1. Talk to me and tell me what you think; your thoughts and ideas are important to me. But keep in mind there’s a time and place for everything. This means my bathroom has a closed door policy and when it’s closed I’m in no mood to listen.
2. You look hot in (or out of anything) you want to wear. This can make it difficult for me to help you pick out an outfit. I can help you out, it’s just I will want to you be prepared to take it off. Repeatedly. Slowly.
3. A random unexpected grope is always welcome, even in public. Especially when I’m the one doing the groping.
4. Sometimes the crankier, old man inside of me gets the better of my cranky, old man exterior and I take my bad attitude out on you. I don’t intend for it to happen and so I’ll apologize for it here now. Sorry.
5. When I screw up, go ahead and tell me right away. My poor memory is part of my coping mechanism for dealing with an imperfect world. I forget all my screw-ups as quickly as I can, so I won’t remember it when you bring it up six months later.
6. Shopping is a mission where specific target(s) must be acquired as quickly as possible. We go in and we get out. If you only wish to perform reconnaissance and information gathering on the target(s), be sure that objective is made clear during the mission briefing.
7. There are a variety of physical traits that I find attractive. What I find even more attractive is when I can tell you are feeling confident and sexy.

7 Things My Wife Should Know © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I know I woke up grouchy and not at all in the mood for the “lovey-dovey“ness of Valentine’s Day. Hopefully assembling this mosaic for you, will help you forgive me.

To My Lovely Wife: © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

For the rest of my readers who don’t know what I’m babbling about, don’t worry about it. You can just skip the rest of this entry.

Dear Friend,

I truly feel your pain, but there are limits to what I can do too. I gave humanity the gift of free will that every man and woman might find their own way through life. Some of you have used that gift well; others.… not so much. But really, we’re not corresponding like this to talk about me; we’re here to talk about you. You asked “Why does the buck of everyone else’s crisis stop with me.…?”

Friend, through your use of free will; you have developed wit, charm, drive and a loving spirit. The buck stops with you because you want it to. A while back you saw a job opening in your workplace that would give you a chance to do good works and help a greater number of your fellow man. You knew it would not be an easy task, and unfortunately the task did turn out to be even more difficult than you had anticipated. I’m sorry things turned out that but I am grateful what you have done so far. I am also quite looking forward to what you’ll be doing in the future. I would like to promise you your work will go smoothly this year but the flipside of giving humanity free will is I cannot directly intervene. However I do have this bit of advice for you; the bible says I created the world in six days and then took a day of rest. The next time you are feeling overworked; remember if I’m allowed a day off, so are you.

Oh and as for that blessing you asked for…

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And the rains fall soft upon your fields until we meet again.

~ Divine Power

Dear Friend, © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Why? Because every cellphone I see out there sucks. The cellphone manufacturers are rushing to build in all sorts of extraneous functionality. This adds to the phone’s weight, size & complexity without providing any meaningful benefit.

Let’s look at a similar product for a moment, the iPod. In a field of hundreds, if not thousands, of MP3 players the iPod is the industry leader and it has the least functionality of the lot. While the other manufacturers have added FM tuners and recorders and god-only-knows what else; Apple has kept the iPod simple and it’s making them money hand over fist.

But what does the iPod have to do with cellphones? Besides that hideous ROKR thing? That’s simple, literally. By restricting the functionality of the device to the bare minimum, Apple gave consumers exactly what they wanted. While cellphone manufacturers keep throwing function after function into their phones in hopes that more people will plunk down $500 for their latest toy.

All those functions sound great, but really how many people actually use all of them? I cannot speak for everybody, but I would greatly appreciate a cellphone that simply promises:

• Superior battery life
• Excellent Reception
• Easily fits in my pocket

However from all the adverts I see for cellphones; I have a feeling that is just too much to ask for. *sigh*

Cellphones suck! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Then about 10:00, 10:30 at night when I noticed a pounding sound. I was a bit puzzled because it sounded like somebody was at our door. I peeked out the window, but didn’t see any of our friends cars. So I headed up to the door and I could hear voices like the people were talking to one of the neighbors. I looked through the peephole, but couldn’t make out what was going on. Then they knocked again. I opened the door and found two cops on my doorstep.

