Zombies

I wonder if anyone else thinks about what they would do if a zombie apocalypse occurred. I mean seriously because right before I fall asleep every once and awhile I have this thought of what would happen if a zombie apocalypse occurred. I think about this and I feel unprepared, scared even, I mean I don't know how to hunt, skin an animal, find wild herbs, and I have no cool skills, you know like bow hunting skills, kung fu skills, you know skills. In all seriousness or as serious as one can be when talking about a fictional event I think I would be screwed, I have no guns, no giant knifes, no baseball bat and most certainly no cricket bats laying around. On top of that my house is nothing but windows, I mean we are talking human aquarium for Zombies. Damn I would be total zombie fodder in my current home, I'd have to bunk-ify it or something. I mean is this normal that I am thinking about how to get prepared for something so unbelievable as a zombie apocalypse? Anyway I figure I may not be completely screwed being without guns as they rarely seem to work as well as a good shovel or bat. Last night I saw myself wielding two metal bats like a Shaolin Monk twirling like Taz smashing zombies left and right as they tried to close in on me on all sides. Yeah bats would definitely be the way to go, I have three axes, a coal shovel, a mall and a scythe but I think if I had a choice the bat would still be the preferred weapon, which reminds me I need a bat.

I think the hardest thing and this always makes me feel pretty sad is if someone I loved was bitten and became a zombie. I mainly keep thinking about this because there was that scene in "Shawn of the Dead" where Shawn's mom becomes a Zombie and he has to blow her head off. Depressing that.

Cocksuckers.

I used to wonder what my grandfather used to get so angry about, I mean the guy was ALWAYS angry about something that was happening in the world. We would come to visit and he would be raging about something, it would be Christmas and he would be raging about something and you know when I was a boy I couldn't understand what the big deal was. I'm starting to get it these days, I seem to remember a saying "If you're not angry it's because you're not paying attention" and for me that seems to be the case. I can't help myself, I was listening to NPR on my way over to Damons for a happy hour and every story just kept feeding my rage.

Let's see there was Columbia Gas telling us that luckily because the winter has been warmer than normal that the average gas bill will be going down. They mentioned something about cheaper rates but you know what who gives a flying fuck, the average bill is going down because you are running your heat less and has only a little bit to do with the fact that Columbia Gas decided to drop their rates 1/10 of a peso. After the story about Columbia Gas NPR went on to say that the average salary for CEO's in the US increased by 30% (last year it was 15%) and that of the top ten bread winners all were from IT companies that underperformed. I really need to get a job where they pay you heinous amounts of money regardless of how badly you fuck up. What a fucking joke. NPR went on to say that because of Jack Welch's (Ex-CEO of General Electric)ability to get GE to pay for his NY apartment, dry cleaner bills, catering, florist expenses and his NY Knicks tickets for life that the government was going to watch companies a little bit closer in how they compensated their CEO's in retirement. What a joke I mean come on if you made 900 million dollars in your tenure you'd think that maybe you had saved/invested about half that and are sitting pretty. I mean WTF, why would you need your apartment paid for and all that other shit if you probably have only 10-20 years left in your life. If you can't make 500 million dollars last then maybe you aren't that great of a CEO.... bunch of cocksuckers.

To top it off NPR went on to tell how the government approved some small business loan that gave over 3 billion dollars to small business that were affected by the 9/11 attacks. There just happened to be an investigation to look into who got the money and of the 50 companies they talked to only 9 actually needed/deserved the money. The other 41 companies were like "Money because of 9/11, really? Come on we're just a dog grooming company in South Dakota." The final icing on the straw was when NPR started talking about FEMA and how they didn't know that the levies broke in New Orleans until 24 hours after it happened. NPR went on to say that FEMA did not also realize the dire situation of all the evacuees in the stadium, and how there were gang members taking pot shots at the helicopters that were providing supplies. WOW! I mean come on you have to figure that FEMA has at least one fucking T.V. in their headquarters and maybe just maybe it is tuned to CNN or at LEAST Fox news. Then again maybe that is the problem maybe they were turned to Fox News and all Fox was doing was touting the new line of Presidential horse shit.

