Thanks for your comments, everyone. This one really hit hard, and continues to. Even though I expect that hurt to last a very long time, one thing I know for sure is that Paul wouldn't want me to be sad, so I'm doing my best not to be.
Toward that end, I'm going to pick up this place a little and get back into the groove. Not tonight, but perhaps this weekend. I'm just trying to figure out exactly how to proceed.
Oddly, things are starting to look a little brighter, and I guess it's in my nature to find humor in things, even when there might not be much to laugh at. Paul was the same way, and one big reason we were such good friends.
I may start with a ghost story. I'm not sure yet.
Anyway, thanks for waiting, and thanks for the words of sympathy, encouragement and kindness.
See you soon.
4/12/09
Rivendell awaits.
My best friend died yesterday.
I type those words, and I simply cannot believe they're true. Even though I stood in a room at the hospital for hours, his body on a gurney three feet in front of me, it still doesn't seem real. I feel like I could pick up the phone right now and call him, and in 15 minutes we'd be drinking coffee together and talking about our latest shop projects -- his of forged steel and mine of wood. He was a swordsmith, and his swords were functional works of art -- my lacquered wooden scabbards simply trying to keep up. I know he probably could have found a professional to make them, but he wanted them to be ours. That he is no longer in this world, and no longer in my life is inconceivable to me.
I'm not sure how you sum up in a few paragraphs a friendship that spanned 33 years. It's just not possible. When you meet by chance in 7th grade, you are friends of circumstance more than anything else. Something as simple as seating students in alphabetic order, picking the teams in gym class, or even the random assignment of adjoining lockers can determine who your friends are in high school. If you are lucky, at least one friendship will take root and last throughout your high school years, and you will have someone who can join you in a united front against your own burgeoning adolescence. You have each other's backs, and somehow you make sense of it together. That single friendship can shape you in your formative years, and to a large extent it can determine the kind of person you will become.
For that friendship of circumstance to take hold, blossom and then strengthen over the course of three decades is a rare thing indeed, and I know how lucky I am. It's a true gift, and one that I will never take for granted.
A friendship like that is one of firsts -- first girlfriends, first cars, first breakups, first jobs and first marriages. We were there for each other through all of those things, and many, many more. We were closer than brothers, and I truly couldn't have asked for a better friend. He had the heart and soul of a warrior, and a fierce loyalty to those he loved.
At a little after 7:00 am Saturday morning, he responded to an e-mail I had sent him the night before, referencing a Bill Whittle essay. We were supposed to get together for coffee later that morning, as we had on countless weekends past. He had picked out a particular quote from the essay and sent it back to me. The quote was this:
"From this transformational experience I learned something new and re-learned something old: first, a dream becomes a goal once you make a viable plan and stick to it, and second, the single most important thing you do in life is choose your friends."
Two hours later, he was gone. I didn't get his e-mail until later that morning, after it was too late to reply. Too late to tell him what a great friend he was, and how much he meant to me. Too late to say goodbye.
He had so much left to do. We had so much left to do together.
I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.
I type those words, and I simply cannot believe they're true. Even though I stood in a room at the hospital for hours, his body on a gurney three feet in front of me, it still doesn't seem real. I feel like I could pick up the phone right now and call him, and in 15 minutes we'd be drinking coffee together and talking about our latest shop projects -- his of forged steel and mine of wood. He was a swordsmith, and his swords were functional works of art -- my lacquered wooden scabbards simply trying to keep up. I know he probably could have found a professional to make them, but he wanted them to be ours. That he is no longer in this world, and no longer in my life is inconceivable to me.
I'm not sure how you sum up in a few paragraphs a friendship that spanned 33 years. It's just not possible. When you meet by chance in 7th grade, you are friends of circumstance more than anything else. Something as simple as seating students in alphabetic order, picking the teams in gym class, or even the random assignment of adjoining lockers can determine who your friends are in high school. If you are lucky, at least one friendship will take root and last throughout your high school years, and you will have someone who can join you in a united front against your own burgeoning adolescence. You have each other's backs, and somehow you make sense of it together. That single friendship can shape you in your formative years, and to a large extent it can determine the kind of person you will become.
For that friendship of circumstance to take hold, blossom and then strengthen over the course of three decades is a rare thing indeed, and I know how lucky I am. It's a true gift, and one that I will never take for granted.
A friendship like that is one of firsts -- first girlfriends, first cars, first breakups, first jobs and first marriages. We were there for each other through all of those things, and many, many more. We were closer than brothers, and I truly couldn't have asked for a better friend. He had the heart and soul of a warrior, and a fierce loyalty to those he loved.
At a little after 7:00 am Saturday morning, he responded to an e-mail I had sent him the night before, referencing a Bill Whittle essay. We were supposed to get together for coffee later that morning, as we had on countless weekends past. He had picked out a particular quote from the essay and sent it back to me. The quote was this:
"From this transformational experience I learned something new and re-learned something old: first, a dream becomes a goal once you make a viable plan and stick to it, and second, the single most important thing you do in life is choose your friends."
Two hours later, he was gone. I didn't get his e-mail until later that morning, after it was too late to reply. Too late to tell him what a great friend he was, and how much he meant to me. Too late to say goodbye.
He had so much left to do. We had so much left to do together.
I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.
I'm going to take a break for a while. I'll see you guys on the flip side.
4/4/09
My next recurring nightmare. Shrubmonks.
They might not look that scary in this daytime picture, but try walking past them on a foggy, moonlit night at about 2 am when the only sounds you hear are the rustling of their filthy cloaks and the echo of your own footsteps.
They will reach out their shrubby arms and pull you inside them, where you will meet The Things That Live In The Branches.
Sleep well.
4/2/09
Wow. I'm a little verklempt.
Thank you all for your amazing comments.
I don't know what else to say, so I'll leave it at that. You guys are great.
(and one more picture, sorry.)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
I don't know what else to say, so I'll leave it at that. You guys are great.
(and one more picture, sorry.)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
3/29/09
Losing a friend.
Where to begin?
First, I had a 3-day training class from hell last week, complete with an impossible test at the end that I am pretty sure I failed.
Second, my best friend since 7th grade had a heart attack. (Thankfully, full recovery expected.)
Third, Our cat JD died, and as a result, our house has been filled with sadness. He was a special kitty, and a beautiful boy. He was my wife's best friend and my faithful writing companion. He slept in the crook of my arm almost every night, and his unconditional love and his trusting personality made him better than most people.
If you'll indulge me, I'd like to tell you a little bit about him. This post is probably more for me than for you, so there won't be any funny this time around. If you are here for a laugh, check back later, or see this previous post about JD. This was, to put it mildly, a bitch of a week.
About eight years ago, we were driving home on a back country road during a rainstorm, when my wife said, "What was that? I think I saw kittens! Stop!" so I reluctantly pulled over, having seen nothing myself. It turned out she was right -- she did see kittens. They were lost, abandoned and scared, but when my wife got out of the car and called to them, they came running. She scooped them up and tossed them in the back seat, and suddenly we were the owners of two kittens who smelled like cow crap and looked like drowned rats. When we got them home, we put them in my shop, gave them some food and water, and turned on the heat so they'd dry off. They ate like they hadn't had a meal in three days, which may have been the case.
I hope there's a special place in Hell for people who abandon their pets on the side of the road.
The next morning, we went out to see what we had found and clean them up, but they had apparently spent the entire night cleaning each other because they were dry and totally clean. I got a friend to adopt one, we adopted the other, named him JD, and our adventure began. We took him to the vet, had him checked for worms and feline leukemia, got him his shots, and had his little man-bits removed.
We already had two other cats. I didn't really feel like we needed another one, but there was something about him. I'm not sure if it was his bright blue eyes, or the fact that he acted more like a dog than a cat, but he quickly wormed his way into our hearts. Our other cats are nice enough, but they're not the same. I don't know how to explain why he was different, or why we became so fond of him so quickly, but we did. Maybe it was because we rescued him from an almost certain death, and he acted as if knew that. Or maybe it was because he bonded to us both so completely. I'm not sure.
He never begged and never made a pain the ass of himself, which is rare for a cat. He'd sit and wait patiently for his food while the other two zig-zagged between my wife's legs and pawed at the counter and meowed like they never ate before. He'd follow my wife around the house, and he always wanted to be a part of whatever she was doing. He came running when she called his name, and he'd search the house for her when he noticed she was missing. He developed routines; we developed routines -- and he trained us well. To be honest, we spoiled the hell out of him.
He loved the summer and the warm weather, and would look forward to keeping my wife company as she gardened, or as she sat on the porch with her latest crocheting or knitting project. All winter -- on the sunny days especially -- he would run to the front door and wait to be let on to the porch, expecting it to be warm. It was always such a disappointment to him when it wasn't, and he'd turn around and march back into the house like it was somehow our fault.
After about 4 years, he started getting sick. We thought it was hairballs, or maybe he was eating too fast. To be on the safe side, we took him to the vet, and the vet gave us some sad news: An ultrasound confirmed that JD had small, malformed kidneys, and as a result they were only functioning at roughly 20%. He also had some stomach problems, and she suspected pancreatitis. Toxins were building up in his bloodstream, and that's why he wasn't eating. The treatment for this was to inject 150ml of saline solution under his skin every three days, to ease the strain on his kidneys, which I learned to do. She gave us two other drugs, one to help with his appetite when his stomach was off and he didn't feel like eating, the other to help with his stomach ulcer issues. This seemed to stabilize him, and he remained a happy cat for quite a few years, although he would go in cycles where he'd have a stretch of a few good weeks, then a bad week, then a few more good weeks, etc.
Every few nights, he'd sit on my wife's lap and patiently allow me to stab him with an IV needle, and he never complained other than a low-pitched moan here or there. He never scratched or tried to bite. He trusted us, and even though what we were doing to him must have hurt, he forgave us each and every time. He'd run away and hide, and in twenty minutes he'd be back to see what we were doing.
Because we had to give him so much daily medication, it was difficult to leave him behind when we went camping or visited friends for the weekend. We'd have to board him at the vet's office, and that wasn't inexpensive, or very pleasant for either of us. That's when we started taking him with us when we went places. He got used to a harness fairly quickly, and he loved going on canoe trips and camping in the Adirondacks, and having him there with us was actually pretty fun. I know our canoe trips this year won't be the same without him.
During one of his visits to the vet last year, we got some more bad news -- our vet heard a pretty significant heart murmur, and she suggested we take him to a cardiologist. Yes, believe it or not, cats have their own cardiologists. The cardiologist did another ultrasound, and it turned out that JD had an enlarged heart and high blood pressure, most likely as side effects of his failing kidneys. We agreed that we'd treat him as long as he didn't realize he was sick, and that's what we did. His life became a routine of pill-popping morning and night -- two types of beta blockers, plus antacids -- interspersed with squirts of liquid medicine down his throat, in addition to the subcutaneous fluids every couple of days. Still, he was spunky and happy, and other than a bad few days here and there, he was still loving life and being with us. His blood pressure was down, his enlarged heart started shrinking back to normal, and we thought the worst was behind us, at least for a while. His murmur seemed to have improved slightly as well.
Sometimes when you're lucky enough to find a good pet -- one of those animals that transcends the ordinary owner/pet relationship and seems to know more about your feelings than you do -- there is a kind of wistful sadness built into every interaction. I think it's because on some level, you know your time together is short, and even with a healthy pet, you realize the day is coming when you will have done all you could for them -- when there's really nothing left to do except to let them go, and hope they know they were loved.
For us, that day came early last week. On Saturday, JD and I sat together on the porch, soaking up the sun and waiting for my wife to get home from work. When she pulled up, he ran down the stairs and greeted her half way. That night, everything was normal -- he sauntered up the stairs, jumped on the bed and poked at me until I pulled my arm out from under the covers. I knew if I didn't, he'd walk around and start sniffing my eyebrows until I did. Then he curled up under my arm and I fell asleep to his big purrs and the small ball of warmth at my side. The next morning, everything seemed fine, and my wife and I both had the day off. We were looking forward to just hanging out in the sunshine and enjoying the day.
After breakfast, my wife noticed that JD was breathing a little funny, and looked like he couldn't get comfortable. He was moving a little slowly, and we thought maybe he just had one of his routine stomach aches, since he had suddenly stopped eating earlier. He walked over to me, gave my leg a little head butt, then plopped down on the floor. I petted him for a few seconds, and then he got up and went upstairs to find my wife.
