Wells Blog

I ordered it! It should be coming out July 1st, and has a 3-8 day shipping time. Woo hoo!

This thing turned into a bit of a ramble, so just cope…

So, a friend of mine, and a good friend of a lot of people I know, passed away on Monday. Apparently he fell in a climbing accident, though there is still some amount of investigation going on concerning it. Anyway, that is not what this post is about.

This is about my feelings and approach to his death, and my observations of how others are dealing with it. Yes, I understand it is a sad event to have happen, and that he will be missed. I get it. But I just don’t seem to have the same sense of loss that everyone else is having. Am I just more cold-hearted than other people, or did I just not know him as well, or what?

Perhaps it has something to do with my approach to life in the first place. I feel that you should look towards the good things in life, and the good things about any situation, and try to pay as little homage to the bad things as you can. As such, I look at his death and I think, “Well, at least he passed away doing something that he truly loved doing.” Yeah, little comfort for his family and all, but that is how I look at things. This is the same way I am with my father passing away… he passed away getting the sailboat ready for a little afternoon sail, something he loved doing.

I think that this approach to life in general is what I feel is making me so susceptible to high stress levels. I normally lead a very low-stress lifestyle simply due to the approach I take on things. It isn’t that I have a bunch of low-stress things that I do, because I can see how a lot of the things that I do would be considered quite high stress, but my way of dealing with things in general simply reduces those stress inducers to levels that make life quite easy for me. So, when I am placed in a situation like I am feeling right now where there seems to be a lot of stress on me right now and I am seeing physical effects (I developed a god-damned EYE TWITCH!) I just don’t know how to cope with it because I am not experienced in it in the first place. Other people can probably go through the stress that I am going through and barely feel it, simply because they are accustomed to dealing with it in the first place because it has happened so often to them. I don’t allow my stress levels to reach this point in the first place, so I am not experienced in it and quite frankly don’t know how to react.

Set 10196 has been released, or at least announced. It is a power functions carousel, about the size of Cafe Corners.

There is discussion on Brickset.com: http://www.brickset.com/news/article/?ID=290

There is also a nice set of pictures of it here: http://www.mybricks.de/treffen/obernau/fotos/index.php?action=showgallery&pfad=2009-Sets

From what I have seen of it so far, there are only a couple of things that I don’t necessarily like about it:

• Stickers. Stickers are the bane of existence for serious Lego collectors, particularly when they span more than one brick. Over time, they lose their stickiness and start to fall off, and they pretty much set that particular brick for only one usage… that particular set.
• The power functions elements (motor and battery box) should be better concealed… particularly the battery box. I think that some sort of switching mechanism for the battery box, like what they did with the AT-AT walker, would be really nice. I am seriously thinking of getting this set and dumping the battery box for the rechargeable Lithium Ion battery that is now available.

Overall a nice looking set that I think I will be adding to my collection.

The best memory I have of alcohol doing strange things to people was when my ship was pulled into Sandog, and one of my buddies had just received a Dear John letter. He wrote out a big letter back calling his ex all kinds of nasty things, put it in the mail box, then went out on the town to get rip-roaring drunk.

He came back later that night completely gone, and decides that he really doesn’t want to say all of those things to his ex, so he tries to break into the post office and retrieve the letter.

Shore Patrol picked him up trying to scale a barbed wire fence at 2am, returned him to the ship, where he then spent the next 45 days on restriction and lost a chevron.

The kicker? It turns out he had put the letter in the ships mailbox, and it had yet to actually get transferred to the base’s postal system, so even if he had managed to get into the post office on base, he would never have found the letter.

So today I rode for the Intrepid Fallen Heroes, a fund to benefit veterans and their families who have either been injured or been killed. The ride left from Gainesville HD and went out to a number of different bars in the area: Newberry, Fanning Springs, High Springs, then finally the Eagles Club in Gainesville.

