You've gotta give value to get value: "Bidder pill for Congress"

Shorter version of the below story...and no reg required.

Taking Aim At Soros Is Hardly Politic: "'They could use some friends on the Hill right now, and this is not the way to make them,' Davis said yesterday."

Long story short, a Republic Congressman from Virginia is against the Nationals being sold to somebody who's been critical of President Bush. Read the article to see the BS reasons why.

Hitting to all fields...

• We got a new car...

I think we got a good deal on it but who knows. We did pay what Edmunds says you should pay for what we got, so it's all good. Bargaining was kind fun, too. We got a good amount for the Cougar, which was nice.

• Boots went to the vet this past week. At first we thought there might be something seriously wrong with him. A second visit (and an EKG) later and it ended up he's fine.


• We load up the new car Thursday early morning to drive up to IL. (ugh to the drive)


• Cubs took two out of three from the White Sox at the Cell, thankfully

More later.

Thanks to some quick thinking, the Starburst situation has been remedied...for a time.



One box will of course be frozen in carbonite for posterity.

So far today I've had two calls from Omaha Steaks (a constant around here) and one from a car dealer we visited this week.

I really need callerID on the phone up here.

Warp Speed ahead...

Release the hounds!

For the last two days my Tivo'd PTI has been a half hour of the College World Series and then Sportscenter.

What the hell?

CNN.com - Police: Lions free kidnapped girl - Jun 21, 2005

At first glance I thought this would be the *Detroit* Lions.

Chicago Tribune news : Local news: "'But if we can save one person from going through the suffering that Michelle and Maddi had to endure, maybe we make an effort,' he said."

Are you KIDDING me? Hell, let's just ban open flames all together! Because if you can save one person from getting burned...

Disturbing news from Michelle yesterday. Seems that they've changed my favorite candy, California Starbursts. Now they're 'Baja California' with some junky kinds of different flavors. Now, I may like this new kind, maybe even better than the California kind, but I'll never know, because I'll NEVER try them because I'm protesting Starbursts.

Court even went to Sam's (at my request) today to pick up a few cartons of the California Starbursts. She reports that they only have the Baja kind.

This is not good.

Had a very nice Father's Day yesterday. Court made me a great breakfast of french toast, bacon, and toast, and I had some of the Canadian maple syrup that I brought back. It was all fantastic.

We then headed to the Hyundai dealer to test drive the Santa Fe. We were both very impressed--even more so with the salesman who was not pushy at all. (maybe he just thinks we're not buying...)

We then headed to Epcot for dinner at Le Cellier in Canada. To kill some time (and cool off and relax since it was hotter than hell) we went on Spaceship Earth and Journey into Imagination. Right outside Journey into Imagination (figment ride) there were a bunch of Disney characters out for photo ops and autographs. Now, don't get me wrong, it's nice that they do that, but somebody explain this to me? How in the world do these characters go together?

• The cat that wears rags from Pinocchio--I think he meets up with him on Pleasure Island


• Some creature that looked like the above but was a different color and shorter


• Pluto


• Robin Hood


• Timon

Timon was the kicker. How the hell do they pick out characters to appear together? Just pull them out of a hat or something? Why not 4 Aladdin characters? Make them all be from the same movie not just some mix that makes NO sense. Disney does this all the time.

Dinner was superb, as always. We had maple creme brule and rasberry sorbet for desert. woo hoo!

I'm just tired. There's no other way to say it.

Bleed Cubbie Blue :: A Chicago Cubs Blog: "Now, a show of hands, please. Before the season began, how many of you thought the Cubs would go into Yankee Stadium on Friday, June 17, with a better record than the Yankees?"


How cool is that???

• Republic Commando game review

What can I say about this game? It's one of the better shooters I've played in a long time. Some FPS games team with with a 'squad' that fights along with you. For some games these guys are pretty useless. They don't do much damage to enemies and frequently get in your way and then bitch and moan when you accidently blast them. For Republic Commando, your squad IS the game.

