Though I've been writing via electronic media for longer than most of the people reading this have been able to read, it's only recently that anybody's called it blogging. Back then, it was considered "a series of articles" or "writing a column" or "publishing by installment" or something like that. I'm sure that next year it will be called something else. Or, you can just see the whole thing at once in chronological order (the way God meant for such things to be read). And again, please, don't take anything too seriously! Most recent articles:
View from the Corner
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2011.03.19 Utter Lack of Free Time
I realized it had been a while since I'd posted, so I thought I might need to update everyone on what's going on with me here lately. First and foremost, I'm a lazy, selfish, SOB. If it's a choice between writing something for you, my dear readers, and taking a nap, I'll be taking that nap now. In fact, today I've spent most of the day doing laundry. I now have clean bedclothes and clean pajamas. Now that I've cleaned up the bathroom, I intend to take a long, hot shower. I then plan to put my clean body in my clean pajamas, lay in my clean bed, and just feel clean for ...
Posted Mar 19, 2011 2:09 PM by Troy Cheek
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2011.01.11 Snow Day
It snowed just a little here the other day. While way up North they might have gotten snow measured in feet, way down here a few inches is all it takes to bring life to a standstill. We got at least six or eight inches of white fluffy rain, as my brother likes to say. Still, we managed to have a grand old time.
Posted Jan 13, 2011 8:49 AM by Troy Cheek
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2010.05.26 Bifocal Built for Two
When you're an old man with diabetes, every little change you notice in your eyesight is cause for alarm. This is crazy because, I'm told, that the changes in the eyes caused by diabetes are actually ones that you don't notice. That's the reason why you need regular checkups. Otherwise, you wouldn't notice them until it was too late to do anything about them. With regular checkups, my eye doctors assure me, serious conditions can be caught early and monitored. You might notice that they don't say anything about actually fixing these serious conditions, just that they can be caught early and monitored.At one of these regular checkups just a few short years ...
Posted May 26, 2010 8:52 AM by Troy Cheek
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2000.07.16 Florida Vacation
Hi folks! This is Barb talking. Troy's down at the hospital with my
husband Bob, so Troy asked me to write this month's column. Don't
worry about Troy. I'm sure he'll be just fine. Bob's hit himself
with that weed whacker many a time, and he's always been "treated and
released," and he barely clipped Troy at all today.
I don't know why men make such a big deal out of yardwork. If they'd
just get a couple of push mowers, they'd be finished in the time it
takes them to change the oil in the lawn tractor. It seems like
they're always re-building, re-wiring, or re ...
Posted Mar 26, 2010 6:32 AM by Troy Cheek
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2000.05.06 Carbon Monoxide - The Breakfast of Champions
Like most married couples I know, Bob has "his" car, which is
actually
a truck, and Barb has "her" car, which is actually a minivan. The
last few times I'd seen Bob out in town, however, he was in the van.
"What's the deal?" I asked. "Barb doing all the heavy hauling?"
"Nope," replied Bob. "I just decided to take a page from your book
and have the truck's exhaust system overhauled. Somehow, fumes are
leaking up into the cab. I can't handle the smell. Isn't that what
happened with you?"
What happened with me? Well, it all started sometime around early
spring last year. Early spring in Tennessee is an interesting time.
It's ...
Posted Mar 26, 2010 6:29 AM by Troy Cheek
Bastard Officer From Hell
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2004.05.31 Stupidity is NOT a Protected Disability - Part 2
As you may remember from last week, my boss got the brilliant idea that
security should spend more time enforcing handicap parking laws. All
this because I asked an employee not to park in those cute little
hashed off areas between handicap parking spaces. It turns out that
she didn't know that they were there to keep people from blocking the
special ramps and powered lifts that some vehicles had. "I just knew
I could always find a parking space there."
The boss never actually got around to getting us trained and
certified
to write citations for parking in handicap spaces, so I was limited to
simply asking people to move and, if they failed to do so, call ...
Posted Mar 26, 2010 6:09 AM by Troy Cheek
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2004.05.04 Stupidity is NOT a Protected Disability - Part 1
I once had the pleasure of working for a boss who was constantly
coming up with brilliant ideas on how I could do my job better. By
"pleasure" I mean "undying agony" and by "brilliant" I mean
"unbelievably stupid" as this is some of that famous Cheek sarcasm
you may have heard about. I eventually learned to stop using sarcasm
around this particular boss. It just never worked.
"Troy, you've got to do something about him," a co-worker once
pleaded. "You do a great job of keeping the other managers in line.
Why not him?"
"He's completely immune to sarcasm," I replied. "It goes right over
his head. My powers are useless against him!"
Yes, my co ...
Posted Mar 26, 2010 6:08 AM by Troy Cheek
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2004.04.12 Terrorists with Retirement Plans
I got a letter the other day which said, when you boil it down to the
essentials, that if I didn't act immediately to prove to them that I
wasn't a terrorist, the government was going to arrest me and hold me
indefinitely. Oh, and incidentally, I'd lose my retirement plan.
