Monthly archives for March, 2007

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Can't bring me down

Obama this, McCain that. Ooh, look what Hilary's doing. What's Guiliani been up to? Can Romney raise the money? Blah, blah, fucking blah. Guess what? I've made my decision. Now get out of the news and don't come back until September of next year. Or until one of you goes Marion Barry and gets caught with some rock and a hooker. Either way, bottle up all that petty shit and hit me with it all at once 16 months from now. Then maybe I'll change my mind. If I have to go through another year and a half of this shit, I may go postal on somebody.

 

So California moved their primary. Good for them. Primary elections are kind of fucked up anyway. I feel bad for states with late primaries. In the '92 election, my candidate of choice was Paul Tsongas. But our primary was so late, Clinton was already the last man standing. Pfft. Why even bother?

Here's my idea. Split all the primaries over three separate Tuesdays. The first batch, say the 2nd Tuesday in January, will have 17 random state primaries. Two weeks later, have another 17 and two weeks after that have the last 17 (I'm counting DC). If the primary season is going to be that short, maybe we should make them even later, like maybe May.

Of course, my plan is completely unworkable and might even be unconstitutional. But I can dream, can't I?

 

That little booger Chicken used all the hot water with his shower today. Every last drop of it. When I went to take my shower, the water was lukewarm for about one second before turning ice cold. Darn him all to heck. Oh well. Despite Bunny's quiet disapproval, I took him to the bus stop in my sweats and showered a half hour or so after I returned home. Which is part of the reason I let him take the first shower anyway… because I can do that if I need to.

Still, that's the kind of thing that could really take the shine off my morning. But not this morning. Today I have brand new socks and brand new underwear. They're both straight out of the package and never worn. Nothing can take the shine off a morning with new socks and underwear.

Link:

Woman upgraded after dying in coach

Monday, March 19, 2007

If ever there were any doubts…

…about The Chicken's true parentage (and there never were, I'm just saying), those doubts would have just now been completely obliterated.

A few minutes ago I snuck into Chicken's bedroom to leave him a pile of clean clothes to put away. By the light of his little Superman lamp I could see he was sound asleep with his hand in his pants.

Yup, that's my boy.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Jay and Silent Bob, Fucking Short Version

It's only two minutes, but I think it's captured the essence of the movie.

Link:

300 Reasons to Hate America

Thursday, March 15, 2007

A murder most foul

[This happened Monday. Shut up, I've been busy.]

Goat is a cold-blooded killer. Cold. Blooded. He killed the office mouse.

I was in the back room working with one of our test machines when I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was the mouse scampering across the carpet. I use "scampering" loosely because he was actually pretty sluggish, but scampering seems like the kind of thing a mouse would do.

I was pretty surprised by this. How often do you eyeball the mouse in the house? Those things find the most obscure corners in which to hide, and generally stay there until you've gone away. I wonder what could have brought Mousy out right in front of me in the middle of the day?

I called Goat over so he could share in the oddity. "Bold little sucker, innit?" I said.

"Not anymore." [squish]

Goat squished Mousy under the toe of his shoe. Perhaps he's an old hand at mouse stomping because he seemed to know exactly how much pressure to use to crush the mouse without leaving mouse guts all over the place. Goat then scooped up Mousy's still-twitching body and threw him/her out into the snow.

Sniff, sniff.

Now we're going to need a new office mascot.

Some vacation that was

[Ed. note: republished with permission.]
 

First of all, my apologies for that train wreck of a post Avitable put up. My hair looked way better than that when I was in Vegas. Unfortunately, my hair is just about the only thing that worked out on that god forsaken trip. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

First I got bumped to a later flight. Then something on the damn plane broke and we were stuck on the tarmac for three fucking hours. Fucking Jet Blue. Passenger's bill of rights, my ass. "Article I - After three hours, you get an extra packet of peanuts. Article II - Go fuck yourself."

