My son asked me a question last night. He wanted to know if we could do one last “blow out” before my surgery. Something fun and wild, since I’ll pretty much be on my back for a while after I get cut.

“What the hell, why not” I replied.

We’re attempting to go to the SMo-g hosted by spoklan.net. What’s a “SMo-g” you ask? I’ll tell you…

It’s 60 people with their computers linked together playing games against each other. Much like my old lan parties (wich you can see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here… I used to have a lot of free time) there will be lots of people and plenty of gaming action.

There’s a catch though. This one costs money, and there is limited seating. I guess I should have checked how many slots were open before I paid via paypal. I looks like there’s only one seat left, and I registered and paid for 2. Hopefully it will all work out (read: someone won’t show up).

The games begin on Saturday at noon and finish on Sunday at noon. 24 hours of hot-hot frag action! I just hope I’m physically up to it!

I’ll bring the digital camera and take a few pics to share (if we get in).

In other news… my home PC was being an absolute bitch last night. I did the windows update thing and then rebooted. During the boot, I noticed that I was only showing 512mb of ram (I have a full gig). Then, I went all BSOD and life turned a little sour.

I pulled out one stick of RAM to see which one was bad (pull one out, boot, swap sticks, boot again). Pulling out one stick and firing it up still showed 512mb of RAM. Logic says the other stick is bad. I swap sticks and hit the power button… and get a big old pile of nothing. This confirms my suspicions.

I swap the ram around again… and get nothing. Hmmm… curious.

Now, no matter what I put in my machine, and no matter which slot I put it in… nothing happens. I put both sticks in my sons machine and viola! Both are good.

Crap… bad motherboard = cranky me.

I figured that I’d just let it sit and worry about it today, but my brother-in-law, David, suggested that I clear the CMOS by moving the jumper. I did it and what do you know… everything works again.

I guess the CMOS just got all screwed up or somethin’. I didn’t really want to replace the board, as I run an IDE RAID array, and finding another IDE RAID board is a little hard now (they’ve all gone to SATA). Life is once again good.

One last note: Don’t forget to check out the WWBD Big Red Head Forum. It’s been kinda dead in there for the past couple weeks. Join up today and entertain me. DO IT NOW!!!

Running a blog makes my life easier. No longer do I have to hand code all the html for each page, rather, I simply type into an application on my pc and it sends the post up. It also allows for people like you to post comments on the page, telling me what you do and don’t like.

Unfortuantely… spammers come along and blast you in your comments section with links to porn, viagra, and all the other usless crap.

Today, I had to remove 35 comments left by a spammer. All of them point to porn.

Luckily, I have MT-Blacklist installed on my site. If you run movable type 2.6 or higher… you need this!

You’ll also need the latest and greatest list of known spammers. You can find mine here (and it’s currently about as updated as it can get).

MT-Blacklist will stop posts containing anything found in it’s list from making it to your website, and adding new filter words is easy. If you run MT, get it today!

Yet another corporatized holiday has come and gone.

I did the usual… boiled eggs, made baskets for the kids, the big Easter^tm dinner, etc..

Usually, my wife does a lot of this, but since she’s currently down for the count, I’m the man. I spent about $100 at Wall*Mart on the baskets of sugar coated crap (can you say “spoiled rotten bastards”?). I also went to Cosco and picked up the fixings for the dinner. A nice 10 pound spiral cut ham with all the fixings.

It was very tasty… and for once, the damn dog didn’t steal the ham.

Of course, all that activity has thrown my back out pretty bad. I’ve been doing the whole rock star routine today (wake up, take a hand full of pills, repeat as necessary). Tomorrow probably won’t be much better.

At least I’m getting my surgery soon (27 days).

On a side note… I’m going to begin a revamp of the dump soon, so the site will change in it’s appearance and functionality. I can guarantee that I’ll break at least one thing, so bear with me till the redesign is completed.

I’ve spent the last couple of days at the hospital.

My wife had a fairly major surgery on Tuesday. The next day, she was up and walking (she’s quite the trooper!). They finally disconnected her from all the tubes and hoses and let her come home last night. All is well, though she’s a little sore (well, “little” may be an understatement).

As for me… I met my new neurosurgeon on Tuesday as well. This man rocks! He took multiple x-rays of me in various positions, looked over my MRI’s and CAT Scans, and came to a conclusion: we need to operate and we should do it soon. So, I’m scheduled to go under the knife on May 10th.

He’s going to do it as non-invasivly as possible, coming in from the left side rather than cutting stomach or back muscles (yay!). This will make the healing process a lot quicker. I may actually get to ride my motorcycle/drive my car this year!

w00t! w00t!

This is a hella improvement from my pervious neurosurgeon’s “fast track” plan of september… and I seriously doubt that it would of happend then (he has this way of pulling the rug out from under your feet).

While I was away in Pittsburgh, my wife happened to win a pair of tickets for three different concerts.

We saw the first of the trio on Saturday night… the Australian Pink Floyd Show.

All I can say is.. “wow!”. They put on one hell of a show! Both vocally and musically they sounded like the real deal, and a special hats off to the people running the light show… it was incredible!

Spokane is a hard sell when it comes to concerts, and this was no exception. The opera house was half empty. But we made up for the lack of people with our enthusiasm. The place was hoppin!

Prior to the concert, we hit the downtown Onion (bah… no webpage) for dinner. I had the Murphy’s Steak (a 10oz sirloin stuffed with garlic cloves). After washing it down with a couple Guinness, I was ready for the concert.

And speaking of Gunness… there’s a new bar on Trent between Sullivan and Evergreen called “Bottoms Up”. It’s in the building that was formerly Fuzzy’s Tavern. This is my new most favorite after work bar! They have a 101 shots menu (the Irish Car Bomb is the bomb!) and the staff is friendly (and some of them are very, VERY hot!).

And finally… I have a new game to play. I got my hands on a copy of Far Cry on saturday. After one hell of a fight getting it set up, I’m now deeply buried in it. The jungle scenes are very beautiful, but the “inside” scenes are much like Halflife (and the storyline is headed much the same way).

I’ll bet multiplayer is gonna be a bitch in those outdoor maps. The terrain is huge, densely vegetated, and near impossible to find anyone in (unless, of course, you have either the heat vision goggles or the binoculars).

Currently, I just got out of the tree house level and am on an island at night. Not sure what’s coming next but I know there are a few of those punk-ass snipers up on the hills (they make my life unhappy). Now I wish I hadn’t dropped that sniper rifle in the lab.

More to follow later. In the mean time, there’s some screen shots of the game here.