Eh, it's been a while.
I can't really do a day-by-day recap of the past two weeks, because I don't even remember what I did three days ago, let alone on July 11. And it wouldn't really matter anyway, because no one would read such a long post of useless drivel if I wrote it. Seriously. My web statistics have gone straight into the crapper ever since I killed the spam bots by disabling my comments feature many moons ago. But that's ok. I'm not doing this for popularity.

I guess the best way for me to summarize my actions recently would be to do so on a per hobby basis.

949 geocache finds. 51 to go. I could have easily been at 960+ by now, but I fucked up pretty badly today. I drove about 30 minutes out only to realize I didn't have my Palm Pilot loaded with the coordinates to the caches I was going to hunt, so I had to turn around and head back home. I didn't bother heading back out because I was expecting it to thunder and rain badly by early afternoon. I have yet to see a rain drop, which means I totally fucking wasted a good day for tupperware hunting. I'm so pissed.

I hit 900 three weekends ago and I've kinda been on a tear ever since. Last Sunday, I went up to the cache-rich area of Lebanon and found 17 of the 20 I sought out for, and almost all of them were hiking trail finds. I did great.

My desktop PC is still in the process of working properly. I got all of my replacement parts, installed everything, and had it all working in no time. I transferred everything off of my IDE drive, formatted it, and "shredded" it. But my big hang-up the last several days is that I can't get my older SATA drive to cooperate. I think it has bad sectors on it or something, as I'm unable to access any file on the drive. I've tried a number of data recovery programs to no avail. It sucks, too, because I'll get like 90% through a day-long data recovery or error checking procedure only for the thing to crap out. So I haven't actually used my new PC for anything yet, though I've had it put together for about a week. Right now, I'm in the process of backing up the entire drive onto my new 750 GB monster using Window's backup feature. We'll see if that 26-hour procedure pays off. If so, I'm formatting that problematic drive immediately. Maybe I should try selling it off, too. I don't need to have 1 TB of space, though it's fun to brag about. :)

Two people on my pool team quit due to long matches and lack of participation from our opponents. Fair enough. This league is such a joke right now, I'm not if I wouldn't even bother if I wasn't the captain. We had to play 5 vs 3 last Wednesday. That means we had to forfeit 5 of the 25 games, and we "won" the remaining 20 games, 12-8. But then you factor the five forfeited games, and we lost by one game to the only team in the league still undefeated. How shitty is that that we have to win 65% of our games to win the match? We could be in for a long second half of the season if we don't get some new players or some changes are made in how the league is run.

I think I have poison ivy. I'm not sure how exactly. I didn't play in the woods this weekend, despite what my recent geocaching find rate may lead you to believe. Even more strangely, it's on my left foot. When I cache, I wear socks and hiking shoes. Hmm.

Vikki has been wanting me to teach her the ways of Excel for her own career advancement this summer, but we have yet to meet. Summer is half over, as far as I'm concerned. To be fair, I kinda need to get my Access skills up to snuff so I can do a job that's a bit more challenging. I'm paid well for what I do, but I can totally do (and make) more.

They haven't had Guitar Hero working at The Railroad for about a month, and I played a little bit Friday night with the people I was with. Though I'm pretty decent on medium difficulty, the people I was with thought I was some sort of god that plays too much. I only looked so good because they sucked so bad. :) I've been reading a lot into Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 lately. I'd like to buy one of them, but I first need a console system. And a bigger living room.

A lightning storm a couple nights ago dropped two trees in my mother's yard, and a couple at my sister's house. Somehow, there was no structural damage. It was a damn miracle; the trees stand like three feet from my mom's house.

Mom is looking to go to the Outer Banks around Labor Day for two weeks. I don't think I'll go. I have plenty of time off available to me, but I'd rather go somewhere warm when I'm tired of being depressed in the winter. I suspect I'll be in Virginia again in February. The Outer Banks isn't a hotbed of geocaching activity, either.

The X-Files movie opens next weekend? Oh my heart!

Good enough for now. Later. News Pending.
I'm way behind right now. I'm a busy guy, what can I say. Tuesday funnies and whatnot will have to wait until I have some spare time. And that could be a while.

Thank you for your understanding. This pool league is for queers.
Nothing says "totally awesome" like having another opponent no call no show for a league game.

What the hell. We're on week #7 and this is the second incident of this sort we had to deal with.

This league is starting to be a joke. It seems that every week, one team won't show up and several others are constantly in need of substitute players. Though not as interesting, they should have stuck to having six teams instead of trying to stretch them out into eight.

I don't know if we're going to take the 25-0 forfeit or not. I guess it depends on why they didn't fucking bother to contact me and/or show up in the first place. I could fit a lot of goat porn on 1 TB.
I finally came to the conclusion tonight that in order to fix my busted desktop PC, I would be best off upgrading pretty much everything. I didn't go for the top-of-the-line shit, but I got a super deal searching around NewEgg for a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. All three will run me about $180. That's incredible. I figured I'd have to spend about $220 or so to get something somewhat decent. Such was not the case. NewEgg is the best. They always have been.

I'm gonna stick to the retail heatsink and fan on the CPU. I'm sure it will be loud and I will have to replace it with something better later. I'm also curious if my video card and its crazy fan will fit in the new board or if the southbridge heatsink will be in the way. It looks short of enough that I hope it won't pose a problem. I'll rip off the heatsink if I have to and worry about it later. I may end up upgrading my video card anyway.

