They Come in Fits and Starts...
... do life's little miracles.
It's been a busy couples months. Aaron was fitted with a cochlear implant in April, and all indications are that we're finally on the way to getting him the clarity he needs. However, we did have to upset his world with one tiny adjustment... more...
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Posted by: olivianoah at May 15, 2024 09:53 PM (tiOBV)
That precipitated a move to Houston in early October, and the wedding was just a week and a few days ago.
With the holidays bearing down on us, we're trying to decide exactly how to go about getting back to Arizona for Christmas with my family without being molested by Nappie's goons. We can either join the holiday migration through the airports and play Russian Roulette with the TSA, or rent a nice car and make the 1,200 mile drive between Houston and Phoenix for the 3rd and 4th time in as many months.
It had better be a damned nice car.
Speaking of cars. The Falcon did finally get "finished." (They never really are...) Finished enough that we took it up to the Run to the Pines car show in Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ the last weekend in September. It was a gorgeous two days, if a bit warm (and shade is always at a premium).
(Don't let the image fool you, this was just after sunrise when those pines are casting a nice long shadow. By mid-day, it was quite sunny, and at around 7000', it's easy to roast yourself.)
Falcon's are pretty rare these days, and we were stuck in a bit of a no-mans-land between stock restorations and truly custom/modified machines for class entry. When we liberated this car from its previous owners, they had done a bit too much damage for us to ever get the car back to truly "stock." But, we did what we could, while making some mechanical improvements to make the car a much better, more modern, vehicle to drive.
In the end we decided to enter in the stock class.
And we won it.
The thing about the Falcons is, for a certain age bracket, it seems like just about everyone has owned one at some point in their life. Both days at the show, the car was surrounded by people reminiscing about their own Falcons. I overheard one pair of ladies wondering to one another how they had ever managed the Nasty in such a small back seat. Then there was the little boy who decided he desperately needed to be under the hood snuggling with the 302 (I don't know what he had on his hands, but it took a bit of work to get it buffed off the grill).
Ohiisashiburidana!
Okay, I probably screwed up a couple long vowels in that title, but my give-a-shitter is on the fritz.
So... quite a lot has changed in the 9 or so months since my last posting.
Last fall I went dark about the time a friend, coworker, and mentor (henceforth referred to as Kahuna) was diagnosed with malignant liver cancer. The first round of chemo didn't have as much effect as the doctors hoped, but it did show promise if performed long-term. However, Kahuna had been through this once before. You see, in his early 20s, he developed malignant bone marrow cancer, went through a nasty battery of chemo, and made it through a 5% scenario with the loss of a leg. Thirty years later when cancer decided it hadn't done enough to him already, he wasn't going to put himself through more than one chemo regimen. Once off the treatment plan, the doctors gave him 5-6 months.
There was a trip to Dallas in November. December saw work really ratchet up and not let up until, well... I'll let you know when it lightens up. I have the good fortune to be at a construction company in Arizona that is pretty well positioned to weather the worst and keep us busy. December also saw a week-long visit by someone very special.
January was fairly quiet on the personal front with the notable exception of a truly kick-ass birthday surprise.
Early February saw me and my ever more significant other take a trip to Florida to watch the night launch of the Shuttle. That first scrub was a killer. *zzzzzZZZzzzzz*
March was fairly blah until a late trip to Houston gave me a chance to meet more of the potential in-laws.
April was off to a pretty good start when the news came that Kahuna had finally succumb to his cancer the Monday morning after Easter. Services were held the following Friday, and my now-truly-significant-other flew in to be with me. She had met Kahuna only briefly in December, but he's been such a big part of my life for the past eight years that she still came out for the service.
If there's one thing I learned from this episode, it's the care and dedication outfits like Hospice of the Valley bring to what is (or would be for me anyway) a truly depressing job.
May was another long boring stretch of work-eat-sleep until Memorial Day weekend when my about-to-be-really-really significant other flew out to go camping with me. Long story short - we're on like Donkey Kong!
