Watching the extended versions of the The Fellowhsip of the Ring and The Two Towers, then watching The Return of the King is an experience I highly recommend.

I can see that everyone is either busier than I seem to be today (which is an unusual thing for me lately), or no one found that gem of a post very insightful. Either way, I don't really care; sometimes, I get caught up in the moment, and that was one of those times.

Christmas is the only good thing about winter. There I said it. Having grown up in a climate similar to that of Phoenix, snow is not something I really appreciate. Temperatures below freezing tend to have very detrimental effects on my happy demeanor. On the bright side, Santa Claus is one of my favorite people.

My struggles in learning to use Linux continue.
At one point in time, I was using gnome for my window manager, had my geforce2 card working correctly, and had even managed to install and play unreal tournament. Unfortunately, the version of mplayer I had installed was wrong, and when I did some upgrades to fix that (I can't remember what else I was fixing), it broke my video card driver somehow. After that, I switched to KDE (I liked the themes manager better, heh), but today I managed to break it by trying to install a PHP IDE (I believe it was quanta). So right now, I'm working out of gnome, hoping that my friend who has been providing free technical support, linux advice, etc. will show up to the office soon. Let me just say that overall I really do like Linux.

For any Strong Bad/Homestar Runner fans out there, I highly recommend the Strong Bad Sings... cd. It's thoroughly enjoyable. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you should check it out. It's a really funny online cartoon.

Well, if bethanie can get all political, I can go all social commentary on everyone. Actually, what I really wanted to do is point to this awesome post on segregation and political correctness.
For context, the discussion was based on an article detailing the censorship of Grand Theft Auto Vice City (censorship being a hot topic for another day.) My favorite line from this person's post: We don't have separate drinking fountains anymore, and only the handicapped and the elderly have seats reserved at the front of the bus. But we have separate television shows, separate music styles, separate styles of clothing, separate vocabularies, and now separate mission objectives in Grand Theft Auto.
I tend to take a middle of the road approach to politics in general, but I find "political correctness" to be more than a little disgusting most of the time.

In unrelated news, The Return of the King hits theaters in a week. Call us maladjusted if you will, but my company (there're only 6 or 7 of us) is having a work party next Tuesday. It starts at 1 p.m. and ends about 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. I'll give you one guess what we're doing.

Wow, imagine my surprise this morning when I opened up /my/amigos/ and found a bunch of JEs talking about LadyGuardian's less than graceful exit from the /. social scene. I'm very much a lurker these days and can't recall ever having a conversation with LG, but I did read her JEs along with everyone else's in my friends list. I guess if I thought about it, I could go to her site and read her amusing ramblings there, but realistically speaking, I'm going to miss her -- just not enough to go visit her non-slashdot site. I barely have time to read through /my/amigos/ page.

A big congratulations needs to go out to Bethanie for getting under her skin. I had no idea. Honestly, the double entendre and innuendos in general get overused on occasion, but you still have insightful things to say. If I flamed everyone who ever said something I didn't care for, I'd be a pretty lonely guy. And after seeing LG and FortKnox's JE comments, I think enough has been said about that. :)

Well, I really need to get back to work; it's taken me far too long to write this today (I keep minimizing my browser so that I can work on something else for a while,) but I had to get my thoughts down.

P.S. LG, you probably won't ever see this, but I always meant to ask what Counterstrike servers you played on, you know, just to see if you're as good a CT as you claim. ;)

So much going on these days. My company moved to a new (temporary) office space about three weeks ago, so we've been trying to get stuff going from here until we move to our new, new spot. I hate moving...

I did finally get my processor back only to learn that the IDE controller was the problem. It seems that no one has been able to write a Linux driver for it yet. I switched back to my old tower (and daily crashes!) and decided to install LInux on it. It works great, except for the crashes still happen (I long ago determined that there is some kind of hardware issue with this tower, so I know it's not the OS' fault.) I'm using Gnome for my window manager. I have it set to use the Apple style theme, which is really cool. I grew up using Macs and see no reason to emulate the evil empire. :p Now, if I can just get Unreal Tournament running on it, that would be killer.

