One disadvantage of a 45 minute work commute...

...when you realize you have to take a piss 5 minutes into the drive home. Gotta love those bladder ruptures.

I hate computers...

Okay, I can handle computer problems that make sense. Those are fine. I'll work them out. What I can't stand is when shit just starts happening for no fucking reason. Case in point:

I was burning some music CD's -- 1 MP3 CD and 1 Audio CD. I burned the MP3 CD first, fine, no problems, done. Then, I clicked on the Create Audio CD button in Nero -- and the program crashed. At this point I was thinking nothing of it, so I clicked the button again. Crashed. I closed the Nero control panel and reopened it, and tried it again. Crashed. I tried a DIFFERENT button, Burn Data CD. Crashed. I tried Burn MP3 CD (THE BUTTON I JUST USED!). Crashed. I rebooted my computer and tried again. Crashed. I reinstalled the Nero and tried again. Crashed. I uninstalled Nero, then reinstalled it, then tried again. Crashed. Then, I used system restore to go back to yesterday evening. Tried again. SUCCESS!

BAH!

I survived!

What an exhausting experience THAT was. I was so fucking tired when I got home, I passed out on my recliner on TWO different occasions over the course of the evening. I'm quite sure that my sleep schedule is now totally FUCKED. (It's 1:10 AM, and I don't see myself falling asleep again any time soon.) Thankfully, I have a day to get myself back on some sort of normal time schedule before I actually have anywhere to go.

I didn't really get much shopping done at all -- I got my Mom's present, and I got a few things for my sister. That's it. LOL! I got myself a Network Storage Server, which I planned on using to set up an FTP server. Sadly, it seems that's an impossiblity for me to do. Apparently, FTP servers are very difficult to setup on an internet connection that is filtered through a router. I followed all the steps, but it still doesn't work. So, I deleted the server. No matter, this Storage Server still solved one of my other problems -- the fact that I couldn't attach anymore hard drives to my computer. Since this external hard drive plugs right into my router, that's now a non-issue and I have this drive mapped to my computer and can use it on my internal network just like a normal hard drive. So I gained 250 GB in space, and can add additional external hard drives to this storage server.

We ate lunch twice while we were shopping (Shopping makes us hungry...), once at Krispy Kremes, and once at Steak 'n Shake. Yeah, we pretty much killed any exercise benefits that running through the stores provide dead in their tracks.

Time to eat again?

I'm full. Very, very, very full. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, rolls, gravy, and pie. Lots and lots of pie. Oh, and pumpkin rolls. And I drank enough wine for it to be considered part of the food portions as well. I couldn't leave the dinner table for about an hour after I was done eating, because I simply couldn't move. At all.

In other news, my sister somehow talked me into going shopping with her, her husband, and her husband's brother-in-law tomorrow morning. Black Friday? It'll probably be RED Friday after I go on a killing spree because of all the fucking people in my way.

I love new fallen snow...

It just looks really cool when you're driving home in it, if you can ignore the multiple car wrecks that you have to avoid along the way. I saw 3 today on the way home, one of which was bad enough to require medical attention. But still, the snow looks nice. My favorite part about driving home in the snow is when I'm the first person to be driving on a road that has been snowed on. Because then it's time to mess with people's minds.

As I was driving home on my road, which was covered with new snow and had no tracks on it, I joyfully swerved to and fro both sides of the road, driving like a drunk heroin addict on crack. I wish I could sit somewhere and watch the next few people who drive down the road, seeing my tracks and wondering what crazy son of a bitch had just been through there.

You know you live in the middle of nowhere...

...when migrating birds use your yard as a pit stop.

Today's Sound Byte Part Deux

Enjoy...

Define "day off"...

A day off is when you just finished playing CSS with yourself, and then you go upstairs to find your Dad getting up to go to work, when you yourself haven't gone to sleep yet. Oops.

Nope, don't wanna work...