Since then it's been more work and sleep.
Throughout all of this there have been a couple other things going on.
In mid-February I started having serious digestive problems. The most recent diagnosis is that I may have caeliac disease, which doesn't make much sense to me, given how gluten-heavy my diet has been for 30 years.
The other ongoing thing'ama'bob is the impending completion of the 64 Falcon. As of this last weekend, glass is in, headliner is in, carpet is in, door panels are ready for install, rear deck is in, seats are ready. The only thing preventing us from putting the seats in this last weekend were the kickpanels. Bastards just would not go in and it looks like the manufacturer either cut them a little short in the door jamb, or our bodywork has been previously "modified" by the chuckle-heads who started vandalizing this poor car before we got it away from them. Either way, once the kick panels are in, we can drop in the front seat, install the seatbelts, and she'll be completely road legal (well... except for the fact that the reverse lights aren't linked to the shifter yet).
I expect to take a short cruise this next weekend (Short, because the suspension has yet to be aligned)
Anyway... That's the last 9 months compressed into a few paragraphs.
You've been saying you'll be done with that car for 3 weeks now. I no longer believe.
Posted by: Esteban at June 16, 2010 06:52 PM (3GiN/)
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Dad keeps quitting early. I want to keep working in the evenings, but by then he's spent. I can't exactly fault him. He's 67. This weekend, we put in the kick panels, lay in a bit of carpet (we didn't know we'd need to supply this particular piece ourselves), bolt in the seats and seat belts, and I think we'll be ready to roll. We'll need to check the various fluids and whatnot, but that's a 10 minute job.
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Looks like a beautiful place. Those desktops are nice, too, but of course I am contractually obliged to use only space-themed shots for my wallpapers.
Posted by: Mrs. Peel at June 24, 2009 03:32 PM (kTwMy)
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So I need to some how get some astronomy into my next set of pics? I'll need a tripod, but I think I can manage that.
The lake is really popular with eagles. There are a bunch of trees with giant nest set into the tops. I thought about putting up a lot more pictures of the dam, but I was honestly surprised how little (none, really) security consideration there was.
Campsite Scouting - Hazlet Hollow
Not quite one year ago, we went camping at Hazlet Hollow, one of the campgrounds in the Horsethief Basin Rec Area near Crown King. Just a few days after leaving, some dipshit got lost, set a signal fire, and proceeded to burn half the mountain down. We had heard the campground was spared, but much of the area around it was burned. This last weekend we decided to head up there and see how bad things looked.
Road Trip (not by design)
So this morning I and a couple friends arranged to take a short drive outside of town and hike Four Peaks, a local geographic landmark northeast of Phoenix.
However, when they saw the weather looking like this...
Ok, maybe it looked a bit more like this...
Suffice to say I quickly found myself on my own. So I decided to at least drive up and see how things looked (but I'm not dumb enough to do the full hike alone).
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Beautiful pictures, Will! I secretly wish I lived in Forks, WA. I would have never known it was the rainiest city in the US if not for the Twilight series, lol.
Are you going to be at Steve's tomorrow?
Posted by: Kerith at May 23, 2009 10:22 PM (JmylO)
What ever happened to the art of Fisking?
It's not to say no one does it anymore, but the concept and use of the term seem to have dropped out of the blogging lexicon.
Every once in a while you'll come across something that resembles a good 'ol fashion Fisking, but the ruthlessness and bile just isn't there like it used to be.
There was a time in my life when I really wanted to do stuff like this. I wouldn't say those days are completely behind me, but I know now that I don't have nearly the patience for the kind of detail required in top-tier scale modeling. It may come to pass that someday I'll have the resources, but I see myself trying to push performance limits more than detail.
Ever since I quit the job at the hobby shop in early 2002, I've been hauling all my old RC airplane equipment around with me from house to apartment to house hoping that some day I'll have the time to really get back into the hobby. I have several engines that have had little to no time put on them. Most of my balsa airframes are dried out by now, and who knows if my radios still meet FCC specs.
