O Entertainment is the company that made Thumb Wars. They have some trailers available for download. Women everywhere run in fear from the low quality humor!

Grrr... My back hurts and there's a tourney tomorrow.

I skipped Kung Fu last night. A friend was having a birthday party. We watched War Games, a movie from 1983 in which a hacker nearly starts a nuclear war. There was a 19 year old watching it with us who didn't understand what all the fuss was about (and hated the 80's styles).

Someone found my resume yesterday by looking for a Quickstep Programmer on google. I have three years of experience with CTC's Quickstep language and I am looking for work. Call or email me.

I found it!!!! HARRISON BERGERON a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. about equality.

213 SPC "Skippy" Schwarz is not permitted to do
funny. offensive.

"Worried about India's practically infinite pool of smart, educated, English-speaking people eager to work for the equivalent of your latte budget? Get used to it. Today's Indian call centers, programming shops, and help desks are just the beginning. Tomorrow it will be financial analysis, research, design, graphics - potentially any job that does not require physical proximity. The American cubicle farm is the new textile mill, just another sunset industry."

The New Face of the Silicon Age on Wired.com. It's a long article but the topic is dear to my wallet. the numbers.

So the conclusion is: You can't outsource creativity.
I have to add: Yet.

The Topeka Capital-Journal does an excellent job with headlines and blurbs. It's rare to find headline writers, like these, who are trying to save the readers time.

Russian Names
Eventually I'll pick a name and make a persona for use in the SCA.

Jenny and I are trying to come back around to "Normal Time". I think she's going to have more success then I. I went to sleep this morning at 8am and she managed to stay up till 6pm.

We're heading out to Market Day at Birka (event announcement) this weekend. The last Birka was covered by the television show New Hampshire Outlook.

I got my butt in gear and fought in Troy Sunday and in Schenectedy today. No major bruises. My sword arm needs more power and my pole technique needs more speed and um . . . commitment, dedication. My movements are too restricted when I fight pole.

My Linksys BEFSR41 router acted up and had to be replaced. It was passing traffic internally but wouldn't server its webpage, respond to pings nor connect to the Internet. I think it's a heat problem when develops with constant traffic. I have all my songs on one machine and play them on the other.

My Comics page grabs Foxtrot and Dilbert right now. I'll try to add more soon. I don't know if the Dilbert.com folks will change their website to break my code. If what I have still works in a week, I'll add more.

BushIn30Seconds.org sponsored a contest for an anti-Bush ad to be played during the Super Bowl. After they picked their winner, CBS refused to air it. On the Finalist's Page, I prefered "What are We Teaching Our Children" and "Imagine". (alternate links: "WaWTOC" and "I"

Mars Rovers on Nasa.gov

Commodore 64 Emulator and C64 Games. Go turn your expensive PC into a $100 1980's machine for a short time.

My email supporting gay marriage hasn't been particularly well received. Sometimes the price for standing up to be counted is high. Here are some quotes:

"Although the argument is interesting is has not changed my mind as I am in support of the definition in holy writ. If this offends in anyway I simply say that the argument is not with we lowly humans."

"Boy did you open up a can of worms with that one!!"

"I will pray that one day you will recognize that there is a great and merciful God, and that his son, Jesus, died on the cross for you, for the salvation for your sin."

Also of interest, I can't find supported/documented numbers for what percent of the population is gay. If it was close to the same across cultures, that would lean towards a biological explaination. But how do you get people to accurately report something that may damage their lives?

"It's a combination of factors." is scientific shorthand for "We don't know."

I got an email asking me to sign a petition opposing gay marriage. Here's my response.

Recently you have been asked to sign a petition opposing gay marriage. I find it to be my duty, to both my gay and straight friends, to provide a counter argument. It is my belief that relationships based on love should be valued above all. Toward that end I am happily engaged.

I invite you to go to this website: http://www.bidstrup.com/marriage.htm There you will find an examination of the arguments against gay marriage and a point by point rebuttal.

You have my thanks for every moment you spend examining this issue with an open mind before you reach your own conclusion.

Thomas Cerul

Second hand word came back from the interview. Nope. I didn't convince them that I was enthusiatic about 10-12 hours a day 7 days a week.

Nothing is sadder than the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.
-Fear of Style Sheets page 4

Interviews about drugs by Frontline. Retired DEA agent Bill Alden provided an interesting interview. He thinks prevention is the way to go.

Opera (the web browser I recommend) has a deal with google to serve ads based on the pages you visit. Part of this deal is that google will look at sites that I look at.

MSN.com's search likes me more then Google. I get lot's of hits from MSN search... maybe too many actually. Someone came to my site through a search for "quintuplet pictures" of all things.

