Quite a lot goes into her stuffing, including ham, bacon, and frozen veggies. Her potato skins are creamy due to the potato filling, sour cream, and other items like more bacon, etc…

Aside from these two things, she usually cooks a turkey, which in my early years, would come out very dry. Sorry mom, but it is true! Not until one year when I gave her some basting suggestions like adding some butter under the skin and other such suggestions. Ever since then, the turkey has always come out moist and delicious.

This year it is different. This year, mom and my younger, of the two, sisters along with five other family members went to Mexico. They went to Mexico to accompany my grandfather’s body. He passed on November 12th at about 12:30pm.

This left dad, my sister Yesenia, and myself with a bit of a conundrum. A quandary, per say. I didn’t want to not celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean I am still very thankful for the full life my grandfather had among other things. Also, if we did not do anything, that would be kind of depressing. I decided I’d take care of dinner. So I placed an order with Boston Market for a holiday meal.

Serves 4-6 people, but we are just three. Let’s invite an uncle and cousin since the wife, mom’s sister, is also in Mexico! Then other cousins had nowhere to go with their families also in Mexico. Suddenly, we have a count of 12.

This Thanksgiving will definitely be different. My grandfather will not be there for one. His oxygen tank in the corner with a line to him. Walking from the living room to the kitchen and back whenever he got bored of the tv or the people. My mom or my sister Yoselin, or several aunts and cousins won’t be there. My mom’s cooking will definitely be missed. Sure, I could try to do the cooking myself, I mean I can probably almost repeat her recipes since I’ve seen her make it year after year. But, no. I won’t do her justice. Not yet at least.

Anyway, I leave you with this as you all {U.S. peeps} prepare for the day of thanks; Tell your loved ones you love them. Don’t wait. You never know when the last time you will see someone alive. I will never forget the last time I saw him conscious. He had fallen so we decided to take him to the emergency room just in case. I looked at him, right in the eyes as he was in the ambulance and as the doors closed. There was a calm sadness about him. Had I’d known that would be my last real opportunity, I would had told him one last time how much I loved him.

I do.

I love you grandpa.

Rest in peace, Jose Angel Ramos. 1931 - 2011

Short URL: http://is.gd/thanksgiving2011

Last year, a company named Euclideon from Australia, came out with Unlimited Detail Technology showing infinite point cloud data being run in real-time using only software. Instead of using polygons, they said they could use atoms. They had very little to show for it, especially since processing this amount of detail was questionable at best. Now, after a year of work, they have released what they have and it is amazing.

It’s been a busy year, and all is going very well; we only have 9 people working here, but will be hiring a few more soon. We also have another piece of technology that isn’t graphics, but does something game related that’s also pretty clever, but we’ll keep that secret for now.

They will soon make a developer’s kit and release it out to the gaming companies.

I. Can’t. WAIT! OMG I AM IN TEH FUTURES!!!

Short URL: http://is.gd/gaminggraphics

On Netflix instant watch, Scorched, a 2003 indy film is available for viewing. Starring Alicia Silverstone, Rachael Leigh Cook, Woody Harrelson, and John Cleese. Check out the Netflix summary:

Three employees of a bank located in a small desert town all make separate plans to rob the bank on the same weekend — unbeknownst to the others.

Same old chestnut of great minds think alike. Now, one of my favorite scenes is a game of Dungeons & Dragons in which Schmalley (Cook) decides to be a rogue with 14 intelligence and can speak multiple languages.

Once again I want to play DnD! Once again, I realize somehow I actually don’t have enough friends in Chicago to make this happen.

Anyway, this movie is worth a watch. I really enjoy watching different stories and how they end up interacting with each other. Everyone has an agenda, mostly stemming from the same a-hole boss, except for Harrelson’s issue which involves a duck. A duck.

I give this movie 4 out of 5 ducks. *QUACK!*

Short URL: http://is.gd/scorched

When the late King Alband III had gone into the long cold sleep in a manner queerly
Five years after King Alband III, Belrand’s father, had gone into the long cold sleep in a manner queerly suspect leaving son as King, the young mage by some means defeated and consolidated all of the Gnomish Eronon and now, but three lunar cycles later, the warmachine is being readied. A map with the latest updated information lay across the table between he and his generals. On the left lay Eronon with city points and troop strengths. On the right, past the Lycernian Sea, lay Garns. What information bought through the traders added to that side of the map.

The various realms of Garns did not know what awaited them. Soon they would be ruled by King Belrand.

In a nondescript northern village within Garns, Edgar awoke with a start. War is coming. There was a sense of dread. He knew what he had to do. With the rest of the realm in turmoil, there was only one force he could turn to. The Unicorn Kingdom in South Garns. Edgar needed to make leave quick.

To Be Continued… Below is a preview of the EPIC battle.

This drawing was commissioned and paid for. Check out the artist on twitter @RemyKat and visit her blog, http://remykat.weebly.com/. Thanks Remy!

Short URL: http://is.gd/UnicornsVSGnomes

Lunch time at work is such a weird time for me. Weird in the sense that the kinds of conversations we end up having, the coworkers and I, tend to be strange. One particular coworker remarked once “I wonder what it feels like to be shot.” He then went on to try and expand that and add scenarios of how to safely do it, and where on the body would be best to both feel the “full impact” and safest too. Myself and some of the others tried to get him to explain why the fascination and I even tried getting him to at least downgrade to a knife.

