Breakfast at Ulysses

Christmas List 2011 - Jon Fuhrman Holiday Shopping Guide

2011-11-21T07:16:00.000-08:00

TBD

2010-11-26T21:28:00.000-08:00

Hoping to begin posting more regularly in the near future.

In Between Days

2010-08-01T17:57:00.000-07:00

Really amazing. Feels like I'm hearing it for the first time. Watch, listen, and enjoy Superchunk cover The Cure.

Superchunk covers The Cure

Limbo - 7.21.10 - Raleigh

2010-07-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned before, I'm going through a strange video game phase at the moment. Really looking forward to this game. Its available via XBLA next Wednesday, July 21st. Very cool.

Otherwise, I'm down here in Raleigh, NC. Can't recommend this city enough to folks. If I had to relocate to anywhere Raleigh would undoubtedly figure somewhere into the top 3. Downtown Raleigh is very cool and has a lot of diverse offerings in terms of food, music, shopping, arts, you name it. It feels like an immigrant town too - no one I've met is actually from Raleigh. Everyone is a transplant. If you ever visit I highly recommend checking out The Remedy Diner. This place probably beats the better vege restaurants I've experienced in Baltimore and NYC. It's phenomenal. My non-vege friends had a great time too.

Raleigh has been a blast. A cool, productive blast. It really made sense to get down here.

Sorting Cap

2010-07-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

Shaved my head. Reading Sorcerer's Stone. Playing what seems to go back and forth between an exciting and depressing amount of video games. Heading to Raleigh, NC next week for a business trip. Plan to visit the Remedy Diner while I'm down there. Still listening to The Evens. Not really interested in seeing Predators. Beginning to worry that I won't see Cyrus in theaters. Trunks TV Special on DVD. Episode of TNG with Picard's Flute. Depressed by my most recent visit to Atomic Books. Car Wash. GenCon in a few weeks. Numerous friends turning 30. Back to California in August. Retired from D&D indefinitely. Netflix queue reaching critical mass. Temperatures are deadly in Maryland. Excellent veggie burger at One World Cafe. Wondering when I'll have time for a more substantive post.

Weekend

2010-06-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

Toy Story 3. Extras Christmas Special. Mario 64. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Cousin's wedding and reception. Flight to San Jose, CA by way of flight to Houston, TX.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/devil-details-dhs-monitoring-web-wrong-words%C2%A0

http://www.joystickdivision.com/2010/06/seven_marios_made_from_common.php

Fuhrman Tuesday Index

2010-06-22T17:41:00.000-07:00

Aside from Stanley McChrystal's crazy bullshit its been a fairly quiet day. Here's the index:

Pretty great reading of a very ridiculous break-up letter. I'm guessing these people are in middle school. I can only think that the teachers unions are to blame for this sort of nonsense.

http://youmakemetouchyourhandsforstupidreasons.ytmnd.com/

The Onion A.V. Club came out with their own iPhone app yesterday and it looks like it has opened up to some positive reviews.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-v-club-film/id376191269?mt=8

Speaking of the iPhone, is anyone else experiencing issues with battery life after updating to OS 4? OS 4 has pretty much killed my phone. Jailbreak is a possibility.

In other news, picked up War for Cybertron. Played through the first level and wasn't really blown away or anything. I'm getting a friend of mine to review it to post on here later.

Music I Wish I Still Owned

2010-06-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

Fuhrman Monday Index

2010-06-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

High Energy Physics!

