Reading is half a battle

09.10.2015

It's no secret that I enjoy GI Joe, in all forms of media. After years (and years) of collecting I've finally decided to make my way through the IDW comic series. The series started in 2008, so I'm a little behind. I've read the comics intermittently, but I've never gone through the whole story line (which is still continuing). While I probably have the individual issues, I don't read them. I know, it doesn't make a bit of sense. I wait until the issues are collected into trade paperbacks and then I read them. I just like the heft of ~6 issues collected together. My problem here is that GI Joe isn't 1 title. It's many. Many that I haven't kept up with. Thankfully Wikipedia has the order the trades in which the trades were published. I've missed a few along the way, and I can never remember the order. That brings me to this post, a post just for me so that I can go back and reference what the next book I'm supposed to read is, because I keep forgetting to bookmark the Wikipedia page.

Plus I've got some collections/compendiums that lump together what Wikipedia lists. There are also some that I'm missing, but I doubt that will last for long.

 

7 years of reading to catch up on. The collections I've read cover 2008-mid-2011, but I'm not really in any hurry to get through them all. I've been enjoying them.

Sept 22 Update - Now reading Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow and still getting a kick out of it all.  Makes me miss the days I had the laser--rifle troooper Flash with a JUMP pack flying around, shooting unseen Cobra troops hidden somewhere in my grandparents couch.
 


books/comics

Russellmania.com 2015 ¼-Marathon!

08.22.2015

August 22, 2015 saw me as the winner of the 2015 Russellmania.com ¼-Marathon! I managed first place in this special event held near Athens High School. The route started at my car, which I found very convenient, and passed through scenic Athens, but away from traffic. Finally, after a grueling 6.55 miles that saw temperatures vary wildly from 68° to upwards of 71°, I managed to triumphantly pass the finish line FIRST after just over 2 hours. A finish line that was, again conveniently, at my car.

I was worried I might be beat out by the Kenyans, or even worse, that group of women pushing baby strollers, but I need not have fretted. I was first. FIRST! I wonder if they knew there was a race going on...?

The race wasn't without dangers. There evidently was a bicycle race going the opposite direction, as a dude on a bike passed me a couple of time. And he was flying. Although since we were going opposite directions you may need to take into account that I was viewing our relative speed, so maybe I was flying! Still, we need to talk to race organizers about concurrent races sharing the same route.

I would like to thank everyone for their support, without which I couldn't have realized this accomplishment.

First, I'd like to thank the little infant baby Jesus, laying there in his little heavenly bassinet and most likely with his little baby Jesus thumb in his mouth. I know it's not Thanksgiving but shout out to you there Lil' J.

Thanks to the Kenyans for not beating me.

Thanks to the race organizers for placing the start & finish lines at my car.

Now I've just gotten the official race results. I finished 1/1 overall. 1st in the Men's Division. Also managed 1st in Women's, Handicapable, and Breathing Heavy Divisions. Huh, it seems since it was a field of 1 I technically also came in last place. Well that sucks! I'll over look that part. Ooh, I won't even post that part. I'll hit delete and nobody will ever know!

 


Crap. Hit "Post" instead of "Delete" so now it's too late.


random

Air Conditioner Woes

08.07.2015

Earlier this summer I had air conditioner problems. Intermittent air conditioner problems that I first hoped were due to a cheap, 17 year old thermostat which I ended up replacing. The week after that I had air conditioner problems on the weekend that I couldn't reproduce when the A/C guy came to check. Since then everything worked fine, until yesterday.

Yesterday I noticed the house felt a little warmer than the normal 75° the house has been set at all summer. When I checked the thermostat - the super nifty wifi connected thermostat I replaced the old cheap piece of crap with, the thermostat showed 78°. Everything displayed as working properly so there wasn't a setting amiss. Bringing out the IR temp gun, I pointed it at the vent in the computer room and the air coming out was at 86°.

It had started raining heavy today after a fairly long dry spell, and the outside humidity, according to the fancy thermostat, was 98% (36% humidity inside).

This continued for a while when I noticed the indoor temp was 80° The rain had stopped but the humidity was still a little high. Thinking back to last time this happened and I complained to Jerry, he had mentioned that maybe the condenser on the air conditioner was having a hard time keeping up in high humidity. When I poked my head into the attic that time, there was water (cold water) dripping from the drain pipe that eventually leads outside. From this I mainly noticed that I now knew why there were weird spots on the kitchen ceiling - that was some serious dripping at some point.

