This Should Work

When we first moved in, we noticed alot of mouse droppings in kitchen cabinets. After some thorough cleaning, we thought the mouse was gone. But in the past few weeks, there’s evidence that the mouse has returned and he’s starting to cause problems for us.

A few months ago, we started to notice a few mouse droppings from Henri(that’s what I call our mouse) in a kitchen cabinet, so we set up a “humane” mouse trap- the sort of catch and release type of trap. I would check the trap every other week to see if we caught anything, but no mouse.

Recently, Henri has been spotted by both my wife and I. Once, she spotted him on the stove top, but he quickly scurried away. I saw him one night behind our toaster oven; he then dashed into the corner and hid behind some wine bottles. I was looking around to for something to catch the mouse in and found a coffee can; I started to move toward the kitchen corner with the coffee can in one hand and the lid in the other. As I moved in to catch him, Henri ran out from behind the wine bottles and hid under the stove.

The next day we checked our trap only to find out that the mouse was able to get into the trap, eat some of the bait (peanut butter) and get out.

And now he’s getting bolder about what he eats and where. The other day we found little nibbles out our stick of butter. Another time we found a mouse dropping on our salt container. That will not be tolerated in this house. We’re probably going to buy a new trap this weekend and we’ll probably go with a different “catch and release” trap instead of the “murder, death, kill” trap.

That’s my new mantra/philosophy when playing baksetball- a line from Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights are my words to live by on the basketball court.

This new credo just started this week-Tuesday to be exact- when I was shooting hoops at the gym. For the past three months I’ve built playing basketball into my workout routine, and I’ve been making maybe 25% of my shots. I’ve been working on my form and shot technique over this time and I wasn’t seeing any increase in my shot percentage.

Every time I was at the free-throw line I would think ‘OK, feet should length apart, bend the knees, elbow in, extend, and follow through, and…’ Airball! Shooting from the three-point arc was the same process ‘Alright, get your feet under you, jump, extend, follow through, and…’ Brick!

On Tuesday, while standing at the free-throw line I was thinking about some of the NBA players who will mutter a line to themselves before shooting the ball. So I thought ‘I’m not going to think about shooting the ball, I’m just going to shoot it. Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver’ and…swish! I returned to the freethrow line and mumbled “Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver” and…swish, again. I made 7 free-throws in a row. I then tried this technquie from other points on the court, just before shooting the ball I would think ‘Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver’ and the ball would go in.

I tried it yesterday as well with similar results: 5 free-throws in a row went in (twice), 4 consecutive three-pointers, 5 consecutive shots from random spots on the court.

From now on I’ll remember “Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver.”

When LL tagged me the other day to come up with 5 funny things about my two dogs, Yoda and Spike. This was really hard because we’ve lived with them for so long that some of the things outsiders think are funny or quirky, we consider normal behavior.

However, working with my wife we came up with Five funny or quirky things about Spike and Yoda:

1. Spike barks at the sound of crickets in TV shows, but does not bark at the sound of real crickets in our backyard.
2. Yoda loves to lick our feet, especially my wife’s feet at during breakfast.
3. If the downstair’s bathroom door is left open, Yoda will unroll the toilet paper from the bathroom into the hallway
4. If we’re sitting on the couch with Spike, then get up with a sense of purpose, Spike will jump off the couch barking and running toward the front door.
5. And Spike will bark at objects, like my wife’s purse or my gym bag, if he feels it’s out of place. He’ll continue to do it until we move to it’s “right” place.

The sad thing is that my wife and I were able to easily come up with three things about our foster pug, Otis, who we had for only three months. Here they are:

1. Otis would do handstands on his front paws whenever he peed
2. He would bob his head to classical music (I tried playing Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, but he wasn’t down)
3. He would get so excited at dinner time that he would hurdle over our other dogs to get to his food

(from left to right: Spike, Yoda, and Otis)

Sunday night I saw Snakes On A Plane and found it to be good, gory movie that at times forgets what it is: a B-movie with loads of hype.

