my css was done with a chisel and stone tablet
Apr 19th
Back in the day, after Compuserve but before Limewire, there was this website called Myspace. While it originally appeals to teens and tweens who were looking for a way to release their pent-up emotions unto the entire planet, it quickly also then appealed to skeevy types who are into teens and tweens, and then soon after attracted sexbots and camwhores trying to get money from the skeevy types.
Thus ended the hope that was Myspace, but not before giving birth to Facebook. And not like a real birth. More like Zeus giving birth to Athena. Facebook sprung from the forehead of Myspace. Anyway.
So then this Facebook comes around and everyone likes the Facebook. They are much better at keeping out the skeeves and the bots and the crappy garage band that you know one of the guys from high school but you have to be friends with them anyway. In fact, the Facebook really helps usher in the whole Web 2.0 thing, and now we have blogs which let me make words at you.
But Myspace is still hanging around outside, trying to peek in the windows and asking when we’re going to come back out and play.
Sorry Myspace. Never. Nobody wants to play with you anymore. You smell funny.
So I went onto my Myspace account with the intention of taking it down. The internet already has enough of me. The email address that I used to make my Myspace page doesn’t even exist anymore, so of course when I tried to cancel my account, they send an email to confirm this. I try to change my email address to one that actually exists, and they send an email to my old one to confirm this.
By now, I’ve spent more time on Myspace already than I have in the last five years, and I’m starting to get annoyed. After much digging, I found the procedure that they have in place required to change your email address if you no longer have access to the email address with which you registered:
- Write down your url on a piece of paper
- Hold this piece of paper under your chin
- Take a picture of yourself with this piece of paper, like its a mugshot
- Email picture to Myspace
I was actually surprised that step 4 wasn’t “have a tintype made and pony express it to the local branch.”
To be fair, I understand they need to have certain rules and security in place to make sure nothing happens to my Myspace page. But it’s not like anyone’s Myspace page is a matter of life or death. For all I know, my page still says that I’m a fan of the Verve Pipe and that Natalie Imbruglia is the next superstar.
You know why Facebook isn’t blocked at your office? Because your IT department uses it. You know what is blocked? Myspace. Even us nerds think its lame.
hot tub outlook inbox
Apr 13th
“My email isn’t coming until the day after people send it!”
This is actually a fairly common problem, and nine times out of ten, here’s the problem:
The eagle-eyed among you may notice that the “Today” group is collapsed, which would cause any email to only be visible when it moves into the “Yesterday” group.
I hope I have saved you some trouble if this happens to you. Back to the story…
I remote to the person’s computer so see if this is what she is doing, but no, all her groups are expanded and she can see all of her emails.
“Ma’am, can you show me an email that you didn’t get until the next day?”
“Sure, right here…” and she drags the mouse to an email that was sent on a Tuesday. I remark to her that the email appears to have arrived on time, roughly two minutes after it was sent.
“But I was supposed to get this email on Monday!”
“The user didn’t send it on Monday; they sent it on Tuesday. That’s why you got it on Tuesday.”
“But I need these on Monday! I always get this on Monday!”
“Maybe the sender was late, or maybe they were out on Monday, but they didn’t send it until Tuesday.”
“Well, how do I get Outlook to get the email on Monday?”
“Outlook can’t receive an email before it was created. It is not a time machine, ma’am.”
Finally sinking in, “Oooohhh….”
not being at work
Apr 13th
You may have noticed my slightly longer than usual absence last week, which is due to me being on vacation. It’s also entirely possible that you didn’t notice, because you got your own thing going on and you don’t need to check up on me every ten minutes to see how I’m doing. And, let’s face it, I’m not the world’s most prolific poster, so it’s not like Vegas was making odds about what had happened to me. (Computer-related fire was going off at 6:1.)
I spent last week in sunny San Diego visiting my sister. She lives in an area of town called Ocean Beach only a couple blocks from the beach itself. This is a very…unique…part of town. It has yet to go through the real-estate regrowth of most coast cities, so the houses are still from the 60′s and 70′s complete with their original inhabitants: aging hippies. Old hippies seem to attract young hippies, and the number of white people with dreadlocks was just wrong. However, it does make for some interesting people watching whilst drinking beers.
