Riders On The Storm

I am trying to get a top for my Jeep…

Just a little thing to keep about while driving about with no top, and the freak thunderstorm pops up.

Indiana's weather sucks, so ya know.

Sleeping In Our Cars

Allow me to go and properly clean my cat at you!

Sending Out An S.O.S.

Learn to build .NET Connected apps for SOA
Attend a seminar near you and receive Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Standard Edition (not for resale)*
Register today for just $99!

Join your peers get the skills you need to build .NET Connected apps for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) today!

Attend this one-day demo-driven technical Roadshow and find out how easy it is to develop Connected Systems today with Microsoft .NET. We start the day with an "uberdemo" to show what your future looks like with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Followed with more demos on WSE v2, Moving Beyond HTTP Request/Response, and Securing Web Services. We'll end the day with an "end to end" walk through of how you can use Microsoft Biztalk Server to connect your code to other systems.

You'll learn:

How to design and build commercial-grade web services

How to secure and deploy connected applications with commercial-grade web services

What web services architecture looks like

Plus, your Roadshow registration also includes registration for the Microsoft Connected Partners Networking event at the end of the day in the same place. After a short presentation geared towards Business Decision Makers and Technical Decision Makers on the Microsoft ISV Partner Program Benefits (ISV Competency), you'll be able to network with local Microsoft representatives and other local developers in a relaxed environment. This is an opportunity for creating new relationships as well as renewing old ones.

Plus, when you attend, you'll receive the following:

Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Standard Edition (not for resale)*

Visual Studio Resource Kit

Windows Marketplace Resource Kit

A cool Microsoft .NET t-shirt

Only $99 - Register today!
Use RSVP Code: MSISVDEVX
Regular price is $249.

Little Drops Of Rain

Music: Page & Plant ~ Thank You
first off, i am typing this very blindly.  i can not sleep, and i am therefore not wearing my glasses, so bear with me here.
let us see.
tonight i stopped and helped some random strangers who were stranded on the road.  the kid hit a pothole and blew both tires on the passenger side of his car.  he only had the standard one spare, and no lug wrench, so i helped them push it out of the entrance of the parking lot where he stopped and into a parking space.  i hung around until the person they called for a ride showed up.  we messed about with the car a bit longer.  i put a jack under the front because leaving the rim sitting on the ground is not really smart.  yes, the tire was more or less completely gone.
that, combined with the events of saturday through tuesday made me realize that my Jeep is not invulnerable.  so, i spent some time tonight putting my tools back where they belong, finding my jack and putting it back where it goes, and adding 2 flashlights to the mix.  i need to get a folding 4-way lug wrench tomorrow, because i gave my other one to annie.  i have a 22 mm socket that will work, but i don't have a breaker bar and i don't want to subject my ratchet to that kind of abuse, if i can help it.  i have broken 2 of them, and this is the only one i have left.
my toolbox is so nifty,  it is a small army ammo box.  metal, watertight, seals nicely.  if fits perfectly between my seat and door in my Jeep.  i got it for fifty cents at a garage sale a few years ago.  i may need to come up with another because this one is almost full.  i will worry about that when i get the time and resources though.
and the tendonitis in my right elbow is making the typing so freaking difficult now, so goodnight kids.

It’s A Rig That Will Never Fail

the Jeep now has a muffler again.  it goes in a quiet and happy manner.  i am right back where from i started.
go me!
once mine birthday comes and goes, i will probably use the monies from that to begin doing things i want to do to the Jeep.  probably the frame for the top or new hinges or doors or something.  just small stuff to get it to where i eventually want it to be
well, goodnight kids

Message In A Bottle

Pickles.
That is dinner.
Just pickles.  Right from the jar.
Gads, I am pathetic.

Sing, Sing, Sing!

