I meant to mention this yesterday while I was busy justifying why I had not yet completed my research into RSS feeds into LJ.

Some of you may recall in the vaguest of fashions that I was looking for a new forum to go to. There were some good suggestions but I never quit meshed into any of them.

Anyway, on a lark I did a search on Google, I don't remember the exact string ("Old fart gamers"?) and found www.gamerswithjobs.com. I've been hanging out over there ever since.

T-Duck suggested getting my blog to update over here via an RSS feed. I have not yet figured out how to get LJ to do that. I certainly can get LJ to feed over to the blog, but that's the wrong direction. As usual, I'm finding LJ's documentation to be scattered and disorganized.

I used to, somewhere, have a client that posted to multiple blogs. Did I just toss the darn thing? That is something I am considering. There is also a way, I think, to feed comments from LJ over to Unfettered Blather, but again I don't know if the reverse is true. I wouldn't mind establishing some sort of synergy.

I do have one major reservation, and it occurs due to reading my friends list again. Let's just be real honest here. LJ is largely a personal experience. Me? Well, I've not grown to fond of either complaining about life nor trumpeting how good it is. I might have an off-handed comment about how things are going, but I find it terribly droll just to talk about me. In fact, I've pretty well dropped it. Unfettered Blather is largely impersonal, except for presenting the world from my point of view. It's me looking outward, not me looking in. LJ is largely the reverse of that. That is an observation, not a criticism.

Anyway, the REAL lack of progress is simply being busy with this or that. I'm sure everyone, you know, gets what I mean. Sure I'm holed up in a hotel after work and being an old married guy I don't venture out much. Still, it's amazing how little free time I have. Besides, Sunday evenings and Friday mornings are completely consumed by trips to the airport and flights back and forth from work to home. I'm losing a good 10 to 12 hours a week just to travel.

I ran into loganpvp at the Stonebriar Mall in Frisco on Weds. I was in town on vacation and was meeting an old friend that had just started a new job.

I made a clean break some months ago from LJ. I won't go into petty details behind my decision. It was quite liberating. For those interested, the new blog is...

Unfettered Blather

I am still working at a consulting company. My contract in Plano expired and I am now working in Virginia on a long-term contract. I fly twice a week and am home on weekends. It has been hell, but my performance appraisals in light of the tough assignment have been glowing. Not that the work is hard, but the client can be difficult to work with. Despite this, I think they're good people, just disorganized.

I was promoted to Senior Consultant at the end of last year. I believe I had mentioned making Technical Designer earlier last year. I am now attempting to go for Senior Consultant/Architectural Specialist for the end of 2006. I may not make it, but it gives me a goal.

My older son is in an advanced learning class in school. His lowest grade so far has been 92%, but this is only 1st grade so we'll see. The fact that he enjoys school whereas I hated it is a good sign. He takes after his mother, who was a much better student than I was. My younger son is in pre-school and doing well but is a bit of a hellion.

I can't say that I will post here like...ever. I have the other blog for that. After running into Logan though, I decided that I should at least be checking my friends list.

However, I am only getting older and grumpier. Now would be a good time to remove me from your friends list.

Recent diatribe while talking to a friend....

You know how they talk about survival kits? A vampire survival kit would have a stake, garlic, and possibly a crucifix. A werewolf survival kit would have a gun with silver bullets. A zombie survival kit would have a shotgun and a pamphlet explaining how to shoot them in the head.

I'm going to make a geek survival kit. It will contain a clean XXXL T-Shirt, a bar of soap, some shampoo, and a belt. That way the next time I run into some guy digging through the Hot Wheels at the local Target wearing his nasty tie-dye T-Shirt with his long greasy hair tied back with whatever rubber band he found on the counter that morning showing off his buttcrack, I will be prepared!

Yeah, it's been a long time in coming.

So by this point I have seen the movie twice. Once at a light night showing last week, and again the following Friday with my 6 year old son. I know, I know. I took a 6 year old to a PG-13 movie. You may boil me in oil later. I did at least preview the movie first.

I think a quote I read on a forum I frequent summed up the movie pretty well. "If you don't like this movie then you just don't like Star Wars."

I think that is fair, because most of the complaints I hear about Episode III are pretty well applicable to every movie in the series. I think there are fans out there that are just determined to hate everything Lucas does and any endeavor he dares set upon after 1983 is "raping their childhood". Note, I hate that expression with a passion.

