NOW I'm a PIMP!!!

I went to my parents house after work today to take the boys trick-or-treating. Around our house isn't good for doing that, because its a lot of steep grades and almost no sidewalks. I don't think anyone gives out candy around here. Anyway, I got there and my mom had a surprise for me, a purple pimp hat with leopard skin print band and brim edging!!! I love it!!! I wasn't going to do much dressing up, I had a glittery wig I was going to put on, but that was it. Well, with this bitchen' hat I had to do a little more. She had a wild print shirt, and of course some gold!!! I would have liked to have some proper shades to go with it, but the ones that I had there were too dark for going around at night in. Last year I had a gold tooth cap that I wore around all day, but I don't even know where it's at now. Oh well, I was just thrilled to pieces to have the hat!!!

The kids made quite a haul!!! A lot of people were giving out full sized candy bars. Someone had gummy eyeballs, and something I'd never heard of before, inside out reeses cups!!! A lot of the places went all out with the scary decorations, too.

Happy Halloween!!!

What a weekend!!! I swear, I need another one just to rest up from this one!!! Spent most of the weekend pretty much as I thought I would. Took the youngest up hiking on Friday, rebuilt my comp and my son's on Saturday, and took my mom out for her birthday today. I got some pretty good pictures on the hike, one of which I used on my wallpaper page. I didn't get a chance to do that until this evening, so my halloween themed wallpaper page only gets one actual day. I had planned to do pumpkin carving on Friday night, but that didn't happen. I don't even remember what I ended up doing, but that didn't get done then.

First thing I did on Saturday was to tear into my comp project. The hardware part went fairly quick and easy, but my old operating system didn't like the new motherboard slipped under it!!! It would do a reboot every time it got about halfway started. That's kind of OK, it had a couple things broken on it anyway. I used the hard drive I got from Granny when I had rebuilt her comp so I could pull stuff I wanted to save off my "real" hard drive afterwards. It took a while, but I got it handled. The only part that didn't work right was the onboard audio. I swear, I have more problems with that than almost anything else!!! Solved that by throwing in an old PCI sound card I'd picked up a couple weeks ago and disabling the onboard sounds. A lot of good it does having six channel audio when it can't even get one to work!!!

While the operating system was installing I did some work on my son's. Once again, it went fairly easily, except for operating system problems!!! I had a copy of Windows 2000 I'd wanted to put on there anyway, but it didn't want to install the way it was for some reason. Ended up having to re-install 98, then put 2000 over that!!! Oh yea, it was able to work all the drivers for everything on his, except for the onboard sound!!! Wish I'd been able to pick up a couple more of those PCI sound cards!!! I imagine they're not too expensive. I originally had picked that up for my youngest's computer, his sound won't get straight either!!!

Took my mom to Polly's Pies for lunch, that was some good chow!!! Got home tonight and carved our pumpkins. And that was my weekend.

I Love Thursdays!!!

One of the main perks of my job is that I do 4 ten hour days (although they're never only ten hours!!!) then get Fridays off!!! So, my Thursday is my Friday!!! Of course, by the time I've gotten through three ten-plus hour days, I'm pretty beat, and I do have school on Thursday nights. However, by the time I get home from that, and knowing I don't have to get up early the next day, I can usually go for quite a while after that, its a good feeling!!! Tonight I got myself a Rockstar energy drink before class so I wouldn't fall asleep in class. It worked rather well!!!

I'm taking my youngest up to Millard Campground tomorrow while the older is in school. He keeps wanting to go camping with me now. He's kind of young for it still, but I think we'll do an overnight in spring when the temperatures aren't getting down into the freezing 5o's overnight!!! Gonna hike up to the waterfall, I think he'll have just enough of it by the time we're done. Its been cloudy and feeling like it could rain at any time, but weather.com says its going to be clear most of the day. We'll see. Don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows revisited!!! Which reminds me, that looks like an amusing movie, maybe I'll check it out sometime. Or buy a bootleg DVD of it in a week or so. I've been wanting to take the boys to see the Wallace and Grommit movie, maybe that'll happen this weekend. Stream of consciousness brought to you by Rockstar... I could go all day and night and then some!!!

