- sunday 10 21 01 -

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3. More later ...

- thursday 10 18 01 -

Well fuck all .. some useless bungholes decided to hack my uploads folder, park a bunch of shit out there, screw up permissions and folder structure, and delete a few of my FTP logs as well. Sucks to be me - my box appears to be functioning okay, but I think it's gonna get reloaded just in case. I'm pretty damn tired of all the shit you have to go through to secure IIS - I'm thinking it's about time to give Apache and WarFTP a try. Regardless - the breach was my own damn fault for thinking I could leave an upload folder parked on port 21. I'm hoping the rest of my system hasn't been compromised - the missing FTP logs make me worry a bit. So it's off to the security websites to see if I can figure out exactly what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. For the time being, the files link over there won't do a goddamn thing - you can thank whatever web maggot decided fuck up my FTP for that. If they needed some space, all they had to do was ask. Fucktards ..

Next up .. something is rotten in my dog's ass. I'm not sure what, but he can clear the house right now with one squeak. I'm afraid it's time to hit the vet up for something - Beano, a plunger, dunno.

By the way, you have to go wander through this site - trust me. I own the first four issues, and by God I need a t-shirt for work ...

- thursday 10 04 01 -

Just a few further thoughts on the situation around the world after September 11. I've been watching and listening to comments and ideas being tossed around, especially being smack (pardon the pun) in the middle of Dallas, in the heart of Texas, one of the most conservative, right wing areas in the United States. It seems to be very hard for your average Anglo-Saxon American Protestant / Catholic / non-Muslim to differentiate between people of the Islamic faith, and the sick butchers who are holding the world hostage right now. I look at it the same way that I look at the Ku Klux Klan and other fanatical organizations here in the States - the KKK and their ilk fly the banner of righteousness and Christianity to justify their hatred and evil, the same way Bin Laden and his mongrel crew hide behind the cry of "Islam over all!". Damning people, whether intentionally or not, for being Muslim because Bin Laden calls himself Islamic would be on par with Muslims or Jews damning American Christians because the KKK flies that particular flag. It's particularly depressing to hear people who have probably never even spoken with a Muslim about their beliefs proclaiming knowledge about the way that "those people" live.

I'm afraid that the insanity has only begun to creep further into the lives of people all over the world - I am reminded of a line from Men In Black, delivered by Tommy Lee Jones as K. It went something like this: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." I hope that we can rise above the sheep mentality that can so often infect people in times of crisis and make informed decisions that punish the guilty and leave the innocent untouched. That would be something to pray for.

Enough on the depressing state of the Earth for now - on other fronts, I've been re-reading the Books of Blood, by Clive Barker. Sadly, his site is not up right now - the Lost Souls site that was at this link previously was an awesome testament to Barker's work. From wandering about a bit, it seems that the site is under new management and should be back up soon. Anyway, I can highly recommend the Books of Blood to anyone needing a good horror fix in short, prickly doses that'll leave a lingering sting on your skin. For the more adventurous, I'd still recommend Imajica or Galilee as some of his best works, with The Great and Secret Show and The Damnation Game following close behind.

Movies - finally saw Boogie Nights, The Messenger, and Chasing Amy. Three flicks that I've been wanting to check out for a while, and just haven't gotten around to. The first - very, very good, in-your-face, gritty film, not quite Magnolia, but an excellent, character-driven film, digging into the way people can become family, and the ties that bind you once that happens. Highly recommended. Sadly, I can't say the same for the second one - an interesting take on the Joan d'Arc story, with a cast of memorable characters, including Dustin Hoffman as The Holy Trinity, and Milla Jovovich as a hyperkinetic Joan, sprinting along the ragged edge of madness. Uneven plotting and direction, with Milla getting a bit overworked in spots, drag this film down - it could easily have rated up there with much of Besson's other work, with great set and production design. It just doesn't quite come together - combined with the grim subject matter, it made for a pretty depressing evening. Saving the best for last, Kevin Smith's take on modern romance hits home in so many places that it hurts to laugh. After watching and enjoying the hell out of Dogma, I'm becoming a card-carrying member of the Smith fan club. Jay and Silent Bob are a bit more in the background in this one, with a very effective Ben Affleck running around in circles trying to deal with his lesbian girlfriend. If that sounds weird, it is, and when you toss in a roommate / inker who may or may not be in love with Ben (oh, and he's a guy), things could get messy. In Smith's hands, you get a brilliant, sharp examination of the ways that people talk themselves in and out of love with each other, drawn with clean strokes that don't pull back and let the viewer off easy. With Clerks, we got a buddy tale with crassly realistic dialogue - with this one, we get a bite of beautifully rendered life.

Whew - my fingers are aching. Time to go knock out some bad guys. Last note is that I've moved the FTP to port 21, so you should be able to hit ftp://ftp.smack2.com and get in. Let me know if you have problems. More later ...

- sunday 09 30 01 -

A few updates to the cinema page - hoping to do more soon. It's such a beautiful day outside today that sitting here making updates to a web page would be an act of heresy, so you'll just have to wait until tomorrow ..

