Dream of Waking

I’m ripping CDs from my collection and I realized I spend way too much time on my MP3 collection. Here’s the process I use when I get a new CD or find a CD I don’t have ripped yet:

1. Run CD through EAC, getting album info from freedb
2. Rip album with EAC, encoded with LAME using VBR alt preset standard, putting ripped album into a folder named “Artist – Year – Album”
3. Open folder with Tag & Rename, run an Amazon search on it to get album art and correct tags.
4. Rename files to “‘Track Number’ ‘Title’”
5. Move folder to my “My Music” folder.

I do this with every single CD. And if I download something I don’t own, skip to step 3.

I’m playing Daikatana, the infamous first-person shooter that was delayed until it became irrelevant. I’ve played it before and got somewhat far in the game and I remember it not sucking at some parts but my god these first couple levels are awful. The first weapon, the ion blaster, bounces off walls and damages you when you fire it in water. The first level is in a marsh with lots of close quarters areas. So if you miss chances are your shot will bounce off a wall and zap you and once you land in the ever-present water locations, it’s utterly useless. The monsters are about the lamest variety imaginable. You’re in a marsh, right? So what do you fight in the year 2455? Bionic frogs, mosquitos, and crocodiles. When you do fight something that’s not indigenous to the bionic environment, it’s a robot with a bajillion hit points that has twin rocket launchers.

I think I might keep playing though. See how far along I get this time around.

Since I’ve been back I’ve contacted 4 different companies about getting stuff replaced. My DVD drive on my laptop stopped reading DVDs and blank CDs, my mouse’s middle button has become harder and harder to use, the external hard drive debacle, and just yesterday my router crapped out when I tried to upgrade the firmware. Dell sent me a new DVD drive through some next-day service. Nothing else has shown up yet. I’m hoping Linksys pulls through with a new router with a quickness because having no wireless sucks.

Still doing crappy briefings till the end of the week. They only suck up an hour of my morning through so it’s okay. I took next week off just so I can have more time to wind down and relax.

By the way, owning a copy of Strapping Young Lad’s “The New Black” makes it sound that much better. I swear I’ve listened to it a thousand times.

So I bought an Action Replay and a copy of Splinter Cell and I softmodded my xbox. It’s rather painless except that something went crazy with Unleash X and it kept crashing so I resorted to Evolution X instead and everything just great. I’m playing MAME roms on my xbox, playing SNES roms on my xbox, watching movies that are on my computer through my xbox. It’s insane how much stuff a modded xbox can do.

I’ve been home for a couple days now, I just haven’t taken the time to really alert the internet. I was on the local news too.

http://www.wkrn.com/node/36405

I’ve got to spend two hours getting more briefings today. There’s a whole week-long process of getting “reintegration” briefings that simply can’t wait for the work week. Thank god they’re only a couple hours in the morning and then I’m done for the rest of the day.

I finally beat the Imperial Guard end of the Winter Assault campaign in Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War. Wow, that’s a lot of adjectives and qualifiers. The last mission is just plain retarded and took me three tries to finish, once from the beginning all over again and the other retry was from an autosave after I didn’t figure out an obvious strategy. The end fight is awesome but you really have to suck up some crap to get to it. I’ll probably play the last Eldar mission before starting the Orks and Chaos side of the campaign.

I’m still bored, if you can’t tell. I still have a couple days left here before I move again. Katie’s getting phone calls about me coming home so that must mean this isn’t an elaborate plot to make me insane!

So I’m at another base for the next few days. Waiting for my plane ride. This is where my old unit got sent and it’s really rather nice. Big PX, big base, lots of stuff. The Denver Broncos cheerleaders were here tonight so I went simply because I had nothing else better to do. It was somewhat entertaining. I got pictures and an autographed picture.

I’m on a public computer and loving my thumbdrive full of portable apps. I’ve got Firefox running with privacy settings on max and I can get Thunderbird up to check all my email accounts. It’s like having my own computer everywhere I go.

I have less than 10 hours left on this base. I’ll spend six days at another base, a day or so in Kuwait, and I’ll be home in a week.

Words don’t describe how thrilled I am. I cannot express my happiness in words. I don’t have the vocabulary.

So I’m listening to Busta Rhymes and the first track of Extinction Level Event starts and it’s got this really crazy monologue that I can’t help but post. Enjoy!