For years AM was the "standard" mode used by most radios. Only the really rich guys could afford FM radios. When the FCC doubled the number of channels occupying the same frequency space in 1991, FM became the new default mode (AM being too prone to bleed-over from other now very-much-closer channels) and PCM became the new hot-ticket mode. I haven't checked in on the market for a while. I suspect PCM is far more common than it used to be.
Not Dead, Just Busy. Might as Well be Dead, but Too Busy for That.
Hoe-lee-krap, has it been one of those fortnights... Don't let those poor bastards in the housing market know that commercial construction is going balls-to-the-wall. It could mean we get a break around here, heaven forfend.
I haven't watched a single episode of the spring anime season. As a matter of fact, I haven't watched any anime in the last month, not since finishing Shingu (a show I just can't seem to find anything to get riled up about, good or bad). I get home and all I want to do is veg out watching a baseball game, where I don't feel inclined to use my brain.
Blew through Medal of Honor: Airborne in a couple nights. There used to be several distinct differences between the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series. Now they play almost identically, and I suspect it's because they're both being consolized. It used to be MoH played as a more "realistic" depiction of WW2 battle situations, while CoD seemed geared more towards placing the player in cool action sequences. But in a rather bizarre twist, CoD4 pushed realism as much as possible, while MoH:A started to look like Wolfenstein in the latter levels with it's Nazi super-soldiers and preposterous "Flak Tower" level design. I fully expected to run into Mecha-Hilter sporting fire breath and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Gag.
When does "Inspired by" become Plagiarism?
Here's a good example of how I hope to use "Random Debris" from now on.
There are only so may ways to arrange notes. Repetition is inevitable. So when I first played through the third episode of the Xenosaga franchise, one track in particular tickled that portion of my brain I mentioned previously that gives me (annoyingly selective) Rainman-like ability to remember a bit of music.
You can only take "inspired by" so far. Hans Zimmer caught flak for his heavy-handed use of Holst's Planets when composing tracks for the Gladiator soundtrack (I've heard them both, and I'm much more on the side of the Holst foundation than the article's author). I like Yuki's music, but this sounds a bit suspicious.
The less I remember about the Big O, the better. I caught a couple of episodes on Toonami back in the day (which is why I've never seen the factory-installed OP/ED, until just now). It was enough to convince me I did not want to see anymore Batman with mecha.
Posted by: Will at April 29, 2008 11:39 AM (WnBa/)
Which version of the Big O's theme? There was also one lifted from the old UFO series.
Have to actually finish the Xenosaga trilogy. It's my favorite, which is why I have been spending too much time building up my characters rather than advancing the plot.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 13, 2008 04:57 PM (zM0D5)
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Well this is the one I found immediately (and it does have that Queen sound).
Xenosaga is my favorite RPG series, with Xenogears taking top honors in the stand-alone category. It's a shame they had to truncate the plot of XS. There's plenty of room for a continuation. Unfortunately, Monolithsoft is now owned by Nintendo while the XS series is firmly in Namco-Bandai's grip.
I've been thinking of going back to work on my own translation of Perfect Works (I did a few pages for class projects back in in college). It is not light reading material and is a mother to translate.
Wow, you want to translate Perfect Works? And you got a copy to do that from? Wow. I mean, just wow. There were some other people doing it, back when the Zenosaga website was still up, but that effort seemed to have disappeared.
Last time I checked, though, Namco-Bandai was not platform specific (After all, they gave the world Idolm@ster for the XBox 360.). And given Nintendo's history of letting subsidary development studios get bought out by other parties (Cough-Rare-Cough)...Well, we did get Xenosaga on the DS. Since Xenosaga is my favorite video game series (Never played Xenogears though.), I still hold hope that we shall see something come from it again one day.