I got a new motherboard and processor the other day. AMD 64, baby!!! I'll be rebuilding my PC this weekend. Hadn't made mention here, but last weekend I had an incident with my PC, the video cut out, and I couldn't get it to come back for a while. I tried all kinds of things, swapped hard drives, stole my son's video card, finally swapped my hard drive into his box and tried that. Kind of worked, then I touched the heat sink on the CPU of mine and realized that it was burning up after being off for around 45 minutes!!! I'm thinking the fan on it is going out, it has been making some funny noises. Still haven't gotten my son's working right, I'm not sure wherein the problem there lies, but I'm fairly confident that swapping in my old motherboard and memory will fix it just fine!!! My new motherboard supports 8x AGP video, which should help my performance. I currently have an 8x video card, but the motherboard only supports 4x. Still works OK, but they say doing it like this can inhibit performance. It also uses PC3200 DDR memory, so I've picked up a 512mb module to go with it. All together, it cost $125. They had a full computer in the same ad for $269 with a DVD burner and Windows XP operating system. I had been thinking for the difference in price I should just get that, but then got to thinking it doesn't have an AGP slot, only onboard graphics, so it'd never do for all the games my son plays. That, and it only comes with 128mb of memory, its gotta be a dog!!! I can't even imagine trying to burn a DVD with only that, bet it would about choke!!!

I have dreamed of a black car that shimmers and drives

I have dreamed of a black car that shimmers and drives
Down the length of the evening to the carnival side
In a house where regret is a carousel ride
We are spinning and spinning and spinning...

That was one of the songs Counting Crows did last night, entitled St. Robinson and his Cadillac Dream. Interesting choice, and cool that they did it, that song has been stuck in my head for the past couple weeks!!! Here's the set list they did:

1 Round Here
2 Recovering the Satellites
3 Amy Hit the Atmosphere
4 Mr Jones
5 August and Everything After
6 Children in Bloom
7 Ghost Train
8 New Frontier
9 Black and Blue
10 Goodnight Elizabeth
11 St Robinson and his Cadillac Dream
12 Rain King
13 Chelsea

I've heard August and Everything After before, its something of a rarity, but I managed to download a recording of it, quite possibly from the very show I saw them perform it at when I first heard it. It was done with quite a bit of drum this time, different that what I'd heard before. Almost like a march is how it sounded.

Another point of interest is in "Rain King" they inserted portions of "Someone to Watch Over Me". They often put other songs in there, second time I saw 'em they put "Oh Susannah" in there, it was pretty amusing.

On the whole, most of the songs were changed, at least subtlety, from the album versions. A lot of the songs were, in my opinion, a little too much on the band and not enough orchestra. Not complaining, tho, I really enjoyed it!!!

I've got to go on a bit about the venue, too!!! This was my first time going to the Disney Concert Hall, excepting the trip I made down there to pick up the tickets. It's an impressive structure from the outside, and its even better inside!!! The walls and seats climb steeply, and it looks like most of the seats are good. The acoustics are excellent, as would be expected. The seats I had, I was concerned that wouldn't be that great. They are called "orchestra view" seats, meaning that they are behind the orchestra. Mine were on the very end of the fifth row. Doesn't sound too promising, does it??? Well, the conductor was positioned off to the left side of the stage and a bit back, and Adam was in the middle. He spent most of the show turned around facing the conductor to watch his cues, so he was facing right towards us!!! The crowd (I heard someone saying the place only holds 2,000 people) was a bit loud for the first couple of songs, but Adam told everyone that they just needed to chill and let the conductor be able to hear what was happening, and for the most part everyone did.

Oh yea, as I said in my previous post, I did manage to record the whole thing. Even the part at the beginning where they do an announcement that recording at this venue is prohibited!!! Still haven't figured out what to do about those pesky codecs but I have an idea of another way to deal with that problem. Its not the best recording, but its all there, and my latest version of Nero has some mixing and clean-up utilities I'm gonna try on it. Of course, it came out to be something like 87 minutes, so it can't all fit on one CD. I can probably edit a lot of the talking between songs out and get it shortened down enough to do that with.

Awesome Show!!!

