Posted by Dennis Judd at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the carving of my second pumpkin ever (the first is here)....The grim reaper

Every year Jen want's to get a pumpkin, but somehow I end up doing all the carving...I think she's in it just for the seeds.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Considering I just returned from NJ, this strikes a cord with me. That and the fact that it's pretty god damned funny.

Speaking of NJ....EWR (Newark Intl Airport) is probably one of the most jacked up places I have been. It pulls a close second to DFW, but looses since they didn't appear to have death manning the counter at the security site. Over all though, if you asked me if flying American Airlines out of DFW was a good idea, I'd have to say no...the people manning the gate desks are utter and complete incompetent morons. Unless of course you like standing in lines...if line standing is what you enjoy, with no movement, then EWR is your nirvana. Or perhaps you would like to taste the wonders of a 9 dollar personal pizza, with more sausage on it than the sky has stars. If so then EWR is certainly your destination.

With the sheer number of flights out of that place, you would imagine that some body's gotta be making money besides the restaurants. The only impression that I left with was that somebody somewhere was getting stinkin' rich off that place, and hadn't done any improvements since the last time I spiked my hair to look cool in 1988 (and no...it didn't work).

Anyways boy it's nice to be home, even if I did have to drive through rush hour traffic on I90 to get there cause my flight was 1 1/2 hours late. I'm still shocked that my car was even there....and not even ticketed. My O'Hare naivete must be showing, but nothing about my parking was 100% legit. But then again for a friday night that place was so packed that I suspect that the car I was semi-blocking (I mean I could have gotten out) was still there. So I suspect a lot of flights were late that day.

Well off to watch anime, honestly it's been great to relax a bit today with Jen. A week of meetings doesn't sound like a rigorous exercise, but being in a room with a guy who makes 3x's more than you and arguing with him can get a little daunting :) Although I feel pretty good about it in the end honestly, I'd like to think that if I got that high up the food chain I'd be sick of bullshit and appreciate an honest answer.

We'll see monday if my desk is still there :P

Posted by Dennis Judd at 04:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This was original a rant about the horrible food I just ate, but I decided that I was just sick of the complaining.

Honestly, my life is pretty damn great, and one lousy meal (that I didn't even have to pay for) doesn't change that one bit.

I better watch it or else I won't have anything to write about :)

Posted by Dennis Judd at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How the hell does something like this fly under my radar....and why the hell didn't Jessamine tell me?

Official site here

Posted by Dennis Judd at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

good night from New Jersey

Posted by Dennis Judd at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is clearly no gypsy blood in my veins.

Can somebody explain to me why ever damn time I change lanes on the I-90 that the one I'm in suddenly begins to go the slowest? I mean I know I was on it around morning rush hour, but it was just damn comical. I really thougt the understanding was that the left lane was supposed to be the fast one. The minute I got into it, it became the slower lane.

Also, why the f*&@ do they still give out tickets for Lot E if the damn thing is full. This isn't that hard people....have the stupid ticket machine count how many it gives out versus how many leave, and when that number exceeds the total # of parking spaces then stop dispensing them. If I get back and there's no ticket I'm gonna be shocked, but I didn't have time to go to another lot and then take a bus from there to the tram. Plus I'll probably need a shoehorn and a quart of vasiline to get my damn car out.

Anyways, at least this hotel has free internet....although I had to set my network card to 10 half to make it work. I miss the hotel I stayed at in San Ramon...that place was real nice. Although for some reason I have a handicapable room so I've got basically what looks like a delousing room....no bathtub just a big tiled room for hosing down inmates or something.

I'll probably feel better after eating something...I'm freakin' starving....but of course I don't have a car so I'm stuck here at the hotel while other's go visit with their boss (I know nobody out here basically).

Posted by Dennis Judd at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is one of those situations that are hilarious as long as it's not happening to you....get's good around the bikers.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Bad new: I have to travel next week on a trip for work.

Good news: Proving once again I have the best wife in the world, she gave me an early birthday present for the trip.

