February 10, 2005

OneWord: Smudge

I work at a photo printing store now, which doesn’t mix very well with my hands, because they are oily pretty much all the time. It’s not that I don’t wash them or anything, I’m just a naturally oily-handed person, you see, and it’s a condition that we have to live with.

But back to the point, the problem is that when I handle the photos to put them in a little bag or something, I can easily get finger prints and smudges on them. We have special cotton gloves, but they are all too small because all of the other people that work here are small-handed women.

That is my story about the word Smudge.

OneWord

February 09, 2005

OneWord: Wires

My desk has a pretty huge pile of wires behind it, as do most computer geeks. You’ve got powercords to almost every device, monitor cables, mouse/keyboard cables, USB wires, USB hubs, external hard drives, the list goes on and on.

Pretty soon most of that stuff will be wireless though. I already have a wireless mouse, though it still requires a cradle to be plugged into the computer with a wire. Then you have the wireless keyboards, and now even wireless battery recharging.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the room behind my desk once everything is wireless though. Maybe I can rent it out as storage space or something.

August 26, 2004

OneWord: Awake

It takes me about 3 “snoozes” in the morning to finally wake up. Which is kind of silly when you think about it, because after the alarm goes off the first time, you are getting less than 10 minutes at a time of sleep, which can’t be very good sleep. So you might as well just set the alarm for the correct time and wake up the first time. Then you get 20 more minutes of deep sleep, rather than short snooze sleep.

It sure does feel good to go back to sleep after the alarm goes off the first time though… If only you could go back to sleep for as long as you wanted. Maybe I should try setting my alarm at 9:00 some Saturday morning, just so I can turn it off and sleep as long as I wish.

March 05, 2004

OneWord: Nails

I bite my nails a lot… every time one grows out enough that I can “feel it” I bite it off. It’s a pretty bad habit I guess but it gives me something to do when I’m sitting around being bored. I’ve also grown my nails really long before, so it’s not like I can’t stop biting them if I wanted to. Honest. I can quit any time! ;)

March 03, 2004

OneWord: Usual

Most people have a “usual” order at their favorite restaurants. I don’t frequent any one place enough that I can walk into it and say I’ll have “the usual”, but here are my usual orders for the restaurants I frequent. If you happen to work in one of these restaurants in the Chattanooga, TN area, please take notes so that I can order “the usual” the next time I come in.

Taco Bell
3 bean burritos Minus the Onions
Nachos
No drink (ripoff! bad for you!)

Or if I’m feeling special, I’ll get a couple of 7-layer burritos.

My wife gets 7-layers with no cheese. And sometimes she eats all my nachos. :(

Little Caesar’s Pizza
1 Large Mushroom Pizza

My wife gets breadsticks. Or a large mushroom, olive, green pepper pizza with no cheese. (weirdo ;))

Subway
1 foot long wheat vegi-patti sub. (not available in all areas. if it isn’t available, I get a vegi-sub)
Lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, mayonnaise, mustard, oil, vinegar, american cheese.

My wife gets the same thing with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, olives, cucumbers, green peppers, and oil and vinegar. And no cheese. We have them put her cheese on my sub, so I get DOUBLE CHEESE.

Olive Garden
I get Manicotti.

My wife gets the Portabello mushroom ravioli, with alfredo sauce instead of tomato sauce, and spinach on top.

Arby’s
I only eat here once every three months when I have no food or car at work, because it’s just across the street.

Broccoli and Cheddar baked potato. Curly Fries.

My wife never eats here.

Fazoli’s
I get Fettucini Alfredo. So does my wife.

Chinese Place Down the Street
Vegetables with Bean Curd (tofu) and 2 or 3 vegetable Egg Rolls. My wife gets the same.

And that’s pretty much the only place we ever eat out at regularly.

What do you get?

March 01, 2004

OneWord: Continue

Continues in video games are important. Back in the olden days there was no such thing as continues. Which really sucked because you never saw more than the first level or two of a game. More important than continues though, are saves. This is one reason I love gaming on the GameBoy Advance, because most games let you save anywhere since they realize you may only be able to play for a few minutes at a time, considering it is a portable game machine. Other set-top systems force you to do silly things like only save at certain points, collect items that allow you to save, etc. These serve no purpose other than to make you backtrack and go over the same part of a level over and over to make the game seem to last longer. I don’t appreciate it. If they want to make the game more difficult or longer, they should add more puzzles, more story, more levels, etc. Not make the gameplay unfair.