Just got back from seeing the Counting Crows playing a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra!!! This is the fifth time I've seen them live now, and it defenetly ranks in the top five!!! Really, though, it was a great show!!! I may put more detail about it here later, but its late. I recorded most all of the show on my new MP3 player and was mostly wanting to get the tracks out of there and into my comp, and hopefully onto a disc. Looks like the disc thing isnt going to happen, at least right away. Neither my Nero nor the Windows Media Player will support burning them for reasons of unrecognized codecs. Come on now, they're just WAV files, what's the problem here??? If anyone has a clue about codecs, please pass it along.

The High Cost of Ink

I don't know what the catalyst for it was, but today my wife declared that she wanted to get another tattoo. A butterfly for her other ankle, only with its wings open on this one instead of a side profile. We were already going to be out doing some shopping today, and one of the shops was going to take us right by In The Skin where both my good friend Sammy and I had gotten out nipples pierced. I suggested we stop in and check what they have and how much. Turns out it costs $125 and they could do it fairly quickly, so she went for it. I think it came out great, and I really like the colors!!!

We did go to the wax museum yesterday, it was pretty cool. Everything it the gift shops was 50% off, and we ended up spending more there than we had on admission!!! There were a lot of people there, I imagine if it was like that on a consistent basis they never would have needed to close down!!!

This needed to be shared!!!

I was watching the news this evening when I got home, and I saw a story that just needed to be shared. Apparently a new lingerie shop has opened up, and the display in the front window has a mannequin lounging on her side. It is wearing a short kimono or wrap or some damned thing, and a see-through thong below that, and is facing ass-out towards the window!!! This apparently is causing an uproar among some people who are offended by plastic mannequin ass!!! Someone even called the mayor about it, and they had him on the news saying there really wasn't anything they can do about a mannequin!!! So there you go, now you know....

Happy Thursday!!!

Well, it's Thursday anyway, don't know how happy it really is. I'm currently in class, and decided to blog some since I can't get the next part of my project to work right. Besides, I must since I complained in my last post that no one was blogging!!!

Granny, on the left hand side of your blog there's a box towards the bottom that says "who gives kudos" and how many from whom. Hate hearing that you're suffering, but good to hear that you got your musicmatch working right for a change. One of these days I'm gonna make up a page to show ya how to make up an audio CD. Watch out for impending hurricanes down there girl!!!

Lilly, sorry to hear you had a rough day. Get yourself to bed early tonight and have a better one tomorrow!!! *Sending you good thoughts...*

Work today was largely uneventful. I got a chance to run my CNC today, but all I was doing was drilling holes. Actually that was pretty cool, I made up a fixture and was able to just undo two clamps and slap in fresh plates. Did ten of 'em like that. Oh yea, I worked on a program for a really cool project I've been wanting to make. My first G-job on a CNC!!!

No major plans for the weekend. There's a half price day going on at the junkyard, but don't really need anything there. My dad is going I think, maybe I'll go just to hang with him, but I doubt it. The wax museum is closing down at the end of the month, and I haven't been there for probably 25 or more years, so I'd like to do that before it closes. The admission is reduced to $5 I hear. I've got that TV I trash picked a while back that works fine, except the RCA inputs for the DVD don't seem to be contacting right. Maybe I'll open that up and see what I can see. Guess I've got a copy of Windows 2000 to try installing on my firstborn's computer, too. Damn, this sounds like it could be a very busy weekend!!!

I sure wish I was back on my vacation, I had SUCH a great time!!! Oh well, I'll just have to look forward to the next one!!!

Where Have All The Bloggers Gone???

Gee, I leave for a few days and I don't see any new postings when I'm back!!! Come on, what have you all been doing???

I had a great extra long weekend, with a bit of rain falling excepted. Damit, it wasn't supposed to rain this weekend!!! Oh well, I didn't get too terribly wet, except a couple of evenings in there. I'd love to do it again soon!!!

More Fun With Big Balls

I was going to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, but I had to share this, it's too funny!!! We have a customer in Arkansas who produces nail products. One we did recently was a kit that had a cuticle pen, a bottle of some sort of nail conditioner, and a couple of nail fizz balls. The girl from the company calls me up today and says she needs to discuss this package, and we're going to have to make some changes. She tells me that I'm going to laugh when I hear the problem, and proceeds to tell me that their balls are getting bigger!!! I was laughing, and I told her I can see why she said that I'd laugh!!! She proceeds telling me their problem is that when they're packing them out, their balls are getting busted!!! I'm silently laffin' my ass off and taking it all in, picturing the production guy who had to come in and bring it to her attention, etc. Had to share that with you, I was very amused!!!