Blockbuster.com has a rating/recommendation site for movies. You rate movies on a five star scale and it recommends movies that you might like. Jenny has used it extensively. It got us to watch "Pride and Prejudice" which is actually pretty good. I wouldn't have grabbed it off the shelf, but I've been enjoying the 6(?) video set. (registration required)

Netscape.com gets a dishonorable mention for covering up their homepage with a flash ad. I can't imagine what would posses someone to think those ads are a good idea. It boggles my mind even more that a corporation would obscure their homepage, their first impression, with that.

Okay, I can't repeat replicate the ad. That's actually another point off. If I see an ad somewhere, it should still be there when I come back for it. This ad was a large red box that scrolled down from the top of the page and covered the middle of the page.

Some jerk hit and broke a telephone pole on our block. Said jerk then proceeded to drive off without waiting for the police. We lost power for 5-10 seconds when it happened (4:30am) and again when they fixed it sometime during the day while we were asleep. (Pics)

The lucky part was that everyone was parked on the other side of the road last night in compliance with the street cleaning schedule.

Shooter's Mistake Chart is for diagnosing inaccuracies caused by mistakes in one's shooting style. This chart is for right handers.

The Federalist Papers

What Good is the Second Amendment? is an Op-Ed piece from Kuro5hin.org.

Still no word from the interview.

I made my weblog into my default page. If you go to http://cerul.dyndns.org:3000/ you now come here.

"An Indian mob has destroyed 30,000 ancient manuscripts and rioted in retaliation for Oxford University Press publishing a book about a Hindu king."

This Network Admin got himself into shape! Pictures from each month. (Main page)

My interview went pretty well. I should hear back in a day or two.

Apparently ".date" is a reserved word in Internet Explorer. That's why it has been ignoring my CSS style for displaying the date. I copied the .date style into a new style called .iedate and everything displays the way I intended. Even in IE. Opera users won't notice a difference.

Tired. *yawn* -4 degrees outside. *shiver* Interview Monday. *cheer*

I am officially boggled by the number of people finding my armor pages by searching MSN for leather armor or making leather armor etc. It's not many in internet terms, but it's a lot in terms of the number of people who ever visit my server.

Dagorhir is a Live Action Role Play (LARP) group that fights unarmored (mostly) with padded weapons. Take a peak. I'm vaguely tempted to try it. It should be quite strange to fight in an Almost SCA way. There's a group at Bard college down near Kingston.

Bludgeons $240. "Museum Quality"

I'm partway through making a php script to help me learn Regular Expressions when I accidentally found The Regular Expression Coach which does what I was planning but does it much better. Oh well, I mostly finished my script anyway. Good practice in PHP and Javascript.

"A regular expression is a string of characters which tells the searcher which string (or strings) you are looking for." - Perl Regular Expression Tutorial

Hey web geeks, if you can't get javascript's focus event to work because of a null object issue, put the script AFTER your form. Thanks DevShed.com (and the people that post answers on your forums.)

I should look at my webpage in Internet Explorer (v5.5) more often. . . Everything is completely different. Now I remember what I hated about making webpages years ago. You have to make the same page half a dozen times in one file.

And, I give up. If it's not readable tell me. Optionally, get a decent browser. Wow. I haven't gotten platform snotty in a long time. And Hurray, I found the Opera Change Logs!!! I've been looking for them for a while now.

No dissenting signs are allowed near President Bush. The SF Gate article is titled "Quarantining dissent How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech". Enjoy the double talk "Free Speech Zones" are out of sight and only apply to dissenting opinions.

Hey geniuses, suppressing the expression of ideas doesn't make them less powerful but more. If people can't be heard when they speak in a small voice, they use a bigger voice. If a bigger voice doesn't get heard, they start using actions.

I forgot to mention the rental agreement I signed yesterday. It was Very thorough and gave me lots of ideas. I'm not allowed to use the rental car as a taxi nor am I allowed to disconnect the odometer while I drive it. Darn. :)

I got my car back already! An entire day early. Hurray for Goldstein Collision.

Posted pictures from our friends Yule Party.

Kingslayer Armoury sells basket hilts and helmets.

Well, my car is in the shop. The insurance company sent the check to me. My bank won't clear it until the day After my car will be done. I'm driving an Impala right now. I miss my all wheel drive and antilock brakes.

We got a working DVD player. *cheer* Thanks Kevin Beard! CompUSA almost loses a point for the 5 minutes when I thought they bait-and-switched me. It turned out at the register that they we just slow in updating the price tag. It rang up fine.