Current Brainstorms
Saturday, August 31, 2002
Last night Desiree, Jeff (bro), and Samantha all went to
Medieval Times. Jeff had a coupon for one person to get in free with the purchase of 3 other passes and one person having a birthday in the month. Are you following me here? Good...
I was like a kid in a candy store. I had never been and was very excited about the whole thing. We cheered the black and white knight but he died so we were supposed to cheer on the green knight. We were jumping up and hollering for our knight most of the night. (Do you know how difficult it is to keep spelling knight versus night?) I say we, but I should really say two of us. I asked Jeff what he thought about it after the show and his response was, "It's
WWF with swoards." True, but I think a good time was had by all regardless.
1:42 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Friday, August 30, 2002
I promised to put up the video from my tubing incident last week. I finally got the video and cut a little piece of the video to put up here. The whole thing is 5 minutes and about 140 MB.
Real Media - 337KB
Windows Media Player - 356KB
2:11 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002
I seem to have picked up a
Trojan. It's either that or some stupid little
script kiddy managed to put something on my computer when it was outside of my
router waiting on the cable guys to show up. I'm not sure which I prefer, but I'm going to be really annoyed if some little juvenile decided to see how some of the tools worked and hacked into my computer. I'll admit I had very lax security since it had been inside the router, but it's still taken me an hour trying to figure out how to pull this stupid thing off my computer. Apparently it's been turning my entire hard drive into a download free-for-all via IRC. I kept noticing that my computer was launching mIRC on boot up. I thought that was odd since I hadn't loaded it on this computer since I rebuilt it last. It's also messing up my web server which is why I really started looking for the cause.
8:17 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Well I didn't think I should put anything here about it, but it seems to be big news to everyone else so I might as well say something...
Drum roll....
I have a girlfriend. (Insert a chorus of girls going "Awww..." here) Yes, shock of all shocks it's true. Her name is Desiree. I'm not going to post a lot of information about her, because this is my thing to do, not hers. I will say she is a grad student at
UNT and she's a cute little redhead . So now you know who is being referenced in the future. Our first
date was a trip to Cowboys Red River where she let me drag her out even though she had never been country dancing. I told her I was being selfish and doing what I wanted to do. I'm just glad she wanted to go dancing as well.
On tap for this weekend, Medeival Times with Desiree,
Bro and Sam this Friday. Sunday is Smokefest. It's a barbecue competition. I have been asked to be a judge. Oh yeah!!! The featured artist this year is
Omar Dykes. I don't know who he is, but I do know the
label. I'm expecting a really good show. The parentals should be back from their trip on Saturday. I'm not sure if they are going to give me a shout while they are in town or not. Someone else is picking them up.
12:32 PM Posted by Big Dave
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It has been a wild week of highs and lows. My bruises are still healing from my tubing accident. While relating that story to my friend Andrea, she told me that a close friend had lost his former wife to suicide. He received the news via email while he was in Paris on business. It's been very difficult for him and everyone else involved. The services were Sunday afternoon. I was amazed at how many youth from the church came to support Nate. I think
Leia's comments are most appropriate.
It's times like these when you wish you could utter some magical phrase and make the world right. But instead you can't say anything so words feel incredibly cheap.
11:15 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Friday, August 23, 2002
It's a good thing I don't have a web cam. I have a very strong desire to dance at the moment. I think my
Veggietales tie brought me luck today. But the only comment I got on the tie was calling it "nerdy." Regardless. I now present, the
Dance of the Cucumber. Baila! Baila! Baila!
11:53 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Thursday, August 22, 2002
So I have my own little story to relate from this week. Yesterday I went out to a party thrown by one of the guys at
Marconi. We had a great time, but I am really sore today. I've never been much of a skier. It's very difficult for me to get up on skis. Instead I much prefer the innertube. I was being pulled by Franz behind his boat and whooping and hollering the whole time. It was great. Well Franz is used to pulling his daughter who's all of about 60 pounds and doesn't move out around the boat.
The lakes are ski lakes which mean they are very narrow and long. Franz was turning around at one end, but his turn was a little close to the shore and I have a lot of momentum going. I slung around the boat and end up crashing on the shore with a bunch of rocks. The innertube took most of the damage, but I still rolled once or twice on the rocks. I'm fine, but I have some interesting bruises all over me. The best part is it was all caught on film so I hope to submit it to America's Funniest Home videos and win a bunch of money.
10:17 AM Posted by Big Dave
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My mom brought up the story of my
Eagle Project in one of her earlier comments. Since it's an interesting story I thought I would remember as much of it as I could and recount it here. One thing you have to realize though. I was 13 when I was leading this project. It seems so long ago now.
