Soupergenius

George Clinton and the Psychodelic All Stars was in Manassas Last weekend. They were the headline act at the Capitol City Carnival, which was a beer tasting event. Fishbone was the other band that we saw there and they were really good. I did not know they were still together, since I used to listen to them a long time ago. George Clinton was also good, but I did not know he had issues with James Brown, (kept referring to him as James Clown). Over all it was a good time. I heard that there were a few good beers, but I did not drink any. Man, I am a good designated driver.
The new season of television is upon us. The shows I have watched include Chuck, The Bionic Woman, Reaper, Big Shots and K-ville. There is not one show that really stands out as a new winner, but I will probably give them a few weeks and make my judgement then. I liked Big Shots, but it is definitely like a soap opera for men, which is not a good thing. Chuck is kind of funny and may get better. I did not like the bad bionic woman, it seemed to be a cliche. The cop in K-ville oposite Anthony Anderson sucks. After all is said and done, I will probably forget that these shows are on tv and just stop watching them, but only time will tell.

I may have found a directory of lost pictures but I will not know until I compare them to pictures that are already in the gallery. It is pretty funny how many copies of files that I have and I never know if any one of them is the most recent or the most complete. With multiple computers and multiple external hard drives, it can be a daunting task to get everything organized. I started organizing all my digital music a while back and had to take some time off from that due to the amount of music that I have. I don’t have as many pictures as songs, but I do have a fairly large number of them. Some day I should be able to get everything all in order.
Golf is complicated. I play better now, but my scores never show that. 5 years ago, I was shooting in the 115-125 range. I could not hit the ball farther than 200 yards and had no short game or any putting ability. Now I can hit the ball 250-275 yards pretty regularly, have gotten a lot better at playing around the greens, get a couple of pars per round and even an occasional birdy and average 2 putts per green. My scores are still in the 110-115 range. Not very good. I believe I should be scoring in the 93-98 range, but have never been able to do that. There are always a couple of holes that totally mess up the round for me. I think my problem this past weekend was playing from the blues (championship tees) instead of the whites (regular tees). I played poorly the first 4 holes and lost a ball on each hole. Then I played really well and had two pars over the next six holes and did not lose a ball. On the back nine I did ok for the first 4-5 holes, but then I guess I got tired and my form went bye-bye and I doubled my score on the last 4 holes. I could not hit a shot properly. I still had a good time though. I don’t know if I will be getting out to play anymore this season, but I definitely had some memerable shots and that is what I play for now.

ISD (Irresistable spending disorder)
This is a disease that is very hard to beat. I always want to spend money on things I don’t need but do want. Right now I have been looking at new cellphones. I want a new phone becuase I am bored with the one that I have, but the one that I have is really cool and exclusive. I also want a new Honda Ridgeline, but my Element fills all of my needs right now. These are just the things that I want and have been able to resist. I should never be allowed to go to Wal-mart or Target, because I will almost always come out with something I don’t need or even will remeber a few days later. I try to direct my disease towards things that would be more benifical to everyday living, but it does not always work. We could use new drinkware since most of our plastic cups are cracking from the dishwasher.
My other disease is being a Buffalo Bills fan. They definitely have not started the year off right. I have only seen a little of the Bills vs. Steelers game, and they did not look very good then. We now have a slingbox at work, so I should be able to catch more Bills games this year. The worst part of them starting off slowly is that the Washington Redskins have started off strong. 2-0 and playing a weak Giants team. Already the locals are talking super bowl. I was accused of having IBF (Illusional Bills Fan Disorder). I think it was supposed to be Disillusioned Bills Fan Disorder though. I don’t know how I am dissillusioned though as I believe that they are about an 8-8 team this year. This is still very possible for them, but they do have a very hard schedule.
Hi-Def rules.

The install is finally done. I was really impressed with the technician who did the install, he was very friendly and knowledgeable about the system. They ended up using all of the current wiring, so nothing new was needed. I like the multi-room dvr, but I wish you could schedule recordings from other televisions. ESPN does a very good job with their HD content. I am excited about seeing some sporting events (Maryland vs WVU) tomorrow. Internet speeds are good, I ended up having to use their router, which works as good as the old one I had. It is fun having on-demand again as well. I just hope that Verizon continues to deliver new HD channels to compete with Directv and Comcast who both are saying they will have a lot of new channels soon. We really need to work with Kayla when visitors come over. She is very protective of Pharaoh and seems to think every one is a threat to her and him. I also visited a new pet supply store called Doggone Natural. They had a very nice selection of treats and a few hard to find dog foods that we may try out on our pups.

