Tag: park

Pukka forwarded me this link today and killed any hope of me being productive. How’s that work? Well the link ends up leading you to this article over at 1UP. The article takes a couple of today’s youth and exposes them to some of the classic games of my own youth to get their reactions. Here’s a quick snip to give you an idea of how well the games went over.

EGM: What do you think this character’s name is?

Parker: Dot. Or Adventure? That’s what this game is, isn’t it? Go up, go up, go up.

Bobby: Stupid duck. I hate the duck. The duck is evil.

I’ve done my fair share of complaining in this blog and recently 2 companies have done me some good; so I figure I’ll spread a little praise for once.

Company #1 is
Amazon.com. I recently ordered some books from them and they said the expected time of arrival was between November 10 through November 12. I had one of the books in my hands on November 6 and all of them by November 9. Good job!

Company #2 is Westport Touchless Autowash (WTA). They’re local carwash company. I’d been busy/lazy/tired this summer and probably haven’t washed my car in months. I also frequently drive out to visit some friends who live in a small country town, which means my hood was covered in dead bugs. For extra fun, yesterday I parked too close to a tree and well… let’s just say some birds in that tree really could have used some Imodium AD. My car was flithy and over lunch today; I drove up to WTA and had them wash it. It wasn’t cheap as I went for the full package wash ($10) but my car came out of there spotless. Every dead bit of bug and every little present from my bird friends was gone. My car is currently all clean and shiny! 😀

So, I say thank you for the job well done.

This evening after work Ariesna and I headed up to the World Theater in Cedar Rapids to attend an early Halloween Party.

Err… that’s not strictly true. We’d heard from AWelkin about said party being a mascarade and that it would start off by showing Shaun of the Dead. This is a British horror/zombie flick that was released here in the US not all that long ago and it had looked mighty funny, going by the trailers. Having now seen the movie, I can safely …. but that’s getting a head of myself.

We were running a bit behind schedule when we left (movie scheduled to start at 5:30, left house at 5:10, drive is ~30minutes) but we hurried along as best we could. Narrowly avoiding getting lost in downtown CR, I had to drive around the block a couple of times to find a place to park. We hurry inside –the time is now 6:00– and there’s no sign of a movie screen or a movie playing. We stumble around a bit confused when AWelkin waves us over. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones running behind schedule. *shrug* So we sit and chat1 until nearly 7 o’clock!

Finally the movie started and it was flippin’ fan-tas-tic! Sure, some bits had crude langauge and there was a bit of excessive gore but overall; 4.95 stars out of 5. Definitely, a must see and leaps & bounds better than the last movie we saw together.

1 Well, we tried to anyway but they were blasting annoying music at a near deafening level at us.

Been feeling a bit burned out lately, too many weeks of running around doing stuff and not enough down time, I suspect (hence the lack of posts and lack of Ant-Boy).

Anyway, while taking a break I ran across this article over at CSM. I’ve felt that frustration as well when I was younger. Back in a high school painting class I took; I was working on painting a lighthouse on an icy shore. The teacher came over and said my waves were wrong, took the brush from my hand and painted the waves the way she thought they should be. After all these years1, I still feel somewhat annoyed/bitter that she did that. Ah well, not much I can do about it.

Our assignment was to paint watercolor landscapes. I painted trees with round tops, modeled after the pruned trees I saw as I walked to school each morning. I liked my painting; my teacher did not. She said my trees looked like lollipop trees; that they didn’t look like real trees, although they looked like the trees I knew.

Mrs. E picked up a paintbrush and painted over my trees to make them look the way she thought trees should look.

For the rest of my school years, I never voluntarily took an art class.

Anyway to Mrs. Kennar I say, though I’m not a teacher and I did continue taking art classes2 in high school and into college; I’ll never paint over your lollipop trees.

1 While I’ve been told that I look much older than my actual age (28); I’ve been through enough other experiences that thinking high school feels like I’m trudging through ancient history.
2 Though perhaps not surprisingly, I haven’t done any painting since I took that class.

If you’re not a regular WP user, then you might not have noticed there’s a large amount of anger and frustration happening in their support forums lately. Basically, some people in the community have spent a great deal of time and effort helping out WP users with layout problems that others ended up with due to quirks in the default layout and in some1 of the designs that were posted over at Alex King’s WordPress Style Competition. But that wasn’t the direct cause of the current mess in the forums; no the blame for that seems to rest with Michael’s announcement that a variation of his Kubrick style would be included with the next release of WordPress. This was the spark to an apparent holy war between WP’s community support leaders2 and WP’s developers, with a bunch of fanboys on the sidelines escalating things.

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