The movie starts off slow; after the first ten minutes of this movie I found myself asking ‘where are the damn snakes? Get to damn snakes already!’ But ten minutes later, after a brief introduction of all the characters, the plane was in the air and snakes were let loose.; this is when things started to get fun.

The snakes slithered their way through the cabin finding every little opening to wreak havoc and kill passengers. Some of the human deaths are a little disturbing (especially one guywho dies in the lavatory, it had me curled up in a ball in my seat) and some of the snake deaths are pretty amusing (one flight attendent throws a snake into a microwave and sets the timer for two minutes, he then starts talking trash to the snake until it explodes which sents him screaming the other direction).

As much fun as it was watch Samuel L. Jackson be a badass and kill snakes with tazers, broken bottles, and harpoon guns, he doesn’t have enough badass lines. There are maybe two or three memoryable Sam Jackson quotes from this movie- the one in the trailer (”I’m mother##@$ing tired of these mother*&%#ing snakes!”) and another line at the end (my wife’s favorite) “All hail the Playstation 2.”

I also expected this movie to give a nod to the audience, as if to say ‘we know it’s bad too,’ but it never does; this movie takes thinks it’s a serious thriller, not a B-Movie.

Snakes On A Plane won’t break any box office records, but it’ certainly a fun ride.

Prey for the Xbox 360 and PC has been in the making for about 8 years and has now come out of development purgatory to reveal a game that’s visually amazing and relatively fun.

The “story” in this sci-fi first person shooter is par for the course; a dude, Tommy, finds himself on an alien spacecraft and must kill everything that moves in order to save yourself and ulitmately save the world. The plot device that makes this game different this: Tommy can’t die. Tommy, because he’s a Cherokee Indian, enters the “Spirit World” when you run out of life. From the Spirit World you find your way back to the real world and pick up right where you left off.

The Spirit World makes it pretty easy, but this game is still fun because of all the level design. There are two things that help set this game apart from other FPS games: portals and wall-walking. Portals allow Tommy to warp to different place, or he can look through the portals and shoot or throw bombs at enemies .

The wall-walking is where things get a little dizzy. There are pathways that allow Tommy to walk along the walls and ceilings of certain rooms which can make for some dizzy-ing effects. I would find myself tilting my head to the right as Tommy walked along the walls.

This game is based-on the the Doom-3 engine which means it has a high level of light-shadow details. However for a game that has a high-level of details you rarely see it becuase everything is so dark! Most of time I’m running around with some external light source (in most cases Tommy’s Zippo lighter) just to see where the hell I’m going.

Overall it’s a fun game and I’m glad I got it.

[tags]xbox 360, prey[/tags]

Yesterday my wife and I drove to Louisville to hand Otis over to his adoptive family. This is the hard part of agreeing to foster; Otis had been with us for two and half months and really started to feel like part of our family, but now it’s time for him to go to his permanent family.

My wife once said “Yoda may be the sweet one, and Spike may be the cute one, but Otis is the funny one.” And it’s true, he could always make you laugh either with his big smile and wall-eyed stare or doing something acrobatic like hurdling our other dogs on his way to his food.

Otis also wanted to be in the middle of everything. If it sounded like something was going on in the other room, one could hear Otis sprinting to find out what was happening. Here’s an example: Before we sent our other foster dog Charlie to another foster home, my wife wanted a picture of just her and Charlie on the couch. Just as I was about to take the picture, Otis came flying into the room and the picture ended up looking like this:

Yep, that Otis taking up a third of the frame with his mug. He jumped up at just the right time.

We did get a chance to meet the family who have three kids ages 4 to 13 and all of them seemed to smittened by him right away. The middle child wants Otis to sleep in his bed at night-which he’ll love- and their youngest daughter was hugging him so much that the mother kept telling her “gentle, gentle.”

The family’s in-laws also have a pug, so Otis will have a playmate to run around with; and the mother has a home business so Otis will be with her most of the day (not extensive hours in a crate).

