Digital Brainwaves

I think I’ve discovered what it feels like to be both proud and disappointed at the same time.

Tonight, my office held a charity poker tournament, with the buy-ins for the tournament going to fund breast cancer research. 90 players, at 9 tables. Each table basically held its own tournament, and the winners at each table went on to play the final table.

The first player out, in last place, win a copy of Poker for Dummies.

The final player, winning the tournament, won the set of custom poker chips used to play the final table.

Everyone else gets… well, the satisfaction of knowing their buy-ins went to a good cause.

I finished…

Continue reading ‘Pride and Disappointment’ »

I was all set to try to write a Veterans Day piece, but Bruce “McQ” McQuain outdoes anything I’d write over at Q and O:

Most of the time, when you hear tributes to vets, they’re filled with the stories of those who’ve fought and suffered in combat and we see pictures showing the battle-weary combat vets which pointedly make the argument about the sacrifices veterans have made and continue to make.

They’ve fought in such places as Saipan and Guadalcanal in the Pacific, Normandy and St. Mere Eglise in Europe or Pork Chop Hill and the Chosin Reservoir in Korea or the I Drang Valley, Hue and the Ashau Valley in Vietnam. Now new names such as Fallujah, Najaf and Anbar are added to those which tell the tale of all who have paid the price for our freedom over the centuries and deserve the acclaim we give them. They’ve faced circumstances that we hope our children will never have to face and many have paid the full and ultimate price with their service

However, not all sacrifices are made on the field of battle. While infantry, armor and artillery are the combat arms - the tip of the spear - they, better than anyone, know how important the team that makes up the rest of the spear are to their success on the battlefield.

Have a read of the whole thing.

I’m in Le Roy, NY at the moment, soon to be checking in on some friends and their band, and should have some pictures available on Flickr tomorrow afternoon. In the mean time, being the day before Veteran’s Day, today is the 232nd anniversary of the formation of the United States Marine Corps. Be sure to salute a Marine this weekend.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, lighting at the bar wasn’t very good for photos, and I didn’t get anything worth posting. No pictures this time, sorry.

It was pretty tame in the grand scheme of things, but apologies all the same if i set off any content filters at work with the title.

Yvonne has been having trouble charging her cell phone battery lately.

It won’t always keep a charge in it after reporting itself as fully charged, and sometimes appears to drain while the phone is off. She didn’t want to have to pay Bell (her Canadian cell carrier) for a new battery, so she was opting to just live with it.

The other day, I took the battery off the phone to see what model it was, then looked back at the battery itself.

“Hey, Yvonne? Is the battery supposed to bulge in the back like that?”

———

Her new battery arrived in the mail yesterday.

Also, while it’s still the 7th, I’d like to send out a huge happy birthday to my friend Amanda from high school.  She probably doesn’t read this blog, but I hope she had an awesome day all the same.

Have a happy!

Yvonne and I have a sofa bed.

When we first started dating, I didn’t have a very big apartment, and thus had no room for a bed bigger than my existing twin size bottom-half-of-a-bunk-bed, so I got a used sleeper sofa from a friend for cheap. It proved to be rather uncomfortable to sleep on after a while, so we got a new one from Pottery Barn back in June 2006, which has served us quite well.

It’s built like most sleeper sofas are: the fold out bed frame has springs connecting trampoline-like to a canvas panel, upon which sits the mattress. At the top of the canvas, where the fold-up head section is, the canvas wraps around a thin metal rod, around which there are hooks that connect the top back to the bed frame.

Over the last few months, the metal rod has torn its way completely out of the canvas, leaving the panel completely unconnected on the top edge of the bed. Not very safe, and subtracts from the comfort level, as to avoid putting my head up too far where there’s no support for it, my feet now hang off the foot of the bed.

Continue reading ‘No, the whole thing.’ »

As usual, Scott Ott brings the funny on ScrappleFace today:

Just days after author J.K. Rowling publicly revealed that a fictional character in her Harry Potter series was secretly a homosexual, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald today empaneled a grand jury and vowed to find out who ‘outed’ Dumbledore, the imaginary headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Mr. Fitzgerald is best known as the prosecutor who spent two and a half years, and millions of dollars, failing to identify who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA spy, although he knew the names of columnist Robert Novak’s sources before the probe began.

So, there’s a lot of talk in the technology news corner about the latest iPhone software update from Apple, that upgraded the phone to version 1.1.1. A lot of the comments I’ve read and heard are about how Apple is deliberately attacking hackers and unlockers who’ve opened up their iPhones to use third-party applications (called jailbreaking) and unlocking the SIM lock to use non-AT&T SIM cards.

I posit that there’s a simpler answer, one that’s a smidge more reasonable than that floating about the blogosphere and media.

Granted, it’s not as “sexy” as “Apple attacks hackers” so it won’t make headlines, but I think it makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Continue reading ‘iPhone 1.1.1: malicious intent?’ »

“The Skipper” of one of the blogs I read regularly, Allan Kelly of Barking Moonbat Early Warning System, was found dead in his home late last week. Condolences to his friends and family.

Wedding 041
Originally uploaded by Pauley2483.

Finally uploaded, captioned and tagged all the pics from Miranda’s wedding last weekend. Come have a look on the photoset page on Flickr.  The pictures are all released as Creative Commons.