So I’m at Best Buy this weekend. Need I say more? I’m a guy who likes technology with a new computer sitting at home with old peripherals that don’t exactly jive with Vista as much as they did with XP. So I’m walking around Best Buy looking at all kinds of cool things that I could use. Well, I found some. I got a new scanner because my old one was not compatible with Vista (not to mention that my old scanner was a piece of shit) and I also got a tablet which I can use with my Photoshop. Now I just have to wait until I can have some fun with all of this shit.

Hey, it was finally above freezing today. It almost hit 50 and a lot of the snow is melting and I can actually see curb. Although our roads are finally in good driving condition, that doesn’t mean that people are driving any better. I was waiting to make a left turn today and someone was driving slowly coming from my right going almost 10 miles an hour. Meanwhile I’m sitting waiting for them to move so I could get to work wondering if they thought that they were perhaps in a parade or something? I however am sitting there thinking that they either need to step on the gas or throw some candy and wave because I’m not getting any younger here.

I also got a new phone and a new carrier. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter because AT&T bought out my old company so now I’m “part of the largest networks of douche bags” ever. Whatever, as long as I can still make phone calls and not text I’ll be happy. I do have MP3 capabilities and MP3 ringtones, so that makes it all worth it. See, I’m easy to please.

I took the plunge again not even five years since the last time I did this in May of 2003. I ordered myself a new Dell computer. This one is an XPS 420 which apparently is supposed to appeal to either gamers or potheads… then again, what is the difference? Anyway, my wants for this are a little different; I want more speed and shit of that nature. I am of course getting Vista with this computer. Probably not exactly the way I want to go, but for what I do on my computer, I don’t think it will bother me too much. Unfortunately my poor scanner is going to have to take a ride somewhere; it is the only piece of hardware that isn’t going to make the cut on the new computer. Hey, my new computer will have a 22” widescreen Ultrasharp monitor with it… pretty fuckin’ sweet huh?

I received free overnight shipping on this computer which was rather nice… had they shipped through UPS. They didn’t, they shipped through DHL. I noticed on Monday that my computer had left the Dell facility so I was rather excited that I would have my new toy by Tuesday night. Well I had lined up someone to be at the house to accept delivery since it needed to be signed for (like I want my computer sitting on the steps anyway). Well as I’m sitting at work supposedly working hard, I kept an eye on my computers tracking and noticed that a little after 2pm it said that delivery was attempted and no one was home. I didn’t buy that shit so I called and confirmed someone was there to answer the door and that no one had shown to ring the bell. That pretty much put me into panic mode that DHL dude was attempting to drop my sweet ass computer at someone else’s house and I was highly pissed off at that point and time. I went online to the “chat” section of the DHL site and was told that if they attempted delivery that they would wait until the next business day before attempting delivery again. At least UPS will come back a second time around, so now I was highly pissed even more than before.

So now it’s Wednesday morning and I’m online at work again trying to track this fucker and figure out what was going on. Around 1:30 in the afternoon Mr. DHL calls me and wants to confirm that someone will be at the house since he didn’t have time to stop the day before. Whoa, back up there skippy, you totally skipped my place and put down that you attempted to stop? Now…. NOW, I’m extremely pissed off. I confirmed that someone was home and told him to call me if he gets to the house and nobody was there because I would leave work and accept delivery myself. Everything worked out though and I got home and opened my sweet new computer and then I had to go to fucking school for the night.

Now it’s Thursday morning and all I had accomplished was opening the new computer and looking at it and not being able to hook it up. Well that was enough for me, and I asked for the afternoon off from work so I could get cracking on this shit. I spent most of the afternoon getting this computer hooked up, downloading my new antivirus software and then downloading my new Office 2007 software. (hey, if you’re a college person and you have a .edu address, check out THIS website for a hell of a deal on this) and then I installed my Adobe Master Collection as well. I didn’t start transferring all of my files until almost 10 at night on Thursday. I had borrowed a two way network cable from work to connect both computers and I started transferring the big stuff and stayed up with it until about midnight. I decided to just let it do its thing while I went to bed after that, and when I woke up around 3am and checked on it, it was still not done. It didn’t finish until 5:30am which is also the time I woke up and stayed up because I had to go outside and shovel snow then. I got to work Friday and I was pretty much exhausted from staying up so late. Anyway, now I’m finally at the point where I have everything I really needed installed and running with the exception of the scanner which will see the new day at a garage sale or as a donation to Goodwill.
Now I just need to have some time to have fun and play with it. Damn school work.