As soon as she saw him, she knew it was something besides his normal stomach issues, so we immediately jumped in the car to bring him to the emergency vet. It was 30 minutes away, and I drove like a maniac. My wife was holding him in a blanket and about half-way there, his breathing became extremely labored, and he started crying and trying to breathe through his mouth.
He kept reaching one paw over and touching my arm as if he was asking me to fix what was hurting him. It was heartwrenching, and I could barely keep my eyes on the road. We finally got to the vet's office and they quickly put him in an oxygen tent, but it didn't do much good. The vet said they were going to give him a sedative and take a chest X-ray to see if they could determine what the problem was. We waited.
When the vet finally came to the waiting room a half-hour later, I could tell by her face the news wasn't good. She told us the prognosis was poor -- heart failure and pleural edema. She told us that that even if they could treat him and he made it through the night, the treatment would be extremely rough on his kidneys, and he would probably go back to being sick and uncomfortable all the time, and the chances were that the same thing would happen again.
We always said that we'd treat him to the best of our ability for as long as he maintained his quality of life. The walk to the clinic's operating room was surreal, and I felt like I was watching it through someone else's eyes. JD was lying on a soft, folded towel placed on an operating table, with the vet's assistant holding an oxygen mask to his face. The vet unwrapped a syringe, and placed it on the table next to him. We petted him and talked to him and told him how much he meant to both of us, and how sorry we were. The vet picked up the syringe, and I almost told her to stop. But then JD looked at me, and I knew it was the right thing to do. We couldn't put him through any more. Putting him down was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. It wasn't the first time I've had to do this, but it was the first time I've had to do it to a pet that I truly loved.
I'm alternately sad and angry, and I know that such a sweet cat deserved more than the life that was handed to him. Most of all, I wish we could have given him one last summer.
I'm so glad we got to be with him for 8 years, and I'll never regret the lengths we went to in order to treat his illnesses. I hope he knew, on some cat-level, how important a part of our lives he was.
Rest in peace, buddy. We'll never forget you.
Adirondack Canoe Trip - Autumn, 2008
My favorite picture of him.
First, I had a 3-day training class from hell last week, complete with an impossible test at the end that I am pretty sure I failed.
Second, my best friend since 7th grade had a heart attack. (Thankfully, full recovery expected.)
Third, Our cat JD died, and as a result, our house has been filled with sadness. He was a special kitty, and a beautiful boy. He was my wife's best friend and my faithful writing companion. He slept in the crook of my arm almost every night, and his unconditional love and his trusting personality made him better than most people.
If you'll indulge me, I'd like to tell you a little bit about him. This post is probably more for me than for you, so there won't be any funny this time around. If you are here for a laugh, check back later, or see this previous post about JD. This was, to put it mildly, a bitch of a week.
About eight years ago, we were driving home on a back country road during a rainstorm, when my wife said, "What was that? I think I saw kittens! Stop!" so I reluctantly pulled over, having seen nothing myself. It turned out she was right -- she did see kittens. They were lost, abandoned and scared, but when my wife got out of the car and called to them, they came running. She scooped them up and tossed them in the back seat, and suddenly we were the owners of two kittens who smelled like cow crap and looked like drowned rats. When we got them home, we put them in my shop, gave them some food and water, and turned on the heat so they'd dry off. They ate like they hadn't had a meal in three days, which may have been the case.
I hope there's a special place in Hell for people who abandon their pets on the side of the road.
The next morning, we went out to see what we had found and clean them up, but they had apparently spent the entire night cleaning each other because they were dry and totally clean. I got a friend to adopt one, we adopted the other, named him JD, and our adventure began. We took him to the vet, had him checked for worms and feline leukemia, got him his shots, and had his little man-bits removed.
We already had two other cats. I didn't really feel like we needed another one, but there was something about him. I'm not sure if it was his bright blue eyes, or the fact that he acted more like a dog than a cat, but he quickly wormed his way into our hearts. Our other cats are nice enough, but they're not the same. I don't know how to explain why he was different, or why we became so fond of him so quickly, but we did. Maybe it was because we rescued him from an almost certain death, and he acted as if knew that. Or maybe it was because he bonded to us both so completely. I'm not sure.
He never begged and never made a pain the ass of himself, which is rare for a cat. He'd sit and wait patiently for his food while the other two zig-zagged between my wife's legs and pawed at the counter and meowed like they never ate before. He'd follow my wife around the house, and he always wanted to be a part of whatever she was doing. He came running when she called his name, and he'd search the house for her when he noticed she was missing. He developed routines; we developed routines -- and he trained us well. To be honest, we spoiled the hell out of him.
He loved the summer and the warm weather, and would look forward to keeping my wife company as she gardened, or as she sat on the porch with her latest crocheting or knitting project. All winter -- on the sunny days especially -- he would run to the front door and wait to be let on to the porch, expecting it to be warm. It was always such a disappointment to him when it wasn't, and he'd turn around and march back into the house like it was somehow our fault.
After about 4 years, he started getting sick. We thought it was hairballs, or maybe he was eating too fast. To be on the safe side, we took him to the vet, and the vet gave us some sad news: An ultrasound confirmed that JD had small, malformed kidneys, and as a result they were only functioning at roughly 20%. He also had some stomach problems, and she suspected pancreatitis. Toxins were building up in his bloodstream, and that's why he wasn't eating. The treatment for this was to inject 150ml of saline solution under his skin every three days, to ease the strain on his kidneys, which I learned to do. She gave us two other drugs, one to help with his appetite when his stomach was off and he didn't feel like eating, the other to help with his stomach ulcer issues. This seemed to stabilize him, and he remained a happy cat for quite a few years, although he would go in cycles where he'd have a stretch of a few good weeks, then a bad week, then a few more good weeks, etc.
Every few nights, he'd sit on my wife's lap and patiently allow me to stab him with an IV needle, and he never complained other than a low-pitched moan here or there. He never scratched or tried to bite. He trusted us, and even though what we were doing to him must have hurt, he forgave us each and every time. He'd run away and hide, and in twenty minutes he'd be back to see what we were doing.
Because we had to give him so much daily medication, it was difficult to leave him behind when we went camping or visited friends for the weekend. We'd have to board him at the vet's office, and that wasn't inexpensive, or very pleasant for either of us. That's when we started taking him with us when we went places. He got used to a harness fairly quickly, and he loved going on canoe trips and camping in the Adirondacks, and having him there with us was actually pretty fun. I know our canoe trips this year won't be the same without him.
During one of his visits to the vet last year, we got some more bad news -- our vet heard a pretty significant heart murmur, and she suggested we take him to a cardiologist. Yes, believe it or not, cats have their own cardiologists. The cardiologist did another ultrasound, and it turned out that JD had an enlarged heart and high blood pressure, most likely as side effects of his failing kidneys. We agreed that we'd treat him as long as he didn't realize he was sick, and that's what we did. His life became a routine of pill-popping morning and night -- two types of beta blockers, plus antacids -- interspersed with squirts of liquid medicine down his throat, in addition to the subcutaneous fluids every couple of days. Still, he was spunky and happy, and other than a bad few days here and there, he was still loving life and being with us. His blood pressure was down, his enlarged heart started shrinking back to normal, and we thought the worst was behind us, at least for a while. His murmur seemed to have improved slightly as well.
Sometimes when you're lucky enough to find a good pet -- one of those animals that transcends the ordinary owner/pet relationship and seems to know more about your feelings than you do -- there is a kind of wistful sadness built into every interaction. I think it's because on some level, you know your time together is short, and even with a healthy pet, you realize the day is coming when you will have done all you could for them -- when there's really nothing left to do except to let them go, and hope they know they were loved.
For us, that day came early last week. On Saturday, JD and I sat together on the porch, soaking up the sun and waiting for my wife to get home from work. When she pulled up, he ran down the stairs and greeted her half way. That night, everything was normal -- he sauntered up the stairs, jumped on the bed and poked at me until I pulled my arm out from under the covers. I knew if I didn't, he'd walk around and start sniffing my eyebrows until I did. Then he curled up under my arm and I fell asleep to his big purrs and the small ball of warmth at my side. The next morning, everything seemed fine, and my wife and I both had the day off. We were looking forward to just hanging out in the sunshine and enjoying the day.
After breakfast, my wife noticed that JD was breathing a little funny, and looked like he couldn't get comfortable. He was moving a little slowly, and we thought maybe he just had one of his routine stomach aches, since he had suddenly stopped eating earlier. He walked over to me, gave my leg a little head butt, then plopped down on the floor. I petted him for a few seconds, and then he got up and went upstairs to find my wife.
As soon as she saw him, she knew it was something besides his normal stomach issues, so we immediately jumped in the car to bring him to the emergency vet. It was 30 minutes away, and I drove like a maniac. My wife was holding him in a blanket and about half-way there, his breathing became extremely labored, and he started crying and trying to breathe through his mouth.
He kept reaching one paw over and touching my arm as if he was asking me to fix what was hurting him. It was heartwrenching, and I could barely keep my eyes on the road. We finally got to the vet's office and they quickly put him in an oxygen tent, but it didn't do much good. The vet said they were going to give him a sedative and take a chest X-ray to see if they could determine what the problem was. We waited.
When the vet finally came to the waiting room a half-hour later, I could tell by her face the news wasn't good. She told us the prognosis was poor -- heart failure and pleural edema. She told us that that even if they could treat him and he made it through the night, the treatment would be extremely rough on his kidneys, and he would probably go back to being sick and uncomfortable all the time, and the chances were that the same thing would happen again.
We always said that we'd treat him to the best of our ability for as long as he maintained his quality of life. The walk to the clinic's operating room was surreal, and I felt like I was watching it through someone else's eyes. JD was lying on a soft, folded towel placed on an operating table, with the vet's assistant holding an oxygen mask to his face. The vet unwrapped a syringe, and placed it on the table next to him. We petted him and talked to him and told him how much he meant to both of us, and how sorry we were. The vet picked up the syringe, and I almost told her to stop. But then JD looked at me, and I knew it was the right thing to do. We couldn't put him through any more. Putting him down was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. It wasn't the first time I've had to do this, but it was the first time I've had to do it to a pet that I truly loved.
I'm alternately sad and angry, and I know that such a sweet cat deserved more than the life that was handed to him. Most of all, I wish we could have given him one last summer.
I'm so glad we got to be with him for 8 years, and I'll never regret the lengths we went to in order to treat his illnesses. I hope he knew, on some cat-level, how important a part of our lives he was.
Rest in peace, buddy. We'll never forget you.
Adirondack Canoe Trip - Autumn, 2008
My favorite picture of him.
3/21/09
And the winner is....
Not Diesel. And not that guy in the picture, because he's wearing speedos with a little bow and probably has paper cuts on his junk.
First off, thanks for voting for my buddy Brennin, and if you get the chance to vote again, please do so. It'll be a kick to see him on TV. I don't know about you, but every time he snaps that old permed-up picture of Ellen and does that sideways head-bob thing, I laugh out loud. You may say I'm easily amused, and you'd be right of course, but that's ok.
As for the prize drawing, I thought better of drawing names from my underwear (although there's plenty of extra room in there) and instead just used....my hat. Yes, original, I know. But to be fair, it's the hat I don't wear out in public. It's the hat I only wear when nobody is home and I can run up and down the stairs pretending to be Indiana Jones. This hat:
Really, this is just to prove to you all the painstaking effort I put into this endeavor. I typed all your names into notepad because trying to paste html into excel was pissing me off. Then, THEN, I printed them out and cut them into strips.
And do you know why I went to all this effort and took all this time? You are correct. It's because I really should be working on my taxes and I will literally use any excuse to avoid doing that until I absolutely have to.
Here's the fruit of my labor:
Since my wife is working and not able to don her tiara and sparkling onesie in order to draw a name from the hat, I had to do it myself. Since Brennin said he's sending me some CDs, I am going to draw 6 names from the hat instead of just one, and the first five people will get a copy of Brennin's first CD. Drum roll please......
6th place: Anhara (please, please, please don't be in the far east)
5th place: Deanna
4th place: Christina
3rd place: Tricialynn
2nd place: Melodie
And the grand prize winner of the JV Box 'O Junk is: Tracey
Jeez, that list reads like the Tuesday night line-up at the Bada Bing club. Congrats everyone!
Drop me an e-mail (see my profile) with your mailing addresses and please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. Not really, but that gives me some time to do my taxes. (I'll let you know after the IRS has their way with me if I'll need to collect postage. Just kidding. Probably.)
