Sometimes she just amazes me...

I do it all the time... we all have. You start something, like a diet or learning a language, and then you quit. Someday, I'm going to learn the guitar! Yep... I sure am (don't hold your breath). Well,

Joy doesn't do that. She is the first and only person I know that says she's going to do something and then just does it. She doesn't need support from friends, she doesn't care if it's 'cool' or is in the latest fashion (like one of her more retarded friends does). She just buckles down and knocks it out. She wanted to learn to play the harp and she's awesome at it. She's never, ever applied for a job and not gotten it. She's never had a job where she wasn't promoted above her peers faster than anyone else. A few months ago she wanted to learn how to knit and sew. This is her first project, she just finished it.

It's wild because, she really follows through on what she sets out on. It's awesome, and it forces me to be motivated at the same time, which I love. So, I thought I'd share this pillow with you and some insight into my life with Joy. She's the reason why I push myself forward. If it wasn't for her I'd probably be working for Ian.

They killed Apature Science!

Where did my ASP go?

I made this pretty cool (or atleast I thought) ASP page for my CS degree... about 2 years ago. I would check on it ever so often just shocked that it was still being hosted. Well, it's dead. We had to do a buisness page, so I made one of Apature Science... the company from Portal. It turned out really awesome. I even embedded the games ending and had a page for cake. Oh well, it was cool while it lasted.

Guns and Bees

Joy's uncle Tim invited us out to his lease to shoot some jugs of water on Memorial day. It was awesome! I never really got to shoot to many guns as a kid, which is probably a good thing. It's funny because I've always been an really good shot. Whenever I have gotten the chance to shoot I usually start out by proving my incompetence through leaving the safety on or dropping the clip in the dirt (I did both this time) and then I'll not miss the whole time I'm out there. I guess all those years of Duck Hunt paid off. (I still hate that dog!)

Hayden got to shoot a .22 for awhile. He was really good at hitting this tree behind the targets. If we were smart, we would have put a bottle in the tree... he would have knocked it right out! I love getting him out to do redneck stuff. I was really hoping to get him to shoot the 20 gauge, but after watching us shoot the 12 gauge... he was a little gun shy. I honestly think that is the first time I've used that saying literally.


Now, I didn't do all of my shooting with the rifle resting on a feed bag, so give me some credit. Joy decided that this picture of my ugly butt needed some prettying up, so she added her beautiful thumb to it!

Joy even got into it and took out this menacing gallon jug at about 25 yards. Once she figured out how to get the rifle in and rest her cheek against the stock, she was an regular Annie Oakley, well a Vietnamese Annie Oakley (which I think is way cooler).

We were shooting somewhat near a beehive and I decided that it was a good idea to go and piss them off... because I'm retarded. I had one come over and buzz by me and I swatted it away. I guess it released it's "kick this guys ass" pheromone because I was almost instantly swarmed. I quickly remembered my extensive Air Force training and ran around screaming like a little girl. I took off out of the camp and away from everyone as fast as I could. I got stung 11 times in about 1 minute. It was pretty intense. Oddly enough, the bees didn't bother anyone else. I guess the go after the overweight and feeble first. Luckily Tim's daughter, Becky, had a bunch of Benadryl on hand... which made the ride home so enjoyable.

All in all it was an awesome trip. When we got home it took all of our effort to stay awake long enough to wash off the bug spray before we all passed out! Hayden had a ton of stories to tell at school the next day and I had a wicked cool farmers tan and some big bee stings to show off. Good times!

Hayden's play and our stupid camera

Hayden is almost done with the first grade! Since his disastrous run at Kindergarten, he's made a complete 180 and is doing way better in school. We were really worried about him, but it turned out that we just got stuck with a really, really crappy school for kindergarten. So, here's a pro-tip... if greatschools.com tells you that the school your kid is in is a 4... get your kid out of that school!

Hawthorne Academy has been a godsend for Hayden. He's had to really bust his butt there, but the hard works really paid off. His teacher is the best and she's responsible for how far he's come from when he started the year.

They had an end of year play called 'The History of America'. Since we're in Texas I figured it'd be named 'The History of America: How all the founding fathers were totally Christians and all loved Glenn Beck and how there was never any slavery either... it was a trade triangle'. I guess they opted for the shorter title.

Hayden was a pilgrim for the play. It went really well until I decided to use our crappy camera. I've had a love/hate relationship with this thing for a while. Sometimes it pulls off these awesome shots and works great for a whole event. Other times, like during the play, it sucks. Since it was semi low-light, the camera went full retard and would not work. Every picture was crap and it would randomly lock-up trying to do it's pre-processing on the photos. So, when Hayden and the other pilgrims sang their song about how they were about to screw the Indians out of their land... my camera died. Good times.

The play went really well and Hayden had a blast. We got some really good hot dogs from our favorite place after that so it was all good. The big problem now is that I'm quickly loosing the argument against Joy over getting and D-SLR camera. I think I'll get her one before summer is out... I'm pretty much agreee with her that we need it after this mess.

To play a video game

For some reason, I decided that I needed to be able to play old arcade games on my LCD upstairs. It actually started at work with a conversation with a guy about this Xbox I hacked for him. When I gave it to him, it had a MAME emulator and the Simpsons arcade game on it. He had messed with it and it stopped working. I was explaining how to fix this when I got this idea to set up an arcade game in the game room... it seemed fitting.

We had a media PC hooked up to the game room TV back when it was a 32'' CRT. I kind of forgot about it since we got the big TV downstairs. When we got the 46" in the game room, I replaced the media PC with a netbook. I decided to take today and get MAME running on it.



Getting the emulator to work was pretty easy. The hard part was getting my controller to work with MAME. I started out with this really nice software called Pinnacle. It was reccomended by a few sites I checked. I downloaded the trial and it worked like a champ but they wanted $20 for it! That's way too much money for a gamepad mapper. So, I looked for an opensource alternative. I found JoytoKey. It did the same thing for free so that rocks!

I played through Golden Axe and started up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. I think I'll finally beat The Simpsons after that. The cool thing is that since it's running on the netbook, I can take it with me when I travel. Maybe next time I'm at NSA, I'll throw some Shinobi up on the projector during one of my briefs.

I'm still going to use IE

Check out this really cool advert for Google Chrome.



I'm going to stick with IE for now though. I was a big Firefox supporter because of how it handled tabbed browsing and, at the time it performed better than IE 7 and way better than IE 6! I have to say though, IE 8 works really well with Windows 7. For now, that's where I'm staying.

The problem is that Joy would use IE and I'd stay on Fire Fox. This would keep all our cookies happy. Now, we both fight by logging each other off our respective sites. It's not like we don't have enough PC's. I have my desktop, Joy has hers... there's Hayden's netbook, my netbook... we have the server under the stairs. Hell, we even have browsers on the 2 media centers. Not to mention the PSP and DS browsers... and my phone... and her phone... well you get the idea.

I guess I have to start a campaign about how awesome Firefox is so she'll stay off IE. Man, that's going to feel weird.

Playing golf

Instead of working, I got a chance to play golf. I really hate golf. It's boring and Texas is really hot. Some idiot decided that we should have a 1300 tee time, so it was extra hot. The two things that made it fun were that I got to drive the golf cart and that we had beer. I'm proud to say that I waited a full 3 and a half holes before trying to pull a donut. Whenever I tried to hit well, I just hit a miserabley short drive and when I decided just to whack the hell out of it, it went flying... hard right.

It was a good day over all... a lot better than going to work! Tonight turned out really nice with a strong wind at about 76 degrees. I've got all the windows open and I'm going to vacuum a little. Yeah, I'm a wild man!