www.agasupport.com

In the last few weeks I’ve had little time to devote to my side projects (like DartCalc, Character Sheet, Minecraft, Music and so on). Real life (read day job) has been consuming most of my creative energy. This is not a bad thing in any way. As many who know me have heard before I’m one of the lucky ones who works a job I love. It does mean that some things I wanted to get done by Christmas haven’t happened. DartCalc’s new version hasn’t made it. I haven’t finished a song in months. I haven’t gotten a rev1 of CloudBank out. I have learned a lot for my current day-job project, I’ve spent almost 80 hours on it in the last two weeks alone. That’s more steady work than I ever do, and it feels great.

In the middle of the real-life work I’ve been doing Gabe had a birthday (yay!). Christmas is almost here too. I am not ready for Christmas, then again I never am. I have lots of ideas of things I want to get for people, but I rarely get around to actually getting them. I either have the idea too late, or it requires some amount of time that I either don’t have or have devoted to something else. If it were really the thought that counts almost everyone I know would be ecstatic this time of year. Instead I’ll end up getting the normal collection of gifts I think are good enough, and maybe that one or two that really show I thought about it and made it happen.

Normally I would try to make excuses for this behavior. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time.” “I couldn’t afford it.” “I would have to have ordered it and I came up with it too late.” There are probably a hundred of these lame reasons why I don’t do the things I want to do every year. I’m sort of tired of making them and the only person who has ever seemed to care is me. So, instead of spending this holiday season feeling guilty for what I haven’t done yet again I will instead be happy for the things I have done.

Almost every time I go to the local grocery store I buy a bag for the food bank. I’ve given to various non-profits. I know what I am going to get my wife (she’s easy to buy for since she tells you what she wants). I know what I’m going to get for the other people on my list too, save one. So Mom, if you read this before Christmas, tell me what you want! I have holiday plans. I have a date with my wife on Saturday with a babysitter and everything. I’m not stressed out, even though I’m working harder this year that I normally do. I haven’t yet blew up at my children, or let the gloomy skys get me down. Of course, it does help that we’ve been hovering right around 32 degrees every day and have almost no snow. I don’t really need snow in the valley for Christmas anyway. This isn’t a big list, it isn’t an impressive list. It is a list of the things I am going to do this year. Oh ya, and I made a list of the things I’m going to do, instead of only dwelling on what I didn’t get done.

So with that I hope your holiday season is joyous, uneventful, and entertaining. As always, have fun.

~Agathezol

I like vampire movies. Good ones, bad ones, smelly ones, doesn’t matter. I know most that are made are crap. Again, it doesn’t matter. I just like them. I don’t mind if they are cliche to the point that they fear crosses and don’t have reflections or if they are modernized to humanize/dehumanize them. I do get annoyed though when a lot of effort is made to create vampire society, humanistic in nature, and then the writers/directors/whatever feel it necessary to leave completely ridiculous cliches in.

The movie “Daybreakers” offers one of the best examples of this. An entire society, complete with corporate corruption, conspiracy, etc. The premis of the movie could easily have been that mankind was infected with a virus that made everyone allergic to water and they therefore cannot eat most foods or go out in the rain. It isn’t, they are vampires. Fine, no worries there. As I said, I like vampire movies. Why though, after establishing the ‘realistic’ reason for vampires to exist, do they not have reflections? What is the point of that? The sun reacts with them, fine, I can buy that.  However, after all the effort put into the film on behalf of making it a potential alternate reality why do something as stupid as making it so they cast no reflection? I can see them. That means they reflect light. The virus is unlikely to have made all light reflected off them polarized and at the same time somehow mutated all mirrors to also be polarized, but at the opposite angle.

So yes, this is a stupid thing to get my tail in a knot over on a thursday afternoon, but there it is.

Today I got a sandwich at Worden’s. I like their sandwiches, great bread, and generally they are well made. When I got to the counter with my Pepsi and a cookie and my sandwich slip i got rung up at $2.89. I said “That can’t be right”. The gentlemen behind the counter was shocked that I’d bother to point out the mistake. Why? I got the sandwich. I was planning to eat it after all, why wouldn’t I pay for it?

The answer I fear is pretty clear. I could have gotten it for free. After all, it isn’t my fault the guy at the sandwich counter didn’t mark my sandwich on the little slip. I, as a normal person, should have taken advantage of that. Instead I said, no, I have a sandwich, turkey on wheat with seeds and olives. His response, “thank you for being so honest” saddens me. It shouldn’t be “so honest” to simply tell the truth and not intentionally rip off the corner grocery. It should be the normal thing to do.

The AGASupport website is now back on WordPress. Apple it seems wants to do away with the web hosting side of .Mac (soon to be the Cloud). With it I’m betting iWeb will be turned out to pasture. As I’ve been using iWeb for a few years to manage my site content I had to make some kind of migration off of it. It has been unwieldy to use for a while now and more than once I’ve had to restore the iWeb data after corrupting the multi-gig file it has become. So it is probably a good thing that it is going away.

So here it is, the new AGASupport.com. I hope all the broken links are fixed soon.