November is "National Novel Writing Month" -- NaNoWriMo for short. The goal of NaNoWriMo, which started back in 1999, is to write a novel -- that is, 50,000 words -- in one month.
I recently read a library book called "Writing Your First Novel" (or something generic like that) and the number one thing the author stressed was, in order to write a book, you must write every single day. Even if you don't have a finished plot (or a plot at all), the author stressed you should set aside a block
After spending fifteen hours in my truck (thank goodness for McDonald's iced coffees), I made it back home from Atlanta safe and sound. I spent most of the weekend lounging around and resting, and am back at work today.
Last week's class was eye opening, to say the least. WebInspect is a program that scans websites for vulnerabilities. Throughout the week I ran several scans (some even against my own website), finding lots of interesting things and learning a lot. After seeing some of the mo
Everything's going well during my Atlanta stay so far.
The hotel is swanky. The rooms are huge and breakfast and a "bistro" dinner are free. I only have two complaints about the room. The first is, you can't see the television from the desk area. The second is, the air conditioner is unusually loud -- it's woken me up in the middle of the night several times this week, which is pretty hard to do. Even with those two drawbacks I still give the hotel a 9 out of 10. I've never stayed in a Hote
Last night I was in the mood for Chinese food. The first restaurant the GPS led me to was positioned between a Ferrari dealership and a Porsche dealership. Deciding this wasn't my side of town, I drove on to the next one -- a sleazy hole-in-the-wall restaurant named "The China King Buffet" -- at least, that's how it appeared on the GPS. Upon entering the restaurant, half of the signs were in Chinese; the other half, Spanish. My kind of place.
After fixing a plate of food and sitting down, I
A little over a month ago I decided to buy an external terabyte drive and copy all of my mp3s over to it. Copying all of mp3s over to the drive took a couple of weeks. I have a lot. For this week's trip to Atlanta I decided to bring the drive along with me so I could do some file house cleaning and listen to some music at the same time.
So how's that going, you might ask? Well, I'll tell you. Winamp keeps randomly stopping while on random play. One of the tracks it was hanging on was Help!,
So far without fail, my GPS has always got me where I needed to go -- although I must admit, it doesn't always led me down the fastest route. The route it picked for me today from Tunica to Atlanta led me through small town America. Not that I minded its planning -- I wasn't in any hurry to get to Atlanta and I enjoyed taking something other than I-40 for a change.
Every small town in America needs at least one of each of the following things: a church, a cemetary, and a gas station. By smal
I'm on the road again; pulled out of Tunica a little after 8am after downing a comped breakfast at Bally's.
For the second day in a row I came out ahead at a casino. Saturday night I won $120 in Broken Bow and walked away $90 up. Last night, I won $100 on slots and $100 on video poker. I had planned on playing more, but as I was walking through the middle of the casino my belt broke. I felt a weird "pop" and the next thing you know my pants fell down. I caught them before they got to my kne
This weekend, our family (me, Susan, Mason and Morgan) and Jeff's family (Jeff, wife Heather, son Talon and daughter Morgan) went down to the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, stopping once again at the Beaver's Bend Cabins in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. I've been to the cabin multiple times, but I'd never been to the Diamond Dig before.
The Crater of Diamonds State Park consists of a big field of dirt where you can for diamonds. About two diamonds a day are found at th
...does that mean good things do, too?
Picked up my third cabinet in less than a week last night -- Commando, by Data East (1985). It's a dedicated cabinet in great condition with a like new/refurbed monitor. The game looks and plays fantastic; it needs nothing. Years ago when I started collecting arcade games I made a list of "the top 10 games I'd like to own" -- Commando is on that list.
In the summer of 1986 I went on a school trip to Washington D.C. for 4 days. On one of the fo
For some time at work now I've been running dual monitors and I love it. The extra pixel real estate is like gold. I can't tell you how many times I appreciate it on a daily basis. While doing day to day tasks, I can work on one monitor and keep my e-mail open on the other. When programming, I can write code on one monitor and test things on the other. I love me some dual monitors ... but at home, things haven't gone as well. The first problem at home is, my monitors aren't as nice as the ones I
Last night was the first pre-season home game of the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Susan and I were there to experience it. Before last night's game against the Thunder our record stood at 1-3, and with Marcus Camby and Baron Davis out on sick leave I thought we might have a chance of pulling out another win.
We didn't, of course, but it was close -- 100-98. Not a bad showing for a team that is ranked 30th out of 30, according to ESPN's power rankings (the Clippers are current ranked 19th). Fo
Last week I had the opportunity to attend a fellow collector's private arcade, about an hour south of Oklahoma City. The place isn't open for business -- it's a 6,600 square foot private playground, a joint venture between three friends who have built the ultimate hangout for their friends and family.
If you enjoy arcade games, you won't want to miss these photos.
Here are a few pictures to whet your appetite:
Gameroom #1.
Gameroom #2.
A shot of the living room area.
Came home from lunch yesterday and there were three messages on the answering machine. The first was from an old family friend, informing me that she had just seen three arcade games for sale at a local estate sale.