Chicago's Fermilab reaches an incredible breakthrough towards solving the mystery of the much-theorized Higgs-Boson particle. Very cool stuff. Our whole universe (and possible others) is hinged on this idea of the Higgs-Boson, also known as 'the god particle.' Its like the most fundamental of all fundamental increments of the universe - its what allows for mass in the universe. This is a huge win against those damned Europeans and their damned Large Hadron Collider. Many feared that Fermilab would be rendered obsolte and completely overshadowed by an accelerator as big as LHC. Nope. Wrong. Big time. Haven't felt this much 'merican pride since the last time I saw Rocky IV. I'm not one of those 'science has no boundaries' types. That's yankee speak. Just kidding. There's actually a really great documentary about Fermilab and some of the employees there. Its called "The Atom Smashers." Probably the best documentary I've ever seen. It was put together by PBS which almost always means quality. Its conveniently available on Netflix's "watch instantly" feature for your 360s, CPUs, and other select media devices.

http://news.discovery.com/space/the-higgs-boson-may-have-five-faces.html

Jon Fuhrman Fun Fact: Jon Fuhrman failed physics in high school mostly due to truancy.

General Grievous Kostum

How do you get cooler than this guy? Here we have a deutsch-sprechen fellow who goes ahead and makes himself a General Grievous costume that, in my opinion, puts the General's CGI likeness to shame and back again. This thing is terrifying. The way he moves is utterly robotic and alien.

Very excited for Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Resurrection of Ulysses

2010-06-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

"Woh," you say, "what gives Ulysses? I thought you were gone and never coming back." "Nope. Undead and back from the beyond. Breakfast at Ulysses forever."

True Geek Confessions!!!

2010-02-17T19:39:00.000-08:00

I started following AlertNerd and Amy Ratcliffe of Geek with Curves on Twitter recently. I found out about AlertNerd's "True Geek Confessions" through one of Amy's tweets today. I figured I'd put my own set of confessions together.

I often fantasize about going to a Toyota dealership and test-driving a Toyota Highlander while listening to Queen's "Princes of the Universe" at full volume.
I think DS9 is the true spiritual successor to TOS.
I watched Captain Power and Land of the Lost recently and took both series very seriously.
I've admitted to several women that everything I know about love was learned from watching Robotech's Macross Saga.
I think David Lynch's Dune is actually pretty cool.
I failed physics in high school.
I've sent at least one "in-character" email to a fellow D&D player so that we could resolve some issues between our characters.
I still buy and subscribe to comics even though I don't read them just so that I can avoid the hassle of "breaking up" with my local comic shop guy.
I understand why folks think its great, but I've never been really, really, blown away by Bladerunner.
I think the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is still the best comic book movie ever made.
I think Wil Wheaton comes off as a phoney sometimes.
I used to be able to recite every piece of dialogue from Transformers: The Movie up until Moon Base 2 gets consumed by Unicron. I could probably get halfway through the assault on Autobot City if I tried today.
I like Star Wars more than Empire Strikes Back.
I have an idea for a Doctor Who fan film set in the late 1990s that I think would be so freaking cool.

How about yours? What are your geek confessions? Be sure to tweet a link to AlertNerd.

Happy Birthday Galileo!

2010-02-15T06:46:00.000-08:00

The Fuhrman Sunday Index

2010-02-14T05:22:00.000-08:00

http://lifehacker.com/5466795/pwnagetool-315-jailbreaks-iphone-313

The iphone dev team puts out a new hack for the latest version of the iphone OS. Jailbreaking gets more tempting every day.

http://lifehacker.com/5468742/lookinmypc-is-a-must+have-tool-for-computer-troubleshooting

Nice sounding diagnostic tool for Windows machines

http://www.physorg.com/news185223339.html

Future, here we come. Folks manipulate light and convert it into electrical current in a nano-scale molecular circuit. Reminds me of an article I read a few weeks ago re: tobacco plants behaving like a factory of PV cells. The growing prospect of solar energy makes me really happy.

http://nextfabstudio.com/about/

If I only had the time, money, and mind.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/13/several_years_ago_i_met/

Sobering Chinese perspective.....Steve Clemons is like the smartest foreign policy blogger on the internet.

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/quayle-51-votes-not-what-our-founding-fathers-had-in-mind.php?ref=fpb

I forget which Federalist Paper discusses this point but it made a big impression on me in college and I could not agree with Dan Quayle more. The system is broken and it so sucks.

http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2010/02/11/zentai/

Read at your own risk. NSFW by any means. Super disturbing. Totally unrelated to the picture below.

