Bachelor Party

I've uploaded pictures from Tino's Bachelor Party over at

Flickr

. You can check them out

here

.

Also going tubing this weekend, expect crazy pictures and even crazier stories out of Benjamin.

They wern't drinking hooch.

All this time I thought my 80 bucks a month for 768/256 DSL was going to buy hooch at the bar next to the telco but it turns out they were in fact investing the money. I checked

PcPartners

website yesterday to my surprise they had bumped up their packages and it was cheaper than I was currently paying. I stopped in this morning on my way to the post and requested the new faster cheaper 1.5 meg package, she said she thought I was on the new OCCAM trunk so shouldn't be a problem. That's good because they have a DSLAM at my apartment building that was full when we moved here and I bet they didn't upgrade it. I get home tonight after a long day of work and my net seemed fast, my speed monitors were indicating my net to be going WAYTOHOT, to my wonderment a speed test showed that indeed I was approaching the 1.5 meg barrier. Ping is around 120 which is normal for here (outrageous but normal). I think the ping stems from the

a. shoddy lines around here.
b. PC partner leases its lines from Iowa Telecom so there's extra hops in between that needn't be. I think fiber runs from Kellogg to Gilman to Newton.

Anyway I'm pretty tickled to see my net up to par and 10 bucks cheaper now only 70 bucks a month for twice the speed. Still outrageous but fairly less outrageous.

You'll note that Pc Partner doesn't even show up as the ISP on speedtest.net. On DSL reports it shows as dsl.partnercom.net though.

Goozex Amps It Up

Just when I thought Goozex couldn't get any hawter they amp it up a notch. For posting in a thread with photos of my

"Goozex Lair"

they are sending me a T-Shirt and a free copy of

Crackdown

, which I had on my request list. I recently purchased a Polo, T-shirt, and some magnets but more is always better. These guys are fantastic, once before when I had helped them net and ban a scammer on the system they tossed me 20 free trade credits. They run good promos for new users and are trying hard to support the current users with some promos and freebies as well. I can't speak highly enough about this service, sure there are a few bad apples, and a few scammers but by and large it's a fantastic community dedicated to low cost gaming. By my estimate based on the games I've sent and recieved and on current trade in values at

estarland.com

they have saved me over $375. Thats a lotta dough. If you're interested use my

referral link

, with your first active trade it will net you 5 free trades and 100 points. Click

here

to sign up with Goozex now. There are some other promos floating around at different sites as well such as

Cheap Ass Gamer

, but in general they are all worth about the same.

In other news I don't mean to spoil any secrets but on p.323 of Harry Potter Dumbledore comes back as a Woman Walrus. No foolin.

City Witty

Went to Des Moines today, visited a place called In Play. It's a bar/resturant/arcade/kids games with tickets place. Pretty neat. They have a Mario Kart GP2 cabinet that was hella fun and will likely draw me back in. The food wasn't terribly priced for being in downtown Des Moines. 8 bucks for a BBQ brisket sandwich with some fries, was pretty good too. 6 bucks was a bit steep for a Java Monster drink (Monster and Vanilla wodka) but their standard drinks were more average priced at 3-4 dollars.

Went to the Mall, played with the iPhone, feels very intuitive thats for sure. At Barnes and Noble picked up a few bargain books including a Bruce Campbell smash

I usually only buy bargain books there or at borders since it's so much cheaper to order off Amazon with the free shipping n shizzle. I do go look at books I want though, there was a hawt Grindhouse book,

Grindhouse: The Sleaze-filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature

It's of course 10 bucks cheaper on amazon, even with their scamocard they peddle you save dollars at Amazon. The card nets you 10% off all books or something, so you've got to buy 250 bucks or so worth already to make it worth your while. And then you know, you feel like you should buy books since you spent money on this damn savers card. No thanks, I'll buy the books I want already discounted @ Amazon thanks. I'll still buy your reasonably priced bargain books though. Got both beer and wine encyclopedias. Even nabbed a couple cat books including one on how to test your cat's IQ, that should be good for a laugh with the Nemo. Overall a good trip, traffic wasn't too bad even with all the road construction.

