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Somehow I talked my beloved wife into allowing me to get some Lord of the Rings statues from Sideshow Collectibles. The premise is that we LOVE LOTR and are trying to get into “fine art”. So figured that these would bea nice combination.

The statues we received were Helm’s Deep and The Golden Hall part of their “Environments” series. Unfortunately I missed out on the first one, Orthanc which is now selling on eBay for around $1,000. We can only hope the same happens to our new statues.

They are beautifully detailed, especially the Golden Hall. Unfortunately the Hem’s Deep statue is covered by semi-hard to see reddish/marroonish dots. They definately don’t seem like they fit in… unless they are squished orcses or something. I sent an email to Sideshow asking if this was a bug or a features, and that I could provide pictures. I was quickly responded to with a request for the pics, so I will have to take some tonight to send along. So far so good on the customer service. Their FAQ’s state that sometimes replacements can’t be had due to limited number editions (which this is) so I’ll then have to decide if I want my money back or a botched statue.

Anyway… will post the results of the dot findings when they happen, but am excited to add these to the collection. Now I just have to find a place to display them proudly.

**update**
After sending some pics they approved my return, and sent someone to pick it up. According to the UPS tracking number, they just got it. So hopefull a new unspotted Helm’s Deep will be on it’s way shortly.

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Well, I have joined the ranks of the iPod owners. The most recent price reduction put it in a range that I was willing to pay. So after checking a few places to see who had one in stock, I ventured down to BestBuy to pick me up the 20gig 4g model.

I’m not sure how I feel about going to the dark side (Apple that is… really… one mouse button? come on!), as it felt a little weird looking down at the apple logoed cable sticking out of my box. But my hatred of the OS aside, you can’t deny that the iPod is a good product, and will hopefully bring me many hours of enjoyment.

So I’ll try and post every now and then how things are going with my new Apple relationship…. maybe that will get me to post more then once a month.

I’ve now had it for just over a day. First weird thing I noticed while clicking (scrolling) around the menus was the capacity before I did anything with it was 18.6 Gigs. What the heck is on there that takes 1.4 G of space? I can understand a little descrepency in size for whatever OS is on there, and a little for other misc stuff… but 1.4 gigs? Come on… Ok, I’m leaving the above rant just for history sake, but decided to go Google ipod capacity 18.6 while typing this up and found that it kind of was what I thought above… that whole “misc stuff” stuff. Binary verses decimal… yadda yadda yadda… blah blah blah… still sucks.

Anyway… am in the middle of re-ripping all my CD’s to have them at a higher quality (192 instead of 128 or whatever I had before), and to start over in a new folder with all spiffy legal music. Ripping CD’s is quite easy with iTunes… but still boring as heck.

Enough blabbering for now… back to ripping… weeeeeee.

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Alex sent me a link to this on a different forum, but tracked down the original. I had to try hard not to LOL at work while reading it, is freaking hillarious.

Requirements: Have seen LOTR:FOTR, and be a gamer

sif = As if
ffs = For F*** sakes (their words not mine)

F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng

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Introduction

This lengthy article is here to describe the process of how Shaun Inman’s IFR technique came to be used on Sprint.com and SprintPCS.com. This is my first write-up of the process involved in implementing a major new standard, and I didn’t take the notes I should have along the way… so please bear with me.

(Read the article)

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I’ve been wanting to go to the zoo for several years now (starting back in Utah) and just never got around to it. So Friday night I decided that we’d go to the Kansas City Zoo on Saturday morning… Weather was supposed to be in the upper 60’s and overcast the whole day so figured it would probably be one of the last nice weekends before the summer heat came.

The zoo is layed out kind of in continents. You have baboons in one area, chimps in another gorillas in another, so it’s kinda weird not being able to see all the similar kind of animals at once, but also kinda interesting to see what is from where.

Overall it was a fun day, with a LOT of walking. I won’t go over each little detail but there were two that were really cool. First was a bird show that we went to watch while waiting for the second thing. I know, bird show shmird show… which was kinda what I thought going into it. During the show they asked for two adult volunteers and if they had a camera all the better. So I held mine up and got picked. We were told to go sit on these chairs. Then they bring out this big ole owl that they are going to send to a stand that is inches behind us. Luckily my camera has video, so I switched to that thinking it would be cooler to get the full action instead of one shot at a picture that I would probably miss. I wasn’t mistaken… this huge owl comes flying at us and lands basically on our heads. Having it come right at the camera is pretty sweet. Then they sent it off to another stand across the crowd, and then back to us, before going back up to the stage.

The second part was the best. They have a cage full of lorikeets that they allow 25 or so people into feed every hour. They give you a small plastic container of nectar (which is the majority of their diet) and you just hold it in your hand. You walk into the cage and they just come right up and land on your hand to start eating. There were some people that had 4 on each arm, Kaylene (my wife) had one keep landing on her head. The most I got was 3 on one arm, but had several on my shoulders a couple times. We hung out for like 20 minutes just having these beautiful rainbow colored birds flying all around and landing on us just to check things out. It was such a cool experience and worth the price of admission itself. It may be a worth a return trip to go do that again when it’s not overcast just to get some better shots with the brighter light.

The rest of the zoo was pretty cool, got some other cool shots. A large part of me wanting to go was to get some fun pictures and to play with the camera which I seem to be wanting to do more and more lately. They had a number of walk through bird aviaries which was nice to be able to get the pics without glass or wire between us. The kangaroos are just out in a field where they could walk up to you if they wanted (but naturally don’t).

Several times we had the whole “is a zoo cruel?” discussion as we would run into a particularly pathetic looking animal in a bland cage. It seems the “big ticket” animals get it pretty good, and a few others just get the shaft. We still don’t know how we feel about it, but it was just sad to see a few animals in a bad setting. While others seemed to be just fine, and you never know the back story of how maybe these particular specimens would have already died were it not for human intervention.

Anyway… good times were had and to anyone in the area, I highly recommend a visit for the lorikeet feeding alone. It was a blast and we will enjoy the pictures and video for some time.

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