Birthday Wishlist 2010

2010-02-13T11:07:00.001-08:00

New pair of Doc Martens, preferably green or blue dress shoes
Love Streams – you’d have to find it via bit torrent, no R1 DVD available
Books about Linux and/or Ubuntu
Book about VBA
Magazine subscription to Make, Vice, or Wired
Urusei Yatsura DVDs
Super 7 paraphernalia (t-shirts and kaiju dolls)
Giant Robot paraphernalia (t-shirts and kaiju dolls)
Money towards tuition at Carroll Community
Van Heusen shirts
Haggar Pants
Sarah Records or similar C86-like compilation
Chiptunes/Gamewave mp3s
2010 Anthology of Graphic Fiction
First Dresden Files novel
New laptop with Intel i7 processor, greater than or equal to 4GB of RAM, and greater than or equal to a 320GB hard drive
Lifehacker book by Gina Trapani - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470238364/ref=nosim/gizmodo-20
iPad

Reasons to Consider Adopting a Vegetarian Diet

2010-02-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

I say consider because I know it's difficult for people. It's difficult for folks not only because it's more than likely difficult for them to conceive but even more than that today's marketplace doesn't make it all that easy to adopt such a diet. Not only does meat take up more than 95% of America's restaurant offerings but it's a heck of a lot cheaper too. Eating healthy and eating vegetarian is a luxury in the United States. It is much cheaper to eat and drink junk then it may ever be to eat in a way that promotes health and prevents heart disease.

There's been a lot of “on again off again” in my relationship with the vegetarian diet. I suppose I initially embraced it because of whatever music and literature I was into at the time. A lot of the folks I looked up to were long-standing vegetarians, in some cases vegans, and so it was very easy for me to side with the ethics of not eating meat. I was a pesco-vegetarian for most of college which means I still occasionally dined on fish, mostly sushi. During that time period I lost a pretty noticeable amount of weight. I think I was weighing in around 220 lbs those days having shrunk down from somewhere between 260 and 280. My overall health improved and I began to notice things like not feeling tired or beat up after meals. I'd get sick less often, had better moods, etc. I eventually relapsed though and just sort of gave in. I figured that messing up the diet once somehow made it alright for me to resume eating meat as constantly as everyone else does. Quitting the vegetarian diet killed all the improvements I had made to my health during those few years. I was very quickly back to my pre-diet weight and back with all the weird feelings you don't realize you get from eating meat until you're a vegetarian for a few weeks or so.

I've recently gone back to the diet and this time for ethical and practical reasons. It's more or less clear to me that the only way I'll be able to lose weight is by avoiding meat in my diet. Same goes for successfully avoiding a heart attack and an increased chance for certain cancers.

Sure I smoke which probably cancels out all those benefits and then some, but there are plenty of reasons to quit that go beyond the basic health benefits.

Whatever you're eating was made especially for you

No, not exclusively, but that hog, chicken, or cow was raised and bred so that folks like you and I could have as much of it as we wanted whenever we wanted. Even grosser is the fact that these beings are modified to keep this machine as efficient as possible. Factory farming does all sorts of nasty engineering to animals including accelerating their physical development as well as shrinking their bone mass and other organs so as to allow for a vessel which delivers more and more meat. These shouldn't be regarded as industry milestones. This is mad science.

Environmental Sustainability

The amount of energy required for grain and vegetable farming is exponentially less than the amount of energy required for rearing livestock and is capable of delivering far more in the way of nutrition and proteins than livestock farming. If the United States were to increase its grain and vegetable production by even 25% rates of obesity would be noticeably affected and starvation in the United States would be able to disappear.

Your taste buds deserve a vacation

Vegetarian cuisine is much more than meatless. It has its own unique pleasures, flavors, and culture. Approach it like you would any other exotic cuisine. Experiment with it at home and learn about what your local restaurants have to offer.

