This weekend, I have been witness to what has been a very exciting week in baseball for the Cubbies. At this moment, the Cubs are snockering the Pirates 8-0 and the Braves are whacking the Brewers 7-4. At the end of the day, the Cubs may be 3.5 games into 1st place with 6 games to go.

It’s rather perverse, they’re doing the chop in Wrigley.

So, I may as well say it now and jinx it so that I’ll be disappointed before the playoffs instead of 6 outs before the World Series…I think this is the year 🙂

Very nice weekend, besides all of this Cub goodness. Friday night, I played poker with a number of friends. I lost my shirt, but thankfully we were only playing for chips with nothing behind it.

Saturday was smashing, too, with a party that eve for Matt Pierce’s 30th birthday. Poor bastard, hitting 3 decades. The hippies can’t trust him anymore. Fortunately, I still have 1.25 years until I have to face that 😀

Fall hit early this morning 😀 I’m all about that; it will always be my most favorite season ever.

I feel like I was just killed and ripped to pieces by alien whores…

Seemed like a particularly short one this time around.

Saturday was full of volleyball goodness. It was quite fun. I was sore yesterday afternoon from it. I haven’t had the opportunity to play so much, but it really is one of my favorite sports to play 😀 Baseball being the first, of course.

Saturday night, Ruthie and I saw Shaun of the Dead and Flushed Away. Both are quite awesome; it was Ruthie’s first time seeing Shaun of the Dead and neither of us had seen Flushed Away. I really liked Flushed Away very much.

I loaded Linux on my Palm TX. It’s pretty interesting, although it does seem to reset at least a couple of settings that I’ve seen so far, namely date & time. WiFi and Bluetooth don’t work at this point, but it is kinda cool to play around with. It’s basically a dual boot-type setup. I can start Linux from Palm OS and then reset the device to get back into Palm OS.

w00t! Another weekend 😀 I’m all about that. Too bad it’s not another 3-day one, though *sigh*

So, I’ve been converting movies for my 360. I downloaded Sanctuary this week. It’s a very nice web series, thus far. It stars Amanda Tapping from SG-1/Atlantis. It’s in HD, too. They’re pretty short episodes, 17-20 minutes long. I’ve seen only one episode, but so far it reminds me of The X-Files and Underworld. There’re 8 episodes, and I’m up to number 6 in conversion.

I’ve gotten my first movie off of Unbox from Amazon; A Dog’s Breakfast, the murder-mystery/comedy that stars a bunch of people from SG-1/Atlantis. I must be on some Stargate star kick or something. haha. Anyhoo, Unbox looks nice, but too bad it doesn’t deal out HD content. I’m about to download the pilot to The Bionic Woman from there (the new version by David Eick), which is free for who knows how long.

This Unbox thing is a very interesting concept. I had been pondering getting a TiVo, but this may eliminate that desire. Why pay a bottomless subscription fee (basically rental every month, fixed-fee despite how much you do or don’t use it) when you can purchase as you need it? Mind you, it’s not perfect…but, it seems that all of the series I am interested in are on there. Plus, if there’s any truth to ratings slumps because of TiVos (personally, I think it’s hooey, but I don’t know that for sure), then this seems like a great solution–they get their moola and I get commercial-less content and help to keep the series going. Between Unbox and XBL Marketplace, I might have all the bases covered.

Ruthie has finally seen the season 3 finale of BSG. She seemed most impressed 🙂

Volleyball shall be played today, which is nice. I’m all about some of that. I’m kinda meh when it comes to volleying, but I’m dynamite when it comes to serving 😀

The Cubs are in 1st place by 1.5 games with 15 games to go. Oooooh, if they could hold out. hehe. If they can’t, they probably won’t win the wild card because the Central Division is particularly weak in comparison to all of the others of the MLB. In any case, no matter how they end up doing, it’ll be better than last season–which is good, and maybe it’ll lead to good things next year. Story of a Cubs fan’s life 😉 lol.