Drop me an e-mail (see my profile) with your mailing addresses and please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. Not really, but that gives me some time to do my taxes. (I'll let you know after the IRS has their way with me if I'll need to collect postage. Just kidding. Probably.)
And if you curious about what wonderful assortment of junk is in the box, here it is:
A copy of Brennin's 2007 self-titled debut CD.
A FULL-SCREEN DVD of Ghost Rider starring Nicholas Cage. Yeah. My Dad doesn't know the difference. I mean, FULL sounds better than WIDE, doesn't it? Who doesn't want their screen FULL?
An opened and played once copy of the debut CD by Glasvegas, given to me by my buddy dUgE of Kasim Sulton and Isle of Q fame. They're supposed to be the Next Big Thing. They are not going to be the next big thing for me, because I don't like singers who sound like Bono.
A new copy of Good Charlotte's "Greatest Remixes" CD. I am not a fan of rap, even when it's dressed up in punk pop clothing. A rap remix of a song is like saying "Here, let me pour some shit on that for you." It might not be that bad, but I didn't want to chance it, so it's still in the cellophane.
A graphic novel of the Family Guy episode "Peter the Great"
A sunglasses-wearing Coke can from 1991 that dances to music. Batteries not included. Well, they were included but they were dead, so I figured I would take them out to save on shipping.
An unopened tin of Ironport mints from a trade show that says "Mints made in USA or China." I supposed that means if you're a gambler, you will either get an enjoyable mint or your USDA recommended daily allowance of melamine.
A weird, suction-cupped stick-on digital clock from IBM/Lotus that gives me nightmares because I'm convinced it walks around at night. Just look at it. You know I'm right.
A $20 gift card from the store that shall not be named.
A home-made wooden prototype of a rubber band pistol. It never made it into production, although I did make a really nice cherry and maple "executive edition" for my father before he retired. Don't shoot your eye out, kid.
And last but not least, a BRAND NEW pair of Toasti-Toes foot warmers!
And last but not least, a BRAND NEW pair of Toasti-Toes foot warmers!
Thanks for playing along. You guys are the best.
As for me, I'm going to go make a fresh pot of coffee and get out of this tiara and onesie.
3/18/09
Brennin Hunt and "The Ellen Show" Update.
You guys asked me to keep you posted, so I am.
I guess they pick the winner next week. If you get a chance, go here and click on Brennin's video.
I'll tell you what -- If you vote and leave a comment below, I will randomly pick a voter from a hat (or some other random article of clothing) and award a prize box of my choice. It will most likely be worth almost nothing, make you shake your head in disappointment and wonder, "WTF was he thinking when he bought this stuff?" Or it could be something cool and actually worth something.
I'm like Monty Hall.
The last prize I sent out went to the first person who told me what needle ice was, and I sent him a book of Rolling Stones interviews and stuffed Brian and Stewie dolls. So that's the equivalent of winning a donkey behind door number three, I think. Hey, it's what I had handy.
I'll be more original this time. Or not.
I guess they pick the winner next week. If you get a chance, go here and click on Brennin's video.
I'll tell you what -- If you vote and leave a comment below, I will randomly pick a voter from a hat (or some other random article of clothing) and award a prize box of my choice. It will most likely be worth almost nothing, make you shake your head in disappointment and wonder, "WTF was he thinking when he bought this stuff?" Or it could be something cool and actually worth something.
I'm like Monty Hall.
The last prize I sent out went to the first person who told me what needle ice was, and I sent him a book of Rolling Stones interviews and stuffed Brian and Stewie dolls. So that's the equivalent of winning a donkey behind door number three, I think. Hey, it's what I had handy.
I'll be more original this time. Or not.
3/9/09
Curry and Death.
I spent most of yesterday shoveling ice and slush -- from the inside of my garage. The entire thing flooded, despite a 2-foot-deep trench I dug in front of the garage doors. The trench just filled up with water and then overflowed. I must have taken about 20 five-gallon buckets of half-frozen water out of that trench yesterday afternoon. Needless to say, it sucked ass. The first thing I am going to do when the snow is gone is hire someone to regrade my driveway so it's no longer higher than the garage floor. I don't care if they have to dig it down so deep I end up needing fucking stairs to get from the driveway to the lawn -- this is the last year I will have an ice-skating rink (and then a pond) inside my garage.
As I was trying to get my lawnmower unstuck from the ice-encrusted garage floor, I was pondering what to write about. Not a lot of funny stuff has happened to me lately, and I've been slacking off in the blogging department because I've been sick for the last week and a half with the worst headache of my entire life. It was so bad I thought I blew a tube in my brain but it turned out to be my first-ever sinus infection. What the hell, sinuses. After all this time you decide to screw with me? Tonight is the first night I'm able to think in complete sentences, so what am I doing? I'm entertaining you, that's what. Why? Because I care. Anyway, yanking the shit out of my frozen lawnmower reminded me of a time when I was still living home and my parents got new "across the street" neighbors, and I think it's a tale worth telling. Or maybe it's not and that's just my inflamed sinuses talking. I guess we'll see. It's a little gross, so be prepared.
When I was a teenager, the house across the street went up for sale. It wasn't for sale for very long because this was the 80's and aside from parachute pants and mullets, things were swell. We lived in a pretty middle-class, tighty-whitey neighborhood, so it was sort of a surprise when an Indian couple moved in. I think I found out later he was a doctor, and I don't think his wife worked, since she was home all day. I don't remember her name, but for the sake of this story, I'll call her Ahladita, because I just looked it up and it means "in a happy mood" and she was always smiling and waving.
She spoke very little English, but she seemed friendly enough. She would periodically bring over dishes of indian food that my mother couldn't stand the smell of. To her credit, she actually tried it the first time, but it was so spicy she couldn't eat it. So from that point on, she would politely accept it, and then when Ahladita left, she'd immediately bury it in the backyard. No, not really. She just double bagged it and put it with the outside trash. Basically, it got the same treatment as the used cat litter. We were an Irish-Italian meat and potatoes family. We didn't know what curry was, and we didn't want to know.
My mother worked part-time as a medical transcriptionist, so she worked out of her home office. I found out later that 'home office' was IRS code for what I normally just called 'the dining room table' but that's between my father and the government. It's only relevant to the story because as a result of working part-time from home, the bulk of the weekly yard work fell to her.
My mother would plant flowers, weed the flowerbeds, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, put mulch down, you name it. The first week they moved in, my mother would see Ahladita across the street, doing the same chores, and they would wave to each other, even though they didn't have a common word between them. One day, my mother noticed something. Whenever she would start to do a particular chore, so would Ahladita. If my mother weeded the flower beds, Ahladita would weed the flowerbeds. If my mother decided to trim the shrubs, Ahladita would trim the shubs. It occurred to my mother that Ahladita thought there were proper times to do things, and was trying to fit in by doing the same things my mother did at exactly the same times. You can't fault the logic, really. It was just a little creepy.
The following week, my father came home from Sears with a new self-propelled, walk behind lawnmower for my mother. As she was using it, she noticed Ahladita watching from across the street. After my mother was done mowing, Ahladita came over and took a closer look at at it. The next day, my mother saw Ahladita pushing the same exact lawn mower back and forth across her lawn.
It was about 95 degrees outside, and Ahladita was streaming sweat, and her sari was soaked. She was leaning into the lawnmower like an ox into a yoke. My mother watched for a second, then realized that the lawnmower Ahladita was pushing wasn't making any noise. She was pushing a non-running self-propelled lawnmower back and forth across the lawn. My mother called my father downstairs, and he went over to check it out. Turns out not only was the lawnmower not running, it also didn't have any gas or oil in it. She basically took it out of the box and started pushing it around.
My dad went back to his garage and got some oil and gas and the mower set up, then showed her how to use it. After that, my parents sort of adopted Ahladita and her husband. Any time they had a question, they'd come over and ask.
One day, Ahladita came over and wiggled her fingers and asked my mother something about worms. My mother wasn't sure what the heck she was talking about, and for five minutes she tried to get her to explain. Eventually, she got something out of her that sounded like "carpet worms." My mother told Ahladita to show her, figuring that would be much easier. So Ahladita brought my mother into her house, and my mother knew immediately that something was very wrong. The entire place smelled like curry and carrion. Ahladita brought my mom into the family room, and walked over toward the fireplace. She stopped in front of the hearth, and knelt down and started slapping the rug. As soon as she did it, hundreds of maggots boiled up from the carpet. My mother completely freaked out, grabbed Ahladita and ran outside, where she then tried to explain to her what they were and where they came from, and why it was never good when maggots came out your carpet when you slapped at it. Something horrible was happening with the fireplace and the rug underneath it.
When my father came home from work, my mother told him what happened, and he went over to check it out. He came back, completely grossed out, but grabbed his shop vac and headed back over. After vacuuming up maggots for twenty minutes, he started checking out the fireplace. There was definitely something foul going on up in there, and my father figured a bird had gotten in there and died. When he tried to open the flue, a rain of maggots fell down and the full stench was released into the room. This was no bird. It was something big, heavy, and very, very deceased. No, it wasn't Santa Claus.
This went way beyond what my father had signed up for, so he admitted defeat and called animal control, who referred him to a local pest control company. They came out and took the damper apart. As it turned out, the chimney ledge above the damper was the final resting place for a very large, very dead raccoon that had apparently been in there for weeks. It took a month for the stench to finally dissipate. The pest control guy installed a screen on the top of the chimney so it wouldn't happen again, and that was the end of that. I think everyone in the neighborhood got screens for their chimneys within the space of 2 days. I am pretty sure not having carpet maggots was a big purchase incentive there.
After that, my parents kept their distance. I think they decided that a friendly wave from across the street followed immediately by jumping in the car and driving away at high speed was the best course of action going forward. A couple of years later, Ahladita and her husband moved away, and the carpet worm story became one of my mom's favorites.
I only hope that wherever they moved to, Ahladita isn't walking slowly around the yard, waving a leaf blower that isn't turned on.
I'll bet you my paycheck they have a screen on their chimney though.
As I was trying to get my lawnmower unstuck from the ice-encrusted garage floor, I was pondering what to write about. Not a lot of funny stuff has happened to me lately, and I've been slacking off in the blogging department because I've been sick for the last week and a half with the worst headache of my entire life. It was so bad I thought I blew a tube in my brain but it turned out to be my first-ever sinus infection. What the hell, sinuses. After all this time you decide to screw with me? Tonight is the first night I'm able to think in complete sentences, so what am I doing? I'm entertaining you, that's what. Why? Because I care. Anyway, yanking the shit out of my frozen lawnmower reminded me of a time when I was still living home and my parents got new "across the street" neighbors, and I think it's a tale worth telling. Or maybe it's not and that's just my inflamed sinuses talking. I guess we'll see. It's a little gross, so be prepared.
When I was a teenager, the house across the street went up for sale. It wasn't for sale for very long because this was the 80's and aside from parachute pants and mullets, things were swell. We lived in a pretty middle-class, tighty-whitey neighborhood, so it was sort of a surprise when an Indian couple moved in. I think I found out later he was a doctor, and I don't think his wife worked, since she was home all day. I don't remember her name, but for the sake of this story, I'll call her Ahladita, because I just looked it up and it means "in a happy mood" and she was always smiling and waving.
She spoke very little English, but she seemed friendly enough. She would periodically bring over dishes of indian food that my mother couldn't stand the smell of. To her credit, she actually tried it the first time, but it was so spicy she couldn't eat it. So from that point on, she would politely accept it, and then when Ahladita left, she'd immediately bury it in the backyard. No, not really. She just double bagged it and put it with the outside trash. Basically, it got the same treatment as the used cat litter. We were an Irish-Italian meat and potatoes family. We didn't know what curry was, and we didn't want to know.
My mother worked part-time as a medical transcriptionist, so she worked out of her home office. I found out later that 'home office' was IRS code for what I normally just called 'the dining room table' but that's between my father and the government. It's only relevant to the story because as a result of working part-time from home, the bulk of the weekly yard work fell to her.
My mother would plant flowers, weed the flowerbeds, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, put mulch down, you name it. The first week they moved in, my mother would see Ahladita across the street, doing the same chores, and they would wave to each other, even though they didn't have a common word between them. One day, my mother noticed something. Whenever she would start to do a particular chore, so would Ahladita. If my mother weeded the flower beds, Ahladita would weed the flowerbeds. If my mother decided to trim the shrubs, Ahladita would trim the shubs. It occurred to my mother that Ahladita thought there were proper times to do things, and was trying to fit in by doing the same things my mother did at exactly the same times. You can't fault the logic, really. It was just a little creepy.
