As this is a forum for me to complain about everything that is wrong about the world:

Today at lunch I saw a guy wearing a “Austin, Texas” t-shirt. Let’s go through some of the problems with this. Whether he lives in Austin or not, he is definitely ‘that guy’. There is under no circumstance a need for you to be wearing a t-shirt indicating to everyone the name of the city and state they are in. If he lives in Austin, he or someone he knows and to purchase that shirt for him with some idea in mind like “Now he’ll never forget where he is”. If he doesn’t live in Austin, he or someone he knows had to purchase that shirt for him. Someone saw this shirt and said, “I’m going to love wearing this around all the time. And maybe people will come up to me and say ‘Oh wow, Austin, Texas. Have you been there before?’ And I’ll impress them with my adventures of eating at Trudy’s while wearing this kickass t-shirt tucked into my wranglers.” As a general note to everyone, if you’re ever going to buy a t-shirt for me while you’re on vacation, don’t buy one of the stupid, tourist city/state jobs. I’d rather you buy a ‘My friend went to [some location] and all I got was this crappy t-shirt’. Alright, that’s enough complaining for now.

On the other hand, maybe I’m being mean. The devil machine told me this story about a drunk that came into his sonic once asking for bus far to get him back to the St. Louis area (he was in OKC). Apparently the guy was some kind of wicked drunk that would go on binges and had would just sober up in some far off state. Maybe that’s what this guy had going on too. He had some kind of alcohol/drug-induced Memento business going on and he thought the t-shirt was a better idea than tatooing “Austin, Texas” on his chest. I hope that’s it.

Not to the New Year; what kind of a loser do you take me for?? Besides, it’s not really New Year’s Eve without Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve! Since Dick Clark is finally on the verge of death, ABC is replacing him with the lovable tag team of Regis Philbin and Ashlee Simpson. That’s one dynamic duo. I, fortunately, will not be watching the rockin’ new year’s eve. I will be gambling, in what is probably the most lawless place in the country, an indian reservation in Louisiana. For those unfamiliar with Louisiana, you may remember it as the last state to raise the drinking age to 21 (it was 19 previously, I believe). And they only gave in because the federal government refused to give them money to build and maintain the highway system. They didn’t give up without a fight though. And the highway system in Louisiana is a testament to their desire to allow 19 year olds to drink.

I’m excited about going on another gambling trip because I haven’t been to a real casino to play poker since I was in Toronto, eh. I’ve been doing pretty well online, so I’m always anxious to see if it’ll work out the same way for me in a live casino game. Plus, it’s much more fun to unleash the power of the 36o on people in person. In my opinion, it’s a much better hand to play out than 72o, because people online almost expect you to play it anymore. Last week I took down pocket aces with my 36o when I hit a 3 on the flop and another on the turn. The guy got so upset that he left the table. It’s not awesome that he left, but if he had stuck around I could have counted on him calling any bet I put out there. Maybe next time. I’ve been trying to think of a good name for 36o and I’ve been running into some trouble. Up until now, it’s just been the magical hand, but I’ve been trying to work on something slick. So far the only name I’ve come up with is “place the five”, which is a reference to craps (that’s what the stickman says when you roll a nine). If you’ve got some ideas, throw’em out. Anyway, there is much fun to be had in Louisiana and I’m excited about making it out for a second time (we went for new year’s two years ago). It’ll be nothing but gambling for two solid days because there really isn’t a whole lot to see in Lake Charles. In fact, here’s the view from my hotel room two years ago.

That’s a bud light can on the window sill. Exotic, I know.

For x-mas this year, kat and I went to minnesota to visit her aunt’s family. This marks two years in a row where I haven’t been with the family over the holiday. Last year, kat and I passed on the x-mas thing altogether and went to vegas (now that’s a holiday!). It really is nice to make it through the entire holiday without having to worry about driving anywhere. Driving to oklahoma around x-mas is the biggest pain in the ass in the world. And then there’s the decisions on which houses to visit on x-mas. Seeing my dad and stepmom is always awesome, but seeing my mom is an extreme pain in the ass. And the gift giving, that’s also a nightmare. It’s easy to shop for the family that I like and make an effort to see on a regular basis, but the “holiday” relatives? How am I supposed to buy a present for people that I don’t even know. Let alone the fact that they’re much older than me, which already means it’s going to be difficult to buy them anything. They’re over 40 years old, if you haven’t bought it in forty years, you probably don’t want it. But I digress on the whole gift-giving thing.