As you can tell, I’m on strike as well. I thought I was anyway, I heard that writers were striking for more money or something, and I figured that shit, I don’t make any money off my website, why not go on strike as well. I did temporarily forget last month and I posted one entry… my bad.

So what has happened in my lovely world since my last entry? I started school now, and will be a slave until mid May. It isn’t anything too complicated that I can’t handle, its just that I’m pretty lazy and don’t like having to do homework. I also don’t like all the snow and cold that is showing up around here. It is kind of funny that the 11 years that I worked far away we hardly had winters, and now that I don’t have too far to drive, it snows like a mother. At least it waited for me.

Here is something fucked up from the memory files… This was in sixth grade in Tomah before we moved. This sounds weird and probably even weirder when you read it, but here it goes. There was this girl named Ann in my class and I am pretty sure I had a crush on her. I remember taking a spelling test in class and I was done early and just sitting there, and she was about one row up, four desks to the right and as I sat there, I just kept thinking her name over and over while I looked at her. Normal dorky 11 year old shit you say? Well, here is the weird part. After a little while she goes… “What??” and turns around asking who said her name. I know for a fact I did not say her name, and everyone looked at her like she was crazy or something. I don’t know what the hell it was, and was far too young to really think about what had happened. Maybe I am gifted?

Do you know what I don’t like? I don’t like texting. I’m not talking about this type of texting, where I’m writing shit on a keyboard and uploading it through some software to a website for people to read. I’m talking about texting on cell phones. What the fuck is that shit about? I find that mostly it’s kids doing this shit, a lot of teenagers think that texting each other is hella cool apparently. I was at a movie theater once and you see all these flip phones glowing in the theater during the lovely pre movie trivia bullshit and I was wondering if the fuckers were checking the time or what, then I realized they were texting each other. The bad part was that they were probably texting their retarded friend two seats over from them.

Of course I’ve come to the realization of late that it isn’t just clueless teens that are sending text messages back and forth like they are on instant pestering, it is also some older people as well… like my age and up. Look, I’ve only got one thing to say to my generation about sending text messages… STOP IT! It looks just as stupid as being in your 30’s and still wearing your hat backwards. Texting is not a testament to your youth and will not make you look any younger to anyone so just stop doing it.

Here’s my problem with the whole texting thing, aside from it being fucking stupid. If you have to dial the person’s number anyway to send them this message… then fucking call them and TALK to them. I don’t think I’ve ever sent a text message, and I don’t respond to them either. I get a text message it’s like, oh well, if they really give a shit they’d call. Look, if you really want to half ass communicate with someone and not have to risk actually talking to them on the phone then send an email. I totally accept email for correspondence and don’t even consider that too bad.
Of course there are a few instances where a text message is ok, like when you’ve just had a baby and you text everyone the good news or something to that matter, but to just say hey!! No… just no.

As I sit here and I’m typing shit about whatever, I was thinking back to the past about some shit, like before my dad died. I remember in sixth grade that I was the kid with the boom box. For those young ones that have made it this far, a boom box was a huge ass radio and if you were cool, it also had the cassette deck in it, and if you were rich, it had the double cassette deck in it. The reason that came to my mind is I was listening to some of my songs on my computer and had some Twisted Sister come up… old old school shit right there. Anyway, back in the days when I would take music to school, I had the boom box but I only had two cassette tapes to take to school. Of course I could have borrowed my dads Conway Twitty and been beaten up or something, so I took my two cassettes I owned… Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry and Huey Lewis & the News’ Sports. As you can see, I was an MTV child for sure, because I know my next cassette was Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. I don’t remember if I ever made it to school with that one or not before we moved.

Oh well, that was my ADD moment of the day… fuck texting!

Do you know what sucks worse than watching some poorly written piece of shit drama or comedy show on network television? Watching some poorly written piece of shit drama and or comedy RERUN on network television. Do you know is even worse than that; watching the bullshit that is filling the void more and more every day… reality television. When I mention the void, I’m talking about the ever expanding space in between our ears where our brains used to be. Someone needs to tell these people that produce television that not everything that someone does deserves its own show. I’ve been watching a little more television this year than in years past and every time a commercial comes on I see an ad for another reality show.

Do we really need another tattoo show on the air? I thought there was two at first, then the one show branched from Miami to LA, and now there is supposed to be one from England. Who cares if people in England get tattoos, let me know when they learn to brush and floss properly then maybe I’ll end up giving a shit. If you really care that much about tattoos then maybe you should stop being such a pussy and just go get one.

