I wonder if I’m the only one in the world who sees a similarity between Lee Van Cleef in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and Benjamin Bratt in “The Great Raid.” If they should ever do a remake of TGTBATU (and I don’t know why anyone would) they should get Bratt to play Angel Eyes.
This is outstanding! The Pakistanis have “arrested more than 20 suspected militants near the Afghan border and seized a Chinese-made spy plane used to track army movements.” Now take a look at the photo of the “spy plane”:
And now, take a look at the HobbyZone Aerobird Xtreme:
So Pakistan is now considering a $180 toy airplane to be a “spy plane”? I wonder what the Patriot Act has to say about that. I expect the feds to come round up my neighbor any day now. He’s a big remote control plan fanatic.
It looks like the federal government’s response – or lack thereof – to the Hurricane Katrina disaster is going to become a major political issue. Before I forget, I just wanted to jot down how strange it felt to me to read the news on September 1 that our President had to cut his month long vacation short to attend to crisis management, and that the nearest thing he came to being there was to ask his jet plane to “fly low” on the way from his Texas mansion back to his Washington mansion.
I felt disappointed that anyone would think that getting only 28 days of a 30 day vacation was a sacrifice, and I felt disappointed that the best he could do was look out the window at the remains of New Orleans rather than setting up a command post in Louisiana and taking charge of the situation.
I’ve been using a wireless keyboard from Microsoft for the past couple months, but lately I’ve noticed that it’s been acting very strange. In particular, sometimes it will continue to enter keys even after I let the key I’m pressing up. So, if I type a word like “very” sometimes I’ll get “veryyy”. Also, sometimes the Shift key “sticks” down. No, it’s not really sticky, but I’ll get letters capitalized even after I let it up. So when I type “Mr. Smith” I might get “Mr. SMIth”. Also, it occasionally loses characters. I know for sure that I hit a key, but it doesn’t get entered. So, “Mr. Smith” might come out as “Mrith”.
I thought maybe my keyboard was just going bad, so I went to CompUSA and bought a new one. This one’s also from Microsoft and is also wireless. I couldn’t find one with just a keyboard, so I had to get a kit with a mouse, too, that I didn’t want. But I plugged in the keyboard and wireless module (the thing that’s got the radio transciever and keyboard and mouse cables coming out the back). But the new keyboard (with the new wireless module thingy) continued to do the same thing as the old one.
I bumped up the priority of the Type32.exe process, which is apparently the Microsoft software that communicates with the keyboard. But that didn’t solve the problem. So, I stole Beth’s regular old fashioned wired keyboard and it seems to be working just fine. I guess the problem must have something to do with the wireless-ness of the other keyboard. So I think I’ll go buy a new wired keyboard (I’m surprised I didn’t have one stashed away in my box of PC parts in the basement). I’ve found that I need the “natural” keyboard style. Otherwise, when I type for a long time, my fingers start to hurt.
I did some web searching to see if anyone else had problems with missing keys or repeated keys with a Microsoft wireless keyboard, and I couldn’t find anything online about it. And Microsoft’s support site didn’t say anything either. So I decided to blog about it so that if someone else has this problem someday, they might find this blog entry and know they’re not alone.
Literally hours after I made the post about CNG being such a great deal at $1.88 a gallon, I went to fill up the Honda and found that they’ve raised the price to well over $2.00 now. As far as I know, nothing has happened in the past week to justify a significant increase in natural gas prices. I’ve been told much of our CNG comes from right here in Colorado, where hurricanes and terrorism shouldn’t have any impact on the price. I suspect it’s just good old, down home price gouging by Clean Energy. Hey, since gasoline prices are so high, let’s raise the price of natural gas, too!
Well, it’s Labor Day weekend, which roughly marks the 3rd anniversary of Beth and Todd. We celebrated Thursday night (our actual anniversary) with dinner at Bloom. Yummy food, high prices. Definitely not a place to go for a cheap date.
At half past midnight last night, I put a beef brisket on the smoker. We’re having a block party late afternoon, and I’m providing brisket. I hope it turns out nice. I bought the pre-trimmed brisket from Wally’s Quality Meats. It’s significantly more expensive, but has almost no fat on it. As part of the trimming process, they almost completely sever the top from the bottom, so I ended up cutting the remaining inch of meat connecting the two and I’m smoking them separately. Since both pieces are thinner, I’m sure they’ll cook faster than usual. We’ll see.
In addition to doing tons of chores around the house the past two days, I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading. But more interestingly, I wrote up a two page summary of the concept I have for the Broomfield Independent Film Series. In 2006, I’m hoping to put on a show once per month at the Broomfield Auditorium, featuring the best local independent films. It’ll take me a few months to gain non-profit status under the BCAH (an umbrella non-profit for Broomfield arts projects), though, so it probably won’t kick off in January.
Gasoline Prices on Yahoo! News Photos – Wow, $6 a gallon is a bit hard to believe, but here in Broomfield gasoline prices are now just over $3 a gallon. Compressed natural gas (CNG) is relatively a better deal than ever at the moment. Even though it keeps going up in price, it’s at $1.88 a gallon. Usually it’s about $0.50 less than gasoline, but right now it’s more like $1.20 less than gasoline. It’s times like this I appreciate having a car that runs off CNG. All my fuel is produced in the US, and much of it is from Colorado. So my transportation costs are pretty isolated from the Middle East war-du-jour and hurricane. Beth’s aren’t, though. She told me last night that it cost $50 to fill the tank on the pickup (which is what she drives 90% of the time).