surrealization.com

I Sold a Dream Last Night

Tuesday, February 13 2007

Everyone wants to play an instrument when they're young. In elementary school I tried to play the tumpet and failed. They moved me onto the trombone because it would be easier for me to play. I swtiched, but I wasn't too thrilled about playing it (I wanted the cool saxophone but they wouldn't let me) and after a year I realized it wasn't for me. In high school I had some guitarist friends and decided to learn to play. I got a $200 used guitar and an amp and started to play. I learned all the standard beginner songs and eventually realized I was neither good nor did I really want to keep learning...

Elevensies: this morning was a good morning

Monday, September 11 2006

My wife made a Lord of the Rings joke this morning.

(sort of quote)
"I packed a ton of food because I didn't eat breakfast. I'll have second breakfast and elevensies."

I think I may have won her over.

Tom, James, and Adam vs. the UPS truck

Wednesday, July 19 2006

I wrote this years ago when I had my weblog hosted through Blogger. Some recent conversations reminded me of it so I decided to bring it back. I call these stories "Tom Stories". Tom is that crazy-ass person you were friends with in high school that always seemed to prompt you into doing some incredibly stupid things. Following is the first ever Tom Story I wrote, unedited from my first posting of it. We were in ninth grade (James was in tenth), it was an afternoon nearing summer, immediately after school was over. Tom, James and I always met outside a certain door and walked home. Typically we...

You Immerged A Lucky Winner

Wednesday, June 14 2006

Come on now... if you're going to spam me to try and convince me I've won 10 million dollars, at least spell your subject correctly!

I wish I were smarter

Friday, May 12 2006

Seriously, read this article:

Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it goes... Backwards?

I like to read up (or watch up on Nova) on the dumbed-down scientific theories presented for the layman. It's just baffling to me how people can me up with this stuff.

Shadowrun PC XBOX360 Game Announced To Fan Outrage

Tuesday, May 09 2006

It was announced recently and they now have an official website . They have some forums and so far they're not getting very many supporters of the idea of making a team-based FPS game from a tabletop RPG. If you're a nerdly like myself, you may know Shadowrun, and you're probably also at least disappointed in the decision to make the game in its current format. It's an odd decision to use an RPG genre for what is essentially a cookie-cutter game nowadays. They could have created their own and not paid the royalties. The guy who's making the game has a blog post explaining the decision, however...

IPTV

Tuesday, March 14 2006

Ars has a good introduction to IPTV and points out one major problem that has me wondering how useful the technology will be to the average multi-television home: simultaneous streams. IPTV won't similar to cable in that all channels won't get pushed to your house. Instead, only the channels you request will get sent to your house. This means that your phone line's bandwidth is the limiting factor in how many channels you can receive at once. There are people on tivocommunity.com who frequently talk about having a dual-tuner DVR in their bedroom and two on their main television (and I'm sure they...

CableCARD Overview On Ars

Tuesday, February 07 2006

ArsTechnica has a good overview of CableCARD (what it is, what's coming in the future, what's going to obsolete it). Even though there will potentially be a new technology shortly after CableCARD 2.0 (which offers 2-way communication features for capabilities like video-on-demand and pay-per-view), I still can't wait to get my hands on one of the Series 3 TiVos with CableCARD support. I'm curious, since TiVo constantly updates their software, if it will be able to support the software-only CableCARD successor when it comes out. As long as the runtime environment for the software isn't a hardware...

Banana Blender Surprise

Friday, December 30 2005

Natasha and I went to a show the day after Christmas at the Continental Club in Houston. The headliner was a local band whose members have all moved away but come back around for reunion shows occasionally. Anyway, they're called Banana Blender Surprise; the show was pretty good and everyone in the Club had a good time. One of their songs (one of their few cover songs) was song by the drummer while wearing a banana suit (like you would see on the side of the road trying to get you to buy something from a store nearby). The song he sung? Coming to America. My phone doesn't take the best pictures...

Mr T Says You Gonna Get There In One Piece

Thursday, November 17 2005

This story about putting celebrity voices on car DVD navigation systems says Mr T is one of the voices they'll use. And not only will he give you directions, but he'll give you some appropriate Mr T phrases as well.

Mr. T not only guides, he also threatens: Pay attention to what Im saying, he bawls. Mr. T gonna get you there in one piece ... you gonna be there safely, or else!

Pure genius. If I ever get a navigation system in a car, it'll definitely need to have Mr T's voice.