Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Stargate SG-1 Cancelled?
August 22, 2006

This posting requires a huge preface and will still end up causing all sorts of heckling of me by my friends, but yet I think I still need to post it.

No. I do not like the move “Stargate”. I think that the movie as it stands alone had the best potential to be an amazing sci-fi movie, and then turned into a lame desert movie. I have long said that there is a point in the movie where you can feel the actual turning point from “hey, this is cool” into “holy crap, this sucks!”

That said, if you take what the movie might have tried to do and combine it with the ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 that followed, then you have something. Perhaps the movie should not have been about the discovery of the gate or the things on the other side of the portal it opened, but somewhere in the middle. Regardless, Stargate SG-1 (and the Atlantis spinoff) have become one of the few things I look forward to on TV these days.

And so, of course, they’re cancelling it.

Exercise In A Box
August 17, 2006

I found a box in the garage while we were moving (actually, I kew it was there all along) that belonged to my grandfather, which I took for my own after he died. In it I put all of those things that I held precious during my teen years living at home.

Assuming you had a box that contained a volume of 6×3x9 inches, what would you put inside it that would represent the most significant things about your life that you would want to remember?

Installation
August 15, 2006

Yesterday, the Dish Network folks showed up early within their delivery window, installed better components than what their online ordering system forced me into, installed two dishes and all of the inside wiring (including running a new cable and phone line), and were gone within three hours leaving me with crystal-clear high-definition TV in four rooms.

The delivery of our new washer and dryer from Home Depot took a terrible turn this morning when I received a call from a woman saying essentially, “Your washer fell off the truck and we won’t be delivering anything to you today.”

Duality
August 13, 2006

Living in two houses is for the birds.

We’ve spent the past two days carting smaller breakable or odd-shaped things to the new house. We’ve put quite a few miles on Berta’s car doing it. We’ve managed to get a reasonable chunk of things into the house to start off, and the place is slowly becoming livable. And that’s the problem, really.

Just as soon as you start to get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to live there, you realize that, for example, there are no chairs. There is no kitchen table. The bathroom works, and it’s stocked with toilet paper (a terrible thing to be missing on the first day in) but there is no hand towel.

Figuring out which switch works which light is an exercise requiring patience. You’ll notice that some lights have switches with a little slider along the side, and others have a turning knob that toggles when you push it, and still others are just a glowing switch that doesn’t toggle as much as slowly make things get brighter and then snap into full brightness. You’ll also be disturbed by switches in your basement near wall panels that are sealed shut with paint that do nothing when you toggle them.