Down but not out. Well, I've been out a few times. Yesterday was one of the worst sick days I've ever had. Today is slightly better. I'm not coughing as bad, but my entire body hurts plus I've got these shivers of cold and flashes of heat. I have absolutely no energy, which pisses me off. It looks like I'm being forced to take a few days off.

Medicine. I'm taking Mucinex DM, which while Robotussin failed to help me, has made me feel better. It has also fuzzed up my mind. Seriously. It makes my mind fuzzy. I'm not complaining because the medicine does seem to work. I'm just saying my mind is fuzzy which takes some time to get used to.

Last night, while waiting to take more medicine, I watched several episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I also watched The Incredibles. I didn't know that Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl's daughter is the girl from Ju On/The Grudge. I don't know if it's more disturbing that Sarah Vowell does the voice for Violet Parr. Sarah Vowell is an author I like. You need to pick up a copy of Take the Cannolie and read about the Trail of Tears.

I've sat here as long as I can. I wanted to write more, especially about my dreams about George Costanza and Star Trek. Yes, Costanza was on that show, well, according my dream he was. But I need to go lay down for a bit.

  ¶ 11:11 AM

  Do you think this voids the warranty?

  ¶ 10:18 PM

  I'm doing my weekly Mandriva update, and one of the updates is for Lynx, a command line, text only browser. To be honest, I'm a little stunned that somebody actually took the time to update Lynx. Of course, as soon as the update is finished, I'm going to use it just to see what's up.

Last week, I spent an hour looking for a computer power splitter, a Y-like cable you use if you don't have enough power connections inside a computer. I did not find it last week. Tonight when I came home, I spent ten seconds looking for it and found it. It was probably more like five seconds. I wonder how often things like that happen.

This site, Under The Moon, will more likely than not be going through a change over the next few weeks. The update or modification or simply put, the starting over of, is long overdue.

I'm feeling much better than I was a week ago, but I'm still sick. I do feel better, but I'm just so tired. And if you feel like there's never enough time in a day to do what you need done, sickness just pisses you off. Well, it pisses me off. At first, I do this whole denial thing about getting sick. Then I ignore it. When it's just about to put me down for good, I deal with it. Why? Because I don't want to be slowed down.

Oh well. I'm going to go rest and probably watch a horror movie.

  ¶ 1:18 AM

  I'm not dead. Well, I could be dead. How would you know, right? If and when I die, I do plan to keep on updating this blog. Anyway, I am sick, dog sick. Dog sick is when the thought of actually eating grass passes through your mind. You know, dogs eat grass when they are sick.

Jon and I finished designing the new MUDKICKA site. Go have a look, and look closely for anything looking back.

One more thing, did you know that The Unholy Three was Lon Chaney's only talkie? The Unholy Three was based on a story by Tod Robbins, who later wrote Freaks. And we all know about Freaks don't we?

  ¶ 2:44 AM

  A creepy video is going around the net with this note attached:

READ THE STORY FIRST BEFORE YOU WATCH THE VIDEO

Strange but interesting. This is a car advertisement from Great Britain.

When they finished filming the ad, the film editor noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist. They found out that a person had been killed a year earlier in that exact same spot. The ad was never put on TV because of the unexplained ghostly phenomenon.

Watch the front end of the car as it clears the trees in the middle of the screen and you'll see the white mist crossing in front of the car then following it along the road. Spooky.

Is it a ghost, or is it simply mist? You decide.

If you listen to the ad, you'll even hear the cameraman whispering in the background about it near the end of the commercial. So turn up the sound.

A little creepy but pretty cool.

For the video: Right Click & Save As

Please mirror this file on your own site if you blog it.

  ¶ 2:28 AM

  I would not mind having a Fender tee shirt:


  ¶ 12:25 PM

  Pretties:



  ¶ 2:43 AM

  Almost without exception, five days a week I hurry to wait and look at trees.



  ¶ 2:08 AM

  Yesterday I picked up the two disk version of Raging Bull and the three disc version of Gladiator. I have been so hungry for great movies lately. I just want to see actors doing something instead of reciting lines from a script.

I watched Raging Bull last night. It has been years, probably ten, since I've seen it. It wasn't until after I bought Raging Bull that I remembered I didn't like the ending of the movie. It's not that I hated the ending, I just didn't like it. I remember thinking it was awful short. I think before, I didn't pick up on the whole brother thing. I can't believe I missed it. But I got it last night.