This day is never going to end. Never! I've died of boredom exactly 56 times already, and it's not even 1:00 PM yet. Not only that, but everyone in this fucking office is getting on my nerves today. (And for "you know who", I said THIS office. The only people in YOUR office that are annoying me is fucking accounting and their "Oh, check the counter on the printer but we don't know where it is." Fuckers.)

So let's see, I guess I should give this post direction.......Okay, I'll share the story about the UPS guy.

Yesterday, we noticed a UPS truck parked at the side of our office for quite some time, right outside the one window near my desk. After about an hour, I looked out and he was still there, sitting in his truck and playing with his cell phone.

So, I went and got a piece of paper, and wrote on it with a sharpie "SHOULDN'T YOU BE WORKING?" and taped it to the window.

Time passes, and we notice he then went into the back of the truck for a while. At this point, we're making jokes that he's back there playing with himself, and I considered changing the sign to read, "YOU'LL GO BLIND FROM THAT!" But I didn't.

Then, a few minutes later, he beeps his horn, and leaves.

One way, or another...

I actually made this video clip a rather nice 640 x 480, so I can't embed it into the blog directly. So click here to view it!

What.....the......?!

There is something horribly, horribly, HORRIBLY wrong with this picture. Can you see what it is?

Oh boy, I was ambitous

Yeah, so I went on a mission to create some inlays today -- I got a whole ONE created. Woo for me! So now I have approximately .0002% of my anime inlayed. At least it's higher than my BT share ratio.

Today's Sound Byte

It's actually way more than a byte, but who cares?

Ride 'em, cowboy

I never liked western movies. They all look the same to me, they all seem to have no plot, and they all are set in a boring landscape where nothing ever seems to happen until the last 30 seconds where two guys shoot at each other in the middle of Dodge City on a hot, sunny day at high noon.

Thus, I wasn't thinking I would enjoy Gun very much, given that it's a western game with all the western trimmings. Well, after playing about 30 minutes of the game, I've discovered that PLAYING a western is a hell of a lot more fun than watching one. I started out very unimpressed -- the first mission consisted of hunting elk in the wild with some old guy named Ned who looked like Burt Reynolds character from Without a Paddle. After we killed a few elk, we then had to shoot the wolves that tried to eat our elk. Be still my beating heart.

After the steamship arrived, things got a whole lot better however. The next 20 minutes contained an attack by savage indians on the ferry, explosions, and gunfights. The steamship was sunk, and I was found on the shore of the river by some really ugly guy with two horses. I horse raced him for one of the horses, but of course two of his buddies showed up and it was a gunfight on horseback. Golden.

After that, I was off to Dodge City. To do what? Why, to visit a whorehouse of course. Oh, I'm so enjoying this game...

Beep, Beep!

I was at the supermarket this morning -- Nestea was on sale and I needed cat litter plus something for dinner. I was with my Mom, and we finished getting everything and checked out. (We ended up with a much more soda than we anticipated, because the sale included a free 8-pack of 12 oz. bottles as well. Gotta love Giant Eagle.)

As I was pushing the shopping cart to our car, someone parked right beside us at that moment. So, I had to go around a few cars to the empty spot behind us so I could access the trunk. It was then I realized that the person who had parked beside us was a very old woman, and at that point I knew we were in for an experience.

I finished loading everything into the trunk of our car and returned the shopping cart to the drop off area. When I got back, I saw the old woman was just starting to get out of her car. Leaving her front door wide open (meaning that my Mom couldn't get in the car because the woman's car door was in the way), the woman went over and got a shopping cart and brought it back to her car. Then, she opened up her BACK door (she now had both of her doors wide open at this point), and began putting a few black garbage bags in the cart, filled with what I would assume were aluminum cans or some other recyclable objects. It was at this point that the old woman turned around and noticed my Mom patiently waiting for her to get out of the way. She said:

"Oh dear, why didn't you just say 'beep beep!' and tell me to get out of the way?"

