An actor playing Chewbacca throws out the ceremonial first pitch prior to a game between the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays Fenway Park in Boston, Wednesday Sept. 28, 2005.
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Damn, it figures. Right when I finally have an inspiration to post something up on dailygrowl.net, my host (dreamfusion.net) coughs up and dies.
Okay, well, I suppose my idea can wait. It's nothing groundbreaking, for sure. More of a... prolifically updated, general purpose blog. But with real content! Or at least, that's the plan. We'll see how that works out. I'll be taking a new approach this time around and, more than likely, use a WordPress publishing system to power the thing. I figure content first, and I can engineer it into a full-fledged site later. Flashy sites are nothing without content anyway, and a blogging system is one of the easiest means of publishing content, so it makes perfect sense. And I'll be using WordPress instead of Drupal this time around just to avoid the headache with reverse-engineering their code; WordPress is more widely used, and thus it has somewhat better support for the... less technically inclined.
But enough about baseball throwing Chewbacas and ambitions with presses of the words, lets talk about something quite a deal more interesting. If you happen to be me, that is...
Much to my surprise, no one seems to have caught on to this minute fact, which is in fact, a very good thing, for me. Nonetheless, I figure since I have abjectly failed to produce any kind of recount of my trip to Europe, aside from a few sessions from 'net cafes and boats in the middle of the Adriatic, I'll let unto you a fact that few shall ever know... and now that I've captured your interest, I'm sure you'll be greatly disappointed by what it actually is...
I have a spotless driving record. I've never been ticketed, pulled over or involved in any kind of accident. So despite what some may tell you with regards to my driving skills, (primarily by those who lack any of their own), I consider myself to be a particularly safe driver. In an automobile, anyway. Take away the car and all bets are off.
So, cutting to the chase, the first week of arrival in France, a tiny municipal (not even worthy of classification as a hamlet) of Gras, a little remote place naer some river who's name I don't recall, I was cruising along alone the hilly one-lane, sometimes paved roads neighboring my friend's remote abode. Now I've never ridden a 'quad' before (ATV, for the uninitiated), so I figured, simple, right? Just an oversized Power Wheels. And I got a hang of it in no time.
Long story short, I drove incredibly recklessly (oh and on a tangent, the French are ridiculously aggressive drivers on these one-lane two-way roads - it's a miracle I wasn't mowed down first) exploring parts of the countryside, atop a large hill. I was probably cruising at around 30-something MPH on some relatively tough terrain when I realized immediately that I was going too fast to maintain control of the quad and I would not be able to slow down fast enough to regain control before swerving out of control. So, without so much as pausing to think twice, I hurled myself off the bike and ran it into a hedge off the right.
I don't recall whether the quad actually ran over me or not, but I do remember that I had managed to flip it off the road, and that I hadn't been burned by the tail-pipe. No one was in the vicinity (as no one should be in the middle of nowhere) so I was pretty pleased with myself... until I realized my hand was bloodied with a nice layer of ripped flesh bleeding quite nicely. I cursed at myself got back on the bike (which was still running quite handily; the safety mechanism for turning off the bike in such a scenario [rider falling off] had been recently removed due to it's inconvenience), and returned down-hill, still in a haze of sorts, but at a much slower crawl. My host family, was in shock - visibly in much more pain over the ordeal than I was, and I was shortly afterwards taken to the house of a local who worked as a nurse to receive such treatment as I did. And thus, I spent the first week of our Eurail trek with a generous amount of gauze on my left hand, a scar below my chin, a bruise on my forehead, and a bottle of aspirin in my pocket. As if an Borean tourist didn't stand out enough already...
(While still in Gras, I was then-on strictly forbidden to ride the quad, although the 11-year sibling did regularly without incident.)
By the time I returned home, none of this was apparent. Just as well, for I was able to spare myself the embarrassment of explaining the debacle to my parents.
Moral of the story?
