TheArtistSwayze's Blog - 2old2play

What Does This Tell Us?

Is this a statement on this particular bank or all banks in general?

Busted Again

After my own experience and hearing from some friends and friends of friends, it seems that Xbox Live got busted up tonight. When do I get my free arcade game?

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A Formal Letter

Dear United States Government:

I understand that you are considering loaning out some $700 billion to help out Wall Street and various failing banks. I understand that this is probably necessary to bring the markets back to some level of normalcy. While I am unhappy that this course of action is necessary, I understand its necessity. I am not writing this letter to criticize or place blame, I'll leave that to economic experts and History. What I am requesting is that, in your generosity, you consider bailing me out. I have some $50,000 in student loans that Sallie Mae is going to want back starting late next year. In comparison to the money you're giving to Wall Street and others, $50K is a very insignificant number. Why should you bail me out? Well, for starters, this is all the debt that I have. If I were unburdened with this debt, I would feel more comfortable with spending my money in the consumer market. My increased spending would help the economy. I know, I'm just one person and my spending would be but a rain drop in a monsoon. However, if you're willing to spend $700 billion to help Wall Street, why not bail out all the people who owe student loans so all of us can have more money to spend on consumer goods or invest into businesses. Our economy could use a lot of rain drops right now. It's just a thought.

Sincerely,

Richard Swayze

PS - Since you know now that I owe money, don't come looking to me for any donations to this bailout.

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Ambushed!!!

For a week I've been playing phone tag with the contact at one of my job leads. I finally got her on the phone today, thinking we would be setting up an interview or something. But no, it turns into a phone interview. Completely unexpected, completely caught off guard. I started running out of breath and getting drymouth. Worst interview ever. Just thought I'd share

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Oh No You Di'int

Sorry. Sometimes I get that Mercenaries 2 commercial stuck in my head. We had some decent weather here yesterday so I went to the campus of Ole Miss, my alma mater, to take some pictures. Spent about an hour walking around, remembering my time there and snapping pics. The sun wouldn't cooperate (too many clouds) but I still got a few decent shots.

Got back to my car and found a familiar memory from my undergraduate days: a parking ticket on my car (Oh no you di'int! Sorry). The people who walk around writing tickets are so anal. I even checked the parking map online and found an "open" area to park in. Still got a ticket. Unlike my undergrad days, there is no parking decal on my car and they can't track me by my license plate so they can just take this ticket back and use it to wipe themselves because I ain't paying!

This is the Lyceum, where the Chancellor's office is and other various offices. It's the most iconic building on campus.

This is a close-up view of one of the columns with the sun peaking from behind. The shot is supposed to be vertical, but Photobucket is being screwy so it's appearing horizontal here for some reason. Just tilt your head

There's a cool fountain on campus. I took a high-speed shot to capture the droplets of water.

This really isn't an artistic shot, I just wanted to put a picture of the Grove up. This is where the party happens on football game days. Every piece of grass is covered with tents and tables. To call it tailgating on crack is an understatement. People bring their flatscreens and mini satellite dishes, chandeliers for their tents, etc. When you get near it there is an interesting aroma of grass, sweat, and alcohol. On any other day you can find hippies throwing frisbees or even playing Ultimate Frisbee.

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Kid's Shows Teach Kids About Everything

When you have a child you watch a lot of children's shows. One of these shows, "Arthur," is on PBS. It's based on a series of books about Arthur (an aardvark I think). Anyway, one of the episodes deals with cursing. Not something you'd see on Dora or Blue's Clues. What happens is that Arthur's sister, D.W., overhears a curse word but doesn't know what it means. What follows is a series of events that are both funny and full of this curse word, which is bleeped every time it's spoken. You only have to watch a few minutes to get a few laughs, but it gets really funny near the end.

PS- The intro to the episode is missing where Arthur is on the set of their version of The Sopranos. He explains about the bleep and there is a scene going on for their TV show where they're cursing and bleeping as if it was The Sopranos. This is all I could find though.

Edit: If you want to cut to the end around 8:30 is where it gets really funny.

Embedded YouTube Video --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhuLyk1FjgQ

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Is a Title Necessary?

Lately I've been intrigued by photographing inanimate objects. I'm not completely sure why. Maybe I have some fascination with the design of them, or in the way they were crafted. Sometimes I just like to try to make you look at an object in a way you've never seen it before. Or maybe I just like the juxtaposition of a sleek steel fork with a rough dead tree. Enjoy.

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Back in Business

My repaired Xbox arrived a few minutes ago. It even came earlier than expected! Now I finally get to play that Force Unleashed demo I heard about (it's taking for-freakin'-ever to download). I have to say that even though I know a lot of people have had horror stories about this repair process, my experience was thankfully easy. I'm also really glad there was a free one-month Live card in the box. I would have been pissed if there was no compensation. Like when you go to a restaurant and the server totally screws up your order, you should get your drinks free or something like that.

