Craig's Blog : Craig's Life

Dead guys

craigg75 — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:07:00 GMT

Today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death. How come we remember the death's and not the births? Not to be morbid but here are the top 5 deaths that really got to me --

1. My father - nuff said there.

2. John Lennon - He was a hero of mine growing up as a teenager. I still remember where I was when I heard. I was laying in my bed listening to a Cardinals game and they broke in with the news. I went in to my parent's room and I remember my mom being shocked and expressing sadness. Never even knew she knew who John Lennon was.

3. Anwar Sadat - I admired him for standing up and changing his ways and becoming a man of peace. Then to be shot down. Really bummed me out.

4. Carl Sagan - Another hero growing up. So sad, the people's scientist. One of those guys that had nothing but good to give to the world.

5. John Denver - He left us too soon. I admired him for many years, grew up enjoying to his music. He was someone I aspired to be more like, someone who didn't let anything stop him from enjoying life to it's fullest.

I noticed I don't have any females on this list. Maybe Princess Diana could have gone here. But she really didn't do anything for the world other than marry an ugly prince, look pretty and smile and became the only member of the royal family that had more than an ounce of humanity. She was approachable royalty in many people's eyes, an ideal that existed in reality. I think people had similar reactions to JFK or RFK's assasinations.

New York City

craigg75 — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:29:00 GMT

This weekend Annette and I are visiting the Big Apple. Growing up I had no urge to visit NYC but recently my interest has grown. I'll admit it, watching TV had a lot to do with it. Annette and I got into watching reruns of Sex and the City which takes place in NYC. Add Seinfeld and that Donald Trump show and I got hooked. So I did my obligitory research and gained more interest into the culture and history of the city. A friend called NYC the center of civilization. There's a lot of truth to that statement. When I was growing up NYC seemed to be old, dirty and crime ridden and it did have it's problems. Somehow they were able to clean up their act and get back on the map. So anyway we're going. What do we plan on doing there? I'm of course interested in the history and architecture. Number one on my list is to visit the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, classics of my favorite style of architecture - art deco. I want to see Penn Station, Grand Central station, Rockefeller Center. We have tickets to Ellis Island, see if we can find our ancestors in the records. We're going to try and get tickets to see the stage show Spamalot. I'm not sure if we'll be able to or not. Actually I have no idea what our chances are. Which is ok, I want to leave some of this trip up in the air, unplanned. I have no idea where we will eat. NYC is supposed to be an eater's paradise so we'll just let our noses guide us on that one. I have no interest in visiting art museums. I usually never do.

One of the fun things about going some place new is to compare expectations with experience. So I'll lay out my expectations and maybe follow up with what happened next week.

Craig's expectations of NYC
1. Awesome buildings
2. Busy, busy, busy
3. No kindness from strangers
4. Panhandlers - yuck
5. Many people
6. Massiveness

Celebrating the brain freeze

craigg75 — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 13:37:00 GMT

Slate is running an article on the 40th anniversay of the Slurpee. Wow I'm the same age as the slurpee. I grew up craving slurpees and still enjoy them a lot. There's just something about sucking a 32 oz cup of Coke slurpee through a straw that is extra special. My girlfriend's daughter (9 years old) and I will usually hit a 7-11 when we see one. Usually she's gotta fill up on some of that establishment's fine concessions such as nacho cheese chips. Although the consequences usually arrive an hour later “Craig my tummy hurts“.

The article pointed out some interesting points. Such as the the guy who invented the slurpee machine was a Dairy Queen owner in the 1950's who noticed that people went gaga over soda as it first came out of the freezer because it has that soda slush in it. 7-11 bought the machine and paid somebody to come up with the name, slurpee. I still like the knock off name slushee better. I always liked it when Apo from the Simpsons would always ask Homer as he walked into his Quickie Mart <in Indian sing song voice> “perhaps you'd like a delicious slushee mr. homer”. Slurpees are consumed most in Detroit and believe it or not, Winnipeg Ontario holds the world's number one spot for slurpee consumption. And lastly the elite in Manhatten have gotten their first 7-11 this year. I hope they put it right next to Prada or some overpriced coffee house :)

