The check engine light in my car keeps coming on.  This is what the book says:  "Empty fuel tank - If the fuel tank is empty, refuel immediately.  Loose fuel tank cap - If the fuel tank cap is loose, securely tighten it.  These cases are temporary malfunctions.  The malfunction indicator lamp will go off after taking several driving trips.  It the lamp does not go off even after several trips, contact your Toyota dealer as soon as possible."  Did you catch that?  Basically it says that the check engine light is stupid, so drive around for a while before you go to the dealer.  What's that about?  What if it's a serious problem?  It later says, "If the fuel tank is not empty or the fuel tank cap is not loose ... there is a problem somewhere in the engine, emission control system, automatic transmission electrical system, or warning light system itself."  Well at least it's not serious.  Oh wait, automatic transmission electrical system.  Hmm that sounds a little serious.  Engine?  Right.  Problems with my engine could be big problems.  Big friggin problems!  Toyota says, "Hey don't worry about it man.  Just walk it off."  I'm not sure I'm comfortable with their relaxed attitude towards major vehicle malfunction. 

No, this isn't about that catchy pop tune by Everclear.  I'm talking about Amplitude Modulation radio.  I listen to AM radio in my car sometimes.  I try to become a little bit informed, instead of filling my head with the same old classic rock tunes.  But AM radio gets annoying sometimes.  A lot of the talk show people do their own commercials.  So they'll be talking about something that's happening in the world, and then in the same sentence they'll say something about their wife trying something called Shaminy Esoteak.  What the heck is that?  And the "good ones" do it seamlessly, without even the slightest hint that you're listening to a commercial.  Like Paul Harvey.  I like him because he has interesting things to say.  But he always talks about this thing called ocular degeneration.  If I was a normal person, I'd have no clue what the heck he's talking about.  But I'm a super-genius, so I know he's talking about eyes.  I also think it's a little annoying that I can hear 10 minutes of commercials in a row during my 11 minute drive to ShopRite.  So then I go back to filling my head with the same old classic rock tunes.

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. 

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. 

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!