All a matter of a one's point of view.

I was sitting in the office of one of my co-workers today drinking a cup of coffee and reading over the latest proposal for some contract that we are going to attempt to get when in walks Kiddy Porn (KP). He and this the co-worker who's office I was in started some small talk and after a few minutes KP mentions how completely backwards my company is as we have 27 developers (an exageration as we only have 12) but only 5 sales people. He went on to say the reason why we have so many developers is that the developers are always having drop what they are doing at a moments notice do another more important project and that because of this we rarely ever finish anything This nearly caused me to shove my foot so far up his ass that he'd still be picking bits of rubber out of his crap for the next year. Here are the reasons why I nearly exploded:

A. We have five sales people of which maybe two have closed a deal in the last two years. On top of that we provide a salary good enough that they can apparently live just fine without receiving any commission, now does that make any sense?

B. We have 12 developers not 27 and if KP would pull his head out of the sand long enough he'd realize that we are a software company not a company that provides a service. So really having 12 developers really isn't unreasonable.

C. We never finish anything because the sales people never actually close a deal, they get on the phone and start trying to sweet talk a potential client. They then make us write a bunch of code to provide the functionality that they described to the potential client only to have the potential client decide they really don't want to buy our service. It seems to me that we should at least try to get some token amount of money out of people before we write a line of code.

D. KP was someone who sold a client some functionality that we did not currently have, he then forgot that he ever did this until a year later when the client started asking about this bit of functionality that he sold them. Pure genious, and oh yes a bit of that scurrying around like chickens with our heads cut off.

E. The fact that he is named KP is a reason, guess what he used to do in his free time at work.

F. The project I was on has been finished for about a year or so, we just are always developing and adding new bits of functionality, KP maybe would know that if he ever talked to anyone or say logged into and looked at the system that KP is selling.

That was enough to get me all fired up like an englishman after his favorite soccer team looses but it continues. When I mentioned to KP that software development, and managing software projects is actually pretty hard he turned to me and said "It can't be that hard look at so and so." It was this point where KP went on to blather some garbage about how anyone can do it, that it isn't that hard, yada yada yada. He has a point but I think he missed my point that managing software projects are a little harder than he thinks. Hopefully I will have a few Mr. Wonderful-isms to post tomorrow, who is Mr. Wonderful well that will have to wait till tomorrow.

Some call me.... Gozer

DBA, Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, for short we will just call the DBA at my job Gozer. It fits, its vaguely amusing oh and according to Wikipedia Gozer is hebrew for "surgeon who performs circumcisions" which well makes it even more amusing even though pretty unlikely that it is true. It's not that I dislike Gozer it's just that Gozer is an adamant believer in doing nothing new, the fact that Gozer questions us at every turn can be good as it makes us check and double check what we are doing before we come talk to Gozer. However in the long run all it means is that we try to do as much as we can in code just so that we don't have to interact with Gozer because every time we do I'm pretty sure a software fairy dies.

Here is an example of an interaction with Gozer, today I had to run a bunch of updates to add security groups to for a client. This is a continuation of what happened last week when I finally realized just how "advanced" data replication is in Oracle. I have these four files that I needed to run, in one of the files there was two updates that combined equalled a little over 70,000 rows. Gozer's suggestion was that we just pull those larger updates out of the file and run them with replication turned off. I didn't really like that but truthfully one shouldn't argue with a sumerian God. Even so I brought up the suggestion that maybe Gozer the Gozerian should just turn off replication and then run my little script. This must have caused Gozer much uneasiness as Gozer then asked me not once but FOUR times if I was sure the script was correct and if I had tested it. The conversation went a lot like so:

[Once]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

[Twice]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

[Thrice]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

[Fourth time]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

After the fourth time I told Gozer just do whatever you feel most comfortable doing, which meant that we did it manually because in the scripture laid down by Gozer "Scripts can make mistakes but humans cannot." Dwell on that for awhile. So Gozer then copied three to four updates at a time and ran them in both databases, then verified that the row counts matched. The only thing that seemed more ludicrous was that Gozer thought Gozer was being careful and that keeping track of which updates had been run in Gozer's mind was much SAFER than running a script that had been tested in two other databases.

