The Mighty Buttocks of Dumbledore

It's been quite a while since I posted anything for my comic on LJ. Since I know two people at leats read it via this format I might s well get everything caught up here with the current story: The Danger, the Diamond and the Dowager.

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I have a couple more pages done and ready for coloring, but the I was thinking they are slowing down the story so I'm scraping them in favor of something different.

And I'm spending it off work.

Which is the second week I've not been scheduled. Back in November, I lost a week right after Black Friday. Apparently there is some kind of glitch i the system that's kicking me off the roster at the start of the month for some reason (or the boss is forgetting me when he's making the schedule.) The first time I took it as a nice little vacation in the middle of the worst period of the year. This time I'm a bit more concerned, since I'm out of vacation hours at the moment. 

Between this and my increasing dissatisfaction about the job has lead me to come up with an escape plan. I found a company that offers forklift certification, and I'll be making a class reservation for later this week. I should be able to make about the same, if not more, money running a forklift as Target.

The other day at Half-Price, I found a copy of the Player's Manual and Monster Manual for Castles and Crusades, it's an OGL version of Dungeons and Dragons, largely based on First Edition AD&D. I find I'm more tempted to use these rules for a D&D game than my copies of second or third (I'm not even going to bother with fourth.)

The character classes seem a bit more logically organized and a lot less overpowered in some of the other editions. Rangers are actual woodsmen, not just fighter/clerics with some nature background. They separate Paladins and Cavaliers (Knights in this version) once again, with Cavs getting more focus on horse combat. Barbarians are still badass, and most of the classes seem fairly sensible. Fighters did seem to get the short end of the stick, limited pretty much only to their weapon specialization for special abilities. But considering the idea of them being the more average and common. The  one class anyone could literally pick up, I guess it makes some sense.

In general, it just feels right. It's very much how I envision the system should be.

Dark storms roll in from the horizon. I hear the rain beginning to fall, the distant flash of lightning and the far off sound of thunder. It is the soundtrack of dire portents and horrors of the night that lead down into the heart of madness.

Welcome to Black Friday.

I got a friend of mine to make a boot disk of Ubuntu for me, and I spent this morning installing and updating. Now I'd say the computer is about 80% functioning the way I want it to. The biggest stumbling block remains my scanner/printer. It's one of those unfortunately cheap models from Wal-Mart, and it's hard to tell if it's just quit working or if the damn thing is just not Linux compatible. Being a low end HP from Wal-Mart I'm thinking it's just it's disposable nature and trying to use it with an atypical OS is giving it fits.

As for Ubuntu itself, I've been playing around with it all afternoon and I'm fairly happy with it. It's interface is not too far removed from what I'm used to, and it doesn't have much of a learning curve to getting up to speed with it. For the most part I am a low end user, I don't play a lot of games, and the main use I have for my computer is for internet accesss and occasional image editing. So except for installing Gimp, I can get by with what Ubuntu has given me with the basic package.

And picking up again with my reviews of the 100 sci-fi movie pack . Today I sat through Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. It stars Jesse "The Body" Ventura as a pan-galactic cop who has lived for over a thousand years and is tracking his ex-partner Secundus played by  Sven-Ole "The Accent" Thorsen who has gone off the reservation. He's tracked to Earth, where Secundus rapes a woman as part of some weird plan to get the Anti-Life equation. Yep, it's some real choice material when they are clearly ripping off Jack Kirby's Fourth World. Secundus does the deed, but Abraxas stops him, and sends him back to prison. Braxie is also supposed to terminate the woman, who is going through a 30 second pregnancy, but he chooses to spare her and she gives birth to a boy alone in the woods (really nice guy huh?)

Fast forward five years, the boy is growing up, and Secundus escapes to collect his prize from the kid's brain. Braxis naturally follows, and we have the big show down in a nondescript Midwestern small town. At the heart of it, the movie runs like the obvious Terminator rip-off that it is. Braxie and Secundus both talk in that oddly technical android speak. It's even worse with Secundus, since he has a thick foreign accent, which makes him sound even more like Arnold.

Overall, it was a lot of stilted and goofy melodrama. There was a distinct over use of internal monologue by all three primary characters, especially at the beginning of the movie. Though on the bright side I would say it was paced pretty well and there wasn't the massive amount of padding like I saw in Galaxina. It had it's moments, but it clearly suffered from a badly written script.

I bought a replacement hard drive for the computer today.  I went ahead and upgraded to a 1 terabyte drive, just so I won't have  all the space limitations I had with that 80GB drive. I also found a copy of Windows XP pro amongst all the discs I got from my brother, and so I thought I was all set to reinstall.

Of course, there are problems. First I realize my copy of XP is only an evaluation copy (limited to two weeks.) Worse than that, the copy appears so old it's having trouble recognizing my hardware. It says I don't have a sound card, nor does want to believe I have an internet connection. So I can't get it online to update itself and right it's problems. And in 14 days what little functionality I have will disappear anyway.

Unless I can lean on some friends for another copy of the software, I may just see about switching to Ubuntu.

When I got up this morning, I went to check my email and such before work. All the computer gave me was the blue screen of death, so I shut down and rebooted, hoping it would right itself.

No such luck, I get stuck on the boot screen being told there is no hard drive. Dammit.

So now I get home from work and think maybe I can salvage the hard drives out of the other computer we have lying about. I open the case on my Dad's old computer and I realize it uses Parallel ATA (IDE) drives and mine uses Serial ATA, so no dice.

Right now, I'm using the iMac in the living room to get onlie, but I really need my computer working again. I'll see about scrounging up a drive and some Windows XP discs so I can try and get it going again.

The truck was practically identical to yesterday's truck, so we got done pretty quickly. It seems I'm headed towards being assigned trash duty. Mike has been pushing to get everything done quicker, especially since the cardboard has a habit of accumulating and no one bothers to take care of it. It's a job that does need someone working on it full time, and it's what I did back at the old store, so I wouldn't be surprised of they stick me with it.

Also today, I found a movie that's just jumped to the top of my "movies I want to make a fan MSTing of." It's called Starship Invasions and it stars Christopher Lee and Robert Vaughn in a totally slumming-for-a-mortgage-payment performance. Chris Lee doesn't even speak in the whole movie,  the aliens were all telepathic and all his words were dubbed in post. 

Because of the annual inventory, the flow team got Monday and Tuesday off. So today more or less marked the start of a new week for us. It also started a run of six days straight we will be doing trucks, so my next day off will be Tuesday, which feels quite a long ways away from right now.

My main concern is whether this is an accident, or if our schedule might be shifting back to having trucks on Sunday. Mike thinks next week schedule might be in error, since there is also a midnight start time on Friday. It could be the schedule was automatically set from one of the last weeks we had a similar set up. We'll probably find out later this week, our department manager Josh will be in tomorrow and we'll figure it out then. Hopefully it's a mistake and we will have Sunday free.

On the upside for today, I got my new glasses from Coastal.com. They had a promotion on Facebook of giving away a pair for $15. They seem to fit a bit snug, but then my other pair was rather loose since it didn't have the nose pads. The prescription seems a bit strong, but I think that might have more to do with the frames. This pair has wire frames, while the previous pair I bought was solid plastic frames. It feels like I have a much wider blurry peripheral area around my eyes now. Not surprisingly, when I bought that plastic framed pair (switching from my previous wire frames) I felt like I had blinders over  the sides of my eyes. So a lot of this is simply personal adjustment.