Later he said he had said it because we were quiet for 5 seconds too long and he did not like awkward silences. I guess he prefers awkward conversations over silence.

This leads me to today. Lunch time. I don’t know why it was said or asked, one train of though or another lead another coworker to pose an interesting question, which I answered right away and he then debated to no end.

He asked, “If you could create a genetic clone of yourself, then imprint it with an exact digital copy of your mind, then you died, did you really die?” to which I responded, “Yes.” without hesitation. “But he is you in every way.”

His question was about eternal life. The ability to preserve the mind digitally and perfectly.

I’m sorry, but death is death. For me, if you could physically move my brain onto another body, or stop entropy, THEN we can talk. He went on to use the perspective defense… say we have Edgar and cloneEdgar. Edgar dies but no one knows about it. For anyone else who experiences cloneEdgar, I haven’t died yet. But wait, I did die. Just because someone doesn’t know about it doesn’t make it not true!

YES, a tree DOES make a sound if it falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it!!!! What are you STUPID!?!?!?

I’ve suddenly delved into the existentialism realm. Drank its clear tasty Kool-Aid. Swam in the tenderness of its caress. For what is death really? “the permanent end of all life functions in an organism or part of an organism;” or “Death is the termination of the biological functions that define a living organism. It will eventually afflict all living things. Death refers both to a particular event and to the condition that results thereby.” but when there is, in essence, a new instance of me out there, for all purposes is me and can basically be indistinguishable from me aside from the cellular life-table (I made this word up) since it was just recently created while I was born and grew up, but still… if I die, while another me is around, do I really die?

Yes. Yes I die. See, for when if there ARE two of me and the other me is next to me, we’re not even breathing the exact same air. This means that his experiences are already different from mine and that means that he is not me. My head’s about to explode.

My thinking is that even though both me’s have within them the exact same experiences and are genetically identical, our thought will not be exactly the same. We’ll think alike and get to the same conclusions, but things will be different for the both of us. Our own interactions will make our experiences unequal and ultimately change us drastically enough that we’d be two different people.

This tells me that if I died but clone me was around to continue the me for everyone else, my death still matters. This me would cease to exist. He would be alive and kicking and have all my memories and experiences but is he really me? Kinda. But no.

Does anyone else have any thoughts about this? I hope so. Write it up below.

Short URL: http://is.gd/WhatIsDeath

Lenka has quickly become a favorite artist of mine. The Show was such a wonderful song that really was akin to my life. Something about this song, My Heart Skips a Beat, that is so catchy. I would LOVE to see her live.

Enjoy, her new album Two, drops Tuesday, April 19th. I will definitely get it!

Short URL: http://is.gd/LenkaHeartSkipsABeat

One can only wish Shatner a happy birthday with one of his own creations. This is probably my favorite Shatner-song and I like this edit of the cartoon. Have a good one. His twitter feed says today is #talklikeshatner day. So… goahead and. Talk? Like… Shatner.

Short URL: http://is.gd/shatnerbday

This hilarious parody of Bruno Mars’ club hit Grenade, was written and directed by Payman Benz. Payman is of Awkward Pictures, which includes Sean Becker, and known for their comedic genius.

Payman approached me a while back wanting to set up a website with his videos and information about him. A very simple site was what he wanted.

I quickly suggested he should seek out wordpress templates, which he took to heart because I started getting links to templates he liked. “Can you make some changes to this template? Is that hard?” were some of the companion questions I’d get.

I’ve had about a good hour max of facetime with Payman in the past so I didn’t really know him too well. I am a fan of his work, and he’s heard of me through Sean and the work I do for The Guild. I quickly realized that this man has his head on straight. Particularly with what he wants with his site. Perfect!

Ultimately, he found the template which did what he wanted and had the basic look he needed. He also asked me if I could work on this and get it done by today. He had a new music video he was uploading and wanted to coincide his site launch with it. I said, “Sure!”

Payman sent me everything I asked for. And even stuff I didn’t. He gave me good quality photos for his thumbnails and a list of his videos, separated into the categories he wanted. He even went as far as create photoshop mock images of his site. The man made things SUPER easy for me to set up.

The other reason for this blog post is because I came across an issue while working on this template. Half of Payman’s videos are on Funny or Die. That website is usually not supported in plugins or anything video-related. YouTube, Vimeo, self-hosted files, is usually as far as they go. This template was the same. I looked at the functions, and figured out how it worked and actually added support for FoD. It also came with prettyPhoto, a javascript library for opening up lightbox-like views of pictures and videos. I added FoD support for that as well.

It felt good to be able to do something like that, and do quickly also. I remember back in the days when I would spend hours trying to dissect code for Felicia or The Guild to fix something or make it work how we needed it.

Anyway, http://paymanbenz.com is up. Check it out. Watch Payman’s old content on there, I spent some of my time last night going through it. Some I hadn’t ever seen before, while some I had seen many times over. Feel free to comment by clicking on the title of a video and going to the page.

Thanks Payman for giving me the opportunity to help you with something creative, and then making the whole experience pretty phenomenal.

Short URL: http://is.gd/GRENADE

Watch the video, then check out the page I created for them: http://superHarmony.com.

Short URL: http://is.gd/superHarmony

Happy Friday everyone!