T'is the season of giving
I don't like Christmas shopping. It's a pain in the ass. And 90% of the time I don't even know what I'd like to have for lunch, let alone figure out what to get the people I normally buy gifts for. But at least this time around, I can cut down on the time spent at the mall and order some stuff online, especially since my dad and his wife are in Florida for the next five months. Although, I kinda enjoyed being able to go to the mall and purchase something for everyone on my list within 2 to 2 1/2 hours about three or four days before Christmas last year. Yeah, that was cool. This year, though, I decided to give myself a little more time and I should have only two people (potentially one gift) by the time this weekend is over. Woo!

But that still doesn't make it a fun experience. I went to Borders to pick up some books today and I got to stand in line for about 25 minutes while their 4 open registers helped customers as quick as they could. It was like I was getting lunch at my high school again. I kept zoning out to make the time go by. :) Needless to say, the place was pretty packed, and Borders isn't a small store.

Traffic is starting to get pretty insane now, too, as it gets closer and closer to the holidays. I had to pull a few Michigan lefts to get to where I needed to go, even though it wasn't really necessary. I just didn't feel like stopping and waiting at lights forever. Heh.

In pseudo-related news, here's something funny about Michigan people. It's very similar to the "You know you're from New Hampshire" list, thereby making it not very creative. But whatever.

Any ideas as to what I can get for someone who has everything? I'm already planning for next Christmas. :)

Absurdity
Everyone knows you can find some of the weirdest crap on eBay, be it an aluminum foil hat to protect you from a falling MIR, old dot com logos, someone else's virginity, or even get your own posse. Hell, there's even a website dedicated to these odd things and then some that I made mention to a long time ago. But did you know you can some of the weirdest services on eBay, too? Meow.

And on an unrelated tangent, do you want a faster computer but you don't want to go through the hassle of buying new parts or overclocking your current machine? Have no fear! You can make your current hunk of junk go ten times faster by making it look like a stock car! It's true. I've seen it happen.

I was reading the paper this morning...
And Dilbert = funny!

Damn Yankees
Well, it's been quite a while since I've posted. I really don't have any excuse except for laziness and having nothing interesting to say. But too damn bad.
As a life long Red Sox fan I have grown to hate, no, despise the Yankees. Why? Because it's what Boston fans do that's why. I guess we're just pissed off because we haven't won a friggin' World Series in 80+ years and maybe we're just a little scared that the curse of the Bambino / Bimbo / Dildo, whatever the hell you call it, is true. I never believed in it before this year but after seeing an all-star Bo-Sox team fall apart due to injury and shitty management I'm worried. I mean, who the hell is Dan Duquette working for anyway? The Yankees? Screw him and long live Jimmy Williams!
So it is with great interest and despair that I view the current Yankees' acquisitions. How deep is George Steinbrenner's pockets anyhow? If you have no clue what I'm talking about, the Yankees just signed Jason Giambi to a $120 million 7 year contract! And that's just for starters. I was hoping that the era of the Yankees was over. Shit.

Stuff I've been saving up for a rainy day
Actually, it may not be rain. I think a bum may have pissed on my windows.

Read Crack Aficionado and learn about the lifestyles of those celebrities who smoke cigars! I mean who smoke crack! This one is thanks to Matt.

How about a cute hug? No? What if it's from Becky?

Here we have a picture of Jerome as a boy. Thanks to Serpa.

Here is a graphic depicting the fun features of the Segway Human Transporter we scooped you on last week. Thanks to Jim from work, who, if he has a website to link to, I don't know it.

Here's a neat story I found myself regarding kamikaze kamels. 1 Hump or 2?

A guy I know that works with me and also went to school with me was featured in the Onion! (Well, really, it's just his picture, he had next to nothing to do with the article, but still, its cool.) Also, he founded Sheer Idiocy, the improv troupe at our old school. Also for the record, Nate Orenstam is not his name.

A couple items that suck
I stole some Reese's mini peanut butter cups from the pantry downstairs, and I consumed two or three of them. Then, I unwrapped the next chosen one to be eaten. There was a small deformity on the surface of the cup that looked like excess peanut butter. Notice the word "looked."