I Just Can't Look!!!

I worked a 13 hour day today, and on the way home I caught a little of the Steelers game on the radio. At the time, they were up 7 to 0. Good start!!! Just before I went to get in the shower I checked again, and they were down 21 to 22 with only seconds of play left!!! I couldn't watch!!! (I had to get into the shower LOL) Checked it out after I got out, and they'd gotten in a field goal to take it!!! Whoo hooo, way to go!!! Then there was the game everyone was watching, the Angels taking out the Yankees... I don't have any especial loyalty there, but they are something of a home team, and there is that rally monkey, so I was pleased by that too!!! For a guy who doesn't really follow sports, it was a good night in sports!!!

Kabila's Help Desk

Just read and replied to Granny's comments to my last post and realized I typed about as much for a reply as I normally do for a post!!! And I don't know, but kind of don't think, that when you reply to a comment it doesn't tell the commenter that there's been a reply to the comment!!! Soooo, thought I'd make a little post here and when Granny reads it, then she'll know for sure!!! How's that for chopped liver??? Oh yea, and now I have a slogan:

"Kabila's Help Desk, where we're not really much help at all!!!"

Or maybe I'll change it to:

"Kabila's Help Desk, where if we can't help you, you could be beyond help."???

I don't know, I'll put it up for suggestions!!! Love to hear your suggestions!!!

Good Day, Lazy Day

Now this is what a weekend day is supposed to be like!!! Woke up pretty late, and made a crock pot full of chicken chili!!! Sammy didn't make it up here, so that was kind of a bummer, but oh well. I got most of my stuff together for next weekend because usually I don't have any time during the week, so got that taken care of. Set my tent up in the yard and swept it out. Sprayed it down with fabreeze too, it was smelling a little ripe last time I used it. Did just enough yard work to not feel completely useless!!!

This evening was even better, got to chat with my ladies Granny and Lilly (or should I refer to Lilly as my GIRL??? LOL you had to be there) as well as Bob for quite a while, always fun. After they all went off to bed I tried my chili, it came out very good, but more soupy than the last couple times. The chicken meat came out REALLY good!!! Strangely enough, I wasn't too terribly hungry, but it still tasted like more!!! After that I updated my Wallpaper page, a decent one, but not one of my most inspired picks. At least I did something there to keep it fresh. I was tempted to use one of Steven Pinker's images, but I want to pace myself on using his stuff!!! Do just a little blogging and looking around (looked at ~DoOmEd To WaLk EaRtH AlOnE's~ page and blog for the first time in a while, Lilly, good restraint shown by saying nothing about her opinion of her father!!! LOL, not that I think you are of the same opinion or anything) I'm looking forward to more of the same tomorrow!!!

Oh yea, I heard today that my homeless sister is pregnant again... I don't even know what to say...

Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows

Been trippy weather the last couple weeks here. It usually happens like this towards the end of September where we get a little "Indian Summer" where it gets quite pleasant after having cooled down some. Towards the end of last week, tho, it heated up viciously, largely due to Santa Ana wind conditions (I don't remember their being a lot of those so far this year). Contributed to the many fires we've had out here. I could tell even before the weathermen said a thing about it because it messed up my sinuses. The first day I had some sneezing and a runny nose, but the next two days I woke up with terrible sinus headaches. Got better for a few days, then came back for the end of this week, too. The instructor of my class had taken an antihistamine and it had made him really sleepy. Better today though. Hope decent weather holds for a while, I'm taking a few days at the beginning of the week after this one and getting outta town!!! Gotta get my money's worth out of my wilderness pass. I'm really looking forward to it!!! Wonder if they're going to remember at my work that I've put in for vacation those days???

Lilly, thanks for sharing your "serious" blog with me!!! I think you're doing a good job with it so far, and I'll keep checking it out. I checked your ID number from that on Cool Numbers and it came out with a Universal Coolness Index of 96%, pretty good!!! Not that will come as too much of a surprise to you though, huh???

David Gray was on Letterman last night, and I recorded his performance of The One I Love. It was pretty cool, but my recording isn't the best, has a lot of static noises in the background.

