The Halls

Getting old sucks.
I'm a walking injury. I feel like I've been in a car wreck. I've currently got one big toe so jammed up and/or broke that I walk with a limp, the and next 2-3 toes are also pretty banged up. I'm pretty sure my right shoulder has some kind of rotator cuff injury that has been steadily improving, but is a constant nag and keeps me from being able to lift much at all.
Monday Kyle, the 275lb monster in judo

re-tourqued that shoulder until it popped. Not the shoulder joint, but the elbow joint! So now that's highly sensitive too.
My knees are both a constant source of pain, instability and general paranoia for fear of something bad happening to them, yet I cannot stop doing the very things that cause them the greatest jeopardy.

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We have plans to go skiing at the little hill in Iowa this weekend, so the kids can get some cheap lessons in now, then maybe we'll go to CO later in the snow season.
Skiing is good for the knees, right?
Well, I'll surely snowboard, which is supposedly less potentially dangerous on the knees, and why I picked to learn that instead of skiing in the first place. But snowboarding has a higher risk of arm/shoulder injuries, and with a fresh shoulder injury already, I'm really looking forward to this.

Posted by Aaron at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was perusing through DAvid's blog(s), including his additional one where he and his friend actually try to give social commentary. I tried that for awhile, but it just bored everyone, and I eventually couldn't come up with new material every day, or even every week.
It doesn't mean I don't have some now, but I strayed from just that.

But a post on that site, caught my attention. It was about the downloading of music, iTunes, and current CD marketing.
 He makes some interesting points about how the price of CDs really hasn't fallen much, and that's largely to blame for today's music piracy and the success of iTunes and similar.
I would say that you can't say that it's price should fall just because the price of computers, and other technologies have fallen in price?
He makes a comparison to the falling price of a car, but in reality, the selling prices of cars have risen along with everything else. Costs of PC's have fallen, but that's when it's largely the same technology that doesn't incur any further research costs, and benefits from cheaper production costs as the technology matures.
Also, we're talking about something that in inherently an art form as well, not pure technology. It could charge be hard to argue what the inherent value of that is, although there seems to be a long standing precedent as to what it is, based on what the public is willing to pay.

But here's a completely separate point that he didn't address in his 'new model' that I still cannot believe hasn't been done somewhere.
I thought of this idea back in the 90's (along with several others), when the CD burners were first becoming commonplace. I was paying $9 a disc, which is crazy expensive, but still less than I was paying for music CDs. The internet was young, but fully functional. Hard drive was expensive, but basically, for ~$1000, you could get a decent PC, and plenty of hard drive space to store. As music CD store, buy this PC, and start saving all the tracks of all the music you have to hard drives.
Then only download from the music (legally) from the music labels, and burn the CDs right there in the store for the person who wants it.
Perfect, right?
They never run out of a CD (assuming they don't run out of blanks), and they don't have to carry stock in a bunch of crap that never sells. It would even be dirt simple to make compilation CDs, although that would be much trickier from the royalties to which labels, but it would surely quickly have moved to whatever model iTunes now has.
This whole great plan was thought of over 10 years ago, and would have been somewhat cost prohibitive in the 90's, but now I could open my own music store it would be so cheap. Literally anyone could do it.
So why didn't it happen?
Who would have shot down that idea?
The shipping industry.
They are moving a lot of CDs around the country, and all that revenue would disappear, instantly.
I can't remember the details, but they almost single-handedly killed the idea.
Now it's become so cheap, the model is effectively what I suggest, just in your home.
So it happened anyway, effectively.

Posted by Aaron at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been getting in to Slayer lately. It's real old stuff, really, but some of it is pretty good.
I never thought so when it came out.

My dad got to go home from the hospital finally after his latest surgery. So even though he still has quite a bit of recovery left, he can at least do it at home now.

I had a decent judo practice tonite, but it seems like attendance is dwindling.

I really need to get cracking on the writeup of my thesis. I haven't even started.

I love how now the tv is flooded with 'you should refinance that stupid high rate loan you got 5 years ago into a 30 year fixed loan' commericals now.
So who was it  that talked all the idiots into getting all those loans in the first place, and now have sent the economy into a downward spiral?
Oh yes, it was all you stupid bans, preying on the stupid, but you overfished, and now the economy is tanking.
I just wish we could punish the banks and not bail out all the morons who screwed themselves by getting these loans.
I was planning on being a total bottom feeder and buy up all those cheap properties, but now the gov't is bailing them?!?
crap.

Posted by Aaron at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I finally had something happen recently that made me laugh.
My friend Aaron Shelton

has apparently become something of a gay celebrity, which is wonderfully ironic, since he is even more homophobic than I am, and that's saying something.
We went out with Aaron and his wife, Marla (in the above pic) and some other friends. Aaron started off by saying "so have you heard that I'm a star on youtube?"
To which I answered "No, Aaron, I didn't hear you were a star on youtube, how did that happen?", totally expecting a great punchline to come next.
He said "No, really. Apparently someone from San Francisco posted a video of a newscast that was shot in my senior year, where I was being interviewed for football, and I happened to have no shirt on. Only now, it's become some big phenomonon with all the gays. There's all kinds of comments that say "he's hot" and worse. I have no idea who posted it, but I know it had to be someone from my senior class, which means someone from my senior class is gay!"
I laughed and laughed and laughed.

It is apparently some big gay phenom, as it's had well over 100000 hits!

How do you spell irony?
I do with S-H-E-L-T-O-N, since my ultra homo-phobic friend Aaron is the now an unwilling gay porn guy!
(Well I certainly wasn't going to spell it AARON, was I?)


And I felt obligated to find the video and post it, so all could share in my laughter as well.

