After many, many years of living with a computer that was mainly fit for only doing email and surfing the web, I have begun the climb up the ranks to having a kick ass computer. My computer of course is a homegrown, noname brand, built it myself machine. Before my computer would chug along when playing FarCry, Unreal Tournament, and the photo stuff I usually do. Now this puppy rocks! Right now I am running:
Abit N7F-S ver. 2.0 mobo
Athlon XP 2800+ (stabilly overclocked to an XP 3200+)
512MB of DDR400
240GB of drive space (1 WD 40GB + 1 Seagate 200GB)
Xtasy Ti4600 video card w/ 128MB
My baby rocks!! The configuration is far from complete. There's another 512MB of RAM to add. A couple of SATA hard drives in RAID 0, a better case, bigger power supply, DVD burner, and a 6800GT video card are also slated to complete the upgrade. This should tide me over till the Athlon64 config I want to do gets done. Oh yea at some point a big ass CRT or LCD. Lest I forget a Logitec wireless gaming mouse too.
So now I play FarCry with all the settings maxed out and it is breathtaking! The game if you actually play it all the way through occurs in its little time. You start out in the day time, then it turns to dusk, then night, and now I'm in the section where it turns back to daylight. The colors and hues remind me so much of St. Thomas, it's made me want to go back even more.
This weekend was pretty cool. That lacks panache, a certain je ne sais quoi.
Friday evening I drove up to Delaware and hung out with my boys. I couldn't leave early so I ended up sitting in traffic for almost 2 hours. Anyway, we ended up playing pool eating foods drenched in fat, drinking beer and playing pool. Good times as far as I'm concerned. There is stuff you can say and do around your boys, you don't when the women are around. We laughed so hard about some stuff we were all crying, that stuff was that funny. We recounted the evil things we did as kids and the ass whoopings we witnessed other kids get. Funny now, not so much then. lol
Saturday I got my hair retwisted, and as promised it has grown noticeably. It was well worth the wait to make it back to DE to have the same person do it again. Simply put, I look good. Mwhaha!!
Saturday night Elise and I went to out to dinner. The original plan was to go to the Imrpov in DC, but we got off to a late start. So we ended up the bar at Red Lobster with a bartender, I swear looks like Isaac fromt the Love Boat. It PAYS to befriend the bartender or waitress/waiter when one goes out. Bartenders especially can just slip you stuff gratis.
So me, Elise, and the bartender were talking about guys who order drinks usually associated with women, like Cosmopolitans, Daiquiris, and what not. JUST as we were talking this guy next to us orders a Cosmopolitan just randomly. He wanted a drink, but didn't know what to get and just got that one. And then this other guy orders a strawberry Daiquiri WITH whipped cream on top. Not that there's anything wrong with a grown man ordering a VIRGIN Daiquiri WITH whipped cream.
Lately, I've been fascinated with the martini and all it's variants, and asked the bartender to make me an apple martini, a very chick drink to get right? Figured if I'm going to mock people, I should know why I'm mocking them. Turns out those suckers are great, or at least the one I had. Then he made this other martini with this raspberry liquer called Chombard, Amaretto, and something else and it was off the chain.
Good times. :)
...about the differences between East Coast and West Coast living. Today I had a customer who was also from California and we talked about some of the differences that occured to us. For example customer service out here is totally different, read that as WORSE out here than there. Don't get me started on that one.
The other thing we totally agreed on is the complete and utter lack of GOOD Mexican food restaurants out here. I'd kill for some good nachos, simply a scoop of good fresh salsa, tacos with fresh ingredients, man oh man I could on and on. Freebirds back in Santa Barbara made the best nachos and this burrito that was probably easily 2 lbs. of food. So I'm done talking about it, I've resigned myself to making some of this stuff myself because well - I can. Fresh salsa and tomatillo sauce from scratch will be had. Grilled chicken and beef, marinated in lime, tequila, and a few select spice for sure will be had. Gawd I can't wait! So I've struck out finding good BBQ and Nils and I ended up doing that on our. I did however find really good soul food in Philly. Next up is Mexican food - bring it on!
I friggin' hate having to go through my entries because some fucking bot has attached some lude comment to something that really shouldn't be. I really want to find these people and beat their asses and shove their keyboards and mice up their asses, and yank them back out by the cords. Damned fuckers. I am upset because one of those spam comments was attached to one about my little brother. So not cool. I know those bots/people don't care, just as long as they get their comments in, but it still bothers me to no end.
Star Wars is on DVD!! Woohaa!! It looks and sounds amazing! Go get yours! If you don't get the wide screen version, I don't want to talk to you!
About 3 months ago on a routine trip to the mailbox I discovered that I had a susbscription to FHM magazine. Mind you I never actually PAID for a subscription to FHM. Now I'm not a fan of this particular type of magazine to be totally honest. Sure I like seeing scantilly clad women in 4" heels just like the next man (that line should get some good Google searches), but this magazine is truly dumb. The articles look like they were written by hornball 12th graders. Yes, there are actually articles in there. Most don't span more than a single page and wrought with many of the aforementioned pictures. I stopped reading Maxim because it insulted my intelligence as a human being and me as a man. Sure the magazine is total brain candy, but are we me THAT dumb? Admittedly my love for Tyra Banks began after seeing her on GQ. Now GQ is cool because it has actual articles and stuff that helpful.