I'm going to make more chili in the crock pot tomorrow. Got chicken this time for it, should be good. Sammy was talking about coming up tomorrow, that would be cool. He was talking about showing me how its done with the chili, guess we'll just see about that!!!

Must Be Sick

Yea, I must be sick. I woke up this morning at 4:10 and was done sleeping!!! This almost never happens to me, I'm usually dragging my ass into work late, and consider "morning people" to be sick in the head!!!

They're having me make that 4-up tool that was the first one I made again. They want to make the whole thing about 1/8" deeper, so I'm able to just make some mods to my programs and re-do the whole thing. I'm also cutting it in a 3/8" thick plate instead of 1/2" this time, and I finished all the cutting today. I'd taken my new mP3 player in yesterday to show it to Sammy and Rafi, and ended up listening to it while the CNC was doing the hard work. I was glad I had it with me!!! Brought it again today. Gotta get some new 'phones for it, it came with these little plastic discs about the diameter of a dime and slightly less comfortable!!! Interesting, I cut 4 cavities 10" square by 3/16" deep, plus all the detail and vacuum channeling on the back.... I took a bit more than half the metal out of it!!! It's amazingly light now!!!

Reggie the reptile in the Harbor City lake is in the news again, they just did a story that T-bone the gator wrangler from Louisiana said he's getting him TONIGHT!!! We'll see. Guess he finally got that liability insurance squared away. He had a group of Cajun musicians doing a song for him, it was pretty entertaining. There was an article in the weekly Outdoors section in that yellow rag I get, the L.A. Times about how if he wasn't caught soon, and didn't eat anyone's chilluns or beloved family pets, it would actually be good for the lake. Thin the ranks of non-native species in the lake and the overpopulation of ducks.

Lilly, don't worry too much about not being able to get your other blog working, ain't too much going on there. I keep posting there, exact mirror of the MySpace one, and it doesn't get the attention there. I get comments there, but they all seem to have links to other sites built in. Here's one of my favorites:
"I definitely don't have all the answers, but I know that as long as people keep sharing ideas like this, the truth will eventually reveal itself and maybe it can make a difference somewhere.
I think this blog rocks! Keep up the good work, I've bookmarked it and will definitely swing by again soon.
Feel free to pay a visit to my Canada immigration site. (linked, I didn't link it find it your damned self if you're that interested) It might not be your "cup of tea", but it covers Canada immigration related topics."
OK, I'll keep that in mind in my search for the truth and make a diffrence while on my life quest to immigrate to Canada, eh???

NEW TOYS!!!

Well, one new toy anyway!!! I picked myself up a little MP3 playa today after work. It was on sale for only $49.99, and had the one function that was pretty high on my list, the ability to record. It's only 512mb, but 512 is cool with me!!! It's tiny, just a little bigger than a bic lighter, and has a bunch of cool stuff it does. If you have a .lrc file to go with your MP3 or WMA file, it'll display the lyrics to the song as it plays. You can store any type of file on it as a flash drive. You can make phone number and address lists to display on it (in case you lose all the info in your cell phone, I guess). Took me a while to figure it out, because the one forward-backward slider it has also doubles as a push button. I'm very pleased with it, now that I've got it figured out tho. Main reason I'd wanted to get a recorder of some sort is because of the Counting Crows and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra concert I've got tickets for near the end of this month. I also picked up a network card there too, because they were only 99 cents, and you can never have too many network cards. Well, actually, I guess you could. In fact, I'd only need about 2 or 3 more to have too many!!!

They had a guy come in and work on my CNC last Friday, and he replaced the inverter bleed element that had heated up the one time the power had gone out, and declared everything to be fine. I turned it on when I got a chance this morning, and the screen still came out blasted with pixels. Seems like the guy had it running, he got the table all centered up and everything. I kept messing with it, but had no luck. The other CNC operator went in and moved things around inside later and got it going. He says to just not shut it down, just turn off the video and activate the emergency stop button. Seems like the wrong way to deal with it to me, but we'll see.