I finally broke down and bought a pez dispenser. It has been years since I had some pez. It came with strawberry, raspberry and cherry flavors. The first two were kind of gross, but the cherry was actually good. It reminds me of the sugar sticks that you can dip into flavored powder. I also bought a Jerk cookbook. I hope to learn how to make decent jerk dishes. It is kind of interesting that none of the cooking shows have chefs that try do do anything with jerk seasonings. I guess it is not a fancy enough style. I will still continue to watch all these cooking shows though.

Fios is finally coming to our house next week. I am curious to compare it to Directv and Comcast. I am encouraged by what I read, but the 4-6 hour installation makes no sense to me. I would imagine that they would be able to use the existing cabling. I hope that I can continue to use my current router, but I bet that it will need to be replaced. That means I will have to redo the entire wireless network again.

This weekend, we watched a lot of Miami Ink. After that a few episodes of LA Ink came on. I heard Kat Von D say she had some friends from Chicago helping at her store and I thought that I saw the name Hannah at the beginning of the show. Then they did the cast introduction and Hannah Aitchison is a featured tattoo artist at LA Ink. Her website is Hannah Aitchison Web Site . She is the tattoo artist who did my portrait of Samson on my calf. I was extremely happy with her work and am amazed at her talent. I just thought that was really cool to have a tattoo from someone so talented. The artists on the show are pretty impressive.

I do believe that my computer has some issues. I don’t know if I am going to be able to fix them this time or not. The first is I have a drive appearing in my windows explorer that does not exist. It is the same size as a logical drive that I had deleted. It does not show up in the disk manager though. I could not use usb drives on my computer until Saturday. This stopped me from using my email, since I use Thunderbird on a U3 enabled drive. Then I converted my disk from basic to dynamic (wow, i should learn some patience.) This caused the firewall to have all sorts of issues. That was hard to figure out because some things were network accessible but others were not. I fought with it for a good portion of the weekend and finally got it to a working state. If circuit city would have had a 18 month same as cash policy, I probably would have a new computer today. Every time I boot up now, it says it needs to run chkdsk on my drives. I don’t understand why this is, but I will figure it out.

On Aug 13, I went to Lowes Motor Speedway to enjoy a day of driving a Nascar Cup car around the track. These cars were apparently real cup cars with lower horsepower motors. I was told they were running 650 horsepower small block Chevy’s. This ended up being enough to run up to 170 miles per hour. I don’t think I was able to run that fast, but it looks like my best lap time was a 43.6, give or take a little. The record qualifying time is a 27.948 from 2005. It was a 10 lap event with a co-driver. The co-driver was responsible for keeping you on the race line and for when you are about to get passed. I never saw the cars coming from behind as I was too focused on trying to hit the lines going into the corners. I only got passed on the first two laps and that is because I was getting up to speed there. I never did catch anyone though. Overall it was a very interesting experience, and I would enjoy trying it again, now that I know more of what to do.

The day started with a 6 hour drive to Charlotte, North Carolina. Then we had dinner and a driver’s meeting where they explained that “It isn’t racing unless your passing.” The guy leading the meeting reminded me of Mario Andretti. It was ok as far as sitting in a room getting told to go fast. Then we went on a 3 lap tour of the track in a 15 passenger van. That was more scary then driving the car. It really felt like the van wanted to kick the back end loose at 95 mph in the turns. After that it was time to drive the car. It is hard to explain, but I was so focused on the driving, it was a pretty tame experience. It was definitely fun and I don’t think I could run a real 500 mile race though. I wish there was some telemetry to show speeds and rpm’s on the video, but here are the videos from the in car camera.
Small Video (11mb)
Large Viedo (26mb)

I cannot believe how many different kinds of computer memory there are. I spent a good portion of the weekend trying to get memory to work in a server at work, only to find out it only uses registered memory. I believe that this means that the memory has a number of chips that are divisible by either 3 or 5. Well, the memory that I had was not. Every thing else was exactly the same as the memory that was already in the server. Luckily this memory will work in some other machines that we have.

On a brighter note, we went to Kings Dominion a week ago and it was pretty fun. I was surprised at how empty it was, but we did not get there until 5 in the afternoon. We only rode a couple of roller coasters and played in the water park, but their were no lines to get on the coasters.

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After getting the cast off of her leg she really favored it for a day or so. Now she only favors it when she first starts to move. I think that everything is ok now. We need to figure out why she does not like guys though. She must have growled at every one that came over or walked by this weekend. She is really good with women and children though. She also has no problem with me at all, so I am not sure what is in her head.