Case in point:
Our first night in town, right after our plane landed, we went down to this bar on the main street and got seats next to a big open window that allowed us to interact with the folks in front wandering about. At a certain point we were observing a gentleman who looked like unwashed ZZ Top with a kilt talking to another guy who looked like he may have started Hell’s Angels. A woman in her forties walked by using one of those walkers that old folks have with the built-in chair. On the chair was a large bag. On the large bag was a little dog. She was also cleared loaded.
The lady saw these two gentlemen and decided that she wanted to hang out with them, so she pulls up her walked and spins it around to sit on the chair. The dog leaps out of the way as she sits down hard, but she forgot to apply the parking brake, so the entire contraption goes backwards down off the curb and into the road. The lady goes upside down and backwards, the dog runs under a parked car and hides, and kilted ZZ Top turns to us and says, “That’s some shit you don’t see every day!”
After a minute or so, the lady gets herself upright and back on her chair. She digs in her bag and comes out with a beef jerky stick, a cigarette, and a hairbrush. She then uses all of these items simultaneously, chewing her jerky, smoking her cigarette, and brushing her hair. Apparently she decided she was antsy, hungry, and disheveled, and couldn’t prioritize very well.
After a start to the week like that, I knew it was going to be a good time.
I had the best fish taco ever. Don’t even try to tell me you know of a place that has good ones, because you’re wrong; I had the best one ever. Back away from this argument or I will destroy you.
Was in an earthquake for the first time. It happened about 120 miles away, but it was a 7.1 so we felt it pretty good. At the time, I was relaxing on the beach, and I wondered if it was an earthquake or they just put something extra in my margarita. Unbeknownst to me, there were about 3,000 more aftershocks that I didn’t feel at all. Currently Baja Mexico/California is doing it’s best to separate from the mainland.
There’s this special beach that San Diego built specially for children. They made a large concrete and stone barrier so that big waves don’t come in and sweep your younglings out to sea, and it looks like they spent a fair amount of money making this protected little cove. Apparently humans aren’t the only species to find this place appealing, because harbor seals moved in and squatted on it. Officially, no people use this beach; the seals planted a flag and claimed the beach for Sealandia. Little known fact: seals smell absolutely terrible. You wouldn’t want to use this beach anyways, unless you Febreezed it first.
Since we wanted to see the seals better, we drove down a ways to La Jolla and rented one of those kayaks that you can take out on the ocean. At the rental place, we noticed they had a chalkboard with “Number of Lost Sunglasses” on it, and the count is currently up to 69. I asked the guy why people lose their sunglasses and he explained that when you’re coming back in, you have to go through the point where the waves break. The only way to get through here easily is to pretend its a surfboard and surf it all the way to the beach. However, if you have the kayak turned slightly sideways, the wave will just flip you over, and your sunglasses will be forever lost.
So we go out into the ocean in our little boat, and go along the coast and look at all the seals and birds and caves and such. We see another kayaker get too close to the shore where the waves are breaking, and sure enough, it flips him right over. The wife and I laugh at this and shake our heads. Didn’t he listen to the guy at the kayak rental place?
After our time is up, we head back in. By this point, it’s a little windy and the waves are picking up, and we have to head back directly into the wind. My goal was to get to the point 90 degrees from where we needed to be on the beach, so that way we could come directly in on a straight line and then we’d be able to surf the waves. Wife, on the other hand, is in the front of the kayak and now getting sprayed with windy, cold water. She wants to head back on more of a “shortest distance between two points” method. Compromise is the key to marriage, so we go on a curvy route that splits the difference. The laws of physics care little for compromise.
Our kayak half rolls and half flips. Wife in the front gets rolled out. I in the back get flipped over the whole thing. When I pop up out of the water, I’m holding onto the kayak in the waves and desperately trying to control it. Wife is standing there, having just gotten bonked in the nose and face with the kayak on her journey out of it, somewhat stunned and looking for her sunglasses. I’m yelling at her to move so she doesn’t get bashed again, since I have very little control over our boat, but she can’t hear me because her ears are full of water.
When we went back to the rental place, she had then change the sign from 69 to 70.
As far as adventure goes, that was about it. The rest of the time was spent relaxing, drinking wine in Temecula, walking through the zoo, and doing what I call “not being at work.”
