Coming Home, Yippiekayaymotherfucker, Rebuild

Coming Home…

Drivin’ Drivin’ Drivin’,

Got my troubles on hold.

Just drivin’ down that highway,

My fossil fuel’s as good as gold

— Sammy Hagar, “Privacy”

Tomorrow I head back on the road again, this time back to Kansas.  I like to travel for short stints, but there’s still…  er… “no place like home”.  

But that’s not what this part is really about :-)  One day, some asshole stole my CD collection.  200+ CD’s down the drain in nothing flat.  To this day, I still haven’t managed to replace that entire collection.  “Privacy” is off of Sammy Hagar’s last solo album before he joined up with Van Halen, and it’s a complete BITCH to find.  In fact, it was re-released as “I never said goodbye”, and it’s still impossible to find.  There’s only three really good songs on it, but, they are REALLY good.  I did search of the used music stores again before I left town (waisting an hour and a half) because I really wanted to hear Privacy while I was behind the wheel.  I’m setting in my hotel room, and it hits me… a quick iTunes search later, and I’ve got it.

I’ll admit, I’m an adict when it comes to finding the tunes I like the most.  I have always avoided iTunes for the most part except those “hey, you win a free song” type things on Pepsi bottles and similar.  Because if I attached a bank account or credit card to my iTunes account, I would spend THOUSANDS on music in nothing flat.  Seriously.  I was at Walmart, and I finally saw the solution:  iTunes guift cards cost $15.  If I want music, I have to drive down to Walmart to buy a card, removing the instant gratification factor behind iTunes purchases.

I personally think iTunes is the greatest thing to ever happen to music sales.  I always hate buying CD’s because half the crap on the CD I don’t want to hear – I’ll listen to everything once, then learn the skip sequence for the CD (IE, track 1, 5, 6, 9) to get the best listening (or, better, just rip it to MP3).  I can think of a couple of CD’s that I’ve wanted to count tracks on the CD and scratch the song out just so I don’t have to even accedentally listen to it (“A Horse With No Name” on America’s “History” compliation, for instance)  The convenience factor is amazing.

The only problem is that it’s not complete.  I still can’t find a couple of songs, one of them particularly obscure “Breakaway” by Big Pig for instance (I actually want to own that entire CD just to hear the rest, but would even settle for the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure soundtrack to have the song.)  

If I ever find the mother fucker who stole that CD set, I shall torture him for hours, no, DAYS before I kill him.  I’m gonna download “It’s a Small World” from iTunes, an set it on repeat! 🙂

Yippiekyayamotherfucker!

“You just killed a helicopter with a car!”

“I was out of bullets.”

— Justin Long & Bruice Willis, “Live Free or Die Hard”

OMG, holy shit!  I’ve known Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard) was coming out for a long time now.  I love the Die Hard movies.  But, I figured, well… this is number 4, it’s gotta suck.  Really suck.  Then I saw the trailers.  

I’m excited.  See, I wanted to see Spiderman 3 and a number of other movies, but I haven’t gotten around to it.  Die Hard 4?  I’ll be standing in line opening day, by myself if I have to. 

Die Hard was something cool and different – for once, you weren’t real certain the hero would survive.  Rarely in a movie do you wonder that.  Why?  Because they beat the piss out of the hero.  Repeatedly.  Most movies in that timeframe had indestructable heroes.  Sure, you could beat them up, but, the worst they had was a trickle of blood out of the corner of thier mouth (Last Action Hero does a good job of parodying those heroes)  But “John MaFuckerCain” (that’s a Bruce Willis quote) was a bloody pulp by the time the movie is over.  That just didn’t happen to heroes.  

I figure this is probably the last of the Die Hard movies, and hopefully the best.  One of the interesting things surrounding the movie was a sign of what could be a bit of the future of movies and movie stars, IMO.  AintItCoolNews (I’ve actually always hated the site) had a thread going about Die Hard 4 being PG 13 (HUH!?  PG 13?  You have to be kidding me.), and someone starts posting about the movie, and eventually says he’s Bruce Willis.  The usual skeptisism occurs, and Mr. Willis eventually does two things to prove himself:  Gives a member his iChat address (he’s a Mac user.  Coooool – he’s now my favorite actor 😉 so he can see him online, and calls the owner of the website.  