Couch potato season starts

craigg75 — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 17:44:00 GMT

Well football season started last weekend. Our Rams lost their opener to SF. This year will be a repeat of last year, lucky if they hit 8-8. Same strengths and weakenesses. I think it's time for the head coach to go. He's in a rut and can't figure out how to energize the team and give them an edge. The St.Louis favorite ex-QB Kurt Warner starts this year as the Arizona Cardinal starting QB. The Arizona Cardinals are the old St.Louis Cardinal football team. Lot of animosity still exists for St.Louis. However that has changed a little with people rooting for Kurt. His team lost the opener too but hopefully he can make a difference with that beleagored group. I noticed the Cincinnati Bengals won their first game. I have a feeling they finally have a team that can make a playoff run this year. Let's hope so, the people of Cincinnati live and breathe football, they are overdue.

TV's fall season starts too. I noticed a large number of crime related shows this year. Up from last year. I really don't care for them. I tried watching a couple of them but they really play on viewer's dark fantasies. It's not just a mystery murder that gets solved. It usually a perverted sex crime or some really disgusting murder that's highly graphic. Call me a prude but I find all of it to be repulsive that people allow their inner demons to be manipulated by Hollywood. Gross. On a brighter note my favorite series Lost is starting it's second season this month. Can't wait to see what's in the hatch! I decided to stop following ER, the characters and stories are so worn out. I'm also anticipating watching the new season of Everwood and Judging Amy. Good shows even if they are mostly chick flicks. Speaking of chick flicks I picked up the second season of Once and Again on DVD the other day. Great show, not sure why I can relate to it so well. TV is still mostly a vast wasteland, even with cable tv. I find most of the shows I watch are from the BBC that I obtain in several questionable ways ;-) I'd pay for BBC service if it was ever offered in the US.

Palin's Travels

craigg75 — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 15:15:00 GMT

I've been watching Michael Palin's BBC travel shows for awhile now. His latest adventure is travelling the Himalayas. Awesome stuff. It's 5 one hour shows, I'm on the last 2. Anyway I discovered he has a web site set up to go along with his travels -- http://www.palinstravels.co.uk/. I also found out the books that go with the series are free to read on the web site -- http://www.palinstravels.co.uk/static-187 Wow! How cool is that. I noticed you can get them from amazon in paper format. I've been watching his shows for so long I'm no longer associating him with Monty Python but instead the British dude who travels the world. Every once in awhile though he'll pull out a Python character to get a quick laugh from somebody he meets who knows him as a Monty Python guy. Anyway I do like his motto, don't be a tourist, be a traveller.

Paintball

craigg75 — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 14:49:00 GMT

Last weekend I played in my first paintball game with a friend from work and a bunch of his friends. We played in the morning to avoid the heat of the day. Another guy there was a newbie so I wasn't alone. We paid for 4 hours which got us a referee and access to the 6 fields there. The fields vary from a wooded acre to short ones with only barriers to hide behind. I rented a gun and ammo, costs about $35. There were 10 of us and we split up into 2 teams. The object is whatever team has the last man standing wins the game. Simple but with only 10 guys you can't get too complicated. If maybe you had 50-60 people you could play capture the flag or something like that. So I got shot up good and I actually shot somebody a couple of times. But I have no killer instinct or much aggression so I usually hid behind a barrier and took pot shots at people when they exposed themselves. Usually I'd last towards the end of the game since I didn't move much and then get ambushed by the other team. I didn't make risky moves like moving to another barrier to get a better shot at somebody and thereby exposing myself to gunfire so I think I missed out on the fun of the game. Part of any game is to take chances. Playing it cool will usually defeat you in the end. I think there's some mathematics that can prove that point, game theory? Will I go again? Probably. Annette really wants to try it out so I'll take her next time and try to get more aggressive in play. In conclusion I think I've proven to myself again that I wouldn't last long in the wild..haha.