San Diego is an awesome place and I would love to live there, if I could somehow wrap my head around the ridiculously inflated real estate prices ($350k+ for a 1bed 1bath 1000 sq ft?!). Maybe someday when I’m a millionaire and if California hasn’t fallen into the ocean yet, I’ll have my winter home there.
Anyone know surefire ways to win the lottery?
TAR update and planning
Apr 1st
TAR is fast approaching, and if you don’t know what TAR is then you should click on the link in the nav bar above this. We’re booking rooms and taking names, and all looks like its coming together very nicely.
I’m planning on driving down Saturday from the great state of Wisconsin and through the mediocre-at-best state of Illinois. Sorry, but if the Cubs call your state home, then you can only be mediocre-at-best.
As of now, my plan is to leave early Saturday morning and get to St. Louis around noon. I don’t know if anyone else from the area is planning on coming at this time, but if it’s feasible I have room in the vehicle for more. Splitting gas and being able to share the driving so we don’t end up broke and on trucker “medication” would be a good thing.
We have a number of folks, male and female of all ages, signed up already. If you would want to come but have questions, please let me know! I’ll try to answer anything I can, and we do have people coming from all around the Midwest, so odds are that there is someone near you who is coming.
We got a solid list of things that we’ll plan on doing, and we’ll probably hammer out final details when we all get there so we can gauge what people want to go do. We have another week or so of being able to book a room with our group rate; after that you can still come and you’ll likely be able to get a room in the same hotel, but I have no promises on price.
This is going to be full of Epic Win, and don’t you want to say you were there for the first one? Meet new people and do something crazy for a weekend just to say you did it without the permanence of a tattoo.
Bring it on, St. Louis. Bring. It. On.
at least they weren’t frozen
Mar 31st
User: “Yes, we have a bunch of laptops and they’re all locked up!”
Me: “OK, were they all online when they got locked up?” Most of this company’s programs are web-based, so I wanted to find out if their internet connection dropped.
User: “I don’t know, but now we can’t do anything.”
Me: “OK, can you press Control, Alt, Delete?”
User: “No, it’s locked up. We can’t do anything”
Me: “What do you have on the screen right now?”
User: “I don’t know! They’re all in the office and the door is locked!”
Me: “Oh! The computers are locked up in an office and you need a key?”
User: “Yes!”
Me: “…Then why are you calling me? Shouldn’t you talk to maintenance or whoever’s office it is?”
User: “Ummm, errr…”
Who’s got two thumbs, job security, and a migraine?
segue is for suckers
Mar 29th
Hey, you know those things called transitions? Who needs ‘em? Not this post!
What’s a Bieber?
I don’t get the romanticizing of the vampire thing. To me, it’s like having a pet tiger: it might be fun and different but eventually he will eat you.
I heard a lot of really good new music this weekend that I immediately went home and downloaded so I could put it on my mp3 player and have those really good songs with me. You know what song is in my head today? Owl City “Fireflies.” Dammit.
Whilst clothes shopping, I saw this dandy shirt available:
That’s right, it’s Nickelback shirt, just in case you were looking for a way to announce to the world how big of an asshat you are without just wearing a trucker hat that says “ASSHAT.”
Here’s the amazing part:
That’s right, they were charging $20 for this privilege. I think it’s ironic because this isn’t even close to the actual amount that someone would have to pay me to wear this shirt for a night out. I wouldn’t even want to use this shirt as a rag to dry my car because then it would get all Nickelbacky and I’d have to wash it again.
The speaker on my phone blew out. Now everyone I talk to sounds like a robot, and I sound like a guy who only knows how to say the word “What?”
things learned by living
Mar 24th
Ducky over at Batcrap Crazy (one of the folks going to TAR by the way; have you signed up yet?) like to throw down some life lessons she has learned and then asked us to join in. I figured I’d share my experiences and hopefully prevent you from making the same mistakes I did. Not that I’m admitting to any of these mistakes. It was a friend…who lived in Canada…you don’t know them.
#112 Mixing crappy coffee with crappy hot chocolate mix only produces a crappy mocha. It does not in fact create some magical elixir that you enjoy drinking.
