Churblurbish or Be Careful What You Search For

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Kirk M

I wanted to put up a small post tonight just to say I did but after pushing my brain to the boiling point in hopes of a bit of inspiration (my wife actually asked me if there was something overheating) and coming up with absolutely nothing I turned to Google Images instead. With the default Google Search Safety switch enabled I figured it would be a safe enough venture for possible blog topics.

Not!

First I put in the phrase “dazed and confused” (which reflected this evening’s state of mind) figuring I’d get several hundred pics of stoned out 20-something year olds and maybe some vague reference to a Led Zeppelin tune. Okay, so the images of stoned out 20-something year olds were there but hardly as many as I expected and…wait…pictures of naked women?! I checked the Safety Switch at the top of the page and it was set to “On: Moderate”. So this is the default setting now? And what does this photo of a groundhog have to do with being dazed and confused? For that matter what do naked women have to do with it I ask you?

So I removed “and confused” from my search phrase and left simply “dazed” figuring that might be safer way to search for some sort of bloggish type inspiration. Boy was I mistaken!

Just a whole slew of images of naked women came cascading down the screen including one who seemed deliriously happy about what some guy was doing to her. So how was I to know that “dazed” was the name of a porn magazine? And this is moderate setting? Hardly the kind of inspiration I was looking for–not as far as this blog of mine is concerned.

So I decided to get completely silly about the whole thing and typed “churblurbish” into the search box just to see what happened. I did look away first before hitting the “Enter” key because if the search results for the above term actually included any images of naked women I’m not sure I wanted to see the results. But it appeared I had stumped the mighty Google as the term produced nothing but a solid white page instead of the usual gallery of results. So I axed the “chur” and went with just “blurbish” instead.

Well, this produced a whole slew of rather differing results. Elephants, dinosaur skeletons, a man looking in the window, a baby, a bowl of soup, Steve Colbert (Steve Colbert?), more babies, some guy named Frank, a derelict building in Chicago, a blurred picture of a cat, somebody’s living room and…uh…this:

Blurbish?

And not a single image of a naked woman. Except for one woman who looked like she was thinking about it. So much for inspiration.

Like Swimming Through Molasses

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Kirk M

People who know me really well know I’m a geek. People who know me really well always seem to end up moving out of state for some reason—never could understand that. But back to the geek part. One should always realize that once a geek always a geek, no matter how old one becomes you’re still a geek. Now I don’t look like your typical geek per say, I look more like a character from Pirates of the Caribbean ©. Somewhere between Jack Sparrow and his father I’d imagine although you can’t look much worse than Keith Richards and still be alive. And folks say I always look pissed. That is until they get to know me better then they move out of state.

So what has this to do with swimming through molasses? Well, just this. It refers to writing and how hard it’s been for me to do so of late. Seems that every time I start writing up a post lately I completely lose interest after the first paragraph or two and end up chucking the entire thing. Even with the simplest of topics the thoughts flow like sludge. It’s like swimming through molasses you see. You don’t get very far and you become exhausted real quick. I used to love researching a post, sticking in all sorts of references and the like—I didn’t even have to think about it. I’d have multiple tabs open in two different browsers while I was writing while all the time wishing I had a dual monitor setup with my research sources on one while I was writing on the other. Now I find it’s all I can do to write some twaddle about the snow outside and how sick of it I am.

Frustrating.

I’m not totally daft, I know a lot of this has to do with the way I feel and the [Insert: nasty word] prescription medication I’m forced to take. And in doing some research with a good friend of mine who is also having the same type of trouble as I am (except that, unlike myself, he’s a natural born writer so that helps some), we have come to the conclusion that CFS might have something to do with it also. No matter what the cause the end result is a mind that’s mostly turned to mush or at the least it feels like it.

Now here’s where the geek part comes in.

For the last couple of months I’ve been worried about this lack of production as far as writing goes and whether it’s spreading to other preoccupations of mine such as remembering where I live—things like that. But then the other day, while I thought I was staring listlessly at my computer display I suddenly realized what I was doing. I wasn’t paying any attention to my actions at the time, my thoughts as usual were more turned toward the fact I needed to post something to my poor old blog here when I came to realization that I had just finished writing a rather long post to a tech forum involving a problem in updating a certain operating system along with a work around I had found for it. It then occurred to me that I had been doing this on a regular basis for the past several weeks without really thinking about it all.

