Old Aug 11, 2005
My checkout person at ShopRite yesterday was an old lady with a wrist brace.  I felt bad.  She's probably been alive since the Great Depression.  She probably still hates "rock and roll music".  She probably has children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Her husband probably retired before the bicentenial of our country.  She probably watched the first and last episodes of MASH.  If she lived in Arkansas, she probably worked for Sam Walton's Butler Brothers store.  But now she's working at a ShopRite in Dover, NJ for something close to minimum wage, and she has a bum wrist.  So I tried to be nice to her.  I said hi, which is actually an uncommon thing to do.  And I wouldn't let her carry my 30-lb box of kitty litter. #psychology
Manager Aug 10, 2005
My whole life, I've been led to where I don't want to go.  All throughout school and work, I've done things that I had no interest in doing so that it would help me in the future.  In high school, I did marching band and mock trial because they told me it would look good on my transcripts.  In college, all my professors said, "The average engineer is only an engineer for 5 years after college.  Get into management."  And that's what all these jerks are still telling me.  "Take Six Sigma courses and get your MBA.  Become a manager."  I have absolutely no interest in becoming a manager.  I want to be a geek for the rest of my life.  Why must people force me to do things I don't want to do?  From the little I've learned, management is all about people.  I'm not good with people.  And I've heard that managers work long hours and have difficult jobs.  I don't want that.  That's stupid. #business
Google logo maker Aug 10, 2005
I found this cool site called Logogle that creates logos similar to Google's.  It's basically useless, except it's a cool little tool to use on your site.  I wonder how long it'll take before Google shuts them down because of copyright infringement? #technology
Website colors Aug 10, 2005
You may have noticed that my website has new colors.  Actually, it's amazing that there are colors period, let alone new colors.  Since I'm absolutely illiterate when it comes to style and fashion and matching, I always had problems with colors on my website.  I like loud bright colors, but they never seemed to go with each other.  So I stuck with the old black text on a white background.  A little gray here and there.  But then I found this website, Return of Design, when I searched for website color design.  It has a bunch of color combinations that can be used on websites.  This is great stuff.  I actually took one of their ideas and changed it around to make it my own.  I think it works. #technology
Nuts Aug 9, 2005
Putting nuts in food is just about as useful as using rocks or Brussels sprouts.  Whenever I bite into a brownie or a cookie with peanuts or almonds, I want to spit it in the face of the person who made them.  What a great way to ruin a perfectly good food.  Or those little chocolates with coconut filling?  Disgusting!  It's always a gamble when you bite into them.  Will I get nougat?  Will I get caramel?  Or will I get the despised and wretched coconut?  Sometimes I like to buy those packages of dried fruit.  But I always try to stay away from the mixes that have big ugly almonds floating around.  They destroy the entire package.  They get all up in everyone's business.  You take a handful and chew on some nice soft dried fruit, but then all of a sudden you bite down on this object that doesn't quite fit the bill.  I've been known to eat everything but the nuts.  On a positive note, I do eat peanut M&M's.  I think they're acceptable.  And I also like trail mix made with raisins and peanuts.  It's probably because I know what I'm getting into.  I can see them in my hand before I put them in my mouth.  But with cookies and brownies, it's like I'm being deceived.  Like you're trying to give me poison by putting it in a friendly little package.  It's like giving medicine to a cat or dog:  you have to mix it in with their other food so they're tricked into eating it.  Screw you, nut people!  You won't trick me! #food
Dancing (1) Aug 8, 2005
For as long as I can remember, I've been trying to avoid dancing.  When I was about 10 years old, there was a dance floor set up at Hampton Day.  Some DJ was playing the best of the best from Power 103.7 and Kara Nelson wanted me to dance with her.  It was at that moment that I developed an intense hatred and utter fear of dancing.  I realized that I had no rhythm and couldn't control how my body moved, much less coordinate it with some regular pattern of beats.  As I watched other people acting like idiots, I realized how much I didn't want to act like an idiot by dancing.  And so the story continued throughout my entire life.  In junior high, our school always had dances as part of an all-encompassing "activity night".  I remember going and sitting in the back, but just hating the idea of dancing.  [Some may remember that I danced to bands like Nirvana and Metallica, but it was more just moshing and jumping around.]  This pattern continued until I realized that girls like guys who dance.  So for one simple reason, I started to dance a little here and there.  I even asked girls to dances and formals.  But I still wasn't a fan of dancing.  This continued through high school proms and things like that.  When I got to college, I went to parties where there was dancing.  I participated, but I wasn't a big fan.  I went to a small school, so we even had formals and things like that.  When I started drinking, I danced a lot more and enjoyed it.  But hey guess what, you can enjoy anything when you're drinking.  Drinking helped me dance at bars, clubs, parties, and things like that for a few years.  But then I stopped drinking, so dancing ceased being fun.  And now I go to weddings, which are essentially the same thing as senior proms, except that they focus on a wedding ceremony instead of [insert focus of prom here].  As I was growing up and going to these different events that centered around dancing, I always figured that dancing would be phased out and my problems would be solved.  I never saw my parents dance, so I didn't think adults ever danced.  But now 10-15 years later, I'm still stuck in these situations where I'm forced to act like an idiot by erratically moving my body in conjunction with the beat of music, all the while people stare at me and mock me from their seats (because that's what I do).  And at every one of these events, I always see those people who go around and say "C'mon, get up and dance!" as they point and yell at me.  There's a very simple psychological reason why these people act the way they do:  they feel like idiots and they want everyone else to feel like an idiot too. #entertainment