#21 Drinking twenty-seven Jagerbombs in one night will not actually make you drunk; it will however prevent you from sleeping for a week.
#802 Not all entrances and exits at stores are automatic open. If you stand there staring at if for more than a couple seconds, odds are that its a push. Also, odds are the employees noticed.
#4 Learn the difference between “reply” and “reply all.” And then double check before pressing “send.”
#271 Pets are not kids. While this could be quite a lengthy lesson on the differences between human children and animals that live in your house, I’ll just mention two quick points: nobody wants to hear about your pets, and nobody wants you to bring them with you. The quicker you learn this, the sooner you will be invited back to parties.
#70 When the dentist asks if you floss, just say no. They can tell that you’re lying.
samurai conquer slug
Mar 23rd
Now if you read that title and thought to yourself, “Jeff usually has strange titles that make sense by the end, I wonder what he’s talking about here? I MUST click on that link and find out!” then my secret plan has worked. Damn, I just gave away the secret.
Don’t leave.
A couple weeks ago, I had a caption contest giveaway for some of the worst prizes in giveaway history. Marnie won a box of authentic Japanese Samurai with Ninja and Travis won a Build Your Own Easter Island Kit. I sent these packages off into the the world with a tear in my eye but with hope in my heart that they would enjoy their new lives.
Imagine my delight when pictures surfaced of the Samurai on their adventures! It looks like they’re having a grand ol’ time out west with Marnie, but haven’t let California mellow their martial inclinations. Here’s the email they sent me:
To: jeff
From: JSwN
Subject: Battle of the ParkNanika atta? Kawatta koto aru? Nothing much here. Katsumoto says hi. We went to the park yesterday, and you wouldn’t believe what happened, so we took pix. Don’t worry, we’re all OK, but it was close for awhile there.
So here we are marching in formation through the woods, and this giant monster comes at us. We quickly surrounded it to make sure it would get no further.
The beast howled at the realization that it was trapped, and grew fierce! We stabbed at it with our spears, but we could not penetrate the tough skin of the monster. The lines wavered and nearly broke, for with each attack from the hellbeast, it grew harder and harder to defend.
Suddenly, Omura jumped upon it’s great back with dagger held high!
The brute roared with anger and tried to throw Omura from it’s back. Omura hung on tightly, and plunged his dagger into the fiend behind it’s single eye. The demon reared up on and nearly threw Omura clear, but still he clung to it’s back. As it fell forward and died, we let out a resounding cheer. Such bravery! Such devotion!
Unfortunately, we had to throw it back because it isn’t hellfiend season right now. Here is a picture of Omura. He said that if we didn’t get a picture of him with it, nobody would ever believe him.
Marnie is going to take us shoe shopping now. If we don’t get in any more battles today, she said she might get us ice cream.
l8ter dood. Oyasuminasai and gokouun o inorimasu.
Samurai with Ninja
Well how about that, they cared enough to write! *sniff* I miss you guys!
time for shorts
Mar 17th
For the first time in months, last week as I was driving to work I had sunlight. I work at 6 a.m. and driving in that early all winter, I never got to see the sun. It was dark when I drove in, dark when I drove out, and my cubical is not near a window. For some reason, companies always like to put the tech support far from windows in a dark corner with half the lights burned out. I think HR believes that nerds will melt and flee in terror if there is too much light in their world.
In Wisconsin, the spring is a strange time. The mornings can be in the single digits and the afternoons can be in the 50′s. Yesterday, we opened all the windows to let in some fresh air because it was so warm, and then in the evening turned on a space heater for our feet and put on a snuggie. Not that I have a slanket or anything. If you use your heat and air conditioning in your house or car within the same day, you live in Wisconsin.
This weekend, I did a lot of yardwork. I put down some borders around the plants, threw down some more fertilizer, and added some grass seed to some bare patches. The hard part was working around the piles of snow still sitting in the middle of the yard.
Also, dog poop. When the dogs poop in the backyard during the winter, its gets buried and hibernates. Then when the snow thaws and makes everything squishy again, the poop appears in piles so large you wonder if your neighbors have been coming over at night and pooping in your yard.
