July 1st, 2009 by jay

Long ago, my wife and I discovered that one of the keys to a happy marriage is to provide each other with lists of gift ideas or cold hard cash.  As callous as that sounds, I really enjoy my new Father’s Day gifts from my kids.  With a little judicious use of eBay, and I got three gifts for the price of one.  In addition to the Orange Box on Steam (which allows me to get my butt regularly kicked by the other Olde Fartz in Half Life 2 Deathmatch), I picked up these two items:

The Superman bobblehead, as shown here in its native habitat next to my Yoda bobblehead (I do NOT collect bobbleheads, by the way).  I was searching online for the Einstein Bobblehead from Night at the Museum, but they were sold out from the Smithsonian Store.  This was a good substitute.  I was most impressed by the quality of the sculpt and the material.  Both were much better than expected.

Adding to my ever-growing Justice League pantheon that lives atop my desk, I found this DC Universe series Captain Atom figure going cheap.  I think someone bought him looking for the build-a-figure part and then sold the remaining figure.  I like this line of DC figures very much, and I wish they weren’t so hard to find or expensive.

June 2nd, 2009 by jay

I have long ticked off friends and family by not following their lead and subscribing to a single political party.  I’ve made no secret about being registered as an Independent voter.  I think at its core, I find Libertarianism to make the most sense.  Indeed, in the last election I voted for a Republican, a Democrat, and a Libertarian.  I was kind of proud of that.

Lately, it seems as though I have needed to hide more and more friends’ posts from my Facebook news feed.  Maybe I’ve just lost patience with zealots in general, but discounting entire ideologies or people based on a label seems to demean us all and our capacity for critical thought.   I’m not really speaking of a particular current event in the news.  The examples are new every day.  Listening to political opinions has become embarrassingly predictable, both from individuals and pundits alike.  Whoever is on the “other side” will be portrayed as utterly incompetent or thoroughly evil, or often a combination of the two.

I wish we could give up the labels and start having dialogs about individual issues.  It saddens and frustrates me that the best we can offer the world is that “the other” team will somehow usher in the apocalypse, and the only way to fix it is to completely disavow anything they might bring to the table.  I did not think that Bush was entirely evil, nor do I think that Obama deserves that label.  Both men are what we all are - flawed human beings with personal agendas and ideologies.

I resent:

• Logging into Facebook and hearing how someone thinks we’ll be lucky if we all live to participate in the next presidential election.
• Being told that Fox News or MSNBC are nothing but partisan hatemongers.
• Turning on Fox News or MSNBC and hearing nothing but partisan hatemongering.
• Owning a majority stake in a nationalized car industry.
• Having my son believe that Alaska is where the villains live, because someone thought it would be funny to make Ted Stevens the villain de jour while playing Batman with him.

and so on.

We seem to be restricted to being either Red or Blue, therefore I hereby declare myself purple.  Of course, that now gives me the right to ridicule, abuse, and marginalize anyone who is not purple.  It’s the American way.

April 14th, 2009 by jay

I buy very few things sight-unseen.  Two notable exceptions are Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher and fantasy novels by Raymond E. Feist.  Both guilty pleasures, I anxiously await the latest installment in these sagas (well, saga may be too strong for these books, but the novels do create one long continuity in each case).  

Harry Dresden is the only professional wizard practicing openly (complete with an ad in the Yellow Pages) in the Chicago area.  Unfortunately for him, he’s one of those people that fate continues to kick in the privates.  If anything weird or evil is going to happen, it’ll happen to or near Harry Dresden.

Raymond Feist’s novels of Midkemia span several hundred years, and I’ve followed them all from year one.  Feist has a rare ability to create a sweeping fantasy saga that can immediately draw you in and make you feel invested in the lives of the characters, and later their children and their children’s children.  Short on undecipherable dialects and pretentious characters, I find them easy to enter and quick to ensnare my imagine.

In the past two weeks, the latest works from both gentlemen arrived in my mail box.  These two novels will be how I spend my leisure reading over the next week or two:

Like I said - guilty pleasures both.

