Omphaloskepsis  -

+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Psi Phi site updated!

I've recently updated the Psi Phi Star Trek Books site. Some of the updated pages include the Book News page and the Upcoming Books page. A revised home page will be posted shortly!

davidh

+ 0 - 0 | § ¶To do, the week of Monday, July 16, 2007

Monday:
8:00am — Work
1:00pm — Report to Peoria County Courthouse for jury duty.
5:00pm — Pick up prescription for Patches I.
7:00pm — Kyle XY (Family Channel).
8:00pm — GRΣΣK (Family Channel).
9:00pm — Whose Line is it Anyway? (Family Channel).

Tuesday:
9:00am — Report for jury duty.
?:??am — Call Dr. S. to re-schedule appt. for after jury duty.
4:00pm — Haircut.
7:00pm — Appt. with S.C.
8:00pm — Big Brother 8 (CBS).
9:00pm — Pirate Master (CBS).

Wednesday:
«Either»
9:00am — Report to courthouse for jury duty.
4:45pm — Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rave Motion Pictures).
8:00pm — Last Comic Standing (NBC).
«Or»
8:00am — Work.
6:30pm — Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rave Motion Pictures).
9:00pm — Last Comic Standing (nbc.com).
«/Either»

Thursday:
8:00am — Work.
7:00pm — Big Brother 8 (CBS).
8:30pm — Jukebox Comedy Club: Amateur night, plus Paul and Storm.

Friday:
8:00am — Work.
8:00pm — Doctor Who (Sci-Fi Channel).

Saturday:
TBD.

Sunday:
TBD.

davidh

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Blogger's Bash, 2007-05-29

Another Blogger's Bash tonight! This time, I'm actually liveblogging.

Bill Dennis (The Peoria Pundit, http://www.peoriapundit.com/)
Brad Carter (former candidate for Peoria city council, http://blog.carterforfreedom.com/)
John Arussa(?) (PeoriaIllinoisan, http://peoriaillinoisan.blogpeoria.com/)
Mike Tietjen (Peoria County Politics, http://peoriacountypolitics.blogspot.com/)
David Henderson (Omphaloskepsis, http://www.psiphi.org/cgi/blog/)
Diane Vespa (Peoria Rocks, http://peoriarocks.blogspot.com/)
Laura "Eyebrows" and Garth McGee (http://eyebrowsmcgee.blogspot.com/)
C.J. Summers (Peoria Chronicle, http://peoriachronicle.com/)

At One World

Twitter evangelism from Bill

PeoriaIllinoisan taking a trip to D.C.

Discussion of lawyering tasks.

Computer rejecting Microsoft products. Keeping the user safe!
[7:48]

Discussion of Main Street traffic forum

Second ambulance in 30 minutes

"I'm going to flush your DNS cache."
"Are you sure you should do that in mixed company?"
-- Bill (to Diane), David
[8:04pm]

Food arrives for them what ordered some.

Bill's site going faster now

John McCain discussion, someone called him a nasty name, lectured him on what is and isn't torture
[8:17pm]

Diane reads my site, calls my liveblogging "cute". ["reads" is present progressive, not present simple.]

Joined Twitter http://twitter.com/psiphiorg

City council member Gary Sandburg rode by on his motorcycle a while ago, presumably on his way to either attend the Main Street traffic forum, or go drinking. Peoria State Senator Dave Koehler was in the restaurant, but didn't stop over to say hi. We are all sad. I guess.

Scary videos on YouTube... stereogram where you get your face up close, then zombie jumps in with scream!

Everyday videos. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvDxUoadG6A
[9:14pm]

I've been nudged to start commenting again.
[9:27pm]

Later in the evening, after many had left, things got more interesting...

"Mike Bailey is an annoying little popcorn fart." -- Bill Dennis

"Brad's Bootylicious Badonkadonk Blog" -- Brad Carter

"The word of the day is titillating." -- Brad Carter

Nancy Grace video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPY7b35vF4

Talk about wanting to widen Wisconsin Avenue, or Northmoor.

Peoria's "new" city buses are just old buses from Champaign. Discussion about how poor Peoria's public transportation system is.

"One Word" is where Bill said the Bash would be held. One World is the name of the place.

Discussion about whether men or women benefit more from getting married. Going to other related issues. Rather quite interesting, but I'm going to skip over the details.

"You write this down-- No! Just kidding." -- Name withheld.