Kat’s relatives were totally awesome. They took care of our every need and fed us all sorts of tasty food. I think this is the first trip I’ve gone on where I’ve felt rested after I got back. So there’s no need for a vacation from my vacation. It’s a nice feeling. It still doesn’t affect my insomnia though. That’s still an ongoing drama (as you may tell by the timestamp on this post). The cold was something else though. I really expected it to be a lot worse than it was, but really I think that once you hit a certain temperature, your body just hits a threshold and it just really hurts. -5, -20 it really didn’t feel different, it just hurt really bad and I wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. We didn’t have to endure it much though. We only left the house once during the whole trip, to go to the Mall of America. Not much to say about it; it was definitely the largest mall I’ve ever been in and it’s pretty cool that there is an amusement park in the middle, but all in all there really isn’t a whole lot to say about it.

I had some other nonsense to comment on, but I’m totally getting distracted by a kick ass acting performance by “The Boz” Brian Bosworth (Second link, it’s just too good! and probably NSFW – (not safe for work – for you non-farkers out there)). Stone Cold is a fantastic movie. I have no idea why it wasn’t up for a Single Oscar in 1991 (it must have been that damn “Silence of the Lambs” bullshit. “It rubs the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again.” Maybe Silence of the Lambs is a better movie than stone cold, but the Boz was stone cold before the Steve Austin dreamed about getting in the ring with The Ultimate Warrior.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Kat’s uncle told me about zappos.com, an online shoe store. Now I can continue my infatuation with shoes from the comfort of my own home. Their selection is unmatched by anything I’ve ever seen before. I’m going to be buying some shoes from there in the next few days, so I’ll have to post a report of how it went afterward.

Well, rather than go to the trouble of coming up with a new template, I’ve decided to just get rid of the rounded edges and stick with what the current template, only bigger. Why the hell all these templates are designed for 640×480 screens I will never know. Honestly, if you’re restricted to 640×480, you’re probably not interested in what I have to write about. In fact, you’re probably busy downloading the latest virus or worm so you can send it out to your friends, believing it’s going to get you free gifts from Bill Gates. Save yourself the trouble and unplug your computer from the wall right now. I’m tired of getting all this fucking SPAM from your PWNED!!11!!111!!!!!ONE!!111!11!!11!!!! drone computer.

In other news, I’ve been working like fucking crazy, and I’m not talking about management stuff, I’ve been writing installers and reviewing code for the last two weeks solid. It’s a big mess, because I generally shouldn’t be doing much coding, but we’re really trying to finish our project on time and installers are the main place that I can help out. Writing installers is a horrible pain in the ass. It’s the most tedious thing I’ve had to do since I graduated from college. And it’s extremely complex. Have you ever seen the shit that goes on in the windows registry? Try downloading Regmon from sysinternals.com and give it a whirl. You wouldn’t believe what goes on when windows is just sitting around, let alone when you’re actually installing something with a kernel service. Jeebus. I’m particularly writing an msi installer. We have the wise tools, but in order to fit in with our gigantor installer, it’s easier to write our installer parts using orca. I can’t recommend it because I refuse to recommend anything that doesn’t have an undo function. Seriously. Undo. That’s a dealbreaker. But sysinternals, you should check them out. Every tool they have on their site is worthwhile. Debugview is one that I have used a lot in the past.