I'm currently equipped with a 300 GB IDE hard drive and a 250 GB SATA hard drive. I will need to get rid of the IDE drive, though it runs perfectly fine. I managed to convince swhorfe to take it off my hands when the time comes. With the money I'll get, I'm going to buy a second SATA drive: a 750-gigger. You know, just so I can say I have a terabyte of disk space. Not that I was fully using the 550 GB I already had at my disposal, but the cost per GB has dropped a lot in recent years, it's really not putting any sort of dent in my funds.

Now if I could pawn off my existing memory and CPU...

Anyone need 1 GB (2 x 512 MB) of PC3200 DDR RAM? Or an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (socket 939)? Or how about my huge yet quiet CPU fan? You know you do... Tuesday Funnies

Three men were discussing aging at the nursing home.

"Sixty is the worst age to be," said the 60-year-old. "You always feel like you have to pee. And most of the time, you stand at the toilet and nothing comes out!"

"That's nothing," said the 70-year-old. "When you're seventy you can't even crap anymore. You take laxatives and eat bran, you sit on the toilet all day and nothing comes out!"

"Actually," said the 80-year-old, "Eighty is the worst age of all."

"Do you have trouble peeing too?" asked the 60-year-old.

"Not really I pee like a racehorse on a flat rock; I pee every morning at 6:00 no problem at all."

"Do you have trouble crapping?"

"No, I crap every morning at 6:30."

With great exasperation, the 60-year-old said, "Let me get this straight. You pee every morning at 6:00 and crap every morning at 6:30. So what's so tough about being 80?"

"I don't wake up until 7:00."

This is the kind of silliness my mother feels the need to forward me. Not sure why. Am I there yet?
I had this whole long weekend to myself. No one was doing anything. Yet somehow I didn't even get a phone call to do anything with anyone. Fine by me, as I tried to rack up the numbers and hit that 1,000-mark that much sooner.

Friday, I drove to Bratt, followed I-91 to Greenfield, MA, then kinda did this loop to Millers Falls and back up to Keene hitting what caches I could along the way. Greenfield has an ok number for me to find, but it turned out that where I wanted to hunt was also the place where the town was holding their Fourth of July celebration, so I couldn't really do anything. Muggles galore. And it would have been $10 for parking. Pfft. I'll wait for another day. Actually, the whole day was kind of a bust, as it was beautiful out and people were enjoying the sights and sounds wherever I went. I only bagged eight caches. I could have gotten closer to 20 in optimal conditions.

Saturday, I took off for Ashby, MA and played in whatever state forest they have there. My expectations weren't high, but I did find just as many as the day prior.

Sunday was a complete bust in New Boston, NH. There were 13 caches on this easy, level hiking trail that I wanted to find. But the hides were fucking devious. To my benefit, I ran into the cache owners on the trail. They were performing a maintenance run, so I was able to join them for their last two caches. One of the hides was a fake plant with a small tube taped under a leaf, which I would have never found had they not told me where it was. And the other cache turned out to have been missing, which is why I couldn't find it prior to running into them. But even still, seeing how they hid the replacement cache, I don't think I would have found it if it was there anyway. After they left, I tried to find some of their caches on my own, but I had a horrible GPS signal. And seeing how those two caches were hidden, I didn't really stand a chance of finding shit without some clues. And I didn't. I eventually cut my losses and went to my mom's to do laundry. :p

My goal this weekend was to find 25: 10 Friday, 5 Saturday, and 10 Sunday. I found 16 going into Sunday, but I underestimated the difficulty of this "power trail" and had to settle with 18 overall. Boo. I don't mind power trails if they are actually difficult finds, but I didn't plan for this trail to be. I should have better prepared myself. I'll be back for those another day.

924 down. 76 to go. Cake, in theory. Torn in half like a phone book.
I have the turtle for the long weekend.
I fed it a worm at least three times its length.
It kicked its ass this time.
It was cool. Nature's D student
Some number of weeks ago, I found a baby snapping turtle in the parking lot at work. I gave it to Brown to take care of, because that's what deadbeat dads do with their illegitimate children. It's a lot cheaper that way. Until she starts asking for child support, anyway. Then I'll play dumb.

Anyway, I went over her place last night to see how the turtle's been doing, and to get my ass kicked at some console games. Most of the videos I took sucked; I think it was camera shy. But I did upload a couple of the "better" ones for your own amusment:

* Caring for a baby snapping turtle: Baby snapping turtle gets cleaned and eats a mealworm. Yup.
* Baby turtle vs earthworm: Starts out with promise, but ends up not being as cool as it could be. :P

I wasn't aware that my old camera could take video clips, and Nicole actually has a couple nice ones where the turtle ravages another earthworm. I hope to get that online some day.

Also, I took some pics. Most of them sucked (go figure), but there were a couple ok ones:

* With the flash on
* With the flash off
* Turtle on a toy boat

That's all I got. My visitation rights are short because of the most recent court order. Tuesday Funnies

Football Joke

Football practice was delayed on Monday for nearly two hours for the Arizona Cardinals.

One of the players, while on his way to the locker room happened to look down and notice a suspicious looking, unknown white powdery substance on the practice field.

Coach Dave McGinnis immediately suspended practice while the FBI was called in to investigate.

After a complete field analysis, the FBI determined that the white substance unknown to the Cardinals players was the goal line.

Practice was resumed when the FBI decided that the team would not be likely to encounter the substance again.

Oh snap!