- friday 09 28 01 -

Boo ... yaa. Another week at the industrial complex finished, and this one was only five days long. I know, I'm a slacker bastard, but the six-day per week grind can get to even the neediest souls occasionally. Not much going on in Dallas - the air is toxic, but the temperature is nice. Clear and dry, with level "Orange" crap in the air. Yum.

Found this awesome site while looking around for some stuff on the Vietnam Memorial in D.C., which was created by this talented architect. How did I end up there? Well, I was in the middle of this surrealistic mouse review, which led to this meandering discussion, and so on, and so forth. Links to everywhere - this is the kind of website you used to find all the time, with links that would keep you digging for hours, until you had 900 browser windows open and your machine crashed. Good stuff ...

Reloaded UT last night - it looks nice with the new Detonator 21.81's and 384MB of SDRAM to prop it up. And it only runs nicely because of that 384MB of RAM - I'd forgotten what a chunkalicious wad of shit Tim Sweeney and company had created with the non-Glide version of Unreal. It'll be good to see if they managed to write some usable code for the Unreal 2 engine, 'cause it sure as hell is purty.

- friday 09 21 01 -

On a personal note, my wife and I have been together for four years as of today. Here's to another 50 or so ...

Realized that I just plain didn't mention the horror that was September 11. I also missed the speech last night - I beginning to fear that I'm out of touch with a lot of things. I have to agree with the pundits out there that I will never forget where I was standing and who I was talking to when I first heard about it, and I'll never forget the sight of a fully loaded airliner being driven into one of the world's tallest buildings. I could spend many hours writing about the infinitely expanding shockwaves that this act is pushing out across the United States, carrying one of the major paradigm shifts of my life time with it. Indeed, the first such shift - the expansion and ubiquitous nature of the Internet - seems to have sped up and increased the magnitude of this one. Americans no longer feel safe, regardless of what they say - the oceans can't stop a suicide pilot driving an airliner. It has driven home a reality that the Europeans and Middle Eastern nations have lived with for some 25 years. And there are some very tough decisions to be made about how far the public is willing to go to prevent another act like this. I can only hope that they are made in the cold light of reason and not the red fog of hatred. More later - it's time to go give my family a hug.

- wednesday 09 13 01 -

Blah, blah, blah. Sorry about the outage, but I had to take the Win2K Pro box down and reload it with the bigger brother of the family, Win2K Server. Also stabbed another 128MB of RAM into this machine, making it a lot smoother to work on. As soon as I can get enough hardware, I'll go ahead and set up the Smack2.com domain here in my bedroom - w00t!

Other news - not much. Still drooling over the idea of a new VIA KT266A board, or even better, a dual processor Athlon 1.4 system, maybe with 1GB of RAM, ATA100 RAID, a GeForce3 128MB card, and a nice fat set of Klipsch 5.1 speakers. It could happen ..

Weirdness on my old machine - dunno if it's drivers, or the OS, or what, but 3DMark2000 is acting wacky. I either get no results at all from testing, or I get scores in the 50's - reasonable for a 486DX4 with 16MB of RAM, but not for a 650 Athlon Slot A with 384MB of RAM and GeForce 32MB DDR video card. Just plain weird, man.

The FTP link is up at this location - browse around and check it out. I'm working on getting my box secured so that I can park an upload directory out there - not sure when that will happen. Sure would hate to set something up wrong and end up nuking my web server. BTW, that is *not* an invitation to try hacking me.

Gaming stuffnitz - turned onto Max Payne, the gorgeous NYC cops /drugs / gangbangers game from a wacky group of Finns. Awesome level design and texturing, smooth weapons, and the coolest feature to hit the FPS scene in forever - bullet time. Remember those wild shots in The Matrix where Neo or Trinity flew past the bad guys in slow-mo? Hit the bullet time key in Max Payne, and you can do it, too. Dive into a room with your dual Berettas and pump 20 rounds into the geek behind the door before he can even turn around - just plain cool-as-hell. Joe Bob says check it out.

- saturday 09 01 01 -

Well then, looks like I might manage to get some regular updating done here - I'm gonna try to get this thing going again. Had a surf through my archives and found some funny stuff - reminders of why I first did this site, and a diary of sorts logging my failed attempts at maintaining Kingpin Post with my good friend Cerddorion. All in all, justification for logging my life out here again.

Working to get some secure pages setup so I can share family pics with family and friends - I have no desire to just pop pictures of my children up here for the general public's perusal. Along with that, I'm updating and posting some of my tribal / flash style artwork up, including this guy. Good or not, it's nice to have something creative to mess with. So much of my time is spent sitting in the car driving to work or staring at the demonic evil that is Lotus Notes R5.

I've been pushing to get all my home systems on Windows 2000, and doing the same for all my family members whose systems I've built. I've actually managed to get a Slot-A Athlon, Soltek 77KV, Matrox G450, SBLive Value, NIC, and WinModem running, stable, and functional with Win2K - under 98SE, I couldn't even get all the cards recognized, much less running. Of course, the system has ten devices on IRQ 11 ...