Another show I’m seeing advertised is some show called John & Kate plus 8. Apparently having an overactive uterus and a husband who can’t pull out can get you your own show. Since when is having eight kids some sort of feat worthy of television. Back in the old days most families had that many kids and you didn’t see them on TV did you. I think they should rename that show “John & Kate; too Bad They Didn’t Just Masturbate.”

Speaking of people that should pull it out only in the privacy of their own homes and nowhere else; that brings me to a whole slew of shows that are considered dating programs. Now I use that term loosely, even more loosely than the participants of the aforementioned shows. Attention everyone, you will never find love on a television program, it’s just not going to happen. Do you really think that doing crazy stunts is going to win over some skank? I would think you should already know that answer from high school. Oh that’s right, the majority of people on those shows probably didn’t make it that far in their educational pursuits. McDonalds was a calling and they were answering. Don’t even get me started on Tila Tequila, although I’m guessing that somewhere in that package… there is a dead worm.

Now I see that there is going to be a show on called parking wars. It follows around traffic officers and watches them give tickets. Wow, I can’t wait until that show debuts, then I can watch the awesome job of a fucking meter maid writing tickets. I need to get my TiVo set and ready because that is must see TV right there. I guess this is the show you watch if you just can’t handle the grittiness of cops but would like to keep an eye on the police.

I have also heard there will be a show where someone gets strapped to a lie detector machine and is asked all kinds of hard questions. You know, that show could actually be worth a watch… if we used it on the government. Put that fucker on C-Span and I’d even tune in.

I just get so sick of these fake reality shows. It’s all entertainment and I wish they would just say that. There’s no reality in these shows, it can’t be because people see a camera and they act up. Everyone wants their 15 minutes in the spotlight and figure this is the easiest way to go. The only way it could be “reality TV” is if they used fake cameras. Like I said before, if you want reality, watch Fox News… um, maybe CNN, no…

Shit, I no longer know what is and isn’t real anymore…

I decided that since I got myself a nice bonus from work this year, that I would be extra generous and therefore I bought a nice 80GB I-Pod Classic for someone very special… ME.
I’m just curious what is up with people asking me “what is on your I-Pod?” Well, nothing that you’re going to find out about without a subpoena. What are you people so damn nosy for anyway? It’s really none of your business to know what is on my I-Pod… it’s probably something like porn and music just like on my computer. It’s like Capital One; they always want to know what’s in my wallet. Every time I see the commercial, they are asking me, what’s in your Wallet? You know what’s in my wallet Capital One? Five dollars, three condoms and a naked picture of your mother… That’s right, now go bug someone else.

Speaking of the I-Pod, it is pretty sweet and I’m kind of shocked it took me this long to get into the game. I’ve been an mp3 freak for almost 7 years now, so what took me so long. Shit, if you told me 15 years ago that I’d be listening to all of my CD’s on something about the size of the cassette tape that I used to listen to and I’d have album art and all that crazy shit, I would have probably called you a retard and told you to go back to your plans of flying cars. Shit, I was just starting to listen to music on the CD back then.

I can’t believe that Christmas is almost here already. Of course I’m off work until the day after Christmas so I am believing that. I worked a whopping two days this week and took my remaining vacation for the rest of the week, don’t work weekends and Monday and Tuesday are paid holidays. Can’t beat that can you?

I’m also done with school now. I am going to sign up for two classes next semester and then take the summer off again. Once I get my final grades then I can get my money paid back to me, then I get to apply that money to my new classes. It’s like a never ending cycle… almost like me doing a blog once every month.

Ah, you know it’s almost time for the holidays because every time I enter a store now, I’m bombarded by the bell ringers asking me for donations. Not only do I have to worry about them ringing the bell on my arrival and departure of the store, some places actually have the cashiers asking you if you’d like to donate as well. Isn’t that special, as if the cashier wasn’t treated shitty enough, now the stores are making beggars out of them too. Let the fuckin’ management come up front out of their precious offices and ask for handouts instead of making the poor cashier deal with this shit. It’s bad enough you’ve got stressed out customers already, but then to have to say something like…would you like to donate to “insert charity here”? That’s just asking for it if you ask me, and I think if anyone should take the heat for it, it’s the managers, not the lowly cashiers that don’t get paid enough to deal with that shit.