I got a driveshaft
I got a driveshaft
I got a driveshaft
Hey hey hey hey

Got A CJ-5 With A 4 Wheel Drive (2)

also, while the thing was aimlessly spinning all over the world, it destroyed (read: beat the crap out of and then ripped off) the muffler.  I had just put that thing on there like 3 months ago!

Got A CJ-5 With A 4 Wheel Drive

The drive shaft fell off of Gale's much-loved Jeep tonight.  It would not have been as bad if Gale had not been in the middle of a busy intersection when it happened.  Gale singlehandedly pushed it along and got over into the right hand lane (while pushing) and had enough momentum to get it up the hill and into a hotel's parking lot.  It would have worked if some random man had not come up and started pulling it the other way.  Ah well. We got it.  Gale then proceeded to get it to work by pulling the shaft the rest of the way off and then putting it into 4WD.  The purpose served by that was to engage the non-broken driveshaft and render it operable once again.  Worked beautifully.  Until the transmission fluid started pouring out of where the rear shaft needed to be.  So, said Jeep is sitting at work right now and I shall be making my way up there very early in the morning to get it dealt with, one way or another.

The Real Folk Blues

Japanese
Aishiteta to nageku ni wa
Amari ni mo toki wa sugite shimatta
Madakokoro no kokorobi wo
Iyasenu mama kaze ga fuite'ru
Hitotsu no me de asu wo mite
Hitotsu no me de kinow mitsumete'ru
Kimi no ai no yurikago de
Mou ichido yasuraka ni nemuretara
Kawaita hitome de kareka naite kure
THE REAL FOLK BLUES
Hontou no kanashimi ga shirtai dake
Doro no kawa ni tsukatta jinsei mo waruku wa nai
Ichido kiri de owaru nara
Kibou ni michita zetsubou to
Wana ga shikakerarete'ru kono CHANSU
Nani ga yokute warui no ka
KOIN no omote to ura mitai da
Dore dake ikireba iyasareru no darou
THE REAL FOLK BLUES
Hontou no yorokobi ga shiritai dake
Hikaru mono no subete ga ougon to wa kagiranai
THE REAL FOLK BLUES
Hontou no kanashimi ga shirtai dake
Doro no kawa ni tsukatta jinsei mo waruku wa nai
Ichido kiri de owaru nara
English
Too much time has passed by to
Lament that we were deeply in love
The wind still blowing, while my heart
Cannot heal all the tears in it
One side of my eyes see tomorrow,
And the other one see yesterday
I hope I could sleep in the cradle of your love, again
Someone, cry for me with parched eyes.
*The real folk blues
I only want to know what true sadness is
Sitting in muddy water
Isn't such a bad life
It ends after the first time.
Hopeless hope,
And the chance with traps
What is right, or wrong
It's like a both side of a coin
How long I must live till I release?
The real folk blues
I just want to feel a real pleasure
All that glitters is not gold
*The real folk blues
I only want to know what true sadness is
Sitting in muddy water
Isn't such a bad life
It ends after the first time.

People Came Alive

And so ends another session of wasting time with Gale_

We Were Just Another Band Out Of Boston

*Gale_ looks about.
Gale_> Hello!  Anyone in here?
Gale_> Guess not.
*Gale_ has left

With or Without You

Music: Night Train to Mundo Fine ~ John Carradine (The most washed up actor in history)
So
As I sit here waiting for my socks to dry, I start to think.
As dangerous as that is, I am not in the mood for anyone but me to crack jokes at my expense right now.  I will take the liberty of finding some means of hunting you down and doing something very unpleasant to you with a poorly sharpened spoon should I find that you are cracking any joke-related things at my expense.
Now that the formalities are out of the way, I can get back to where I was thinking I might possibly drag this thing.
I am waiting for my socks to dry, and waiting for my chickens to cook.
It occurs to me that I need to start sleeping more than about 3 hours at night.  I don't like what it does to me when I have no sleep and virtually no food.
Most peoples's minds would completely shut down, but when that happens to me, however, some other normally dormant, more perceptive part of my brain decidedes to make it's presence known.  It is not so much as a different personality (no matter how much it may seem to be so), it is more like how a person's hearing improves when their sight starts to go.
Eerie.
This whole thing makes no sense whatsoever.  I might clean it up later, or I might just leave it as a jumbled testament of my exhausted normal mindset. 
We shall see.
I did, however, come up with a mildly interesting voice mail greeting tonight for my cell phone (***-***-*** NOPE!), for those who are morbidly curious, knock yourselves out.
Goodnight kids