But then daylight savings came around, and now I’m back to driving to work in the dark, and that makes me sad. The sun gave me hope for a brighter day. I could feel the positive energy in the morning. Now my positive energy comes from the terrible office mocha (crappy coffee and powdered hot chocolate mix) and a vitamin B cap. This is not a fair trade; the sun powers all life on the planet for millions of years, coffee powers me for about 45 minutes. The only similarity is you don’t want to be around the sun or me when the power runs out.
I don’t even understand the concept of daylight savings. Supposedly, back when everyone in this country was a farmer I guess it made more sense to maximize the daylight hours. However, this argument never made sense to me either, because farmers back then didn’t have a digital alarm clock to tell them to get up; they got up when the sun came up and the rooster crowed and went and did farmer things. Now all daylight savings does is make a couple people late on Monday morning and makes everyone’s internal body clock be slightly off for a week, which just makes everyone grumpy. As much fun as that is, what’s the point?
Now the argument has been that daylight savings saves us money by not having to turn the lights on. However, that argument has been debunked in studies and now they’re trying to keep daylight savings going…because they have such a powerful lobby? I haven’t seen anything on the news about the Daylighters protesting in front of the White House and demanding Obama to make sure the sun stops changing, but then again I barely watch the news.
I have mixed feelings about spring. On one hand, it has the promise of good things to come. On the other hand, it reminds me how lazy and fat I was over winter. Now I’m confronted with the prospect of taking my shirt off in front of people and blinding them with my pasty white skin and amazing them with my doughy physique. Until I start exercising again, I will look like a freshly opened tube of uncooked crescent rolls.
Now that it’s not cold enough outside to kill Bear Bryant in my backyard, it’s time for me to start riding my bike again. SHAMELESS PLUG: SPONSOR ME IN THE ADA TOUR DE CURE. My favorite part about spring is the spandex shorts make an appearance. Sometimes I will wear mine even when I have no intention of riding that day. They’re so aerodynamic that I can get between the couch and the refrigerator much more efficiently than in winter when I’m encumbered by a sweater and fuzzy slippers.
Ah yes, spring is here.
Bring it on you bastard.
don’t actually attempt with quarters
Mar 10th
Today, I’m guest writing for Travis at I Like To Fish because he likes to take Wednesdays off. I’m also reposting that here, because why the heck not.
“I’m 28. That means pretty much everyone I know is married or engaged. The folks at Bed, Bath, and Beyond know me by name from the number of times I’ve bought things off registries there. I’ve seen “Wedding Crashers” and it didn’t seem that much fun to me because I’ve gone to about that many weddings in the last year.
Awhile ago, one of my friends got engaged and has since gotten married. Before he asked his fiance to marry him, he asked me, “Jeff, is it true? Does sex really change after you’re married?”
I said, “No, not at all,” because that’s what married guys tell single guys. And before the ladies get all upset with that, I didn’t say it “suffers”, I just said that it “changes.”
See, sex is like going to an video game arcade.
When you’re single, you go to the arcade with a pocket full of quarters and you want to try every game in the place. Well, maybe not every game, because some look like they have herpes. All the machines are flashy and bright, and you keep almost getting whiplash from the really good looking game behind you. You walk around, put your quarter into the machine and give it a try.
If you did really bad and failed miserably, well you just don’t play that game ever again. If you did get lucky and actually win, well you don’t need to play it again because you already beat it.
When you’re married, you still go to the arcade with a pocket full of quarters, but you only play one game. You play it over and over, and eventually you get the high score. Then it’s not enough to just have THE high score; you need ALL the high scores. You want the entire screen to have YOUR initials on it, because you’ll be damned if someone else has the high score on YOUR machine. You don’t want to be looking through that high score screen going, “Alright, JAH, JAH, JAH, JAH…who the hell is DJS?!”
I really am lucky to be married. My wife is amazing, and every day I’m thankful that she married me. We were one of those couples that met online. At first I wasn’t sure if it would work out, since I lived in a different city and she was an emoticon. But there was just something about her semicolon-closed parenthesis that I just found irresistible.
I haven’t been married very long, so I’m not full of sage advice for those trying to make their way through the harrowing journey that is daily coexistence. However, I do feel that I’m learning all the time; the trick is simply to pay attention. For instance, after letting my wife proofread this article, I have learned that it is a bad idea to compare sex with video games.
Who knew?”