They said one of the downstairs tenants had called in a complaint that we were making too much noise. They said they’d been told the noise sounded like somebody was stomping or bowling down the hallway. I told them I didn’t know what the noise was because we weren’t doing anything. I also mentioned that sound bounces around in the building quite a bit¹.

They replied they’d been out there knocking for a while and hadn’t heard anything, but when they get a compaint they are required to check it out.

¹ I recounted the story of the time when we thought the people above us were playing their music too loud, but it turned out the music was actually coming from one of the downstairs apartments.

Unflippin’ believeable! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

When I’ve got a really good book in my paws, — mind you this is only for a REALLY GOOD book! — I’ll start reading and won’t notice the passage of time until either:
A. My bloodsugar has dropped from not eating in 8 hours.
B. It’s suddenly four in the morning and my eyes are tired so the words on the page start looking insanely small.

With a book that catches me like that, my head is totally in the book. People in real life can try talking to me, but they’ll get grunts for answers (at best). When my favorite character¹ is happy, I’m happy. When they’re running through forests; I can hear leaves rustling and feel the branches drag across my face as I dash through the trees.

The last time I really felt this way about a book was when I first read the book that I’m currently reading, Ghosts in the Snow by Tamara Siler Jones. A friend of ours had gotten her hands on an early (review?) copy of the book and recommended it to my wife & I. Ariesna sat down and read the entire book while we were at the friend’s house that night. I think I managed to wait until we bought a copy of our own to read it, but once I did I started to get really angry.

I need to pause a moment here to explain about how I generally enjoy my entertainments. If the book/movie/whatever has even a reasonably decent story; then I’ll suspend my disbelief and just enjoy it without analyzing it. This is particularly true on my first experience with the book/movie/whatever.

And what exactly does that have to do with getting angry while reading Ghosts in the Snow? Ghosts is a mystery story with a fantasical setting and I was getting attached to one of the characters. This character happened to be a suspect in multiple murders and some of the clues in the book seemed to be pointing to him being the killer. The thought of this being true was making me too angry to continue reading. Eventually, I had to ask my wife if he was the killer because I was so upset about it that I wouldn’t be able to finish the book if he was. She told me he wasn’t but not who the killer was (at my request) and I was able to finish the book.

It’s for moments like those that I read.

¹ This will usually be a supporting character. Why? Because the main characters tend to get all the glory while somebody else is doing more to accomplish the goal (e.g. Sam vs. Frodo).

Why I Read? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I thought about it for a minute, but I knew there’d be more chances for Pampered Chef parties and I doubted I’d have any better chance of getting to see Mr. Campbell in person. So after a quick shower¹, Bryon and I hopped into the car and drove into Iowa City. We got to the site about 40 minutes prior to the event began. We waited around and it turned out one of my co-workers was also there². Then about 10 minutes before Mr. Campbell was scheduled to begin speaking; they opened one set of the doors into the auditorium and let everybody in. And naturally, it wasn’t the door we’d had been waiting at. *sigh*

Eventually, everybody was inside and mostly seated but then the organizers explained how the signing procedure was supposed to work and said the new book was for sale at the back of the auditorium. So we ended up giving up our fairly good seats to go get in another line. It took a while to get through the line, but it was good that we both went to the line as Laura³ showed up looking for us. Apparently, she decided the party wasn’t her cup of tea. While we were waiting in line; she kindly thanked me for “being so god-damn tall”.

There was a considerable amount of waiting in line to get the book, but eventually we all got our copies and headed back to find new seats (the good seats we’d had were long gone). A bit after that Mr. Campbell started taking questions. It turns out he’s a very charismatic speaker. There were a number of questions about him working with Sam Raimi, but the only one that really stuck in my mind was:

Questioner: When working on Spiderman, did you hang out with Tobey Maguire?
Bruce Campbell: Why would I?

*grin*

After far too little time had passed, Mr. Campbell stopped taking questions and then made a short speech promoting B-movies as the only place that is still creative in Hollywood.

…getting bitten by a radioactive spider is a b-movie!

