/var/log/geek

My lovely wife, Tara, has a Toshiba laptop that she has owned for the past year. Being about a year old, it's a Vista Home Premium roll-out machine. She enjoys the benefits of the 64-bit Vista Home Premium install, the dual-core AMD Turion X2, ATI Radeon integrated graphics, etc.

She is also one of the few who enjoys using Vista. She likes the interface, the add-ons, and the ways that things are placed. It just seems to make sense. She isn't one of the crazy, anti-progress hermits who insist on running Windows XP Professional 32-bit on a Quad-Core processor with 2 gigabytes of RAM (because that's all it can utilize).

I digress.

Her only complaint has been her boot times (which are atrocious). I had been threatening her with Windows 7 since the Public Beta was released. She has been listening to different podcasts with me, and has been a little more receptive of my badgering.

Insert Windows 7 Release Candidate

Last night I downloaded the ISO of the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 Release Candidate, and have been attempting to install if for the last couple of hours. The installation has been going relatively flawlessly until this last part. The hard drive seems to be working on something (as the light is intermittently blinking, as normal). The problem is, it has been stuck at 42 percent on the "Transferring files, settings, and programs" part. It doesn't seem to be frozen, it just hasn't moved in the last half hour. I really hope nothing is broken.

In a story (taken from Tahoe's Record-Courier),

"A 29-year-old Los Angeles man was sentenced to one year in Douglas County Jail on Monday for hitting a man with a beer bottle which caused a broken nose and loss of vision in one eye for the victim.

Raymond Mendoza pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit battery with a deadly weapon, a gross misdemeanor, stemming from the December 2006 incident that occurred in a condominium at Lake Tahoe.

The victim did not attend the sentencing.

Lawyer Tod Young, citing Mendoza's diagnosis as bipolar, said the incident was “one evening” of his client's perception that his brother was in danger.

As it turned out, Mendoza's brother reportedly hit himself in the head with a bottle, and a fight ensued with the defendant striking the victim with a bottle.

“After the victim got hit with the beer bottle, that was it,” Young said. “It wasn't Ray's intent to put a piece of glass in someone's eye.”

Mendoza asked to be returned to a treatment program in Southern California which led to him surrendering to authorities.

Mendoza claimed had he gone to trial, he would have been acquitted. He said he was pleading guilty to speed up the process.

“They were attacking my brother,” Mendoza said. “What was I supposed to do? I couldn't have walked away. They blocked the door. They put their hands on me.”

District Judge Michael Gibbons gave Mendoza credit for 100 days in custody."

There are just far too many connections I can draw between this poor guy's life and my own.

Some people have ties with individuals that borderline on creepy. You may have a person who you went High School with and have ran into them at the grocery store twenty years later, completely out of the blue. Some might have a childhood friend that you have accidently bumped into on a cross-country flight. Nathan and I have had more strange intermingling, in our lives, than any other that I have ever heard of.

I was born in Woodland California (as I believe he was, as well). His wife and I both grew up in Knights Landing California (which at the time I believe that it had a population of 700 - 800 people). There was a few years of age difference that could excuse the fact we had never met each other. My family moved to Woodland when I was eight, and around that time, Nathan and my eldest cousin Ross were friends. It is also said that the Cordero and Medina families are close friends. 

Even with all of this connection between he and I, it wasn't until I had began a security job at the hospital in Woodland (in 2001) that Nathan and I began our friendship.

We both left the hospital in 2003 and kind of lost contact with each other until a couple of weeks ago, and this is where more spooky shit ensues.

Nathan basically stayed in the Sacramento area while I did my bouncing from Woodland to Phoenix, to Albuquerque, and back to Sacramento. He was also still in Sacramento while Tara and I were in Southeast Texas. But a week after Tara and I got to Upstate New York (March 10th), Nathan arrived in the same area.

Getting to the meat and potatoes of day with Nathan, we reminisced over things that we used to talk about, changes in our lives, things that have happened to each other in the past six years, and noticing that neither he nor I had changed much in the past six years.

Tara and I were shown some of his works that he had been doing, as of late, and some books his work had been published in. I also told Tara of when he had began, working in plywood, that I'd walk over to my station and there would be small shavings of white paint and plywood (on my bench and floor), and Nathan would be sitting and carving with a razor blade. It is great how some things do not change.

He gave me this piece during our visit. I was floored. Too awesome.

To find more of his work, just Google Nathan Cordero (I promise you that there are plenty of his works to view).

Yesterday I tweeted that I had attended the Rome Cruise-in, in Rome New York. There were a few cars that caught my eye, but growing up in northern California seems to have left me a bit jaded. There wasn't really anything there that I haven't seen a thousand times over. I feel kind of bad for having this outlook because it seems a lot harder to keep a classic vehicle from rusting to pieces here. 

There is one honorable mention: a 60's Dodge pickup dubbed "Dodgzilla." It really is a thing of Mopar beauty that even I appreciated.

According to the website http://www.twitpocalypse.com/, there will be a cataclysmic event in the Twitterverse. At 1700 PM EST (19 minutes from now), the Unique Signed Integer will reach 2,147,483,647. The USI is a number given to each Tweet. 

"The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed2,147,483,647^1"

When this number is hit, it is said that some third party services (not capable of handling such an integer) connected to the Twitter API will cease to function for a short period of time. At this point, they are said to either malfunction or crash.

As of the writing of this post, the Twitpocalypse is set for 13 Jun, 2009 7:05:16 AM GMT (about 2:05 AM EST)