Coulton

Johnathan

Coulton

is an artist that's been doing some covers and other things for a while. Recently he did a song a week for a year. That was pretty neat. He's been available on itunes and some other services but as I think the current prices for music are rather high even at a buck a song(its an ok price not great) plus he's not available on DRM free Itunes plus yet.. I stumbled on his music at a service called

songslide

. This service lets you pay more or less per song or album. I chose 7.50, it netted him 4 bucks about and 3ish for the

songslide

people. It shows you on the scale exactly how much the artist gets and the

songslide

cut. The more you pay the more the artist gets. Essentially after a certain point

songslide

keeps their cut and keep giving the rest to the artist. So check them out and of course this fantastically creative artist. The songs are 192kbit DRM free .mp3 files, well thats the recommended size artists can submit in higher or lower bitrates.

Mugs Galore!

I arrived home the other day to find a note on my door from UPS stating that they had delivered a package. Hmmm I didn't order anything I didn't think. It said they left it at 3B, in the other friggin side of the building. Thanks UPS, for leaving my package in the locked side of the other building. Really, I appreciate it. Anyway I go bug the fella for my package and it says Boston Lager glasses on the box. I'm like WTF is this, It can't be beer glasses can it? Did I order beer glasses drunk? I haven't been drunk for a while, did I order this a long time ago? I get in and open er up and low and behold it's really 2 Sam Adams Lager glasses. Apparently Beer Advocate and the Boston Beer Company joined forces to send these new Slovenian crafted glasses to all Founding Members of Beer Advocate Magazine, which I am. It's a fantastic magazine by the way, if you like a good beer, you should really check it out. Anyway there's a bunch of hullaballo about how it makes your beer taste better but at any rate they are neat looking glasses and for free I'm not gunna complain. It came with a letter from the CEO about how they appreciate us beer connoisseurs and would like us to be the first to try their new glasses, on them.



Next up is a mega ebay beef. So I ordered some perfume that is now out of production that my wife likes. It was a reasonable price with free shipping so I bought 3 of them at the same time. Shit you'd think I'm doing this person a favor you know ordering 3 they can toss them in the same package save shipping make some more moolah. A couple days later I get a note in the mail saying I have a package at the post and that I owe 6 dollars postage on it within 2 days or it will be returned to sender. I'm like this better be some joke A. why the fruck do I owe postage and B. thats not very long to pick it up. No joke, the frackin sender threw the 3 bottles of perfume in the mail with no frackin postage. It somehow made it all the way to me for me to pay for postage. That's not my idea of free shipping. Needless to say negative feedback will be left if the user doesn't paypal me 6 bucks back. Heres a shot of the package as you can see it says liquid which is great but there's no postage at all. Friddly frack. Saw harry pothead in the Omnidome IMAX, however apparently Omnidomes don's show 3D which was kinda lame, but frack that was a big freack screen. I could count the pores on Harry's face. Cost me a bundle, 24 bucks for tickets and 4 bucks for parking damn science center. Sister is coming down this weekend we're thinking of checking out that new place in Des Moines In Play, big bar/arcade/resturant for megadultsgames. Lost.fm baby.

The Boys Are Back In Town

Went up to Toledo tonight. Apparently Uncle Chris was in town whom I haven't seen for 12 years probably. His hair is noticeably grayer since that time and his beard noticeably bushier. On some vacation trip to a Greek Monastery in Arizona of all places. Told me to make sure to filter my water, too much garbage in the water. As I filter all my water I tend to agree.

Cache Cache Baby

We went geocaching around 4 today and hit a few Caches. First one was over in Rock Creek Park. It was a pretty easy find. We left a Wii Rock sticker and took a red car. Next one we hit was under a bridge. I saw the cache under the bridge but I didn't think that was it because it was way up under there, well come to find out it was actually the cache. We'll have to go back this week and hit it up. The last one we hit tonight was over at Arbor Lake. This one took us a while. It turns out that the cache is about 80-90 feet North West of the stated coordinates. Normally you'll find the cache within 20 feet of stated coordinates based on GPS sensitivity and where someone was holding the unit when they took down the numblers. Took us a half hour to find this one after the half mile trek up the trail to find it. It was pretty muggly back in the swampy woods with this one. Overall a good caching day hopefully we'll get going again sometime soon. It's been like a year since we last went, you'll see our cache count on the badge to the right isn't very high. I'm hoping we can hit 20 before the summer is over.

Free Trades At Goozex

Goozex is running free trades til the end of the month in honor of their 1 year anniversary. If you've been looking into getting into this hot trading site nows your chance. Click here to get 5 free trades and 100 points on your signup. In the 9 months Goozex has probably saved me 5-700 dollars in gaming goodness. That's not pocket change. Reports are that over 5 million points have traded hands which means if users had bought all those games they traded it would have cost them collectively $230,000. Gamestop better start trembling in it's shoes, the new way to get games is here.