February 17, 2004

OneWord: Switch

My wife’s parents came down to visit this weekend, and her dad helped fix the lighting in our kitchen/dining room. For around 6 months we haven’t had light in either room except for the light above the stove. Turns out we just needed to replace the lightbulbs! Actually one of the lights really didn’t work. But we bought all new lights anyway (the existing ones were old and brown and ugly) and installed them. Now we have so much light we went to buy a dimmer switch so that the light could be adjusted, because it’s just too bright. But it didn’t work, even after trying to install it in every possible way for about an hour. But it is really nice to have all the extra light now… We can actually see what we’re cooking!

February 13, 2004

OneWord: Breathing

I love the little pulsating light on my Macs that lets me know they are sleeping. It makes it look like they are calmly breathing as they sleep, all happy and cozy… :) Yes I’m aware it’s just a computuer, but Macs are a whole lot more personable than a Windows machine. You can’t really describe it until you’ve used one for a while. They become little buddies rather than just a computer. Maybe Apple should make a furry model with eyes to make people like them even more. The FurMac.

OneWord

February 11, 2004

OneWord: Late

Late fees are a thing of the past now that I use Netflix, just like the marketing says! It really is quite nice to just queue up the movies you want to watch and have them delivered a couple of days after you send one back. Then you can keep it as long as you want before sending it back for another. There is even a cool little OSX application called Netflix Freak that lets you do even more stuff with your queue and movie renting strategy. If you rent quite a few movies, give Netflix a try. We rent about 3 per week, which would come out to around $54 a month if we rented them from Blockbuster or some other ripoff video rental chain. Hooray for the internet.

February 10, 2004

OneWord: Bike

The first bike I remember having was one that I got in Florida while my family visited my grandma. I think she bought it for me. It was a white and red and black BMX bike. I learned to ride it on the flat roads of Florida after my dad put on the training wheels. I rode it a lot, crashed a lot. Had that same bike for years and years until my dad got me a Bridgestone MB6 mountain bike, which was pretty nice. Until it got stolen out of the fenced patio of his condo a few years later. I missed it. Haven’t owned a bike since then. I just can’t bring myself to replace my old MB6… Sniffle… :)

OneWord

February 05, 2004

OneWord: Formal

I’ve only warn a formal tuxedo 4 times in my life, which might actually be more than a lot of people now that I think about it. One was my mom’s second marriage where I walked her down the aisle. Then I wore a tux to two “banquets” at school (it was a religious private school, so we didn’t have a prom, just a banquet), and once when I got married. I found them to be pretty uncomfortable. It also takes a really long time to put them on and take them off. You have the cufflinks to deal with, then the weird buttons on the shirt, the cummerbund, the weird buckles on the pants… Phew. Glad my normal clothes aren’t so complex.

OneWord

January 20, 2004

OneWord: Burn

When I was a kid my grandparent’s house didn’t have central heating, so they always had a kerosene heater in the kitchen to keep the house warm. One day when I was staying with them because my parents were out of town or at work, my uncle and I were playing around on a scale next to the heater. I would stand on the scale and he’d push down on my shoulders to make me weigh 100lbs or something, which was fun for a 5 year old or however old I was. Then he left to make some popcorn or something and I decided to make myself lighter by pulling up on the scale. Obviously that didn’t work, but I lost my grip and then lost my balance, and fell on the heater, stopping myself with my arm on its hot surface. Needless to say I burned the crap out of my arm, and still have the scar to this day a little bit. My palm turned into a giant blister. It was like holding a baseball all the time or something, except it was a huge ball of skin and whatever is inside blisters, instead of a baseball.

So let that be a lesson to you… don’t play on scales around a kerosene heater when you’re 4 - 6 years old! I just wanted to write about this to warn all the 4 - 6 year olds that read my blog, to keep them from hurting themselves.

OneWord

January 15, 2004

OneWord: Rotate

Rotating and sorting through your pictures is much easier in the new iPhoto 4 thanks to the new slideshow controls during the slideshow. You can flip through all of the pictures one by one, rotate them, rate them, or delete them, all while seeing them in a full screen preview rather than a little thumbnail. Before you had to double click the picture to open it large enough to see, then go back and rotate it or delete it or whatever. Now you can just import your photos, click “last import” as your album, hit slideshow, then look at all of your pictures full screen and decide what to do with them.