-kingfish

April 14th, 2009 by jay

I’ve had this idea for a while.  It’s inspired by all of the many DIY projects for building home versions of the Flux Capacitor found on the interwebs.  I really want a cool USB hub, and I might try to build on of these if I had the time.  Knowing that I’ll likely never take the time, I’ll leave it here as a concept image that I mocked up in Photoshop:

-kingfish

February 16th, 2009 by jay

I think the e-reader evolution has just reached a tipping point.  In fact it’s may just be my personal tipping point, since the release of the new Kindle 2 has generated a significant amount of gadget lust in me.  Every night at bedtime, I am faced with the 3 or 4 reading choices living on my night stand.  The idea of having an entire collection of books, magazines, blogs, and personal documents at my disposal holds a great deal of appeal.  By all accounts, the screen size of the Kindle and it’s main competitor, the Sony 505, are plenty big for your average novel or plain text document.  At $300 - $400, that still makes them a pretty steep gadget investment.  The really drool-inducing gadget in this up-and-coming technology is the unfortunately named FLEPia from Fujitsu, which not only supports full color, but a screen size comparable to a full sheet of paper and freedom from any proprietary file formats or subscription services.  It, however, will likely weigh in at a whopping $900 when it is finally released.  All in all, it still looks like the best way to enjoy comics books in the digital age. 

I want one.  Badly.

As noted in my participation in the “little known fact about me” meme, I haven’t purchased a single issue comic book in about 20 years.  I love comics, but if a particular storyline is not available as a collected volume or graphic novel, then I don’t buy it.  I’m not a collector, and I still contend that the whole comic-book-as-investment concept is just an illusion, perpetuated by the marketing machines of the publishing industry.  I especially get annoyed at having to follow a particular storyline through many different individual titles.  Serialized storytelling should not feel like a expensive scavenger hunt, but that’s a rant for another day.

Much like browsing a large retail bookstore, I will peruse the comics titles that interest me in a digital format.  If I like them, I will almost certainly buy them in collected print form.  Many of the gems on my bookshelf originated this way, such as Superman: Birthright, Superman: Secret Identity, and Lex Luthor: Man of Steel(hmmm, I believe a theme is emerging here).  Having read these titles digitally first actually made me more likely to purchase them in print.  The difficulty here is trying to curl up with a laptop at bedtime or use it to read in the car.  It’s just no fun (it’s heavy, it’s hot, it’s slow, and I usually have to plug it in).  Only slightly less cumbersome is the tablet PC that I use for work.  At least with the tablet, I can read a comic in portrait mode and not scroll up and down in landscape mode.

And thus we return to e-readers.  As much as I would like a Kindle or a Sony, they can’t read comics.  Technically, I guess you could say that they can, but who wants to read comics in black and white on a six inch screen?  Now the full-sized color Fujitsu on the other hand, well that would be something to see.  Thinking about carrying a collection of comics in full color with me wherever I went makes me feel all tingly inside.

Would I fork over $900 for a digital comic book reader?  Heck no.  That’s why cell phone companies sell you phones for steeply discounted prices, but then commit you to a subscription plan for service.  The same could apply here.  It’s not an original idea, but the comic book industry needs to be proactive in developing a plan for the delivery of digital comics.  I am long past buying individual comics for a few dollars each, even if there was a subscription option.  On the other hand, I would gladly pay $20 for an annual subscription to an especially beloved title.  Better yet, let DC or Marvel make their entire catalogs available for a much higher annual fee.  What would make the deal even sweeter would be if these companies would use their deep pockets to subsidize the cost of the e-readers as an investment in future subscriptions.  (Before someone scoffs at the term “deep pockets,” I contend that Warner Brothers and Marvel could easily afford this by limiting some of the crap that makes in onto film and using those funds here instead).

I think the music industry has shown how trying to control the rights and usage of digital content actually harms the net profit of the industry, but I’m not going to open the DRM can of worms here.  Suffice it to say that i think there is profit to be made by making digital content widely available without restriction.  Sites like Hulu and Netflix have made significant strides in that direction already. 

What we do know is that digital content from comic books is already being distributed and will continue to be distributed online.  What the industry needs to recognize is that now is the time to define how it will participate in the distribution of digital content and help control the direction of the future.  If not, it will become trapped in a reactionary cycle of tantrums and litigation, much like the music industry.

I still want an e-reader.

-kingfish

February 13th, 2009 by jay

I am a spy.  That’s very cool. 

More accurately, I am in my own small way a counter-terrorism agent.  For example, when the FBI or CIA speak of success, there is always mention of the prevention of “countless unknown acts of terrorism.”  There’s truth here, and I’m grateful that those invisible agents stand between me and unspeakable unknown harm.  

Anyway, that’s kind of what I do.

In my own journey of self evaluation, I have recently discovered that my professional success may be measured not by what I can accomplish, but rather what I can prevent from being accomplished.  As a Project Manager, I was originally under the assumption that I was meant to take reasonable requests for products or services and organize them into successful results.  Instead, I spend most of my time collecting enough data and professional input to prove that a requested project is not at all reasonable, but is in fact a very bad idea.

