Not Necessarily Interesting News

Last night I went out and voted in early voting. Polling place was actually very busy. By busy in our neighborhood I mean there was like 8 people there. Normally there’s like you and two others. As we left there was a honest-to-God line, of two people. It was about to get a lot busier after we left though. I heard the poll worker say that the wait to vote was 45minutes at the county annex up the road and they were sending people down here. Interesting.

Go out and vote. I don’t care for who, just do it. Many people don’t even have that right.

Ok, I love my new TV. It’s great and we’re rewatching all our old movies in big screen glory.

Here’s my problem. Playing my Xbox now gets me motion sick. I’ve never had that problem before. I was playing Medal of Honor last night and I had to quit and walk away after 10 minutes. I was getting queasy and I started to break into a cold sweat. Not normal.

A few hours later I decided it was something else and I fired up Colin McRae 4. I love rally racing. It’s real racing on real roads. Anyone can make a left hand turn for 500miles. Driving a mountain road in the snow at 100+ MPH takes real skill. I guess because it can’t be done in a stadium it’ll never take off in the US.

Well, after 15 minutes of racing I started to get queasy again and had to quit. I think because the screen is so big and fills my peripheral vision it’s causing me to get motion sick. I’ve never had this problem before and I’ve played games for years. I don’t want to go back to a smaller TV because games look awesome on the new one but if I’m gonna throw up while playing games I may have to.

Decisions, decisions…

A friend of mine, Bill, is moving to Houston and didn’t want to hassle with taking his big screen TV along. He offered for me to buy it and I took him up on it. We picked up the 51″ beast this afternoon and just barely beat the rain home. We went to Best Buy to get some cabling after dinner and just got it hooked up. I took the time to adjust the colors and stuff and then my wife had me throw in her favorite movie for testing and it looks awesome. In our smallish family room it is downright huge. We had to do some major rearranging to fit it in. We’re thinking of turning the living room we never use into a dedicated home theater setup instead. I’ll be trying out the Xbox a little later and I’m sure that’ll be a blast.

Thanks Bill.

Ok, we get it. You hate Bush. Fine. Vote for someone else.

Too many of my favorite websites have decided it’s their job to preach to the masses about how bad Bush is. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve stopped even visiting most of those sites. Some of them were good sites like BoingBoing. It had lots of interesting and cool things to see but the preaching has just gotten to be too much. I wish these sites would stick to what they were good at and let the politcal sites take care of the politcal stuff. If you give someone a bit of your attention for something they do that you like they figure it gives them the go ahead to tell you what to think. Actors, musicians, etc, think that people care about what they think. No, I don’t. No, I give you money because you makes good movies, music, etc. Not because you espouse a certain party line. Just because you play a president in a movie does not make you a politcal expert. I’ve stopped listening to several bands because I got sick of their constant political agendas.

The good that’s come of it is that I spend less time surfing. Now that I’ve got a seemingly working Xbox I’m spending more time playing that with my son.

Look at that. I didn’t even tell you who to vote for there either. See? It’s not that tough.

Yesterday I received a new toy in the mail. A nice powerful green laser. It looks like any ordinary red pen laser but has a green dot instead of red. It is a bit more powerful than your $5 red laser. It also is visible in air at night as you can see in the photo of me lighting up the neighbor’s house. It can be modded to be even more powerful but I’m happy with it as-is and see no reason to do that and risk breaking it. I can light up a street sign from 1/2 mile away and dazzle myself with the reflection.

You definitely do not want to look into this laser with your remaining eye.

: Look At Little Sister from the album “Soul To Soul” by Stevie Ray Vaughan

Our Xbox has been getting ‘Dirty Disc’ errors for a few months. We finally called support and they said they’d fix it for us even though it was out of warranty. It was a known problem with early Xboxes and ours finally started showing the symptoms. Well, we sent it off last week and got it back last night. They didn’t replace the DVD drive like they were supposed to, they replaced the hard drive and in the process trashed all my saved games from the last 3 years. I was not pleased. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it now. I haven’t played it enough to know if it fixed the problem but I doubt it.

*sigh*

As you can see by the picture to the left, we took the Defender out mudding this evening. I’ve got a semi-secret spot we go to that has some really nice deep dark mud that is perfect for making a mess. We probably spent an hour out there getting dirty. The Defender 90 was looking way too clean after last week’s car show where I got it all gussied up. My son took some really good photos that I’ve put in the defender album. My son learned to keep his arms and head inside the car when mudding as the huge lugs on those giant BFG Mud Terrains really throw the mud all over the side of and into the truck. We both got a bit of mud on us. Him more than me. 🙂

Once we got done having our fun we went by the new HEB that’s just opened up near our house on the corner of Anderson Mill Rd and 620. The place is huge. According to what I’ve heard it’s the biggest store in the entire HEB chain. As we walked in the first thing we saw that they were selling was an upright video game cabinet that played like 30 classics from the 80’s. Interesting. We stopped to play a few rounds and decided the $2500 price tag was a bit much. As we were playing I noticed an older man walk by that was wearing an HEB name tag, ‘Charles’ is what it said. What was so interesting about him was the 10 or so other people wearing HEB name tags following him around like puppies. They all looked like executive type. Nice logo’ed shirts or suits. I figured he was a high-up exec visiting the new store.
A bit later as I was navigating the store I guess I looked a bit confused as one of the execs asked if I was looking for something. I told him I was trying to find the juice aisle. He motioned to an manager type to help me out and the manager type led me to the juices. They had two sections for juices. Their ‘All-natural’ section and the regular section. I asked the guy who the big-wig was and he said it was Charles Butts, the owner of HEB. I said cool. I said it was nice the way he was stopping to talk to every employee he passed. I then grabbed the juice and headed for check out.
Once we were done checking out Charles was making the rounds of the baggers. There were two baggers for each aisle. Kinda showed they were showing off for the Boss. I don’t expect that to last. Anyways, he was shaking the hand of a bagger on our aisle so I kicked back and waited for him to finish so we could leave. Once he was done with her he turned to me and said ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ I said not bad and ‘you have a nice store here Mr. Butts’. He smiled and asked if I’d found everything I was looking for. I said ‘Not exactly. I was looking for Cran-Strawberry juice but couldn’t find it’. (I love Cran-Strawberry and could easily drink a 1/2 gallon a day. HEB used to carry it but stopped about a year ago. I’ve been lost ever since.) He looked a bit puzzled and I noticed looks of horror on a couple of the execs faces. He turned to one of the managers and asked if they carried it. He said it should be in the juice aisle. I told him I looked in both places and they didn’t have it. Another manager agreed, they didn’t have Cran-Strawberry. Mr. Butts looked at another manager and said ‘Get this man’s name and address when you get it in give him a call.’ I said thanks to Mr. Butts as threee different execs came up to me with their notebooks and took my info. It was kinda cool. He basically gave the store management the order to start carrying my favorite juice on the word of one customer.
The embarassing part was I didn’t know it until I got home but I had mud on my face. Literally. I had mud on my arm and a bit on my shirt, I knew that. I didn’t know I’d managed to get my face while mudding in the truck. I think it’s damn cool that the CEO of a company as large as HEB would still take time to talk to a customer that’s covered in mud and actually listen to his suggestions.
I’ve shopped at HEB over all other stores here in Texas since moving here. Mostly because it is convenient but also becuase I just prefer the store. After my brief talk with Charles Butts, they’ve got a customer for life, especially if they start carrying Cran-Strawberry juice.

: Like a river from the album “Wayward Angel” by Kasey Chambers

Go see it. Today.

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