I think the rest of this JE is going to fall under the title: A Little Too Excited About the Small Things.
I'm just way too excited about this ergonomic keyboard.
I'm also way, way too excited about my basketball team (aka The Utah Jazz.) Maybe I should cut back on the sugar, but their two wins so far (out of a predicted 8!) were very encouraging. I have tickets to tomorrow's game against the Phoenix Suns; the Jazz aren't expected to win, but they also weren't expected to win against Portland or Minnesota. It should be a fun game regardless.
I'm less excited, but still a bit too much, about ze Matrix coming out tomorrow. I really enjoyed the second movie. Sure it wasn't as mystical, mysterious, or mind-bending (heh, alliteration) as the first, but it was a fun action flick. I expect something very similar from the final installment.
I'm very possibly a little too excited about The Return of the King. I'm not expecting the Scouring of the Shire or Aragorn's Mighty Trot through the Lands of Death, so I figure I'll really enjoy it. I will keep my fingers crossed that Liv Tyler doesn't have too many speaking lines. She really looks the part, but Eowyn was far more interesting to watch onscreen in The Two Towers.
I'm definitely too excited for this Zelda bundle that they've been arguing about on games.slashdot for the past couple of months. I've never spent a lot of time playing any of the Zelda games, but somehow I've convinced myself that buying a Gamecube and this bundle will solve that. Only time will tell.

I think I've reached the end of the Over-Excited section for this JE. I'm sorry for not commenting in anybody's journal; I have been reading though. Bethanie, as always, has had some real humdingers that I thought I'd write in, but never found the time. Mao Che Minh had a short lapse of madness that was very troll-like of him. And of course, the FortKnox photo contest of infamy. See, I've been keeping up in my spare time. :)

Oh, by the way, the subject for this JE: it's been snowing for 4 or 5 days straight, and I keep telling msyelf that the sun will come out tomorrow. Shortly afterwards, I feel sick to my stomach, but there you go, you can't have it all.

Interpol.

Interpol rocks.

Interpol rocks [insert superlative here].

Yes. I saw Interpol last night. Yes, I'm still suffering from the morning-after-glow. Yes, this glow is brighter than it normally would be due to the presence of a girl that accompanied us to the concert last night. If I say anything more, I may betray my allegiance to U2 and Coldplay. Besides, said girl might (the odds are miniscule) find this entry and uncover the truth: I am a freak.

Back to regular old /. topics: No word yet on my processor. I hope Intel doesn't take too long. Switching to the new computer is high on my list of wants.

Also: Mozilla Firebird still rocks (not as much as Interpol, though.) I even converted a good friend (who considers himself a strong proponent of Windows) to this miracle of a browser (ok, maybe not a miracle.) So the love affair mentioned in the past still burns brightly. :)

One more thing. I ran across this yesterday, thought about submitting it to the editors, but figured it was too inflammatory. Then I thought I'd write a Journal Entry (JE) about it, then it occurred to me that I've been ripping off journal entry themes from others a little too much (apologies to bethanie. :p) Besides, there really isn't that much to say about an article talking about Billy Gates and prostitutes in the same breath.

I haven't written in my journal for what seems like ages. Part of this is due to a change in my work schedule that leaves less time to kill on /., and part is due to trying to install Linux on my brand new computer. It seems that I am under a double curse (too bad it's not a pirate curse seeing as how it's Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

The first curse I suffer is that trying to install Linux on any kind of system owned by me will result in lots of Mormon curses and general ill-will towards the open source community. There is this cycle that I seem to follow (much like Gabe's famous RPG cycle from Penny-Arcade) wherein I start thinking a lot about Linux, I find the latest 'cool' distro and install it on a computer of the x86 persuasion. I immediately begin having problems with this new OS and shortly thereafter, wipe the partition and switch back to Windows. Then follows a period of time during which I talk about how great Linux would be in a world where someone would install and configure it all for me, but since such a place doesn't exist, I'm a Microsoft flunky. The cycle then starts over.

The second curse is related to my work computers. You see, they don't work. This new one will be my third (but the first I tried to put Linux on.) They have a tendency to freeze up at very inconvenient times, regardless of which version of Windows I'm using (and I have to say here that I've had almost no problems at all using XP at home.)