Couldn't tell you what the other two messages were. Didn't wait to find out.
Grabbed my keys, wallet and Mason and zoomed out the door. Got to the auction in minutes flat. There were three arcade games and one pinball machine to be auctioned. The two machines that caught my e
While searching for some old videogame manuals on Google the other day I discovered that Nike had released a tennis shoe in honor of one of my favorite old arcade games. This seemed a little odd to me, so I did a little research and here is what I found.
Nike Dunks were born in 1985, retired, and were reborn in 1998. Dunks are known for their bright colors and unique patterns. Nike also makes an offshoot of the Dunk called an SB ("skateboard") Dunk. There are literally hundreds of different
Didn't make it to the Bigfoot festival ... got suckered into the Czech Festival instead. The Bigfoot festival looked really neat and from what I could glean looked pretty boring for kids, so we went to the parade instead. Maybe next year.
Parade was much better than last year's, although Yukon's standing policy of no throwing candy from floats again disappointed the children. This year we brought our own candy instead.
60+ photos from this year's parade here.
I love bad horror movies but I rarely have (or make) the time to watch them. I've been talking about throwing my own personal Halloween movie fest for a couple of years now, but for some reason never got around to it. Well, this year I'm doing it. For the entire month of October I plan on watching and reviewing a different horror movie each and every night. Halloweenfest 2008 kicked off last night with 1986's classic Heavy Metal thriller, Trick or Treat.
Don't worry, those of you who subscr
The weekend before last, Susan's mom informed me that there were would be some Star Wars items up for sale at Danny's Friday Night Auction. Stephen and I attended the auction, and I came home with a pretty decent haul.
Here are the action figures I got. I paid on average about four bucks each -- not a great deal, but they were there. The only one I really wanted was the classic figure at the bottom of the picture. The other thing I really wanted was this:
The Death Star, comple
A couple of days ago I wrote about a local car dealership's billboard that appears to contain Photoshopped cars. Apparently I inherited my nose for investigative journalism. Dad solved the mystery with a simple e-mail.
From: Dad
To: Norris Auto Sales
Question: Are the cars depicted on your banner real cars?
From: Norris Auto Sales
To: Dad
Answer: not at all but thanks for asking,they are cool looking arn't they...
When all else fails, use the direct approach.
Here is a good example of how I clean rooms.
"Boy am I in the mood to clean the garage. I'll just turn on the radio and get started."
"Hey, what's going on here? One speaker doesn't work! That sucks! Hey ... I think I have some smaller speakers I bet I could wire up to my old boombox. I think I'll do that."
(Rob finds a spare set of speakers in the garage and some wire in his toolbox and wires everything up. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound very good.)
"Hmmm. I guess the
I had a bunch of stuff to post today but I forgot to pull the pictures off my camera, so instead of posting those I'll offer you a challenge that I saw floating around the interwebs a while back.
You send me up to five things you would like me to take pictures of. Your requests can be specific or generic, doesn't matter, and obviously I retain the right to veto/ignore any requests. You may request up to five photos (I've got things to do, man!). Be creative, but remember that this blog is ra
This billboard has been driving me crazy for a while now.
Norris Auto Sales is a relatively new used car dealership that popped up recently on the southeast corner of I-40 and Macarthur; as such, I typically pass it twice daily, and often get stuck at the traffic light at the same corner, causing me to stare at the above advertisement.
What bugs me is, as far as I can tell, the two cars on the billboard are not real cars.
It's hard to tell on the one on left because, unless I su
A year or two ago there was a reality show called "American Inventor" (I have no idea if it's still around or not). On the show, everyday people presented their invention ideas to a panel of judges. The first few episodes were similar to the first few episodes of American Idol and were filled with judges spending a lot of time making fun of most of the inventors and their silly inventions.
There's one invention I never forgot from that show. A rather eccentric fellow presented his "remote cl
Last week I discovered that Bally's Le Mans, one of the oldest arcades in the Oklahoma City area, has closed its doors. (Technically it didn't have doors since it was located at Crossoads Mall, but you get the idea. They're gone.)
Bally's Le Mans was originally Le Mans Speedway, an indoor go-cart race track that was installed sometime during the late 70s. Eventually the race track was removed to make room for arcade games and the word "Speedway" was dropped from the name, leaving us with si
Earlier this week, Cox Cable announced that they had "formed a partnership with Viacom's MTV2 music network, which will promote both MTV2 and Cox's high-speed Internet service." I'll buy that, but the way they have chosen to "promote MTV2" is questionable and unique.
They turned it off.
At least, they did mine. While flipping through cable channels this morning I found a bright purple screen on channel 55 where MTV2 used to be. I am no advertising genius, but taking away a channel from y
Here are three somewhat odd restaurant experiences we've had in the last month. None of the stories by themselves were particularly blog-worthy, but put 'em all together and you get ... well, today's entry.
#1: A couple of days ago the family and I went to Pizza Inn for dinner. Our waitress (the only one in the place) had just recently moved to Oklahoma from Houston, and she told us all about how her parents' home was ruined and how most of her stuff was still at her parents' house in Housto
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