Posted by Aaron at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have some good news finally.
I got my thesis project working.
I still have much work to do, but I was totally sunk if I couldn't get the thing actually working at some point. This is the point I wanted to be at something like 6 weeks into last semester.
But at least I now fully believe I'm going to get there.

Posted by Aaron at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a little depressed.
My grandmother died last week, we had the funeral saturday.
Got to see a lot of family I don't normally see, which was nice, but not my dad, as he stayed behind to get his last surgery done.
At least that was the plan.
It seems the surgery did not go well, and although he's out of it fine, he now has to have another surgery in ~3 months. He was lead to believe this was going to be the last thing he was going to have to deal with, and then all would go back to 'normal', or at least pretty close to it, but now it's up in the air.
Pretty depressing, for me just because I know it prolongs his overall healing and well being, and for obvious reasons for him.

bleh. I went to judo to beat someone just to feel better, but then I did just that, too well.
I popped some poor kids ribs (rib separation)
So now I feel like crap for doing that to him.
This week is not starting off well.

Posted by Aaron at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm quite frustrated with Linux right now.
My gallery installation seems to have died, and I cannot revive it.
The database in general took a hit, which killed this blog software for a short time, and was at least one problem with the gallery.
I need some of those pictures, so I'm quite mad that I can't get it up.
Plus, I'm trying to bring up a brand new work server, on killer new hardware, and it's quite impossible.
I've been able to bring up other weaker systems in a matter of hours. But this is the best hardware I've ever touched, and it's the most problematic.

Sigh.
I won't get to do anything with it tomorrow, either, due to my crazy busy weekend.
poor me, huh?
ah well, it could be worse.
I thought I had my thesis all working, but still no joy. This weekend was originally going to be a weekend to work on that, but too many other things have come up now.
Maybe I should take next week off and just work on the thesis...

Posted by Aaron at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am sad to say that my Grandmother (my Mother's mother) passed away yesterday.

It was not a huge surprise, as her health has been steadily deteriorating over the last few years, but it hurts to lose someone.
The whole matter is further complicated by the fact that my dad has two surgeries coming up, friday and monday, the most likely days for the funeral, so my mom will most likely not be able to be there while he's in surgery.
Timing is everything.

Posted by Aaron at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Didn't get much accomplished this weekend, but had plenty to do.
I had a political rant all prepared, but now that I've sat down here, I've totally lost it.
Guess it's a genetic issue, as when my parents were here over Christmas, they both forgot many things on short notice, making me dread my future mental state.
Because I feel half handicapped now.

I played my first volleyball game in nearly a year today. It went pretty good, but my shoulder that has been bothering me for the last 2+ months was a big question mark.
I performed ok, but it was a definite liability.
We'll see how the rest of the season goes.

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ok I remember now. I was just at the gym and saw more of the updates on the caucuses.
The whole vehicle used to get elected now is really irritating to me.
It's never really mattered much how good a politician you were, it always only mattered what the public perception was of you.
If you could somehow turn yourself into a media darling, you got elected, no matter how big of an idiot you were.
This makes the whole process a sham anyway, so why prolong it?
They should have cut it in half. No political ads or campaigning allowed until August 2008.
Do you know how few people vote based on more than one poltical view?
Never mind how few there are that vote at all!
So now i have to hear about the political election process, and the latest polls for 2 years!!! before the actual election. I hate them all now. By the time whoever actually gets elected gets sworn in, I'm going to hate him as much as I hate Bush right now!

The other very real problem with this new longer election "season" is the fact that it's no longer a season at all. It's a full time job for many people. Many people are making a living, and some a very god living, at doing nothing more than helping people get elected in one form or another.
These people are bottom feeders.
What are they really doing that is productive or beneficial to our society?
Nothing I can see.
If you shorten the process as I suggest, these people no longer have jobs, and they have to resort to picking up trash on the roads.
At least in my fantasy world.

Posted by Aaron at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, 4 days into the year, this is the coolest thing I've seen so far this year.
It's nearly the coolest thing I saw including all last year too.

Posted by Aaron at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

To all users of AVG free (something I've been recommending for a few years now) who also develop using Visual C++, I've been seeing that AVG has been deciding that several tools in the Visual C++ suite are suddenly being defined as viruses, and being quarantined.
It has also been 'finding' that all TI DSP C tools are suddenly infected as well.
(They're not, BTW)

I'm losing the tools I need to do my job because the virus scanner is too sensitive!

Thankfully, I just quarantine, and not delete them, so I'm able to recover them, but this is annoying...

Just a helpful post to those that use these same tools, if you suddenly get an error saying
"Error spawning 'rc'exe", and you think, I've never seen that before...

Posted by Aaron at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's been a busy holiday season around here, and now it's over.
It was really good to see my parents for 2+ weeks, and got to not work very hard for the last 2 weeks.
(Despite what everyone thinks, I definitely have to work hard on occasion)
But now the vacation is over, and I have to go back to work.
The kids are out of school for a few days yet, so I have to work from home for those days. It's still hard tho!

We had a very fun new year's eve party last nite, where we all played some PS2 trivia games and guitar hero. It was pretty fun.


Saturday nite we watched the UFC fight, and saw what I'm sure was Hughes' last fight. I always liked him, but St-Pierre is an animal. I actually cashed in this poker tournament, instead of going out first like I did last month.

So all in all, it was a very good last few weeks. I'm fairly sure I've gained 5+ pounds, and I now will be like the rest of the country, and make a resolution to lose some weight. Except my motivation is like the girls in the late spring. I need to lose some weight so I can look good in my swimsuit, cuz i'm going to be on the Hawaiian beaches in March!


Oh, and some gratuitous christmas pics and links!

Posted by Aaron at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)