The following week, my father came home from Sears with a new self-propelled, walk behind lawnmower for my mother. As she was using it, she noticed Ahladita watching from across the street. After my mother was done mowing, Ahladita came over and took a closer look at at it. The next day, my mother saw Ahladita pushing the same exact lawn mower back and forth across her lawn.
It was about 95 degrees outside, and Ahladita was streaming sweat, and her sari was soaked. She was leaning into the lawnmower like an ox into a yoke. My mother watched for a second, then realized that the lawnmower Ahladita was pushing wasn't making any noise. She was pushing a non-running self-propelled lawnmower back and forth across the lawn. My mother called my father downstairs, and he went over to check it out. Turns out not only was the lawnmower not running, it also didn't have any gas or oil in it. She basically took it out of the box and started pushing it around.
My dad went back to his garage and got some oil and gas and the mower set up, then showed her how to use it. After that, my parents sort of adopted Ahladita and her husband. Any time they had a question, they'd come over and ask.
One day, Ahladita came over and wiggled her fingers and asked my mother something about worms. My mother wasn't sure what the heck she was talking about, and for five minutes she tried to get her to explain. Eventually, she got something out of her that sounded like "carpet worms." My mother told Ahladita to show her, figuring that would be much easier. So Ahladita brought my mother into her house, and my mother knew immediately that something was very wrong. The entire place smelled like curry and carrion. Ahladita brought my mom into the family room, and walked over toward the fireplace. She stopped in front of the hearth, and knelt down and started slapping the rug. As soon as she did it, hundreds of maggots boiled up from the carpet. My mother completely freaked out, grabbed Ahladita and ran outside, where she then tried to explain to her what they were and where they came from, and why it was never good when maggots came out your carpet when you slapped at it. Something horrible was happening with the fireplace and the rug underneath it.
When my father came home from work, my mother told him what happened, and he went over to check it out. He came back, completely grossed out, but grabbed his shop vac and headed back over. After vacuuming up maggots for twenty minutes, he started checking out the fireplace. There was definitely something foul going on up in there, and my father figured a bird had gotten in there and died. When he tried to open the flue, a rain of maggots fell down and the full stench was released into the room. This was no bird. It was something big, heavy, and very, very deceased. No, it wasn't Santa Claus.
This went way beyond what my father had signed up for, so he admitted defeat and called animal control, who referred him to a local pest control company. They came out and took the damper apart. As it turned out, the chimney ledge above the damper was the final resting place for a very large, very dead raccoon that had apparently been in there for weeks. It took a month for the stench to finally dissipate. The pest control guy installed a screen on the top of the chimney so it wouldn't happen again, and that was the end of that. I think everyone in the neighborhood got screens for their chimneys within the space of 2 days. I am pretty sure not having carpet maggots was a big purchase incentive there.
After that, my parents kept their distance. I think they decided that a friendly wave from across the street followed immediately by jumping in the car and driving away at high speed was the best course of action going forward. A couple of years later, Ahladita and her husband moved away, and the carpet worm story became one of my mom's favorites.
I only hope that wherever they moved to, Ahladita isn't walking slowly around the yard, waving a leaf blower that isn't turned on.
I'll bet you my paycheck they have a screen on their chimney though.
3/6/09
If you're bored...
So a buddy of mine is trying to get on the Ellen show. Apparently she's been hosting this "bathroom concert series" where people send in videos of themselves singing a song to Ellen from their bathrooms. She picks the best videos and she's been showing them daily, and his got picked.
Now she's turned it into a contest, and the winner gets to come on the show and sing. So if you're bored and you want to do me a small favor and vote for him, it's here. It takes a while to load, but his name is Brennin Hunt, and if you could give him a quick click, I'd appreciate it. His song is called "I'll Make Love to You." When she played it on the show, she did a rebuttal song where she lip-synced "Never Gonna Get It" while holding a picture of him. I've never been an Ellen fan, but she went up a few notches when I saw that.
He's an upcoming singer/songwriter that I think sounds a bit like Edwin McCain. He's also got a myspace page here if you want to check out some of his more original tunes. Thanks!
ps - I promise I'll be back with something funny this weekend. I have a few things cooking.
Now she's turned it into a contest, and the winner gets to come on the show and sing. So if you're bored and you want to do me a small favor and vote for him, it's here. It takes a while to load, but his name is Brennin Hunt, and if you could give him a quick click, I'd appreciate it. His song is called "I'll Make Love to You." When she played it on the show, she did a rebuttal song where she lip-synced "Never Gonna Get It" while holding a picture of him. I've never been an Ellen fan, but she went up a few notches when I saw that.
He's an upcoming singer/songwriter that I think sounds a bit like Edwin McCain. He's also got a myspace page here if you want to check out some of his more original tunes. Thanks!
ps - I promise I'll be back with something funny this weekend. I have a few things cooking.
Update: Brennin is doing really good. He's # 2 on the show's comments board, and #1 on the show's music comment board, by about 200 people. Second only to Pink, which is probably a good thing because I'm pretty sure she could kick his ass.
3/2/09
The Musical Box
When I was nine years old, Peter Gabriel left Genesis. Phil Collins took over as the lead singer, and I was devastated. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration. Truth be told, I was completely oblivious.
That's because I didn't know who Genesis was. Ditto Gentle Giant, Rush, King Crimson, UK and ELP. I was listening to McCartney and Wings singing silly love songs, Wild Cherry playing that funky music (for their one and only hit,) and learning 50 ways to leave your lover from Paul Simon. Sara Smile, Afternoon Delight and Gary Wright were my thing, and Casey Kasem's top 40 didn't have room for a song called "Squonk" or any other song from A Trick of the Tail for that matter. At that point in my life, if it wasn't music from one of my mom's old 45's or on AM radio, I didn't know it existed.
Fast-forward 9 years. A band-mate friend of mine handed me a cassette tape and said, "The first time you listen to this, you'll think it's weird and you probably won't like it. The tenth time you listen to it, you're going to think it's a masterpiece. Promise me you'll listen to it at least ten times."
I promised, and he was right. That cassette was "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis, and to this day it remains one of my favorite recordings. By the time I was a full-blown Genesis freak, Duke had come out, and Genesis was on their way to becoming a household name. I was disappointed that I never got to see Genesis with Peter Gabriel, but still, I burrowed deep into their back catalog, and within no time I owned all the Genesis there was. I then expanded into other areas of prog music, and became a huge fan of Marillion, Spock's Beard, ELP and Rush.
Which brings me to this past weekend. Yort, my wife and I went and saw this show:
It was fantastic, and I highly recommend it. Two years ago, I saw the same band play the entire Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Album. I think they do a better job with that line up, but the Phil version isn't shabby at all, especially if you like the Trick of the Tail CD. For that show, we sat far enough away to preserve the illusion, and it was truly like going back in time. They use the same lighting, the same stage props, same slides, same equipment, you name it. And they are top-notch musicians to boot. I guess they'd have to be in order to pull off album-perfect renditions of Genesis tunes.
If you want to feel really old, have a conversation with your friend's 16-year old about the concert you're going to see.
"They're a Genesis tribute band."
"Who?"
"Genesis. You know who Genesis is, right?"
"Uh, no."
"Phil Collins? You HAVE to know who Phil Collins is."
"I think I maybe heard of him."
At that point, since he was clearly lying through his teeth, we just laughed and gave up.
Fame is fleeting, I guess.
I'm going to bed. Old people need their rest.
That's because I didn't know who Genesis was. Ditto Gentle Giant, Rush, King Crimson, UK and ELP. I was listening to McCartney and Wings singing silly love songs, Wild Cherry playing that funky music (for their one and only hit,) and learning 50 ways to leave your lover from Paul Simon. Sara Smile, Afternoon Delight and Gary Wright were my thing, and Casey Kasem's top 40 didn't have room for a song called "Squonk" or any other song from A Trick of the Tail for that matter. At that point in my life, if it wasn't music from one of my mom's old 45's or on AM radio, I didn't know it existed.
Fast-forward 9 years. A band-mate friend of mine handed me a cassette tape and said, "The first time you listen to this, you'll think it's weird and you probably won't like it. The tenth time you listen to it, you're going to think it's a masterpiece. Promise me you'll listen to it at least ten times."
I promised, and he was right. That cassette was "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis, and to this day it remains one of my favorite recordings. By the time I was a full-blown Genesis freak, Duke had come out, and Genesis was on their way to becoming a household name. I was disappointed that I never got to see Genesis with Peter Gabriel, but still, I burrowed deep into their back catalog, and within no time I owned all the Genesis there was. I then expanded into other areas of prog music, and became a huge fan of Marillion, Spock's Beard, ELP and Rush.
Which brings me to this past weekend. Yort, my wife and I went and saw this show:
It was fantastic, and I highly recommend it. Two years ago, I saw the same band play the entire Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Album. I think they do a better job with that line up, but the Phil version isn't shabby at all, especially if you like the Trick of the Tail CD. For that show, we sat far enough away to preserve the illusion, and it was truly like going back in time. They use the same lighting, the same stage props, same slides, same equipment, you name it. And they are top-notch musicians to boot. I guess they'd have to be in order to pull off album-perfect renditions of Genesis tunes.
If you want to feel really old, have a conversation with your friend's 16-year old about the concert you're going to see.
"They're a Genesis tribute band."
"Who?"
"Genesis. You know who Genesis is, right?"
"Uh, no."
"Phil Collins? You HAVE to know who Phil Collins is."
"I think I maybe heard of him."
At that point, since he was clearly lying through his teeth, we just laughed and gave up.
Fame is fleeting, I guess.
I'm going to bed. Old people need their rest.
2/25/09
Instant Messaging: Geeks at Work.
Co-worker: So what was wrong?
Me: For some reason the ldap sync didn't have CN in the sametime buddy name field, so no valid buddy names were being populated. I also changed the connection from the ip address of the sametime server to actually be the FQDN of sametime.domain.com. I forced an ldap sync, restarted the service to pick up the ip/name change and that was it.
Co-worker: So simple I should have known.
Me: Well, there was also a slight misalignment in the high frequency electromagnetic field which caused an imbalance in the magnetic eddies induced in the dilithium crystal structure, so it had a problem keeping the charged particles away from the crystal lattice. It was a close one.
Co-worker: Whew, I knew there was more to it.
Yeah. I know. Out of all the people reading this, there's maybe one star trek geek who still lives in his mom's basement who is thinking, "Heh, good one!"
2/22/09
Facing your Fears.
I recently joined FaceBook. I don't know why. One day my buddy Yort asked me, "Are you on Facebook?" and I replied, "No, why?" and he said, "Why not?"
Why not, indeed. I was hesitant at first: I didn't really need another way to waste valuable time that I should be spending on other, more productive things like watching television and surfing the web. It's been interesting getting back in touch with people from my past. There are some bits of Facebook that are kind of goofy, but the overall idea is pretty neat.
The ads though, are something else. The vast majority of them seem to revolve around get-rich-quick schemes, and they alternately creep me out and/or make me laugh at their sheer ridiculousness.
Here are my favorites:
I seriously doubt he makes $1000 a day online. From the picture, I'm guessing he makes ten bucks a day offering hand jobs in the parking garage.
He is not here to make friends, and it's a good thing too, because he looks like a total dick. Regardless of what he says, I don't think he is better than me, even though he also says he makes millions online. My guess? About 5 times a year, he makes $150 a day working as an Andy Samberg impersonator. OK, he still might be better than me.
She wants to hang out at singlesnet, but it's too late. She's already pretty much hanging out everywhere.
"I have four 25-cent ties. Because of this, all the women want me." Totally plausible.
97.6% of what? Blind people? Hamsters? What? And what about that double set of chompers? Apparently, nobody is interested in what percent of something-I-know-not-what is a little skeeved out by that. Why would you click on that ad? I would be afraid of where it would lead me, not to mention the additional damage it might do to my IQ.
He makes more cash than me. In fact, he makes so much money he can afford to go to a car show and get his friend to take his picture while he stands with two booth babes who seriously hate their lives right now.
I am not buying her sales pitch, because she says people like me can earn $50-90/hr online. The truth is, she is not people like me. She is hot people, in short dresses. It's easy for her to make $50-90/hr online. All she needs is a web cam, a domain name, and a VISA merchant account.