After the speech, they started having people come up to get their books signed. Bryon & I had relatively low numbers but when we were going up they weren’t actually checking peoples numbers. Eventually I got up there and had Mr. Campbell sign my book; but I felt like a complete twit, the entire time I was there. I mean I have enjoyed all of his movies that I’ve seen and what I read of the book while I was in line was very amusing but I didn’t really have anything to say to him. He was very polite to me, but it was a rather uncomfortable moment for me. Signed memorabilia is nice to have I suppose, but it doesn’t do much for me. To tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure why I went up to have him sign the book. Other than I’d waited in line to get the sticker saying I could do so. *shrug* Life, go figure.

After that, we took off and headed off to meet up with some other friends for some RPGing. When we got there they were still finishing up with the Pampered Chef party and I got to munch down some of the leftovers⁴. Then it was game time and afterwards off to Old Chicago for dinner. All in all, a very pleasant Sunday. :)

¹ Bryon arrived before we were expecting anybody. And yes, I’m extra-specially lazy on the weekend; so if I’m not expecting company I will hang around the apartment without getting myself up and ready for the day.
² That would be Quincy for those that are curious.
³ Another friend of ours. One who was supposed to be at the Pampered Chef party.
⁴ Ah, breakfast at 3pm.…

What A Day © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Erotic images can turn you blind
• A World of Warcraft World
• Monkey Business: Keith Chen’s Monkey Research
• The family that plays together.… grounds their kids for staying up late!
• Things That Only Happen In Movies
• The Caffeine Database [Editor] Even better than the caffeine database’ on the same site is the Death by Caffeine calculator. Apparently, it would take nearly 185 shots of espresso to be the death of me. Hmmm… The Terrapin has a Ghengis Kahn which is 4 shots of straight espresso that’s means it would take about 46 Ghengis Kahns to take me out. Heh.

Not from Pukka:

• Office Guns
• The Elizabethan Costumer’s Guide To Home Depot
• Canon s400: Awesome Moon!
• Christopher Walken for President in 2008 [Editor] I’ve no idea if this is legit.
• View the Earth from various satellites [Editor] This link was sent in by Pukka’s wife.
• Lego Lovers Unite in Arlington
• Man builds Viking longboat from 15 million lolly stick
• Kittens Start Fire After Using Fax
• Is Your Boss a Psychopath? The same site also has a short quiz to determine if your boss really is a psychopath.

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Before dinner this evening, my wife & I walked down to our local Farmer’s Market. It was a bit hotter out than I’d thought it would be, making me extra glad we’d brought along bottles of iced tea to drink. However upon returning home, we were dismayed to find our apartment to be a scene of some illegal dumping.

The Accused: Captain Jack — known aliases “Jack”, “Captain”, “Fuzz Butt”, “Stinky”, “Jacque“
The Crime: Illegal dumping (e.g. pooping on the bathmat not more than two feet from his litter box).
The Prosecuting Attorney: Me.
The Judge: Her Honorable Judge Michelle¹

Statement by the Prosection: In this apartment there are 3 living beings; myself, my wife and Captain Jack. Two of them were out of the apartment at the time of the incident. No illegal dumping had occured prior to Michelle & I leaving for the Farmer’s Market. The apartment was securely locked while we were gone and there were no signs of forced entry.

Statement by the Accused: *meow*

Verdict: Guilty as charged. The accused is to have his nose pointed at, but not quite in, the illegal dumping to show him what he did wrong. Further, the accused is to held in solitary confinement for a period of not less than 10 and not more than 30 minutes.

¹ Judge Judy ain’t got nothin’ on my wife! *grin*

Illegal Dumping © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I finally got around to updating the Gallery’s CSS to better match the styling of the rest of the site; plus I added some of the more interesting photos that I took during our local 4th of July celebrations. I’ve also tweaked the About page by adding back in a sketch of the site’s mascot. I’ve got a better sketch in my pad, but I need to get that scanned so I can post it. The problem is the wife’s computer was the only one with an ISA slot for the adapter card for the ancient scanner I have and her machine recently died. Of course, even if her machine was fully running; there’d be the bigger problem of trying to get it to run under SuSE. I don’t think SuSe has ever been able to detect the card, much less the scanner itself, though the XSane project does show the scanner as one that is supported.

Site Updates © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.