Con Trek Episode Two

Here is ConTrek Episode Two at Anime Weekend at Atlanta.

ConTrek on the Web

You can see ConTrek on the web now.

Here is the first episode from contrek.blip.tv

Gulf Shores in December Pics

From Gulf Shores December

From Gulf Shores December

From Gulf Shores December

From Gulf Shores December

Saratoga Springs Pics From February

Back in February I had to go to Saratoga Springs in New York. Lovely lovely place, unfortunately the light was already fading when I got to get out and explore, but here are the best of the pics I got.

From Saratoga Springs

From Saratoga Springs

From Saratoga Springs

New Phone

I have a new phone. I found myself in dire need of one Monday night. Well not really dire. I just don’t like going a day without one anymore. I have been thinking about a new phone for months now so it was easy to pick out a new one. Which was good because I walked into the ATT store about ten till nine.

Anyway back to why I suddenly needed a new phone. Monday night was the last showing of Two Lane Blacktop at the Belcourt. Since I was still feeling rough over the weekend I did not go and see it Saturday or Sunday. So on the way out I got stuck in some traffic and had to watch the temp gauge. Everything stayed within tolorable levels but I thought I noticed the tranny making more noise than it should.

Now that got me thinking. If the tranny was low on fluid that would make it run hot which would strain the rest of the cooling system. So I determined that I would check the tranny fluid after the movie. Since I needed to run by Dad’s office I checked the level there. After pulling the dipstick I held it up to the headlight and what do you know. The level was fine.

Now to get the dipstick back into the tube. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t feel it. Now if can remember back to the beginning of this tale you have probably already surmised what I did next.

I got out my cell phone flipped it open and held it out over the firewall to try and find the dipstick tube. As soon as my hand was deep over the running engine I dropped the phone.

It slipped deep between the block and the firewall and landed on top of what I supose was the transmission. For a few fleeting moments I could still see the faint glow but before I could attempt to retrieve it the glow went dark. Sticking my arm much further onto the dark recesses of the hot engine compartment than I wanted to yeild nothing but a greasy arm.

I tried a couple of quick stops and starts in the parking lot but to no avail. So that was the end of the Nokia N75. Well at least that is when I cut my emotioal ties to it. For all I know it’s still down there.

Today I was telling Art about how I came to buy this phone. It’s a Motorola Backflip by the way, which I’m quite happy with after some tweaking. Art has a Droid which is also an Android phone and after my story he tried to show me some flashlight apps I could download for my new phone, but I don’t think I will be using this phone as a flashlight for a while.

Fools names, fools faces

Just realized my first post in around ten months is on April Fools Day.

Seems appropriate.

Hello again?

You know how when you sort of drift apart from a friend. You go from calling or seeing he/she every other day to just speaking when ever something comes up. Before you know it you only talk when you or they have a question or need them for something. Then you realize you haven’t heard from them in months and suddenly they call out of the blue but your busy and can’t take the call and before you know it a week has gone by and you haven’t called them back. Suddenly it’s been months again and you haven’t called them back because it would be awkward, or more truthfully you think it’s now all awkward.

That doesn’t happen to you?

Oh, because your not a total schmuck.

Yeah that would explain a lot.

Steering Wheels

To quote one of the most important philosophical tag teams of the twentieth century. “And now something completely different”

From Cars

From Cars

From Cars

From Cars

From Cars

From Cars

Texting Whilst Driving Day

By the power vested in me by the voices in my head I declare today Texting Whilst Driving Day. Just be careful cause the damn nanny-staters have made it illegal in many places, including Tennessee. Next on their agenda is chewing gum and driving. Think I’m joking, there is actually an asshole in New Jersey, a Jersey City assemblyman by the name of L. Harvey Smith, that has submitted a bill to the new Jersey Legislature to make it illegal to operate a GPS unit in a moving vehicle. Has this guy ever drove himself around in a strange city. Has he ever tried to figure out where the hell he is on a complicated interstate system where your afraid to get off because your not sure you’ll be able to get back on and this doesn’t look like the best part of town to be driving around on surface streets at midnight and all you’ve got is a map that’s been folded up so that you can sort of see where you should be and the road at the same time. If he has he doesn’t remember it, or more likely he’s just a cynical prick that’s just jumping on the bandwagon.

This is one issue that transcends parties. You find these meddling dogooders on both sides of the aisle. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you have a R or a D by your name your just as likely to grab a hold of this rubbish and shout from the rooftops “it’s for the children”. When are we just going to say no to these jerks that want to micromanage our lives, because they aren’t going to stop. They won’t be happy until they completely regulate every little facet of your life. Till everything and everybody is homogeneous as Velveeta. And Velveeta sucks.

Reconciling Science and Religion

Okay, I’m going to wade out into the waist deep water for a bit here. I have never understood the problem with reconciling science and religion. Maybe I should clarify that by religion I mean Christianity as it’s the only religion that I’m even halfway familiar with. On one side you’ve got an all powerful, all knowing, all encompassing God. On the other physical evidence. To get specific let’s look at creation. On the one hand you have the world created in seven days. On the other a universe that took billions of years to create. On the surface there appears to be a discrepancy, but let’s take a look at the God part again. We are dealing here with an entity that is omniscient. God can literally do anything. If God can create the earth and the universe in seven days couldn’t he have created it in such a way that the physical evidence would lead you to believe that it was created in some other way. To be brutally simplistic could not an all powerful being have created an earth that was littered with fossils that would lead you to believe, just looking at the evidence that can be seen and touched and experimented with, that dinosaurs and other creatures predated the date that strict creationists see as the beginning of the planet. That man and all the other life on the planet were built in such a way that again would lead someone to believe, based just on what their senses and power of reason could tell them, that all life evolved from some original source. If you grant that God is all powerful then the answer, by definition, is yes. I really don’t understand why you need to go any further than that. You could ask why, but again we are dealing with an all powerful, all knowing being. When faced with the problem of evil, say why does God let the innocent suffer and the wicked be rewarded the common answer from the devout is that God is so far beyond us that it is impossible for us to see his plan. Which makes perfect sense as long as you grant the existence of some kind of omnipresent being. Why then is it necessary to twist and distort the facts to come up with pseudoscience like Intelligent Design. It’s almost like the proponents of babble like Intelligent Design aren’t quite able to believe that God could be so creative. They want to replace a beautiful subtlety with hamfistedness. Grasping this idea would seem to make the path of discovery an unbelievable joyful activity for the devout. I could imagine the thought process of some believing scientist to be something like this. “Yes God I know in my heart of hearts that you created everything about six thousand years ago exactly like it is laid out in Genesis and other parts of the Bible, and by the way any discrepancies I find therein are a failure of my understanding and not of the actual text, but I am fascinated by how you brought this bit of light I’m seeing into being so that it appears to have originated a million years ago on the other side of the galaxy.” Every new piece of knowledge would be a tiny step closer to knowing the mind of God. Every new bit of data collected would be literally a message from God and a confirmation of his love for us. Imagine the entire universe is one big puzzle lovingly created for us to unravel, to discover what our ultimate purpose is. Of course being a non believer I may be missing something very basic. I am the person who had to raise his hand in an Old Testament class to clarify that we should take it as a given that God is good after all. Maybe it’s my lack of faith and certainty that obscure some reasoning that throws a monkey wrench into what I’m trying to get at. Anyway it’s late, so here are some pretty pictures in case you actually got this far.

From Nighttime

And one more.

From Nighttime