Paleck.com

I’m sure many of you have seen and enjoyed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. However, many of you will not have seen Requiem for a Dream. It is not a happy movie nor does it have a happy ending. Rather it shows in rather a gruesome detail just how drugs of many different types can tear a family apart. Now someone has very artfully mashed up scenes from Ferris Bueller with the soundtrack from Requiem. I definitely recommend giving it a watch and if you haven’t seen Requiem for a Dream, then go out and rent it.

Tags: funny, mashup, video

I gotta hand it to Blizzard. They, for the most part, really know how to take care of their customers. I purchased the old Warcraft III and Diablo II games years ago. At this point the original CDs are just about unusable, for example I figured out I could still play Diablo II, but only if I could start a new game within 6 seconds of the main menu appearing. Now blizzard has set-up a system to allow those of us who have bought their older games to enter our old CD keys and download a non-CD version of the same games. They were definitely under no obligation to do this, but they did it anyways. It just goes to show you that Blizz really does care about their customers, even the older ones who may not have bought anything from them for a while.

I only have one gripe and it’s not even Blizz’s fault. In one of the recent updates to Leopard, Apple removed the 256 color mode (which these older games rely on) for their computers with NVidia cards. So for now I cannot play them, but rumor has it that the upcoming 10.5.5 update is supposed to restore that function and allow these games to be played again.

Tags: blizzard, cd, diablo, Games, Retro, warcraft

A picture from my trip to California this pas weekend. My family went for a drive Friday afternoon and ended up at the Huntington Dog Beach. 

Tags: beach, california, dogs, Photo

This is not a joke!! The book on the bottom I was reading before I went out of town(more on that later) and the one on the right I started when I got back and had forgotten about the first. The third book on top I started while I was out of town, but had forgotten about until I started unpacking.

Tags: books, distracted, Photo, reading, simultaneous

And no I don’t mean it literally.

Today started out like any other Monday, badly. I was running late, hadn’t gotten as much done this last weekend as I wanted and I was unable to get to sleep until past midnight despite having attempted to go to bed at 8pm. After walking into my meeting five minutes late my personal phone rings and I almost ignored it until I saw that it was from my mom. She never calls me on Monday mornings, because she knows it is the worst day for anything, unless it is an emergency. When I answered she told me that my grandpa in California had died last night.

Now I have mixed feelings on how to feel at the moment. On one hand I am sad, but not enough to cry and on the other hand I am happy since his health had been declining for the last few years. About 5ish years ago he had a stroke and was no longer able to speak or to eat normally. Add onto it that in all that time I have not taken the time to go down and visit him except for one time. My mom and even my sister has managed to get down there at least twice a year, but somehow I was always too busy.

All of this leads me to the bag of bricks I mentioned in the title of this post. When my grandpa on my mom’s side died I was fine(translation: composed) at the funeral/memorial as he had been in pain for years and years. Then my grandma on my mom’s side died shortly thereafter and I completely broke down and had to leave the viewing since she was her health failed suddenly and immediately after my grandpa had died. Now I am faced with a situation where for the last few years my grandpa on my dad’s side whose health has been deteriorating only for the last few years, but I only ever saw it once. Will I be able to hold some semblance of composure or is it going to hit me like a ton of bricks where I will completely break down? Unfortunately I have no idea and that scares me. For some reason I don’t like to not be in control of my emotions especially in a public setting and I am crying uncontrollably. 

I guess I’ll see in a few days when I head off to Cali for a few days over the weekend.

Tags: death, drama, Family, funeral, grandpa, Life, stroke