This video has been around a while, but I finally watched it after DrHorrible twittered it. It really is pretty fuckin’ cool:

(PS: If you go to YouTube, you can select the High Quality version.)

One of my favorite people of all time, George Carlin, has died. He’s had his share of health problems, so while it’s not the biggest surprise ever… I feel a bit like I’ve been hit by a truck. Seriously. George Carlin was one of my heroes. No exaggeration.

I’m glad we got a chance to see him a couple years ago in Vegas. I had never seen him in person before, so it was really a lifelong dream come to fruition. I’m not generally affected by celebrity deaths, in fact… almost never. George, though… fuck.

So, to remember him, I leave you with the Seven Words You Can’t Say On TV:

Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of “adds” on Digg. I’m pretty active on there, I guess, so a couple, I understand. Whenever another digg user friends (only the web could turn that into a verb) me, I receive an email. It looks like:

Hey there! Stonehenge360 is your latest fan. He became your fan because he likes what you are up to on Digg and wants to see what you think is interesting. You can either leave him as a fan or add him to your own list of friends. Check out his profile here:

http://digg.com/users/Stonehenge360

Cheers,

The Digg Team

Control what emails you receive from Digg here:
http://digg.com/settings/email

So, then I go look at Stonehenge360’s Recent Activity on Digg, and I see:

Stonehenge360 has added Steven Schlottman, Erin, J, pkulak, Vote #1 Moojj, digitalgopher, dadof2, Mr. Baby Man, JoeyC, Spencer, Mihr, Gazerock, xoogie, Curtisnot, Vonkhan, phillip torrone, Chris Gray, Daniel Šimko, PAWEL FLAGA, Edward Alexander, johnlandes, Ralph, Steven Safak, Lord_Mizaru, Dane Kenney, zovi, hugesaks, bluedragoon, Ankush Dhiman, Phil, glass junky, Frank, you, Dennis, lese, bunny607, Leo Laporte, Aviar, Wayne, Rich Tannehill, Prakash, dabneyd, Jesse Jones, Dan Huard, Ralphy, Nathan, bambinette, Josh, Joe, selphishnerd, Celsius032, tyrstephen, Amar, Furious.Styles, purrp, diskazz, will4042, TrainingName, UCBearcats, Tyson H. , Carson, james estrada, Chelsea, johnsmith118, powersaber89, Ian Mansfield (a guy!), Chris Taran, Zaibatsu, Ken, UnlivedPhalanx, Noah, Rick Schmidt, Mike Z, tljff9, Alex H., Sarah Lane, Joe Biden, ricktoid, mike, Wil Wheaton, Roberto Villarreal, typ44q, P9, Diggnation, sahaskatta, boober86, hammydude, dpk87, justinvt, quokkapox, Flabbadabba, Troy E, DanThePainter, Christopher, iching, Miguel Lopez, verge, Bwack and CLIFF W. to his network.

I refer back to the mail that said he “became [my] fan because he likes what [I am] up to on Digg”.

Really? I think you, Digg, should stop guessing at his motives for adding me. I don’t think he knows me at all and I don’t think it’s very nice of you to play with my emotions like that.

PS: Stonehenge360 is just the most recent example of this. I’ve gotten a bunch of mass adds recently. I don’t get the point of having a huge number of ‘friends’ on Digg that you don’t actually know. It waters down the effectiveness of the Digg features. In other words, who cares what my friends are digging, if I don’t even know their tastes?

As most people know, a computer can run certain tasks in the background. These are jobs that it’s doing behind the scenes and typically hidden from the user, sometimes at the user’s request. Most people’s brains work like this too, to some degree. I know hardcore coders who are constantly thinking about whatever problem they are trying to solve and will, in the middle of lunch, have a “eureka” moment. Hell, I’ve done the same and I’m just a Perl hack (at best).

However, my mind is cluttered with much less important background tasks. For example, the other day I was chatting with a friend and he was having a particularly dreadful day. “Shoot me,” he requested. I responded that I was all done with killing for the day and he needed to ask again tomorrow, or some such. So, he said, “I didn’t say you had to kill me.” My retort was so unfunny that I don’t even recall what it was. However, unbeknownst to me, a background process started running.

This morning, I’m in the shower and an epiphany strikes me. The proper response would have been, “What? And waste a bullet?” Now, I don’t claim that it’s comedic genius, but it is better than whatever the other line was.

Why the hell was my brain still working on that? It’s not like I can ping the guy two days later and deliver the re-written punch line. Hell, it’s not even that funny: just a minor improvement.

I need some sort of Activity Monitor or task manager for my brain. Or maybe just a command line…

ps -ax  | grep -i "stupid joke" | awk '{print "kill "$1""}' | zsh

(I realize the flaws with the above line, it’s a joke. Lighten up.)

So, we’re both feeling like crap. My lungs are bugging me from weeks with bronchitis and she has a massive headache. So, this is the exchange:

GF: “I need to put my head in a vice.”
ME: “I don’t have a vice big enough.”
GF: “Are you saying I have a fat head?”
ME: “No… I’m saying I don’t have a fat vice.”

If you don’t hear from me after a while, this might be why.