Remember "Scripts can make mistakes but humans cannot."

Samurai Showdown and Ghetto Hawks

At last tonight I have games to play on my Neo Geo AES system. AES? Yes AES see there was this company in the 90's that decided that they were going to provide the most perfect home arcade experience by making a console that used the EXACT SAME hardware that the arcade machines did. The only problem that they didn't seem to grasp was that not many people would be willing to pay $600 for the hardware and then another $200-$300 per game, being hardcore is one thing having no money is entirely another. Anyway three three weeks ago I received one of these home arcade consoles (Neo Geo AES system) from my friend jmglov who is now working for Amazon Japan in Tokyo. The reason why I wanted to acquire a Neo Geo AES is because playing Samurai Showdown on the Neo Geo CD is kind of like watching snail shit run up hill. I bought the Neo Geo CD system the last time I was in Japan and had heard the load times were terrible, but was thinking "It can't be slow enough to warrant spending over $100 for a AES system and then anywhere from $60-$400 per game".

Hearing that they are terrible however and witnessing that they are terrible is a whole nother bag of jalapenos. Terrible really doesn't describe it, I'm pretty sure I could pop in the CD load up the game select my character and while waiting for the level to load I could run around the block at LEAST twice, take a shower, brush me teeth and then get my ass handed to me by the computer only to start the whole process again. So I am now the proud owner of a Neo Geo AES system but until tonight did not have any games. To remedy that I browsed over to Ebay and purchased Samurai Showdown I and Samurai Showdown II (Samurai Spirits) and today I found them nestled between my storm door and my front door. These are the first AES cartridges I have ever seen and while I heard that they were large nothing could prepare me for how large they actually are. It's great the cartridge is so big it makes me look like a child holding them, it's kind of like SNK (Creater of the Neo Geo) decided that in order to help people justify the expense of the game they would need to make a cartridge that would look quite normal in the fist of Andre the Giant. To give this all a little more perspective I took a picture of the cartridge right next to the latest Wheel of Time book (700+ pages). I have to say so far I am a little underwhelmed but then again I think I built it up way to much especially since I really never played much Samurai Showdown when I was growing up, it HAS taken me many years to perfect my geek you see.

Oh and I nearly collapsed when I first plugged in the system and I couldn't seem to get an image to appear on the TV, it was only after a little fiddling that I realized that the front input of my TV seems to be broken..... grrr.

On another note the ghetto hawks realized that it's been awhile since they last flew over my neighborhood. Ghetto hawks? Yes ghetto hawks, I'm pretty sure meriam-webster defines ghetto hawks as police helicopters that can and will do continuous fly by's over just about any area for no apparent reason. Tonight they circled over and over my house for 10-15 minutes while it attempted to shine it's ghetto hawk eye about a block down on the next street over. Strangely enough I felt a sort comaraderie with my fellow neighbors as just about everyone was looking out their windows or standing in their front lawns trying to figure out why the ghetto hawk felt the need to buzz us at 11:30 pm.

Merry Belated Christmas

Another year has come and gone, and yeah another Christmas has been survived. I remember a time when I used to love Christmas, but I'm pretty sure now that was because I had to do nothing but receive one metric shit ton of presents. Fun stuff too, Lego's, those Tyco electric race cars, game consoles, Lego's, matchbox cars you know the good stuff. I think I've also decided that if I ever end of having a child be they boy or girl the mini me will be sure to get Lego's, lots of Lego's that Papa Smurf will be sure to help play with, err put together.