While on the developer tools kick, I recently started using Compare It! as a differ tool. It’s a million times better than any other differ I’ve ever used. And much like Orca, there is one feature that totally makes this product. Syntax highlighting. Previous differs that I’ve used have sucked ass. Windiff is the worst joke I’ve ever seen in my life. The perforce differ is alright, but lacks by letter or by word diffing and can’t be adjusted to do a vertical split view, which is extremely useful, in my opinion. After using perforce forever, I used tkdiff, which has the split view, but is a horrible pain in the ass, like most open source software. Configuration was a bitch with this thing; it consisted of a bunch of nonsensical, undocumented switches. Sounds an aweful lot like the linux operating system, doesn’t it? Either way, I actually gave that shit up and went right on back to perforce diff, it may not have had the by letter or by word diff capability, but it was still easier to read than that tkdiff shit. Then someone turned me on to csdiff, which to it’s credit is pretty good, and the price is definitely right (free). But I couldn’t get used to the fact that it doesn’t go along with the F7 previous, F8 next shortcut keys I’m used to and I’d rather use a different differ than learn new shortcut keys. And it didn’t have syntax highlighting. But Compare It! has it all. And when you have to diff over 300 files to diff in a day, you’ll thank me for it. You’re going to have to pay for it though.

…but they make me feel a whole lot better.

I was all set to write about different situations in the past couple weeks where I’ve felt a bit evil, when I stumbled across the ST website. So I’ll start with an aside (aren’t these all asides?). Anyway, I recently purchased a 200 GB harddrive so I can keep all my music at work. With all this newfound harddrive space (my previously full drive was 60 GB) and some free time over the x-giving holiday, I ripped a bunch of music that I haven’t given a good listen in a while. Some particular albums of recent interest have included:

Butthole Surfers – “Independent Worm Saloon”. While it may not have had the critical success of the “Pepper” single (you know, the Butthole Surfers song everyone knows) this album is fantastic. I mean, “The Wooden Song”, “Who Was In My Room Last Night?”, “Alcohol” — fucking spectacular. Got the power of an upright in [my] goddamn hand.

Nudeswirl – “Nudeswirl”. This is a band that definitely fell through the cracks. They never had any real success, unless you count having their video played in a Beavis and Butthead segment. I just remember Butthead saying something about if he made a video he would also have a lot of trash flying around. I still can’t make out more than 20% of the lyrics, but I still love the hell out of this album.

Suicidal Tendencies – “Lights. Camera. Revolution.” This album makes me want to ride my bike. Unfortunately, the pain in both my ankles and my left knee say no. Maybe after the holiday I’ll give it a shot.

But back to me being evil. So once I found the Suicidal website, I had to take a look around. This once again touches on my hatred of bad websites. There are so many things wrong with this website. First, the flash intro? Please, if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a flash intro it better be smooth, and it should include something more than a slideshow. Next, capitalizing everytime “ST” happen to be next to each other? “STeve went to the STore to buy some STaples” Rock out. Then, if you go through much of the site you’ll notice an extreme lack of content and an overuse of ALL CAPS. IN FACT, THERE’S AN ENTIRE SECTION (WHICH IS SOMEWHAT NON-SENSICAL) THAT IS WRITTEN EXACTLY LIKE THIS (click on the “VILLE” link). If you can make sense of that, let me know. But how does this make me evil? The “stories” section. I can’t stop reading them. Something about people baring their souls that makes me laugh and want to make fun of them to all my friends. I want to force my friends to read through all of these too so we can memorize some choice phrases and drop them into our every day conversation. I may be going a bit far here, so back on to other evil moments.

Today I had a pretty shitty day. Nothing at work got finished when it should have, I have a million things to do before taking off for the weekend to visit Jim and my familia in oklahoma for x-mas, and I’m just continually tired. I took my car in for the 60k service ($400), where I also found out that I needed new belts ($100) and I’ll eventually need to have my power steering pump replaced (another $600). Needless to say I was extremely pissed off. But then, at a stop light on my way back to work, I saw something that brightened my day. Austin is becoming completely overrun by beggars, especially on the north side lately. I swear the beggars here must have a business plan similar to Walgreens. Anyway, I witnessed two beggars fighting over who owned the corner. One guy was insisting that he was there first and therefore he owned the corner and the other was insisting that by standing 20 feet away at the same intersection (on the same side even) he was clearly not imposing on homeless guy #1′s territory. Priceless. Yes, this alone made me less mad. Then there was soccer. Tonight we played two of the worst teams in the league. We’re not a great team (company-sponsored teams rarely are), but the teams we played tonight were terrible. We could have won both games while playing a player short for the entire game. It was that bad. The poor guy that was playing goalie for the men’s team we played had obviously never played before and he was taking a beating. Cassio hit a shot so hard at this guy that he couldn’t get his hands up in time and the ball just hit him in the face. I laughed out loud. A part of me felt better after that. I’m mean.