At least she laughed…

I got into an odd discussion about calendars and leap years, so I did a little wiki research on the topic and stumbled across this tidbit: “In the Islamic calendar, leap months are not used. They are forbidden by the Qur’an, which says…”

WTF? Were they running out of shit to ban?!

Mecca, sometime in the 7th century. A wise looking prophet, MUHAMMED, sits with a SCRIBE. MUHAMMAD dictates as the SCRIBE scribes.

SCRIBE

“Ok, cartoons of the prophet. Got it. What’s next?”

MUHAMMAD

“Leap years!”

SCRIBE

“What?”

MUHAMMAD

“I hate that shit. I can never remember how many days in February!”

SCRIBE

“I’m not adding that. It’s stupid.”

MUHAMMAD

“You have to! I’m fucking Muhammad and an angel told me Leap Years are evil! Don’t make me add something about stoning mouthy scribes…”

SCRIBE

“FINE. Whatever. Next?”

The above didn’t actually happen, as the Qur’ān did not exist in book form at the time of Muhammad’s death in 632. It is, however, funnier this way. It would be funnier still as a cartoon.

It’s 2008. Where’s my flying car?

Have a good ‘un.

Been a while since I made an actual blog post, so I thought I should update in case anyone is still paying attention. (Though, I’m not sure how, since I seem to have borked my RSS feeds.)

For the record, there are several causes for the lack of posts here. Primarily, I blame, in no small part, the micro-blogging aspects of Pownce and Twitter. It’s pretty easy to fire off small updates to those services and neglect writing longer posts for the blog. Sometimes, small posts are better anyways. Not every bit of subject matter really deserves more than a sentence or two.

Secondly, I blame a recurring issue: Work. My job has been sucking a lot of time and energy lately. It’s been sucking other things too, but I’ll leave that for another day. The cat is nearly out of the cage, so it should ease up, but then again we re-orged again, so it’s a crap shoot.

Thirdly, I’ve been trying to focus on actual writing projects again. Or, rather, yet again. However, I’ve had an epiphany about a project I’ve been kicking around for years. I’m excited about refining this concept and bring it to life. However, between work and life, it will take a long while. Hopefully, I can keep up my level of enthusiasm, though, and continue to make progress. Focus is hard, sometimes.

Recently, Annette and I took a weeklong vacation. We rented a house on the Russian River and it was awesome. During the trip, we attended a wine club events at Trefethen B.V. vineyards, tasted in the Russian River region, got a massage, and, perhaps most importantly, sat around and relaxed. We bought a tanker’s worth of wine. It was a fantastic vacation.

Last weekend, I went to a family reunion. Those are always really weird for me, because I just don’t fit in. I mean, I love my family. My mom, grandma and aunt are some truly special ladies and I like spending time with them, but the list of topics we have to discuss is pretty short. The unending supply of cousins are nice enough as well, but I know them even less, and despite being closer in age to most of them, I may have even less in common. I avoided interesting topics (like war, politics and religion) and instead we discussed other family members and their ailments. Very, uplifting. >.<

Anyway, I guess I should wrap this up. I’ll try not to be such a stranger.

Oh, and PS: I think I’m having my midlife crisis early. Unless of course I die at 70, because then it’s right on time.

I’ve been getting calls for this Jeanine chick for a 2-3 years now. It’s pretty annoying. What’s worse is that they come in batches. I won’t get any for a while, and then I will get hit maybe 6 or 7 times in the span of a week.

Well, today a guy calling to offer to refinance her home (like many of the calls) heard the exasperation in my voice with my immediate response of “there’s no Jeanine here” which I punctuated with an annoyed sigh. We chatted a bit and he took pity on me.

He then gave me her e-mail and mailing addresses.

That was pretty cool of him, but I don’t know exactly how I’m to proceed from here. It’s not like she made a typo one day, she’s recently used this phone number according to my inside man at Lending Tree. She’s purposefully giving out my number as her own on forms for stuff.

So, do I just send a polite email, saying “hi, could you not do that?” Or do I send one that sounds more forceful, like a cease and desist letter? Or do I just sign her up for as many gay-midget-animal-clown-porn mailing lists as I can find? Flaming poop on the doorstep?

I must ponder.

A forum discussion about cops and traffic stops reminded me of this memory from my youth.

I file this snippet of my life under “Best Lines I Never Used“.

Many, many, many moons ago (back when I was 18), I was taking a risk and speeding to work through a part of the South Bay Area sprawl known as Campbell. Campbell was well known amongst my friends for having more than it’s fair share of really dickish cops. We all tried our best to not get pulled over in that town because there was no talking your way out of the ticket. However, I was late.

So, predictably, I got nabbed only a few miles from work. The cop pulls me over and takes his time coming up to my window. When he gets there, I can see that he’s already pissed off about something. He gives me a little lecture, and then asks me if I knew what the speed limit was.

I actually didn’t, but it just so happens he pulled me over right in front of a speed limit sign. I look up at it and say, “uh… 35?”

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Uh…”

“53 miles per hour.”

Now, this is what I should have said: “But, officer, I’m dyslexic!”

It only would have made things worse, but what was he gonna do? Write me a ticket for being a smart ass on top of the speeding?

I still kick myself and use it as a reminder to always go with the instinct, because “one time, I said to this cop…” makes for a better story than “one time, I thought of something to say to this cop…”