I then debated on picking it off or just eating the entire cup. After staring at it for a while, I decided to pick it off. I'm not sure why I chose to. But it was a good thing I did that, because on further inspection, it turned out to be a small maggot. Oh, the joy. No peanut butter or chocolate for me for the next two weeks.

There's this T-shaped intersection in town that people often make a left at in order to get to the post office or to the school without having to stop at the light fifty feet further down the road. I had to go to the post office, and I had the great opportunity to sit there with my blinker on for about two minutes before I finally had clearance to go. And as I made my left turn, some jabroni decided to pull out from his parking spot (the main drag has parallel parking spots) without using his blinker and drive towards me without any inclination to slow down. He noticed he had a break petal when he was within ten feet of my car. Then he was pissed at me for "cutting him off." Yeah, whatever you say, asshole. I'm just happy I'm alive to tell about it. :p

Ok, that was not as good as the peanut butter maggot, but it's kinda hard to top an act like that.

I think something's different...
I'm not sure what it is, hmmm...
Oh, the site! Wow! For a second I thought it was just the background that might have changed, but at a second glance, it appears that the site had a palette swap! And I think some things were moved around, added, and/or deleted.

This site is far from complete, but it's functional enough even exclusively for display purposes. Some crap will be added or edited as time goes on with or without notification.

Have fun with the little poll, too. Placing it on the front page should give it a lot more visibility. It isn't ten or more questions like my surveys of yore, but at least this one may get more than four or five submissions.

Unfortunately, the poll doesn't work yet (ha!) since I want to figure out a way for it to be filled out and submitted with realtime results instead of having each submission emailed to me and the totals counted up when I feel like it. Not an incredibly easy task for a illusory static site like this. And if this site gets as many visitors as Geocities claims it does, I'd hate to see how many possible email submissions I could end up getting. :p I don't want one of those dumb "FREE" ones that a bunch of web hosting sites have that are chock-full of ads and come in one of three different colors to get the job done, either. It's bad enough that this site's pseudo-professional look is tainted by a Geocities ad, I don't really want more of them courtesy of free web tools.

Speaking of free web tools, I'd like to say "Hi!" to Blogger. :)

Netscape 6.x users are fine, but Netscape 4.x users will get some interesting errors. Unfortunately, Netscape 4 is rather illogical and buggy that I can't quite figure out how to correct some of them. Some of them are because of CSS commands it doesn't understand (yet are considered to be CSS Level 1 standardized). I'm not too concerned though; I'm sure you users are used to having display problems. But hey, at least the site is still functional!

And for some reason, this site kinda looks like a marine-ish blue-green on my laptop. Yet, if I change my desktop computer's settings to be the same as my laptop's, it looks bluish like is should. Funky...

So there you go. Take it and like it, heh. And feel free to moan and complain in the comments under this sentence.

Something I don't understand
During the last couple nights when I was flipping through the channels in the search of some intense, riveting, high quality television, I stumbled across something quite unusual on The Discovery Channel and perhaps even The Learning Channel (I'm not sure if the latter station was involved). It was one of their typical nature shows where they show different animals in a region doing their thing like looking for food and mating and then getting eaten by something bigger than them. But in this instance, I was watching a group of tigers fight each other for territory. One tiger was named "Sawtooth" and the two invading tigers were brothers. It was kinda weird to see two tiger brothers traveling together looking for new territory, especially since male tigers usually travel and live in solitude. Then, I realized that they weren't normal tigers; they were sabertooth tigers. I then spent like ten minutes trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Last time I checked, sabertooth tigers roamed the earth around 8,000 BC.

After the fight, Sawtooth had to retreat (go figure, it's 2 on 1) to the fringe of a swampy area and hunt for food on his own. Previously, the female sabertooth tigers in the area would bring him food.

Then they moved to another species of animal that looked like a huge armadillo with a 50-pound ball flail for a tail. I had to stop watching it at that point.

