Category: General

Yet another historical article about a military pilot with l33t m4d sk1llz, this time involving landing a C-130 on an aircraft carrier.

It’s September already, which means that the 2004 summer-that-never-was is nearly over and the weather here in northeast Ohio will soon start providing us not-so-subtle reminders that winter is on its way.

It’s also time for my annual format and reinstall of Windows XP. At least once a year I find myself wanting to completely blow away everything in my system directory and reload the operating system just to remove all that cruft from applications that didn’t uninstall every last bit of themselves, hardware drivers that didn’t perfectly update themselves on top of older versions and simply to clear out the start menu that I find myself not keeping as ordered as I should.

Things are better than in the past, with the Windows 9x family, in which a format and re-install was needed at least every three months if you wanted to keep your system in top performance form. Windows XP itself would probably last for years without needing a re-install, provided I didn’t upgrade video drivers as soon as new betas were available and didn’t install and delete as many applications as I do.

Still, it keeps things interesting, providing I can find all the CDs for those programs I now have to reload. Otherwise, it simply becomes frustrating.

Ha! Going through old boxes and tossing everything I dont need led me to find my old BCGs.

For those that dont know, BCGs are birth-control glasses, given to you during basic training in the military.

Big, thick, heavy, ugly, brown plastic things that can survive anything you throw at them.

Ive been sitting here like a big dork, in fact, wearing them for the last twenty minutes, bringing back memories of my time with the US Army, both good and bad.

For those of you interested in helping out a service person, regardless of your views on the politics of Iraq, I point you towards Books For Soldiers.

 

For those of you who enjoyed the fan-made Batman: Dead End film that made its way across the ‘net a year ago, check out Grayson.

The five and a half “preview” revolves around Dick Grayson, the man behind the first Robin’s mask, as he sets out to find Batman’s killer. Obviously taking place much earlier in the comic run, as no mention of him as Nightwing among other continuity changes, the film is fun in it’s attempts to keep true to the comic costumes, rather than the “moviefied” slick versions of the same we’ve gotten over the years.