OneWord

January 05, 2004

OneWord: Volcano

My wife and I watched Showgirls the other night… One of the repeating scenes was during their show when the “Goddess” would pop out of a volcano to make her grand entrance. Man that was a terrible movie… One of the worst I remember seeing… Ever. I think I saw parts of it when I was younger on HBO or something, and I remember it being a whole lot more interesting then. Probably because I didn’t have easy access to porn and no girlfriend/wife at the time!Plus I was probably only 14 or 15 when I saw it so that would have been a lot more exciting at the time. But anyway… I think they should have just made it a full on porno. It would have been quite good for porno standards, but it made a really terrible Hollywood drama.

January 02, 2004

OneWord: Precision

I think the word precision is quite underrated these days. It’s a good, unique word to use to make something sound “elite”. Most adjectives these days like “cool” and “awesome” and “bling bling” are so overused…

Here are a few examples of how to use the word precision to make your job title sound really cool…

Precisioneer

Vice President in Charge of Precision

Advanced Precision Analyst

Internal Precision Representative

Precision Examiner

Precisionist

Post your own Precision title in the comments! It’s hours of fun!

December 27, 2003

OneWord: Sabotage

I just downloaded the demo for Uplink tonight and played it a little bit… It’s a fake hacking game basically. You are given missions by the corporation you work for and you have to spoof IP addresses, break passwords, bypass proxies and firewalls, delete log files, decrypt files, delete files, edit files, change databases, etc. Sometimes you have to sabotage someone by taking away their degree in the educational database, or you can steal someone’s identity by taking their Social Security number after they die. The interface is pretty slick with lots of animations and stuff. It looks like computer interfaces that they always have in the movies… Completely unrealistic but still pretty cool looking… The only thing I would have appreciated being added to it would be keyboard shortcuts to a lot of the different menus and stuff. Though I guess that is part of the excitement in the game, trying to click everywhere to run programs before you get traced and fined or arrested…

OneWord

December 22, 2003

OneWord: Why

Why does anyone use Windows? That’s what I’ve been wondering since I got my Macs. I recently visited my dad and his computers, and heard him tell me how the computer repair shop had completely rebuilt his computer, trying to figure out why it was constantly slow and crashing frequently. They formatted the hard drive, causing him to lose a lot of data. Then they installed some anti-virus software on the computer that made it too slow to use. After a couple of weeks of downtime and lost productivity, they finally got it running decently enough to use, and it’s actually quite speedy at the moment.

Then this weekend when I was visiting the in-laws, I logged on to their brand new Sony desktop, only to be greeted with approximately 50 Windows Messenger spams that you have to click “OK” on to get rid of. Luckily I knew how to disable Messenger to stop that from happening, so I did.

Then we visited another friend’s house, where we found that his dad’s computer was constantly kicking the entire network offline somehow every time Internet Explorer was opened on it. It also had about 45 processes running in the background constantly, even though there were no programs or even system tray icons going. Most of them seemed to be spyware… After running about 3 different anti-spyware/adware programs, they were still there. When I was using the computer for about 2 minutes to try to see what I could do, a window came up saying something about a virus, then the whole screen went blue. It wasn’t the blue screen of death though, just a solid blue screen. My friend ran a few different anti-virus programs, only to have one of them destroy some files that Windows needed to operate, so he spent the rest of his weekend reinstalling Windows.

Meanwhile I’m happily laying on my bed typing away with my Mac on my lap, without wires, without anti-virus software, without any worries of someone spying on me or attacking my computer just because I looked at a web page. Sure Macs are still vulnerable to attack, but there are still no viruses at all for OSX, and only a few known security flaws, all of which Apple has already patched before anyone can take advantage of them. It’s so nice to just be able to use your computer, not maintain it.