For my project we went to a Methodist retreat center on
Lake Brownwood. As with any large place there are always repairs to be made. We took approximately 25 kids between my troop and one I invited to come. We stayed there for the weekend and made it a combination campout and work project. The work to be done included securing a cross in the vesper's area that had come loose in it's concrete, clean up and repaint a small campfire area, and paint and waterproof a dock. Everything was going great until about 3:00 that afternoon. I was hoofing it back and forth between the sites to make sure everything was being taken care of. I was on my way back down to the dock when I met three of the four boys coming back from the docks and covered in paint. They were going to get cleaned up and explained that they had been in a paint fight. I sent them on their way and headed down to the docks. One thing I didn't realize was that they were headed to the showers where they expected to get off oil-based paint. (i.e. It doesn't wash off with water and soap) I went the rest of the way to the docks and one of the boys was still swimming in the water. He had jumped in when the paint fight started b/c he didn't want to mess up his clothes. We couldn't decide what to do with the dock since it had blue flecks of paint all over it. We couldn't find the ranger to ask him if he wanted us to sand it down to remove the paint or what exactly we were to do with it. By the end of the day we finished the blue paint around the rails, but didn't have time to finish the dock so we had to go back another time. When I get back to the camp the boys are out of the shower. One of them, Bill, didn't bring a change of clothes for the weekend and had jumped into the shower with all his clothes on. When he got out he just walked around with his undershirt pulled up like pants. Somehow he had managed to get paint on his rear end. Whenever he bent over we suddenly had a Blue Moon. The three boys rode home with my mother where she took them to the unfinished furniture store to get the rest of the paint off, before their parents came and picked them up.
10:05 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Wednesday, August 21, 2002
My cable modem has been down since Friday. I have it working at the moment, but I don't know why. The cable guy spent three hours here this afternoon, but didn't get it resolved. I think he may need to run a new cable so that everything is back to working hunky dorry. No big deal, but it has been very frustrating.
2:00 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Friday, August 16, 2002
I'm in Abilene again. I don't know if any of you saw, but Abilene was in the public spotlight this week with a child kidnapping case. If I had a fast connection I'd go find the story, but I don't have the patience right now. Maybe later.
I went to see xXx this evening with my mom. I really enjoyed the movie, but my mom kept laughing during the more fantastical stunts. I was getting really mad at her, but I think she thought it was funny that I was mad. Oh well... Still a good flick and I want the soundtrack. I also commented to my mom that I was going to go comment about it on my site and I'm sure she was going to comment about it on
her site. What an odd family we are.
11:41 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Thursday, August 15, 2002
Last night we started painting a very large mural in the big round room at the church. You may have seen the markings on the wall for where it was going to go. It went well, but lots of the youth decided to get as much paint on each other as on the wall. One of them had paint in his mouth and near one of his eyes. We got everyone cleaned up, but there was a big group that was hanging out until their ride (one of the mothers) got out of Choir practice. Since we’re not supposed to leave them alone I stayed. We actually had a pretty good conversation. One of the girls had visited with a family that is extremely charismatic. They were telling her all these things about the rapture and yelling and her. Basically they just scared her. The Methodist church doesn’t preach hellfire and brimstone very often so most of these kids had never heard anything about it before. One of them had read the
Left Behind series, but everyone else was told they weren’t allowed by their parents. It was a good talk. Not bad for a non-“bible study” bible study. During the process of the conversation we found out that it was the birthday of one of the other youth. We decided to go sing him “Happy Birthday", but when we got to the house it was dark and everyone had gone to bed. They wouldn’t come to the door so we went to a group members house and called him on the speaker phone. We sang happy birthday to him that way. I’m sure he thought we were really odd.
This morning I bought a tent that was on sale at
Academy with the rest of my birthday money. It’s a large 8 man tent. I’m really excited about it. Camping season is soon approaching and I hope to put it to use. I got my old tent in '93. I loaned it to some of my freshmen friends (girls) who wanted to camp in the back yard. I hadn't even taken it out except for one night in my own yard to try it out. Well they set it up and slept in it. It worked great for them and they went inside the next morning. Well it was a really windy day and got blown up into their fence where it got a rip in it. They came over that night to show me what they had done and say they were sorry. The look on their faces was so miserable all I could do was laugh. I put some duck tape on it and it’s been that was for as long as I’ve had it. It was a great tent with lots of memories. But it’s time for me to retire it. It no longer has a bag, has some mildew damage, the poles are breaking, and has the old taped up rip. Maybe I'll break it out every now and then when I really need a big tent, but that’s about it.
5:06 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Desiree and I went to
Dave and Buster's last night. It was fun, but I remembered that place having more games. They did have a couple of things that were really neat though. One was a boxing game where you actually needed to duck and move about and punch with your hands. There was also a police trainer that was the same way. I didn't do very well, but it was fun anyway.