Community

Being that you're in the minority, there's a great sense of community in sharing and enjoying vegetarian food with all sorts of resources available for learning about aspects of the diet. More likely than not there's some form of co-op or vegetarian group that's local to you. You'll never feel so involved by your diet as you will with being a vegetarian. One of the greatest feelings is the sense you get when finding out someone you know is vegetarian. It's a great form of camaraderie.

Everyone wins except for the big guys

All in all there's not a whole lot of players in the game of food production, distribution, and retail. Way less than you would think what with massive corporate conglomerations and all. Giving less to these organizations is an investment in your health, community, and environment. It promotes alternative thinking and makes for statements like these.

snomg: the aftermath

2010-02-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

Um, so yeah, Yeti didn't really attack did they? Such a damn shame. I could have used a new Yeti fur jacket for these next few weeks of winter splosion. From what I understand we're in for a strange sort of weather pattern for the remainder of February. We're supposedly in for a significant-enough snow storm every weekend until March. Effing sucks. Oh well. Plenty of more time for Yeti to actually go through with their plans. Plenty of more time for me to establish a resistance movement. So it goes.

I broke my glasses over the weekend. Not very cool at all. I'm not exactly sure how it happened either. I was outside shoveling with all the neighbors and my glasses kept fogging up. I put my glasses in my coat pocket and about an hour or so later – when going to take a smoke break from shoveling – reached for my lighter and noticed that my glasses were broken at the nose frame and were now in two pieces. I actually handled this pretty calmly, but yeah, it reeks of suck. Wearing taped glasses just ain't cool kids. I did for a long time through college. I was accused of doing it for effect almost daily. Very embarrassing.

Otherwise I've just been doing my normal thing: playing lots of MW2, unintentionally avoiding that book I've been meaning to finish, playing some SF2 HD Remix....speaking of which....

Here's a great SF2 image a friend of mine sent me the other day:

Pretty nifty, right?

SF2 HD Remix is, as I've mentioned on Twitter, tantamount to me rediscovering God. My biggest complaint, with God (obviously), is that like all SSF2 ports, the single player is ridiculously difficult. Imagine the difficulty (and bullshit) that was fighting Bison back on the SF2 and SF2 Turbo SNES ports only that's how difficult it is for all the “new challengers.” Yeah, its hell. Fighting Thunderhawk and DeeJay was harder than college. Just shouldn't be that way. I can say pretty darn objectively that I'm an above-average player on Capcom fighters. I've gone whole nights undefeated with other respectable, above average players. Some combination of work and married life (perhaps owning a cat?) must have drained me of all my 2D fighting prowess. That, or the game is just really really hard just like all the other ports I've played. Is it clear that I'm totally having an identity crisis over this? The game's just freaking bullshit. The CPU is such a freaking cheater. I can't even use my best fighter against them. How can I be Ryu and fight honorably against these freaking cheaters?! SUCKS. Enough of my life in down, down forward, forward. I can bring it back. I will bring it back. Online play is truly great. There are some fantastic players out there. Folks that put my skills to shame. Picking up SF2 HD Remix is worth it just to see how many folks have mastered it and the different approaches people have to characters and fighting styles. I still can't believe that game is 20 years old. Online play is extremely friendly too which is a nice break from the poor sportsmanship you sometimes witness on Modern Warfare 2. I guess its just folks that really appreciate the game. Nice feeling. Oh, all the endings for characters are redone and actually include a choose your own adventure theme. For instance, after beating it Chun Li you can “return to life as a normal girl” or “continue fighting, etc.” If you return to life as a normal girl the ending involves Chun Li at a dance club beating up a guy who's laying it on a little too thick. Very cool.