Funy thing you mentioned it, since over at AOD, there was a conversation on whether Yoko Kanno had done the same thing, or was simply a case where certain taste and styles produces similar results.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 13, 2008 09:32 PM (zM0D5)
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I've had my copy of Perfect Works since about 1999/2000. Even at that point it was hard to get. What was supposed to be a 2-4 week ship turned into 3-6 months. I have a few of the translated PDF pages "int" put up on zenosaga.com. I'd like to do something similar, but I'd have to wreck my only copy to do it (and they're getting $200 for copies on amazon). It was a damned shame when he decided to shut the site down (of course I'd been through the same thing a few years prior when Dark Warlord shutdown xenogears.org.). There's a fairly complete history of things here.
Nintendo bought up Monolith specifically to make them RPGs (Batten Kaitos was one of the few on the Cube), but given the poor sales of the XS series, I don't see them making the effort to work out a deal with "Bamco" to re-ignite the series. Tetsuya Takahashi has now tried twice to tell this story, and both times he's run up a huge tab and taken too much time getting product on the shelf. He needs to just write a novel or three and get it over with. I just don't think he has what it takes to develop video games. And given the way Soraya Saga was treated by all parties involved, she certainly won't be getting involved again.
Shrug...Well, given the dearth of games available for the Wii, you would think something might be worked out. In any case, that is water under the bridge now, and I have been waiting for both Gust and Tri-Ace to release their latest titles. Tri-Ace, especially, since Star Ocean (The only reason why I would touch a PS3) and Valkyrie Profile have titles under development. As an aside I thought it was Tri-Crescendo who developed Baten Kaitos?
Anyway, I would not be eager to rip apart the copies of the Japanese books I have either, given the scarcity value of some of them. I think I might had read seen some of the translation you had for Zenosaga if I remember right. Never really could understand them, even after they were translated, probably because I never did get into Xenogears. Thanks.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 14, 2008 07:50 AM (zM0D5)
Wikipedia says both were involved, but I don't know how the work was split between them. Monolith's name has been the one I've always heard linked with the BK series.
I never submitted any of my translations to Zenosaga. Those PDFs were all done by them. I haven't looked at them in a while, but as I recall, they were only slightly better than Babelfish quality in places. It looked like they fed the text to a machine then cleaned up the output with mixed results. The book is also full of technical jargon that is really hard to translate. It took me a half-hour working with my Japanese instructor (who had little to no science background) to work out the differences between the three words (elevation, absolute altitude, and AGL) the Nelson dictionary translates simply as "altitude."
If you can find Xenogears for anything less than a small mint, get it. There is so much going on in XS that hearkens back to XG that I've always thought people without the extra background weren't getting the full experience.
Ah, that clears it up then. I never did see more than a handful of scans on Zenosaga so I probably was not missing much.
Oddly enough, I have seen Xenogears, back when Gamestop/EB still carried PS1 games, at pretty good prices (~$20). I was tempted to buy it the last time I saw a copy, but I was quite happy with Xenosaga by itself than trying to read too much into a backstory that even Monolith Soft commented had spiritual connections with the Xenosaga series. (Just to complete things - I have no opinion on Soraya Saga/Xenosaga situation. Almost all the stuff I read seemed to be a lot of hysterics and not a lot of facts.)
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 14, 2008 06:43 PM (zM0D5)
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As few as he had done, they were easier in the eyes than raw text. But int quickly locked them away from the general public, limiting access to only those people who put in ridiculous amounts of time in the Z forums and whatnot. Can't say I liked the guy that much.
Oh, so that was it. I always suspected something like that, but my interest in Xenosaga at the time was not that devoted. Now it is much higher (As a quick assessment of the Xenosaga merchandise I own will report.), but that attitude always irked me a bit.
Just as well I was more into naval matters on newsgroups back then. Either everyone could find out about a piece of information, the information was made-up and therefore non-relevant, or you would not be able to say anything about the information you knew because it was classified...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 15, 2008 09:28 PM (zM0D5)
(See what you've done now Mrs. Peel? She went from flirting with me to flirting with you.)
