Down 'round our way, we like to think of ourselves as at the height of cat couture. While we certainly would not wish painful surgery upon any cat, we can't help but feel parental pride in the sartorial simpering our little kitty Edmund is doing. Having clocked in a whopping eighteen (18) visits to the vet this here month, Edmund may have had trouble staying well, but he refuses to stay down. He currently is sporting the latest in alternative lifestyle fashion, having opted for the buttless chaps look. Mrowr! Click to get a (cough) closer look at this money shot.

Well, I was supposed to be home tonight, but Philadelphia ATC kept my Syracuse flight from even taking off until 45 minutes too late. Meanwhile, I had to endure the guy next to me smacking his gum loudly while I tried to sleep. Nice enough guy, but 45 minutes of eardrum-rattling gum smacking was enough to make me want to drop the gloves and pull his jersey over his head.

So I get to Philadelphia and my connector was gone. Did I mention that was the last flight to Raleigh this evening? The best US Airways can muster by way of compensation is a lousy "distressed passenger" rate at the Ramada for $69 a night. Of course, any rate at the Ramada is lousy, because it's the Ramada. More to the point, though, I needed broadband in the room to deal with the boatload of email that surely awaited me. So I write, gentle reader, from the 6th floor of the Philadelphia Airport Hilton. It's a good thing I only smoked cigars in one of my changes of clothing. Wheee-eeew!

Allow me to recommend to you the band The Long Winters. I recently discovered their CD When I Pretend to Fall, and everytime I listen to it, I find something new to love. My brilliant and tasteful wife Shelley bought the CD, and I picked it up just out of curiosity. And, they're coming to Chapel Hill on April 16th. Can't wait!

Well, it's Sunday and my folks were here last night and this morning. We went to 411 West and ate good Italian food, and then I made breakfast this morning. Took a couple pictures of breakfast, but don't have my USB transfer cable handy at the moment. Probably won't be many pictures for a while, as I'm returning my boss's digital camera. (sigh)

Their visit was notable as the occasion for the first significant ding in Uga, my dad's swanky Cooper S. Apparently he has these new competition brakes on the car, and he has to step on them harder to get them to take. Well, he didn't do something right when he and my mother parked the thing. When we went back out Uga had rolled over to smack my CRX. So the front left fender has a dent and a scrape on it.

In other news, I travel to Utica, NY, tomorrow. Utica is home to folks who live in Utica. That's about it, except for a pretender of a microbrewery that is beneath my sampling. I've not found much good beerwise to come from New York, except by way of importers.

So Shel and I have been down in the dumps the past two days. We took in a beautiful Siberian Husky named Seth from a friend at my office. He's a sweet, energetic yearling with a gorgeous coat, and the boy can run like the wind. I loved that the dog made us get out and play with him, and he arooed whenever he felt left out of the action.

Unfortunately, Seth is like many Siberians in that his prey instinct is walloping strong, and he didn't see our cats as anything else but prey, I'm afraid. We had a bad episode which resulted in Edmund (our little cat) getting rushed into surgery at the 24-hour pet trauma center. Afterwards, Edmund was not able to tolerate the presence (even the distant, outside presence) of the dog. Taliafero, our older cat, was as usual unruffled by the whole affair.

But as we are contemplating a move to the midwest soon, we aren't sure what kind of life we could give the doggie, and we want the boy to have the best that can be given. So we returned him, about two days ago. I feel like I've spent the whole time since silently arooing. Maah!

Here are a few pics of sweet Seth. You can click on each image to see a larger view.

You know, I have a love/hate relationship with Rogue Ales. Usually, I hate them in anything as small as a 12 oz. bottle, but on draft it's an altogether different matter.

A buddy of mine and I used to go to Woody's Tavern on Franklin Street here in Chapel Hill to eat wings and swill beer. That was when they had Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on draft, which is pretty good by itself, and really good with wings and fries. They stopped serving it, and replaced it with several knucklehead beers like Yuengling and Killian's.

Needless to say, yours truly found that wings weren't so tasty anymore. So my friend and I moved up the street to Pepper's Pizza, where they serve Rogue Dead Guy Ale in pitchers dirt cheap. I've always hated Dead Guy in the bottle, but verily, I telleth thee, on draft it is like a thing heaven-sent. Sweet, smooth, with a delicate hop finish. I find that the pizza, good as it is, always takes a back seat to the Dead Guy.

But when you pair a slice of Pepper's Slaughterhouse Five (pepperoni, sausage, hamburger, ham, and bacon!) with a Dead Guy, you can expect to be caught up forthwith into the seventh heaven.

Here's the thing. There are tons of sites out that showcase arcade controllers with so-called "custom" art. Nearly invariably, these builders plaster their overlays with copyrighted images of various fighting game characters. That is, unless they've received prior express written authorized permission, they're swiping copyrighted art to decorate the controllers that they build.

More to the point, though, I just don't care for all that crap all over my controller top. Maybe I just have a different aesthetic. The overlays I'm contemplating actually draw inspiration not from videogame cabinets, but from skateboard art of recent years, particularly that found at Alien Workshop and Rasa Libre, both of which feature awesome and innovative stylings.

But am I going to steal those guys' designs? No -- just like I wouldn't ripoff Capcom's Bengus, or any other copyrighted work.

Because that's unimaginative, and weaksauce.

So I've been working on building an authentic arcade controller for several months now, following the threads at Build Your Own Arcade Controls and Shoryuken.com, in addition to closely reading the materials that Armad1llo of Modeverything.com and Catch22 of The Joystick Builder have been cool enough to post on their sites.

I ordered some empty controller cases from RedOctane, and have been to Radio Shack about a thousand times it seems. On a business trip to Chicago, I actually went to Happ Controls' main distribution center in Elk Ridge, and bought real honest-to-goodness arcade parts, including the joystick, competition-style buttons, and super-dee-duper microswitches.

Despite the fact that the last time I held a soldering iron was fifteen years ago, I managed to get the thing wired up right and hooked up to the printed circuit board (PCB) which hooks into my Playstation 2.

Here are a few pics of the work in progress. You can click on each image to see a larger view.

Well, this is my first blogging post. I'll likely spend much of my time here talking about my progress with stupid enjoyable things, like videogames, coffee, the best beer in the world, and the amazing world of domestic housecats. I might throw in some teaching-related crap from time to time as well. The most likely scenario is a blog that blathers on and on. Enjoy!