This year was slightly less hectic than previous years but I think that was only because we spent more time at my Dad's parents and then were able to rest for a couple of hours before going to the families house. So it was brunch at my Dad's parents, a quick visit for an hour and a half at SG's family gathering and then a final stop at my uncles for dinner. I ate so much I'm suprised I didn't bust a gut, let's see I had two tasty bloody mary's, egg caserole (egg's, sausage, cheese), scrambled eggs, four pieces of bacon, one sausage, one mini muffin, one piece of chocolate danish, a bunch of cheese cubes, some nuts, a Pepsi and a diet caffeine free coke for brunch. I am such a big fat glutonus fuck. Then for dinner I had a bunch of cheese log on sesame crackers, nuts, shrimp, a cosmopolitan, three glasses of wine, a slice of roast beast, brussels sprouts with prosciutto, potatoes, cranbery relish, a roll, a piece of cake and a couple cups of coffee. Did I mention that I was a giant glutonus fat fuck? Now that it's over I wish I could have had more time to enjoy it, but holidays like weddings seem to fly by before you realize it.

The one thing I will say about this year is that if I had my choice Christmas should always be on a Sunday as having Christmas Eve on a Saturday makes it really really easy to get prepared for Christmas Eve dinners and such. Also having the day after Christmas off to rest up was equally nice, I should remember that if I ever want to run for President. Along with getting rid of the open container law I would make it a law that Christmas and New Years would always fall on a Sunday, oh and four day weeks for everyone. Anyway Monday was spent resting up and working out like an anorexic sorority girl as I spent two hours at the gym on various gerbil machines. In my defense I did read a whole issue of Scuba Diver and finished the latest Wheel of Time book "Knife of Dreams." After that was a happy hour at Barley's Smokehouse to wish some good friends of mine congratulations on their engadgement and to partake in many fine brewed beverages.

Christmas Eve

I've been to church twice in one week and I'm pretty sure hell hasn't froze over... well just yet. I am starting to come to the conclusion about something, I actually kind of like church services. I don't much care for the sermon's though sometimes they can be really good. Really this isn't the fault of the pastor/preacher/monk/abbot/etc it's just that being a Godly person doesn't always make you a good public speaker. Hell when I was a kid we went to this other church where the Pastor was excellent, superb everyone loved him until he ran off with his secretary who happened to be another man's wife. Yeah, weird I know.

Anyway back to this church service thing, really I just find it rather peaceful and settling on my nerves, I don't think I'm going to go to church every week but I just might start going a little bit more than once every 2 or 3 years. Tonight the church I went to did by far one of the best versions of "O Holy Night," I'm not entirely sure what it sounds like normally but it was beautifully done. It started out with a single man singing in a baritone voice and as it went on more voices came in until it was a chorus fit to be called a heavenly host. Really it was quite nice, the sermon on the other hand was not so good.

It's been years since I've heard this particular pastor give a sermon however I always sort of found him preachy, and tonight wasn't any different. It really wasn't the preachiness that got me though, it was more the lack of direction and a centralized theme. The sermon went on for I'm not sure how long (LONG!) however I could sum it up for you like this, "People are drawn to Jesus because he walked with the common man, was an underdog" then the pastor jumped too "We all have a God shaped space in our hearts." I'm sure there might have been a connection there but I don't really get it. I did find it humorous when he was talking about this "God shapped space" because the pastor choose to quote some preacher from Africa in the 2nd century AD in how again we all have something in us that cannot be filled by anything other than God. That got me thinking too, why have a sermon talking about this, then quote people that talk about this to then come back and say that we were made to look for God, it seems like we could just get past that and talk about something else.

Anyway is it a statement about Christmas when most of the present's people get are clothes. I remember a time when clothes were like old curdled milk in my mouth when I received them, now they are preferred, ugh I really am getting old. Oh another thing I got to do tonight was carve a ham, actually "carved" is a stretch but I did cut some very nice sized uniform ham steaks. Which reminds me a friend of mine used to simmer a piece of ham in a skillet using a can of 7-Up, Cherry 7-Up or Beer. Beer I understood but the Cherry 7-Up really just hurt my brain.