But in a true showing of my vengefulness, last week in soccer we were getting killed by the team we were playing and this jackass kept playing overly rough, elbowing me and slamming me into walls even though they were beating us by something like 7 goals. As with all things, I finally got the opportunity for revenge when I had a free kick and this jackass was standing three feet away from me (which is illegal – you actually have to stand 10 feet away). I immediately had the impulse to just crack a shot at him as hard as possible, but some reasoning from my teammates convinced me that I should request that he stand 10 feet away, which I did. Now with this extra time, another player from their team stood in front of my free kick (two in front of me now). I still had the impulse to knock the shit out of this guy, so I decided that I would still shoot it as hard as I could, but I would make an honest effort to not hit him and hit the goal instead. Of course, I knocked the shit out of the ball, probably harder than I’ve hit one in a long time and promptly hit the other player. Who turns out to be the nicest player on their team. I fucking tatooed him with the ball. You could still see the outline of the panels of the soccer ball over half an hour later. I spoke with him a few days ago and he said that it took multiple days for the mark to go away and it left a nasty bruise. The funny part of all this is that even though I didn’t kick the guy that was pissing me off, I still felt better. For real though.

Stay tuned next week for some nerded-out techie non-sense.

That’s right, I finally updated my computer at home to something that:

1. Doesn’t sound like a jet engine when you turn it on
2. Can let you both burn cds and look at the web at the same time
3. Doesn’t use SIMMs (remember those?)
4. Looks 1337

Getting older makes a tremendous difference on how I keep up with computer technology. When I bought my previous computer (my junior year of college, 1997 for those of you keeping track), I knew everything about computers because I had to get the most for my money. Now it doesn’t really matter. I don’t have to order from some sketchy online part reseller that gives my money to terrorists. I can walk into Fry’s and buy damn near anything in the store and it’s not going to break me. That’s a nice feeling, but it also means that I’ve missed a huge change in the computer industry. Apparently all the sudden the in thing is case modding. Now while I think that’s good and fine, I’m not really the kind of guy that needs a shitload of neon lights coming out of my computer. Especially since I keep my computer in my bedroom. (Or maybe I could put some kickass glow in the dark anime posters up…that’d be hot). So what really sucked about buying the computer was trying to find something that I wouldn’t be ashamed to keep around my house. But even worse, most of these mass-produced “case mod” cases look ridiculous. It’s like tricking out your honda with parts you bought at wal-mart. After searching around for the better part of an hour (Fry’s has quite a selection of cases, I finally settled on an old-fashioned beige case and it was on to the processor/motherboard.

This is where the real fun started. I already had the hubs, but now I’ve really got a LanParty. If I really wanted to have a 1337 computer I’ve totally got the right components for it. This fucking motherboard has all sorts of glow in the dark and neon shit going on. I love the picture from the DFI website too, once everyone gets home we’ll all gather around the computer and they can cheer for me while I type out some blog posts. That should be fun for everyone.

For the processor, I opted for the Athlon 64, not because I wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology, but because that’s the only AMD that’s sold at Fry’s now. My old computer was a K6-2 300. That means I’ve skipped something like three generations of processors. Everyone is amazed when they hear how old my computer is and the fact that it keeps running, but I’ve really needed it for nothing more than burning cds, looking for stuff on the web, and pirating music. WIth this new computer, I’ll be able to do all those things at the same time && with my new cheapo dvd burner, I’ll also be able to pirate movies. w00t!

(sorry, no Tender Fury link)

Jim forwarded me a post from Charr, about eavesdropping. I think this post is awesome because I too am an eavesdropper. I’m not beating around the bush about it either, I do it all the time. I can’t turn it off. I’m like that guy who needs the hearing aid. For some reason all the ridiculous conversation that go on around me are just as loud (most of the time) as the conversation I’m having, generally making it difficult for me to follow my own conversation when a gem of a discussion is going on nearby. At work, this isn’t generally the case. Most of the time as a manager I hear most of the news up front. Occasionally I manage to get info from being at the right place at the right time, but generally I have enough agents in the field that I hear all the important shit. This wasn’t the case in the past though, I really had to work to hear all the news. Here are some methods in addition to charr’s that have proven useful for me. For most of these, I’m actually surprised that people don’t catch on to them.