The house felt a little cooler. Checking the thermostat the temp read 77° with an outdoor humidity of 90% (still in the 30's inside). Air coming out of the vent was at 56°

An hour later I was getting ready to go to Gina's and it felt warm again. The temp had gone back up to 78° with warm air coming out of the vents (in the 80's is all I can remember), humidity was still at 90%.

Since there was nothing I could do I went to Gina's and we had a TV night. When I got back home 4 hours later everything was back to normal. The house was cooled off to 75° Air from the vent was in the 60's. Outdoor humidity was now at 100%. Outdoor temp was 73°.

I don't know if high humidity + high temperature is more than the condenser can handle, but that's my theory. Now I've got somewhere to refer to my theory the next time it happens. Maybe the data points I'm collecting will lead to something. I know they'll eventually lead to having to spend at least $5K to replace the air conditioner, but I'd like to delay that for as long as I comfortably can.


random maintenance

Reading Roll

08.06.2015

I've had a little spurt of reading of late. Real books, as opposed to comics or the pop-biogrophies I lean toward.

The first one on my list was the 2nd book from the author of Ready Player One, which has nothing to do with that book. Armada is chock full of pop cultural references that the author likes to throw in (sometimes too many). It was a good book, a fun book. My only problem with Ernest Cline books is that they end weak. The last 5-10 pages where everything wraps up just don't have the umph the rest of the story has. I'm not sure what I would try to do different or what I would ask for, but they just left the story wanting for me.

Armada, while a good book, felt like a combination of 3 movie plots.

 

 

All 3 of these are mentioned in Armada. The Last Starfighter is mentioned multiple times. That was a little too "in your face" for me.

The book is still good. There are some good plot points and a twist or two. It's well worth reading, but anyone who's a fan of Cline's first book will likely be a bit disappointed.

 

A deal with Jerry led me to read Andy Weir's Martian. I had passed on it previously since it sounded like reading a Castaway-like diary from Mars.

I was wrong. This book was great.

You know from the start that any story with somebody stranded is going to end 99% of the time with them not stranded. That's not really important in this story. While the journey to survive with limited resources is the base of the story, it's managed to be written with the right amount of humor and possibly pseudo-science that keeps it interesting. Humor. From a guy stranded basically keeping a journal. I was shocked.

Later in the story more people show up and even better interpersonal dialogues show up in the writing. I don't think that's giving anything away - the trailers for the movie have started sprouting up. This is a book I don't think the movie will do proper justice. Already form the trailer I've spotted a couple of differences from the book that don't really influence the story, but movies have to have certain things.

That's what I've been doing while trying to spend some time away from the computer. I've even got another book queued up to start over the weekend (John Scalzi's Lock In).

In the interim, I'm worrying about the A/C unit blowing air through the vents that's 86° instead of the 75° it's set for. Deep down I know it's time to replace this 17+ year old unit, but it's a chunk of money I want to put off spending as long as possible.


books/comics

Update Windows Update To Update Windows

07.25.2015

This past week there was a big hullaballoo to patch all versions of Windows to prevent a security hole available through websites embedding fonts (I'm embedding 2 or 3 right now, so if you're on Windows and haven't updated I can do all kinds of nasty things to you - I've just sold your first born to make my house payment, thank you very much).

I don't update my desktop computer. There have been more problems with random updates than any noticed fixes, so I turned off updates a long time ago. I don't do things I'm not supposed to with my computer - I don't download pirated software or movies, the websites I visit are generally safe - and as I use my computer for software development I generally don't want 3rd parties mucking about with settings and interjecting problems that I would have to track down as something I did. This happened on my government contracting computer and Visual Studio once upon a time. There was a VS update that broke our code. Royal pain in the taint.

Sorry, I've been fighting a lot of code of late and it skews my language toward the less publicly acceptable. I should go back change that. taint nethers. Yes, much better.

Embedded font exploits sound dangerous, so I took it upon myself to update Windows. When I went to do so, I was greeted with the above:

To check for updates, you must first install an update for Windows Update.

I laughed at that for minutes.

If there's no option for Windows Update to do anything without updating itself first, just do it. Without the update, Windows Update is a Message Box Display, that would forevermore display the above message. If I'm running Windows Update, I want to update Windows. If updating the Updater is the first step, go right ahead.

After updating the Updater, I was able to successfully update Windows without incident. I also received no more messages about updating things to be updated.


random

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As always, correct spelling is optional in any blog entry. Keep in mind that any links more than a year old may not be active, especially the ones pointing back to Russellmania (I like to move things around!).

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