Nope, no damned news. Only main thing I am looking forward to doing is voting. I just love how everyone has forgotten - oops, Bush was NOT actually elected by the popular vote. I live close to DC and still feel freaking displaced from the political process. Are there any PAC's out there for disallusioned Americans fed up with the hipocrosy of the political process and the farse it is?
Once upon a time a friend of mine commented that food appeared in a lot of my entries on here. That and I tend to go on a lot about women. Well I am very passionate about both topics...hehe. I had the nerve to actually challenged that observation, because well it is damned well true. I'm very passionate about food especially when it brings my friends together.
Today we had a BBQ over at Chantel's and pulled out all of the culinary stops. Once again Nils handled the grill and I got the meats ready. This time I was more deliberate in the creation of the dry rub, but as we say back home, my "hand got a little heavy" with the cayenne and chili powder. So although the ribs and brisket were bangin', everyone's lips were tingling after a few bites. Being the true Caribbean people we are, we sucked it up and enjoyed the food. There were pork ribs, brisket, garlic bread (I ended up making that from scratch and Nils grilled, and was one of the first things to finish), and salad. For dessert Brigid broke out with this homemade chocolate cake with chocolate icing. It had chocolate going 20 different ways from Sunday and was kicking!!
Asaunta came down from New Jersey and man it was good times all around! Like the rest of us, she is from St. Thomas and fell right into step with my other friends who are a pretty damned group of people. I feel really honored to have such great, long lasting friendships. Even Lavida who always manages to make my life an occasional living hell!! Love you shorty! ;-)
Hope everyone's Labor Day weekend went well!
Today I drove up to Delaware to spend Labor Day weekend with my friends up here. I'll save myself the keystrokes from bitching about the freakin' tolls again. We went over to Niika's mom's house for BBQ and pool. That was great. Just great. Nils and I pounded back about 5 ice cold Heinekens each. We also discovered a great use for the beer by way of dousing the chicken on occasion with some of the beer. It was great! Cooking with alcohol is such an awesome trick. Whether it be beer, wine, vodka, rum or whatever spirit most dishes can be enhanced with a bit of alcohol. Some ingredients and their flavors are only soluble in alcohol. The most common example of this is wine in tomato sauces. The sugars in tomatoes for example are only soluble with alcohol, such as wine, hence why red wine is so popular in most marinara sauces.
Afterwards we played pool in the basement. One of the things I do love about most East Coast homes is the inclusion of a basement. The basements can be more bedrooms, gamerooms, home theater rooms or whatever. THIS house's basement is bigger than most 2 bedroom apartments. There's room for a full sized pool table, some bar stools around it, a big ass big screen tv, and comfy chairs to chill in. This isn't to mention the area off to the side that could easily accomodate a dance floor for a club or bowling alley with a few lanes. Final pool score: Tony: 2 | Nils: 1
Tonight I caught some of the Republican National Convention while doing a late workout at the gym. I wasn't out to watch it, but it was better than watching the O's play the Devil Rays. On top of that I'm of Sun Tzu's school of thought, one should know their enemy. Watching the first ten minutes of Zell Miller's speech has me convinced the next President of the United States will be the same fucktard who's in office right now. President Bush will be re-elected not because he is a smarter man, a more cunning diplomat, or better versed on national affairs. President Bush will be re-elected simply because he took a stand. No matter how unfavorable that stand may be with our allies or even the people who is going to govern, he will be re-elected simply for being decisive.
Kerry is on the ropes and none of his agenda is going to be heard until he himself takes a stand. Until Kerry goes guns up on the Republican war machine, like it is going on him, he is sunk. I admire the fact that he's trying to focus on issues, but he is getting smeared left and right. Kerry needs to fight back and stop pussy footing around. It's bad enough that he is going up against a sitting President with an ongoing agenda. It's worse that every decision he made and every unfavorable word he spoke is being broadcast left and right. Taking it on the chin is NOT helping your cause if you are looking to move from 'Senator Kerry' to 'President Kerry'.
I am no political consultant. I can't spout at the drop of a hat which states will be lost because of what issues and by whatever margin. But it doesn't take a political consultant to realize the Bush campaign is playing everyone's emotions like a virtuoso. People want hope for the future: let's get all hot and bothered about going back to the moon and mars. People are concerned about security: let's bring up 9/11, Hussein, and Al Qaeda. People are concerned for the money: let's talking about the mild upswing of the economy. The outline for Bush's speeches must come straight from Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The worse thing that can be said is Dick Cheney daugther is a lesbian - woopty-fucking-do. More power to her.
The ironies of ironies though came in the companies that bought commercial time during the RNC. There were more financial institutions and energy company commercials that you could shake a stick at. All those touchy feely ads about how they are concerned about our money, welfare and what not really did get me all misty. Whatever.
Senator Kerry, time for you to cowboy up and handle business. You'll never get the REAL debate you should have with the President, so you need to push your points home hard. The Republicans are using this tactic and aren't caring about the collateral damage, e.g. the poor, minorities, homosexuals, immigrants, and our allies just to name a few.