Merry F***ing X-mas

Christmas can officially start, while going to the bank yesterday I accidentally took someone's parking spot. Just to make sure that no one thinks I was being an asshole let me explain the situation as I saw it. I (B) was going to the 5/3 branch on Henderson road heading west and was entering from the Henderson road entrance. There was someone in front of me, someone behind me oh and there was this giant green suburban (A) parked along the edge of the parking lot. It had been sitting there even before I entered the parking lot, and while it was sitting there an Excrusion swung around from the drive through and took a spot right in front of the suburban. As I was entereing the parking lot someone came out of the bank and got in a car and started backing up(C). As I had someone behind me and the car was already backing up and due to the fact that the car in front of me was already past the backing out car I figured I would wait and let the person continue backing out. After they did I not realizing the offense of what was about to happen choose to take the recently vacated spot. As I got out of my car I was greeted by a grimacing face full of rage staring out at me from the green suburbans passenger window. It was at this point I had found out that I had somehow taken her spot and she was wishing me a happy and joyous Christmas, or maybe it was something like this, "You just took my spot, Merry fucking christmas." So the Christmas season can officially begin, I have been cursed at by an enraged person who couldn't even wait long enough for me to tell her that I would move if she would like the spot so badly. I never got to say more than "Ma'am" before she pressed the peddle so far down I expected to see her foot rocket through the under carriage of her car and start trying to move her vehicle forward like Fred Flinstone.

And some people say that the Christmas spirit is dead.

The Keymaster

So as far as I can figure the company that I work must be at the center point of some crazy energies. You know, kind of like in Ghostbusters where there was the apartment building 55 Central Park West that Sigourney Weaver's character (Dana Barrett) lives in. The building itself was built by a leader of an apocalyptic cult designed to gather psycho-kinetic energy that would power a portal and would let Gozer and his minions through. Because of that it was the center of and the reason for all the paranormal activity in New York City (Wikipedia Ghostbusters) Anyway my office place is kind of like that but it's all weird energy not that bad psycho-kinetic energy that one would need to to open a portal for an ancient sumerian God to come through.

Yesterday I did something really crazy, I attempted to use the database and in doing so I brought it to it's knees, KNEES! See we use something Oracle calls "advanced data replication", and the only thing advanced about it is how much it likes to make you get down on your knees and admit who your Daddy is. If I had to guess I'd say it was probably first called "data replication" and it was only after they got the feature working that they realized what a cluster fuck it was they created and it was then that they added "advanced" to it. I mean I know if something is called "advanced" I tend to avoid it because all advanced says to me is, buckle down hombre and prepare yourself to become the pinata of whatever it is your trying to use. Just for reference Oracle defines advanced replication as so:

What is replication and why should one use it?

Replication is the process of creating and maintaining replica versions of database objects (e.g. tables) in a distributed database system.

Replication can improve performance and increase availability of applications because alternate data access options becomes available. For example, users can access a local database rather than a remote server to minimize network traffic. Furthermore, the application can continue to function if parts of the distributed database are down as replicas of the data might still accessible.

Anyway, apparently advanced replication is not advanced enough to replicate 500,000 records, I could go into why this is, but you know it really doesn't matter, really it just doesn't. I did my updates on Tuesday at about 1:45pm and by COB that day the updates still hadn't finished on the target database. Then on Wednesday our DBA stopped by and was like "Yeah those updates, still haven't finished" and then a little bit later she came by with a piece of paper showing what still had to be done on the target database and suprise suprise it didn't seem to have done any of them. So my pennance for yesterday was to watch and provide moral support as our DBA tried to kill all the stuck processes and then manually run the updates one at a time. I think if I had a choice I would have tried to bite my tongue off and then let myself drown on my own blood before going through that again.... oh wait I do have to do it again TOR!