So I finally had to sit and ponder the situation. On one hand I had 3 different operating systems installed on my computer, all different versions of Linux Mint (Linux Mint 10, Linux Mint 10 KDE and Linux Mint Debian Edition). Actually I had 4 different operating systems on this machine of mine if you counted the same copy of Windows 7 running in a virtual Machine on two of the Linux installs. Now the point here is not so much that I’m promoting Linux Mint but rather the fact that I’ve been running essentially 4 different operating systems on the same PC, 3 of which I’ve been testing, troubleshooting, trying this-that-and-the-other-thing, posting on forums as well as doing my best to break 2 of them which often requires an entire re-install of the OS and doing all of this apparently without thinking one bit. Sort of akin to a geek’s version of twiddling their thumbs.

And on the other hand I have this blog. My poor 5 year old blog that has been suffering from a bad case of lack-a-post for the last few months and the only difference that I can perceive at this point is the act of thinking about what I’m doing. Here I am writing long, detailed troubleshooting reports and helpful hints about operating systems without giving it a single thought but I can’t seem to grind out a post a week to my own blog? The solution therefor is obvious.

I must stop thinking when I’m writing.

That has to be it. The only difference between this tech writing I’ve been doing lately and writing up posts to Just Thinkin’ is, in fact, the act of thinking. So the obvious remedy is to not think when I’m writing, yes? Keep my mind a complete blank, listlessly stare at the screen or the keyboard in this case since I can’t touch type to save my soul. Maybe even listen to some music while I’m at it? Surprised smile Either way this lack-a-post has to stop. I didn’t keep this blog of mine going for 5 years just to have my brain of mush put a stop to the whole thing now. So from now on it’s going to be Just [not] Thinkin’.

Maybe that will help?

Losing my mind one cell at time

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Kirk M

I’m losing my mind.

Without a doubt I am absolutely convinced that I’m losing my mind. Or perhaps I’ve already lost it and am now just realizing it? If that’s the case I’ll probably forget the realization before I fully realize what I’m forgetting.

Get that?

It’s bad enough that I keep forgetting to take my meds when I’m supposed to. Or the fact that I’ve honed the skill of tromping off to get something in another room only to forget what I was going to get by the time I got there to a fine art. But now not only do I forget what I came for but by the time I get back to where I was I’ve forgotten why I left in the first place. And I’m just waiting until the day I forget this is my own house, it can’t be far off at the rate I’m going that’s for sure.

And what’s put the icing on this cake of senility you might ask?

I sent a check off to our auto insurance company yesterday and today I realized that I had failed to write upon said check exactly who it was for. I wrote the correct date alright as well as the amount, signature and the correct account number but I utterly failed to write anything in “Pay to the order of” section of the check. On top of that the bloody check is late getting out and it’s a 3 day weekend so our insurance agent isn’t available until Tuesday.

I mean things are getting really bad lately. Someone asked me my name the other day–I asked them to give me a hint. Not only that but I was watching my wife’s quilt shop last week and tried to call home several times only to get a busy signal. Later that evening I was just about to open my mouth to ask my wife why the phone was off the hook all day when I realized that I had been dialing the shop number the whole time instead of our home number.

I’m lost.

I’ve gone to find myself.

If I arrive before I get back,

tell me to wait.

Somebody shoot me, okay? Just shoot me and be done with it. I’ll be 52 next month and I’m obviously well past senility and racing towards dementia. And the way things look right now I’m going to be a slobbering veg-head before I hit 55. Anyone know of a good home for the prematurely feeble minded?

What was I saying?

Dangerous Times for Disabled Vets

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Kirk M

The Tea Party as well as extremist conservatives have me very concerned of late especially in who they’ve been looking to for their leaders. Politicians like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann in particular and Bachmann got my intense interest when, in proposed legislation to rein in federal spending, she proposed to slash disabled veterans disability compensation by 4.5 billion dollars:

Veterans: $4.5 Billion
Cap increases in Department of Veterans Affairs health care spending, and reduce disability compensation to account for SS disability payments. Reduce Veterans’ Disability Compensation to account for Social Security Disability Insurance payments.

The entire original proposed legislation can be found here in .pdf format.

The VA has always been underfunded and has consistently suffered from budget shortfalls until President Obama, in an historic piece of legislation (at least for the VA it is), actually increased it’s funding for 2010 and further increased it for 2011. Now this woman wants to start taking it away? And as far as reducing payments by what a disabled vet receives in Social Security disability is just plain stupid. Only a small percentage of disabled vets actually receive both VA disability compensation and SS disability payments (between 150,000 to 160,000 out of a current 2.9 million disabled veterans) which gives you an idea how difficult it is to pry any disability payments out of Social Security at all.

