Well it's done

I've been thinking about it for awhile now and today I finally cancelled my Galaxies account. Given that it automatically paid again at the end of August I still get to play until the end of February.

Since I'm playing City of Heroes now and World of Warcraft is coming out next month I'll probably be finished with Galaxies. Parts were fun but it's still nearly as broken as it was when it was released (supposedly after a thorough beta test). It's not fun any more so I don't play except to take care of my factories. I did play a bunch this weekend because Wef's vendors sold all the pets I made.

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CoH is fun still. Got 2 levels with my martial arts scrapper. First time I tried to buy double origin enhancements. Twice as effective as the training ones I've been using up to now. Spent all my cash on it though.

Don't know how much I'll be able to play this week with the party coming up.

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Halloween Party is Saturday. Need to get my costume together. Shaved my beard to match. Looks kind of strange, sort of bohemian. Now to find some clothes which come close to what he wore in that film. I'll see if I can get someone to take a pic with my camera if it comes out good.

Mary and Jess are going to help me decorate on Thursday. Need to vacuum the carpet again, it's new so it's still shedding. Have to decide on the menu too. Maybe chili or mexican.

Op Center again

I'm in the Op Center again this afternoon, this time because Ikram is out sick. So I can blog the stuff I meant to on Friday. Most of what pops into my head comes from listening to the radio in the morning while I get ready.

There a car dealer here, Perry Nissan, who has ads touting how they know there is lots of competition and they have to be better. I find it humorous. I bought a Nissan Sentra from them in 93. It lasted almost 10 years and quite a few miles. As long as the salesman I bought it from was still working there, they were very friendly and helpful. I recall one instance where I had to have some work done (a scheduled maintenance) and he arranged for a loaner. However once he quit and moved to a different dealership they had no clue who I was and the good treatment stopped abruptly. When the Nissan finally died and I was looking around for another one (after the motorcycle accident) I went there and looked at the new 240Zs. Nice car. Very fancy. I went to their website and I couldn't identify the purpose of any of the extra options you could get on it. Technobabble for adding another 5k to the price was my conclusion. At the dealership I got a salesman so slick I'm surprise it didn't run off onto the floor and cause us (Jeff was there with me) to slide across the showroom. "No, you can't pre-order with options you want blahblahblah". It seems that Nissan only produces a set number of them every year and you're stuck with whatever options the dealership asked for. Lame. Very Lame. Needless to say I didn't put up with that so I bought a Subaru WRX instead. So the ads I hear touting this place as your friend are humorous in the same way that Ashlee Simpson was caught lip synching on SNL this weekend (which is to say I shake my head and say "it figures").

More later (when I can remember the other three topics I was going to comment on).

da da da (or is it 'la la la'?)

Took the Op Center this morning for Brian so he could go over to Telecom and do some machine magic.

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Twiddling my thumbs and reading blogs. Got to some strange places following links but found some new blogs to read. People with interesting things to say. Reminded me that I never really post anything of significance on my blog. But I guess not getting wrapped around the axle about much may have something to do with that. Just for the folks who's blogs I posted to, in case they come to look at mine, I'll post my own personal golden rule again. I got it from a retired Army officer (a colonel I think) who had been a lieutenant in Vietnam. He used this throughout his career and it served him well.

"If someone is not lying on the ground bleeding, it's not an emergency!"

Granted I can't make use it at work (the chancellor will think it's an emergency if he can't read his email!) all the time but it still makes sense to me.

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Tried out the new exercise machine last night. It wasn't really a good workout though. I pressed the "chest" and "lose weight" option on the control panel and got a series of exercises but I kept having to go back into the house to watch the video to see how to do them. And the names for them differ between the video and the control panel. That's annoying. For some of them it seems the position of your hands or the direction you push are important. I can see that I guess, working slightly different sets of muscles. And eventually I'll learn all of them and make it a better workout.

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I need to call dad and talk with them to see how things are going. Posting a comment to a blogger who was having problems with her family reminded me I haven't called since I moved into the house in August. Got to start Christmas shopping for the kids too.