I can't wait to go Gamestop tomorrow and pick out a new game for the trip. And they're coming out with Final Fantasy III soon....which looks so hella cool. It's the images that have me excited, reminds me of FF7.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday Jen and I shared a rare day off together, so we did what any normal loving couple would do.

We went to Gamestop :)

We traded in Radiata Stories, Kingdom Hearts, and Devil May Cry 3:SE. And walked out with Tales of Legendia and Star Wars Legos 2.

We also picked up another controller for Jen (since my dualshock died), you gotta check this thing out:

Pink is the new PS2 controller

And it was only like $12.99 at Gamestop. So far it's been great, not a bad deal for about 1/2 the price of a used sony controller.

Yesterday, my new office chair casters arrived from coolcasters.com. Of course I never got a confirmation email for my order, and had to call them twice to find somebody who could even confirm I placed the order (only to find they were backordered)....but I did get them. And to be fair, the price on that site was 1/2 of what I was finding elsewhere online. So my experience could have just been a fluke.

But I got'em, and put them on today....just for reference let's listen to what my old wheels sounded like.

Either my chair is noisey, or I have serious intestinal problems that need to be addressed

So the difference is night and day. It's like I'm sitting in a ninja chair now...much much quieter.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I uploaded a bunch of cute cat pictures I found online:

Posted by Dennis Judd at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I ran across this today while visiting a site that offers you a free sample Schick Quattro razor (give away the handle, and lock people into buying your blades....typical business tactic). And I have to say it's probably one of the more clever marketing sites I've seen. I just had to capture some screen shots of it, it's stupid but funny:

MN has 10,000 lakes, IL has my sweet cheeks.

Um...why are there dude's in this pic?

Posted by Dennis Judd at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So I threw up a little video of the cats today to see how popular it would be. There's certainly no arguing that youtube.com is vastly superior in terms of video then say a local solution like gallery.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So...my gallery installation was acting weird. The thumbnails were showing, but when you clicked on an image you wouldn't be able to see anything, just a blank background of the default theme.

I re uploaded the whole gallery directory, but that didn't fix the problem (no idea why) so I was about to post on the forum for gallery when I figured, why not take a look at my error logs.

[error] PHP Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/djudd/docs/gallery /html_wrap/inline_photo.header.default on line 14

wtf? I took at look at that file (which should have reuploaded....but didn't for some reason) and sure as shit, on line 14 instead of // it had -/. Some how, when the power supply died, that file got magically corrupted so that only one little bit of information changed.

Changed it back and bam! everythings peachy again....weird.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm still messing around trying to get the photo gallery fixed. What I thought was the problem turned out to be a wild goose chase, and a huge time waster :(

Looks like the albums are fine, it's the core program that's corrupted. Going to take a while longer to fix.

But...in the mean time, here are some links:

- Trying to loose weight? How about a tiny bite to eat? Jen sent me this and once you read about it you kinda want to just devour like 30 of these guys.

- Again with the Jen theme, can you park this car? Silly little time waster, which of course she's already beaten.

- I have found my halloween costume.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looks like we're online again....still working on fixing gallery, so no of the pictures are gonna work for now :(

Posted by Dennis Judd at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So the power supply in the server died a few days ago.

Apparently when that happend it decided to take my Gallery album directory with it, so all the photos are jacked up. And we're having problems figuring out how to restore them, because the file system is all jacked up in that directory.

So how's your week going?

Posted by Dennis Judd at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

please standby....

Posted by Dennis Judd at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Dennis Judd at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Part of a continuing saga...you can find the previous parts here:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5

Alright, now with all of the physically demanding activities behind us we move on to the more sedate pastime of glacier watching.

So basically what happens is they have a person on board, who basically narrates what path the boat is taking over the loud speakers (and tv channel for the front deck), she tells you when they think they're gonna see whales, when they are coming up to important glaciers, and a little history of the area like how it was named and stuff. Meanwhile, you are basically responsible for keeping yourself busy, warm and dry. As you can imagine any area cold enough to boast glaciers is a tad bit chilly, and windy. So we were pretty bundled up, and basically killed time circling the boat, playing ping pong, and eating at the buffet.