Spamalot III

craigg75 — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:43:00 GMT

Annette and I have booked a trip to New York City the weekend of Sept.30 - Oct.1. In my travelling years as an engineer I never cared to go to NYC, in fact I'd route my flights around LaGuardia and JFK to stay out of the city. Now I've gained more appreciation of the city, it's architecture, it's people, history, many cultures. I'll admit part of the interest has come through watching tv shows like Seinfeld and Sex and the City. Woody Allen films too. I'm a big fan of old architecture especially the art deco period during the roaring 20's and 1930's. NYC was a mecca for this style of architecture during that period, the first skyscrapers went up then. The Chrysler building is probably the most noticeable building like this. Of course there's the Empire State Building and Grand Central Station too. So there's several things that I'd like to see in addition to the architecture such as; Central Park, Times Square, Wall Street, Ellis Island to name a few. But I never cared to see a Broadway play or visit an art museum. That was until....da da da daaaaa... Spamalot! It's the Monty Python's Holy Grail done for stage that won a Tony award this year, is of course playing in NYC this year. $200 a ticket..hmmm.. I've heard you can go to the theater and try and buy up turned in tickets. I might play it by ear, depends on how I feel. I'd love to see the play but it's not a must see thing. If it made it to Chicago it might be a good excuse to make a weekend trip up there.

Super Size Me!

craigg75 — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 16:54:00 GMT

Annette and I watched a fascinating documentary last night called Super Size Me. I doubt I'll ever eat McDonalds after that. This guy decided to perform an experiment to only eat McDonalds food for 30 days. He had himself checked out by 3 doctors beforehand, he was in top physical condition, healthy, correct weight, low body fat, etc. The doctors drew blood every week, examined him, weighed him, etc. Three weeks in he was having chest pains, mood swings, felt like crap. His doctors urged him to stop because his liver was failing just like an alcholic's would on a 3 week binge. He gained 27 pounds in 30 days. He said he'd feel depressed or down but once he ate a Big Mac his mood went way up, almost like an addiction. He interviewed people during the month - school kids, people who eat at McDonalds, industry food groups and others. I was shocked what they feed kids at school. We never had a choice, you got a plate of food and that was it. Today they bring in french fries, hamburgers, pizza and get this CANDY and SODA!!! This is in the cafeteria! He filmed kids leaving the checkout with their plates full of fries, Snickers bars and Cokes. What!?!? I did like the song he opened the movie with, Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen. Very appropriate. The stats for this country in comparison to the rest of the world were awful. Fattest country with dropping intelligence. To pull a line from Animal House, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son”.

The Wave

craigg75 — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 16:30:00 GMT

Way back in the 1980's in one of my more boring moments I turned on the tv and flipped on an Afterschool Special. Remember those shows? They were always on between 4-6 pm in the pre-Oprah days. The themes were about teenagers and how they deal with growing up. Most of them were kind of stupid and always tried to pull a tear or two. Lot of kid stars got their start on the show, such as Scott Baio and Kristy McNichol. Anyway I never liked watching them but like I said I was bored and I wasn't in the mood to watch cartoons. The show that day was titled “The Wave” and was based on a true story about a high school teacher who said he could prove to his disbelieving history class that Nazism could flourish in the good ol USA as it did in Germany. So he came up with an experiment where he made himself the supreme leader and picked the unpopular kids to be his loyal followers. Filled their heads with propaganda how they were the chosen ones, gave them special status in class, etc. Well it started turning violent as the popular kids were getting beaten by gangs of these “Nazis”. So he realized he had to end the experiment and decided to have an assembly in the gym reminiscent of the Nazi displays of power in Berlin and Nuremborg. The kids all lined up in perfect lines, eyes fixed on their “leader”. The teacher pulled the curtain aside and up on the screen behind him was a video of Hitler. The kids of course had a breakdown as they realized the learned a tough lesson. It really blew me away afterwards. No country is safe from facist tendencies. I did some looking around for the video. It's a rare one, but I found it here for $28.99. I checked ebay, amazon, half and even my local libary, no dice. I did find a Real version of it that's free to download and view in a postage stamp sized window here. Here's the imdb link too. If anybody has a copy and would be so generous to send me a copy, why you'd make my day :)

Comment spam

craigg75 — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:11:00 GMT

Ok I dropped the anti-comment spam control from my blog. Chris lost a comment due to it. Those letters are hard to read I guess at his age..whoa! ;-)

New skin too. It's called Blue Curve, fashioned after a Linux variant from Red Hat. Looks clean.