Perhaps I’m more like a Jedi Master than a spy.  I have my Jedi mind tricks down to an art form, with my oft used “This isn’t the software you’re looking for.  Move along.”

So, when asked how I rate my own success, I guess I should say that I have saved my employer from “countless unknown acts of waste and stupidity.”

-kingfish

January 27th, 2009 by jay

Part of creating a blog was the desire to be like the cool kids.  They all seem to have them.  It also seems as though all the cool kids participate in these “random things about me” chain letters on facebook and the blogosphere.

I was really starting to feel left out, but Billy Flynn came through with an invitation.  I doubt if this makes me one of the cool kids, but I remain hopeful.

1. I typically avoid this kind of forwarded e-mail / Facebook spam.
2. I am an ordained Baptist Minister who now works in IT
3. I have officiated at least 10 weddings. I forget exactly how many. The funeral count stands at 2.
4. I weighed 4 ibs 8oz when I was born and was in an incubator for several weeks. When I asked my Mom how premature I was, she replied “I don’t know. I didn’t know I was pregnant until two months before you were born.” She thought I was a stomach tumor.
5. I have a small plastic container which holds the metal plates and screws that were in my arm from 1984-1985.
6. In college, I majored at different times in electronics, sculpture, business, theatre, and psychology, in which I earned my degree.
7. At last count, I’ve travelled to 26 countries.  Most of Europe was covered while we lived in the Czech Republic for 2 years (maybe that should count as two entries).
8. I do any sewing that needs to be done in our house, which means mainly buttons and holes.
9. I taught my wife to cook. She’s now a much better cook than I.
10. I have started three different businesses, with varying degrees of success.
11. I cannot stand to have anyone or anything touch my collarbone. Intentionally doing so is an invitation for violence.
12. I used to carry a yoyo with me at all times, but I can only make it “sleep” and “walk the dog.”
13. I worked in a funeral home as a teenager. I saw some “interesting” things.
14. I had a private personal tour of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in London.
15. I’m a bit of a completist when it comes to books. If I like an author or a particular book, chances are good that I will read all of its sequels. If I really like them, I’ll buy the whole series in hardback. There are some notable exceptions, however.
16. In college, I sold my collection of over 700 comic books (bagged and boarded) for about $75. I have not bought an individual comic since.

January 26th, 2009 by jay

I recently received this birthday card from my sister.  I thought it was cool enough to share.  The sad part is that she probably bought it off of the “cards for little boys” rack.

And open:

January 23rd, 2009 by jay

I’ll just get this straight up front - this is not a sappy tribute to our recently departed dog.  Dexter was indeed an awesome dog, and we got him when he was a puppy:

Although most folks would remember him in his natural habitat:

He lived 10 years, which was several years beyond our expectations (Cavaliers are not the hardiest of breeds), and he had a good run.  In the end, euthanasia was the best choice as cancer made him increasingly uncomfortable.  I have no regrets.

What did surprise me, and I have thought several times since that “I wish I knew that ahead of time,” was the actual euthanasia process at the vet’s office.  We have awesome vets.  Those guys are willing to do anything it takes to fix an injured animal, but totally understanding if you don’t plan on taking heroic measures.  They’ve been our vets for nearly ten years now.  This was the first time I had ever put an animal to sleep, and I should have asked more questions.  In my mind, I equated the process to pre-surgery anesthesia, which can be somewhat slow.  I expected to be there for some time as the process worked itself through, and that’s how I prepared emotionally.

In the end, there were two things I wish I had known ahead of time:

1. It’s fast.  I mean really fast.  The syringe goes in, the pink goo is injected, and 5 seconds later it’s done.  This is probably a good thing for suffering animals.
2. The eyes don’t close.  The doctor checked for a heartbeat and said “it’s done.”  I looked down, and Dexter’s eyes were still open.  Apparently, you can close them and they’ll pop back open.  That’s not a huge deal, but I wish I had know that ahead of time too.

Anyway, it’s not my intent to lay out some sob story about my dog.  I just like to be prepared for stuff (I think it’s a holdover from Boy Scouts).  If you’re the same way, and facing a similar situation, at least now you’ll know what to expect.

-kingfish

January 21st, 2009 by jay

Also insipred by a convention photo op with Valharic during the Geeklabel days.  Valharic was really generous in sending us a cool toy which sadly arrived after the last episode of Geeklabel Radio.  Wracked with guilt, I took the following photo:

And created this:

It’s not my best Photoshop project, but I was pleased with this overall.

-kingfish