little lost robot

I’ll be flying off tomorrow morning (Friday) for a weekend family reunion in Colorado. Tater will be there, and we’re likely to get in some trouble. And while Meeker, the town we’re going to has a web page, I doubt I’ll have an luck with finding any internet access for the next few days. Perhaps I’ll be able to do some Twittering (via my cell phone - provided I can get a signal), or get lucky and find a TV and a wireless cloud for my Nintendo Wii.

Photos and updates about guns, yahtzee and beer to come later.

These are things that have happened, or that I’ve been thinking about this week - none are long enough for their own blog entry, or too long for a Twitter post.

1. I just got a copy of Advantage Yahtzee from Amazon. Is it cheating to read a book on how to kick ass at Yahtzee? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m obsessed with the game lately. And if there were performance enhancing drugs for the game, then I would be juicing up every day and paying a co-worker to pee in a cup, so I could fool the Yahtzee Gaming Commission.

2. The season premier for my favorite show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is up on the gang’s MySpace page. But, it’s way better if you’ve seen the past two seasons (which come out on DVD next week - buy it!). And now I have a favorite new character: “PepperJack” the street pimp. And I have a favorite new catchphrase: “Pepperjack love Fraggle Rock”

3. I was kinda horrified yesterday when I randomly heard Carrie Underwood’s stalker chick song on the radio and realized that I knew all the lyrics (but I apparently don’t know the name of the song). I was equally astonished today when I was driving along with my photog boss, John Hendon and he sang Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” along with the radio perfectly. You gotta see it to believe it.

4. I’m totally gonna start tearing up my blog template soon and getting a new look. Something with a slightly wider sidebar.

I’m kinda terrible with the stop motion. Believe me, if I had the patience to painstakingly move something ever-so-slightly for thirty million frames over the course of a few hours, then you’d see all kinds of crazy-ass robot videos from me. So I have no idea what compelled me to stop-animate a laptop last week for my vodcast (Click on JL: Lost & Found Online), but I went through with it anyhow. I think it came out okay.

Anyway, here’s some of the behind-the-scenes outtakes I chopped together for fun. I just noticed that the video is streaming all weird in a few spots, I’ll re-encode it and reload it later (if you scrub the timeline indicator it clears up).

If you’re interested, the actual segment is below (after the jump).
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I’ve been a Flight of the Conchords fan for a while now, and I get all excited each week when I see how they work their past songs into each show. But I’ve always said, “There’s no way their doing the Bowie song” and then they had a whole awesome Bowie episode, but I kept saying, “Yeah, well there’s no way that Frodo song will ever be in the show.” Wrong again!

I like how they kept the lines from the Fellowship trailer in the song, so funny. The best line from the song: “I don’t rap about bitches ho’s, I rap about wizards and trolls.”

Anyway, here’s the mp3 that’s going around the web from thier live performance of the song a few years ago. [Flight of the Conchords - Frodo (live)]

After our little trip to Costco last week, and subsequent new HDTV purchase, my media room has gotten a whole lot more awesome. We moved the old 36″ HD television into my lair, and was promptly hooked up to the Xbox. But I went a step further and done away with my LCD monitor, hooking-up my PC directly to the television, since it’s pretty much a large monitor anyways.

I don’t know why, but I guess I expected problems, however it worked out pretty well. I used the DVI input on the TV and then matched the screen resolution (the XFI sound card also plugged directly into the TV). I chucked out my old peripherals and got a wireless keyboard and mouse, so I can surf the net and play online games from my recliner. Also, I was able to tweak the Windows settings and game settings so the the fonts are large and readable from across the room. After sitting in my room playing PC games on my television today I realized, I’m never gonna sit at a home computer desk ever again.

The weekend the wife and I drove up to Maggie Valley, North Carolina to visit the newly (re)opened Ghost Town in the Sky. We had a free passes, and I gotta admit that I was pretty excited. Although I should’ve realized it was a bad sign when I told one of my coworkers I was going and his only response was, “Ehh”.

Here’s the deal: You basically take seventeen minute ride up a chair lift to this fabricated old west town, that has old timey stores and gunpowder battles in the street. There’s like 10 shops in the town and six of them are candy stores, which somehow doesn’t seem authentic. Also, after watching the past three seasons of Deadwood I can tell you that not nearly enough people in the ghost town used the word “cocksucker” in their day to day conversations.

We spent less than an hour in the ghost town because it got slammed by a monstrous thunderstorm just after we got there. Matter of fact, as we rode the creaky (and sometimes problematic) chairlift, we couldn’t see the end of the ride, but watched as it pulled us upward into the looming rain clouds. Kinda like a modern day ride on the River Styx.
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Tonight I made the tough decision to finally cancel my SOE account after close to seven years of online gaming adventure.

But the truth is: the adventure has been winding down for me in the SOE universe of games, and the fun has sortaa gone away. The current line of games have become increasingly disappointing, and I’ve finally come to the realization that nothing is ever going to be as awesome as the original Everquest. And now that I’ve finally pulled the plug on my account, my character of seven years, the half-elf bard Loveknife is now dead to me.

So now, I’d like for everyone to participate in a moment of silence (which you probably are already, sitting in front of your computer) for Norrath’s fallen hero - his ones and zeroes are now just dust in the wind.
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I have no idea if this sushi roll looks disgusting to most folks or not, and hopefully it’ll scroll off the front page of my blog before I get sick of looking at it. But I gotta tell you, it’s probably one of the most awesome sushi rolls I’ve ever had.

My wife and I have become addicted to this little treat at Azia, the new fancy pants restaurant in town. It’s called “Surf-n-Turf” and it has cooked lobster in the center and well done kobe beef sirloin on the outside (and some other key ingredients I can’t remember). I nearly cry each time I pop one in my mouth, as I feel like I must be eating something truly enchanted, such as a unicorn meat.

I’ve had a Nintendo Wii for like a day now, and I’ve already become one of those folks that are going apeshit over those Mii avatars. Here’s what I look like as little Mii person.

I’m so glad they had a mouth that emulated my trademark smirk. [I recreated my Mii by using this totally rad online Mii Editor]