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The game is tonight. We should be two sessions (including this one) from the end of the Iron Kingdoms campaign. Been reading the Aberrant book and still haven't finished my character for that but we have the Vampire stuff next so I've got some time.

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Having this year's Halloween party at my house. Mary and Jess are coming over to help decorate next Thursday. Got to find the accouterments for the costume. The bowtie and the vest will likely be the hardest to find. Should talk Erik into going to good will to see if they have something that looks right. Been pondering how to cut my beard to make it look right and have that down but it doesn't look like the sideburns will be too close. Need to watch the film again to write down his monologues.

Weekend report

Well this weekend was like most. Cleaning the house a bit, playing something, lately City of Heroes or something on the Xbox (gotten tired of Galaxies).

Friday the exercise machine was delivered and I put it into the garage. Saturday I moved some things around to make room for it. I didn't start assembling it Saturday cause I was lazy. Sunday I got off the computer around lunchtime and went to open the box. I started assembly around 2:30 or 3. Erik and Mary came over after they rode their bikes on the Katy trail some. We finally got it assembled around 5:30. It's got quite a few cool features. So now I just need to not put off working out.

I didn't Sunday night because the new Farscape movie premiered. It was pretty good and now I'm going to have to get both season 7 of Stargate SG-1 and season 1 of Farscape. Tonight isn't looking too good either. The 2nd half of the Farscape thing is on and I promised to deliver some stuff in Galaxies as well as needing to look for some good flora for the next batch. Plus I need to vacuum the carpet, it's shedding again. People are coming over for the game on Wednesday and I want to have it done before then.

I sent out an email for the Halloween party today. No responses yet but it's still two weeks. I need to get some decorations and figure out what I'm going to fix. Should be good. My costume needs some work but I got "The Ladykillers" and watched it so that helped. Now I need to get his voice patterns down and memorize some of his monologues. Not going to try for a full costume since a coat would likely get too warm. We'll just go with the pants, shirt and vest. The bow-tie may be hard. We'll see.

The final chance

Well the last presidential debate is tonight. So far nothing either one has said has changed my mind but then I didn't think they were going to. And I couldn't stand to listen to their retoric enough to actually listen to very much of them. However the few facts which came out didn't make the republicans look very good but that's more tied to the final report by the UN weapons inspectors and the administration's response to it than anything said during the debates.

The Iron Kingdom game is tonight. They should get nearly finished with next session being the Big Final Showdown with the Ultimate Bad Guy. I finally got the correct version of Aberrant and have been reading that. My nova will be called "Monkey Boy" and he is the sole surviving member of a group (I hesitate to call them a gang since that has so many overtones) called the "Rad Nulls" who throw themselves in front of buses and off building in an attempt to cause their nova powers to "errupt". Needless to say most of them weren't successful at it but my character was. His powers are going to be being nearly unkillable (hehe) and blending into the background (some appearance based power) but since I haven't finished reading the rules yet I can't be specific.

Jason has ginned up something a bit more colorful for the Wings of Angels vampire campaign. It needs a migration of the player posted content but should be up and working now.

I'm not playing Galaxies much anymore, not very much new or interesting to do in there but I'm still Mr. Moneybags (29 million creds) and churning out factory runs of stuff which sell as fast as I can get them done (bio-engineer food tissue which helps chefs make their food better, which in turns buffs players when they fight).

I haven't played City of Heroes in a few days but will probably poke around some this weekend.

I ordered an exercise machine late last week and it should be delivered on Friday. Now I should spend some time tomorrow evening clearing out space in the garage to put it together. I should get some sort of rubberized mat to put it on too. Then to see if I can't trim off a few pounds and get back some of my endurance.

"Trust No One"

Wasn't that the theme of the X-Files?

http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=272

It seems that both sides were playing fast and loose with both their numbers and their "facts". Hmmm

So who won this one?

I didn't see any of the VP debate the other night. However Andy had a humorous story. (I'm getting this 2nd hand so I can't vouch for it's validity)

It seems Cheney got a question about his comments concerning the link between Saddamm and Al Queda. He maintained that he never said anything about there being a connection between these two and directed people to "factcheck.com".