In other news, my son started at a new daycare today. He's been out of a daycare for about 8 months. My wife and I had to pull him out of his last one because their policy on biting sucked and our son was apparently every child's favorite to bite so for about 3 days in a week he came home with new bites and big bruises from them. So we stiffed them the 2 weeks tuition we were required to pay for pulling him out without notice. Thankfully at the time the classes I were teaching were night classes so I could stay at home with him during the day. Then the summer came and I didn't have any offers to teach classes in the summer. Complete disappointment, but I stuck around with the kid b/c it saved us about $500 a month and we figured that was good enough savings for me to take the summer off. I'm not sure why I'm rambling at this point. Anyway, he started today and didn't cry when I left. Though he did try to escape from the classroom to explore. So now I get to look for a job and take care of more housework than I did before. From this experience all I have to say is being a stay-at-home parent is not as glamorous or as fun as you think it might be!

Anyway, I've got one possible job lead. It involves going to parties and taking pictures which are then uploaded to a website for the party-goers to look at and buy from the company. Since I'm in a college town there would be lots of Greek parties to go to. Hopefully I can at least do that and get some cash.

Well, I see that my Force Unleashed demo is at 97% so I'm going to shut up now and go play.

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A Round For Everyone

For all of my fellow unemployed people who are looking for jobs: I'm pouring Jack and Cokes for everyone. Keep up the search, we'll find those jobs soon. What's that? You don't like Jack and Cokes? That's fine. I'll just drink yours

My wife and I recently moved for her to take a great job offer. I was getting frustrated at my job as an adjunct instructor at a local college (they kept giving me crap classes to teach that were leading me nowhere) so I decided that I could leave that behind so she could take this opportunity. The other great thing was that we moved to the only city in Mississippi that we would actually be willing to settle down: Oxford, MS, home of the University of Mississippi where we both received our undergraduate degrees.

So I've got one lead so far (only part-time, but part-time is better than no-time until I find full-time) and one more place to send a resume before I've exhausted the available jobs that are actually in my field (Art, you couldn't tell by my username?). Then I might have to start looking at just anything. Supposedly if I go work in an AT&T store I get free phone service, which would be awesome. And if I go work for *shudders* Wal-Mart I can at least get a discount on groceries and some games maybe.

Ideally, I'd get a job as an adjunct instructor at my alma mater next semester. However those positions are far more competitive than the college I was teaching at, but there's always dreaming right?

Anyway, good luck to everyone looking for jobs. We certainly need it.

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Jack and Coke please. Easy on the Coke.

One o the best gifts my wife has ever given me was the bottle of Gentleman Jack I received for Father's Day. I'd fix another drink, but I think having a second one while sitting in front of my computer and not really doing anything would kinda be sad. Speaking of sad, I wish I were playing Halo Haven't I already said not having my Xbox sucks? Anyway, here's a funny video that Darth Frost showed me. It's definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK, so put on the headphones, especially if there are kids around!

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A Good Laugh

No long-winded rants today. Just a funny video and a WTF? article. The video is from SNL and if you have small children who watch Dora the Explorer you'll appreciate it. It's 99% safe for work save for the appearance of the word "asshole" which is half-censored, sot take the necessary precautions if you need to. The link is to an article at Kotaku about a Halo board game. That's right. I said Halo board game.

kotaku.com/5040308/how-to-play-halo-the-board-game

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At Least There's Wii...Right?

Let me just say: having a broken Xbox sucks. To all of you playing The Force Unleashed demo: stop it. Right now. Seriously, it's just not fair. I guess I'll have to unpack the Wii now. It's been sitting in its box for about 2 weeks now because we recently moved (for the second time in about a month, but that's another blog post altogether). Before that I had unpacked it, but it just sat there for about 3 weeks, never being turned on.

Raise your hand if you think Nintendo would have gone out of business had Wii (or whatever console they would have made) not been such a financial success. Seriously, they've suckled at Mario's teat so long it's drying up. I mean, it's a popular console, and I still haven't finished Metroid Prime 3 even though I'm a Metroid fan; but why am I just not excited about playing it again? Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed the series so far, even though I never finished the second one (that's only because I rented it and ran out of time, but didn't want to rent it again). I guess one con about it is that, graphically, it's not much of an improvement over its predecessors. I know, the Wii isn't meant to be a graphical powerhouse, it's meant to change the way we play games.

So that gets me thinking about Prime's controls. They're decent, but in some ways using the Wii-mote to aim and the analog to move forward/backward and strafe sometimes makes certain parts of the game more difficult than they should be. And personally, I don't think a game's difficulty should be related to how hard it is to control the game.

But enough about Metroid Prime, my lack of excitement for the Wii go much further than that one game. Now, I know I'll play Wii Sports, but only Tennis and Bowling. I'll get the Wii Fit out again, but only for the balance games. I don't need a video game belittling me for gaining weight. I mean Wii is great for parties with your friends (I'm looking at you Wario Ware). Maybe I just don't invite my friends over enough?