Speaking of not getting paid enough to deal with something; tomorrow is Black Friday. Apparently that is some magical day where stores sell products for the prices they probably should every day but hold out for one day and try to get people up way before they should wake up and put them all in the same place. Tired cranky people that are still suffering indigestion from the day before all trying to buy the same damn thing… you can’t have 30 products and 200 people wanting that without some sort of altercation happening. And where will a disgruntled human be tomorrow morning for Black Friday? My grumpy ass will be in bed hopefully sleeping while all the other retards fight the crowds and shop for deals. I don’t need an I Pod that fucking bad. Besides, I have tomorrow off with pay from work and I’m certainly not going to ruin that by having some sort of retail flashback nightmare by going straight into the battlefields of the stores.

In fact, I’m going to try and spend this four day weekend playing with my new Adobe products and try to work on a few tweaks to the sites. I know, I say that a lot and never do anything… why should this time be any different; right?

Dear Subway,
I have enjoyed your fine restaurants for many years; however I have run into a few problems in the recent past. Here’s my first problem, my town only has about 8000 people in it, but for some reason we have 3 Subway’s. The other problem; I know you guys are all excited when you premiere a new sub and don’t have to use Jared to try and sell people on the health side, but maybe you need refresher courses on how to make some of your older so called “classic” subs. While you are hyping up your new mega subs or whatever the hell your marketing department pulled from their ass this month, you’re people are forgetting how to make the other subs. You pull them in the back and say… this is the new sub, here’s how to make it… don’t fuck it up now. Then here I come and I don’t want your new steak fuck cheese sub or whatever it is, I just want my good reliable Subway Melt. It’s not too hard to make it, it’s just whichever bread I want, you put some turkey on, some ham, and bacon and cheese of my choice. At this point you ask if I want you to nuke it or put it in your super nuclear “toaster” oven, which is more like a microwave lined with tin foil.

Like I said, we have three shops in our town, and on any given day I can go to all three, order the same sub and get three different sandwiches. One time I went to the one in Wal Mart, since obviously my day wasn’t sucking enough, and I ordered my sub. For whatever reason the girl put ham, turkey and roast beef on my sub. What the fuck? That’s not even a melt, that’s a club you dumb bitch. Another time I went and she put the bacon in the microwave and left the rest of the sub cold. And exactly which part of “melt” didn’t you understand? I don’t think you can melt the bacon dear, maybe it’s referring to the cheese?? The last time I had this sub I had high hopes, all the right stuff went on it, she actually asked me if I wanted it heated or toasted and I thought, awesome, someone finally got it right. Well, that was until it came out of that nuclear reactor of a toasting oven looking burnt as hell. Maybe I should just go to Quizno’s instead… oh wait, that’s right, they closed down a few months ago. Fuck.

I guess I should just be happy that I haven’t gotten E Coli or something from eating there. With the large rash of recalls of ground beef and frozen pot pies and now the cream of the crop… Totino’s Party Pizzas. What in the hell is up with that? This news totally fucked up my weekend here, telling me that all my frozen pizzas were going to possibly kill me, or at the least, isolate me into the bathroom for many hours of endless water and blood filled shits. You know what Totino’s, when I pay 75 cents for a pizza, I expect a little quality dammit.

Oh, and fuck you Subway, unless you send me lots of coupons, then we can be cool again.

How wonderful it is that October has come into our lives. Not only is this my birthday month, but it is also the official bridge to winter and the start of what I used to call “holiday madness”. I know it’s getting closer to winter because one week ago we were in the mid 80’s and it was humid as hell and now we are freezing our balls off (well at least the males are). The leaves all changed colors and fell off the trees again; I swear that happens every year. Another ritual is that I get to watch the old men in the neighborhood work tirelessly to make sure that no stray leaves are in their yard. Old dude, it’s fall, that means the leaves will fall, and yes, they will fall into your yard. I swear as soon as more than 4 leaves fall into their yard they are outside with the rake or lawnmower or blower taking care of them. I can only hope that when I retire, I actually have a life.

Hey, in better news, I’m on vacation this week. I get to basically do nothing for a whole week; a whole week which will go by faster than any other week in the history of my life. What am I going to do on my week off you ask? Well, I received and installed my new Adobe Master Collection on my computer this weekend so that will probably be what I’m working on for the rest of the week. Of course when I need some downtime I will have to watch a movie or two. I am thinking of checking out Transformers tomorrow when it comes out as long as I can get to the video store before the rest of the slackers with no jobs do.

Hey, back to the holiday thing. I am sure I said it before but I am noticing that the whole holiday thing doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. I don’t give a shit if there are Halloween cards (as long as I don’t get one) and am not phased that stores have their Christmas aisles started already. Christmas can finally be in December for me. I had started feeling that way last year but I was still quite fresh out of retail so I wasn’t 100% withdrawn yet, but I think I might this year. Shit, I might actually even enjoy the holidays this year. Scary shit isn’t it?

