Tomorrow’s my Birthday! Please email me if you would like a list of gift ideas, I have plenty in all price ranges. Today’s post is a cat story. For all of you out there that don’t like cats, please see the podcast links. For those of you that are cat fans, I’m sure this story is neither original or extraordinary, however it is amusing so if you’re interested in hearing it, please read on, for those that are not, please see request for non-cat lovers.

A few years ago we picked up the modern day cat’s favorite toy, the almighty laser pointer. All the cats loved it, especially our male Spike, he would chase the laser non stop for as long as he had the energy. He even recognized the sound of the key chain the pointer was on and would come running whenever he heard it being picked up. Well the batteries died out long ago, and the pointer itself lost to the forgotten realm of time, and even though I saw one at the grocery store now and again, we always passed it by.

I was shopping by myself on Sunday as the wifey was out of town and I came across one in the kitty section and figured I’d pick it up. I got it home and after unpacking the groceries, pulled it out, cut off the top and pulled it out. I added the batteries and screwed the cap back on, during which time I jingled the key chain that it came on. Out of a superman movie, a white blur came flying into the room and skidded to a halt in front of the sofa in which I was sitting. Spike looked up at me quickly, then began scanning the floor in earnest for the little red dot he know had to be there somewhere. Unable to resist his cat like charms, I obliged him and turned on the pointer which he bounded after with more energy than I have seen him exhibit in as long as I can remember. He ran from one end of the house to the other chasing the beloved red dot, ran in circles trying to catch it, and attempted to sneak up on it and pounce on it every now and again if it stopped in one place for to long.

As Spike is not the most light footed or graceful of cats, his kathumping around the house attracted the attention of the other cats and brought them into the room looking around curiously. The older of the cats followed the dot with her eyes, but would not case after it unless it was within arms reach. If it was close enough she would make an obligatory lunge at it, or try to snap at it if the dot were to hover on her front paw for a few seconds. The youngest kitten didn’t quite seem to know what to make of the mysterious red dot. She spent a good deal of time staring at it, following it around, but never attacking it with the zeal that Spike would. That is until she watched him for about 10 minutes chasing it like a crazed lunatic. Once he wore down, and she had a much better idea of what to do with the strange red dot, she warmed up to it nicely and chased it down with a much more enthusiastic attitude.

The day after my wife had gotten home from her trip to the Midwest, I decided to play a very small trick on her, and left the laser pointer on the ironing board, knowing full well that at some point she would want to but the ironing board away and would have to pick up the laser pointer to do so, when she did, Spike would come running. I found out later that day that my plan had worked perfectly. As soon as she picked it up, Spike came running, looked up at her for a second or two, then began to scan the ground excitedly for the dot. He was too cute to resist, so my wife played with him for awhile and he got some much needed exercise. He is most definitely a very nutty cat, but he’s our nutty cat and we all love him dearly.

For the past couple of months or so I’ve been really getting into Podcasts. Not as something I would do personally, but instead enjoying the labors of others. I started out listening to some of these on a Windows XP box using I-Tunes however have since switched over to mainly using my Linux (Kubuntu Edgy Efft) Laptop since I carry that to and from the office on the train. I’ve played with a couple of podcast programs on Linux and have settled on gPodder as my reader of choice. It’s not the absolute best program but it does all I need it to with a relatively minimal amount of fuss. I could think of a couple of improvements to make to it, but I’ll save those for the developers and see what they have to say.

I highly recommend the following podcasts to anyone. Read the description and if you haven’t already done so, check them out.

If you have any podcasts that you enjoy, please feel free to let me know and I’d be happy to listen to it and if I like it, I’ll throw out a plug. Thanks.

Welcome to the reincarnation of Vision Knights. Back in 2003, I started my blog over at Blogger and have since then been an off again on again blogger, however I realized yesterday that I didn’t post a single blog in the year 2006. I’m kind of disappointed in that as we did a number of noteworthy things that I didn’t even mention. So I’m attempting to get back on track. I went to blogger to attempt to log in to post a recently written blog and discovered that even though my web page is still up at www.josephrinman.blogspot.com my blogger account has been deleted. I have written to them, however I haven’t heard anything back from them as of yet, and even if they do re-enable my account I have been a fan of WordPress for quite some time and was excited to see that you can now get a free WordPress blog from their site. I spent some time going through my old posts and copying them all to Word files, so there is a possibility that I may be able to port them over to this blog, provided I can change the date of the posts as I am posting them. As I haven’t spent much time exploring my new blog here at WordPress I have yet to find out what bells and whistles I have available to me.

