8/27/2008

Not Much Going On Right Now….

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 9:25 pm

I’m concentrating very hard on getting our Winter catalog out the door, so my spare time is taken up largely with pampering myself with wife, food and cats, necessarily in that order. A fair amount of TV fits in there somewhere as well: we got Season 2 of Dexter on DVD and burned through it in less than a week. Not bad, not bad. It started off pretty limp, but by about the middle of the season it really came together. I hope that subsequent seasons will not follow the same basic model of the first two; namely, that a secondary character who proves to be as/nearly as fucked up as the title character comes in and shakes Dexter’s foundations. It worked well for the most part so far, but I’d like to see the plot take a different turn in Season 3. Which I won’t be catching until it comes out on DVD in about eight months, by which time I’ll be so Dexter-deprived that I’ll take just about anything. Oh well; at least the final season of The Shield will begin airing next week….

Right now I’m sitting here listening to Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Firstly, I find myself almost swooning, listening to a true orator wielding the spoken word with a craftsman’s skill. Makes me feel the intellectual vacuum left by the Clown Prince even more strongly. Obama is an excellent speaker as well, no doubt about it. But he seems to waver in his speaking style between sounding like a preacher and sounding like a social studies teacher. Bill seems to find just the perfect middle ground between policy wonk and back-country lawyer. He always sounds like he’s talking individually to every one of the audience.

Bill is setting just the right tone here: no question about his (pragmatic) allegiance to Obama. Is he super-pissed that his wife didn’t get the nomination? Sure he is. But like Hillary he is God-damned if he will take his ball and go home, leaving the election to McCain. Good on both of ’em. Now if we could just get the rest of the delegates she won over to be that grown up. I swear to God, if those big babies manage to somehow lose us this election I’m gonna—um—be very downright upset, lemmetellyou.

Among the many things I had forgotten about raising cats in the interim between our last two and this year’s models is the fact that they only exist in as many dimensions as they feel are necessary at any given moment, in order to maximize their ability to get into spaces and situations they ought not. Need to get behind the VCR? Cincherino! Simply shed an unwanted dimension and slide into the three-inch gap in the entertainment center. Feel like seeing what’s on the top of the six-foot-tall wire shelving unit in the basement? No problem! Just drop yourself down to a single point without space, at which point you are both nowhere and everywhere at once, one of those places being the top of the shelf. Then slap a couple more dimensions back on, just in time to knock some canning jars off the shelf. Oh, and being able to adjust one’s relation to the fourth dimension comes in really handy when a human has just gotten up to go find the source of that gawdawful racket.

Since my former IIS box is no longer doing duty as both a Web and a camera server, I’ve decided to slim things down a little bit. I’m moving the CPU, RAM and drives over to a Shuttle SG31G2 Small Form Factor barebones kit. With half the power supply and a third of the fans, this thing should be much quieter than the leaf-blower I’m currently running, which was originally built around a replacement motherboard that I got when my gaming rig’s mobo went foop right in the middle of Bioshock and I couldn’t wait for the warranty replacement to arrive. Also, it helps to fill that deep inner need to be tinkering with some computer or another, now that my new blog server’s fully up and running and I finished fleshing out an old blue-and-white Power Mac G3 for some friends who needed a word-processing computer. I’ll let y’all know what I think of the Shuttle when I’m through gussying it up.

That’s about all the news that’s unfit to print, much less read, for the moment.

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