I think I can already tell you the steps involved:
1. Move to a gated, residential community.
2. Have countertop sex with a black drug dealer.
3. Set up a grow house and sell Milfweed.
Why not, indeed. I was hesitant at first: I didn't really need another way to waste valuable time that I should be spending on other, more productive things like watching television and surfing the web. It's been interesting getting back in touch with people from my past. There are some bits of Facebook that are kind of goofy, but the overall idea is pretty neat.
The ads though, are something else. The vast majority of them seem to revolve around get-rich-quick schemes, and they alternately creep me out and/or make me laugh at their sheer ridiculousness.
Here are my favorites:
I seriously doubt he makes $1000 a day online. From the picture, I'm guessing he makes ten bucks a day offering hand jobs in the parking garage.
He is not here to make friends, and it's a good thing too, because he looks like a total dick. Regardless of what he says, I don't think he is better than me, even though he also says he makes millions online. My guess? About 5 times a year, he makes $150 a day working as an Andy Samberg impersonator. OK, he still might be better than me.
She wants to hang out at singlesnet, but it's too late. She's already pretty much hanging out everywhere.
"I have four 25-cent ties. Because of this, all the women want me." Totally plausible.
97.6% of what? Blind people? Hamsters? What? And what about that double set of chompers? Apparently, nobody is interested in what percent of something-I-know-not-what is a little skeeved out by that. Why would you click on that ad? I would be afraid of where it would lead me, not to mention the additional damage it might do to my IQ.
He makes more cash than me. In fact, he makes so much money he can afford to go to a car show and get his friend to take his picture while he stands with two booth babes who seriously hate their lives right now.
I am not buying her sales pitch, because she says people like me can earn $50-90/hr online. The truth is, she is not people like me. She is hot people, in short dresses. It's easy for her to make $50-90/hr online. All she needs is a web cam, a domain name, and a VISA merchant account.
I think I can already tell you the steps involved:
1. Move to a gated, residential community.
2. Have countertop sex with a black drug dealer.
3. Set up a grow house and sell Milfweed.
2/18/09
Vampires! Getcher Vampires here!
A while back, my buddy Dave wrote a vampire novel called "Blood Witness" and he's recently converted it into a free audiobook. You can read about it, listen to it and download it at bloodwitness.com.
It's an interesting look into the life of a Jehovah's Witness who gets tangled up with a vampire, and a pretty fun listen. Check it out if you get a chance. Did I mention it's free?
2/17/09
Can You Feel The Love?
It's been a week. Funerals, duty pagers, roof leaks, you name it. So.... a belated Happy Valentine's Day to everyone. I'm not normally a big fan of this holiday, but believe it or not, it was a bright spot in a pretty shitty week. I got to spend some time with my wife, and I actually (wait for it...) cooked dinner. Believe it or not, I made this. I know, even a monkey could make that, but still -- it beats boiled hot dogs, which was my next choice. (Hey, it has meat AND broth.)
When I got to my desk yesterday, there was a pile of mail, and this:
Now, normally on Christmas or my birthday, there will be a little something on my desk from the girls in support, who I spend most of my day assisting. Usually it's a nice card signed by everyone, some candy, maybe some homemade cookies or a small, funny gift. Last Valentine's Day, I think they got me one of those Reese's miniatures foil hearts.
Typical office-type "thank you" stuff.
Sadly, I may have to step up my game, because they're clearly not trying any more.
First off, let's talk about the card. It's not signed, and frankly, I don't blame them for leaving it blank. I wouldn't take credit for it either. It was worse than the cards I got in second grade. Just look at it -- it's a black kid on a three-wheeled, heart-shaped skateboard, and it says "You're Co ol."
Clearly, I'm not black. I'm certainly not cool. I think they may be mocking me. And the single lollipop? At first I thought, "Well, at least I got a lollipop." Then I looked closer to see what flavor it was and saw this:
That's a ten-month old lollipop right there.
I'm hoping that this week will get better. Happy Easter, everyone!
When I got to my desk yesterday, there was a pile of mail, and this:
Now, normally on Christmas or my birthday, there will be a little something on my desk from the girls in support, who I spend most of my day assisting. Usually it's a nice card signed by everyone, some candy, maybe some homemade cookies or a small, funny gift. Last Valentine's Day, I think they got me one of those Reese's miniatures foil hearts.
Typical office-type "thank you" stuff.
Sadly, I may have to step up my game, because they're clearly not trying any more.
First off, let's talk about the card. It's not signed, and frankly, I don't blame them for leaving it blank. I wouldn't take credit for it either. It was worse than the cards I got in second grade. Just look at it -- it's a black kid on a three-wheeled, heart-shaped skateboard, and it says "You're Co ol."
Clearly, I'm not black. I'm certainly not cool. I think they may be mocking me. And the single lollipop? At first I thought, "Well, at least I got a lollipop." Then I looked closer to see what flavor it was and saw this:
That's a ten-month old lollipop right there.
I'm hoping that this week will get better. Happy Easter, everyone!
2/8/09
Us doing Disney. And vice-versa.
After the conference, my wife and I decided to stick around Disney for a while and enjoy the beautiful weather, and take in some of the Disney parks. We've been there quite a few times now, and after the first couple of times you don't feel so obligated to get up at the crack of dawn and do everything there is to do.
The progression goes something like this:
Year One: "Wow! Look at this place! It's amazing! We'll never see it all in 7 days!"
Year Two: "We know our way around this time! We'll spend a day at each park, go to Blizzard Beach, eat dinner at Rain Forest Cafe on Tuesday, Mexico in Epcot on Wednesday, and the House of Blues on Thursday."
Years 3-5: "How 'bout we just hit the roller coasters at each park and catch the fireworks at Epcot? Holy fuck. I just paid $20 for two pretzels and a couple of bottles of water."
By the third time you visit, you've pretty much resigned yourself to the fact that Mickey and Friends are going to give you a major ass-reaming every day you are there. You also realize that every store there sells the same over-priced shit, and traveling around by bus can get very old very quickly. It's ironic really - here you are with all this free bus transportation everywhere you want to go, but two mixed drinks will set you back $24. You can't afford to get drunk in Disney. It's a horrible state of affairs. Although for a second, I thought maybe I was drunk when we walked into a Disney store and the first thing I saw was this very un-disneylike shirt:
Alas, it was just a bad fold, although I think they should give serious consideration to making a shirt like that.
Speaking of un-Disneylike, what about that Minnie mouse? I learned a dirty little secret about her when eating Goofy's Gummies. I know that sounds dirty, but it's really not. These are gummy bears in the shape of Disney characters, and for some reason they are fresher and better tasting than gummies you can get elsewhere. My wife usually stocks up, buying some to eat when we're wandering around, and a bunch to bring home. As I was eating Minnie, (again, not dirty) I noticed something. Here's Minnie:
As I was marveling at her freshness and gummability, I happened to do this:
OK, now that's dirty.
Gummy fun notwithstanding, the only way to get the party started in earnest at Disney is to (1) be very, very rich, (2) leech off some big company's expense account, or (3) have an outside contact. Lucky for us, Shamus was down for the same conference, and he and his family were staying in a condo off the Disney campus. Therefore they had rented a car, and offered to get us out of the Goofy bin for little while. Ah, sweet freedom! They became our window to the outside world, where you could buy things like affordable food, chewing gum, Pepsi products and reasonably priced booze, all without pictures of Disney characters on them. We all decided to have dinner at their place on Saturday night, so we went to the supermarket and bought the fixin's for steak and chicken fajitas, and it was glorious.
That's the thing about 5th time's the charm. After a while, you just decide that it's not so bad to get up at noon and then spend the rest of the day hanging out by the pool with a book and a rum drink. Although in retrospect, I think we could probably go somewhere tropical with way fewer screaming kids for about the same price. I realize Disney is primarily for children, so I can't bitch too much, but I've also noticed that a single kid in the "grown-up" swimming pool is a lot like a single motorboat on a wilderness pond. It has a tendency to wreck the mood, and sometimes you just want to shoot a hole in it and watch it sink.
The reason we were there for an entire week after the conference ended was, oddly enough, because of the state of the economy. We were already staying for an extra 3 days, and in an effort to drum up some business, Disney was offering a "buy four, get three free" deal. We figured that we would stay over one extra night to pick up the 3 extra freebies. Since the park tickets are tiered that same way, (the fourth and fifth days of a park hopper ticket are almost free) we picked up a couple of those too. We figured we wouldn't have to buy anything but food. That sounds good until you realize that the cheapest thing you can buy anywhere in Disney is a 6" miniature frozen pizza (cooked on a chain-driven conveyor belt) that will still set you back seven bucks plus tax. Speaking of taxes, if you go there, be prepared. There's "room tax" and "resort tax" and "late-night Tinkerbell visit" tax and these will add another $40 bucks a night to your room price. OK, I may or may not have volunteered to pay extra for that last one - but the other ones just automatically showed up on the bill.
We stayed at the "moderately priced" hotel -- Port Orleans Riverside -- quite a downgrade from the Swan/Dolphin I stayed at during the conference. The first room we were assigned was horrible. We walked in, and the room was so humid it felt like you couldn't breathe. There was condensation running down the window, and it smelled like a tropical rain forest, if a tropical rain forest could somehow grow bitter ass and dirty feet. It did have one redeeming quality -- it was on the top floor, which is great because then nobody is walking around above you. We called the front desk and got another room that was marginally better, but on the 2nd floor, with a family of 14 in the room above us. I never actually saw them, but I surmised that they were in some sort of horrific accident, and as a result had been fitted with prosthetic legs made of a newly-discovered metal I can only assume is called Stompium. Also, they had bladders the size of dwarf peanuts.
How do I know this? It's all because of the crazy toilets. When you flushed one, you feared for your life. In an effort to avoid plug-ups, the hotel installed jet-assisted flushing mechanisms that would practically pull your clothes off. I was more scared of that toilet than I am of my 3 horsepower table saw. They flushed so violently, and so loudly, that your ears popped if you had the bathroom door closed. Sadly, I am not even exaggerating. Because of the aforementioned peanut bladders, I got to hear this jet noise no less than 14 times a night. I can only hope that we were able to pay them back in some small measure by exposing their 12 children to the raucous sounds of late-night, drunken sex.
In very short intervals, separated by many hours of snoring.
What? I'm not a machine.
On Monday we went to Animal Kingdom with Shamus and the family. We met them there, and he had already thoughtfully grabbed some FastPass tickets for the Everest roller coaster, which is big on scenery and not so big on coaster. I remember the last time I rode it, a giant Yeti made a swipe at you when you went under him. Oddly, he was missing this time. Either he was out getting a fresh Sherpa for breakfast, or he was being repaired. I remember him being pretty close to the cars, so I have a feeling he's been the victim of more than his fair share of vandalism. They probably have to clean the gum out of his fur periodically.
It was a riot to hit the parks with Shamus' kids. At one point I noticed his son walking funny, like he had a load of crap in his pants and cramps in his arms. I asked Shammy's wife what he was doing, and she replied that he was "being a T-Rex" and that she has to periodically tell him to "be a boy" when they go out places. I watched him for a second, then said, "In a way, you're lucky. At least he picked something that walks on two legs." The funny thing is, once you realized what he was doing, I'll be damned if he didn't have it down cold. Their daughter is a year or two older, so as far as I could tell, she stayed a girl the whole time.
If you've been to Animal Kingdom, you know about the Tree of Life, a giant artificial tree that houses the "It's a Bugs Life" attraction. As we were walking around the jungle, we were watching these water birds, and suddenly they all started swimming toward this one tree stump in the middle of the small pond. Apparently, when I had glanced away, this stump spit out a sizable amount of food, and the birds were going nuts. We promptly dubbed it the "Stump of Life."
My wife likes to watch the Silverback Gorillas. I think if I didn't keep an eye on her, she'd climb right in there with them. God only knows what would happen then -- Gorilla queen or silverback sex slave would be my guess. It could go either way.
Me, I was partial to the fruit bats. Was. Now, not so much. If you've never seen a fruit bat, they look like full-sized Chihuahuas with giant, leathery wings. Apparently, along with a 4-6 foot wing span, they also have great eyesight and like to sunbathe. Who knew? Well, I'm sure lots of people knew, but I wasn't one of them.