As you may have guessed, the two curses coincided a little over two weeks ago to produce a rather unpleasant experience culminating in sending my processor back to Intel for a replacement. That's probably far too much said about that.

In brighter news, the little company some friends and I started has developed a very potentially big solution to the email spam predicament. More about that in 3-4 months when we're ready to launch our sell-out campaign. :)

This thought brought to you courtesy of my cousin's wedding.

Let's see, I've wanted to be in a band since my obsession with U2 really started to take hold sometime around eight or nine years ago. The closest I've come to this was around the time my brother got married (got a marriage theme going on for this JE -- details at 11.) The full story behind that is very short: a couple friends played guitar while I sang a song or two.
This time however, things seem to be falling into place for really forming a band. Over the last three or four summers, I've been getting occasional guitar lessons from the previously mentioned friends. These were aided somewhat by the torturous piano lessons I endured as a minor in my parents' home. So my performance skills are almost to a point where I won't get booed off the stage.
11: This weekend I went home (I don't know if you can call a place where you haven't lived for seven years home) for my cousin's wedding. At the reception, she had a mariachi band playing. The thought flashed in my mind: wow! what a great way to make some money on the weekend. There was already a plot to form a band for some weekend gigs, why not throw in some mariachi numbers. I could be Adam Sandler! So anyway, that's the why and wherefore of my subject.
I feel obligated to say here that the mariachi band was very good. They played the classics (my family has Mexican roots on my mother's side) and some Elvis in Spanish. I think that were I to add some numbers to our our brit-pop set, they'd have to be from the classics line-up (e.g. Cielito Lindo, Guadalajara.)

Now tell me, is this not a better JE than ranting about how bethanie totally beat me to writing about Dowd's article on the politician's blogs. Then she goes and writes a beautiful JE about the power outage at her place. Talk about salt in the wound... :p

Never make the mistake of saying something you'll regret. Ha ha. Well, since that rule is nearly impossible to keep, let me expound. I only vaguely recall why I started my journal here on Slashdot. I seem to remember having a desire for some form of /. domination. This reminds me, I need to post an update to that plan at the bottom of this JE, however, I first wish to blather on about something I sometimes regret saying.

Nic-o-demus (who will be referenced further below) is the mastermind responsible for my entrance to the /. world. It was he who introduced me to the wonders of karma and fueled my desire to become a more involved member of the community. It's becoming very apparent that the real reason for this post was to talk about karma...anyway, shortly after I began posting journal entries, I stated that I had begun doing so in part to exercise my dormant writing skills. You see, in school (both high school and college) my English professors were fond of lauding my papers, generally - to my dismay - in front of the rest of the class. Being a shy person, this praise was somewhat discomfiting. At the same time, I was a very focused student of the science commonly referred to as Mathematics. This love of Math (that most beloved subject of teenagers everywhere - but that's a different post entirely) led to my entrance in the College of Engineering at the University of Utah. See now I'm totally going off-topic and should be modded down. Let me summarize (no! that would take too long,) I am writing now because of guilt. I feel that all these entries discussing my hated vice (gaming) have taken something from the literary side of my writing. Not that there was much to start with. In reality, Nic-o-demus made fun of my blog.

Yes, that's the crux of it. Somebody made fun of me, so now they must pay. Actually, anyone reading this horrendous entry must pay. To recap:

• I have a bloated opinion of my writing skills.
• I use my /. blog in part to keep said skills from atrophying
• I haven't been writing about anything but games lately.
• My entries have also been over-laden with asides and general stream-of-consciousness ravings.
• My good friend Nic-o-demus pointed this out to me in a joking tone.
• I feel the need to write something - anything! - that is not about games, but can't think of anything to write.
• This is the result.

To totally defeat the purpose of this post, I'm still enjoying KotOR very, very much. I've gone back to try and finally finish FF8 (yes, I do have a crush on Rinoa, sadly enough.) And, there is still a stack of games in my To-Do pile. Blech.