How’s about this lil diddy from Robot Chicken? 😀

Boy, I sure do miss MST3K *sigh*

98th percentile. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry 🙂

I hardly have a big ole pile of privilege. I have debt like you wouldn’t believe, I’m surprised I can make my house payments, student loan payments and any other credit-type debt beyond that. I’m not on the winning end of any side. I’m barely hanging on, which I think is where most college graduates end up, particularly just out of the gates. I live in a neighborhood that is a hearty mix of black and white, since a lot of liberal democrats would take issue with race. We get along. There is no rampant hate.

I am not anti-choice. I want people to make the right decision. And, of course, our visions of that right decision can be what differ. So, who’s right? Should choice be limitless? Should any moral consequences be cast asunder because it doesn’t make us feel good to ponder consequences to our actions? I don’t believe I’m part of the problem, at all. I don’t believe anyone generally is part of the problem. Personally, I don’t think there should be any laws either favoring or disfavoring things like abortion on the books. I must be another fucked up excuse for a Republican.

I think, in a way, that socialized health care is an inevitablity. I think, though, that people should have the option. They should be given a choice; do I want to pay into a government-run health care organization, or do I want to pay into a private-run health care organization? I think they should be mutually exclusive, or perhaps one supplementing the other. But, people should individually have that choice.

But, hate is what drives so much of this. Hate on both sides. How the hell we survived the revolution as a nation is beyond me, much less a civil war. I want there to be more to life than hate.

Because, you know what? Christianity is all about love. People forget that, both agnostics and even Christians themselves; people on the left and the right. Christianity is not about dictating to people and finger-wagging…it’s all about living how God and Christ want us to live. Both sides, Democrat and Republican, need to remember that. And I don’t believe for one fraction of a second that Christ wanted us to do that to each other.

And I do hope that you don’t truly hate me because of my opinion. We’re all entitled to them. I just think that no one should dictate to anyone; we all have our conceptions of how things should be, of how people should act and what they should support and what support of something should or shouldn’t mean. But, in the end, it’s all trite. Love should be color blind, it should be gender blind. Life shouldn’t be all about worry, animosity and vitriol.

I wouldn’t dare dictate to anyone what to do with their bodies, minds or souls. I do, however, have the power of speech and therefore the ability to inform them that I believe that they’re misguided. That, in itself, is not evil…to me, anyway. It’s love.

Peace.

I’ve been converting video all day on my day off. Of course, I haven’t been sitting here watching it all day. But, two episodes of Galactica are now encoded to wmv from avi so that I can play it via Media Center on the XB 360. For some reason Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, neglected to give the XB 360 DivX or XviD decoding capability. Go figure 😛

But, I’ve been using Windows Media Encoder to change my video to suit the hunk of junk. It has taken all day to do three episodes of Galactica. I think the last will finally be done before bed, after which I have one more which will probably go a good bit of the day tomorrow.

It’s upscaling 608×336 vids to 1280×720. It’s doing a rather good job, me thinks. I’ve played part of two episodes and they look SD broadcast quality–which isn’t too stinkin’ bad, even on my 720p TV.

So, the Ruthie shall now be able to see the last 4 (and most important) episodes of the season 😀 w00t!

And thus begins Geekfest ’07. lol. Actually, I have to get through a day of work, which includes a demo I’m not looking forward to. Bleh! But, after work, Ruthie and I shall be headed to Atlanta. I bet traffic in B’ham is going to be a joy 😛

There’s going to be so much to see there, and so little time to see it all. My Jedi costume has been mended by the lovely Ruthie, the creator of the awesome threads; it had seen lots of action at the last D*C we went to in ’05, so it certainly needed a lil fixing.

Anyhoo, should be a hoot. Pictures shall most certainly be posted, at some point. I’m pretty sure Cristine said she purchased Internet access, so reports shall come in semi-daily 🙂