It’s clear that Otis will get lots of love from this family, but our concern is also his health. He’s got some sort of allergy as well as a minor ear infection and pneumonia in the past. So we hope that they will follow up with the medications and research the allergy thing, but we no longer have control over that.

At home things are quieter; only two pairs of dog paws trot across the hardwood floors, there’s a little less barking a the squirrels and birds outside the window, and running and jumping on and off furniture has almost gone. And while we both enjoy the calm silence, we also miss our Mr. Otis.

Yesterday our oldest dog, Yoda got a little older. He’s seven and is starting to slow down; the puppy energy is gone, but the enthusiam is still there. He always gets overly excited for his breakfast and dinner; I asked my wife if she thought he would ever not be excited for food and she thinks that he’ll always be excited, but his body may not allow him to show that excitement. I think that’s starting to happen now.

We’ve had him for six and half of his seven years and when my wife brought him home to our apartment in North Carolina he looked like this:

Small, sweet, ready to spring into action; his motor never stopped. These days, he’s happy doing this as well:

Just lounging on the couch pillows, half-asleep.

So what did we do for his birthday? Well nothing special really. My wife and I were pretty busy yesteray, but at 10pm I decided to make the birthday dog a treat: Peanut Butter Cupcakes. I baked them this morning and gave him his “birthday cake” a day late, but as you can see from this video he enjoyed it.

ChaoticScroll. It’s my Xbox Live gamertag. If you’re every on Xbox Live and see someone with this name, it’s me.

How did I come up with this name? Well I wish there was some cool story about how I took the initials of my first and last name then blah, blah, blah… but in reality it went like this:

I finally got around to connecting my Xbox 360 to the home network, so it was time to “experience Xbox Live.” I after a few attempts, I was finally able to sign-in and the first question it asks is “Do you want to use your current profile.” I had created a “local” profile on the 360 with a very original gamertag: “carter.” I said “Yes” and Xbox Live checked for the availability of this gamertag but it was taken.

Xbox Live then asks for me to choose another gamertag through two options: Type in another gamertag, or show available gamertags. I picked “Show Available” thinking it would return a list of names like Yahoo! would if you were to sign up for an email account. Things like:

• carter082006
• carter1209334

Instead Xbox Live returned some rather inspired choices; most of them included my name but others were just random. Here’s a small sample of what was “available:”

• RebelCarter
• BookishCarter
• UncutCarter
• SmokedShoe
• SinisterTen

There were about four screens full of different names, but I chose ChaoticScroll because I got tired of looking and couldn’t come up with anything as cool as ChaoticScroll. However, less than 24 hours later it’s becoming very uncool. It sounds too much like I’m trying to cool, like it’s the name of “still-in-development” anime cartoon about a distopia with ninjas and mechs fighting each other. That’s not me. I’m somewhere in between “carter” and “ChaoticScroll” but I don’t have a name for it yet.

It can be changed, but it costs ” 800 Microsoft Points” which can be purchased for the low cost of $12.00. So I’m sticking with this for a little bit.

[tags]xbox 360, xbox live, gamertags[/tags]

I think we should all thank Google for fighting the good fight and not releasing massive amounts of search data to government; now we can see just how dangerous data mining can be.

Over the weekend AOL deliberately accidently released the search queries of 650,000 AOL users and the results were rather scary. Even though AOL says that the data cannot be tied to specific users, the New York Times has used the data to discover the identity of one person in Georgia.

It was this type of data that the Department of Justice was asking for from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and now we can see just how dangerous it is. Not to mention freaky; just look at the results from this guy.

Two Words: testicle festivals.

I hope they don’t find out who he (or she) is.

My brother-in-law sent this semi-personalized message from Mr. Samuel L. Jackson regard, that’s right, Snakes on a Plane! It was funny enough that I sent one to my brother as well.

Anyone can send a “personalized message” from Samuel L. Jackson telling them to go see Snakes on a Plane either through email or phone.

My brother-in-law tried to send it to my phone, but I missed the call and the service doesn’t leave voice mails.

Here’s the link to create your own message about SOAP to friends and family.