Revenge of the Sith was good, it was not great. That's ok because I wouldn't call any of the movies great after the original Star Wars anyway. Honestly, the original was only great because nothing like it had ever been done. It wasn't exactly science fiction, it sure as hell wasn't fantasy, it had revolutionary special effects. In short, there has never been anything like it before and you can't just recreate that magic by producing sequels.

The movie certainly had its weak points, as expected, but it delivered where it needed to. The final scene with Vader was silly. I get that the Emperor had to drive out the last of Vader's humanity, and I understand the purpose of the scene. It was the execution that was flawed. Still, it had the one scene that, in my mind, was essential to making it the transition to the original film. Obi-Wan with the infant Luke in hand, walking in the desert to give the child to the Lars family.

It also had the 2nd scariest lightsaber fight since Luke confronted Vader in Empire Strikes Back. When Windu faced down Darth Sidious, I honestly did not know who would win. I knew what the final outcome was going to be, that isn't hard to figure out considering what we already know. Still, when Sidious struck down the other three Jedi, people we saw who had survived the previous film, I seriously wondered if Mace wasn't in over his head.

I'm sure some people will go to this movie and be disappointed. Opinions do vary. I do think the utter piece of crap that some people claim it is are too bitter and too biased to have arrived at that fairly. Sorry, I've seen some pretty bad movies in my day. If you consider this film to be utter crap, you've obviously been watching nothing but critically accalimed award winning movies your entire life. Call it bad? Fair enough. Cinematic sewage? I think some people just can't let go of the fact that they don't get to define what Star Wars is.

Oddly enough, the comic book shop where Scott Kurtz does most of his appearances? Yeah, it's like 5 minutes from my office if you include the elevator ride down. I mean 5 minutes walking distance. It actually shares a parking lot with the office.

Feels kind of weird. I popped in there the other day just because. It's funny when I think how much effort I've gone through in the past to take trips down there (usually to meet a buddy of mine) and now I can just pop in over a break or whenever.

I wish the store hadn't gone down to half its size. It used to take so much more time and effort to visit.

I rolled off my project on May 16. I took last week off to get things done around the house. I've been absent so much because I have been in the midst of chaos since the beginning of May.

Which is kind of funny because I did so little in my last week on the job. It wasn't for lack of trying, but there was no clear transition plan at all.

So now that I don't have a contract I am coming into the office 3 days a week, Tuesday through Thursday. Not sure of my hours, probably between 10am and 3:30pm. Yes, indeed, it's tough being me.

I was very discouraged because during my 2nd to last week on the contract there were almost no positions posted in the staffing reports that I qualified for. However, I have been submitted to quite a few and it looks like it is just a matter of time. Especially now that I am more aware of what I am expected to do and what I can do to make the process quicker.

If worse comes to worst and I don't get an assignment soon, I may end up working on sales proposals. It's not exactly ideal work, but there is some business we are trying to sell and I happen to be an expert in the technology set the customer is looking for. If nothing else, it may be good experience to put on a resume. Until then, I am just coasting.

But hey, I've taken my son to school everyday for the past week and a half. Plus I took him this morning to his last day of kindergarten. Being on the bench has not been all bad.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/landofthedead/large.html

Dennis Hopper in a Zombie movie? My real question is, why didn't this happen sooner?

They are selling 20 oz. bottles of this stuff at the Prestonwood Commons area in Plano. It's really not bad. I still prefer the Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, but it would be better with Splenda to.

I'd love to see more products currently using Nutra-sweet or Sorbitol replaced with Splenda. It would make my life a whole lot easier.

Any kindergartner at my son's school who successfully completes 25 AR (advanced reading) tests is going to have lunch with the school principal and some firefighters on the roof of the school.

Most of the kids who were able to do so were in advanced schooling prior to entering kindergarten. They pretty much started off the year able to read. Of course we're talking about all of two kids in his class, so maybe I should say "both" instead of "all". Anyway, my older son, Reid, was just starting to read at the beginning of the year and started later on the AR tests than the other two kids who had been taking them. Although he tried hard to make up the difference, by last week he had completed just 18 tests.

Yesterday we received an e-mail from his teacher in the middle of the day (how things change!) saying that Reid had been in the library all day. Apparently she allowed him to go to the library on his own and read all day and take as many tests as he wanted. He read ten books and passed all ten AR tests. The tenacity and perseverance he showed when he saw something wanted was incredible.

He had a soccer party that night where he received a trophy for the season. We took him out for pizza afterwards. He said it was one of the best days of his life.