PS3

The Xbox 360 premium and elite provide a superior package of online and gaming and HD in the box that you buy. The PS3 costs 100-200 dollars more with a far shittier online experience and no HD in box. Thats right composite cables in box. Microsoft gives you component in the prem and HDMI and component in the elite box. I say while HD is nice, it's not the superior defining factor of the PS3 vs. 360 fight, and that the superior global online experience offered by MS is the defining factor in this generation.

So slightly handicapped friend thus states that Sony has no reason to include HD compatible cables with the PS3 because I say it's not the defining factor of this generation. Well but Sony is charging 100-200 more than MS with a shoddy online system and no HD. SO you get both for less with MS. How is that a deal for the PS3. Friend can only state circular logic that because I say HD is not the defining factor of the xBox 360s superiority that thus the PS3 shouldn't have HD cables in the box. Again I would state that that would be fine if it offered something else better. Hmm shoddy online, no HD. Microsoft superior online+HD. Seems like an easy answer to me. Unfortunately individual doesn't understand simple logic. *sigh*

Sidebars

Looks like I hobbled my sidebar to not slide over my main blog. I may do some more tweeking but this is the final look for now.

Nintendo announce Wii Fit, that looks fun, lot of different activities for the whole family.

The Wii zapper adapter looks real fun too.

uTorrent

While I'm not a big torrenter I know some who are and I think the protocol is fantastic. I've used it myself to quickly and easily send large files to friends and colleagues. Mac users have had realtivly few choices in a torrent client, though we've always had access to the arguably best one Azureus. It's packed with features and based in Java so it runs on just about anything. It's also a little bloated and packed with features many don't need. Rumors are that uTorrent is making its way Macside and the net is abuzz. Many Windows users swear by this client for being fast and lightweight. I may test it out at some point after its release next time I need a linux image or something.

Finally

Finally the frackin heat broke. That was real nice. I updated some of the sidebar, there might be some formatting for me to do but overall thats that. I added widget things for my librarything and bookmooch. Both really nice websites for readers. I need to add links to my flickr page but for now you can find it over at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaltsasa/. Cats are lazy, I'm tired. I'm going to add a couple more things and get my blog roll up but overall this is what it's going to look like. I'm going to go read a page or two of The Dresden Files and hit the sack.

Hot

What is up with this frackin heat. It doesn't let up. Every day they say it's going to rain and every day it doesn't rain. Gimme the job where I can be wrong 75% of the time and still get paid.

Transformers rocks hard. It's not exactly a great movie but an extremely entertaining one. At any rate you won't be disappointed in it if you don't go in expecting Requiem for a Dream or something.

I'm working on finishing the site redesign, I've been working late so I haven't had time to deal with it. I'm also debating on what I want to add to the side bar.

Eureka starts tonight, I'm sure it's on the DVR right now. For whatever reason I found it to be a quite entertaining show. It's no BSG but a little more up beat and the characters are very like-able. I'm going to go flickr pro, I'll be posting photos shortly (well they are uploading right now even but my DSL is slow will take days). Hopefully by then I'll have this all worked out like I want it.

I'm en ur faze eatin ur brainz

We went home for the weekend to see the new puppy. Pupples as I call her. I snapped a lot of shots which I'll throw up on flickr at some point (I'm going to be posting all my photos there shortly). Anyway this shot was hawt.

Changes

I'm slogging my way through creating the new site. I'm completely replacing my old iweb site and photo galleries with this new unified site. I'm debating on wheiather I should make galleries on here or just use flickr. I'm leaning toward flickr for ease of use. I'll be trying to patch links and other things like the skype button and the gamertags shortly but I just got back from music in the park (which had a delightful Jazz band) in Grinnell and I'm a bit worn out from work. Cheerio.

Adapting

I'm slowly bringing the blog back up to speed. I'll be hobbling in links here shortly as well as the old gamertags. Give me a few months I'll get it all worked out.

Lazy Cats

I have some incredibly lazy cats.

New Blog

I've decided to create an entire new blog. The old one wasn't cutting it and my hobble code was shoddy at best. Granted I'm positive the hobble code on this blog won't be much better but at least it will be functional for now.