I am going to be working on web pages this coming week in between bouts of reality and homework and movie watching. I want to upgrade my Movable type and redo my 3rd Bass website and work on my friend’s website as well. Hopefully I can get all of this shit done in the following week… but I think I’m going to go take a nap first.

Do you realize that I’ve gone almost a whole month since I’ve bothered to even attempt to write a blog? Well, I’ve been busy helping GWB teach kids how to read and shit.
Well, ok, not really. I should be though because my life is a little boring lately. I work, I go to school and I sleep, eat and shit. Probably the most exciting thing I’ve done lately is….
Wait, you’re going to want to sit down for this one, I’ll wait for you to get a chair…

I bought the second season of Robot Chicken. I know huh? Exciting shit here, move over Lindsay Lohan, a mover and shaker is being shaped right here.

Something else exciting I’m thinking about is flexing my student ability and buying myself some kick ass software. I can get the Adobe Master Collection for under $500 through my school and I’m going to buy that. I have been wanting to update my Dreamweaver/Flash/Fireworks MX2004 package for some time now but had grimaced at spending the close to 500 bucks retail for an upgrade for the CS3 Web Design Package. Well, then I find this through my school and not only would it upgrade all my programs I already have, I’d get Photoshop Extended to boot, not to mention about seven more kick ass Adobe programs that I probably can’t live without even though I’ve never had them before.

Other than that, pretty boring. Now that you’ve seen how I spent my previous month since blogging, you’re probably happy I’m not blogging daily. I think I’m going to have to start going to the stores and picking fights with customers just so I have something to blog about.

That’s right; I’ve gone Back to School. I went to class Monday night and spent four hours in a classroom learning stuff. I haven’t sat in a classroom in a school since 1994, so it was a little different. I’m used to going to school and taking a test here and there but to go and sit there and be expected to pay attention for four hours… who do they think I am? I have at the most, one hour of attention to pay to boring things like school. Four hours would be fine if it were one hour a day for four days, but all at once? Damn.

I’ve noticed that now that I am back in school, I have a bug up my ass to do everything but schoolwork. I’ve decided to revamp the 3rd Bass website. I finally upgraded the software for the message board and gave that a new look, and now I’m working on a new site design to mimic the look of the board. I am also thinking of adding a Movable Type blog to the site so that I can announce things on the front page. I downloaded and tested Movable Type 4 this past weekend and once I got it to work it was pretty nice. I tried installing it over top of a MT3.something installation and that didn’t work very well. I was able to get in the blog but much of the functionality that was supposed to be there just wasn’t. There are drop downs to refresh your templates but there were no dropdowns showing and the front page of the blog was littered with tags most likely left over from the previous version’s templates. Well, the instructions to install had said to just replace all of the files currently in the directory with the new files, which I did. However it just didn’t work like it should have. I ended up wiping the entire directory out and doing a fresh install so I would have no clutter from previous versions in there. The big difference was where I put the files this time compared to where I had overwritten previous files. This time I put the mt-static folder in the main directory, and I put everything else into the CGI bin. Once I went through all that, all the functionality that was supposed to be there finally was. Now I just have to decide when I will install it on my blog…

Well, it’s official now, I start school next week. I went and purchased my textbook for my only class this semester which is of course “Income Tax Accounting”. That means not only will I get all educated on doing taxes, I’ll have relatives asking me to do their taxes for them because “I know how”. Maybe I’ll fuck their taxes up and send them on a nice 5 year vacation to the federal pen. Guess they won’t ask me for any free favors anymore.

I see that China is in the news again trying to kill us and our animals with their subpar products. Not only is China trying to kill us, but they are also trying to outdo us in the tragedy department as well. We had the W35 bridge collapse in Minnesota on August 1st and we had 8 people killed in that. It gained instantaneous national news coverage and got the attention of the nation, if not the world. Whoa and behold less than two weeks later, China has a bridge that collapses and kills many more; 64 at last count. Sure, that could be a coincidence right, sure it was.

Shortly after the Minnesota bridge collapse went from news, to rescue to recovery, the media had a new story; trapped miners in Utah. We have six miners trapped and unfortunately, most likely dead by now. We lose three more miners from a rescue attempt gone bad bringing the death toll to nine. Oh and in comes China with their very own mine disaster and a death toll possibly near 200.
It should be obvious that much like toothpaste and DVD’s, China is bootlegging our news stories as well.