All of this gets me thinking about something that I used to believe in: Gameplay > Graphics. But the Wii has really challenged me on that. Most of the games are just difficult to look at they're so bad. But just a brief look at gaming shows that great games don't have to have great graphics: Pac-Man, the original Mario Bros., early Zelda games. However, when these games came out, those games had good graphics for the time. So, as gamers, have the current generation of consoles made us graphic whores? Of course the answer to that is probably another post too, and I've already talked too much (you've probably stopped reading already, right?)

And as I think about it more, I think I've realized why I don't like the Wii: its motion controls are not really motion controls. In most games, you just swat the controller around and stuff happens on the screen. But Link's sword doesn't follow your exact movements, the Wii Sports Baseball game doesn't follow your exact swing, etc. etc. etc. And then Nintendo decides to come out with this add-on that will make the controllers do that. Well, I call Bull**** on that. That's how the controller should have been in the first place. I think I'm officially done with Nintendo. I've had enough disappointment from them lately. So enjoy your brief moment in my sunshine Nintendo. When my 360 gets back, you'll go back to collecting dust.

Sorry for the long rant. Hopefully you read it. If you did, thanks. If you didn't, shame on you. Go back and read it

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Prepare the Funeral

I finally got around to calling Xbox support. The rep I spoke to was very friendly and professional. The automated voice operator was very entertaining. After each choice I made he would say something like "Gotha" or "Alright" in a very strange tone of voice. If you can imaging a masculine, heterosexual version of Big Gay Al on South Park saying "Super!" I think you might be able to get an idea of what the automated operator sounded like. Anyway, the rep was very precise, obviously they have received a lot of training/experience on this issue. All she asked me to do was remove the hard drive and turn the 360 on to see if the lights still flashed. After that she took all my information. No problems with warranty! So 2-3 weeks after they receive my Box I should be getting a functional 360. Just in time for The Force Unleashed. I'm so mad I'm missing the release of the demo.

Now I've heard other peoples stories about getting the RROD and I may have just misunderstood, but I was under the impression that Microsoft sent you a box to ship your console back to them. Was I mistaken or has there been a change in policy?

On a different note, I found this wicked-looking spider on our porch yesterday. I'm guessing it was about 3 inches long. I went back this morning to see where if it was still there, but like the guy you took home after having one too many drinks at the bar, it was gone with no sign that it was ever there.

Enjoy

PS - It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to put a pic in this post. I'm such a blog noob

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Warranty???

So early this morning, say 1 AM, I shut my Xbox down after a few exciting hours of Halo 3. As I turn my eyes away from the Xbox, just in my peripheral vision I see a glint of flashing red. I turned and there it was, staring in my face like twisted smile, the Red Ring of Death. Strangely enough I've seen it 2 other times before, but not for long. Both times were during heavy storms in which our power went out for a brief second or two. The red lights flashed after the power sparked back on, but disappeared once I turned the Box off and back on. This time it wouldn't disappear. I checked it again when I woke up this morning; still there. Then I check it about a half hour later and it's gone. Everything starts up normally.

Now during that half hour I checked the "Registration and Repair" page on Xbox.com. It claims that my warranty expired sometime in May, one year after I got my Xbox. This doesn't jive with that 3-year warranty extension that Microsoft extended. So I'm getting worried that from some technicality I've been screwed out of the warranty extension and when the RROD returns (and it will return. it never forgets) I'll be screwed even more when I have to buy a new Xbox. Anyone else notice this on their registration? Did this just not update after the extension? Or am I really screwed?

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Lost and Found

I'm sorry to disappoint a few of you, but my wedding ring was not in my son's poo (which was abnormally green and squishy. Thanks a lot Kellog's Apple Jacks-flavored Cereal Straws. Seriously, who was the dip**** who starting giving those to my son?......oh. That would be me. Nevermind.). I know you were looking for an interesting and colorful description of how I had to give my ring a bath in rubbing alcohol and scrubbing it with a travel-size toothbrush. However, it was just as I thought. He walked to a random place and dropped it, causing it to roll out of sight.

We have a large ottoman for our couch that we moved into his room to use as a changing table. This afternoon I extended my search into his room and started looking underneath everything. In the shadows under the ottoman I see a small shape peeking out from under a blanket that is partially underneath the ottoman. For a few seconds I passed it off as a dustbunny or fuzz or some random piece of junk. But then I second guess that and reach for it and find that the object is definitely not a dustbunny.

In some ways i was hoping to find it in his poo. it would have made a much more interesting blog and a great story to tell to the first girlfriend he brings home. At any rate, thanks to all who were concerned, even those of you who wanted me to find it in poo

Oh, my second post and I still managed to mention poo 3 times

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