That's all for now - more updates soon.

- thursday 08 30 01 -

W00t! If you're here, you might have arrived by typing http://www.smack2.com into your address bar - I finally bit the bullet and registered my domain name. Sure is a hell of a lot easier than remembering http://c1650555-a.mckiny1.tx.home.com, eh?

Other news - for some weird reason, summer has decided to depart three months early this year here in Big D. I just dropped $2000 on a brand new air conditioner, and the temperature has dropped 30 degrees. Balls. Ah well, I can now hang meat in my living room and not worry about it spoiling - that alone is worth the money I spent.

Still hooked on java - drink enough on a daily basis that my kidneys are in pain, but if I don't get a large mug in the morning, I start getting headaches and body chills. It's damn near like having DT's ... maybe I need to cut back on the intake a bit.

I'm adding a few pics to the site - some B & W shots from my trip around Texas this summer, and a clear shot of my ugly mug. Enjoy.

Fixed a few items on the site to improve the view for those of us with big monitors, and cleaned my code up a bit in spots. As usual, abuse me if you find something broken. More later ..

- tuesday 07 17 01 -

Two weeks - not as bad as my standard ...

Got to visit Six Flags Over Texas, with high hopes that the one day I had off during the week would be an adrenaline-loaded rush on the new monster steel coaster, The Titan. Two-hundred forty-four feet of 60-degree incline, dropping into a hole the size of a waterbed at 85-mph. Alas, the bungholes who run Six Flags decided that a busy summer afternoon would be a great time to shut the Titan down for no apparent reason. Shit ... on ... toast. Ah well, we managed to ride every other coaster in the park several times, including two shots on Mr. Freeze, a magnetic-impelled powered-launch coaster that is a close second to being launched from a 105mm howitzer. The Texas Giant is still the rowdiest wood coaster this side of The Beast, and The Batman Ride has to be the slickest steel coaster I've ever ridden. Suspended steel with two loops and three corkscrew twists, no painful torque on the neck joints, and peel-your-lips back speed. Groovy. Now if the idiots will just open the Titan next time I'm available.

Other news ... still being underpaid and over-worked, but I guess I could be roofing, or laying asphalt for the highway department. One of these days I'll get that job right down the street from the house that pays a quarter-million a year, and I'll have it made. Until then ...

- sunday 07 01 01 -

Well, damn near made it another month, eh? Work, work, work, work, work ... Waiting patiently to get a chance to go to QuakeCon 2001 - we'll see if my plans for that fall through. Listening to Tool, learning Windows 2000, and reading James Ellroy - in all the spare time *cough* that I have every day. On the bright side, Microsoft continues their plans for world domination with Windows XP, an OS that doesn't completely suck (2000 is pretty good, but home users are still screwed with it). SO, looks like they're trying to make up for the evil plague that is Windows ME .. keep your fingers crossed.

- tuesday 06 05 01 -

Whoops. Forgot to mention that there's a new version of EditPad - actually several, including the classic, the newer Lite, and Pro. The Lite version is still free, and adds a hell of a lot of functionality to an already great tool. Impressive stuff. More later ..

- sunday 06 03 01 -

Long time, no news, eh? Well, it's been a wild and rocky ride the last several months, with the new job keeping me out of the house six days a week, juggling kids and dogs, fighting with SWHell.net (no link, because they suuuuuuuuuuuuck), snagging a phat pipe to the 'net from @Home.com, getting ramped up for my Windows 2000 certification, repairing cars, mowing lawns ... aaaaaaaaaagh.

On the good news front, Tool is back with another majestic slab of dark metal, with everything you'd expect from them - eleven minute epics of hypnotic noise, visits to Art, spoken word, and grinding rage. If that's not enough to intrigue you, check Dissectional, the Tool web experiment, or Kabir Akhtar's Toolshed, *the* definitive Tool fan site.

Movies? Too many to mention, but the incredible Jackie Chan in The Legend of Drunken Master is waaaaaay up at the top. If you aren't awed by the godlike agility and strength on display in this flick, you're probably numb from the neck up. Classic kung-fu plot and dialogue, sharpened by razor sharp comic timing, especially on the part of Chan's female counterparts. Accept the cheeseball plot as part of the scenery, and sit back with your jaw hanging as Chan and company make the impossible look effortless. On other fronts, The Contender gets points for solid performances and a good plot, hearkening back to the dramatic intrigue of All the President's Men and The Conversation. More on that later.

On the books front - James Ellroy. Author of L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, and several other L.A. noir novels - vicious prose, no punches pulled, digging into the grime and grit of the L.A. over and underworld of the '40's and '50's with relish. His newer effort, White Jazz, took the stream-of-consciousness white noise effect to an extreme, but going to his older books, you find meaty, rich characters full of flaws and conflicts that draw you in and keep you tied like classic Chandler. Good stuff, and highly recommended if you are a fan of the style.

Wow - that felt good. The first update in I dunno how long - I'll try and make this a habit. If you find a broken link, email me with the gory details. I think I've got most of 'em fixed, but you never know ..

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