Highlander

craigg75 — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 04:30:00 GMT

Throughout the years I've watched the Highlander tv show. I've always really enjoyed it, the stories, the characters, the lightweight fantasy element. Some of the shows had some outstanding writing. Even the main character, Duncan MacLeod had some major babes as girlfriends in the show. So I decided, dang it I need to watch this series start to finish, all 119 episodes. I noticed that the shows were released on DVD. 6 seasons at $60 a pop, ouch. So I did the next best thing, I joined NetFlix. At $18 a month, 3 DVDs at a time, it might be a bit cheaper. I got the first 3 DVDs within a week, so far not too bad. There are 8 DVDs in the first season alone. We'll see how it goes. I worked with a guy a few years back that said the postal workers were stealing his NetFlix returns and he had to have them mailed back from another zipcode. Anyway I've watched the first two episodes of the first season. Once again, ouch. No wonder I've not seen the first season in repeats, it sucked bad. It was nice having some of the back story filled in though. Like where Richie came from, Tessa's knowledge of Duncan and Duncan's avoidance of "the game". There was a great shot of Tessa in the shower, unexpected joy :)

100th post!

craigg75 — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 15:23:00 GMT

This is my 100th post. Time to reflect? It's been fun, although I would like to be more consistent with blogging. My blog gets moldy too many times. Had to revive it only to let it rot again...xxx

A new look

craigg75 — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 13:58:00 GMT

Well I finally got around to updating this blog to most stable version, 0.95. I wanted a new skin and could only get one if I upgraded. The blog I use is called dottext, it's open source and free to use. I don't have any complaints. I wish there was a way to have links open in a new page when adding them in a posting. Anyway I've compared it with other ones and it's up to par. This version added a comment spam blocker and a calendar. I get comment spam from time to time, so it's nice to finally eliminate it. The other user on here still has a big wishlist though...

Mardi Gras/Cell phones/Over consumption

craigg75 — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 21:23:00 GMT

Mardi Gras is upon us again. I'm going with Annette tommorow for the big parade. Meeting her sister, fiance, other friends there. I always find it strange that St.Louis gets weird once a year for this event. Transvestites, costumes, tons of music. Its like you're in a different town for a day. I probably won't stay the whole day, let Annette catch a ride back with her sister, but I do like being immersed in the craziness for awhile. The charm kind of wears off after awhile though, sort of like, what's with all these freaks! haha. I should have acted and got my new cell phone plan this week, my new phone will have a camera in it <wink><wink><nudge><nudge>. Another item I don't plan on using though other than when some girl shakes her ta ta's at me. Just give me a phone that works 99.9% of the time, good reception and long battery life. No games, no ringtones, no camera, no email, no web browser, just a plain vanilla phone that has solid basics. They don't exist, I looked all last month. Bullshit. Sort of like asking for a new home with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a garage. Can't happen, you have to buy 4 bedrooms, 3 car garage, 2 stories, 3 baths, skylights, atriums, vaulted ceilings, oversized kitchen, bay windows, etc. Why do companies have to go after such huge margins on products these days? Big money, no whammys. Welcome to the USA.

Free books - looking for a good home

craigg75 — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:54:00 GMT

Well I had some old science books that I was going to pitch and decided against it since Chris would lecture me if he found out. So I packed them up and sent them off to him. Before I did however I entered them in my bookcrossing.com bookshelf. Basically it's a website where you enter your book and it gives you a url to write in the front cover of the book. Then you drop your book off somewhere random and hopefully whoever picks it up will report back on the website that they picked it up. Sort of leave a cookie crumb trail of your free book. Anyway the post office tore the package and lost the books somewhere between here and there. The books seemed to be controlled by fate. Let's hope that my lost books will find a home somewhere. At least there's a chance that I'll be notified.