10
Nov 05

Free World of Warcraft

Try World of Warcraft free for ten days It’s been difficult to keep myself from reopening my account. I just keep thinking about all the fun I used to have with my friends chasing down level thirty newbs with our mounts to pwn them. When I quit, my warlock alter-ego, Sivori, was level 43. One of my favorite tactics was to have my succubus run up and seduce the opponent with a kiss so they would be mesmerized. Then I’d dump some high damage spells on them and fear them a couple times so that they ran off uncontrollably. Ah, memories. By now all the people I played with have advanced to 60 if they’re still playing, that is. It’s crack though. I must stay away.

iWorkWithFools Rant about stupid coworkers. “She could get an Academy Award for her performance as a tired yet plucky single mom, struggling against all odds to be the best darn homemaker and mother she can. But listen closely to the personal calls; the content revolves around her soliciting free childcare for the night/weekend so she can devote attention to the pursuit of happiness (hers) and the boyfriend du jour.”

Whimsical mouse taxidermy. Yeah. I like the mouse version of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastien.


09
Nov 05

Stupidest Holiday Trend Ever

Upside down Christmas trees. Stupidest Holiday Fad Ever. Hell, let’s just turn everything upside down.


09
Nov 05

A Feast for Crows

George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows is now on sale after a long wait. Amazon’s got it for $18.48. Dang. I need to read this. Is Santa Claus listening?

On a related note: Caught with my book pants down


09
Nov 05

Passing notions

Added to my enemies list: Goobers who wear their bluetooth wireless headsets when they’re not on the phone. It’s an epidemic. This is worse than the tendency to wear cellphones on the belt.

Consumerism / frugality: Both Colgate and UltraBrite toothpastes are made by Colgate-Palmolive and have nearly identical ingredients, yet UltraBrite is half the price of the equivalent Colgate. I have been a sucker.


08
Nov 05

Book reviews for people with gnat-sized attention spans

I’ve been reading a lot lately, although I should probably be doing a lot of the things on my to-do list.

Deliverance This is the 1970’s answer to Fight Club. Modern man in a search for meaning, what’s real and vital. The desire for meaning and the brutal force of the reality they find. The book is so real it makes you wonder if James Dickey had the experiences described in the book. The book is fast-paced and full of action and violence, and of course, the whole backwoods sodomy thing the movie is well-known for. I’d be curious to hear thoughts from a female reader.

Blind Assassin I gave this four stars too. Margaret Atwood makes me ache. She is able to reach inside and touch that quiet center we all have. Her metaphors are delicious and the depth of the story is meticulous. It’s one of those time machine books where you travel into the story. It did leave me feeling wistful and sad, but not in a bad way. More like a lingering sigh.

Day of the Locust This book is depressing. It’s the literary equivalent of watching a “Cops” marathon. It’s got a gritty all-too-real thing going, but after a while you want to go home and take a shower so you can forget about all the cockfighting (literally), midgets, and human misery.

Neuromancer This could have been written yesterday and it stands up amazingly well for 1981. For a book about the future it’s remarkably relevant despite the obsolete references to “RAM”, dot matrix printers, etc. A great story, very Phillip K. Dick in so many ways, despite it’s more pronounced techno-fetishism.


08
Nov 05

Flickr Plugin for WordPress

Wow. I guess I’ll need to use Flickr more now that everyone is supporting it in all the various tools such as WordPress. Like del.icio.us, it has become the de facto standard in what it does due to its flexibility and openness. A guy named Joe Tan produced a cool plugin for WordPress that adds some cool Flickr-ish stuff to WordPress.

The WordPress Flickr Post Bar plugin very simply allows you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts. Once installed, this plugin will display your most recent Flickr photos as thumbnails in a bar across the bottom of your WordPress post form. Clicking on the thumbnail of a photo you want to use will then automatically insert the proper HTML snippet into your blog post.


08
Nov 05

There can be only one

A couple of years ago I figured out that there was another guy out there with the same name as me, Chris Sivori, some distant cousin of mine I imagine in Louisville, Kentucky where my father’s family is from. It galled me that he was popping up first in Google searches when I searched for my own name. This search result is not surprising considering he played/plays college football, and I am just, well, me. A person of no consequence, especially in the world of college sports. Now I have finally made it to the top of the list and I can cross another pointless, petty crusade off my list. This would be more difficult if there were more than two people with my name.


08
Nov 05

Gigantic Apes Coexisted with Early Humans

Gigantic Apes Coexisted with Early Humans “A gigantic ape standing 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds lived alongside humans for over a million years, according to a new study. Fortunately for the early humans, the huge primate’s diet consisted mainly of bamboo.”