And don't entrust me alone with power toys... I do stupid things when no one's watching... >.>
"After all, you're only human."
Holy crud, this is the longest entry I've written myself since... ever!
There's still yet one last thing that I'd like to mention, and really is the cause for starting this entry in the first place.
Awesome book. I carried this one with me all over Europe but never actually got into it, (ended up reading another fine novel, Richard Adams' Watership Down), but since I've picked it up, I haven't been able to put it down. Roughly 2/3 through it as I speak and I've got to say... it contains some of the most humanistic writing I've ever read in the fantasy genre, or any for that matter.
It's a very strange book, written for a ninche that doesn't exist - a type of romance-fantasy novel, but with gracious amounts of canniablism. But at the same time, you can empthasize with the antoganists - excellent character development - and it's even managed to give me that dreaded warm and fuzzy feeling that is universally hated and abhored by all.
Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but if you can get into it, it's a real treat. I'll probably dwelve more into it on here once I've finished it myself.
Additionally, I found recently that this author maintains a current LiveJournal![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
papersky, and has recently finished writing the sequel to it, which makes her doubly awesome in my book.
Ok, shutting up.
read more | digg story
Damn, it figures. Right when I finally have an inspiration to post something up on dailygrowl.net, my host (dreamfusion.net) coughs up and dies.
Okay, well, I suppose my idea can wait. It's nothing groundbreaking, for sure. More of a... prolifically updated, general purpose blog. But with real content! Or at least, that's the plan. We'll see how that works out. I'll be taking a new approach this time around and, more than likely, use a WordPress publishing system to power the thing. I figure content first, and I can engineer it into a full-fledged site later. Flashy sites are nothing without content anyway, and a blogging system is one of the easiest means of publishing content, so it makes perfect sense. And I'll be using WordPress instead of Drupal this time around just to avoid the headache with reverse-engineering their code; WordPress is more widely used, and thus it has somewhat better support for the... less technically inclined.
But enough about baseball throwing Chewbacas and ambitions with presses of the words, lets talk about something quite a deal more interesting. If you happen to be me, that is...
Much to my surprise, no one seems to have caught on to this minute fact, which is in fact, a very good thing, for me. Nonetheless, I figure since I have abjectly failed to produce any kind of recount of my trip to Europe, aside from a few sessions from 'net cafes and boats in the middle of the Adriatic, I'll let unto you a fact that few shall ever know... and now that I've captured your interest, I'm sure you'll be greatly disappointed by what it actually is...
I have a spotless driving record. I've never been ticketed, pulled over or involved in any kind of accident. So despite what some may tell you with regards to my driving skills, (primarily by those who lack any of their own), I consider myself to be a particularly safe driver. In an automobile, anyway. Take away the car and all bets are off.
So, cutting to the chase, the first week of arrival in France, a tiny municipal (not even worthy of classification as a hamlet) of Gras, a little remote place naer some river who's name I don't recall, I was cruising along alone the hilly one-lane, sometimes paved roads neighboring my friend's remote abode. Now I've never ridden a 'quad' before (ATV, for the uninitiated), so I figured, simple, right? Just an oversized Power Wheels. And I got a hang of it in no time.
Long story short, I drove incredibly recklessly (oh and on a tangent, the French are ridiculously aggressive drivers on these one-lane two-way roads - it's a miracle I wasn't mowed down first) exploring parts of the countryside, atop a large hill. I was probably cruising at around 30-something MPH on some relatively tough terrain when I realized immediately that I was going too fast to maintain control of the quad and I would not be able to slow down fast enough to regain control before swerving out of control. So, without so much as pausing to think twice, I hurled myself off the bike and ran it into a hedge off the right.