November 20, 2003

OneWord: Thief

I was always interested in the game Thief on the PC… it focused on extreme stealth, forcing you to walk quietly, and in the dark so the guards didn’t see you. You had to think more than just have quick reflexes, time you moves perfectly so you could sneak into the next alley before the guard turned back around, dampened you footsteps with “moss arrows” put out torches with “water arrows”, etc. It was a lot of fun sneaking around in castles stealing stuff. I strangely never really played the game that much though, even though I liked it. Maybe because it was hard and it was not the kind of game you can just sit down and play for 5 minutes then come back later. Either way it was cool. I should find it again and play it some more. :)

OneWord

November 13, 2003

OneWord: Orchestra

At one point in my “professional” web design career, my dad and I were quoting a job for the Chattanooga Symphony & Orchestra web site. It would have been a fun project, lucrative too, if they had taken our bid. But they didn’t. But I probably didn’t know enough back then to do the site justice anyway, so perhaps it is for the best. It still would have been good experience though! Besides, the site they have now is pretty nice anyway! (they didn’t have that design when we were quoting on it though, it was pretty bad before)

OneWord

OneWord: Balance

I think I have pretty good balance, some people don’t. When I was a kid I was in gymnastics, and I pretended to be a ninja a lot, so that took some balance. :) Then there are other people that lose their balance just from turning around too fast or reaching for something. I don’t know any of those people, but surely they exist somewhere. I lost my balance sometimes when I used to rollerskate a lot when I was like 12. That was embarrassing… Falling down in front of all of those girls at the skating rink! Luckily I didn’t care about girls back then… Just video games and rollerskating!

OneWord

November 11, 2003

OneWord: Skills

I bought Final Fantasy Tactics Advance a month or so ago for the GameBoy Advance, and have played it about 25 hours so far. I thought I was getting pretty good at it until I skimmed over a game guide online, and realized that I haven’t even begun to understand all the strategy in this game. It truly does take some skill, or maybe time/experience is a more correct term. I’m beginning to find that I just don’t have time/interest to spend dozens and dozens of hours playing an RPG anymore. I really like RPGs, but most of them today require 50 - 100 hours to complete, which is just way too long for me. I’m starting to like simpler games like Super Monkey Ball and Pikmin which you can just pick up and play for a few minutes, then get back to work or whatever else you need to be doing. I think Nintendo is doing the right thing by trying to simplify their games. Most people seem to think they are doing it for kids, but as a 21 year old game player, I appreciate them doing it as well! I still enjoy playing games, I just don’t have the time to invest weeks of my life into mastering the controls of a game. I just want a quick break to do something fun to relax, or goof off with a friend for a while, and Nintendo provides this every time.

Oh yeah, the original point of this was to talk about the Skills/Jobs in Final Fantasy Tactics and what a complex system it is to learn, but I guess I got a little off track. :)

November 06, 2003

OneWord: Bank

I hate banks… They are always trying to screw you out of your money. My current bank, First Tennessee, is the best bank I have had though. I recommend them if you live in Tennessee. Mainly because they are open until 6:00pm every day, and shorter hours on Saturday, which is really convenient. Plus their online banking is pretty good, compared to other banks I have used. They also have the best logo and branding of any bank in this area, which is a plus… They also have free integration with Money or Quickbooks, which banks normally charge up to $10 per month for. So as far as banks go, they are pretty good.

OneWord

October 22, 2003

OneWord: Commotion

Dictionary.com says a synonym for commotion is hubbub. I didn’t know that was a real word… It reminds me of Daffy Duck. I remember a cartoon with him in it from when I was little where he said “What’s all the hubbub, bub?”. Or maybe he said that all the time. I don’t remember. I like Looney Tunes though… I used to have some on tape and would watch the same ones over and over and over, and I can still remember most of them to this day.

OneWord

October 08, 2003

OneWord: Stretch

Stretching is quite an enjoyable experience. A good stretch in the morning before you get out of bed in the morning is always a good way to start the day. And maybe one before you go to sleep. It’s also important to stretch before and after exercising, though it seems like I’ve heard stretching afterwards is especially important.

Yes, stretching is good and everything, but no man should be able to stretch like this guy, it’s just not right:

September 25, 2003

OneWord: Favorite

Here is a list of some of my favorite things:

• Game: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
• Drink: Was Mountain Dew, but since it is made out of poison, I try to just drink juice. I like apple juice.
• Food: I like pigs in a blanket a lot. With Big Franks of course, not real hot dogs. My wife also makes some good gravy to put on them.
• Car: Saab 9x. Yes I know it’s only a concept car, but it’s just so great. Super simple, and the interior is great too.
• Band: I like a lot of bands, but my all time favorite is probably the Smashing Pumpkins. Or Weezer.
• TV Show: Futurama, Simpsons, Family Guy, Six Feet Under, CSI… but that’s more than one, isn’t it?