I learned something else about them that I didn't know before. As Shamus and I were standing there watching them eat lettuce and groom each other, and our wives were standing well back from the open bars, one little guy was looking right at us:
He was really cute and cuddly, and I was about to comment on how I would love to have one as a pet when all those words just stuck in my throat. Why, you ask? Well, he showed us what was behind the curtain:
So it turns out fruit bats have major tackle. I, for one, had no idea. Apparently, they are the Ron Jeremys of the Animal Kingdom. Shamus looks at me and says, "That's some genitalia, right there." As a dozen women covered the eyes of a dozen children, the bat hung there (no pun intended) and gave us the inverted full monty. When finding some pictures for this post, I found out that their testicles are approximately 2% of their body weight. Holy shit. No wonder they have a 4-foot wingspan. They need it to get that thing off the ground.
I don't remember much after that. I may have been in shock. I think we just parted ways in the parking lot and my wife and I went back to the hotel and made some drinks. The alcohol helps me deal with the fact that a bat is hung better than I am.
We came back on the 29th, and it sucked. At 10:00 AM, I was sitting in the sun wearing a T-shirt, and at 10:00 PM I was on hour number three of trying to get the cars into the driveway.
Looking outside, it's like our vacation never happened. Well, except for the batcock. That part sticks with me.
The progression goes something like this:
Year One: "Wow! Look at this place! It's amazing! We'll never see it all in 7 days!"
Year Two: "We know our way around this time! We'll spend a day at each park, go to Blizzard Beach, eat dinner at Rain Forest Cafe on Tuesday, Mexico in Epcot on Wednesday, and the House of Blues on Thursday."
Years 3-5: "How 'bout we just hit the roller coasters at each park and catch the fireworks at Epcot? Holy fuck. I just paid $20 for two pretzels and a couple of bottles of water."
By the third time you visit, you've pretty much resigned yourself to the fact that Mickey and Friends are going to give you a major ass-reaming every day you are there. You also realize that every store there sells the same over-priced shit, and traveling around by bus can get very old very quickly. It's ironic really - here you are with all this free bus transportation everywhere you want to go, but two mixed drinks will set you back $24. You can't afford to get drunk in Disney. It's a horrible state of affairs. Although for a second, I thought maybe I was drunk when we walked into a Disney store and the first thing I saw was this very un-disneylike shirt:
Speaking of un-Disneylike, what about that Minnie mouse? I learned a dirty little secret about her when eating Goofy's Gummies. I know that sounds dirty, but it's really not. These are gummy bears in the shape of Disney characters, and for some reason they are fresher and better tasting than gummies you can get elsewhere. My wife usually stocks up, buying some to eat when we're wandering around, and a bunch to bring home. As I was eating Minnie, (again, not dirty) I noticed something. Here's Minnie:
As I was marveling at her freshness and gummability, I happened to do this:
OK, now that's dirty.
Gummy fun notwithstanding, the only way to get the party started in earnest at Disney is to (1) be very, very rich, (2) leech off some big company's expense account, or (3) have an outside contact. Lucky for us, Shamus was down for the same conference, and he and his family were staying in a condo off the Disney campus. Therefore they had rented a car, and offered to get us out of the Goofy bin for little while. Ah, sweet freedom! They became our window to the outside world, where you could buy things like affordable food, chewing gum, Pepsi products and reasonably priced booze, all without pictures of Disney characters on them. We all decided to have dinner at their place on Saturday night, so we went to the supermarket and bought the fixin's for steak and chicken fajitas, and it was glorious.
Needless to say, we stocked up while we had the chance. Our room had a tiny little refrigerator and we filled every inch of it with munchies and cold drinks. We bought way too much booze, although we only ended up leaving behind an unopened bottle of wine and half a bottle of gin.
That's the thing about 5th time's the charm. After a while, you just decide that it's not so bad to get up at noon and then spend the rest of the day hanging out by the pool with a book and a rum drink. Although in retrospect, I think we could probably go somewhere tropical with way fewer screaming kids for about the same price. I realize Disney is primarily for children, so I can't bitch too much, but I've also noticed that a single kid in the "grown-up" swimming pool is a lot like a single motorboat on a wilderness pond. It has a tendency to wreck the mood, and sometimes you just want to shoot a hole in it and watch it sink.
The reason we were there for an entire week after the conference ended was, oddly enough, because of the state of the economy. We were already staying for an extra 3 days, and in an effort to drum up some business, Disney was offering a "buy four, get three free" deal. We figured that we would stay over one extra night to pick up the 3 extra freebies. Since the park tickets are tiered that same way, (the fourth and fifth days of a park hopper ticket are almost free) we picked up a couple of those too. We figured we wouldn't have to buy anything but food. That sounds good until you realize that the cheapest thing you can buy anywhere in Disney is a 6" miniature frozen pizza (cooked on a chain-driven conveyor belt) that will still set you back seven bucks plus tax. Speaking of taxes, if you go there, be prepared. There's "room tax" and "resort tax" and "late-night Tinkerbell visit" tax and these will add another $40 bucks a night to your room price. OK, I may or may not have volunteered to pay extra for that last one - but the other ones just automatically showed up on the bill.
We stayed at the "moderately priced" hotel -- Port Orleans Riverside -- quite a downgrade from the Swan/Dolphin I stayed at during the conference. The first room we were assigned was horrible. We walked in, and the room was so humid it felt like you couldn't breathe. There was condensation running down the window, and it smelled like a tropical rain forest, if a tropical rain forest could somehow grow bitter ass and dirty feet. It did have one redeeming quality -- it was on the top floor, which is great because then nobody is walking around above you. We called the front desk and got another room that was marginally better, but on the 2nd floor, with a family of 14 in the room above us. I never actually saw them, but I surmised that they were in some sort of horrific accident, and as a result had been fitted with prosthetic legs made of a newly-discovered metal I can only assume is called Stompium. Also, they had bladders the size of dwarf peanuts.
How do I know this? It's all because of the crazy toilets. When you flushed one, you feared for your life. In an effort to avoid plug-ups, the hotel installed jet-assisted flushing mechanisms that would practically pull your clothes off. I was more scared of that toilet than I am of my 3 horsepower table saw. They flushed so violently, and so loudly, that your ears popped if you had the bathroom door closed. Sadly, I am not even exaggerating. Because of the aforementioned peanut bladders, I got to hear this jet noise no less than 14 times a night. I can only hope that we were able to pay them back in some small measure by exposing their 12 children to the raucous sounds of late-night, drunken sex.
In very short intervals, separated by many hours of snoring.
What? I'm not a machine.
On Monday we went to Animal Kingdom with Shamus and the family. We met them there, and he had already thoughtfully grabbed some FastPass tickets for the Everest roller coaster, which is big on scenery and not so big on coaster. I remember the last time I rode it, a giant Yeti made a swipe at you when you went under him. Oddly, he was missing this time. Either he was out getting a fresh Sherpa for breakfast, or he was being repaired. I remember him being pretty close to the cars, so I have a feeling he's been the victim of more than his fair share of vandalism. They probably have to clean the gum out of his fur periodically.
It was a riot to hit the parks with Shamus' kids. At one point I noticed his son walking funny, like he had a load of crap in his pants and cramps in his arms. I asked Shammy's wife what he was doing, and she replied that he was "being a T-Rex" and that she has to periodically tell him to "be a boy" when they go out places. I watched him for a second, then said, "In a way, you're lucky. At least he picked something that walks on two legs." The funny thing is, once you realized what he was doing, I'll be damned if he didn't have it down cold. Their daughter is a year or two older, so as far as I could tell, she stayed a girl the whole time.
If you've been to Animal Kingdom, you know about the Tree of Life, a giant artificial tree that houses the "It's a Bugs Life" attraction. As we were walking around the jungle, we were watching these water birds, and suddenly they all started swimming toward this one tree stump in the middle of the small pond. Apparently, when I had glanced away, this stump spit out a sizable amount of food, and the birds were going nuts. We promptly dubbed it the "Stump of Life."
My wife likes to watch the Silverback Gorillas. I think if I didn't keep an eye on her, she'd climb right in there with them. God only knows what would happen then -- Gorilla queen or silverback sex slave would be my guess. It could go either way.
Me, I was partial to the fruit bats. Was. Now, not so much. If you've never seen a fruit bat, they look like full-sized Chihuahuas with giant, leathery wings. Apparently, along with a 4-6 foot wing span, they also have great eyesight and like to sunbathe. Who knew? Well, I'm sure lots of people knew, but I wasn't one of them.
I learned something else about them that I didn't know before. As Shamus and I were standing there watching them eat lettuce and groom each other, and our wives were standing well back from the open bars, one little guy was looking right at us:
He was really cute and cuddly, and I was about to comment on how I would love to have one as a pet when all those words just stuck in my throat. Why, you ask? Well, he showed us what was behind the curtain:
So it turns out fruit bats have major tackle. I, for one, had no idea. Apparently, they are the Ron Jeremys of the Animal Kingdom. Shamus looks at me and says, "That's some genitalia, right there." As a dozen women covered the eyes of a dozen children, the bat hung there (no pun intended) and gave us the inverted full monty. When finding some pictures for this post, I found out that their testicles are approximately 2% of their body weight. Holy shit. No wonder they have a 4-foot wingspan. They need it to get that thing off the ground.
I don't remember much after that. I may have been in shock. I think we just parted ways in the parking lot and my wife and I went back to the hotel and made some drinks. The alcohol helps me deal with the fact that a bat is hung better than I am.
We came back on the 29th, and it sucked. At 10:00 AM, I was sitting in the sun wearing a T-shirt, and at 10:00 PM I was on hour number three of trying to get the cars into the driveway.
Looking outside, it's like our vacation never happened. Well, except for the batcock. That part sticks with me.
2/5/09
Two things:
(1) What the eff is wrong with people?
(2) Google needs to work on their sponsored links algorithm.
Next up: Disney on a budget, and Animal Kingdom with the O'Drunkahans.
(2) Google needs to work on their sponsored links algorithm.
Next up: Disney on a budget, and Animal Kingdom with the O'Drunkahans.
1/31/09
Too... much... stuff.
This is going to be long, rambling, and probably boring, so be prepared. On January 18th, a day before my wife's birthday (she was so pleased), I sat myself down in a luxurious leather seat aboard a Southwest flight to Orlando, Florida for this tradeshow. If you've ever been on a Southwest flight going anywhere, you know that even if you are having sex with the pilot you have very little chance of getting a good seat, unless you happen to be having sex with him/her en route.
Why are there no good seats? Because in order to make money on an $89 fare, they have to pack three people into the space that would normally be occupied by two. And when half the people on your flight actually take up 1.6 people-worth of space, you are going to be uncomfortable no matter what you do. Luckily, the fat guy I ended up sitting next to actually wanted to sit in the middle so I was only squashed against hairy flesh on the one side.
Here's something else I discovered. There is a serious drawback to leather seats. I realize they are a great thing for the airlines -- they last a long time, they're easy to clean, they sound like they're upscale, and they don't soak up liquid. Unfortunately, there is another thing they don't soak up. Leather seats = zero fart absorption. Give me a nice, upholstered foam-filled seat any day of the week. I don't know what the fuck the guy sitting next to me ate for breakfast, but he singlehandedly polluted 110 feet of airborne aluminum tube. Or maybe he had help, I don't know. Either way, at times it was brutal. I did the only thing I could do: I went into full Unibomber mode and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, put my sunglasses on, turned toward the shaded window and tried to breath through my mouth. Oh, and I watched a movie on my nano called Wanted. Not bad if you like special effects and/or Angelina Jolie.
The first night of this conference they have a big party. It's usually just an excuse to eat bad food and drink bad beer and wine, so I usually go for a while and then bail out early since I've been awake for 17 hours. The party stretched across a beach between two hotels, and they had different bands spaced out along the way, covering different musical styles. It started with Latin (DJ), went to blues (passable) then to acoustic (bad) and finally to country (so-so). I went to the conference with one of the guys on my team that I never get to see except during our weekly video meeting. I have to say, he's a lot less pixelated in person. We were standing down on the "country end" drinking Coronas and watching two scary girls do some sort of line stomp on a plywood bar when my phone rang.
It was my wife. She was buried in 18" of snow and the snow blower wouldn't run. Actually, it would run just fine -- but it wouldn't blow snow, which means it's no longer a snow blower and is instead just a motor bolted to a hundred and fifty pound pile of shit. As I walked and tried to find a quiet place to talk away from the music, we tried a bunch of things to get it going, and were rewarded with smoke and the smell of burning rubber. At that point I knew the second stage was frozen up. We pointed a kerosene heater at it for ten minutes and even that didn't work. Finally in desperation, I told her to dump a bucket of boiling water down the chute to see if it would melt the frozen up mechanism and, believe it or not, it worked.