It turns out that Desiree is a master
skeeball player. She won a whole bunch of tickets and had a voucher from when she had been there before. When we went up to the prize counter to look at cool things to get. One of the prizes was a Harmonica. Since she had enough tickets to get two of them she won a Harmonica for me. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. :-) It was fine though since a good time was had by all.
However when I finally went to bed I slept so hard I woke up stiff. I don't think I moved in my sleep at all. I had set my alarm for 5:45 to get up and go to the
Aggie Roundtable, but I didn't make it. The snooze button was too tempting.
11:47 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Find out your
chinese name
One of mine is Ran Tanfu.
Tan - flat, smooth; self-possessed
fu - console, comfort; pacify
11:37 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Monday, August 12, 2002
I want a recount. I think I'm a bigger geek than this test reflects.
You are
46% geek
You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.
Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.
You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!
Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!
You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.
Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com
9:30 PM Posted by Big Dave
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I had a really good weekend, but I think I have some sort of bug and am not feeling top-notch.
Friday night I got really ambitious. I have a sleeper sofa that has been broken almost since I got it. The pillows sink too low into the couch and it's not comfortable to sit or lay down on. I decided to turn the couch over and find the cause of the problem. It appears that a significant amount of the weight of the couch was on a little piece of metal that became bent out of shape. I straightened it out and then got some bolts and reinforced the metal support. So the geek got to play with power tools. (Insert Tim Allen grunting here!)
Saturday was summer graduation for
UNT. A friend was getting her master's in Technical Writing so we were there to cheer her on. I have a couple of complaints about the way UNT handled the whole business. They had 2 graduation ceremonies that afternoon. One at 2:30 and the other at 4:30. By the time they finished the 2:30 ceremony, there was 25 minutes to completely change out the audience. What a a mess. It's ok though... we went back to their house and partied.
Something I thought was funny.
10:45 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Thursday, August 08, 2002
A buddy sent me this link:
Growl Karaoke I can't decide whether to laugh or run away screaming.
I am glad to be back in my own house though. I think the cats are equally glad. They each had a couple of encounters with my parents' english sheep dog. I say my parents', but he's really my mom's. She's not a pet person, but she actually wanted that one. I don't understand it. He irritates the fire out of me. My mom thinks he's the cutest thing. This is an old picture, but one of the very few he will pose for.
For those of you who sent your birthday greetings, thank you very much. I had a pretty decent birthday.
2:38 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Monday, August 05, 2002
This last weekend was a busy one. I managed to survive a lock-in with a final count of 151 kids. I got to scoot a boot with a pretty little lady and I managed to once again completely destroy any semblance of a sleep schedule.
We went to
Cowboy's Red River last Saturday night. I had a great time, but I have to admit that the bar dancing took me by surprise. I've seen people dance on the bar before, but a lot of people seemed to find any place they could to get up and embarrass themselves. I know most of them didn't care, but it was still funny.
For the time being I'm in Abilene. There's not much to report from the town nicknamed Drabilene by it's residents. Tommorrow I turn 25. Nothing exciting happens at 25 except that my insurance payments are supposed to go down. I got to visit with my newest cousin and fixed computer problems at my mom's office. I suppose I should go and apply to the job my dad slip under my nose this morning. Have a nice day.
2:43 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Sunday, August 04, 2002
In preparation for college football season, I thought I'd take this opportunity to give the
University of Texas football program the respect it deserves.
http://www.longhornfootball.net/
8:13 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Saturday, August 03, 2002
Ok, so I have my second wind and I'm not quite ready for bed. Here are some fun web querys that will bring up my page:
1. delta force black hawk down system requirements
2. disney tailspin lyrics
3. dod phone number john stenbit
4. extreme moutain bike clips
8:13 AM Posted by Big Dave
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I know my site has been having problems lately, but I hope it's up now.
I just got back from a lock-in with the youth. I actually got about an hour of sleep. Of course I just sort of collapsed and pulled a sleeping bag over my head to block out the noise. That worked great until some kids game over and started laughing at me. Oh well. Time to hit the showers and then the sack.
7:48 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Friday, August 02, 2002
I think my cats were mad at me for staying out late last night. I went for a little relaxation time with some of the other youth counselors after youth last night. I think I finally got in around 1:30 and went right to bed. This morning about 6:00 the boys decided to have the Kitty 500 with one of the corners being right above my head.
3:59 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Tonight I am going to be helping out as a chaparone to 130+ kids for an all night lock-in. I think this makes it my third year in a row to do this. I'm not sure if I'm crazy of just a little off. Regardless, I'm not expecting to sleep. I am taking a few movies though. We'll set up the projector with the DVD laptop and have our own theatre going. I'm thinking about taking Shrek, Episode I, The Princess Bride, and one of my muppet movies.
3:28 PM Posted by Big Dave
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