I don't recall whether the quad actually ran over me or not, but I do remember that I had managed to flip it off the road, and that I hadn't been burned by the tail-pipe. No one was in the vicinity (as no one should be in the middle of nowhere) so I was pretty pleased with myself... until I realized my hand was bloodied with a nice layer of ripped flesh bleeding quite nicely. I cursed at myself got back on the bike (which was still running quite handily; the safety mechanism for turning off the bike in such a scenario [rider falling off] had been recently removed due to it's inconvenience), and returned down-hill, still in a haze of sorts, but at a much slower crawl. My host family, was in shock - visibly in much more pain over the ordeal than I was, and I was shortly afterwards taken to the house of a local who worked as a nurse to receive such treatment as I did. And thus, I spent the first week of our Eurail trek with a generous amount of gauze on my left hand, a scar below my chin, a bruise on my forehead, and a bottle of aspirin in my pocket. As if an Borean tourist didn't stand out enough already...
(While still in Gras, I was then-on strictly forbidden to ride the quad, although the 11-year sibling did regularly without incident.)
By the time I returned home, none of this was apparent. Just as well, for I was able to spare myself the embarrassment of explaining the debacle to my parents.
Moral of the story?
And don't entrust me alone with power toys... I do stupid things when no one's watching... >.>
"After all, you're only human."
Holy crud, this is the longest entry I've written myself since... ever!
There's still yet one last thing that I'd like to mention, and really is the cause for starting this entry in the first place.
Awesome book. I carried this one with me all over Europe but never actually got into it, (ended up reading another fine novel, Richard Adams' Watership Down), but since I've picked it up, I haven't been able to put it down. Roughly 2/3 through it as I speak and I've got to say... it contains some of the most humanistic writing I've ever read in the fantasy genre, or any for that matter.
It's a very strange book, written for a ninche that doesn't exist - a type of romance-fantasy novel, but with gracious amounts of canniablism. But at the same time, you can empthasize with the antoganists - excellent character development - and it's even managed to give me that dreaded warm and fuzzy feeling that is universally hated and abhored by all.
Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but if you can get into it, it's a real treat. I'll probably dwelve more into it on here once I've finished it myself.
Additionally, I found recently that this author maintains a current LiveJournal
papersky, and has recently finished writing the sequel to it, which makes her doubly awesome in my book.Ok, shutting up.
- Mood:
chipper - Music:Phoenix - Run Run Run
Well, that's starting to look kind of interesting...
I had a royalty-free song that I wanted to do something with... and what started as a "simple" live streaming implementation (that, like most things, I scrapped because it wasn't working as well as I'd pictured it) turned into this setup; all vector graphics/text. First time I've really tried using complex gradients in Flash. I also discovered that it handles PNG-24 transparency very well. Good to know...
Decided to try the pastels while looking for clothes in the mall the other day; I liked the juxtaposition and wanted to give it a shot.
Anyway, I kinda liked it. I could pull a lot of 'neat' effects with this one; scrolling text backgrounds, load screen transitions, color theme transitions, sliding navigation bars, dynamic sound, etc... This really isn't the direction I was looking to take though, and I'll probably keep building onto the CMS I'm using for the time being.
On an aside, I got my books - Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL from Novice to Professional, and Web Designer's Reference - today, and look forward to dive into them... once I get some prior obligations (like the pitifully neglected "job", cleaning the litter on the room of my floor, etc..)
Got my Eurail pass yesterday. Just need to do an inventory, and I should be good to go.
I'll be taking my camera (obviously) and my laptop (weight permitting) and I hope to do a travelblog (again) for kicks. Maybe even in a 'real' semi-interesting journal format? Surely, I'll have enough time on the planes, trains (and the ocassional autombile) to do it...
Got to play with the Prius about a week ago (a day before a camping trip) and I've got to say... it's one sweet toy, and it looks like we'll finally be getting one one week for now (having been on the waiting list since March.)
Oh yeah, and some 3 years after our intial purchase, our Endless Pool is finally up and running. Spiffy.
- Mood:
busy - Music:Daft Punk - Technologic ( Basement Jaxx Kontrol Mixx )