I have a few posts I’ve written over the past couple of days so I look forward to being able to upload them to this site, editing my default links, and working to customize this blog to see what I can come up with. Thank you all for visiting and I hope you stop by again soon to see what changes have been made.

Joseph R. Inman

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get my post that I wrote up yesterday on line last night so I might either do both tonight, or just post a day behind, we’ll have to see what ends up working out. Today’s post, which I mentioned briefly in my previous post is about my Wii story.

Initially I was looking forward to the release of the PS3 as I am a huge PS2 fan and a general Sony fan all around, however the more I read and saw about the new Nintendo Wii the more I began thinking that the Wii might be a better over all choice for the family instead of trying to convince CC that we needed to spend $600 on yet another video game system. However since the Wii was only $250 that was a much easier system to argue for. I decided to talk with my parents to see if that’s what they wanted to get us for Christmas, (it was between that and a new vacuum, thankfully fun won out over function) they agreed and began looking for the new Wii. I figured that since they live in a fairly rural area it would be easier for them than it would be for me, but two weeks later (around the middle of December) they hadn’t had any luck and asked if they could send us the money and we could look for it here in Baltimore.

Despite my best efforts there was not a Wii to be found anywhere. There were a couple of days when we were up by 5:00 AM to travel to various stores all of which were either occupied by campers who had been waiting all night, or stores that just weren’t getting any in. So we gave up our hopes for a Christmas Wii and knew that we’d get one about a week or two after Christmas once the initial excitement died down. No such luck.

One particular day, about two weeks after Christmas, CC and I woke up at 5, drove to a Target, waited until 8:00 for the store to open, only to find that they hadn’t had any systems shipped to them in over 6 weeks. By the time I drove to another store, there were already over 50 people standing in line. The same was to be found at Best Buy, Circuit City, Toys R Us and Game Stop. I did end up picking up an extra controller though which I figured we would need eventually when we finally got our Wii in hand.

Saturday I happened to be up somewhat early and decided to hit Target again as they opened in hopes that maybe they had gotten an overnight shipment of a Wii that I could score, when I got to the store I was informed that they hadn’t gotten any, but that they had 20 for the next day Sales Event. So I again planned for another early morning in the Target parking lot.

Since I get up at 4:00 every morning I tend to wake up early, even on the weekends, but tend to go back to bed until about 9 or 10 when possible. This time though I woke up, threw on some clothes, packed up my laptop and threw on a ski jacket and gloves because I knew that at some point I would be waiting outside. I decided to swing by Wal-Mart first just to see if they had gotten any in, and since it is a 24 hour store I could hit them up on my way to Target, no luck at Wal-Mart so it was on to the Target parking lot.

I was the first one there. No line outside the door, no one parked in the customer parking lot, and only a few cars in the Employee parking lot. So I picked a spot which would allow me a good view of the rest of the parking lot to keep an eye on things and fired up the laptop to watch some back episodes of Diggnation, GeekBrief.tv, and Mugglecast. The laptop battery only lasted about an hour and a half or so, so I ended up just kind of sitting around for a bit. I should have brought a pad of paper and some pens and I could have done a post while I was waiting. Oh well. The next person showed up around 5:15 or so, and then another around 5:45.

I ran into some “trouble” around 7:00 when I desperately had to use the facilities. I was nervous that if I left I would lose my place in line, however as time went on, I realized I would never be able to hold it for the additional hour, plus any time it took once we got in the store. I finally decided to make a break for it, leave the car where it was, and walk to a nearby gas station. When I returned I got back in the car and resumed my place in line.

By 7:30 there were about 10 people in the parking lot. Up until that time everyone was waiting patiently and politely inside their cars so as to stay warm (outside temperature was around 30 degrees or so) at 7:30 though someone decided that it was time to go wait in line outside the store so everyone began getting out of their cars to stand in line. I thew on my ski jacket and gloves and walked up to the building, the two women that had gotten out of their cars first smiled at me and told me that I was clearly the first one there that morning so I could “cut” to the front of the line so I could be the first to get one. Everyone was in good spirits and very well behaved, mostly because we all knew we would most likely be getting one.