Really that wasn't all that weird it, not enough to warrant this post, but I had to vent, really I did, if there was a Santa Claus that mofo would be bringing be coal because well I've just been quite an asshole. Anyway the weird stuff is when co-workers bring their significant others in and then the significant person hangs out for the next two hours. Sometimes the significant person goes and takes smoke breaks with this co-worker and other times the significant person just walks around with them as the co-worker converses with other co-workers. I mean doesn't that strike anyone as weird, or inappropriate. I mean I could understand bringing your kids in if school was closed and you couldn't get anyone to watch them, but a grown adult stopping by and staying at their significant others work place at least once a week is just silly.

Then there is mini-deuce's inability to understand that when you wear jeans that are a little to big that either underwear or a belt is required when you choose to sit backwards in a chair. Plumber crack never looked so jawsome. Oh then there is our DBA who tends to send out OOO (out of office) emails at 3pm when she isn't going to be in the next day, like two hours notice is enough time to get any work done that needed to be done the next day.

Maybe if I'm lucky Sigourney Weaver will knock on my door and ask if I am the key master, then again maybe I will just go home and cry myself to sleep.

North but still close to hell.

After having braved the malls for the last time in my attempt to purchase things that I'm sure the people I love will either return or never use.... actually I think most of the stuff I'm buying is wanted, alright so nevermind. I had to make a journey up to Hellaris where the sidewalk has never been heard of, being a pedestrian makes you feel much like a deer and SUV's burn gas like there's no tomorrow. I can't actually go to far into why I was up there, secret squirrel shit yo, a little James Bond need to know kind of thing, however what I do have to say is why would anyone like to live up in Polaris (henceforth renamed as Hellaris). It just sucks, I realize sucks is not terribly descriptive but let me sum it up: cookie cutter houses, nasty malls, traffic everywhere, chain stores, chain restaurants, chain bars, baby strollers the size of my Civic, oh and one of the largest churches in Columbus if not the nation has it's own highschool up there too, yup shit's Paul Bunyon big up there.

When I was in college I was apart of religious organization in college until I realized.... they were fucking crazy. Nothing like going to college to be a public speaking major, failing that major, running out of money and instead of doing something about it, praying that God will help your lazy ass. Usually God's help would show up in the form of someone's parents giving them money to help them pay for their bills. See it isn't the whole parent's paying for stuff, I am by no means the poster child of self reliance. My college tuition was paid for, my books were paid for and my rent was paid for throughout college. I admit it I was spoiled and am SO thankful that I didn't need to get school loans. It was just that they would never do anything, they would sit around and pray that God would show them the way, which in my mind was ludicrous. Take responsibility for your own damn life, do what you can and if some coincidence occurs (you get hired for a new and better job out of the blue, someone buys your house in the first day, etc, etc) then that could be the will of God.

Anyway back to what I was leading up to, the organization I was briefly apart of in college vaguely reminds me of the all growed up version of this church. This church is a megapolurch (megapolis church), I mean there's a K-12 grade school, a church, a retirement village, I mean come on it's a compound and when you start to enter the realm of compounds, and compounds my friend are never good.

Phone is ringin'... oh my god.

I'm sitting here on the couch again unable to sleep, I couldn't sleep last night, or the night before. On top of that I have the Beastie Boys song "Get It Together" stuck in my head. The only reason why I can figure out why the song is in my head is because I was listened to it this morning... err yesterday morning while working out.

As I cannot sleep I figured I would look up insomnia. Insomnia is defined as a

Chronic inability to fall asleep or remain asleep for an adequate length of time.

