Apparently at a talk/book signing for his newest, Under the Dome, King was asked about revisiting the Dark Tower universe and he said he wanted to write one more book that takes place between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla.

The moderator of the Stephen King message board confirmed this and elaborated:

Stephen has given me permission to pass along that he has an idea for a new Dark Tower book, the working title of which will be THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. He has not yet started this book and anticipates that it will be a minimum of eight months before he is able to begin writing it.

Busy day... bank is finally willing to work with us a little on the house we want to buy. They're giving us until December 4th to close. Not even a full month, but I think we can do it. I scheduled power/water/gas to be turned on Thursday (tomorrow is Veteran's day). I scheduled a home inspection for Thursday afternoon at 2pm. The inspection lady was super nice, and said if the utilities aren't on by 1pm to call and reschedule for next Tuesday.

My fingers are crossed that this all falls in to place. I've been living with my in-laws for far too long now.

I watched a guy open a Zendikar booster tonight an pull out a Mox Ruby. Pretty nuts.

None of my geek friends, or I had ever played D&D before. I don't know how we truly called ourselves geeks not having done so. We sough to remedy that a couple weeks ago and have been playing once a week since. I thought it would be "too much" geek, but it turns out to be a lot of fun. I think the part that's most appealing is sitting around the table with my friends again.

What started out as a trial, has turned out to be pretty fun.

Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. - The Guardian

Is this for real? Do they really expect people to have Windows 7 parties to show all their friends how nerdy they are?

Spam subject of the day!

Have a concrete thing in pants!

"MySQL and Oracle do not compete at all," Ellison said, "If you look at where we compete it's with DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, Sybase, and a long list of others. We never compete against mySQL, it addresses very different markets." Ellison is worried about the delays, explaining it only hurts Sun. "The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose," he said. - OSNews.com

Usain Bolt, who holds the world record for the 100 meter dash can run 23 miles per hour. Last night while biking home from work I decided to see if I could match his speed (on my bike). There is a stretch of straight road with no traffic that is about 300 meters long between Ivy and Fir street. From a complete stop I hammered my bike as fast as I could get it, I hit top gear and pedaled until my legs ached. I hit 21.1 miles per hour.

Sad.

I really really really want one of these! I have the original WDTV and I love it. It plays media off of USB stick or HD. It will play any media file you can throw at it. Output is full 1080p via HDMI. It's a really solid box. The only thing it's missing is an ethernet port, which it looks like they've added in this revision. I can't wait until this comes out!

David Brooks' Advice for High School Graduates:

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we're pretty much on our own.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck.

Well said!

Thank goodness for the windchill... according to canbyweather.com it's only 98.8 with the windchill. Otherwise it would be 101.9.

The USPS apparently won't ship anything that's in a box that says Whiskey on it. We have a bunch of booze boxes that I got from the liquor store (to move) but USPS says no go.

Only on Linux does 0% volume not mean mute!

(08:39:55 AM) Scott Baker: I dare you to watch the whole thing without slitting your wrists - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yavx9yxTrsw
(08:40:32 AM) Jason Dietz: Is it worse that pickle surprise?
(08:41:16 AM) Scott Baker: kinda
(08:41:37 AM) Jason Dietz: I only made it a minute and 2 seconds.
(08:41:53 AM) Jason Dietz: I'll probably die tomorrow like in that movie where they watch that VHS tape and die the next day.
(08:42:10 AM) Jason Dietz: I think part of me just died.
(08:42:17 AM) Jason Dietz: I've never wanted to kill someone so badly in my life.
(08:42:42 AM) Jason Dietz: When shit like that ends up on the interent, the terrorists have won.
(08:43:06 AM) Jason Dietz: That's like the video equivalent of brown noise.
(08:43:13 AM) Jason Dietz: I literally just shat myself.

Kool-aid consists of 2 quarts of water, kool-aid mix, and 1 cup of sugar. 1 cup of sugar is 196 grams. 2 quarts of water is 64 fluid ounces. That means that Kool-aid has about 3 grams of sugar per ounce.

An eight ounce can of Coca-cola has about 27 grams of sugar. Which works out to about 3.4 grams of sugar per ounce.

Kool-aid is usually made from real (cane) sugar not corn syrup, and doesn't contain any caffeine.

A good chunk of the stuff in our house is packed and in the garage. It makes our house less "full" but it just makes me want to move more!

"Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads," Stringer said, "This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US." - OSNews.com

Angie and have been house hunting for about a month now. Now that we have two kids it's time to upgrade the house so we have room for everyone. I know it's only been a month, but I'm kind of getting bummed that we haven't found anything more exciting yet.

We've looked at about 15 houses, and only found one that we got excited about. That houe is a short sale, so we put an offer on it. Another person put an offer on it before we did so they have first dibs. It's not looking good. We packed all the "clutter" in our house into boxes to make it more compelling to sell. It just makes me more anxious to move!