Anyway. This is beginning to look like one of those email chain letters, and I think I went over my 60 second time limit about 3 minutes ago.

September 24, 2003

OneWord: Acrobat

I actually used to take gymnastics when I was around 10 years old. From Charles Harding Gymnastics in Nashville, TN. I was never very good. Too tall probably. It’s hard to make a long body flip and spin. I still have my t-shirt with Charles Harding Gymnastics on it though. My wife wears it for pajamas sometimes. It’s a very comfortable shirt now, after 11 years of use. And to think, she wanted me to throw it away before she actually tried wearing it…

OneWord

September 23, 2003

OneWord: Used

Used CDs are the only thing I will buy these days. Even then I just rip them to MP3s and sell them again on Amazon. However when I get a Mac I plan on buying my favorite albums from the iTunes Music Store, since they are priced at a more reasonable $9.99 for most albums. Plus once you download the album you can burn it to as many CD’s as you want, or put it on an iPod, or just keep it on your computer.

OneWord

August 22, 2003

OneWord: Interest

Interest sucks. The interest on my car loan is really really high. I think like 15% or more. That’s a lot. I need to refinance it. But I had some late bills a while back, so I can’t. Maybe if someone would refinance my car and lower the monthly payment, I wouldn’t be paying the bills late!

OneWord

August 18, 2003

OneWord: Acid

On the X-files last night, Arthur Dales told Mulder about his experiences with aliens back in the 50’s. Apparently all of the great baseball players are/were aliens, and they have acid for blood. So if you are going to kill aliens, you probably shouldn’t do it with a shotgun or chainsaw or anything, ‘cause their blood will kill you. Just thought I’d put that tip out there, for anyone that may be planning to go on an alien killing spree.

OneWord

August 12, 2003

OneWord: Shoulder

My shoulders are crooked… One is always dropped down a little more than the other. My mom noticed it one day when she was standing behind me, and said, “Derek! Your shoulders are crooked!” I don’t know why they are crooked. I guess I’ve just developed a bad habit of standing crooked. Or maybe my “mousing” arm is just stronger than my left arm, and the extra weight makes my shoulders lopsided. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

August 08, 2003

OneWord: Beat

Beating a game is something I don’t do very often. Many games just get boring after a while, or you get stuck on some stupid puzzle and can’t go any further. However, I do finish Nintendo games just about every time. They are always creative and engaging to the very end, and it keeps you interested enough to invest 20 - 40 hours in a game. Another game I played to completion a few months ago was Ratchet and Clank. The story was good, voice acting was great, and the characters were really interesting and funny. The gameplay was fun, with lots of mini-games and puzzles and different styles of play thrown in there to keep you interested.

OneWord

August 07, 2003

OneWord: External

I had some trouble deciding how to handle external links on my site… I didn’t know whether to put target=”_blank” in all the links so that they automatically open in new windows, or just make them a normal link and let the viewer open them in a new page if they want. I decided on the latter, because some people don’t like new windows being opened, and I don’t think there is a way to avoid them doing that, if you put target=”_blank” in the link. So this way if you want it opened in a new window or tab, just hold shift and click on the link. Or in Opera you can right click on it and drag down. Or in Firebird you can right click and drag down to open it in a new window, or right click and drag up to open it in a new tab (after installing the mouse gestures extension).

August 05, 2003

OneWord: Stuck

As I’ve discussed before, getting stuck in a game is the worst thing ever. It will kill your interest faster than anything. Nothing worse than wandering aimlessly around a level looking for the next trigger that will open up the next door. That’s one reason Zelda is so great. They give you hints when you get stuck on a puzzle. They are always very subtle though, not enough to completely give it away, but usually enough to get you back on track. More games should really try to do things like that. Or include maps with the next destination marked on them. Wandering around in the wilderness is not fun, and should not be considered a “puzzle”.

OneWord

August 04, 2003

OneWord: Tremble

I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared that I trembled. I’ve been to a couple of haunted houses, and they weren’t very scary. Probably because they send you through in big groups, and it’s hard to be scared when you are surrounded by 50 people. If you were alone, and didn’t know it was a haunted house, then it would be really scary.

OneWord

August 03, 2003

OneWord: Chord

I was in a band once, but never knew any chords or anything. I played the bass and just memorized patterns on the neck of the guitar, like I do everything else. I really should have learned the notes though, because not knowing anything about music made it difficult to learn/write new songs, etc.

