The Deconstruction Continues

I pretty much finished deconstructing the old television for my Zeniquarium (though the idea of owning fish has not grown on me at all), and now its time for fitting, in fact I’m just kind of wasting time here at home in anticipation of driving to an aquarium store in Shoreline to go look for some tanks that might fit inside of it.

The next step is bringing it to a place with power tools, or perhaps even renting my own, in order to create a hinged top. I’m also considering attaching some castors to the bottom in order to move the heavy bastard around. It’s already pretty goddamned heavy on its own, owing to its solid early-80s construction, I figured it would be far less heavy sans tube, but its still got some heft, and I’ll probably need a bit of a hand getting it into my car and getting it over to the aquarium store. I’ve sort of resigned myself to probably needing a custom tank, but maybe I’ll find something close to the 26×16x16 tank I’m looking for. (In doing some quick research, its fairly close to a standard 20 gallon tank, so that’s good.)

In lieu of fish, Troy suggested that perhaps I come up with some sort of action figure battle scenario inside, which I’m pretty sure would include dinosaurs vs. robots. I could also probably get some kind of reptile, but that just seems destined to be cat food.

The final step will be to create a remote controlled lighting system, either something I figure out and wire up, or maybe just a remote controlled power strip. I removed the old IR sensor today, not sure if I could easily repurpose that or not, so I’l have to do some reasearch before I can finish.

It feels pretty good to be finally putting a project together I’ve been talking about for almost 10 years (Though to be fair to my laziness, I had to wait 7 years for the TV to die.)

I’m hoping this thing gives me a bit of momentum to get into some other projects I’ve got in the hopper, I’ll post more on them later.

Spencer Moody is the Greatest

A lot now, we play these shows in front of a lot of people, and I see a lot of gross, disgusting high-school jocks in the audience. But what we do is for all the beautiful faggots, and the rest of you can all eat a big bowl of wet dicks… You think this many people get together and they’re all good people? They’re all shitheads… I may be stepping out of bounds, but all the heterosexuals in the audience, all the straights, can just turn around and face the other way.” He waited. “If you don’t turn around, I’ll accept that you’re homos, just like all of us up on the stage… Right now, we play and you all sing and cheer, but after this show, you’ll go back to your high schools and pick on the faggots and the kids in the chess club. Fuck you, all of you guys. Who do you think we were? When I went to shows, it was just faggots… I’m glad you took the time out of your day that you usually would’ve spent flat-ironing your hair, but before this band, there was a band called Iggy & the Stooges”—the audience cheered—”and you can cheer all you want, but you don’t know a fucking thing… Fuck you.” —Spencer Moody of the Murder City Devils.

via Eric Grandy

Why I am not writing here these days.

Twitter. Is the main reason, I’m not into writing long stories about adventures at the moment (not that I’ve been having many), but twitter lets me satisfy the craving for people to listen to me while simultaneuosly relieving me of any effort.

Also, I’ve started a Tumblr blog, which is a lot simpler than this thing (and is at admiralzing.tumblr.com) which sort of aggregates Google Reader shares, Twitter, this blog and Flickr together into one tight little package. I called it “Your Socks are White” because I honestly didn’t think I was going to use it, and then found out it was cool.

Things that are going on:

1. I’m starting my new job on June 1st, and am excited for that. I feel like I’m graduating college all over again.

2. I’m stupidly excited about getting a new cell phone, even if it will be like retardedly hard to get. (the Palm Pre)

3. I haven’t purchased any SIFF tickets yet, but better get my ass on that, because I think SIFF is a week shorter this year.

4. I listened that Danger Mouse + Sparklehorse album you can only get by stealing, and it is first class all the way. The first track with Wayne Coyne is my favorite.

5. I haven’t continued work on my television aquarium as I need to buy tools. I might steal one from my dad this weekend.

Poor Little Blog

I don’t have much to wrote about on this poor little guy now that I spend much of my time pouring out my thought nubbins on twitter.

In general, my main thoughts have been directed towards attacking my new yard, and excavating an ancient brick walkway in the backyard. I have no idea what kind of weirdo made this thing (I’m blogging this from the backyard and staring at the weird fucking thing in between typings) but I have to say that this person did not believe in making straight paths. They were a big fan of meandering ones, that have no particular reason for ending where they do. Though I did discover this one ends in an ant colony, so maybe they were afraid of ants.

I like to hink about the random weirdos who have occupied this bizarre place in the past, but I usually get bored of that pretty quickly.

It seems that SIFF is going to be a good one this year, lots of interesting flicks, and a newfound focus on local flicks (that, you know, just happened to play at Sundance)) and a good variety of classics and of course, Moon with Sam Rockwell, a movie I’m pretty excited to check out

My backyard is pretty cold for being such a nice day, so maybe I’ll go attack some ants to warm myself back up.

The Best Flickr Ever

GW and I were talking last night and though I believe its only one of two websites (the other being Pink is the new blog)she visits, she mentioned a post on Kottke about old school illustrations on modern things. Now, I’d seen some of these on FFFFFOUUND (or however many letters it has) and I’d seen the post while skimming by, but then we went throught the rest of this guys Flickr page, and his shit is astoundingly rad. I believe we were giggling at his creations for nearly a quarter hour.

Check it out

Wedding Apricot Couch

I am the worst sick person ever, I had a cold this weekend and it reduced me to a sad pile on the couch more or less, with the exception of attending a friendly wedding ceremony. It was a good one, I think, not too big, with plenty of food and booze and good company. I wore a pair of slip one shoes and did a solo dance at one point. I also met a man who built a robot, I made it through the ceremony on a good bit of cold pills, but missed the after-after party at Thisandthaterberg as the drugs did wear off eventually.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to say that I had a bottle of Dogfish Head beer last night, and I only remembered the wedding because we spoke of Sam Calagione at some point, and how he’s just, you know, marvelous.