I downloaded Open Office onto my laptop. Pretty cool. I'm typing up this post on there during breaks while working from home today. Might actually explain why this is all so incoherent. Overall its a really complete office suite. I have been able to find all the features I'm used to in WORD. I can't wait to get involved on the back-end of Open Office and try to customize some of the features. I downloaded a VBA suite the other day. For whatever reason I have this desire to learn code and start experimenting with programming. But yeah, Open Office is partially an experiment with open source to see what it's like. I'm considering getting into Ubuntu/Linux this year and want to gain a little bit more exposure to open source software. I know Open Office is far, far from the deep-end but I suppose it's a good enough start. Any tips on how to further research open source and Linux would be greatly appreciated. There are great resources online but they're all pretty overwhelming. I feel like I need a primer before using those.

Laertes. I'll talk to you all next week, whoever the heck you may be....

SNOMG Yeti Invasion!!!!!!

2010-02-04T19:32:00.000-08:00

I've come across some reliable radio evidence that suggests a significant Yeti offensive on the mid-Atlantic this weekend.  Yeti were reportedly as surprised by the weekend's forecast as we were. Rather than stocking up on goods and digging in for the weekend the Yeti have opted to make the most of the situation in an all out attack on Maryland and Virginia governments, businesses, and residential communities.  Rumor has it that vast scouting operations are already underway.

Be weary of burly, white bearded, pink toned, denim and/or sweatpants wearing beings as you make your way to the grocery store this evening.  It is not uncommon for a Yeti to attempt a human form for the purposes of intelligence gathering and other covert operations. Undercover Yeti almost universally wear velcro shoes. Their disguise is often convincing from afar but as their agents draw closer one can easily notice some of the Yeti's more obvious traits such as the horrid Yeti breath, crazy googly eyes, highly cartoonsh underbites and nearly constant confusion with all matters of western culture.

Refrain from traveling unless it is absolutely necessary. Be safe this weekend, and remember, a Yeti's greatest weakness is its own arrogance.



The most

Oscar Vibes

2010-02-02T20:04:00.000-08:00

Repeater - The Argument

2010-02-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Anyone ever notice how remarkable the relationship is between Fugazi's Repeater and The Argument? Supposing such a thing could exist in a band's own catalogue, The Argument plays like a spiritual successor, almost like a sequel album. I guess I missed this observation back in 2001 when The Argument was originally released but I can't get over it ever since I put all my Fugazi albums on my iPhone and rediscovered them during my commute.

Another DC band that's caught my ear lately is Title Tracks. Dischord will be releasing their first record soon; they have a single out that's available from Dischord....two bucks on iTunes. They have a really interesting sound, quite unlike any Dischord band in my opinion. The sound is a derviative of later oldies, dub, and some really fresh jangly guitar. The twee sound really comes out in the song (maybe more than one) on the album which features vocals by the singer of Camera Obscura. They're going to be playing in Baltimore at Golden West Cafe in a few weeks or so. I'll be upset if I miss it.

In other music related blurbs, Beth and I will be going to see They Might Be Giants perform in Richmond on March 11th. I'm stoked. They're going to perform the entirety of Flood. Should be great.

An old college professor once told me that whatever music you're listening to when you're 23 is pretty much the music that you'll listen to for the rest of your life. Hasn't caught up with me yet although its come close on several occasions.

New, Simple Look!!!

2010-02-01T18:37:00.000-08:00

So yeah, I've gone with the simplest possible blog design possible (that I can imagine). Reminds me of an old website from the early 90s. You'll have to scroll all the way below for Twitter Updates and Archives. Later you all.

Infinity and Interval Notation

2010-02-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

School actually wasn't that bad. Coolest part of today's lesson was learning that interval notation for linear inequalities has changed. Most of you should probably find this weird given how old you probably are and when you took Algebra, etc. Rather than noting x in final notation you're to note either positive or negative infinity. Isn't that weird? Like if {x| x < 5} the final notation would read (negative infinity, 5) indicating that x is anything between five and any number to its left on the number line. It's odd that they suggest infinity as a reportable value. The whole idea of final notation is to show points of value the way in which one reads the number line, from left to right. There's an even weirder change to interval notation but it'd be too difficult for me to explain it to you without being able to insert symbols into the blog.