Around 7:55 an employee (Store Manager?) came out and said that the good news was that they had gotten some Wii’s in, but the bad news was that they only had 3. After a short stunned silence, the Manager cracked a smile and said he was only joking and that they had 20 so it looked like everyone in the line would be able to get one so he wasn’t going to assign tickets. Finally after waiting for three and a half hours that day (and about 3 months before then) at 8:00 I was allowed into the building, where we all actually walked calmly to the Electronics department where they had the Wii’s behind the customer service kiosk. I picked up the Wii and also purchased Zelda. I asked if they had any extra Nanchuck’s but they said they only had 1 additional controller and if I wanted to purchase that, I declined as I only needed a Nanchuck and checked out.

Just as I brought it home, the kids dad showed up to take them for the day so the kids had to just look at the box before they had to leave. That left CC and I alone to set it up, play a few games and get all the parts hooked up. We had a few other errands to do that do so we couldn’t devote ourselves to the Wii entirely, but were able to get used to at least create our Mii’s which was a blast. If you haven’t already looked into a Wii, I would highly recommend it.

It’s been so long since the last time I’ve blogged that I hardly know where to begin. It’d be easy to say that nothing has happened and that’s why I’ve been so lax in my posting, but that isn’t really the case. Mostly it a large quantity of laziness with a sprinkling of priorities and a health amount of the lack of hours in a given day. I do have a fairly large amount of time in which I COULD blog as I have a 45 minute train ride in the morning and a 45 minute train ride in the afternoon and usually about 30 minutes in the train station for the afternoon as well but I’ve been spending most of that time watching video Podcasts. The ones I’ve really been enjoying of late have been Diggnation, Geekbrief.tv, The Food Guru, and Ask a Ninja. Mix that in with a few audio podcasts such as Matt’s Today in History, History According to Bob, and Mugglecast and you can see why even though I have a lot of theoretical time, my actual blogging time is much less. To be honest, today’s post probably wouldn’t have occurred except that I don’t have any headphones with me today so I can’t listen to anything without severely annoying my fellow commuters. But I think this may be a blessing in disguise because I think I’m going to try to start creating a post a day before I allow myself the “treat” of watching a podcast, and since most of the podcasts aren’t creating new videos every day, all I’ve really been doing is catching up on older shows.

Well to start with I suppose I will start with the bad news side of things so that I can end on a positive note. My Mother-in-law called last night to inform my wife that her Grandfather passed away on Sunday. This is a particularly tough blow to the family because my wife’s Aunt Bev passed away just a few months ago after everyone just began to get their hopes up regarding her recovery from Cancer. My wife’s cousin also passed away a month or so as well so they can’t quite seem to get a break. Unlike the previous passings however we are now in a spot in which to get my wife out to the Midwest to go see the rest of the family for services later on this week. She’s going to be flying out on Friday and coming back late Monday night and she’ll be meeting her Mother who will be flying in from New Orleans herself. I’m a bit sad I can’t go with her as she was with me for the passing of both of my Grandparents however at least she’ll be able to see the rest of her family which she has wanted to do since the passing of her Aunt Bev.

I also just recently lost someone rather close to me as well back in January. He was my Aunt’s Brother-in-Law but he’s known my family for years (since my mom was a teenager I believe) and as he was a Catholic priest he did all of the family’s religious ceremonies so I’ve known him all my life. He was an experienced pilot but hit some freakish weather on takeoff and wasn’t able to recover. I was able to back to town for a few days and see everyone which was a small bit of happiness in an otherwise unhappy situation.

On the whole though things have been going very well for the past year or so. Work is still going well for me, and it looks as though CC will be getting a full time teaching position this fall at the school she’s been working at for the past couple of years. If she does get the full position we’ll switch over our heath insurance to the state plan which is much sweeter than mine currently is. The extra money will also be quite welcome.

The most recent addition to our family has been a new video game console, the wii. This is a story in and of itself so I believe I’ll do an entire post on it tomorrow.