GW had purchased a bottle of Dogfish Head Aprihop ale, and while at first, I was a little suspicious of anything apricot and beer (Pyramid’s apricot beer is kinda gross) but when faced with a sore throat, I decided only a beer could soothe it.

Then I found out a couple of things. First, this is not just an apricot ale, its a beastly Apricot IPA, with a 7% alcohol content, and in drinking it, the taste mined its way through my Ricola-sodden tongue and gave my face a ruddy maiden’s glow. In short, this beer is speckfuckingtacular, and I know I will be going down to the specialty beer store at some point this week and getting a serious amount of these to keep me through the summer. Because honestly, you never know when/where you’re going to find a certain type of their beer again (See: Theobroma & World Wide Stout)

Also, the Ants in our house are gearing up for another invasion, I found them trying to sabotage my laptop on two separate occasions on Sunday morning. I will keep you posted.

Mark Langston Trade

This was mentioned on lookout landing today, and I’ve sort of been following this since Randy Johnson was traded in 98, but the 1989 trade of Mark Langston for Randy Johnson, Brian Homan and Gene Harris has netted the Mariners 20 more players over the course of 20 years.

The Major Players:

Johnson traded  for Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen and John Halama in 1998.

Carlos Guillen traded for Ramon Santiago and Juan Gonzalez in 2003

Freddy Garcia traded for Jeremy Reed, Miguel Cairo and Mike Morse in 2004

Jeremy Reed involved in the giant trade that brought in Franklin Guiterrez, Aaron Heilman and Endy Chavez in 2009.

And Heilman himself was traded again for Ronnie Cedeno shortly afterwords.

I have no idea if this kind of thing is out of place in baseball, but its interesting the direct line from Langton in 89 to Cedeno in 2009 is pretty interesting (even if that last trade did involve a boatload of players of which Reed was obviously not the centerpiece)

Here is the full list:

Randy Johnson
Brian Holman
Gene Harris
Will Taylor
Freddy Garcia
Carlos Guillen
John Halama
Ramon Santiago
Juan Gonzalez (minor leaguer)
Jeremy Reed
Miguel Olivo
Mike Morse
Nathanael Mateo
Miguel Ojeda
Franklin Gutierrez
Endy Chavez
Aaron Heilman
Jason Vargas
Mike Carp
Maikel Cleto
Ezequiel Carrera
Ronny Cedeno
Garrett Olson

Projectithon

Last night I finished a good old fashioned ‘hack your xbox’ project, which turned out to be sort of interesting, in that the only hard parts were making sure I purchased the right parts off of ebay, and actually getting an XBOX (for free). So, once we do some network shenanigans (involving marrying an upstairs wireless router to the downstairs one), we’ll be able to watch various TV shows in the West Wing of our mansion.

If only I could put a coffee pot up there I doubt I would ever have to go downstairs at all. 

I’m still in Phase I of my television aquarium project, I lack the necessary sized socket to will allow me to actually remove the tube from the television, then its on to measuring the glass, and figuring out the necessary info to get the remote control to to turn the light on and off in the aquarium.

Though getting this far sort of made me stop and realize that I honestly have no interest in actually having any sort of pet fish, I just want to build this thing because it seems like an interesting thing to do. There’s also a second TV that just kinda came with the house, that might be fun to do the same thing with as well. Though if I’m going to destroy that one as well, I need to probably come up with some genius idea instead of just another aquarium.

Things You Shouldn’t Put on the Internet Pt. 1

I gave my boss the whatfore today in an email today, and Troy said I should probably start updating my resume again when I showed him what I sent. It’s not that bad, but its definitely going to make my week  a lot more interesting.

I’m not sure what has gotten into me the last couple of days, but I’m feeling really good, and the email was sort of sideproduct of that, I just didn’t want a bunch of corporate bullshit to intrude on my good mood so I told it off.

I’ll let you know it goes.

OPENING DAY (and new t-shirts)

Opening day is today, and I for one will be buying a six pack of rolling rock and watching Felix Hernandez mow down hitters like they are the Kansas City Royals of 2005.

Here is are 10 things which make me far too excited about an average team

1. Felix will finally take off the training wheels and start dominating
2. The GUTENHAMMER’s defense
3. No Richie Sexson or Jose Vidro
4. Ichiro, Ichiro, Ichiro
5. Getting too drunk  and calling Jonathan Papelbohn a douchebag
6. Extra inning games that end on a suicide squeeze
7. Adrian Beltre’s hams, Adrian Beltre’s happy feet dance, Adrian Beltre’s Calling his own check swing, Adrian Beltre swinging so hard he has to use his own bat to keep himself up, Adrian Beltre glaring at Yuniesky Betancourt for doing stupid things, Adrian Beltre Train Night, etc.
8. Dave Niehaus describing a sunny summer day
9. Making up nickames
10. Sailing the 7 seas with our wild-eyed, diabetic closer Brandon Morrow

In other news, GW and I spent part of yesterday daydreaming some new t-shirts to make, one of them is going to have Tony Danza and Bruce Springsteen and say “Who’s the Boss?” the other is going to be a t-shirt of the “Stop for me, it’s the Claw” sign modifications you see around town. I think I’m also going to do a “Don’t Suspect Your Friends, Report Them” in the style of those British police signs.