You play as Delta Squad, and you play the Squad leader. He's voiced by Temuera Morrison, the guy who played Jango Fett--and thus, the face and voice of every clone trooper and Boba Fett. Your squad consists of yourself and 3 other people. Each of the three have their own specialties but any trooper can perform any task. You can give standard orders during combat (form up, defend, etc...) but at certain locations (like a good covering spot, for example) you can order them to cover you, launch grenade attacks, launch sniping attacks, or heal themselves.

The orders are given by running your crosshairs over these 'hotspots' until you see a little holo-outline of the trooper performing the task. Clicking makes the trooper perform this action. It's a pretty innovative function, I thought. You can also make some small decisions like going through a door by slicing it (hacking into the controls silently) or performing a door breach, much like SWAT teams do now.

I really enjoyed this game. It didn't seem very long, mostly because it's pretty difficult to actually 'die'. If you go down in battle you can order one of your squad to bring a Star Warsian defibrilator to revive you. Same goes if one of them goes down. You only really die if the whole squad dies. I thought it was an interesting choice that you do not take command of another member of your squad if you die. It's a little more 'realistic' this way I guess.

Gameplay was fun. Another bit of 'realism' it had was the fact that you can only carry 2 weapons at once, along with your sidearm. Unlike some games where you can half about a half-dozen heavy weapons...you have to wonder how in the hell they can all be carried. At least the Star Trek Elite Force games can claim they use a mini-replicator or something.

This doesn't really touch on the prequel films at all...you do take on some of General Greivous's bodyguards at one point, and you do see the General himself from a distance. Also, you can fight alongside the Wookiee Tarful on Kashyyyk...so I guess it's kind of the start of the battle that they show in Episode III. A lot of the battling is against battledroids and trandoshan slavers. You do have a mission in a damaged Republic Star Destroyer that's pretty neat.

I would have preferred a level or two where you fight alongside a Jedi, but this game was mostly based on the importance of the squad itself, so I can see why that was not included.

All in all, a great game, and one I do not regret paying full price for. That's always nice.

• New computer possibilities (it's a new Cold War, baby!)

While I was in Canada last week my new computer parts arrived. I spent Friday night and Saturday building it. I had to go out and buy a new power supply because my mobo has a 24-pin (BTX or EATX I guess) connection and I only had a 20-pin (ATX) connection. I then pieced my system together. The heatsink (cooling system and fan on top of CPU) didn't really fit onto the CPU the first time and in putting it on I thought I might have damaged the stock thermal material that was on the bottom of the hetasink. This material has to be on there perfectly so it allows the heat to pass through from the CPU to the heatsink. A mistake here could lead to a destroyed CPU, and that's costly. I removed the stock material with a Q-ip and then put some arctic silver thermal conducting grease between the heatsink and the CPU.

I got to power it on...and it it looks like it powers up for a half-second and then does nothing. I then turn it off and on at that point and nothing happens. I disconnect power cables and turn off master switch on PSU, then reconnect everything and turn it back on and the loop repeats itself starting with the half-second of power.

I checked the power switch/mobo connections and it seems they were connected correctly. Also, there was no tell-tale (thankfully) smell of burnt electronics at any time.

I thought it might be an issue with the new power supply, that is, it not being powerful enough to power my system. There aren't many components to power, as I only have a gfx card as a slotted card. Also, two HDs and a CD drive along with 3 internal fans.

I tried removing my new (lighted) round IDE cables in hopes that they were drawing too much power, but that wasn't the case. Even with regular gray-ribbon IDE cables it did not power up. I posted to the Raven boards and usenet with my problem...the advice was to bare-bones the system and see if that helped. It did. Everything powered on fine. I was happy to see the CPU powered up normally and didn't smoke, whine, or explode. That's always nice. I added things back into the system one by one, until I came upon the blue lighted case fan that I have. No dice. Remove it, fine. Add it back in, no dice. It's possible the fan has a short of some sort, I don't know. I replaced it with a normal fan I had to spare and it worked fine.

