Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Mini-Vacation Recap

    Yes, I went to the department-head meeting. Yes, I downloaded the Maximiser data at 10:00. No, I didn’t get sis’ CD-ROMs mailed off. (Whoops.)

    We did, however, eventually get down to the Family Fun Center for some… er… fun. This time we started with the bumper boats. I love bumper boats, and these have squirtguns. Muahahahaha.

    To dry off, we played 18 holes of minigolf. The huge group of kids (did their shirts read YMCA? I think so.) let us play through as they massed at the first couple of holes. Once past them, we had nobody in front of us (or behind, really) for the rest of our game. No pressure! At one point I got down on the astroturf and blew on Erica’s golf ball to make it go in. Needless to say we took very little of the game seriously, which is the best way to play minigolf anyway. Scorecards? What fer?

    After that we split up, Wendi and Erica taking on the go-carts while Alex and I tried out the arcade. Oddly enough our first game was air hockey, and it was just about the most fun we had in the arcade. We’ve pretty much decided “to hell with the arcade next time.” The money would have been better spent on another round of bumper boats.

    Once our arcade tokens were finally exhausted we decided to head out, grab some snacks and head for home. By way of Future Dreams. While at Safeway (of all places) we noticed the paperback for the most recent Raymond Feist “Krondor” novel. This computer-game-based series isn’t bad, but it also isn’t all that superb. We picked this one up anyway, and… it isn’t bad, but it also isn’t all that superb. (Why no, in fact, I’m not going to waste time with a full review. Why yes, I did finish reading it in a mere three hours.)

    We came home, kicked back, prepared and enjoyed some chocolate chip cookies, read comics and novels and such, and then Wendi and her dad took off for another late night of karaoke. Meanwhile I got online, read and replied to my usual ultralight stack of email, then decided to post a recap of my vacation day.

    Um, I guess that’s everything up to this point, isn’t it? Tomorrow it’s back to the salt mines for me. I hope I’m up to it. I’m a little depressed about the conjunction of my small raise and the increase in insurance deductions, but I’m trying very very hard not to let the depression get ahead of me. Wish me luck.

  • Taking The Day

    After a busy stretch at the office, and with both my newly-improved paycheck and Wendi’s double-gig-weekend payday coming, we decided that tomorrow should be a day off. We’re going to run errands, then we’re going to take the rugrats down to the Family Fun Center in Wilsonville. We checked it out on Sunday (we played minigolf, actually) and enjoyed it enough to want to go back during the week when it might be just a smidge less crowded.

    I still have to show up for the department heads meeting at 8:00, and at 10:00 the Spring book Maximiser data gets released. *sigh* So I can’t leave until after that’s installed. Then we run to Future Dreams for the comics, and to the bank to set up my account. (I get my own debit card so that I can’t possibly screw up the family finances whenever I go out to lunch or something. This way I can pay my Future Dreams and Northwest Link monthly bills on my own, yay!)

    In other news, I just finished burning and labelling the six CD-ROMs of anime music videos I promised my sister as a wedding present. I’ll package them up for mailing tomorrow morning while I wait for the Maximiser data to be released.

    At least I’ll get most of a day off, dammit.

  • Versus Man, Versus Monster

    It’s done, it’s posted, and if you have the bandwidth for a 38 megabyte download I encourage you to check it out.

    Versus Man, Versus Monster, footage from Iria: Zeiram the Animation and music by ‘Kin Selim.’

  • “you might get to be a Christian, too.”

    The proprietess of Dragon Ink came across a book entitled, “Little Visits With God.” She also gave us a sample from one of the stories…

    Why Cindy Wanted To Be Spanked

    Cindy had been naughty, and she knew it. Twice in one week her daddy had spanked her. She was little, but not too little to know why she was spanked.
    Cindy told her little friend Walter about the spankings.
    “I never get spanked,” said Walter.
    “Sometimes you should get spanked,” said Cindy.
    “Why?”asked Walter.
    “‘Cause then you’d be easier to play with, and you’d grow up to be a better man and … and… you might get to be a Christian, too,” Cindy explained.

    It’s only frightening because it’s real.
    Dragon Ink – Little Visits

  • Music Video Progress Report

    After three solid hours today spent working in VirtualDub and Premiere, I can confidently claim that by day’s end tomorrow my third anime music video will be complete.

    My progress reports to the animemusicvideos.org journal can be seen here.

  • Friday Blog Five

    Of course, it’s never exactly five questions.

    • How long have you had a weblog? – On and off for just over a year. During the stretches where I had no dedicated website I used other locations’ “journal” functions to make do.
    • What was your first post about? – What most such postings usually contain: “Hey, I got it working! Yay!” The first greyduck.net posting can be seen here. My very first Zero posting from March 28 2001, “Getting Started,” reads:

      And so far, I’ve only managed to break it a lot. Dear gods, let me get it unbroken, and quick!

      For one thing, the Synopsis portion seems to be well-screwed. The Body is the only thing that shows up. Nevermind that using the “Preview” feature adds the article to the database… every time you click Preview. Time to send polite feedback to the program author? I’ll beat on it for a while first and see what happens.

      I also need to experiment with links, images and what-not.

      I will add that the extremely-modular setup of Monaural Jerk means that I was able to easily remove the “headers” from the journal.php page so I could integrate it neatly into my home page structure. Or “more neatly” anyway… give me time, I’ll get this thing looking good.


      Mind you, it turns out that the Synopsis doesn’t show up by design, and the “Preview” issue has long since been resolved.

    • How many changes (name, location, etc.) of your weblog have there been, if more than one? – Hoo boy. Well, my first dedicated journal-style website was Zero. That was shut down by the Powers That Be. Eventually greyduck.net was born, but then it had to move to a new server.
    • What CMS (content management system) do you use? Do you like it or do you want to try something else?Monaural Jerk. It would take something really fantastic to get me to change. MJ does exactly what I want, exactly the way I want it. It relies on having a server you have a reasonable amount of control over, and in order to customize it you have to tinker with it by hand. In my book, of course, those count as benefits of the system.
    • Do you read people who have both a journal and a weblog? Or do you prefer to read people who have all of their writing in one central place? – “Read people?” What, they have text printed on their bodies? Anyway… I’m aware of the distinction between “journal” and “blog,” I just fail to care about said distinction. If someone writes about and links to interesting things, good. If someone writes crap and links to stupid things, bad. This isn’t brain surgery, folks. Is my site a journal? Is it a blog? Does it matter?

    Friday Five