Apparently there are different three different degrees of insomnia to pair with this definition: transient, short-term and chronic. Transient is when you have insomnia for a few days at a time but get over it. Short-term is when you have insomnia for a few days at a time over a three week period and chronic is when you have insomnia a few days a week for more than a month. I don't think I have insomnia or if I do it isn't real serious as many of the definitions refer to people suffering from insomnia as having trouble staying on task while at work. I don't have said issues, I just think that for whatever reason, I blame Christmas, I can't seem to get to sleep because I keep thinking about too many random things at night and my mind never seems to calm down. So there went my theory that I might have insomnia, I am however trying some mint tea to see if it has soothing effects. I have also heard that the light generated from a computer screen can cause issues too, something about the light imitating natural day light and tricking your brain.

To end my little bits of random I learned tonight that a "blue moon" is when the moon reaches a full moon twice in the same month, also thanks to an episode of Farscape my wife found out that in theory a human can live up to 30 seconds in a vacuum. However if you ever find yourself having to leap from your exploading space ship to another space ship keep in mind to NOT hold your breath but to exhale slightly the whole time. If you are lucky you will have a case of the bends, and get to experience the feeling of moisture boiling off of your tongue, if you aren't so lucky well I guess you are space fish food.

Idiots on patrol.

So I attempted to do some Christmas shopping on my lunch break. Little did I realize the rage this would cause me, I'm starting to think that "Sad Faced Boy" was a bad name for this thing, because all I do is rage, RAGE!. So lets start, I choose to go the wrong way and had to double back through a parking lot... BOY that was a bad idea has some mofo just happened to be in front of me wanting to turn left. Well apparently they were doing some personal business after banking as they let an opportunity pass to turn left that would have allowed a double trailer semi to get out. RAGE!... . Then I went to an EBGames to see if they still had Pikmin 2 used, and they didn't, so I left then and while sitting at a light was nearly sideswipped by some ass in a ten year old buick unable to turn his car. I then had some lunch which was actually quite pleasent and then attempted to get my Mom a little Steif stuffed animal from Larsons Toys and Games. Well it just so happened that every single Mother, Grandmother, Aunt, Grandfather, Father, Brother, Brother second removed, Cousin, Nephew decided to shop at the convenient time of 1:45pm. I mean I should have known better, what could I possibly have expected shopping at a store in the middle of soccer mom USA. This again just made me notice another thing that causes my rage to boil, WHY IS NO ONE AT WORK during the day! I mean come on judging by the traffic I saw when I was unemployed three years ago apparently no one works, I mean NO ONE! I'm not just saying that I see Mothers and their children, I see college age people, older people, hippies, goth's, frat boys, business type people, nerds, dorks, and dogs for Christ's sake all driving around with apparently no job to go to. So this finally leads me to my last and final example of terrible driving, I was driving back to work heading south on Kenny. At one point Kenny merges in with Tremont Rd creating a "Y" where the top parts of the "Y" are Trement and Kenny and the bottom of the "Y" is Kenny. Kenny at this point is a two lane road with a left turn lane, some person in a mini-van choose to come to a stop in the straight lane in front of me as they apparently thought that the red light applied to their lane too. This is an altogether terrible idea as traffic on Kenny at this point can be going around 50mph, UGH.

No shirt, no shoes.

So here I was minding my own business at the Mall when I realize.... there's a man wearing jeans a puffy down jacket and no shirt standing in a store. I mean WTF, if you work for some large corporate store wouldn't you think that part of your corporate culture would say "shirts must be worn at work" or something, I mean come on you can't even enter many stores in the summertime without a shirt and shoes on. But then again what else should you expect from the same company that has had racisist law suits leveled at them. Wait, wait this is pointless Les Wexner owns Abercrombie just like he owns Limited, Mens Express, Express and half of Columbus. It's pointless because I like Mens Express clothes, so if I was really angry I'd stop shopping at Express too, but I can't... I'm sorry I just can't. The funny thing about this whole no shirt thing is that last weekend at the "Friends and Family" Gap event my wife and a friend of mine noticed as we walked past Abercrombie that there was not one but TWO shirtless men standing in the entrance of Abercrombie and one of them didn't even have the coat. They point this out and it pretty much went in one ear and out the other, I just assumed they were talking about the posters of the models. Now all I need to do is go to that new store American Apparel on High St. and see if the CEO has stopped by for a visit check on his employees, and rub one out. What you didn't know about that... HA HAAA you do now, don't thank me I know. Oh and if you get a chance call me SFB when you back that URL up and read the articles that Amy Blair posts about Craiglist every Friday.

