I dunno what’s wrong with me. I guess I’m just a sucker for stuff. They tease us with trailers of the “Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends”, but it doesn’t appear to be available in the US. Or if so, not on any of my channels. So I decided to purchase this:

But given the lack of availability in the US, I got it shipped from . . .

(check out the wonderful stamp)

I was cheezed off, cause the seller said it was “worldwide”, which, to me, means region-free (or region-0, or whatever you want to call it), but it’s really region-3. So I couldn’t play it on my home-theater. I probably could have set the region, but I didn’t want to mess with that. So I set the region on my PC, and played it from there.

I only watched the first episode, but it’s pretty nice. Obviously geared towards teaching lessons, but it they did a good job at writing it so almost any audience could enjoy it.

And more importantly, Kitty doesn’t have a mouth! I’ve watched some other (older? I dunno) HK animation, where they’ve animated a mouth, and it just doesn’t work. Yea, maybe it looks funny hearing a character speak with no visible mouth, but guess what? It’s a cartoon! They can do whatever they want!

Maybe someone will somehow stumble on my comments about non-US availability. But that’s probably just me reaching above my station in life.

Figure it out *shrug*

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Decided to take a few days off from work. It works out well. My mother is going to Florida for two weeks, to visit my sister, so I’ll have the house to myself! Yipee. Kind of. It would be nicer if I had someone to spend this free time with. But oh well, life isn’t always rainbows and lollipops, is it?

While she’s gone, I can some work done around the house that I normally won’t do when she’s here, like some electrical work. She gets all nervous and jerky when I do stuff like that, so I tend to wait till she’s not around. Maybe use the pressure steamer to really clean up the bathroom fixtures and work some of my projects I’ve not-quite forgotten about. Or perhaps I’ll just sit around and mope. See what fun the life of a single man is?

Anyways, I have “use or lose” vacation at work. Some of you are probably familiar with that type of vacation time. You get a set amount of time each year. If you don’t use it, you can carry some, but not all of it, over to the next year. But if you have leftover time that you can’t carry over, it just goes away and you lose it. So it’s better to just take the time, even if you don’t have any plans. I still have plenty of vacation this year, so if I ever do decide to go somewhere, I can. There are any number of places I’d like to go, so *shrug*.

Today is Memorial Day, and it’s a fed holiday, so I get a three day weekend. Yahoo. Well, not entirely.

Got called on Saturday, “The internet is down!”. No, it is really not, but I can’t really explain that to them. I log in from home, and after an hour, I know what the problem is. One of the authentication servers is down. I could reboot it from home, but in the past, we’ve had issues with remote reboots. Two core servers, in a row, did not come back, so I didn’t really want to do this remotely. Hop in the car. 30 minutes there. 5 minute reboot. 30 minutes back. Oh well, what can you do?

Anyways, other than that, zoning out on some classic John Wayne movies several of the channels are airing. Back to Bataan, and They Were Expendable, and of course the ever-epic The Longest Day.

Memorial Day is also often called the first unofficial day of Summer. June 21, of course, being the astronomical start of summer. And a more perfect day couldn’t be had. 80 degrees with 50% humidity, clear blue sky. But Memorial Day is also picnics, BBQs, parades, and of course John Wayne movies.

I was feeling very lazy, and did not want to fire up the grill, so I grilled our meal on the stove, in an awesome cast-iron grilling pan.

Start off with the classic, potato salad. My mother made this earlier in the day.

And who can have a Memorial Day lunch/dinner/linner/dunch without corn-on-the-cob?

And the pièce de résistance

I threw the onions in waaay tooo early…

So I decided to create a FaceBook account. All the cool people are there. I wanna be cool, too.

Anyways, I have two e-mail addresses registered, and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out either of them, pfft, so send me an invite if you want.

Here’s another video, small this time, of a canon being shot at the Armed Forces Day event.

Armed Forces Day here in the US is May 16, but for some reason, there were events on May 9. I don’t know why they did it a week early.

I took a lot of pictures, but I’m not sure if I should post them. Maybe I am being overly sensitive, but given that it’s basically a publicity event for military, and all the displays are guns, tanks, weapons, etc, I decided not. Nothing to do with “classified”; since these things are on public display, they’re declassified anyways. But I’ll see what, if anything, people post in the comments.

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Hmmm?

So. Some images of the wonderful food I ate over the weekend.

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Well, back from my weekend trip. I did post a criticism / flame of the show elsewhere, but I want to keep that post specific to the actual computer show (and that site seems to index faster). While the show itself was a disappointment, the trip wasn’t. I’ll make another post soon with all the food I ate. Y’all know how I love my food, and have taken to blogging about it.

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So tomorrow, Saturday April 25, is the Trenton Computer Festival. When I leave work today, I’m gonna hop on the Parkway and go over a friends house, where I’ll spend the evening, and we’ll go to the show together. I’ll probably stay overnight on Saturday and come back home on Sunday. One of the good things is that this weekend it is supposed to be in the 80s and clear. Whoohoo!

I do want to pick up a new MP3 player, but other than that, I’m not sure what, if anything, I’ll buy. Hopefully I won’t spend too much money. OTOH, it’s not like I have a girlfriend or anything to otherwise spend my money on. I guess one of the benefits of being single is I don’t have worry about explaining impulse purchases. But I think I’d rather take the other side of the fence! And “experts” say it’s sometimes good to spurge on yourself (within reason). Well, we’ll see what happens. I’ll probably post some pics when I get back on Sunday.

Oh, and I am pretty cheesed off at the organization which runs this show. I purchased two advanced tickets, but they did not get delivered, so I’m effectively throwing $22 out the window, and we’ll need to buy tickets at the gate. I did send them mail expressing my dissatisfaction, but so far, no response, and honestly, I’m not expecting one. I have another friend who’s superficially associated with the show, so when we all meet together there, I’ll make sure to mention this.

Somewhere along the line, I found this interesting web “game”. You don’t even need to register or anything. You basically build a city, but you can only get one “action” a day, when you visit the page. I guess they track by IP address, so when I get back to work, I should be able to do 64 a day!

http://gazinta.myminicity.com/

Happy Easter everyone.

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Argh. I sent in my answers to the SanrioTown Easter egg hunt, but I am looking at my “Sent Mail”, and I realize I didn’t send in all my answers! I sent in the sub-puzzles, but didn’t paste in the answer to the main puzzle! And now it’s probably way too late :(I had been saving all the puzzles in my Google Documents, so I just copy-n-paste from there, but must not have gotten all the text.

Oh well. It was fun. Thanks to the people who ran it. The hardest puzzle for me was the sudoko one. I’m pretty lousey at sudoko, so there’s a good chance I got that one wrong anyways.

April 8. It is snowing out. Not heavily. Mostly flurries. But still.

I think I’m gonna go cry.