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶"Heroes" spinoff announced

In addition to a second season, we're also going to get a spin-off, Heroes: Origins. The two series will total 30 episodes next season, though it has not been announced how those 30 will be split between the two series. (A report from an NBC insider said Heroes will get a regular 22-episode season, and that there will be 8 Origins episodes, but that hasn't been confirmed yet.)

Read the original press release from NBC, or The Futon Critic's copy.

The key passage:

NBC "bulks up" with 30 combined episodes of Heroes and Heroes: Origins, an innovative new spin-off that each week will introduce a new character—one of whom will be chosen by viewers through the Heroes website on NBC.com to become a cast regular the following season.

davidh

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Election results

Captain: Adam Morand (his second consecutive semester)
First Officer: (left open, to be elected during the New Member Meeting next semester)
Grand Nagus: Mike "Baby Seal" Niiro (his first semester, formerly First Officer)
Communications Officer: Ashley Miller (her second consecutive semester)
Chief of Operations: David Henderson (my twenty-fifth total semester, eighteenth consecutive)
Constable: "Anti-"Mike Watson (his second total semester, also formerly Communications Officer)

So three of the five elected positions kept their current officers, one re-elected a former officeholder, and only one has someone new to the position. A rather stable transition, especially for one that occurs between school years.

davidh

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶End of the Semester Party, May 2007

Tonight's the Psi Phi End of the Semester Party. There are 16 people here at the moment; at least five others have been here at some point.

Among the movies we've watched tonight (or rather, that have been shown tonight): Bubba Hotep (Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) fights zombies who invade his nursing home; John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) also lives there, having been dyed black as a disguise), Plan 9 From Outer Space (almost starring Bela Lugosi), and The Gamers (a movie about role-playing gamers).

The parties have changed in character over the past few semesters. Originally, we watched a couple of movies from roughly 8pm to midnight, held the final meeting of the year from midnight to about 2am, then watched one more movie starting at 2am. But for the past few semesters, movie-watching has been a minor part of the evening... in fact, at the moment, I am the only person watching the TV (and even now, I'm blogging as well). Other things that are going on: Three people are watching some sort of video on someone else's computer screen, a couple of people are role-playing from a book, five people are playing RoboRally (another couple are watching), somebody's sleeping under the pool table, and someone's updating the treasury.

The officer candidates are interesting... there are eight people running for Captain, which is a lot more than usual. Since current Grand Nagus (treasurer) Ryan is graduating this semester, there is no incumbent, but only two people are running (one who's also running for Captain, and one who was nominated in absentia and hasn't confirmed whether or not he's actually interested in running). So we might need to re-open nominations for that position (which will likely use up all the runoff ballots I printed off).

More later...

davidh

+ 3 - 1 | § ¶Weekend update

I didn't do a whole lot this weekend, but there was still a little excitement...

My mom and Dan went to Iowa to visit my grandmother and my great-great-aunt on Friday. They were supposed to come back today (Sunday), but the car broke down about 20 miles in from the Illinois border, and Josh had to drive out to help them. They'll be coming back Monday sometime, hopefully.

Earlier today, we watched Ju-on: The Grudge, the Japanese remake of Ju-on and "premake" of The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Or rather, I watched it, and Josh watched part of it and slept through the rest.

In other news, Marisa is moving out of the house, going to live in Bloomington-Normal. So it'll soon be just me and Josh living here again. That might be a little weird, so I might start looking for another roommate. However, given that the bathroom still isn't done, it might be difficult to get somebody who would be willing to put up with that.

I didn't get seriously April Fools'ed today, nor did I play any jokes. However, I was amused by this year's entry in Google's annual April Fools' Day gag, Google TiSP, a new way to connect to the internet. They actually had two this year, the other one being Gmail Paper.

Also, there was a collaborative gag over at TrekBBS's Trek Literature board, where several of the Star Trek writers claimed to be involved with a Star Trek TV reality/game show called Starfleet Academy, to be produced by Survivor's Mark Burnett. The thread is here, though the discussion doesn't begin until TG Theodore's March 31 post, about halfway down the second page.

This coming Tuesday night, I'm going to go see Peter Robinson, one of President Reagan's speechwriters, and the one who wrote the "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech, speak at Reagan's alma mater, Eureka College. He will be talking about his book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Should be interesting.