• Unclaimed printouts at the printer/copier. I generally don’t go looking for these, but someone usually leaves them face up next to the printer for everyone to see. Performance reviews, salary information, personal chat logs, the list goes on. I guess sometimes people just forget that they printed out things they don’t want other people to see. It could happen to anyone.
• Documents/pictures on the temp directory of our internal file server. This has happened at every company I’ve ever worked for. Every one of them had a network file share where people could put up files temporarily that is deleted every night or week or something of the like. This is a haven for inappropriate pictures of co-workers. Sometimes there’s some personal stuff there too, but that’s a lot more rare. The nice thing about the temporary file share is that people not only put personal materials on there, but they generally put it in folders with their names for whoever they’re showing it to. These can be good and bad. You’ve always gotta be wary of pictures because sometimes you’re going to wish you really hadn’t seen it.
• Personal shared folders. This is another network folder one, but it generally doesn’t include inappropriate pictures. This is generally the place for performance reviews (either personal ones or reviews of employees) and salary information. It’s hard to keep from looking at a document called “salaries.xls” in your boss’ public network share.
• Last but definitely not least, the office calendar. We use Lotus Notes, and unless you explicitly disable public viewing of your calendar or you mark meetings private, anyone can just open your calendar and see what you’ve got going on. This is useful in those situations where you see all the wrong people walk into a room together while speaking in hushed tones. Also, this way I can find out when my co-workers are having that pole shoved farther up their ass and I can avoid them.

In general eavesdropping outside of work hasn’t done much for me. In general, I just end up feeling like my head is going to explode like Lewis Black. I never hear stuff to his level, but I have caught some gems over the years. My favorite is when people make asses out of themselves and make a stranger uncomfortable at the same time. A few weeks ago I was out at Trudy’s Northstar on a busy night enjoying some mexican martinis. We happened to get seated near the bar and the place was so packed that a group of girls was standing directly behind me. It was loud with all the people (of course) so the alpha girl is talking unbelievably loud right in my ear. While I’m in the middle of telling a story, she starts talking about a guy and his girlfriend that have just come up to the bar.

“I totally fall for guys like that.”
“Which one?”
“The one with the nerdy looking girlfriend. I always totally fall for the guys with the nerdy girlfriends.”

First, I find it amazing that someone’s type could be ‘guys with nerdy girlfriends’. That seems like an odd ‘type’ to be placing on yourself. I myself go for lesbian left-handed midget albinos. But even more amazing, is that this girl doesn’t realize that the people she’s talking about are less than ten feet away and she’s yelling in their direction. You’d think the glares and awkward looks would have tipped her off, but no she just kept going on about it. a.w.k.

On another night out, I was out eating sushi with kat. Sushi makes for a particularly good setting for watching people make asses out of themselves because it’s the kind of food that someone wants to display their superior knowledge. And I like (and I hate it too) to watch people showing off for their hillbilly friends/parents/dates. This guy was precious, showing off his superior knowledge of sushi by ordering tuna rolls, extra wasabi, and sake, because that’s how badass he is. Next it was time to show off the gadgetry. This is a personal favorite of mine as a techgeek, because someone inevitably will make a radically stupid claim about their device because they don’t understand enough about technology. “I think it has, like 200 RAMs.” Golden. Anyway, this guy starts showing off his palm pilot cell phone combo. That’s all good and fine. It’s got a calculator and blahblahblah. But the interesting one was when he got to the palmasutra. He starts showing this thing off, his male friend (of course) doesn’t know what the kamasutra is. So the hillbilly girl speaks up in her best hick accept.

“It’s, like, this book about sex and stuff. And it’s old and has like different positions like girl on top and ……”

Please oh please make her stop. Just shut and get back on the bangbus you stupid bitch. The golden one though, was the hillbilly male friend giving his philosophy on music.

“I don’t really like music or know who the popular artists or anything like that. All I know is I like Randy Travis. His music always picks ya up and makes ya feel good.”

Seriously. I need to get away from these people.