Wireless lawsuit Aug 8, 2005
I have a prediction:  I think we'll soon be seeing cases in the news of lawsuits brought against people and companies that offer unsecured wireless internet access.  For example, places like airports (Las Vegas being one), coffee shops, hotels, and even private residences.  I think the lawsuits will be because of illegal things done via the internet, accessed via an unsecured wireless network.  If you drive through any city or highly populated area, you can most likely pick up several different wireless signals at one time, most of them being from private residences.  So let's say that a person uses your wireless connection to plan out a murder or learn about building a bomb.  Our government doesn't feel too fondly about things like this.  So let's say that government officials figure out that the person used your unsecured wireless connection to access this illegal or dangerous information.  I think you'd be held responsible because you didn't restrict access to your internet service.  But then you could blame-shift and say it was because the company that sold you the wireless router didn't automatically have wireless security set up.  And then we'd find out that these companies intentionally disable security when they sell wireless routers because they actually want the whole world to be covered with wireless routers so that you can pick up a signal anywhere you go.  And they depend on the average person's technological ignorance to not read the manual and figure out how to secure their wireless router.  So that's my prediction.  Just wait and see. #technology
Road rage Aug 5, 2005
Sometimes I wish I drove one of those big old 70s clunker cars with real metal bumpers.  If anybody did something stupid, I'd just plow into them.  A love tap.  That's all.  Or how about a less destructive solution:  vehicle-mounted paintball guns.  The idea is that you have a paintball gun mounted to your car with a button inside your car that controls the trigger.  Whenever someone cuts you off or doesn't use the center turning lane or rides your tail for a while, you shoot their car with a paintball.  As you drove around, you'd notice that certain cars would be covered with paint.  These are the idiots.  Stay away from them.  It's like a warning label.  If you saw a car with a lot of paint, you'd slow down or go a different way.  This would result in less interaction with idiots, and they'd no longer be a problem, except of course to other idiots.  So the problem would take care of itself.  Genius! #travel
Center turning lane (2) Aug 4, 2005
As I drove home on Tuesday night from something, I was on a 2-way road with a center turning lane.  All of a sudden, I had to come to a complete stop because someone in front of me stopped dead so that they could make a left turn as there was traffic coming the other way.  As I always say, I'm no genius.  I don't know everything and I don't claim to.  But, for some reason, I was under the impression, oddly enough, that the center turning lane was created by God so that a vehicle wouldn't need to cause problems behind them in order to make a left turn.  I understand that a user of the center turning lane must be careful of traffic coming from the opposite direction because they have equal ownership of this said lane.  But seeing that no traffic was using this lane, I was a bit angry when I had to stop completely.  I honked my horn at this person, and I was surprised when he gave me a dirty look as he made the turn.  Was I wrong?  Is the center turning lane not for making left turns?  Is it for making right turns, as utilized by the infamous Mike O during driver's ed?  I guess I just don't know anything.  The center turning lane is used for making right turns; the right lane is used for making left turns; and go Eagles! #travel
News Aug 3, 2005
News annoys me.  I like to listen to headline news just to get a little taste of what's happening in the world, without getting too much into any of it.  But the big problem with news is that it's no longer news.  At some point in the distant past, things changed.  Instead of reporters doing stories on things that were news-worthy, they started reporting on things simply to get ratings.  And that's what we've come to.  News is no longer meant to inform, it's meant to expand its audience.  What sucks about this is that we never find out about real news.  This is why I'd like to start my own news network.  Instead of reporting on how many people burned up in an apartment building in the Bronx or how many people were shot and raped by some dude in Texas, my news network would report on worthwhile news.  The top story:  "Firefighters save cat from treetop" followed by "Celebrity gives all his money away" and "Local church sponsors car wash for foreign missions".  I'd like to hear about the good things happening in Winslow, Arizona.  I want to know what progress our soldiers are making in Iraq.  I'm sure many people would like to learn about the people helping to rebuild stuff after the tsunami.  Bottom line:  instead of hearing about death and destruction, sex, lies, videotapes, money, murder and the like, I'd like to hear something about some of the more positive things happening in the world. #entertainment