It was escorted by the Enforcers MC, which appears to be a good group. I was there with the Legion Riders, but it really appears to me that our group, at least to some extent, really doesn’t know much about group riding. They also seem to want to always stick to the main roads, not having any sort of adventurous spirit or desire to go out onto the back roads of the area to get to different places. I won’t even go into the mileage that these guys go, because it isn’t all that much. I have yet to go on a ride with these guys where I have had a need to fill up the tank on my bike, and I can only go about 100 miles before going to the reserve.

Really, I think my problem is that I truly “Live to Ride”, whereas most of these other riders do it more for the bar hopping and stuff like that. I like nothing more than to be out there on the open road, riding and seeing the countryside.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a Lego X-Wing fighter (set 6212). I hadn’t built it until tonight because of schedule and stuff, but tonight I sat down and put it together.

Really it is a quick build, only taking me about 90 minutes while watching an episode of Scrubs on the Tivo and a couple of other things.

The first thing you build is the X-Wing mechanical section. The only time I have ever seen one of these center gear pieces is when I built the ferris wheel (Set 4957), which was a real pain in the butt to build because of the fragility of the structure. My cat later destroyed it by knocking it over on a table.

After this you build the four wings for the craft. Easy portion of the build, and a bit repetitious. It is interesting how they are going to have the wings expand out, however.

The next step is to build the nose of the craft, which is pretty straightforward, really. Once that is done, you simply snap it onto the front of the core of the aircraft and everything is done!

OK… just had a very odd dream…

Basically, imagine a hostage situation in a middle-eastern country (unspecified) where a single male is taken hostage in a religious building by terrorists. He stalls them, etc. from killing him, there is a bit of a fire bomb thrown around, etc. but in the end he is being dragged somewhere to be executed as an infidel when *thump* the terrorist falls over dead from a silenced round.

A pair of special forces types walk up, and one of them says to the other “You get the hostage… he’s BoP. You shot the terrorist, the hostage is yours.”

Yes… he really said this in my dream. Either too much John Ringo, too much WoW, or both.

So, took off yesterday morning and headed east out to Palatka. No big deal there, though there were a larger number of bikes on the road than usual because of bike week. On  the east side of Palatka I had decided to take a different way out to the coast, which included going through a place called Dinner Island. What the map didn’t mention is that most of this road happens to be a dirt bog, which is kind of hard on the bike.

After wasting a good hour trying to figure out which way to go, I gave up and headed back to route 100 and went the normal way. The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful, except that getting through Daytona took about three hours. That plus the mud bog set me back so far in time that I got a room just south of Ft. Pierce on the beach.

Had dinner at a place called High Tides on the beach. While the clam chowder was good, the fish and chips left something to be desired. The fish breading was thick and salty, and I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it all. I don’t really recommend going to this place ever again.

OK, so a class I am taking right now is going through the whole software specification thing. This is the full-blown deal, with a specification being written up by committee, etc. I just got done writing the data design portion of the specification, which was the only thing that I had to write.

Of course, what they don’t mention is that in order for someone to write this particular section, you have to know just about everything else about the specification first. Why the hell this is part 2 of an eight part section is beyond me, because it is probably the last thing you really want to do in the specification, at least when it comes to finalizing the specification.

Anyway, it is nice to know that this portion is just about done. For this class we all have to give an oral presentation on parts of it. I already did my presentation about a month ago on a portion of it, so I am completely done in that regard. Makes life nice and easy for me now, because all I have to do now is run around and look busy and stuff.

Coding this beast is going to be interesting, I should mention. I am not a java programmer by any means, so learning how to program this thing should be different and an experience for me. At least I’ll be able to take this thing and eventually play with it in other ways once the class is over.

Just woke up from a nap, and I think I have finally broken the cold. Woke up sweating profusely, etc.

Had a dream earlier in which I was in some sort of boot camp, but there was flooding or something. It was odd. I was in a position where I already knew everything that they were going to teach, but just going through the motions until graduation or something. I wonder if this is telling me something.