After approximately 206 days of air travel nightmare, I finally arrived in Vegas only to find my luggage was on its way to Dayton. Nice. I was stuck with only my carry-on. I spent all that time picking two Do Me Now Prince outfits and they were both in Ohio. At least I brought the plastic and there's no shortage of places to shop in Vegas. But first I had to get to the hotel.

Outside the airport I managed to snag the dumbest taxi driver in history. The guy knew two words in English and kept repeating them constantly.

"Yeah, yeah, ok! Ok, yeah, ok!"

"I said TAKE ME TO THE RIO HOTEL!"

"Ok, yeah, yeah!"

At least he understood the word "stop," which I had to yell at him after we drove past everything in the city twice. I ended up taking a damn bus to the hotel.

I'm convinced I'm cursed or something. The hotel screwed up my reservation and I ended up in what was probably the smallest, shittiest room in the place. But at least it was clean and the bed was soft, which is all I really need for snaring His Hotness anyway.

The Rio has some great stores on the ground floor, so picking out a new outfit for the concert was pretty painless. But I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have listened to the sales clerk who told me I look good in this:

Image: Sasha Cohen milk ad

Of course, it might have been the vodka that convinced me that outfit was a good idea. In any case, once I bought it, I was stuck with it. And I was going to. Work. It! If I was going to be a pretty, pretty ice princess, I'd be a pretty, pretty ice princess… for Prince! I was going to make him mine. Or take my skate off and stab someone with it. Either or.

When finally the concert arrived, things started going the way I expected. Prince. Was. Incredible. He played all my favorite songs. I thought I was going to die when he played Purple Rain. And I would have been pretty happy with that. It was bliss. Pure bliss.

After the encore it was time for me to make my move. It was time for me to get the Hotness. I was prepared to do whatever I had to. I was ready to throw around Adam and The Fish as much as possible. I tightened the laces on my DMS and made my way to the backstage area.

You know, those security guards are really fucking tough. They wouldn't let me through no matter what I did. I showed Adam and The Fish to everyone who glanced in my direction. I even let Marilyn see a little sunlight. But NOOOOO. Those guards weren't having any of it. I was so desperate for The Hotness I started giving BJs to those fucking guys thinking eventually they'd let me in. Nope. Bastards. I was expecting the night to end with a belly full of Prince, not a belly full of 14 guys with names like Chuck.

But at least they gave me a t-shirt.

Link:

DUI suspect's unicorn claim found to be mistaken humor

Link:

Man Tells Cops Unicorn Caused Crash

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Breaking news: whiny readers force return of sidebar!

Ok, so you're not whiny. Well, some of you are whiny, but I heart you all anyway. The sidebar has returned with full bells and whistles. Some elements of the abortive v3.0 design are staying too. I particularly like the tab bar and the archives page. I'll need to do some tweaking yet to sort out what should be on the tab bar and what should be in the sidebar.

Best of all, my page generation times are still pretty snappy. If you're curious enough to view my page source code, you'll see most of the sidebar content isn't there. The sidebar is now mostly just a framework. The content is loaded into each little box via AHAH. Without all the sidebar content, each page generates quickly. But with the asynchronous fetches, you're still downloading the same amount of data and you're using more transactions to do it. The overall time it takes for a complete page to load might have even increased, but there's still a noticeable improvement in the time it takes to load the main content and make that page usable. I think that's a fair trade.

So I suppose rather than being snarky, I should be thanking you for pushing me to solve my problem more creatively.

Pfft. Whiners.

 

Have you heard of Chinese Democracy? It's supposed to be the next Guns N' Roses album. It's been in production since 1994, which is long enough to turn it into a complete joke. ("We'll see democracy in China before we see Chinese Democracy.")

This weekend I downloaded an album labeled Chinese Democracy. Some of the tracks are studio, some are live. Who knows what version of what tracks will really be on the album, should it ever actually arrive?

Real or not, I am loving the track "Better." He might not be in the band anymore, but you can't deny Buckethead's influence on this one.