Well it has been awhile since I’ve written here huh? I can’t believe it’s June already. Hopefully I’ll get some more time to write soon as I’ve got a lot of stuff (unfortunatly none of it’s very interesting) going on in my life. Good for keeping busy, bad for blogging. Any minute now I’ll be able to do some more writing.

Well for anyone that has checked out the blog over the past week, you might notice that today’s blog looks a bit different. (And 100% Better!) And it’s all thanks to Connie. She offered to spruce up my site (I must have been butchering it to baddly for her ) and I think she did an INCREDIBLE job with it. It’s absolutly stunning. Of course I’ll continue to tweak it and add new things (with her help probably) but this is a great site. Check back next week for some new pics (I’m either going to set them statically or do a “Pic of the Week” sort of thing.) but I look forward to contineing to work on this in the future. Thanks again Connie.

posted by Joe at 12:11 PM   

Well it’s been quite a week for me in the computer world. In one week I’ve managed (thanks to the efforts of some very helpful people ) to get my Blog up and running, comments installed, a BBS link, and a guestbook. And last night I published my first web site. VisionQuest. It’s still very cheesy, but it does have a picture gallery of some pics I’ve taken with my digital camera over the past year or so. Using a program called NetObjects Fusion 7.0 and a free web site from web1000 I was actually able to get the site up and running in about 30 minutes of actual work. Very simple, very easy (kind of like me!) but now I can spend countless hours tweeking it, adding pics, and seeing what else I can throw up on there. Hopefully next weeks posts will be a little less based on what I’ve accomplished with online stuff and a bit more thought provoking (at the very least I hope for them to at least be entertaining!) Thanks again to everyone that’s helped out and I want to thank everyone who’s taken the time to comment on my various ramblings. See you all on the Blog.

Well it’s a great day to work on the Blog and all my links! Why you ask? Well I’ll tell you. Last night while skiing the bumbs I twisted my knee a bit. Not baddly, just enough to take some of the strengh out of it. That wasn’t the bad part though, what was, were the flashbacks of my knee surgery (same knee) I had had about 5 years previously.  All I could think about was the surgery, and the rehab, and the ROYAL pain in the ass all that would be if I had to endure that again. So I decided to just pack up my stuff and head out for the day, no use trying to force myself into something that would just get me even more hurt later. So today I was going to take the day off of work, lay around in bed, watch some movies, read my new Blog Book (BLOG ON The Essential Guide to Building Dynamic Weblogs by Todd Stauffer) and hobble over to my computer to work on the web log. Unfortunatly my co-worker decided to do the same and called me at 7:30 to tell me he was staying home. So up I got, took a shower and came in to work after all. Such a good doobie I am. Thankfully I have a wonderful job that I can still sit around here and work on my weblog anyway. Actually today I’ll probably be spending some time setting up the BBS with various forums for comments and discussions. And in case anyone’s keeping a running track, I found my Composition Book last night. It was in a box of books that’s still in the basement. Now I can add stuff to that to transfer to the Blog at a later time. I know everyone was DEEPLY concerned about that.

Ok, that settles it, I’m a fully fledged nerd. Not that I didn’t know this before, but I’m thinking right now it’s as official as it can get. I guess I owe a bit of an explination. Here goes. Earlier today I was talking to Tiara and telling her I needed to get my domain named registered so I could set up my web site out of my house. So she gave me a site. www.web1000.com which boasts free 50 MB web sites. So I poke around, decide it’s legit, and sign up. After I signed up, I log back into their site under their webmaster login prompt (heh, I’m a Webmaster now *flex*) and what little bit of information does it give me? Why nothing other than a free BBS, all you have to do is click the link to activate it, click the link to it, and log in as admin. There it is, that’s it. Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building. God I’m such a nerd. But like any good nerd, I’m going to post the link here for now, and as soon as I figure out how to link items to the Right side of my web page (as opposed to the left side where all my current links are) then I’ll make the perminant link. (if anyone knows how to link to the right side of the page, please leave me a message, thanks). Joe’s Kick Ass Bulletin Board System Ok, I’m done now, I need to get ready to go skiing. I’ll start posting stories to my BBS tomorrow. Some of the featured discussions will be on Harry Potter, skiing, computers, blogging, aquariums, and of course…my greatness. Until then my loyal web monkies, adieu.