I’ve had an aggravating two weeks. My computer started messing up, seemingly at random. After a few days of half putting up with it and half trying to figure out the problem, I had to take it to a shop and have an expert examine it. After a couple days, (the shop was busy), the expert informed me that my hard drive was dying.

With a new hard drive plugged in, I spent the next few days reinstalling all my old software — everything from basic hardware drivers, to MS Office, to Acrobat Reader, to Firefox, to Photoshop, to every other program, large and small. And to top off the madness, I lost a lot of data with the old dead hard drive. Oh God, I lost a lot of stuff.

I have an external hard drive for backing up my data, but I never set it up to automatically run a back up. It was easy enough to just manually run the back up before I went off to bed at night, so I didn’t “bother” with setting up an automated system. But what started up as backing up each night, became backing up once a week, then once every couple weeks, then once a month, then once every couple/few months, then . . . lost data. <sigh>

So I’ve lost everything new I’ve created in the past few months — since January. Argh! This is why my posting hasn’t been on time the past couple weeks. I’ve just finished up recovering from this catastrophic idiocy.

Now let me quickly throw out some updates that I’ve skipped in this time.

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Remember my farmer’s tan sunburn? Well, it turned brown.

And my brother doesn’t think I can tan as well as he. (But the rest of me is pretty pale.)

I was considering showing a follow-up pic of my one year after finishing P90X, but what with the Anthony Weiner scandal going on right now, I’d feel kind of like a pervert showing my naked torso online.

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Here’s a pic of my brother showing off his new t-shirt:

That’s his drum kit hauler he’s pointing to. See, minivans can be cool. (At least that’s what he claims.)

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Calfgrit6 has been challenging me to games of Pokemon a lot lately. A couple weeks ago, he pretty soundly thrashed me, and it was like flipping the competitive switch in his personality to the ON AND LOCKED position. He can now read well enough that he can play all his cards without his big brother’s help. He can go through his card collection and choose the best matches for his deck, and he’s proving pretty good at deck construction, as well as playing.

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Pools are open for the season, and we’ve been a couple times. Next week we’ll be at the beach for three days.

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Our boys are in year-round school, and this is their last week in class this year. Starting in July, our boys will be a 1st grader and a 5th grader. I can hardly believe it.

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My t-shirt store is getting visitors and customers, now. Something funny happened, in the stressful meaning of “funny”: By coincidence, a blogger wrote a blog post referencing my store and I held a give-away contest on a message board I frequent on the same day when my store stopped working for a few hours. I wouldn’t have discovered the problem for many more hours if the blogger hadn’t contacted me and told me it was gone. I was fit to be tied for about an hour as I figured out the problem and fixed it.

Then a few days later, another, completely unrelated error crashed my site again for a couple hours. Oh for the love of sanity! Maintaining a web site is hard enough without random crashes stopping visitors and business here and there.

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I’ve at last made a Bullgrit Facebook page. Check it out and Like it if you want to be updated when I make a new blog post or have a sale or coupon for the t-shirt store.

Thanks,

Bullgrit

Two girls, one bike.

Bullgrit

Happy cup is happy.

Bullgrit

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was reading through some old comic books. In that earlier post, I talked about the vintage advertisements in those old books. Well, now I want to talk about the old stories told in those pages — really hokey stories. I’ve noticed two patterns in the old stories that now just astonish me.

The first story pattern is how coincidental everything is. I know coincidence has always been a part of story telling, especially comic book stories. And it still is a part of story telling, especially comic book stories. I mean, really, it seems that Peter Parker can’t go to the library without some super villain attacking. But I always looked at that as: Peter goes to the library all the time, and nothing ever happens; the comic book story only bothers to show the time something does happen. We comic book readers wouldn’t be interested in reading about the dozen times that week that Pete sat in peace and studied his chemistry. It’s the one time when Green Goblin blasts in, and Pete has to change into Spider-Man, that we buy the comic for.

But some coincidences are just so unbelievably lucky or unlucky that I just have to roll my eyes. For instance, in Iron Man #174, (September 1983), when bad guys are breaking into Tony Stark’s labs, (where he keeps several sets of the Iron Man armor), Tony’s allies fly the suits away via remote control. This is a neat trick and bit of team work. Eleven suits of armor fly up and out over the coast and are ditched into the Atlantic Ocean.

In the next issue of Iron Man, we see that the suits of high-tech armor came to rest on the ocean floor right next to Warlord Krang’s palace. Out of the entire Atlantic Ocean, the Iron Man suits coincidentally fall right in the lap of “a water-breathin’ Hitler,” as Nick Fury describes him in this issue. Really. That’s like a nuclear-powered satellite falling out of orbit and randomly crashing within the walls of a certain compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, (before May 1, 2011).

The second story pattern is how quickly comic book stories get resolved. The story about the rush to grab the loose Iron Man armors could easily fill six months worth of comic book issues, what with S.H.I.E.L.D going in, Krang’s troops going for them, and Iron Man himself rushing to beat both of them.

Hell, Nick Fury says the armor fell into international waters, so imagine how many countries, including the U.S., would be mounting recovery, (read: looting), expeditions. It could be a whirlwind (whirlpool) of activity with a dozen opposing groups trying to be the first to find, collect, and get away with the Iron Man armors. That’s a whole friggin’ epic story arc, right there; that plot could be running as main and sub plot for years to follow.

But no. The whole story is started and finished in one issue. Iron Man ends up slagging the whole collection of extra armor suits with a “fusion pod.” What a waste of a really good plot. Did the writers have so many stories in backup that they could so easily solve and throw away such potentially long-lasting plots?

Bullgrit