i just noticed that i'm buying my minidiscs from someone going by the handle 'fasteddy'.

today is never going to end.

ok, not really, as i've been asking for over a week... but, right after posting my whine fest about the power being out (while charging my phone @ fred meyer), came home to find the power had just been restored.

excuse my language, but, fuck yah.

and zinn no longer appears to be frightened of home....

thank you, thank you, thank you

power... lights, heat, hot water.

out since thursday about 5pm, last week. latest word, scheduled to restore tomorrow night @ 9pm.

arg.

for days when dumb people threaten to sue you for things said by others allegedly in your name in forums you have no control over, none of it which you have any clue about... second life.

second life... because sometimes your real life sucks.

having spent too much time using second life the past few days and not enough time sleeping, my brain is fried and this meme i caught in nadyalec's journal was an easy distraction...


1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.


"Fox's Foot foxes fot (H47) Indentified in OE Herbarium with the Greek name xifion and glossed by de Vriend as 'unbranched bur-reed' (sparganium emersum). Two remedies are given in that section."

the past few months i've been following story after story regarding the 'greening of walmart'. everyone i know thinks walmart is evil, but being evil, walmart had created a unique position for itself. i've been going on here about the possibilities of such a position, and it looks like i'm not as crazy as my better half sometimes believes me to be...

while i'm not saying walmart is where its at, this story is very well worth reading.

i was very disappointed that seventh generation declined to work with walmart, claiming that it opposed their values. walmart has the power to offer seventh generation products all across the country to locations that otherwise have no choice for such products and the opportunity to expose new customers simply to the idea of such products. i'm sure that the vast majority of the mom & pop businesses that walmart has crushed through the country wouldn't or even couldn't offer such products. it seemed like a unique opportunity. hollender acknowledges that they might sell a lot of product, product that otherwise might well be toxic and non-recycled...

earlier today i attended an event hosted by lego, wired and second life, inside second life. having only joined second life yesterday, i had no clue as to what i should expect and i was certainly surprised.

the space where the event took place was made up of lego pieces, with a fair number in attendance, with streaming audio and quicktime video from a real world wired presentation and still it all went pretty smoothly.

the wired and lego folks in the real world talked to us (and also a group of virtual peoples watching from second life teen) about the nxt development, showed us some cool nxt projects (the swiffer bot and a photocopy bot being by far the best shown) and in return we showed the real world folks some of virtual robots we'd constructed with virtual nxt kits (not nearly as cool as the real nxt kits, but fun just the same).

near the end, lego reps fielded questions and surprisingly tackled some tough ones, like the memory issue, some more technical stuff with the motors, etc.

i went away very impressed with lego, wired and totally hooked on second life (how long that actually lasts we'll see). tonight i upgraded my account to paid and as soon as lesa is done putting zinn to bed we're going to pick out a 512 meter plot of land to mess around with.

so many ways to waste time...!

on the advice of one of my brothers, tried calling an appliance repair person concerning our exploding range. they said that they would have to probably get an electrician who could terminate all the wiring to the timers and check all the other wiring for safety, but that it would likely cost us around $100. when he said around $100, the tone of his voice was that of someone telling me some incredible figure. but around $100 sounds pretty damn good considering other options (as we're fairly limited in our options, needing to buy one of only a few expensive drop-in ranges that fit the outdated space that we'd have to locate a new range in without actually remodeling). this is also incredibly cheaper than just calling an electrician to come out and look at it, as just getting them in the door and having them *look* at the range would cost us more than around $100, and with work, well, might as well just get that new range...

so, thanks for the advice bro! we here might still get our long weekend getaway at the end of the summer after all!

for something like the last nearly two months my motivation level to do anything other than do the lego thing or watch missed tv shows (veronica mars, medium, the 4400) and movies. the mindstorms have motivated me a bit to try and work on programming (c#) thanks to the microsoft robotics studio, but other projects like the hedgehog lore and just reading in general, have completely fallen off my radar.

second life is running a robot building contest with a virtual nxt kit and i just bothered to check it out today (and it wasn't even the possibility of a free mindstorms shirt than did it). i'd only briefly checked out second life a while back and now regret it as i have til tomorrow to build something with the nxt kit and to learn enough second life scripting to be able to be able to make my robot do *anything*. it seems unlikely that i'll make it, as the competition is tomorrow at 3pm, but damn it, going to try. not helping matters is the fact that it appears that second life is presently down for maintenance.

yesterday i guess i had all the time in the world, but today, there's so much i want to do. aside from the second life stuff, lego released a couple of new build projects at the website, a clock and a sound machine. there have also been a whole bunch of new mindstorm related posts in the blog world. i need the next few days to be a little longer than usual...

i suppose these aren't real problems, huh?