Night Train To Mundo Fine

I try not to take a firm stand on issues like these, because I don't want to become one of those Comic Book Guy-style movie geeks who pronounce every film they see to be the "worst... movie... ever." But I will say this for "Manos": It does have a bumbling, almost charming naïveté about it. When you see the movie, it's clear that it became such an unwatchable mess because director Hal Warren was in way, way over his head and didn't have a clue what he was doing. With Red Zone Cuba, however, you get the feeling that everyone involved knew better, but just didn't care.

This makes it something much, much worse than an incompetently-made, idiotic B-movie that evokes reactions of unintentional hilarity. No, this is a movie that will make you angry, angrier than you've ever felt in a movie before. Angrier than when Kirk fell under a bridge in Generations, angrier than watching what Joel Schumacher did to Batman, angrier than how you felt during the endings of AI, The Game, Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, or Boxing Helena all put together.

Far be it for me to spoil a movie this early into a review, but Red Zone Cuba is a film that seriously gives Seinfeld a run for its money in the "being about nothing" department. In this movie, three drifters meet up and do nothing. Then they get recruited by the military, and nothing happens. The military sends them off to Cuba, and nothing happens there, either. Finally, after some more nothing happening, they head out to a mine where nothing happens some more, until one guy dies. Seriously, that's the whole movie.

Compounding the pain is how the "characters" are about as charming as my living room furniture. (And I live in a crack house.) The three main characters actually have negative personality. That is to say, as I watched this movie, personality was sucked out of me and I become a significantly less interesting person than I was before I saw it.

Any discussion of Red Zone Cuba would be remiss without a mention of its writer, director, and star, Coleman Francis, who's also singlehandedly responsible for two other cinematic abominations, Beast of Yucca Flats and Skydivers. Until the IMDb recently altered the formula used to calculate the list of its bottom 100 films, these three movies were all in the bottom fifteen. Probability dictates that every now and then, a totally clueless director like Hal Warren or Tony Malanowski might punch through and end up making one of the worst movies ever just by pure chance, but to make three of them clearly requires active hatred towards paying audiences.

And don't think his co-producer and co-star Tony Cardoza gets off the hook here, either. Not only did he co-produce all of Francis' films, but he also produced and had a cameo in Hellcats, a film that somehow is just as hellish to sit through. Watching these films makes it abundantly clear that both Francis and Cardoza had negative talent, and when they get together, incredibly, the whole is even less than the sum of its parts. In this regard, Red Zone Cuba is their masterpiece, because it might just be the one, true anti-movie.

Now, I usually don't mention stuff before the movie like FBI warnings or production credits (unless they happen to be printed on a sheet of paper), but in this case I have to mention that the words "An Anthony Cardoza Enterprise Release" hang on the screen for at least three minutes [!]. Personally, if I were even partially responsible for a piece of shit like this, my name would blink on and off the screen faster than the legal disclaimers at the end of a reality show. But maybe that's just me.

The movie itself starts with a car rolling into a dilapidated train station that looks like it's way, way on the outskirts of town, which is probably where Coleman Francis should have left this movie's screenplay and any notion of filming it. A young guy wearing a tie and a tweed jacket gets out of the car, and then we cut to John Carradine in a stereotypical conductor's outfit of an overalls and cap. Yes, that's right, this movie is blessing us with the sight of John Carradine dressed like a character from Thomas the Tank Engine
All this and more can be found here!