July 31, 2003

OneWord: Save

Saving is very important in video games. Especially mobile games. Take that Iridion game for example, it has no save feature other than a code you have to write down and then type back in when you want to play again. Then you have the RPGs that only allow you to save at “savepoints” throughout the levels. This is equally annoying because I don’t always have 20 minutes at a time to make it from one save point to another. Note to all mobile game developers, let me pause and save the game anywhere! I might have to change lanes or something while driving, and I need to be able to pause the game, not have to wait until the end of a cutscene to put the game down long enough to stop at that stop sign!

July 30, 2003

OneWord: Bond

James Bond is getting pretty old… That last one with Halle Barry was pretty terrible in my opinion. They should really try something new with the series rather than the same old kill badguy, use special watch, sleep with women formula. Maybe I’m just spoiled on newer better movies like the Matrix and stuff, but that last one just seemed pretty darn boring.

I also didn’t like that Goldeneye game on the N64, but mostly just because my friend Kevin was so good at it that it made it no fun to play because I died every 10 seconds.

July 29, 2003

OneWord: Comfort

Comfort Eagle is a pretty good album by Cake. I was going to make a fan site for them several years ago, since I liked them a lot at the time. I had collected a lot of info, but never got around to making it. There aren’t very many good Cake fan sites out there. Most don’t even have lyrics, which seems like a pretty basic thing to have on a fan site. But now I have way too many other sites going on to even think about making that site. It’s too bad, ‘cause they are a pretty good band and need a good fan site.

July 28, 2003

OneWord: Delicate

I always wondered why my mom washed the “delicate” clothes in a little bag in the washing machine, then I figured it out after I got married and washed my wife’s “delicate” clothes. All those little straps and stuff can get wrapped around that big thing in the washing machine, and cause quite a bit of trouble. They can also get torn up on zippers of jeans, get stuck on velcro, etc. It’s a good idea to put your “delicate” clothes in one of those little bags. That’s your Laundry 101 class for today.

July 25, 2003

OneWord: Solid

I prefer solid deoderant to gels. Gels tend to get messy, and they are cold in the mornings. They also seem to run out faster than a good solid deodorant. I use Old Spice… Fresh scent I think. It’s blue, and solid. But also moist at the same time. It’s not a powdery solid like some. I don’t like those because of clumpage and white residue. I always thought the deodorants with the rollerballs were cool though. Kind of like a giant ballpoint pen.

July 24, 2003

OneWord: Pitch

I can’t think of anything related to Zelda for the word pitch, so I’ll have to talk about when I was helping build my mom’s house in Arkansas, and was working on their really steeply pitched roof. That was some crazy business. Roofers are pretty hardcore guys, working on almost straight up slants 40 feet off the ground with only a couple 2×4’s keeping them from sliding off to their imminent death.

July 23, 2003

OneWord: Cave

Well I already wrote about spelunking in another OneWord entry, so since Zelda has caves in it, I’ll write about Zelda again! After you get the ice arrows you can go to the fire island and freeze the lavaflow, allowing you to climb inside the volcano. Once in there you jump across some lava pits and move a giant boulder to gain access to the thing you need. But make sure you have the power rings before you go in there, or you won’t be able to move the boulder!

OneWord

July 21, 2003

OneWord: Lava

There is also lots of lava in Zelda: The Wind Waker. It will kill you on contact until you get the fairy in Mother & Child island to give your bow superpowers which gives you the ability to shoot fire arrows and ice arrows. The ice arrows can turn lava into solid rock, among other things. And of course the fire arrows burn stuff.

I’m such a nerd.

OneWord

July 20, 2003

OneWord: Sail

You do a lot of sailing in Zelda: The Wind Waker (Buy it on amazon.com) on the Gamecube. That is until you get the bow and arrows, then you can shoot the wind god out of his tornado, and he will then teach you a new song to conduct with your wind waker, then you can teleport around the map by way of little tornadoes. It saves a lot of time, because sailing from one end of the “world” to the other takes like 10 minutes of real-time, which can get a little boring. Still it’s probably my favorite game ever.

July 19, 2003

OneWord: Arrow

I remember taking archery class when I was at Indian Creek Camp. I was probably like 14 or 15. Archery is pretty fun, though we just had those play arrows that look more like cue sticks than killing devices. And some cheap little plastic bows. The worst part about archery is that if you don’t shoot the thing right, the string on that bow will smack your forearm and hurt like everything.