Oh Yea

I forgot in my post (as if it wasn't long enough) I did my typical weekend thing and updated my Wallpaper page this morning, and I know I always say this, but you GOTTA check it out this week!!! It's an AWESOME picture!!! I found it while I was looking for some clouds to use as a background for the flying page I was making for Sammy, and found it. It was taken by Steven Pinker from Harvard's Department of psychology. He's got a bunch of pictures posted there, and tell you what, that boy has some mad photog skillz!!! I highly recommend you check the rest out, if you are a photographer or enjoy great pictures!!!

The Latest and The Greatest

It's been an eventful few days, and boy have I missed my blog!!! LOL!!! Thursday I went back to work and tried my machine, still busted. I ended up cutting the final cut with a manual mill, it came out OK (which reminds me, I took a couple pics... now I'm gonna have to post 'em so you all can see) Installed it on the machine it's going on, and it went on like it was made for it!!! LOL!!!

Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about it, the parts fit in nicely and stuff. Then I started fixing the machine up (it was missing the wheels off the trays) and cleaning them up some (the whole thing was filthy) and put the sealing jigs on. Well, surprise!!! With the wheels on it, they're too tall to fit the parts under the head!!! Actually, they'd make it under BARELY but then they'd get stuck in the clearance holes!!! So I'm looking at it, and the maintenance guy is fixing the timer (the head would go down and not go back up) and decide to make a spacer under the cylinder to boost it up a little. Trying to take it apart, I see that it's got a sleeve that threads up into the cylinder, so I start screwing it up in there to shorten it up. It doesn't work, I don't know why. The customer they'd told he could pick it up at noon. I kept saying in response, "that's interesting" LOL!!! He showed up and saw what was happening and says he'll go for lunch and come back in a couple hours. Oh yea, the day before the owner had given me a drawing that he needed modified, he wanted by afternoon the next day. My bud Rafael found me at some point in there and says the owner had been looking for me about the drawing. I told him to tell him so sorry, its gonna be Monday. About 10 minutes later the owner and the sales guy come over and starts going on (nicely) about how he really needs to get this drawing to the customer. I (grubby up to my damned elbows) tell him, OK, you take over here!!! He gets a look at the situation and sends me away to draw. About 10 minutes later the salesman comes over and asks me to go take a look at what the owner's doing, cuz he didn't think he was doing it right!!! LOL!!! I was very amused!!! Anyway, I got back to the machine a while later, and end up deciding we need to extend and boost the whole top end up, and make up these adapter plates and bolt 'em on. The customer comes back, and he's helping out, too. He was just about the nicest guy, and he needs to get it back to their plant in Mexico so they can pack out 4000 pieces for in the morning. O yea, I learned a new word in Spanish, "Chiconada", which is doing something improperly but so it works, I think it's a similar connotation as "nigger rigging". I was taking off these springs and ended up launching the wrench about five feet in the air!!! We were trying to slide the jig trays under the head at one point to put things back together and activated the cylinder and kinda smashed the side of one of my fingers, and got the middle finger of the customer bad enough to bust his fingernail. Anyway, ended up not getting out of there until after 9 at night, missed class. But I did manage to get the machine going right!!!

The next day was Sammy's birthday, and as I said here before, I took him flying with my nephew. He declared it his best birthday ever, so I guess you'd call that a success!!! I got him some memory for his comp and installed it, he's now officially a 512'er!!! I took a bunch of pics, and put them on his computer, then re-sized some of them and uploaded him to his newly opened geocities site, and tried to put together a page for him, but the MS Frontpage it comes with is nothing like the one I'm used to. I could have done better just text coding it!!! I took and made a page this morning and mailed it to him with explicit instructions on how to upload it, but so far he hasn't. So, I uploaded it to mine because you all gotta see it, you can check it here. I wrote it from his perspective, but I think it's pretty accurate. After that, we went, along with his brother, to the go-cart place we'd gone to for my birthday. But, when we were signing in the desk guy asks Sammy if he's been drinking (guess the smell tipped him off) and he answered honestly, so the guy sent us packing. We went bowling instead, three games. We played for 5 cents a pin, and I ended up taking the first game, think I got 119. That's close to my best score!!! I shall not go into detail of the next two games, but suffice to say my game went downhill. It was a really fun day!!! Sammy kept going back and looking at the pictures, he was just beside himself. He wants to get his license now!!!

Granny, you gotta check out my response to Lilly's Saturday post, I'm sure you'll be amused!!! You have such trouble with your colors!!! Don't take it so hard!!!