Super Geek

This past weekend was amazingly fun. I spent the weekend in Milwaukee with some dear friends. Friday night, we went out for some beers, reminiscing, and oggling of wenches. The beer was good. The reminiscing was wonderful. The oggling was just practice for the next day. Saturday, we went to the Bristol Renaissance Faire. Half our time was spent oggling wenches, and the other half was spent being eternal geeks.

The faire was amazing, as always. Broon and Moonie were both funny painted-apes. The Mud Show was silly. We passed on the jousting, because there was nowhere to sit, and we are all short, so standing in the back of a crowd of Frankensteins was not appealing. I was not prepared for the beauty that is falconry. I want to be a falconer…that is my new life’s dream. The falcons and hawks are so cool in the differing ways that they attack prey. Falcons are the more noble, severing the spine, whereas hawks cruely puncture internal organs with their massive talons. The falcons also dive at exceptionally fast speeds, for prey. I forgot that I wanted to go see Christpohe the Insulter, so I missed out on that potential gut buster.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot (wink, wink)… We met Jeff Easley. Jeff Easley!!!! Do your sense of sight a huge favor and peruse the gallery at his website. The man is a living legend, in my mind, and many a gamer. I grew up appreciating Easley’s art in and on D&D books. I can almost recognize them anywhere. We were on our way to the falconer show, when Gash noticed some cool artwork. Suddenly we found that it was all Easley’s prints for sale. Some old dude was selling them. I wondered if it could actually be…HIM. Gash thought it was, and with much trepidation, I asked “Are you…Jeff…Easley?” To which he gloriously replied, “Why, yes I am.” I reached out to shake his hand and said, “It is an honor to meet you, sir.”, with what can only be characterized as a quiver in my voice. I was beginning to shake involuntarily. I was talking to Jeff Easley. About his art, the faire, and D&D. He was a genuinely nice guy, and after we were done talking, Gash bought a print of the Unearthed Arcana book cover, which Mr. Easley happily signed.

It took until about halfway through the falconer’s show to recover, and I am still amazed 2 days later.

Huzzah, indeed…

kb9udr <—– Starstruck Geek

My cats so need this shizzle:

kb9udr

kb9udr

My son should be president of MENSA. Here is why:

This past weekend my family went up to my parent’s cabin. Fishing ensued. My Dad got a fish locator for the pontoon boat, and the kids thought it was the coolest thing. Something was able to tell them that there were fish IN THE WATER where the naked eye was unable to penetrate.

My son kept looking at the locator to see how many fish were around. We all assumed that he was just wanting to know why he was or wasn’t getting bites. Then we heard him exclaim “There’s one!” as he looked at the screen. He ran over to the side of the boat, threw out his worm & bobber, and caught a fish. After I helped him unhook the fish, he walked over to the locator screen, saw that there weren’t any fish on the screen, and said “I got him!” He then told his sister that she might as well reel in her line, because he just caught the last fish. There are none left. He wanted to go to a different spot, because he had caught the last fish in this spot.

My 4 year old son is a freaking genius.

He also loves Rob Zombie.

Oh yes, the next day, he caught a 13″ bass on the smallest chunk of worm possible, on the smallest hook possible. Bass Pro Shop, here we come…

Fruit of my loins.

kb9udr <—– Father of A Child Prodigy

I have issues…

kb9udr

kb9udr

Drunk Pelicans Attack!

kb9udr

Watch this now.

Watch the whole thing. 9 minutes of funny…and that’s a fact…look it up.

kb9udr

OMFG!

By clicking the above link, you relenquish all rights to your sanity. If you begin flinging your own feces at the wall, it is not my fault.

Oh, and watch out for KILLER MICROWAVES whenever you are in a white trash neighborhood, i.e., any trailer park in the continental United States. I just can’t understand how it was the microwaves fault…notice the title. I think it was framed by the drunk redneck.

