any surgery; the bad news (if you want to call it that) is that it’s going to be another 3 to 6 months before I’m back to “normal.” *sigh* I was hoping for faster results, but hey, I guess these things take as long as they take. So, no Tae Kwon Do for a while longer, but at least I’m not in for the arthroscope!

You may all do the “no-surgery-needed” happy dance now!

sparta at 10:59 am

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3/17/2005

Be careful what you wish for….

I was hoping to have something interesting to post, but this wasn’t what I had in mind. Andre Norton has left us [read the article here].
:-( I haven’t read some of her latest works, but Norton was always an author you could expect to be readable - at the very least. We lost Jack Chalker in February 2005; Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1999; Poul Anderson in 2001; Douglas Adams in 2001…sigh…at least their works live on.

sparta at 3:40 pm

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I got nothin’…..

I got nothin’ right now. No interesting pics - no witty remarks - nada, zip, goose egg, diddly-squat, zilch, zero, naught, void, zot, blank sheet, empty box, zippo…..

Okay - I guess I have one thing. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I happen to have some Irish in my background, though it’s fairly far back. I have always wanted to learn gaelic, but then I’ve always wanted to do a lot of things. LOL! Still, I do have this little gem to pass along:

Go raibh tú leathuair ar Neamh sula mbíonn a fhios ag an diabhal go bhfuil tú marbh.

It means: May you be a half hour in heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved that saying. Well, that one and this one: Not all who wander are lost. In fact, I think that one is my favorite. It’s certainly appropriate for AJ and I, isn’t it?

Well, Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh! (Which is, of course, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!)

sparta at 10:35 am

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3/10/2005

It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!

My iPod Shuffle arrived yesterday, and all I can say is: COOL COOL COOL COOL COOL! My biggest problem (at the moment??) is filling it up with music! 240 songs is a lot. I mean, you don’t really think that it would take that long to choose 240 songs, but it does. I’m not even sure I will fill the whole thing up with music. You can also use the Shuffle like a little thumb-drive. You can even choose how much of the 512Mb or 1Gb is used for music and how much for data. Another neat feature is the ability to create a Shuffle playlist in iTunes when the drive isn’t even plugged in. Then when you do plug it in, it makes all the changes on the Shuffle that you made. I guess you could call that “offline playlisting.” You can tell it to “fill ‘er up” with random music from your library OR you can pick and choose (drag and drop, baby) what you want to load OR you can create playlists and tell it to load from those….. Oh, and another thing that’s cool is that while you’re loading music - it can still be charging…from the USB port.

I know, I know, you probably think I sound like some kind of paid promoter for Apple - but I don’t care! LOL! It’s just so teeny - and cool! To give you an idea of the size of this thing… The box it came in is the size of the case that a 2-CD set comes in…of most of it is packaging! Um…you know those Minute Maid juice boxes - those are bigger. Drink coaster is bigger. Um…take a baseball card…the Shuffle is as long as one of those and half as wide. Actually, a pack of Bubble Yum is about right. Pretty small for a gizmo that can fit 1 Gb of information on it AND has the capability to play music, too.

The biggest complaint I’ve heard so far has been: it has no screen (I believe these people don’t even own one yet), but the point is: Apple already has several models with screens. After doing some research, Apple found that a lot of MP3 users didn’t really use/need the screen. They also found that a majority of their iPod users used the shuffle feature most when listening to music. Viola! So, are there lots of bells and whistles? Not on the unit itself, no. But do you really need a lot of bells and whistles to simply listen to music? I don’t think so. The interface on your Mac (or PC…shudder) is what gives you the most features. How can you go wrong? Cool features to fiddle with on the interface to set up a unit that’s simple to use!

Okay, okay, I’ll stop now. It’ll give me more time to go and play with my new toy! HaHa! I want to send out another BIG THANKS to my very sweet and loving hubby who bought this for me for our anniversary!

sparta at 8:46 am

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3/9/2005

Oops Oops

Turns out the Bunny Suicides thing was actually the work of Andy Riley. Michele did not realize this when she linked to it - nor did I. Someone was just posting this guy’s work WITHOUT giving credit. I strive greatly to give credit for everything I post (with some exceptions for some obvious reasons). So, the link goes to Penguin books - but you can find his stuff on Amazon and so on.

sparta at 1:30 pm

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3/8/2005

????

Due to some wierdness with posting, I am turning on admin approval for posts. You can post, it’s just I will have to approve it before it appears. Hope to resolve this soon.

site admin at 12:50 pm

Comments (1)

Hey, there!

Hey. Just realized it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Sadly I’ve been so busy with things that most of you would find uninteresting, I haven’t had time to sit down and post. I would expand upon that, but seriously, most of it is just the day-to-day madness that is my life at present (read that as house, kids, and hubby related stuff).

Some of you have been writing me to ask if comments about my knee were true. Yes, I am going to have an MRI sometime soon, and yes, my doctor has indicated I might need surgery. Am I looking forward to this? Yes and no. The no part is easy: I will need knee surgery, which is never pretty, with a period of time where I am out of commission as far as driving or anything, followed by weeks and weeks of physical therapy. I’m guessing that surgery + recovery = 6 to 10 weeks. The yes part is more complicated. My previous round of physical therapy was at a plateau; I was/am frustrated, and meanwhile my knee was/is hurting…possibly regressing. AUGH! If the cause of these problems can be fixed by a surgery, then the rest of my recovery can move forward…finally. I have been reading up on the procedures and the expected recoveries, and although it pushes my total recovery time further out in the long run, I’m not going to recover at all from where I am now.

Some of my favorite bloggers have quit blogging. I am still quite upset about this. I find it both pleasing and distressing that I can get so attached to people I’ve never met - and some that I’ve never even traded e-mails with, let alone talked to. Ah, the wonders of the Internet.

Now, finally, I have to leave you with some links from Michele’s blog, A Small Victory. Michele is a very interesting person, and I love reading her blog. I don’t post there as much as I probably should, but I hope she knows that I appreciate all the work she puts into her site. Two things. First, her own short fiction, and second, a link she posted to Bunny Suicides.

That about raps it up for now, kiddies. Behave and write more often, eh?

sparta at 12:31 pm

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3/2/2005

To add insult to injury

So, I’m on hold with the insurance company because they’ve messed up my birthday and so my doctor’s office couldn’t schedule my MRI (that’s right, now I have to have an MRI - and if the results aren’t snappy - I’ll probably be having surgery AUGH!)…and while I’m on hold - THE MUSAK SKIPS! That’s right, it’s bad enough I’m on hold - it’s worse that I’m listening to Musak crap - but now IT’S SKIPPING! Andrew found this funny. I mean how bad is that - that your company not only goes around randomly changing people’s birthdays - but your Musak is broken! I should have told the lady that answered, “Lady, your company’s Musak skips; you should quit now.” But I didn’t - I just went on with pre-planned comments - and got her to note that my birthday was wrong and blah blah blah. Maybe I should Maybe Maybe Maybe I should should call her back?

sparta at 9:13 pm

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