Chaos Server

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films. - Alan Moore My frugality was my only defense against becoming a comic book collector growing up. Almost every week my brother would go to Tower Records to look at music. I was completely uninterested in spending money on music and would wonder to the neighboring Comics and Comics to look through the shelves. I looked. I was interested. I read. I barely bought anything while I was there. It seemed like the kind of thing I would get sucked into spending money on every week and I just didn't want to do that. I bought a few random X-Men comics that interested me and I own the TMNT graphics novels, but that's it. In college I received the start of The Sandman as well as Watchmen. I loved them, but better to received the fully bound and completed graphic novel as a gift than to get sucked into some model where I need to spend money every week or month to get...

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it. - Tom Hanks I wrote an app to scratch an itch. I have this annoying little problem at work that my colleagues like to send me meeting invites that including a conference call number in a mode that makes it very hard for me to use. Prior to iOS5, if they put the phone number into the location field in the invite the iPhone would not let me tap it to call it, copy/paste it, or do anything useful with it. I worked hard to train my colleagues to put the phone number both in the location field and in the body of the meeting invite. After iOS5 came out, the location field became a place where text was tappable to make calls or copy/paste, but many of my coworkers don't include the conference call number in a way where it will dial both the phone number and then the conference call entry code. For a while it was okay, where I could temporarily memor...

Sometimes I find it helpful to be reminded that while I am expensively educated, I am not always smart. - Unknown Stanford Student When I got an apartment in Sacramento a couple of years ago it tended to smell a little bit like cigarette smoke. The building owner smoked, and while he assured me he never smoked in the apartment, he did like to smoke on the patio outside and in his office which shared a wall (and I assume shared the ventilation system). My mother was kind enough to get me a super power HEPA filter machine and I would constantly run it to try and keep the air clean and beautiful. I've probably had it for two years now, and we run it every night to create white noise and keep the air clean. Mrs.Chaos has been having a few respiratory problems in the morning and I thought, "ya know, I've never changed the HEPA filter in this thing. So it's probably useful, and might be doing more harm than good." I pulled down some new filters and opened up the ...

They say the truth will set you free, but sometimes, not telling the truth can make you lots of money. - Christopher Elliott When we got a house in late 2010 we weren't expecting have any kind of television other than the really old tube that Mrs.Chaos had, but as part of my family's dumping of extra stuff on us, I inherited my brother's ancient 50" plasma high definition television. It's a gorgeous Pioneer, but I call it ancient because it doesn't have any HDMI connections on it - just a combination of component and composite inputs. We're true cord cutters - with no cable, satellite or even Netflix or Hulu+. Originally all we had hooked up was a Nintendo Wii and a first generation Apple TV. The AppleTV took a lot of curation to get it working as I was constantly re-encoding things to the proper format and adding them onto iTunes on the server. I did it - but boy am I lazy. Not longer after, to my surprise, our mortgage company gave us a Bluray pla...

You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Reves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream. - Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus) As we prepared to host bookclub a few months ago I had to put together a list of four books for people to vote on. I had a variety of methods to select the books, but one of the books I put on the voting list I found by looking at the New York Times best seller list. We didn't pick the book at the time, but one of the other members saw the description with excitement and read the book for extra credit. This past month was her turn to host book club and the book was selected. Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. A book about two aged magicians who pick apprentices and bind them against each other in competition. The venue of the latest round of competition was the Night Circus (Le Cirque des Rêves). I really enjoy books about magic ...

A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. - Lauren Bacall Tuesday, March 27th, the plague struck. It started simple. A sore throat struck in the evening and I just figured it was not going to be a big deal. I drank a lot of water and went to bed at a reasonable time that night. Wednesday, March 28th, was a punch in the face and the gut. I woke up, if it could be called waking, feeling like a cement truck had parked on top of me. My throat continued to burn and my head throbbed. I decided the only acceptable option was to go comatose. Which I proceeded to do for the duration of the day. Thursday, March 29th, was a minor improvement. I think the cement truck had pulled forward a little bit. The sore throat ravaged on, the headache remained, but the crushing exhaustion had lifted. Then the headache got worse. Then the headache got worse. Then the headache got worse. I was hit with a full forc...