Gawker Media peeps annoyed with Movable Type Slowness “Ever since I started posting to Lifehacker several times a day, I’ve developed a deep resentment for the software that publishes the site, MovableType. There are days when it takes between 40 and 50 seconds to publish a single post. Fifty seconds probably doesn’t sound like a long time to you, but when you do it a couple of dozen times a day – what with edits and updates – we’re talking about almost half an hour of my life, snatched from me. I’m a perpetual mugging victim.” MT has been in my experience good for sites that don’t update all the time, but bad if you’re constantly rebuilding and adding content. Add to it the license situation and WordPress stands out as the superior alternative.


08
Nov 05

Solid. Solid as a rock.

I had a weird moment of synchronicity just now. That’s been happening a lot lately. This morning after I got out of the shower I started up Winamp to play some music on the computer in the faint, passive-aggressive hope of disturbing my upstairs neighbor, who we’ve dubbed ‘Kid Rock’ due to his unneighborly redneck ways. Kid Rock likes staying up all night with his equally redneck friends who stomp around above and chortle at each other as “Dog” or “Hey, Dog” in their booming oafish voices. I’ve only seen him a few times in passing with his characteristic wife beater and distended beer belly, but I have had plenty of opportunity to study him and his many sounds while laying awake at night praying for his death. Kid Rock is fan of football I surmise because there can be no other explanation for the excited hooting and hollering that comes bouncing through the ceiling each night. He’s also a smoker judging by the noisy traffic in and out of his patio door every five minutes. There is an on and off girlfriend who comes over, or who did. Once she was beat on (so it sounded) and thrown out of the apartment where she laid on the landing along with a smashed PS2 leaning against the wall. Jody and I went outside to intervene and Jody called the cops on him. It looked like she had come over just to get the once unsmashed PS2 because her grey Altima was double-parked in front of the building. She didn’t stay long enough to speak to the cops. She just grabbed the PS2 guts and drove off. Despite their troubles they seem evenly matched, him with his wife beater shirts and her with her squat shape, ankle tattoo, and those ubiquitous black sandals with the foam soles so many squat women wear to look taller.

But I digress. Let’s just say I have a broiling, impotent hatred for Kid Rock and delighted in the opportunity to wake him up or to at least catch him while he drifted off to sleep since I was up earlier than normal and had some spare time. I heard him stomping around until about 4 am because I stayed up to read Deliverance by James Dickey after my marathon nap. Then he slowed down and went quiet around seven. That’s when I started playing Ashford and Simpson’s smooth 1985 soul anthem “Solid“. I’m not sure if it woke him up or not. Let’s hope so.

When I got to work, I started a pot of coffee and cranked up the XM Radio and “Solid” came on the radio again. This seemed weird to me, at least weird enough to mention.


08
Nov 05

I only sleep to dream

Iggy Pop and Tom WaitsWhen I finally made it home from Dallas Sunday night it was two am. I was dog tired and had trouble staying awake and alert. I would have stopped to catch a brief nap, but I was so close to Austin that I just drove the rest of the way fighting sleep and nearly running off the road.

Dallas is close. I didn’t realize how close until I started driving it once a week. I only need three hours to get there, which, after driving six or seven hours to see Jody’s folks, doesn’t seem like far at all. I’ve been driving a lot more lately. Being with Jody I’ve had to get over the weird reluctance I have to drive long distances. I’m an old hand now. I remember the first Christmas I drove up to Coalgate, OK in my blood-clot-red ’87 Crown Victoria hemorrhaging a trail of oil. It was cold and pitch dark this Christmas Eve 2003. The panasonic mp3/cd player thumping random Depeche Mode created an eerie tunnel of dark calm. To keep myself awake I bought a pouch of Backwoods cigars to chew on. This is one of the benefits of driving alone since I don’t know many people who would be okay with loud 80’s cheese and cigar smoke.

Yesterday evening I got home from work and tried to watch Coffee and Cigarettes. I put it on pause because it was too slow, called Jody for a little bit then fell promptly to sleep for a marathon seven hour nap, which has culminated with me writing this entry at three in the morning. I had the usual dramatic dreamery full of hotels, police chases, and homeless people then I woke up with the lights still on and my head throbbing from the heat in the apartment. The loaf of cheap wheat bread and crumby paper plate were still in front of the television where I left them with a frozen black and white scene from Coffee and Cigarettes glowing at the edge of my bed.