It took everything I had not to bust out laughing right there in the parking lot.

My bowl runeth over...

Yesterday was a weird night. I was exceptionally tired for some reason, and as a result wandered through the house in a seemingly drug-induced daze. An event that happened right before I took a shower makes me think this was brought about in a divine nature, to prevent a tragedy from occuring. (Okay, not really, but hey it's cool to speculate like a deranged TV Evangelist sometimes.)

I went upstairs to take a shower, and realized that I also had to take a dump. Nothing unusual about that. This dump was an exceptionally masterful dump. In fact, had I realized it was going to become part of a blog worthy story, I would have taken pictures to share with you. Alas, at that moment, I didn't realize it was going to be anything more than just an exceptionally masterful dump.

I flushed the toilet and then started the water in the shower (no, we do not have that problem where flushing the toilet causes water temperature issues in the shower). The toilet flushed and the masterful dump disappeared into the oblivion that is the septic tank, but not all the water went down suggesting that there was a small backup. Nothing out of the ordinary there either, since my dumps (especially the exceptionally masterful ones) do tend to occasionally cause backed up toilets. I intended on just letting it go, since a lot of the times the water does eventually just flush on it's own and everything is peachy. This time, however, since I told you I was in a rather dazed state of sleepiness, I just stood there staring at the toilet for some unknown reason. This proved to be quite the lucky turn of events, because the stopper on the inside of the toilet that goes over the hole (where the water pours out of the tank into the bowl) didn't properly place itself over the hole, and thus the water from the water pipe wasn't filling the tank, it was just running into the toilet bowl itself. This, of course, started to cause an overflow of water onto the floor.

Had I immediately jumped into the shower after flushing the toilet, I wouldn't have realized this for another 10 to 15 minutes, and by then the whole bathroom floor could have had a few inches of water on it, and probably run into the basement (MY ROOM!) as well. Therefore, it was quite fortunate that my brain functions were so degraded from lack of sleep, that I stood there staring blankly at it while this happened.

Acting quickly, I grabbed the plunger and removed the blockage, allowing the water to flush normally. I then removed the lid from the tank and fixed the stopper, and all was well.

The best part was the question I got from my Mom when she got home:

"What happened to the toilet?"
"It overflowed."
"Why?"
"I took a dump."

It's like being naked in public!

There was a nice violent storm yesterday, which blew over trees and destroyed homes. Worst of all, it took down my internet. Oh the humanity!

I called my cable provider, and listened for seriously 15 minutes as they named all the areas that had an outage. Mine of course was one of them. That was 2:00 PM. As of this morning, when I left for work, I still had no internet. However, I have hope: I just called them a few minutes ago, and my city is no longer on the outage list.

I may not have to commit suicide this evening, afterall.

CSS Pwnage

So what happens when two guys who haven't played a co-op counter-strike match in probably a year load up CSS and try to take on 3 bots? This happens:


We got pwned. But not for long -- after about 20 rounds we got in the groove and started BOOM HEADSHOTTING all over the place. It was good times.

Completion Visualzation

Finally complete!

After months of waiting patiently for someone to post them, I have finally completed my X-Files DVD collection. That's right, I have now downloaded all 56 FUCKING DVD's, in completion. Woo!

This stuff better work...

So it's cold season, and I have a cold. Go figure.

There's a new cold medicine on the market called Zicam, which is supposed to "Reduce the duration of the common cold." and "Reduce severity of cold symptoms."

Everyone I have talked to about it says it works, so I figured, what the hell, I'll try it. Turns out this stuff doesn't come in pill form. Here are the choices:

Chewable squares
Oral mist
Nasal spray
Medicated spoons
Mouth swabs

For the daytime doses, I went with the chewable squares, and I have medicated spoons (you stir them into a drink) for nighttime. The chewable squares taste like shit and chalk mixed together. This crap had better work damn good for the agony I just went through in chewing this mini-turd.