July 17, 2003

OneWord: Player

The Game Boy Advance Player for the Gamecube looks pretty cool. You sit it under the Gamecube, then put in your GBA games, and you can play them on the big screen. I haven’t seen it yet, but I would imagine it makes the graphics look like a SNES game, which isn’t bad, considering they are releasing all the old SNES games for the GBA now. I’ll probably pick on up someday.

OneWord

July 16, 2003

OneWord: Bumper

I’m glad for bumpers on cars… it has saved my wife car from more serious damage several times, though it is still damaged in other places. But what’s with new cars having these “designer” bumpers? They are all round and pretty, just like the rest of the body of the car. That kind of defeats the purpose of a bumber. They should make huge 100lb steel bumpers on all cars, so that they will really be protected from grandma letting off the brake behind you at a stop light.

OneWord

July 15, 2003

OneWord: Road

I really don’t like driving. It takes such a long time, and there are crazy people on the roads… I don’t know why we can’t teleport people yet. That would be ideal. Or even a vacuum tube system like they have in Futurama. You just stand in the tube, and are whisked away at hundreds of miles an hour to wherever you need to go. If only reality were a cartoon…

OneWord

July 14, 2003

OneWord: Stone

Stone reminds me of the rolling stones, who I’ve never really heard. They were before my time I believe. It also reminds me of people being stoned back in bible times, which must have been pretty terrible. I don’t like getting hit with one rock, let alone hundreds until I die!

OneWord

July 12, 2003

OneWord: Mirror

For some reason mirror makes me think of heroine being put into lines on a mirror. I think I saw that on Forrest Gump, because I’ve never seen heroin in real life. Drugs are bad, mmmmmk? Though I did think Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream were good movies, even though they were both about heroin.

July 11, 2003

OneWord: Stick

My wife got a stick stuck in her knee while out hiking the other day. As you can tell, she hikes a lot because I’ve mentioned hiking in a couple of these OneWord things. I don’t like hiking so much. I would rather just walk on a track or the road, where I don’t have to jump trees and deal with as many bugs. Plus all the pythons and lions can be a problem.

July 10, 2003

OneWord: Crawl

Crawling… I went spelunking a few times when I lived in Arkansas with my mom. It’s pretty fun. The good thing about it is that though it can be tiring and a lot of work, you always have AC in a cave. It’s like working out in an air conditioned gym. Only with the added bonus of bats and copious amounts of guano.

OneWord

July 09, 2003

OneWord: Film

Film makes me think of the fact that soon there will be no film. Digital cameras are becoming extremely popular and in most cases affordable, plus you have all the cellphone cameras, PDA cameras, etc. I haven’t used a film camera in quite a while myself, and find it extremely irritating to have to actually wait for a my pictures to be developed before I get to see them.

July 08, 2003

OneWord: Flare

Flare reminds me of someone with “flare” which reminds me of a gay guy I used to work with. It also makes me think of road flares at an accident. I was in an accident when i was a kid with my mom. It was in our Ford Merkur. I hit my head on the windshield and cracked it.

OneWord

July 07, 2003

OneWord: Microphone

Two turn tables and a microphone was a pretty jammin’ song by Beck. I always liked Beck when I was younger… Still do actually, I just don’t really listen to him much anymore. And it’s hard to keep up with him, since he’s constantly changing styles and “reinventing” himself like famous people like to do sometimes.

OneWord

OneWord: Headlight

One Headlight is a song from the Wallflowers that was quite popular when I was in the 8th grade… I remember it coming on the radio all the time during that summer. My girlfriend at the time really liked it as well and would sing it a lot. I’m really glad she isn’t my girlfriend anymore. And I’m also glad that song doesn’t come on the radio very much anymore.

OneWord

July 04, 2003

OneWord: Clay

I think clay was the guy that was on American Idol, though I don’t know if he won or not since I didn’t really watch that show much.

Also, when hiking with my wife yesterday, I noticed that because of the rain, the dirt turned into a really terrible mud that was like 6 inches thick, but the clay didn’t budge, and was much easier to walk on. I like clay much better than dirt when hiking in the rain.

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I’m going to start answering the OneWord of the day thing here on my blog everyday, so that’s what is going on, if you were wondering why the hell I was just babbling about Clay…

OneWord