Then yesterday, there was a program showing the life of the pterodactyl. There were scenes of it staking out areas for mating nests, scenes of it showing its wings and making calls in order to attract a mate, and there was this one pterodactyl that almost got owned because his nest was built perilously close to a rocky cliff. Then it cut to some scenes of iguanodons migrating.

It's nice to see a documentary about dinosaurs and other extinct creatures, but I seem to have a little problem with nature shows making it look like they used a time machine to strategically place video cameras in what will some day be Brazil. I'm sure we know quite a bit about reptiles like the tyrannosaurus rex from fossilized remains. However, I do not think we know enough to create a nature show replica of several extinct species living in harmony before the dawn of man. How the hell do we know what a pterodactyl mating call sounds like? How do we know what exotic colors extinct birds bore on their head and plumage? And at what point in time were wild male cats like, "Dude, I wanna get my own place to live now; see ya" instead of travelling together? And why doesn't the narrator say things like, "We believe that the pterodactyl may have looked like this" instead of "Here we see the pterodactyl showing off his wings and making a mating call that oddly sounds exactly like a wild turkey." I don't get it. What we know of these creatures is such a small fraction of what we don't know about them, I'm really surprised to see a documentary that only sees things one way and with a sense that their show is 100% correct.

</rant> :p

The Home Depot / PB&F bet
This rocks.

A pair of friends made quite a bet with one another. Friend A would have to consume nothing but peanut butter, frosting, and water for seven straight days. If Friend A fails at doing this, he must give himself "a self inflicted unmedicated vasectomy." Ouch. That's pretty bad. However, if Friend A accomplishes this seven-day task, Friend B would have to spend two consecutive 16-hour days inside of Home Depot. If Friend B can't last one full day in the store, he can't get a haircut until after college graduation (I don't know what year they're in). If he can make it through one day but not two days in Home Depot, he will have to walk around a mall of his choice with his face half covered with peanut butter and the other half covered in fluffernutter.

I must interject at this point: Jesus! Thank god bets and dares were not a staple of life when I was in college, because I know for sure that they would have reached a point of sheer absurdity like this. I know one person who could probably pull off the peanut butter and frosting diet. Well, I bet we all could have given the consequence, but I know someone who would probably do it just for the sake of doing it. But the Home Depot thing? Nah, we probably would not have been creative enough to come up with that, but I'm sure we could have come up with a lot more demoralizing and/or destructive things 'cause we're assholes to one another. ;)

But anyway, the bet was on. PB and F boy made it through and wrote about it. Mr. Home Depot guy went insane during his stay, and he also wrote about it. If you only feel like clicking on one link in this post, click on HD Man's log. It's a long read, but it's so funny. Frosting Man wasn't as funny.

Here's a Blues News link, too, just for giggles.

Ad: Web Designer/Developer
Seeking a qualified web designer/developer to assist in creating web pages and graphics for our commercial and internal web sites. The candidate must possess excellent graphic design skills as well as demonstrated proficiency in coding HTML. Training will include, Javascript, ASP, and other web scripting techniques. Must be detail-oriented, well organized, and able to work as a team player on multiple concurrent projects in a fast-paced environment.

Graphic design skills? Enh, mine are ok, but nothing to write home about. HTML proficiency? Hmmm... I only hand-coded 620 lines for this site's next layout, and that's only the index page. Javascript? I eat that for breakfast. ASP? I could be having that for lunch if that language is as easy to learn as I've heard it is, especially with my prior Perl experience. Detail oriented? Sure. Organized? Sure. Team player? Shit, I hate everyone. Oh well, next ad...

Hey! One of the McDonald's in Concord is looking for people to help close the restaurant! And, their starting pay could exceed what Staples was giving me? wtf?

Here's something interesting...
A sperm donor is being sued for child support. Try and figure that one out.

This story was found by an unselfish Jonathan.

Mother Nature is Smoking Something Potent
What the hell? A few days ago (I think it was Wednesday) it reached 72 degrees. At the time of this writing it is 32 and there is 3 inches of snow on the ground and still snowing pretty heavily. Now that's fucked up. And here's the best (worst?) part: the forecast for next Thursday, according to Weather Underground, is for highs near 60!!! Man, someone is playing games and it's freaking me out.