Have a Heart

Most people who know me know that my wife is a vegetarian. She’s not one of those annoying vegetarian who thinks she’s saving the world and everyone should line up behind her, she’s simply made a choice and honors others choices. Most of all, she understands that her animals not only should get meat, but actually require it. She’s spent a lot of time studying animal nutrition and wants to introduce more “real” meat into our animals diet.

Recently, she put out the call to friends and coworkers that, if they go deer hunting, they save the heart for our dogs. Well it just so happened that a gunshot-wounded deer staggered out of the woods in our neighborhood and died in our neighbor’s yard. After a few seconds of mourning, she ran out to request the heart for the dogs. Our neighbor, also a hunter, had already called his butcher friend to process the deer and within an hour she got her wish. She carried the bloody freezer bag the same way she would carry a dirty diaper. I knew I’d be the one serving up the heart to our dogs.

Now, the idea here is to provide a meal similar to what wolves would eat. Neither of us want to have to clean bloodstains off the floor & walls, so we decided to boil it. I chose a night where the wife was out of the house for a few hours, for obvious reasons. I boiled it for about a half hour, until it looked cooked. Then chopped it up into bite size pieces. The dogs don’t smell real meat very often and get pretty enthusiastic about it when they get the chance. I figured the small bites would prevent any potential choking.

The whole process was pretty disgusting, but at the same time appealed to that primal, caveman side that I believe all men have. You know, the side of your personality that wants get into a fight after watching a real good action movie? That’s the side I’m talking about. It smelled kind of steak-ish and, once it was chopped up, looked pretty much like steak too. One heart split between 4 dogs doesn’t go very far, so I mixed it up in some dry food. How did it go over? They loved it.

Bluetooth Xing

Do you have salespeople walking around your office making sales calls on their douchey little bluetooth earpieces.  I do.  Since humor is civilized hostility, I hung this on the wall near one of their favorite “paths”.

You may need to see it at full size to see the subtle alterations.  I think my message comes through just fine.

Why no posts?

Why no posts? I’ll tell you why no posts…

1. The wife got me a Wii for my birthday. As I stated when I first heard of the Wii, I’m not interested until I can control a lightsaber. That has happened with The Force Unleashed. How is it? It’s exactly the fanboy pantswetting experience I was hoping for.

2. The wife has happened upon another animal rescue. Our local recycling center apparently doubles as a leper colony for stray cats. One of the healthy ones is currently in our house and will be available for adoption once her tubes are tied.

3. One of our “Full Time” cats, Simon, had a brush with death. One of his back legs was punctured and became infected. The infection then spread everywhere. Luckily, we caught it in time and he is now back to 100%. We’re guessing our psycho-bim cat, Caitlin, attacked his leg while going through the cat door to the basement. The bite wound went the whole way through his leg. If I could prove it was her, I’d smack the crap out of her.

4. INVASION OF THE STINKBUGS! Stiinkbugs have attacked Western Pennsylvania. Since it’s still warmish out, we still have our air conditioners in. Seems these little suckers are able to squeeze in through the cracks between the window frame and the air conditioners. This past weekend was the worst. It was like a zombie movie. I’m trying to board up the windows while shopvac’ing up the ones who made it in. Little stinky zombies, I tell you.

5. So, if you know me, you know my wife is an animal lover. Well, her company uses glue traps to deal with any rodents that sneak into the building. The other day, a small snake happened to find its way into one of these traps. So, she digs it out of the dumpster and brings it home so we can safely return it to the wild. Now mind you, neither of us have any idea what kind of snake this is or whether or not it’s poisonous. She’s still determined to free this little wiggler. So, after some googling, she discovered that vegetable or olive oil breaks down the bonding agent in glue traps. Sure enough, after a considerable amount of wiggling, our little snake was free. He’s currently relaxing in an adhesive free container in our garage and will be returned to his woodland home tomorrow.

That’s why no posts.

The Keymaster

About time I wrote a little something about some of the programming I’ve done. Lately, I’ve been working on a secure password generator. As you may know, the most insecure passwords are also the most memorable. A truly secure password is a random string of characters containing letters and numbers, the longer the better. There have been sites to generate these for you, such as GenPass, but I wanted to write my own. Why? GenPass bases everything off of one master password. I wanted to integrate a master password with personal information to attain a pseudo-four factor type of authentication. In short, I wanted more options and to know the process by which the password is generated. Anyway here it is…

The Keymaster

Half My Paper Was Gone

I know, I’m a terrible person. Just one month after promising weekly updates, I take 2 weeks off. I suck. Here’s a freebie.

This is another Garageband experiment. I believe it was a slow day at work and I found myself toying around with Garageband again. Since it was a work computer, all I had was the stock stuff that came with the OS. So I decided to try to compose something with only Mac OS System sounds. This ensued…
Stream Track (Free) | Download FREE via Archive.org

The Brak Show (Brakstreet Remix)

When Apple released Garageband I really didn’t have any music projects on deck. I decided to try my hand at remixing. I could have chose a popular or current song, but I decided to remix the theme from one of my favorite Adult Swim shows. Here’s the “Brakstreet Remix” of the theme from “The Brak Show”.
Stream Track (Free) | Download FREE via Archive.org

Derivative

Here’s a song that appeared on my cd “Imperfect Circle”. I chose the name “Derivative” because the it’s based on a section of a song I ended up throwing away. The whole song grew out of this one little section. I think the Underworld influence is pretty strong on this as well as some Risky Business era Tangerine Dream.

Stream Track (Free) / Buy from Lulu.com

Surrealizations

Here’s a track from a collection I did around 1996. It’s the title track from the album “Surrealizations”. Not entirely sure what all influenced this one aside from the Keith Emerson wannabe solo at the end. I was big into playing with asymmetric meters at the time and used 2 in this one (7/4 & 5/4). Enjoy!

Stream Track (Free) /Buy from Lulu.com

The silence is broken…

Finally, after a year and a half of owning the domain, I’m finally doing something with it. Since the Ball of Confusion has devolved into a linkblog, I’ll use this as a place to post original content. I’ll try to post at least one thing a week. I’ll be including my programs, music, wallpaper, and photography all into this one site. Stay tuned for more.