It all started some time before when I attended an information meeting
at my Bastard Officer From Hell job, where they talked about the importance of saving for
retirement. The main point was that you couldn't count on either your
employer or the government to take care of you after you retired. As
this information meeting was paid for by my employers, which were a ...
Posted Nov 7, 2009 12:39 PM by Troy Cheek
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2004.04.16 Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Speeders
...endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...I spend a lot of time on the road. As anyone who's met me would not
be at surprised to hear, because of my wit, charm, and sparkling
personality, I have a little bit of a problem finding jobs. My
current place of employment is a full hour's drive from my home.
Because of said wit, charm, and sparkling personality, I also have a
little bit of a problem finding a special person with whom to share my
life. My current girlfriend is a full two hours' drive from my home.
In the opposite direction.
While spending so much time on the road, I've encountered pretty much
every type ...
Posted Nov 4, 2009 4:41 AM by Troy Cheek
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2005.09.12 The Bastard Officer From Hell Walks Again... Again
...no sooner than you fix one thing...As I wrote last week, I once worked with an officer whose idea of
preventative maintenance on our patrol car was to shut it off whenever
and wherever it happened to be and just tell Troy about it the next day.
Whenever I'd ask if he checked this or adjusted that, I'd get the same
response:
"Hey!" he'd shout, backing away and holding up his hands as if he
expected me to attack him. "I told you I don't know nothing about
no technical stuff like that."
I'll admit, there are times when I prefer that approach to some of
the alternatives I've seen over the years ...
Posted Oct 28, 2009 10:02 AM by Troy Cheek
Technical Stuff
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2010.11.19 Minecraft Mob Traps
A month or two back, I might have talked about Mining and Crafting with Minecraft. As I said back then, Minecraft is an addictive little game where you mine out minerals, craft
items from them, use those items to mine/fashion better items, and keep
going until a zombie eats your brains.Zombies are eating my brains fairly regularly these days. Skeleton archers are shooting arrows at me. Spiders are biting me. Creepers are, um, creeping, I guess. Recent updates have added an alternate dimension called the Nether. In this world, game physics are altered. New creatures are revealed. Zombie pigmen squeal and ghasts shriek. I have new ways to die.Another thing recent updates have done is tweak the ...
Posted Nov 25, 2010 5:54 AM by Troy Cheek
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2010.09.17 WEP vs WPA vs OMG! Just Let Me Connect, Already!
Not too long ago, I had a few days off because of a holiday. I thought it would be a good time to go visit my girlfriend, Kitten. Of course, her name isn't really Kitten. It's just that if I don't refer to her as a small, cute, harmless, ball of fluff, she tries to claw my eyes out.Kitten asked me to "bring the tools" as she wanted me to "fix the baby." In the case, "the baby" is the notebook computer I loaned her several years ago. It's an old eMachines notebook running Windows 2000. As I recall, I bought the computer so I could do some vital computer work (okay, game and browse ...
Posted Sep 17, 2010 12:20 PM by Troy Cheek
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2010.09.30 Mining and Crafting with Minecraft
My latest little obsession is a little game from Sweden called Minecraft. Minecraft is a game about placing blocks while running from skeletons. Or something like that... Currently in Alpha, but rapidly approaching Beta, Minecraft is an addictive little game where you mine out minerals, craft items from them, use those items to mine/fashion better items, and keep going until a zombie eats your brains.You start out in the middle of a near-infinite world of blocks. Each block is about one meter (or one yard for us old fashioned types) on a side. While the depth and height of the world is limited to something like 64 blocks above and below sea level, the surface area can ...
Posted Sep 30, 2010 6:56 PM by Troy Cheek
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2009.12.30 HandBrake Is Great
HandBrake is great for video conversions. However, I'm having problems with A/V sync, so I'm posting some logs here to see if anybody can figure out what I'm doing wrong.Using the old HandBrake CLI 0.9.3, the file converts properly.Using the new HandBrake CLI 0.9.4, the audio and video get so far out of sync that the show is unwatchable.The following logs were created using the command line options:
handbrakecli93 -i test.mpg -o test93CLI.mp4 -e x264 -q 0.6 --deinterlace=fast -v 1 >>test93CLI.txt 2>&1handbrakecli94 -i test.mpg -o test94CLI.mp4 -e x264 -q 0.6 --deinterlace=fast -v 1 >>test94CLI.txt 2>&1handbrakecli99 ...
Posted Dec 31, 2009 4:31 AM by Troy Cheek
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2009.12.20 Gratuitous Space Battles
Imagine, if you will, that you're watching your favorite epic science fiction movie or series or direct-to-video and some truly spectacular special effects kick in and, for just a moment, you feel like you're really out in space watching cruisers the size of aircraft carriers soaring majestically while blasting each other with ionizing death rays. Of course, that feeling comes to a sudden halt the next time you go to commercial or switch back to whatever's happening down on the planet or, heaven forbid, there's a bit of character development. You suddenly miss that feeling.Gratuitous Space Battles is all about that feeling.Gratuitous Space Battles (hereafter referred to as GSB) comes to us ...
Posted Jan 3, 2010 5:41 PM by Troy Cheek
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