I guess that's about it. Time for bed.

davidh

+ 2 - 3 | § ¶Brother's birthday

Monday evening, I went over to Bloomington-Normal for my brother Dan's 25th birthday party. Mom and Dad were both there, as were several of Dan's friends. We had pizza (what would a Henderson family gathering be without pizza?) and birthday cake.

Three of Dan's friends, Nate, Alan, and Jake, played a game of Cranium with Dan and me. Nate and Alan were on one team, Dan and I were on another team, and Jake was on both teams, by switching each card. (He sat out on cards that were direct competition between the two teams, but played all of them which were challenges for one team only.) Our team got to an early lead, getting about two thirds of the way around the board while the other team was only about a quarter of the way around. But then we got stuck at the three-quarters mark, and the other team got some pretty good die rolls and a few two-turns-in-a-row things, racing around us to win the game.

It was pretty late when we finished, but I got home around midnight (IIRC) and went to bed, saving Prison Break and 24 for later in the week.

davidh

+ 2 - 4 | § ¶What's been happening recently...

Let's see... since the first of the year, the following things have happened:

One of my aunts (Bev, my dad's half-sister), one of my cats (Ronnie, the youngest of the family), and one of my uncles (Willis, my dad's half-brother) died, all within the first three weeks of the year. January pretty much sucked.

Josh moved back to town. He is currently residing here, though we are not "together". Interestingly, we have been much better friends now that we are not involved romantically.

I went to see 300 with several members of Psi Phi. At Steak 'n Shake afterwards, we unanimously agreed that it was awesome. (And since Will was there, that's saying a lot. Will abstains from or opposes nearly every vote in the club.)

I was very fearful of losing my job, due to the side-effects of depression. As a compromise, I went from full-time to part-time, which lost me the benefit of my employer paying my health insurance premiums, so now I have to pay a couple hundred dollars extra per month to keep that. Fortunately, things seem to have settled down for the most part, after a change of medication, so I hope to go back to full-time soon.

The bathroom is significantly closer to completion. Joe, Dad, and I worked on putting up drywall and installing the new window, so now we don't have exposed 2x4s everywhere. We also got a new toilet put in. There's still no sink (we're going to wait until after we get the floor tiled), but it's coming along.

I finally saw Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and I nearly laughed my lungs out. I had purchased the movie at Wal*Mart, and it came with a free "Glorious Kazakhstan" T-shirt. I wore that to work one day last week, but nobody seemed to notice.

I've been to the Jukebox comedy club three or four times. Joe has a routine that he gives on open mic night (Thursdays), and he's getting pretty good at it. After the amateurs perform, they have the headliner from that Friday's show perform. One that I really enjoyed was Dan St. Paul.

Hmm... seems like there was more, but I suppose that's enough for now. I hope to blog on a more regular basis in the future.

davidh

+ 5 - 2 | § ¶I am not dead.

In case anybody was wondering.

I hope to have a slightly more detailed update soon.

davidh

+ 4 - 4 | § ¶Blogger's Bash, 2007-02-03

Peoria Pundit Bill Dennis hosted a Blogger's Bash tonight at The Sports Page, a neighborhood bar/restaurant over on Sheridan Rd., just north of McClure, starting at 7:00pm. I went, as did Josh (who, by the way, returned to Peoria a couple of weeks ago and is staying at my house, but only as a friend). Read on for my "time-delayed liveblogging". . . (more)

+ 5 - 3 | § ¶Death

When I got back from the trip to South Dakota (more about the trip in a later post), I found out from my mom that her dog Kodiak, or Kodi as we called him, had died while we were gone. As I recall, Mom had gotten Kodi well over fifteen years ago, back when I still lived with her part-time. He was pretty old, having arthritis that made it hard to go up and down the few steps in the backyard, but he was still mobile and friendly. He is now buried in the back yard at Mom's house. I miss him.

Yesterday, my aunt Bev died. She's my dad's older sister, and the news seems to have hit him particularly hard. He's gone up to the Chicago area, where she, her husband Jim, and several of our relatives live. I plan on going up there for the funeral as well, though I don't yet know what day that will be. Her death hasn't quite sunk in for me yet. I've known her practically all my life... she would come visit my grandmother a few times a year when I was young, I visited her at least once during my year at IMSA, and I've gone to see her several times with my dad over the years.

Right now, I'm really, really hoping that the "bad things come in threes" thing doesn't happen now.

davidh