[...] I’m afraid the end time is near. The cataclysmic apocalypse refered to in the scriptures of every holy book know to mankind. It will be an era fraught with boundless greed & corruption where global monetary systems disintegrate leaving brother to kill brother for a grain of overcooked rice. The nations of the civilized world will collapse under the oppressive weight of parasitic political conspiracies which remove all hope & optimism from their once faithful citizens. Around the globe, generations of polluters will be punished for their sins. Unshielded by the O-zone layer they have successfully depleted, left to bake in the searing naked rays of light. Wholesale assassinations served to destabilize every remaining government, leaving the starving & wicked to fend for themselves. Bloodthirsty renegade cyborgs created by tax dodging corporations wreak havok. Pissed off androids, tired of being slaves to a godless & gutless system, where the rich get richer & the poor get fucked over and out, unleash total world wide destruction by means of nuclear holocaust, annihilating the terrified masses, leaving in its torturous wake nothing but vicious, cannibalistic, mutating, radiating, and horribly dis-figured hordes of satanic killers, bent on revenge, but against whom? There are so few left alive. Starvation reins supreme, forcing unlucky survivors to eat anything & anyone in their path. Massive earthquakes crack the planets crust like a hollow egg shell, causing unending volcanic eruptions. Creatures of the seven seas, unable to escape to certain death upon land, boil in their liquid prison. Disease encircles the earth, plagues & viruses with no known cause or cure laying waste to whatever draws breath, and humankind having proven itself to be nothing more than a race of ruthless scavengers, fall victim to merciless attacks at the hands of interplanetary alien tribes who seek to conquer our charred remains. This is extinction level event, the final world front. And there is only one year left.

I’m sure this is supposed to be funny but it’s what a father-sounding voice that degenerates into a cyborg tone describes to a child who asks “What will the year 2000 be like”.

Fresh off my coming home announcement, here’s an enormous list of things that made this deployment suck a little less.

(more…)

Katie’s asleep and she’ll probably kick me when I get home for posting it here before she actually knows but seeing how she’ll be asleep past my bedtime, I should at least put this somewhere.

I leave the base I’m at on July 13th to come home.

I have to go to another base from here first and then to Kuwait but the important part is that once I leave here I only have to catch a couple flights and I’m home. Start counting days. I’ll be home within a week of leaving here.

I hate to follow two nonsense entries with another one but this needs to be pointed out.

Nintendo sends George W. Bush a Nintendo DS Lite and Brain Age for his 60th birthday.

That’s exactly what I want for my birthday.

There’s a reason I like Mike & Ike’s so much more than Jelly Belly’s. Mike & Ike’s come in 4 flavors, lime, orange, cherry, lemon. They recently added crappy strawberry and I usually throw those out but otherwise they’re almost perfect. Jelly Belly’s are a much more mixed bag. You get some decent flavors mixed up with utter dog crap like buttered popcorn and black licorice. Ugh, I just ate a coffee one and I think I might hurl. Anyway. In conclusion, Jelly Belly’s have a 1 in 40 chances of making me hurl, while Mike & Ike’s are nothing but sugary love.

Edit: Still dry-heaving.

The word “blogosphere” itself gets on my nerves. Who coins this garbage?

Boring days ahead before I leave. This is a good thing. I’m all packed up, almost. Still have one box to mail out and to throw my junk into the shipping container but other than that it’s all over. I’ve taken down my poncho walls and feel very exposed even though I’m the only one down here right now. I’ll have my camera with me the whole way home so I’ll try to get a bunch of pictures of the process. My memories are as reliable as pre-second edition Windows 98 and taking pictures of things helps me to remember them later. My memory is very visually connected. I won’t remember something if you tell it to me but if I’ve got it written down or I see something related to it, I’ll remember. Then again I have big issues with seeing faces that look familiar but I can’t place a name or a memory to them. Like I’m recognizing total strangers. I tend to think I’m haunted by the ghosts of my past.

So if you’re blind, I was testing my Flickr account yesterday. Apparently it’s working. So go see new pictures here.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/emnii/

Sunset, originally uploaded by Nihilate.

This is me testing my Flickr account. By the way, kind of funny that my “this time in the past” entry is about deploying to Iraq and now I’m less than two weeks from coming home.

Between counting days and working with my replacement, I haven’t been doing much of anything besides sleeping. If I just sleep away the next two weeks they’ll pass by much quicker. I might get briefed today, which is one more step closer to going home, but we tried to do that yesterday and it didn’t work out too well.

I swear I’ll edit and post those boring pictures I took last week before I leave Iraq.