Still, by that time I was almost back to my room, so I figured I'd just stay there. When I had first arrived at the hotel, I changed my room to one with a balcony, having grand visions of sitting out there at night, drinking a scotch and maybe doing some writing, but that was not to be.
Due to global warming, Orlando was twenty eight fucking degrees at night for the first three nights I was there. As an added bonus, I had Coughy McCougherson in the room next to me. He was making this sound every five minutes until I couldn't stand it any more and finally had to fall asleep listening to my ipod. I think he may have died a few nights later, because something in his room started ringing at 4 am and wouldn't stop. After about 30 minutes of that, I heard security in the hall and they were banging on his door. I knew they were security because they kept yelling "SECURITY!" in between each hammer-fest. Finally they let themselves in. I guess he was just a party animal because apparently he wasn't even there. Assknob. Unless he really did die, of course. In which case I'd refer to him as the dead assknob.
The first day of the conference, other people almost died, too. There is something called the "General Session" which is basically a big rah-rah session with some famous people. This year it was Blue Man Group and Dan Aykroyd. BMG was great, Dan A, not so much. I mean, he didn't suck, but he started off with Beldar, and went downhill from there. He went for some laughs that didn't happen and that's always a little awkward. I guess you can take the actor out of the SNL, but can't take the SNL out of the actor.
Anyway, from the dining hall to the session was a straight shot up two separate escalators, one from the first floor to the second, and another from the second to the third. Now picture 8,000 people trying to get up these escalators and into the same room at the same time. What happened is obvious in retrospect. There was a traffic jam at the top, and the people riding the escalator had nowhere to go since there was an unending stream of people behind them. When they got to the top and hit bodies, it started a geekalanche. People were screaming, "MOVE! MOVE!" and disaster was narrowly averted by everyone except maybe Dan Aykroyd.
In a different mid-week session, I learned something else. First, I learned that due to a weak dollar, it's cheaper to fly to the states from overseas than ever before. Apparently, Germany got this memo and sent a shitload of people over. A lot of them looked like this. I believe most of them were (and probably still are) named Deiter or Hans. I think of all the whiter nationalities, Germans are the easiest to pick out. They seem very ... precise. I can tell you one thing, however. There is nothing worse than trying to listen to a presentation when two people are talking to each other in the seats behind you, except when the people are talking to each other in German. Or Hebrew. That one is good, too. It's the only language that makes you sound like you are coughing up snails.
I think I am easily annoyed, or more likely I just hate people. At another session I went to, the guy next to me was a major nose-breather. Every breath in and out was through his nose, and with a gusto usually reserved for use by perverts sniffing women's underwear.
I am also not sure they have elevators outside the U.S. I base this theory on what I experienced in the hotel after we were done for the day. I boarded the elevator to the 8th floor, and two other random gentlemen got on with me; one of apparent Chinese descent and one African American. They both pushed their buttons and we were off. At the sixth floor, the doors opened, and nobody moved. The doors started closing again. When they were maybe two feet apart, the Chinese guy ran from the back of the elevator and dove head-first out the door sideways, landing flat out on the carpet. Seriously, it was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. He wasn't wearing a hat, so there was nothing for him to reach back and grab, but the dive itself was priceless. At the point of his dive, the doors were almost contacting him on both sides of his body. That's how close it was. Since his fancy move was so fast, the doors didn't even re-open. The other guy in the elevator just looked at me as the doors shut and said, "That was some serious James Bond shit right there."
The other thing I love about Florida is that when the temperature drops below 60, people who live here lose their minds and start wearing winter clothes. We're talking parkas, gloves and scarves. And when it's 30 degrees out -- everyone who lives here dies a little inside, and goes batshit crazy with the the heater controls. The hallways in the hotel, the shuttle buses, the restaurants -- all had to be pushing 80 degrees. It was like walking towards the seventh level of Hell every time I went back to my room.
The product showcase was an experience as well. The object of the game there is for you is to get free stuff, and the object of the game for the vendors is to scan your badge at all costs so they can later bombard you with junk mail and bulk mail and faxes and phone calls for whatever crap it is that they happen to be selling.
The easiest way to ensnare an unsuspecting geek, of course, is with a hot girl offering a big-screen TV. So some vendors will stoop to this level, and hire models to hand out their literature and scan badges and ask if you'd like to "enter their giveaway." If you are a newbie, you will fall for this every time and before you know it, the 5' 10" hot model will be gone and you will be sharing a moist handshake with the sweaty, balding guy with the bad comb-over and the clip-on tie. As a seasoned professional, your job is to avoid these traps, and get the freebie without any interaction with their sales person. Talk to the model, enter the contest, say you have somewhere to be in 5 minutes and promise to stop back. Done.
Overall the conference was really very good, and some of the sessions were excellent. I did come away with some new ideas on how to tweak our infrastructure, so it was worth it, but by the end of the week you are basically the walking dead. Your head is so crammed full of stuff that you can't possibly absorb one more thing, and you are so tired from the late nights and early mornings that you are asleep on your feet. I was also studying for a certification test that I had to take on Thursday.
The morning of my exam, I had a surreal moment. I went to the dining hall and got breakfast, and sat down at a big round table, all alone because it was early. I had my iPod phones plugged into my ears, and I was doing some last minute cramming for my test. When I finally looked up from my study sheet, there were 11 Japanese guys sitting at the table with me. I must have looked surprised because when I pulled my earbuds out, they were all looking at me and laughing. I stood up, gave them a little bow and left for my exam. I don't know if that was politically correct or not, but they didn't seem to mind.
Sometimes you go a little crazy at these things, I think. It's a shorter drive for some of us than others, I know. Here's a real life example that made me think maybe I was losing it:
The last day of the conference, I was standing in the bathroom taking a leak in one of the disgusting urinals, and I happened to glance down at the valve on the top. The company that manufactured this valve was Zurn. I immediately decided that Zurn was the god of all things urine. Kind of like Thor, but instead of being the god of thunder, he's Zurn, the god of pee. In the space of 30 seconds, he had a costume, a superpower (beams of yellow force he could bend to his will) He wore a yellow suit with a red lightning bolt on it, but then I thought, "No, I just gave the Green Lantern's powers to the Silver Age Flash," and that's when I realized I needed some sleep because everyone knows the Green Lantern has beams of green power. Also, I had finished peeing 20 seconds ago and there was a line.
In my next rambling and incoherent post, I will tell you about the week that followed, whereupon my lovely wife and I had the best weather ever and managed to laugh our asses off, and even got to hang with Shamus and his family for bit, which is an experience in and of itself.
Go watch his Epcot video and try not to laugh.
Why are there no good seats? Because in order to make money on an $89 fare, they have to pack three people into the space that would normally be occupied by two. And when half the people on your flight actually take up 1.6 people-worth of space, you are going to be uncomfortable no matter what you do. Luckily, the fat guy I ended up sitting next to actually wanted to sit in the middle so I was only squashed against hairy flesh on the one side.
Here's something else I discovered. There is a serious drawback to leather seats. I realize they are a great thing for the airlines -- they last a long time, they're easy to clean, they sound like they're upscale, and they don't soak up liquid. Unfortunately, there is another thing they don't soak up. Leather seats = zero fart absorption. Give me a nice, upholstered foam-filled seat any day of the week. I don't know what the fuck the guy sitting next to me ate for breakfast, but he singlehandedly polluted 110 feet of airborne aluminum tube. Or maybe he had help, I don't know. Either way, at times it was brutal. I did the only thing I could do: I went into full Unibomber mode and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, put my sunglasses on, turned toward the shaded window and tried to breath through my mouth. Oh, and I watched a movie on my nano called Wanted. Not bad if you like special effects and/or Angelina Jolie.
The first night of this conference they have a big party. It's usually just an excuse to eat bad food and drink bad beer and wine, so I usually go for a while and then bail out early since I've been awake for 17 hours. The party stretched across a beach between two hotels, and they had different bands spaced out along the way, covering different musical styles. It started with Latin (DJ), went to blues (passable) then to acoustic (bad) and finally to country (so-so). I went to the conference with one of the guys on my team that I never get to see except during our weekly video meeting. I have to say, he's a lot less pixelated in person. We were standing down on the "country end" drinking Coronas and watching two scary girls do some sort of line stomp on a plywood bar when my phone rang.
It was my wife. She was buried in 18" of snow and the snow blower wouldn't run. Actually, it would run just fine -- but it wouldn't blow snow, which means it's no longer a snow blower and is instead just a motor bolted to a hundred and fifty pound pile of shit. As I walked and tried to find a quiet place to talk away from the music, we tried a bunch of things to get it going, and were rewarded with smoke and the smell of burning rubber. At that point I knew the second stage was frozen up. We pointed a kerosene heater at it for ten minutes and even that didn't work. Finally in desperation, I told her to dump a bucket of boiling water down the chute to see if it would melt the frozen up mechanism and, believe it or not, it worked.
Still, by that time I was almost back to my room, so I figured I'd just stay there. When I had first arrived at the hotel, I changed my room to one with a balcony, having grand visions of sitting out there at night, drinking a scotch and maybe doing some writing, but that was not to be.
Due to global warming, Orlando was twenty eight fucking degrees at night for the first three nights I was there. As an added bonus, I had Coughy McCougherson in the room next to me. He was making this sound every five minutes until I couldn't stand it any more and finally had to fall asleep listening to my ipod. I think he may have died a few nights later, because something in his room started ringing at 4 am and wouldn't stop. After about 30 minutes of that, I heard security in the hall and they were banging on his door. I knew they were security because they kept yelling "SECURITY!" in between each hammer-fest. Finally they let themselves in. I guess he was just a party animal because apparently he wasn't even there. Assknob. Unless he really did die, of course. In which case I'd refer to him as the dead assknob.
The first day of the conference, other people almost died, too. There is something called the "General Session" which is basically a big rah-rah session with some famous people. This year it was Blue Man Group and Dan Aykroyd. BMG was great, Dan A, not so much. I mean, he didn't suck, but he started off with Beldar, and went downhill from there. He went for some laughs that didn't happen and that's always a little awkward. I guess you can take the actor out of the SNL, but can't take the SNL out of the actor.
Anyway, from the dining hall to the session was a straight shot up two separate escalators, one from the first floor to the second, and another from the second to the third. Now picture 8,000 people trying to get up these escalators and into the same room at the same time. What happened is obvious in retrospect. There was a traffic jam at the top, and the people riding the escalator had nowhere to go since there was an unending stream of people behind them. When they got to the top and hit bodies, it started a geekalanche. People were screaming, "MOVE! MOVE!" and disaster was narrowly averted by everyone except maybe Dan Aykroyd.
In a different mid-week session, I learned something else. First, I learned that due to a weak dollar, it's cheaper to fly to the states from overseas than ever before. Apparently, Germany got this memo and sent a shitload of people over. A lot of them looked like this. I believe most of them were (and probably still are) named Deiter or Hans. I think of all the whiter nationalities, Germans are the easiest to pick out. They seem very ... precise. I can tell you one thing, however. There is nothing worse than trying to listen to a presentation when two people are talking to each other in the seats behind you, except when the people are talking to each other in German. Or Hebrew. That one is good, too. It's the only language that makes you sound like you are coughing up snails.
I think I am easily annoyed, or more likely I just hate people. At another session I went to, the guy next to me was a major nose-breather. Every breath in and out was through his nose, and with a gusto usually reserved for use by perverts sniffing women's underwear.
I am also not sure they have elevators outside the U.S. I base this theory on what I experienced in the hotel after we were done for the day. I boarded the elevator to the 8th floor, and two other random gentlemen got on with me; one of apparent Chinese descent and one African American. They both pushed their buttons and we were off. At the sixth floor, the doors opened, and nobody moved. The doors started closing again. When they were maybe two feet apart, the Chinese guy ran from the back of the elevator and dove head-first out the door sideways, landing flat out on the carpet. Seriously, it was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. He wasn't wearing a hat, so there was nothing for him to reach back and grab, but the dive itself was priceless. At the point of his dive, the doors were almost contacting him on both sides of his body. That's how close it was. Since his fancy move was so fast, the doors didn't even re-open. The other guy in the elevator just looked at me as the doors shut and said, "That was some serious James Bond shit right there."
The other thing I love about Florida is that when the temperature drops below 60, people who live here lose their minds and start wearing winter clothes. We're talking parkas, gloves and scarves. And when it's 30 degrees out -- everyone who lives here dies a little inside, and goes batshit crazy with the the heater controls. The hallways in the hotel, the shuttle buses, the restaurants -- all had to be pushing 80 degrees. It was like walking towards the seventh level of Hell every time I went back to my room.