Also, everybody talks about how great De Niro was, and he was amazingly great, but what about Joe Pesci? Granted, he pretty much plays the same character slightly modified in each movie. But he was great in Raging Bull, and it was his second film ever. I also have realized that if you want an Oscar nomination, just put in a scene of Pesci kicking somebody's ass. That's all you have to do.

As for Gladiator, I haven't watched the new version yet. There is a pop up trivia thing called "Are You Not Entertained?" plus audio commentaries with Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott. There's also a 3 hour and 20 minute documentary to watch plus hours of other extras. It also looks slightly better than the first version, and the first version looked great. Raging Bull has a lot of extras as well including audio commentary with Jack La Motta, several documentaries, and actual news real footage of La Motta fighting.

This morning, the phone rang waking me up, and I answered. A man shouted, "Hey! Hey!" and then he mumbled out what I thought was my number and kept on mumbling something. I hung up. He called back ten minutes later, waking me up again. I tried to ask who he was, and he wouldn't tell me. He just kept on mumbling things to the phone and then to somebody else. I kept hearing my number. I kept asking who he wanted to talk to and what did he want. Eventually, I hung up. Ten minutes later, he called again. I told him to stop calling. I was getting pissed at that point. I was awake and couldn't go back to sleep. He kept calling saying the same thing over and over.

The last time he called, and this was about an hour into the whole ordeal, somebody else took the phone. The new man sounded depressed. He said, "Hello." I could hear the first man mumbling in the background, again my number. I asked, "Who is this?" He sharply and rudely shot back, "Who is this?" I asked, "Who do you want to talk to?" He said, "He's trying to get in touch with his brother." I told him who ever he wants to talk to isn't here, and that he had called five times already. The new guy said, "That's not my fault." I then lost my ever-loving-mind apparently. I said, "Well, you tell that fucking retard to stop fucking calling here." I was not loud and spoke at a normal volume. I believe the new guy said again, "That's not my fault." I then said, "Then take the fucking phone away from him." I then hung up and unplugged the phone. I never raised my voice, but I was so pissed off. I just wanted some sleep. I normally do not use colorful language with people like that. For some old-fashion reason, I try to be polite as possible to people on the phone.

I lay trying not to think about things and trying to go back to sleep. And then it dawns on me, it probably was a mentally challenged person trying to get in touch with his brother. He knew his number and maybe the guy he was telling was hearing the wrong numbers and dialing what he thought the guy was saying. Or maybe the mentally challenged person was dialing the number. The point being is that it wasn't until after I said what I said that I realized that it probably was a mentally challenged person trying to reach his brother. The man said the exact same things over and over each time he called and, when I thought about it, he did sound exactly like mentally
challenged people sound sometimes.

I know I wouldn't have said what I said if I wasn't trying to sleep and if the second man wasn't rude. Also, if I had just thought the first or second or third or fourth or fifth time the man called that he was mentally challenged, I would have tried to help him by explaining to him that my phone number was not the one he needed to dial and that his brother was not here.

So what have we learned? We learned that if you want an Oscar nomination, just film Pesci kicking somebody's ass, and if Jason doesn't sleep that he'll call anybody a retard and hang up on them.

  ¶ 5:27 PM

 

"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."
- Philip K. Dick

But... but... oh, why not? Being a night person, I didn't like reading that.

I downloaded Knoppix 4.0 today. It is a vast improvement over version 3.2. Why? Version 3.2 was ugly as sin. I mean, the background image had what looked like a media player stuck on pause. The first time I booted 3.2, I spent a few seconds clicking on the background thinking it would do something. 4.0 has a nice background, a highway with blurred street lights at night.

Looks aren't everything. But thankfully, Knoppix has never really been about looks. It's been about what can you do with it. And you can do a lot with 4.0. There seems to be a whole new batch of "networking" tools included with it. There are also updated versions of OpenOffice and Xine and your basic apps. I recently tried Elive, a bootable Linux showcasing Enlightenment 16.5 and 17 (which isn't ready, but I can't wait for). Elive seemed to have a few more flashy things, but that could have been the nature of Enlightenment. Knoppix, based on Debian, was a lot more stable than Elive and probably more usable (sorry Elive folk).

Unfortunatly, I do not have a DVD burner yet. So the version of Knoppix 4.0 I tried was the CD version. I would love to have the DVD version. For I guess more than a year now, I've always had a version of Knoppix laying around. It's been my go-to when I had to work on computers for people. I really do love it. It's free. And anybody can use it without installing anything.

Here are some bittorrent links for Knoppix 4.0:

CD Version
DVD Version

Download and have fun. It makes Billy Gates cry.

  ¶ 1:51 AM

  I love the month of October.

  ¶ 1:39 AM