Otherwise it was surreal. A good surreal though. My class is in the same exact room where I first took this class back in Fall 2001. I can remember our instructor excusing us from our first Chapter Test on September 11, 2001. I'm guessing the average age of my classmates at that time is probably like 9-12. I don't know if that's significant as a generation marker or anything, but being in class with students that young really made an impression on me. It doesn't give me faith in younger generations like say Harry Potter movies do, but I guess its just nice and affirming to see kids have or be in the process of getting their shit together, having objectives, etc. If nothing else, I think I'll appreciate having returned to school for that sensation alone. I'm fairly sure one of the kids was ripped though but of course that has its own charm.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the semester though. Should be fun. See you tomorrow.

y = 1/2x +mb = Why am I 28 and Back in Community College?

2010-02-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

I'm off to school in a moment or so. I'm chowing down a Clif Bar, drinking up some coffee, trying to figure out what its going to be like with Round 2 College. It feels really appropriate to me in some weird way. and the nervousness and uncertainty is actually a nice feeling. I'm not sure why I'm really going back to school, especially at such a lower level. It feels slightly more exciting than any of the career-driven graduate work I could be doing. Oh well. Time to get validated one way or another. Ciao.

Banker Sundays

2010-01-31T13:33:00.000-08:00

I suppose the name is sort of a contradiction seeing as banks aren't ever open on Sundays, but my wife and I came up with this idea early into our marriage after we decided it'd be best to pool our funds in a single account. We decided to get together once a week to take a look at what we were doing with the moneys, establish goals, notice trends, etc. Doing so has done wonders for the wallet - my only form of spending is by credit card so I'm always a little cautious about making a purchase. I feel like there's finally some traction towards a decent cushion supposing catastrophe strikes, one of us loses a job, the cat somehow becomes sick and so on, or, for a more favorable situation like we take a nice vacation or attempt to buy a house.

Taking moments like these, for me, really helps with disassociating myself from money and all the different ways I could spend it. It inhibits the consumer in me, if not just for a half a day or so. I wish could sustain that feeling as well as apply this sort of method to other facets of life like my perception of events, work, media, and education. I'd enjoy a day that I could spend away from my expectations, away from my relationship to books, TV, etc., away from my anxiety about the future, about people, or how I decide to make use of my time after work.

Machine Gun in our Hands...

2010-01-31T10:57:00.000-08:00

Here's a few updates, nothing special....

Welcome back to a Fuhrman blog - I'm not going to make any crazy declarations on this one like last time (See the Beard Files and six month commitment to beardedness)...this space is pretty much dedicated to me talking about things I find special, a place for me to be disagreeable, and a place for me to endorse products and ideas that I think other people should look into. Posts will be about as varied as my interests. Should be fun. Really just an escape from work.

I'll be doing a Top Ten SF & Fantasy Movies pretty soon as well as focusing on a few guilty pleasures of the genre.
I'm working my brainz out lately. I work generally an hour before I get to work and an hour after I get home from work. This week will be no exception. Modern Warfare 2 has done its best to keep my mind off of work-related stuffs but in a few hours from now I'll be back in the trenches, doing my thing, raising my right eye brow, up in my own base, training my own dudes, etc.
Just saw a trailer for the remake of George A Romero's "The Crazies." If you haven't, go watch the original and do your best to believe the remake doesn't exist.
I'm somewhat unimpressed with this week's Caprica.
John Huston's "Fat City" may be one of the most original movies I've ever seen.
I'm reading "We."
I'll eventually talk about Godzilla's Revenge and the above image.

Check out my friend's blog - www.dustycandy.blogspot.com.

Check out Critical Hits - www.critical-hits.com for excellent coverage of D&D and gaming.

More later this week....