The product showcase was an experience as well. The object of the game there is for you is to get free stuff, and the object of the game for the vendors is to scan your badge at all costs so they can later bombard you with junk mail and bulk mail and faxes and phone calls for whatever crap it is that they happen to be selling.
The easiest way to ensnare an unsuspecting geek, of course, is with a hot girl offering a big-screen TV. So some vendors will stoop to this level, and hire models to hand out their literature and scan badges and ask if you'd like to "enter their giveaway." If you are a newbie, you will fall for this every time and before you know it, the 5' 10" hot model will be gone and you will be sharing a moist handshake with the sweaty, balding guy with the bad comb-over and the clip-on tie. As a seasoned professional, your job is to avoid these traps, and get the freebie without any interaction with their sales person. Talk to the model, enter the contest, say you have somewhere to be in 5 minutes and promise to stop back. Done.
Overall the conference was really very good, and some of the sessions were excellent. I did come away with some new ideas on how to tweak our infrastructure, so it was worth it, but by the end of the week you are basically the walking dead. Your head is so crammed full of stuff that you can't possibly absorb one more thing, and you are so tired from the late nights and early mornings that you are asleep on your feet. I was also studying for a certification test that I had to take on Thursday.
The morning of my exam, I had a surreal moment. I went to the dining hall and got breakfast, and sat down at a big round table, all alone because it was early. I had my iPod phones plugged into my ears, and I was doing some last minute cramming for my test. When I finally looked up from my study sheet, there were 11 Japanese guys sitting at the table with me. I must have looked surprised because when I pulled my earbuds out, they were all looking at me and laughing. I stood up, gave them a little bow and left for my exam. I don't know if that was politically correct or not, but they didn't seem to mind.
Sometimes you go a little crazy at these things, I think. It's a shorter drive for some of us than others, I know. Here's a real life example that made me think maybe I was losing it:
The last day of the conference, I was standing in the bathroom taking a leak in one of the disgusting urinals, and I happened to glance down at the valve on the top. The company that manufactured this valve was Zurn. I immediately decided that Zurn was the god of all things urine. Kind of like Thor, but instead of being the god of thunder, he's Zurn, the god of pee. In the space of 30 seconds, he had a costume, a superpower (beams of yellow force he could bend to his will) He wore a yellow suit with a red lightning bolt on it, but then I thought, "No, I just gave the Green Lantern's powers to the Silver Age Flash," and that's when I realized I needed some sleep because everyone knows the Green Lantern has beams of green power. Also, I had finished peeing 20 seconds ago and there was a line.
In my next rambling and incoherent post, I will tell you about the week that followed, whereupon my lovely wife and I had the best weather ever and managed to laugh our asses off, and even got to hang with Shamus and his family for bit, which is an experience in and of itself.
Go watch his Epcot video and try not to laugh.
1/30/09
Vacation, all I ever wanted..
Sorry for the Go-Gos reference. I'm back. I am regrouping from a week-long geekfest and a week-long vacation. In the meantime, keep your eyes on your Mazda. I'll be back later tonight.
LAGOS (Reuters) - Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery. Vigilantes took the black and white beast to the police saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.
I didn't even know goat-men could drive. And where the hell does he keep his gun?
LAGOS (Reuters) - Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery. Vigilantes took the black and white beast to the police saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.
I didn't even know goat-men could drive. And where the hell does he keep his gun?
1/29/09
Best Buy can suck it.
I've been shopping at Best Buy for at least a decade. I've purchased televisions, computers, 3 dvd players, monitors, digital cameras, 6 different iPods, wireless routers, computer software, and too many DVDs and CDs to count. Yesterday, I walked into the Wilton Best Buy store with an unopened Rolling Stones DVD box set that I received as a Christmas gift. All I wanted to do was switch it for a different DVD because my wife originally bought the wrong one, and pick up 100' of ethernet cable.
Simple, right?
I waited in line at the returns counter, and presented my return to the counter girl. She asked me for my name and phone number, which I gave her. She punched a few buttons, scanned the DVD, then said "I'm sorry. I can't take this back." I pointed out that it was unopened, and all I wanted to do was trade it for something else.
"Yes, but it's past our 30-day return period, so I can't take it back," she said.
"Even though it's not opened, and you can resell it?"
"Yes."
I politely asked her to make an exception. Talk to a manager if she had to. She told me to hold on a minute, and she went and spoke with her manager. I figured there would be no problem, since the manager at every retail establishment in existence makes exceptions like this all the time.
Incredibly, she comes back and gives me the same story again, saying that her manager refused to allow the return. For a second, I thought about tossing the DVD behind the counter and telling them to keep/shove it, but then I remember that it's worth 30 bucks so I took it and walked away. There's always e-Bay. I left, and on my way home I picked up some raw CAT5 cable at Radio Shack for 25 bucks and threw a couple of ends on it. Saved myself 30 bucks.
I guess it's lesson learned on my part. On their part, I hope not expending the effort to punch a few buttons on their cash register was worth losing me as a customer. And yes, I realize that there are store policies, and the policies are there for many good reasons, but I think in this particular case, it would have been to their benefit to suck it up and let me do the swap instead of just sucking, period.
You'd think that when their sales are in the shitter because of the economy, they'd be a little more accommodating to the good customers that they already have.
I'm sorry it had to end this way, Best Buy. It's not me, it's you.
Simple, right?
I waited in line at the returns counter, and presented my return to the counter girl. She asked me for my name and phone number, which I gave her. She punched a few buttons, scanned the DVD, then said "I'm sorry. I can't take this back." I pointed out that it was unopened, and all I wanted to do was trade it for something else.
"Yes, but it's past our 30-day return period, so I can't take it back," she said.
"Even though it's not opened, and you can resell it?"
"Yes."
I politely asked her to make an exception. Talk to a manager if she had to. She told me to hold on a minute, and she went and spoke with her manager. I figured there would be no problem, since the manager at every retail establishment in existence makes exceptions like this all the time.
Incredibly, she comes back and gives me the same story again, saying that her manager refused to allow the return. For a second, I thought about tossing the DVD behind the counter and telling them to keep/shove it, but then I remember that it's worth 30 bucks so I took it and walked away. There's always e-Bay. I left, and on my way home I picked up some raw CAT5 cable at Radio Shack for 25 bucks and threw a couple of ends on it. Saved myself 30 bucks.
I guess it's lesson learned on my part. On their part, I hope not expending the effort to punch a few buttons on their cash register was worth losing me as a customer. And yes, I realize that there are store policies, and the policies are there for many good reasons, but I think in this particular case, it would have been to their benefit to suck it up and let me do the swap instead of just sucking, period.
You'd think that when their sales are in the shitter because of the economy, they'd be a little more accommodating to the good customers that they already have.
I'm sorry it had to end this way, Best Buy. It's not me, it's you.
1/16/09
Probably not going to win.
I apologize if anyone thinks this post is mean, but this little kid makes me laugh every time I see this ad. He has a look on his face like, "Yeah, I got no shot. Thanks, Mom."
Everyone is the cutest baby to someone, right?
Everyone is the cutest baby to someone, right?
1/13/09
Death and Taxes.
It started a few weeks ago, and it's been getting worse ever since.
Now that the political commercials are finally over, it's time for the tax prep commercials to start rearing their ugly heads. They are airing constantly, and it's really beginning to annoy me.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy getting raped by the federal and local government every year. It makes me feel good about myself; like I'm doing something to help out. Regardless, these twice hourly reminders of my exemplary civic duty do nothing to improve my mood.
There's one commercial in particular that creeps me out a little, for multiple reasons. Maybe I'm the only one. It's the new TurboTax ad, and it stars these guys:
I know the dude in the middle is supposed to be Andrew Jackson, and the one on the right is supposed to be Ben Franklin, and I am pretty sure the guy on the left is supposed to be Ulysses S. Grant.
So the premise is, these three guys show up where you are and give you money and tax advice. They are, ostensibly, money come to life. Or -- more precisely -- the people-who-appear-on-money come to life. However, for some reason they keep their "money-like" coloring when they accomplish this magical feat. I don't know why anyone thought this was a good idea. Maybe it's because if they didn't, they'd just look like three creepy guys dressed up for some kind of historical reenactment.
So the upshot of this decision is that they have a pale green cast to them, which is supposed to remind you that they are straight out of your wallet. There's one problem with that -- they don't look like money that has miraculously come to life. Instead, they look like walking corpses. Zombies, maybe. Somehow-or-other undead, and slightly gone-bad. Probably closing in fast on stinky, in other words.
I was hoping to find the commercial on youtube, but no luck. Instead, I had to take a few stills for your enjoyment.
Here's where Ben is asking the guy who is still alive how something so small can cost so much, and telling him that he can get big deductions for his kid. You can't see the guy's face in this snapshot, but he looks intrigued rather than horrified. I would have tucked that kid under my arm like a football and jumped head-first through the store's plate glass window to get to my car.
In this next picture, Grant tells the stroller guy that it smells like his deduction needs a diaper change, but my theory is that he finally just caught a whiff of his own decaying flesh. Also, I am pretty sure Jackson thinks he's an asshole.
In this next shot, Ben Franklin tries to convince the guy that a handy in the alley behind the store is totally deductible:
No, I'm kidding. I made that part up.
And of course this last frame is right before Ben lunges at stroller guy and tears his throat out, and then gives his fatherless infant a demo of how Turbotax can help you deal with your inheritance tax.
OK, I made that part up too.
Anyway, I've decided I'm going to use Tax Cut this year, even though that slacker guardian angel mascot of theirs is only marginally less annoying than the rotting presidents (and Ben*). Mostly because I don't want a rotting historical figure to be my backup if I get audited.
For a bar fight maybe. That'd be cool. But not for an audit.
*She's persnickety, all right.
Now that the political commercials are finally over, it's time for the tax prep commercials to start rearing their ugly heads. They are airing constantly, and it's really beginning to annoy me.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy getting raped by the federal and local government every year. It makes me feel good about myself; like I'm doing something to help out. Regardless, these twice hourly reminders of my exemplary civic duty do nothing to improve my mood.
There's one commercial in particular that creeps me out a little, for multiple reasons. Maybe I'm the only one. It's the new TurboTax ad, and it stars these guys:
I know the dude in the middle is supposed to be Andrew Jackson, and the one on the right is supposed to be Ben Franklin, and I am pretty sure the guy on the left is supposed to be Ulysses S. Grant.
So the premise is, these three guys show up where you are and give you money and tax advice. They are, ostensibly, money come to life. Or -- more precisely -- the people-who-appear-on-money come to life. However, for some reason they keep their "money-like" coloring when they accomplish this magical feat. I don't know why anyone thought this was a good idea. Maybe it's because if they didn't, they'd just look like three creepy guys dressed up for some kind of historical reenactment.
So the upshot of this decision is that they have a pale green cast to them, which is supposed to remind you that they are straight out of your wallet. There's one problem with that -- they don't look like money that has miraculously come to life. Instead, they look like walking corpses. Zombies, maybe. Somehow-or-other undead, and slightly gone-bad. Probably closing in fast on stinky, in other words.
I was hoping to find the commercial on youtube, but no luck. Instead, I had to take a few stills for your enjoyment.
Here's where Ben is asking the guy who is still alive how something so small can cost so much, and telling him that he can get big deductions for his kid. You can't see the guy's face in this snapshot, but he looks intrigued rather than horrified. I would have tucked that kid under my arm like a football and jumped head-first through the store's plate glass window to get to my car.
In this next picture, Grant tells the stroller guy that it smells like his deduction needs a diaper change, but my theory is that he finally just caught a whiff of his own decaying flesh. Also, I am pretty sure Jackson thinks he's an asshole.
In this next shot, Ben Franklin tries to convince the guy that a handy in the alley behind the store is totally deductible:
No, I'm kidding. I made that part up.
And of course this last frame is right before Ben lunges at stroller guy and tears his throat out, and then gives his fatherless infant a demo of how Turbotax can help you deal with your inheritance tax.
OK, I made that part up too.
Anyway, I've decided I'm going to use Tax Cut this year, even though that slacker guardian angel mascot of theirs is only marginally less annoying than the rotting presidents (and Ben*). Mostly because I don't want a rotting historical figure to be my backup if I get audited.
For a bar fight maybe. That'd be cool. But not for an audit.
*She's persnickety, all right.
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