This idiotic piece of proposed legislation of course received a huge backlash and she quickly back peddled saying:

“One point on my discussion list was a $4.5 billion proposal that would affect payments made to our veterans. That discussion point has received a lot of attention and I have decided to remove it from consideration. The problem of government spending must be solved, but not on the backs of our nation’s war heroes. I have always been a proud supporter of the United States military and I continue to stand with our veterans. In the months ahead I look forward to working with our Veterans Service Organizations to ensure that we fulfill our commitments to those who sacrificed so much in their brave service for our country.”

Yeah, right. And I’ve got some ocean front property in Vermont I’ll sell you for the right price.

The really scary thing about all this is that a person like Michele Bachmann can actually attain a position of power where she can propose legislation like this in the first place. Like her Cohort in Chief, Sarah Palin, she clearly has little understanding of how things work especially when reading her proposed legislation which basically amounts to repeal, reform, eliminate, reduce, cap, halve, slash, abolish and scale back without any explanation as to why, how, repercussions thereof or what, if anything, is supposed to take their place (the items to be cut, slashed and eliminated that is). Hell, you might as well have Joe Bombheaver in Backwater, SomeState write up some sort of “Cutting Government Spending” type legislation instead. It would probably make as much if not more sense.

Not only is it a dangerous time for disabled vets like myself but for all the folks in this country of ours when those like Bachmann and Palin who are viewed as leaders and perhaps future leaders of this country, haven’t a single clue.

Officially five years?

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Kirk M

I had zapped yet another spam comment that got through the anti-spam plugins again and was looking at my Akismet stats in my WordPress admin when I noticed that this DIY blog of mine is now “officially” 5 years old. Actually it was “officially 5 years old 5 days ago but what’s a few days “officially”?

And what was that “first” post about? The coming of yet another snowstorm, what else?

(I’m not linking to that post since it’s only a few lines long and is hardly worth the read. If you want to read posts about snow, how about the last 4 or 5?)

Now there’s a reason for all the italics you see up top and the reason is during the transition from WordPress.com way back when, I lost the first several posts I wrote and was never able to regain them back so the word “official” can be taken with a grain of salt. And it makes that “first” post a little odd in the fact that it sounds like I started this DIY blog of mine in the middle of an ongoing conversation which, oddly enough, fits right in to the general swing of things around here.

Things have changed quite a bit in the last 5 years as far as the world of WordPress blogging go. Back then running a WordPress powered site was not a task for the weak at heart, where all installation, updating, plugin and theme installation/upgrading was done via FTP. Where the more popular web hosts were still trying to figure out how to keep their servers up and running with all these new PHP/MySQL powered sites showing up and sucking up all the resources. The world of hosting nothing but static (plain old HTML) websites was rapidly coming to an end.

Now it’s almost all automated and pretty much rock stable and although you still have to know what you’re doing as far as FTP and database backups and restoration in case of a major blog/site malfunction, I find the most difficult thing about today’s WordPress blogging is doing my best not to forget those old ways of doing things. Of course I’m 5 years older too if you know what I mean.

So have I had enough? Is this the end? Well, no. There’s no sense in quitting now…

…the ads are just starting to pay off.

Not going to write about snow today

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Kirk M

I’m not going to write anything about snow today, no sir I won’t. I’m not going to say a thing about the foot of wet and heavy snow that fell last night nor am I going to mention the thunder and lightning that accompanied it. I’m not going to say a thing about the snow in the yard that’s rapidly reaching past 4 feet with the piles reaching even higher.

I won’t write about how there’s almost nowhere left to put snow or how much our poor backs ache like the devil from shoveling and horsing the snow blower through too high windrows left by the plows. Nope, not going to say anything about that. Not one bit.

What I will say (which is completely unrelated by the way) is that I’m still waiting on the release candidate of Linux Mint 10 KDE (amd64) to be released so I can install it on another partition on my hard drive, that today is the ideal day to do it and that they (the devs) still haven’t uploaded it to the servers. Aaarrrgghhh! (Nerd Rage!!).

Otherwise I’m just fine…

…and not writing a thing about snow.

Death by Snow Shovel | Cleaning up after the storm

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Kirk M

Well now! That was one heck of a Groundhog Day wasn’t it? Haven’t seen a snow like that since I lived up by the Great Lakes in upstate New York when I was a kid. But I didn’t realize how big the actual storm was until I saw this image:

Grondhog Day snow storm from space

Now that’s a big storm!

When it was over the storm had covered 33 states and was responsible for the cancellation of 13,000 flights as well as chaos on the roads, in the cities, power outages and all the other wonderful things that come with a winter storm like this one.

Closer to home and even protected by mountains on 3 sides, we received around a foot and a half of the stuff and although the snow was the light and fluffy kind it didn’t take too long before it began to pack down into a semi-solid base that would have made the task of removal all that much harder if we didn’t keep up with it. So, with the storm in full force, out to the shovels and snow blower we went. Overall, it took my lady and I two days to dig completely out and get everything cleaned up. With the previous snowstorms leading up to this Groundhog Day monster we now have a solid three feet on the ground and deeper in some places.