Yep, it was actually Bruice Willis.  Cool.

I read the thread, and was impressed really – no, not saying he’s a down to earth guy or anything like that, just that he jumped into an online conversation about his movie and pimped it himself.  Normally when a star pimps a movie, it’s in a very removed fashion – someplace where they can talk AT everyone, not to everyone.  

I find that pretty interesting, and after someone who’s made $100m paychecks does something like this, I expect slowly we’ll start seeing more stars stepping into the online communities to talk with members to talk about thier movies and answer questions.  I have little hope, however, that many of them will talk with members, and not AT members of those sites.  Maybe I’m just being judgemental (well, ok, I am being a judgemental prick here) but the impression I’ve gotten just seems like most of ’em are higher than thou types.  *SHRUG*  Time will tell I suppose.

I will say that for Bruice Willis – he actually seemed to not be a higher than thou type.  He got into it, trying to answer as many questions people had (about anything, not just Die Hard 4) with some pretty honest sounding answers.

Stressed…

‘Cos out on the ocean of life my live,

there’s so many storms we must rise above

— The Moody Blues, “The Voice”

This week I’ve been a bit stressed.  There’s so many things I felt were out of my control that I had to have go right for me to meet my goals.  In the end, it’s all gone as it should have.   Without intervention on my part.  Go fig.  

But it took a while to identify that the root cause of my stress was the things that are within my control that I didn’t feel like I was fulfilling properly.  I haven’t quit smoking (and let me tell ya, it’s amazing how much self loathing you can feel when you decide something like “yep, I’m done’ and you buy another pack anyway), which means I’m not ready to start working out.  Which means I’m not becoming physically prepared for the first movie.

But I easily transposed those feelings into situations that I don’t control, so I stressed out about ’em when I should have been looking in all along to find the true source.  Bleh.  I hate that crap.

My body, BTW, has started to revolt against the idea of me smoking – I’m quickly becoming alergic to all tobaccos it seems, instead of just a couple brands.  (Though oddly enough, my ears and sinuses are better now – I’m no longer deafened in both ears.  This is almost all in my chest.)  I guess that makes this easier.

So, tonight, I’m done.  

Man tomorrow is gonna suck.  And the next couple of tomorrows.  But, it’ll get better 😉

Website Rebuild

Well, the website rebuild on MidnightRyder.Com is almost complete for Phase 1.  Phase 1 is basically getting it all put back online as the three separate companies:  Midnight Ryder Technologies, Midnight Ryder Games, and Midnight Ryder Productions.  The last one was the one that gave me troubles – it’s the youngest of the skill sets, and the one with the hardest to sell skill set.  But, I’m slowly getting the kinks worked out on it, and I’ll deploy it soon too.

It didn’t take long to find stuff to populate my blog with over on MidnightRyder.Com either – I haven’t replicated the content from here (and I don’t think I will – keep it business), and already people are stoppin’ by and reading ’em.  Cool.

So far, with the exception of R & S, all the plans I’ve laid down are slowly working.  MidnightRyder.com is getting hits pretty fast from a lot of referes and searches, so that might net some results in the next couple of months.  A new payment system is in place for the existing games, and I now have new payment options in place for future projects.

The movie thing is going to very very slowly get moving (this is one of those things that’s going to have a lot of intertia – it’s hard to get things moving, but once we do, it’s going to be fast and furrious getting it done.)

Up next I start executing on another one o’ my plans.  I’ve had the domain for a couple of weeks now, and as soon as I’m happy with the Phase I deployment of MidnightRyder.Com, I’ll switch to it as my “part time” task until it’s ready to deploy.  This was one of those “genius ideas” (hehehe – look back a ways in my blog to find a piece of movie script that references it in my meaning 😉 that showed up in my head during the Gamer Zone days, and later again while standing in line for World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade.   It’s such a hit or miss idea – if it works, I’ll get it up and running for year, and sell it for a few million.  Or if it doesn’t, well, I own a worthless domain :-)  I won’t be out any money really – I set things up so I’m not burning important resources (IE, cash) getting it rolling.

But because of the nature of it, I won’t even mention what the hell it is on here.  That has to wait a while.  I’ll just call it Secret Project #1 😉