Well it seems that what he meant to do was direct people to factcheck.org instead. Factcheck.com turned out to be some sort of web advertising company. When their traffic because of this pegged they redirected everything to George Soros's site. (not knowing who George Soros is I didn't get the irony here) That site got pegged and (kindly) redirected people to factcheck.org. It also seems that if you go to factcheck.org there is nothing there in the first place which proves that Cheney didn't say anything about the link between Saddamm and Al Queda (double negative here).

My first thought was that Cheney had memory problems but someone's (this was at last night's game) pointed out that he's a very intelligent man. So the sole remaining two possibilities that I can bring to mind are that a) he thinks no one will check up on what he says (I can't believe anyone would be that niave, especially anyone in politics) or that b) he doesn't care if we can prove he's lying.

If I think too much about that it's going to disturb me even more than it does now!

Who won?

There was a lot in the news earlier about who won the Presidential debate last week. The liberal media is trying to convince us that Kerry won while the conservatives proclaim victory as well.

I saw a piece yesterday off Google News that stipulated that no one can really win a debate. Bad news for countless High School debate teams I'm sure.

He said that he thought (and this was quite plainly an opinion site rather than a "news" source - at least they're honest about their biases) that Bush had quite successfully sandbagged Kerry. He used a racing analogy about driving your car at less than it's capable of so that the other drivers think that your cars performance is less. I'm relatively certain that Bush himself is not that saavy but he has some slick handlers so this seemed feasible.

The media proclaimed that Bush repeated himself time and again. This writer said this reinforced Bush's points and afterwards people will remember that Bush had X to say while they won't remember what Kerry had to say. True for my part, I don't remember much of what Kerry said (I only watched about half an hour of it before I had to turn it off, I got too mad), but Bush pissed me off mouthing pointless platitudes and rhetoric so much that I couldn't watch more of it.

Kerry wasn't telling us what his plans were, only that he had them, and Bush was repeating the same old lame crap that we all know isn't true now. I did notice that Kerry proclaimed that funds were being redirected toward training the Iraqis to take care of things themselves (police & military training) while Bush rattled off numbers of police (etc) trained. My question is if there have been 126,000 Iraqi police trained, why is the violence still escalating?

Whereas Kerry said a lot of things and the writer maintained that this gave Bush a lot of ammunition. And that it put Kerry on the defensive when Bush found a point to call him on. The writer maintained this made it appear that Kerry had changed his position, even during the debate. I haven't seen a lot of mud slinging on Google news which appears to be a result of the debate so I don't agree with this either.

Overall, I don't agree with the writer's conclusion but he did have some interesting points.

For me the debate didn't show me anything I didn't already know or presume, and it leaves me where I was before. Kerry might not do too well as President but I know I don't want Bush to have the job. He's just too fiscally irresponsible setting aside his international (insert assorted name calling here) policies. We'll see how the VP guys do tonight.

It's here, woo hoo!

That was first thought when I saw the package from Noble Knight games. Once I got it opened I found out I had accidentally ordered the d20 version of Aberrant instead of the older, out of print, White Wolf version. So I had to reorder and this time I made sure of it. D'oh

What IS that smell?

Wednesday we didn't play Iron Kingdoms since Jason was out of town. Instead everyone else came over, I barbequed burgers and brats and Jack and Sharon made Vampire characters.

After that the rest of us worked on making Aberrant characters for Jack's game after we finish IK and Vampire.

We sat down to eat (I had moved the grill from the garage out to the back patio) and I thought I smelled something funny, like perhaps I'd stepped in something Sasha left in the backyard when I was out there. I didn't think it was me because I would have smelled it earlier, before everyone got there. I hoped it wasn't Jack and was afraid of saying something if it wasn't. I was sitting on the back side of the table and everyone was to my right. I glanced left and saw the cause.

Andy had brought Hero over (so Karri got a break from watching the dog) and she'd been in the house the whole time so far. Well it seems she needed to go bad and had pooped on the carpet next to me. D'oh!

He won't live that one down for awhile!