This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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February 2010
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Hard at Work

Ray's Mystery Trip

Excellent! Someone else is in the process of doing a random trip they picked using my random spot tool. They are using a method very similar to how I picked my own spots when I was doing this. He is even doing daily diaries like I did.

Day 0 – Selection / JFK to Madrid, Spain
@raygarsha, 24 Feb 2010

Spontaneous much? I don’t think you can get much more spontaneous then this. I’ve always enjoyed traveling to different places around the world wether its new restaurants in New York City or newly recognized countries by the UN. The problems always been picking a place to go. Not any more. Thanks to a cool website I found while searching the internets this past month, I’ve come across a site that allows me to push a randomize button and I will automatically be shown a random point on the globe via Google Maps. What better way to travel the globe.

Now I had to place a few restrictions on my travel to make it both safe and time effective. First of all the destination had to be on land, had to be within 250 miles of a major airport, flyable via Orbitz.com, and not on the state departments watch list. So I got a few days off from work and got ready to throw the proverbial dart.

It only took three throws to come up with my destination. the first throw landed in the Atlantic Ocean, the second landed in the Pacific Ocean, and the third landed in a little town called Tivoli, Italy, about 35 KM west of Rome.

Ray is also twittering from his trip. Great stuff. I haven’t been able to do one of these in many years, with the planned next one to the Yucatan put off time and time again. But someday! In the meantime, others can have fun. :-)

Cars and Books and Apps, Oh My!

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Ivan’s Ebay Experiences
  • Parental Facebooking
  • Apple App Store Restrictions

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20100222.mp3″ text=”Recorded 22 Feb 2010″]

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House: Season One: Disk One

Still catching up on things we watched for family movie night. It was time for a DVD we own but hadn’t watched yet. It would have been the next Buffy DVD, but Amy had taken that and watched it without the rest of us, so it was invalidated. So I picked at random from the shelf of such things, and so it was House: Season One, which I’d gotten for Christmas this year. Specifically, Disk One of Season One, which has the first four episodes.

The most interesting thing here was the first episode, which was the pilot. It was interesting of course because many elements were just not quite fully formed yet. The visual style was a bit different. And of course the characters were still in a sort of proto-form compared to even the later episodes on this disk, and definitely compared to later seasons. So that was fun.

I actually don’t think I’d seen any of these episodes before. I’ve watched House a decent bit, but I think I picked it up a couple seasons in.

Aside from the pilot which was just slightly different, the rest was just typical House though. It is fun to watch and I enjoy House, but the episodes do almost always follow a pretty strict structure. House is of course an ass to everybody throughout, although there are occasional lurches forward in his character. There is some melodrama amongst the supporting cast. And then there is the medical mystery that they get wrong several times before coming to the right conclusion in the last act.

This disk has the episodes “Pilot”, “Paternity”, “Occam’s Razor” and “Maternity”. As I said, I think the Pilot is most interesting just because it was the pilot. After that Maternity was the most compelling, just because of the babies.

Anyway. Good disk.

Next!

All Hands 12

I Said Don't Lick Me!

Doctor Who: The Romans

So, I am way behind on these, but there is no time to catch up like the everpresent now. Way back a long time ago, we had another family video night thing. It was another old Doctor Who. This time The Romans a First Doctor story from 1965.

This was a fun story because it actually tried to be somewhat funny. People running around, missing each other, that sort of thing. Just a lot of goofing around. So, for a First Doctor story this was pretty good. I mostly enjoyed it. And we got to see how the great fire of Rome happened. (It was of course the Doctor’s fault.)

Four episodes, 25 minutes each. Probably would have been more than fine with half of that. But you know, that’s how old Doctor Who is.

I’m still anxious to hurry up and get to late 70’s and early 80’s Who, but we’re going through these slowly enough that they keep releasing more of the older ones before we get to the newer ones… so we’re still often in the 60’s, although we’ve made occasional forays into the early 70’s.

At Some Point I Fell Asleep

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Angry Wife
  • Keyboard Fun
  • Cheney/Biden
  • Cloud Lock-in
  • Google Buzz
  • Facebook Login

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20100215.mp3″ text=”Recorded 15 Feb 2010″]

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Free Old Couch Bellevue WA

This couch is only a few years old, but it was heavily used. It is stained. It is torn. There is a spring sticking out of the bottom. We replaced it awhile ago and it is now in our garage. With a little TLC it could probably be OK for some uses. We won’t be giving it that TLC though. It will be heading to the dump later this week… unless someone wants it. If anybody out there wants this and can take it away from where it is now in the Newport Hills area of Bellevue, WA contact me at abulsme@abulsme.com to make pick up arrangements. Otherwise, off to the dump the poor thing goes.

(I’ll also be posting this to Craigslist and Freecycle.)

Handing out the Sheep

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Economy Revisited
  • Demon Sheep
  • Sarah Palin
  • Political Mailings
  • DADT

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20100207.mp3″ text=”Recorded 7 Feb 2010″]

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