****The long awaited aside, err, footnote, err, something like that.*****

Nic-o-demus recently achieved excellent karma. The guy doesn't log in for two years, then he shows up last month with good karma (same as me.) I figured, I post more than he does, I read more than he does, I mod (both M1 and M2) more than he does, I'm sure to beat him to excellent karma. BUT NOOOO.

Ok, I'm calmly reading at -1 (for laughs) and come across this comment which has my vote for the best offtopic AC post I've read in a long while. I have to say, reading at -1 in the games section is highly enjoyable. Trolls can be so funny (my .sig says so, it must be true.)

On an unrelated note, is it just me, or have the recent /. polls come from Crazy Go Nuts University? It's pretty funny to see threads in the responses devoted to discussing how no reply could possibly be offtopic. It reminds me of that scene in Mystery Men where Invisible Boy tells The Spleen to just go with it...

I saved the galaxy. Now I need some sleep.

Ok, so I couldn't decide whether to go with the Star Wars prequel icon or the Xbox games icon for this JE. If they had an icon that was something like, "I am a freaking loser, because I will always worship Bioware and Black Isle for producing the Baldur's Gate series" then I would have chosen that. I will, grudgingly, admit that I am not a huge fan of Neverwinter Nights - mostly due to the fact that I could never get a LAN party together for it. I mean, I beat the main campaign, and the story was cool and everything, but where were the party interactions. I don't necessarily expect every game to provide the option for an intra-party romance, but some occasional comment insertions to the dialogues with NPCs from Tommy the halfling rogue with the brogue would have been nice. But wait! this is not a post intended to rant about the few negatives I found in Neverwinter Nights. No! this rant should be dedicated to the announcement that Knights of the Old Republic (or KotOR, if you will) has gone gold.

Yes, I received an email from Bioware last night. Yes, I was surprised at the resulting emotion unleashed by my fanboyism. I knew that I'd been eagerly anticipating this game and in fact knew that it was scheduled for release next Wednesday. Maybe that's why I surprised myself. I just didn't think that hearing of it going gold would be that big of a deal. Ok, yeah, so, here's crossing my fingers that this game will be closer to what I was hoping for from Neverwinter Nights. That shouldn't take much considering it being a Star Wars game and all. Whoo. Glad I got that off my chest.

In otherwise completely unrelated news, I dug down deep into my geekdom and finally downloaded firebird. Shamefully, I use the treacherous and heinous Internet Explorer for most of my browsing needs. I have periodically used Mozilla and Opera as my primary browser but encountered problems and/or generally unlikable things with both. But today, I am in love. Whether this love will last, only time can tell. But for the moment, Firebird and I are in the full throes of geeky happiness.

P.S. For my slowly growing fanbase(erm, list of fans): Did you enjoy the Utah colloquialism (Utonic) "Oh my freaking gosh"?

I saw this in the paper this morning and really liked it, although posting it seems like copying Some Woman...

God doesn't bless only Americans
By Tom Wharton
Salt Lake Tribune Columnist (sltrib.com)

Protesters gathered in front of Salt Lake City's Federal Building each night as the war in Iraq approached, urging those driving by to honk for peace. As the fighting approached, their numbers grew. So did a contingent of pro-war folks who set up across 100 South.
When much of the shooting ended, the number of sign carriers dwindled. Some nights, as I drove home from work, they were often gone.
But one man, wearing a colorful hat and sitting on State Street, occasionally showed up carrying a sign with words that sparked something deep in my conscience.
The sign brought out a festering frustration with all the right-wing patriotic nonsense that swept America after winning a war where the ultimate result was never in doubt and where the only sacrifices being made were by our soldiers.
Driving past, I may have missed the exact wording. But the sign read something like this:
"God Bless Every Nation."
I have always wondered why, during times of war, politicians end speeches with the intonation "God Bless America."
Why should God bless America and not Iraq, France, Germany, Canada, Israel, Russia, North Korea, Iran or any other country in the world?
Have we become so blinded by our patriotism, so convinced of our righteousness, that we think the deity should bless us and not other people in the world?
And should those of us who call ourselves Christians believe that America is somehow worthier of being blessed?
When we go to church on Sunday aren't we taught to help the poor, to exercise tolerance and to love our enemies?
Asking God to bless America seems unworthy of both church and country, jingoism of the worst sort.
We Americans are no better, no worse, no more worthy of blessing than any other human on the planet.
This all reminds me of the late Woody Guthrie, a folksinger and one of my heroes. Guthrie quickly tired of hearing Kate Smith sing Irving Berlin's "God Bless America."
So, he wrote the classic "This Land Is Your Land."
According to Wikipedia.org, Guthrie was blacklisted in the 1950s. "I ain't a communist necessarily," he once quipped, "but I been in the red all my life."
Most of us can relate.
Two verses of "This Land Is Your Land" are usually omitted in the more modern version of a song some think would make a better national anthem than "The Star Spangled Banner."
Sadly, at least one of Guthrie's verses seems more appropriate today in a country where the rich get richer and the poor struggle more, a strange twist of fate in a place God supposedly has blessed.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