System is up and running now. The new mobo has a bunch of USB ports and 5.1 outputs. Might be time for some new speakers in the future. System is performing very nicely. All data is migrated over from the old computer. My 250GB drive, which wasn't reporting it's full size because the Western Digital software utility I had to enable that wouldn't do it since the drive was the system drive (drive windows is installed on). That drive is now my 'storage' drive and a drive I got back from Western Digital to replace a failed drive is now my system drive. I had a problem with reboots yesterday (due to a drive conflict of some kind) but it seems that is cleared up now after installing what I assume was a malfunctioning software package.

I ran the 3D benchmarks to see what my score would be. While it's not as high as Arnold's it's still a great deal higher than my previous machine did. I had originally meant for this machine to have two video cards, but I had ordered the wrong cards from newegg and I'll have to return them. I went to CompUSA on Saturday to get the correct cards but only got one since it was $100 more than the ones I'd gotten from newegg. I'll buy a second in the coming months when we figure out what's going on with buying a new car and house.

• Arizonification

We went to Arizona for Beth and George's wedding. A good time was had by all, I think. The hotel and church were very nice. While we did not get to see Beth & George's new house or Uncle Bruce & Aunt Angie's new house, we will some time in the future. B&A left for Arizona the other day and arrived yesterday. They close on their new house tomorrow. While I know it was tough on the family for them to leave (and tough on them as well) I wish them the best in Arizona. I know it is hard to move cross-country away from your family and friends. They will have Beth and George (with a baby on the way!) there with them, so that's good. Their new house does look very nice. I just can't imagine their old house in IL (which I practically grew up in) empty of their things and them themselves. It's very strange and sad. Good luck to them.

007 373 5963

Word.

CNN.com - Researchers: Dolphins use sponges as�tools - Jun 6, 2005

Welcome to the beginning of the end for humanity, baby.

In Canada now. Very nice here, so far. The guys I'm working with will be here in 20 minutes or so. At the airport I had to go through the same stuff I did when I arrived in the Dominican Republic. On the airplane they pass out customs forms and you give them to the customs people when you get to the airport, along with your passport. They didn't stamp my passport which stunk because I thought it'd be cool to get another stamp. The girl who worked the customs desk (just like the ones they had in Miami) looked right out of Le Cellier in Canada.

On the way to the hotel I noticed a few things. There's a giant windmill on the coast...one of the white wind-farm looking things, not a Holland type. :) Also, while there are ads on the sides of the expressway, they're not crappy looking ones like we have in the US. These are actually 'sculpted' into the hillsides on either side of the expressway. It's a great way to get the ad across and make the sides of the expressway stay nicely cut and manicured. I thought it was pretty sharp looking.

Well, more later.

Well, it's about that time...

• Episode III (which was great)

Ok, Episode III. Well, having read the novel (parts that I just couldn't wait to see) and read the 'Making of Revenge of the Sith' book, as well as playing the Episode III game on my new xbox, there wasn't much to be surprised about with seeing the film. That's not to say I wasn't looking forward to seeing it...in fact, I really couldn't wait.We had tickets for two showings on that Thursday. 10:30am, which was a digital screening at the Disney West Side theaters, and 10:30pm at the Muvico 'Giant Screen' IMAX theater. We got there about an hour and a half early for the first showing and there was already a good-sized line.The first two guys in line had brought a laptop and were watching the Clone Wars - Season On DVD. That's dedication. They were even watching it in the theater before the movie started. For those of you playing along at home, I call that 'going too far'.

The movie itself...the opening sequence was absolutely amazing. It was a VERY large space battle, one that will help me better visualize the space battles that show up in Star Wars books (expanded universe) all the time. Lots of great lightsaber battles in this one. Anakin/Dooku, Obi-Wan/Grievous, Mace/Palpatine, Yoda/Palpatine, Anakin/Obi-Wan....absolutely amazing. The speed was fantastic. Nick Gillard did a hell of a job with the choreography of those battles. A friend was thinking they were computer-enhanced in terms of speed, but stuff in the 'Making of' book makes me think that the actors (or stunt people, in a few cases) were just that fast.