Ping pong on a boat at sea, more fun than you think.

This actually reminds me of something that bothered me. With the changing demographic of guests you'd think that by now they'd have an arcade or video game section for people who enjoy those things. The only places like that on the boat were supposedly for 17 and younger. You know what I mean right? Kind of like a lame mini dave and busters. But I digress....

So basically each day culminates in one natural wonder of a glacier flavor. Never before in my life was I even aware of the term "tidewater glacier" but now I'm a freaking glacier expert....and not to shabby at ping pong either.

Here's a good story, so we're killing time and looking at the Margerie Glacier because....well the boat is right in front of it and not going anywhere. And we're hearing white thunder (sound chunks of ice make when hitting the water....very loud actually), and seeing how nature makes ice cubes and it's all cool....so we decide why not grab a picture of us grinning like idiots in front of some frozen water?

So I look around and ask some kid (teenager) to take the pictures, figuring he'd be able to know how to work it and stuff more so than some drooling 98 year old w/ dementia and bad head lice. So look at this picture...keep in mind we're in Alaska, on our honeymoon, on a boat probably about 500 from a gigantic chunk of ice....Jen's face says it all:

What the f**k are you doing?

Now aside from my hair (which looks quite bad), notice something wrong with the picture? There's no freakin' glacier in it.....just proof that stupidity knows no age. Thankfully we moved on down the boat where I spotted a man with two cameras around his neck, and I knew that I had found the man we needed.

You can tell Jen's happy because she doesn't have that "die you moron scum" look in her face :)

So basically after that I just took a lot of pictures of things that were interesting:

The next day we arrived at College Fjord, and headed up through there until we got to Harvard Glacier where the boat proceeded to flip a 180 very very slowly (took hours) so everyone could get a good picture.

Harvard Glacier...on a very cloudy day.

Not sure which one this is, but it looks cool.

The next day we arrived at our final port, Whittier Bay. Here is a picture of it:

This is Whittier...all of it

Now starts the f'd up ness.

First, the trip from Whittier to Anchorage is taken on a bus, on the only road out of town. Now I don't mean a normal two lane road, it's a single lane road that until recently was a train tunnel...and still is every other hour or something crazy like that. Driving through that thing in a tour bus is reminiscent of that boat/tunnel scene from Willy Wonka (the original version).

So here's the rub. The scenery between Whittier and Anchorage is arguably the most impressive I have ever seen in my life. Now I'm not a big sight seer, and honestly a mountain is just a mountain to me, but the views on this trip are hands down impressive.....from the bus.....which never stops and pulls over to let you out or take a picture. It's 9am, and the cruise boat kicked us out like people who hadn't paid their bill in weeks so they could pump and dump everything for a whole new load of vacation seeking people. We've got nothing but time...and here we are cruising through the coolest shit I've see up until now and we're not going to stop even once.

So we arrive at Anchorage, and for some reason Princess Cruise scheduled us on a 11pm flight. So we basically kicked around downtown Anchorage for 8 hours, which while there were some enjoyable bits....passed very slowly. We did find a place called the Sleeping lady which had great beers, and the coolest bartender I think we've ever met. And on the plus side the airport in Anchorage boasts free wi-fi...which is really cool, and would have been even cooler if I had a laptop. Surfing the web on a palm pilot is doable...but not the most fun. Plus without VPN I didn't feel safe putting any passwords in. We did buy some coffee though....

Remind me again why I married you?

Needless to say the flight back sucked....screaming kid, and trying to sleep in a plane. We got home at around 8:30am the next day central standard time, and drove home.

So that was our honeymoon. Skagway was the most fun for me, and Anchorage actually was a pretty cool city. Buffet's are great, but beer is super overpriced. I think if we went on another cruise, it would be something we'd want to do with friends, or once we have a larger family. It's really kind of a group activity thing I think.

Later,
D and J

------
Our honeymoon pictures can be seen here, and a slideshow is available here.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)