As the July Fourth holiday approaches, Americans should exercise patriotism in their own way.
As I watch the fireworks explode over Sugar House Park this year, I will think of the protester carrying the hand-lettered sign in front of the Federal Building.
Patriotism comes in many forms. Americans can proudly fly their flag, use their talents to serve their country and celebrate the sacrifices of those who came before.
Speaking freely is also patriotic. We should salute those who dare to be different, who shake us out of our complacency.
"God Bless every nation."

Well, I was going to write a review of the 3EB concert Wednesday morning, but I decided to get some work done instead. OK, that's not the whole truth. I was kinda disappointed. I guess I'm just spoiled. I've seen U2 twice and according to Rolling Stone they are the best live band of our time. I heartily concur. To add to the problem, just last February I saw Coldplay at the same place Third Eye Blind played, and I thought Coldplay was just a much better show. However, some people will say that's because I'm an intellectual elitist, a British elitist, too conservative, or possibly too liberal. I'm sure some people would agree with me, and I suspect that they'd harbor similar feelings about mosh pits. It's just no good to be three people back from the stage during the opening band only to get the life squeezed out of you once the marquee band decides to finally show up.

I won't lie. I enjoyed the concert. I'm just saying that I liked other concerts better. Besides Mr. Jenkins is kind of an annoying frontman, but there I go comparing him to Bono and Chris Martin.

Well, this week I saw a post saying that Funny moderations no longer affect your karma. I suppose this is supposed to limit the karma whores. Frankly, I find that funny comments add more to the discussion than most of the other positively moderated posts. While poking around the faq, I was disappointed to learn that meta-moderation (M2!) is not as great as my /. mentor told me. He's been out of touch for a while (hadn't logged in for like 3 years until yesterday,) and he didn't know that everybody can M2 now (except, of course, if you modded up the Post of Death.) This kind of puts a damper on my /. domination schemes. I'll have to peruse the faq deeper. It'd make me sick to actually have to look at the Slashcode.

Well, I was thinking that I had a lot to say today, so I was looking forward to posting this JE, but I can't think of anything else that I wanted to say. I guess I just was filled with a burning desire to rant about the 3EB concert. I did read a funny article in the NYTimes about a reading J.K.Rowling did this week. I guess she mentioned that Harry might die in the seventh book; some little kid that was interviewed said something like, "That was really scary what she said about Harry. I'd hate it if she killed him off." Fans were also disappointed to know that Ms. Rowling does not believe in the sort of magic she writes about...

Mwhahahaha! I finished the book yesterday and now am suffering a headache from lack of sleep and too much time spent staring at a book. Luckily, the print is a decent size, or I'd really be in trouble. I would write up a review, but I think I might get caught up in hyperbole that I would later regret. I did find that this book moved faster than book IV, and the overall sense of sorrow at *******'s death was much more convincing than the death in the previous book. I also really liked seeing Ginny with a personality.

OK, so I must make a pact with myself not to read the next book so quickly. But that's enough about that because I'm rapidly descending down the path that leads to rabid fanboyism.

Thankfully, it rained this weekend which cooled things down and helped out a bit with the whole drought thing. However, I hope it'll rain itself out today, so that the line to get into the 3EB concert tomorrow won't be a thoroughly miserable experience.