The snow on our old deck table should give you a fair idea of what’s on the ground right now:

Deck table with snowy top hat

Of course the clean up wasn’t without it’s little interesting moments. Like when the carburetor fell off the old snow blower half way through the second pass of the driveway. This was on the second day of digging out so I was glad it didn’t happen the night before when spotting fallen bolts and such would have been impossible. With a much longer easement to go, the small wood lot to clear and the various paths that make the rounds past the woodshed, propane tank, back deck, bird feeders, our wood ash dumping spot to the the tree line in the upper lot…this was not good.

As it turned out I found the carburetor gasket on the blower deck and one bolt in the driveway and I only found that because the bolt was rather warm when it hit the snow and had melted a bolt shaped hole that was fairly easy to find. The carburetor itself stayed on the machine for the most part although not in the place it should have been. After a trip to the local repair shop to pick up another bolt and a half hour of freezing my hands off reattaching the carburetor to the engine (and replacing the heat shield, etc) I was off and blowing the snow once again.

Laurie on the other hand had shoveled until she dropped and was at that point laid out in the chair by the woodstove resting up for the next round. I was glad of it since she has a habit of pushing well past her limits and I was much too tired at that point to carry her into the house. Okay, I have the same bad habit but we agreed long ago that if we were too stupid to quit before passing out and ended up face down in the dirt…or snow in this case…we deserved to stay there.

Now I never intended to go up on the roofs but after lunch was over I somehow found myself standing on our woodshed/toolshed roof, thigh deep in snow with a shovel in my hand and a long suffering look on my face. To me it seemed as if that 3 feet of snow was an acre wide. It felt like it too since it was 6 shovels over the side to 3 minutes of leaning on the shovel’s handle gasping for breath. At this rate I figured I’d have the roof clear by Saturday.

But then Laurie, coming freshly thawed from the heat of the woodstove, came to the rescue and despite never being on a roof before, hiked up her snow pants, hauled herself up the ladder and commenced into some rather intense shoveling all with her nose fairly planted in the snow itself. After watching this furious, nose to the snow activity for several seconds I kindly suggested that she might pace herself a bit mainly because just the act of watching her furiously shoveling snow over the side was making me even more tired than I was already was. She stopped for a second, looked up at me with wide eyes and told me she couldn’t possibly allow herself to slow down. I asked why she couldn’t of course and she responded that if she slowed down she might recall that she actually was, in fact, up on a roof!! I took this as good logic on her part and didn’t mention it again (I do love that woman).

Now it was down to using the roof rake on the house which my honey undertook to do. She was so happy to be off that blasted roof she had all the lower roofs cleared off before she had a chance to realize she was exhausted all over again. And with one last round on the snow blower to clean up all the snow we dropped from the roofs on our previously cleaned—we were done.

All in all, the clean up was a success especially in the fact that both of us are still alive and mostly functioning. Now which parts are mostly functioning I can’t say, we’re still trying to figure that one out. All I can say is thank heavens for aspirin and 3 high pressure systems covering the country right now…

Wait, what do you mean there’s a winter storm warning for Vermont!?!

A blizzard and a broken tooth—lovely!

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Kirk M

It’s been one heck of a winter for the Northeast this season as well as for the the rest of the east coast with storm after storm coming through with almost no break in between. But those past storms now appear to have been just practice for the monster that’s headed this way.

Not only that but it’s scheduled to arrive tomorrow, on Ground Hog Day no less. But by what they say is going to happen to Pennsylvania tomorrow they’ll probably have to wait until Spring before they can dig Phil out of his burrow. The positive side of all this is that there is absolutely no way that Phil is going to see his shadow unless some idiot sticks a spotlight behind him and that means an early Spring. Something I can definitely deal with. Meanwhile I’ve topped off the oil in the old snow blower, cleaned out the augers and gassed her up. The shovel and roof rake are where we can get at them, supplies are in, the wood box is full—we’re ready.

On another note, I was snacking on some baby carrots dipped in Caeser dressing when the side of a lower right molar broke off. Not good. A trip to the dentist is not something we planned for in this month’s finances, not in the least. It will have to come out no doubt about it but due to stomach surgery (service related problem) I had in 2009 I need to be able to thoroughly chew my food so it’s back to doing battle with the VA to get an appointment to have either a lower partial made or some bridge work done. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.

But first things first and that’s getting through this storm with as few mishaps as possible. So here’s to strong roofs, intact power lines and a running snow blower. Long may they remain so.