You Are My Deathstar

Hello friends. It has been a while since I have made a sizable blog entry. Back on Labor Day my mother came to visit. I have mentioned before that I lost my father earlier this year. Mom brought an old PC from my late father's business. I plan to take the hard drives out and browse through them for anything important. She also brought some JRR Tolkien books I had bought Dad as Christmas gifts. Somehow I did not expect to see them again. You never give a gift expecting it to show up again on your kitchen table. I have an idea. Since I was a teenager the first time I read and enjoyed the Hobbit, I want to take the books to Archon and give them to a teenager there. It feels like the right thing to do.

Mom and I went to St Louis Bread Company. We tried their Crispani pizza. I had the Sausage and Apple. Mom had the Three Cheese. All in all they were pretty good. I'm grateful too that we didn't have to sit in the waiting area of a restaurant.

Last weekend I had dinner with a friend at Plaza Frontenac. It was nice to catch up. Funny thing is I used drive by that mall every weekend for three months. I never stopped by to check out what it had to offer.

I have a personals profile on Yahoo! Personals. So far the only date I have managed was with a woman I already knew. I just do not get responses from women in which I am interested. I have responded to women in whom I am not even interested. I wanted to see if they would respond. Nothing is more like a Deathstar to my ego than to get the virtual cold shoulder. I hear folks say that they have had luck. But, sadly, my experience has been different.

Well, I got fed up with sub-par performance of my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. I bought a replacement in case I wanted to hack the ROM on my current router and bricked it by accident. Fortunately, that was not necessary. I reset it to its defaults and tweaked parameters. I changed settings one at a time and examined performance changes. I learned the following:

• Enabling burst mode is not good
• Changing the channel from 6 (the default) to 11 helped considerably
• Anytime a 802.11b device uses the router the performance of my 802.11g devices drop
• Increasing the value of beacon interval to 360 milliseconds improved performance on my laptop two rooms away

I upgraded the firmware on my Playstation Portable (PSP) to version 2.81. This allows me to download and play game demos. I downloaded the Loco Roco Demo from Sony's site. It is a cute little game. You control a gelatinous blob by tilting the screen left and right using the shoulder buttons. Pressing both buttons at once bumps the screen causing your blob to bounce. The goal is to collect fruity looking widgets while avoiding the spiky looking whatzits. It is very entertaining but can be frustrating. The graphics are brightly colored and interesting. The soundtrack is a hauntingly sweet Japanese tune.

Black Label Society recently released their new CD entitled Shot to H-ll. Amid a collection of mellow meandering songs with aimless lyrics these songs stand out:

• Concrete Jungle - a grinding metal song. this is where BLS shines
• Blacked Out World - another heavy song. a little softer but still a decent tune with some good riffs

Saw "American History X" last night. I noticed that Ethan Suplee, the actor that plays Earl's brother Randy in the sitcom "My Name is Earl", played a skinhead in the movie. The dude has a huge range of acting ability.

You may have had some problems accessing gazpacho.net lately. Dreamhost, my web hosting provider, has been suffering network issues for a number of weeks now. The past couple of days they struggled with router issues that resulted in intermittent loss of access for my web friends. Just today they replaced the router and promised that things are better. Here's hoping.

I have toyed with the idea of producing a podcast. I'm thinking about doing something funny. I am considering spoofing commercials, mocking liberal politicians and so-called public radio, doing man-on-the-street interviews with America on current events, giving treatment to ridiculous social mores and perhaps producing an episodic radio play. Are there any female friends who want to lend voice talent? gratis? I'll buy pizza.

Underrated Items of 2005

The past year, 2005, brought its share of hype and hero worship. As I did last year I decided to give a select list of underrated items some exposure.

I read an excellent article on podcasting. Would anybody listen to a gazpacho dot net podcast?