We actually played some awesome darts last night, and yet we lost 9 games out of 12. Fricking-A-Right! That is how our dart season has been. I remember having a 7-mark round, my brother had a 9-mark round, my father had a Hat-Trick, and my cousin was getting several multi-mark rounds, as well. We played with gusto, but the other team played with mucho-gusto. Plus this complete “ass-of-a-human” kept walking right between where our flight path lies, and the bar, which is bout 24 inches of airspace. He screwed up one of my shots, and at least 2 for my cousin. He also screwed up the other team a couple times, and one of the tallest people in the world went over to the guy and told him to “never do that again”. The loser never did do it the rest of the night…he went all the way around the bar after that.

kb9udr

Nixie Clock Gallery.

Even Canadians like Nixie tubes.

You all know that I have issues. Some of you may not know about my fascination with blinking lights. I don’t even care what the device is, as long as it blinks, it is cool. My office, at home, is littered with blinky lights. I buy things just so I can plug them in and watch them blink. I am hoping that one day I will have so many blinky light devices in my office that I will not require normal lighting. It is a theory of mine that if I get an equal amount of all the different colors of LED’s that I will have created sunlight grade lighting.

I am a very traditional mad scientist. Because of my remedial mathematical skills, my theories have no formulas or proofs. They are simply ramblings. I am good at rambling…

Funny Story:

I was at the annual “Amateur Radio Expo” a few years ago. This is really a swap fest full of “mostly junk”, but sometimes you can find some good deals. We call that a “scarf”. It was the last day of the fest, and I was nosing around the grounds looking to see if anything I was previously interested in had come down drastically in price. I was stopped looking at a really neat old signal generator that the guy hooked up into a frequency counter. He did this only so that potential buyers would see that each was in working condition. The signal generator was set to, say, 8MHz, and the counter displayed 8,000,000Hz. This was not the amazing part. The freq. counter could be set to “count up” the frequency at certain intervals. Why one would want to do this, I have no idea…I am not knowledgable in such things. What I do know, is that I was captivated by the way that the counter would count up slow or fast, and at differing intervals depending on which way you turned the knobs. I think I played with it for about 20 minutes, all the while asking the guy really geeky questions, and receiving really geeky answers. He wanted $20 for each device. I was not preparred to pay that price, even for blinky lights.

I wanted to show my friends this cool thing that I had found. I was giddy as a school-boy! One of them said neat, with much sarcasm, another thought it was cool, but being the practical man that he is, he suggested I waste my money on a more updated device. It was then that the truth about my interests came to the surface. I told the guys that I didn’t care about functionality. I cared about the blinky lights… After a bit of chuckling we moved on. Later in the day I walked by the increasingly attractive display again. I talked to the guy and he said he would give me both units for $30. I started playing with them again, making the numbers count up, ensuring that it was all in working order. He even said he would throw in the leads he rigged up to go between them. I told him I would take the lot!

I required my friends help with carring one device whilst I carried the other, so I called them on my handi-talkie to ask for assistance. When they arrived, the seller overheard the guys picking on me. He asked what I wanted the devices for. I replied “The blinky lights.” He laughed jovially, and told me to enjoy my new toy. I walked away from his table happy as could be. I even had my cousin help me install an electrical outlet on my shelves so I could power the blinky-lights up and display them without running an extension cord.

On another occasion I purchased an old multi-meter, not because I needed it, but because it used Nixie tubes to display Volts, Ohms, and the like. I had never seen a Nixie tube before, and to me, they seemed the ultimate “blinky-light”. I even haggled the guy down quite a bit on his price. My cousin and I walked away from him several times before he accepted what I wanted to pay for it. I even made him go get the power cord and leads, which took him a few minutes to locate. My friends all knew exactly why I bought this clunky old meter…they didn’t even have to ask.

Each year since, I have received many a call on the radio, each day, that one of the guys found something with cool blinky-lights for me.

My mercantile skill is bigger than yours. Additionally, I receive a +10 when blinky lights are involved.

kb9udr