The story really doesn't have any slow points...maybe a bit of a slow-down when it comes to Padme and Anakin I should say. There really aren't any of the boring 'senate' scenes that show up in the other two prequels.

There's really only one senate scene and it covers the conversion of the
Republic into the Empire...it comes right along with the scene of the Jedi purge and it's very powerful. The senators clapping while the Emperor basically proclaims himself top banana for life while padme says "This is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause" was pretty telling--especially in terms of what's going on in our country these days. I have a few favorite scenes...Obi-Wan confronting Anakin on Mustafar while Anakin and Padme are talking...Yoda doing a few cool things like throw two Royal Guards against a wall with a flick of the wrist and throwing his saber into the chest of a clone trooper then leaping onto his chest and pulling it out. Awesome. At the end of the film everybody ends up where they belong until the beginning of Star Wars (A New Hope), basically.

The dialogue was a lot better than I'd thought it would be, it's the best of
the prequels. It seems a lot of the clunky lines that are present in the film in the 'Making of...' book got cut out. Some bad ideas were dropped (young Han Solo? No thanks) and some good ones were too (Darth Plagueis being responsible for Anakin's birth? How cool is that) but that's too be expected. Artoo has some GREAT moments and Threepio is the Threepio of the original trilogy rather than the prequels...he just seemed more like 'Threepio' in this film...and it can't just be the normal Threepio gold-coloring showing up for the first time. Even the voice seemed more Threepio-like even thought it's been Anthony Daniels throughout the whole saga.

I thought the film was great. It met expectation and probably surpassed them. It's hard to judge these things and I'm extremely biased. I've seen it three times and haven't been board at any point. There just isn't time to be bored during Episode III.

• Hooper and giving him a smidge more responsibility
  
  

Ok, so before we left for AZ last week Hooper had really been coming into his own and growing up in terms of being housebroken and not destroying anything in the house. He's well-behaved and I've wanted to give him some more trust around the house. Basically, penning him up in the kitchen rather than his cage when we leave, stuff like that. A lot of nights where I fall asleep in the chair he falls asleep on the couch and stays there for hours until I get up to go to bed and then I put him in his cage. I was afraid that being at the breeder's while we were gone would 'break' him, or get him to pick up bad habits at least. Though I'm not sure they followed all of our 'rules' for him while they had him, he didn't come back psycho or anything. He will need to be groomed since he was around other dogs and now he stinks like a dog.

I figure a few more weeks and we can stop keeping him in the cage at night. Also, I usually have him penned in the front bedroom here with me while I work. If he does his business while we're out getting the mail I just give him free roam of the house for the rest of the day. He's taken to eating Boots' food now so I'm not sure how fast we'll move with that. We'll see.

• Neighbors and their wrong-ness
  
  

The other day our left-side neighbor (looking at the house) came up to me and asked me to be sure to pick up after our dog. I said, "We always pick up after him" and she seemed to dismiss that saying she'd found dog mess over by the side of their house and stuff...pretty much insisting I was lying about picking up after him. Well, two things. First of all, I *ALWAYS* pick up after the dog, even though I really HATE doing it and it's pretty gross. EVERY TIME I take him out I take 2 of these brawny paper towels napkins out with me and I pick up whatever he does and cart it back to the house. This happens every time. Court does it too. So you can imagine how much fun it is to cart that crap (literally) back to the house and flush it down the toilet just to have somebody accuse you (even in a nice way) of not doing that.

Secondly, he doesn't even do his stuff over by their house. He does
that twice a day...usually by the FAR side of our pond walk (of course, so I have to carry it ALL THE WAY BACK) and the second time is during our night walk where he always goes within 3 feet of the same spot that's way on the other side of our complex. He doesn't crap anywhere near their house. She should try blaming the damn raccoons for her crap problems.

More on that other stuff later...

Hearing the footsteps...

He's just a boy. Obi-Wan can no longer help him.

More on the Cold War heat-up later.

Woo hoo! Cubs just won their fifth in a row!

I'm tired.