Seasons Beatings!

I found out last night there is such a thing as womans roller derby in C-bus. Roller derby, you know two teams, blockers, someone that gets points if they pass some specific member on the oppossing team, violence, fighting, skanky outfits and punk rock grrls. Apparently there is this whole womans rollerderby thing that is sweeping the U.S. and apparently sometime in July of 2005 the Columbus Roller Girls were created by Scarlett Fury. Roller derby is one of those things that has tended to slip under my RADAR, something about watching Roller derby on T.V. seems less than interesting. Now throw in woman's roller derby, make it live, dressed in Holiday regalia, add a little Rob Zombie and my friend you have a recipe for disaster (Did I mention grrls?). Well actually the recipe would have been complete had the WOW Family Fun Center (roller arena) been able to serve PBR, why PBR, because it was the sponsor. Oh and did I mention the whole thing has a feeling of Wrestling (WWF)? Oh but it does all the skaters create their alter skating ego's which again adds another whole layer over pure awsomeness. That's right awsomeness, next I'm going to say inter-spectaculor just because I can... world be damned!

Apparently this event was an exhibition to show off roller derby in Columbus and to help choose the final members of the team based on their performance. There were two teams that they split into, the "Jingle Bells" dressed in X-mas colors and the "Ghouls" who were gothic and well ghoully. What made this whole experience so surreal beyond the fact that I was watching woman skate around the rink with names like "Barracuda", "Triptease", "Hot Wheels", was that the arena where we were at was one that I had not been too since I was in elementary school. See when I was a grade student we used to take our whole class to this place and skate in a time way back when where Jelly's were shoes, Swatch watches were cool and fluorescent colors were the palate of choice.

Back to this rollerderby thing, I don't really know the rules involved and may or may not learn however I do know that my team the "Ghouls" lost. Woe to the undead, it's all because of "Hot Wheels" fault she was the jammer for the "Jingle Bells" team and she owned everyone. Do a google search for the rules for roller derby, I however am just going to add the URL here as I am treating this blog as my temporary memory space. I guess the Ohio Roller Girls are going to be at the Columbus Expo center and this time beer will be served, oh yes there will be chaos. After they were done we were able to slap on some roller skates and roll around the arean ourselves, which just added to the weirdness, I mean I'm not a kid anymore, and I'm roller skating around this arena at 1:30am listening to covers of New Order songs.

On the booze front I did have a new liquor at the Christmas party we went to last night before going to roller derby. The stuff is called Aquavit and it's Danish and it's tasty, at least I think it was tasty. It reminded me of vodka with a nutty, earthy after taste which makes sense now that I read have read what is in it. Flavored with caraway seeds or cumin seed, and actually after having read the description seems a lot like vodka, with the whole distilled from potato/grain mash thing.

White Death in C-Bus

White death (snow) came to c-bus tonight and sadly I have to admit that I may not have been one of the brightest cats on the prowl. C-busians aren't as bad about snow as say Texans might be, however we are by no means the hardened veterans that the residents of say Maine are. Tonight I had the bright idea of going to work out, that's right I can totally psychoflex a spoon right now, really though the not so bright thing was going out and not fully brushing my car off. For whatever reason Honda can make a car that you can drive into the next apocalypse, come out unscathed and get 50+ mpg. When it comes to Civic's and power windows, let me tell that there is the kryptonite of Honda. My passenger side window rolls down so slow... wait who am I kidding it doesn't roll down anymore. It's not so much that it doesn't want to it, it wants too, it tries too, but it can't, it's just too old and tired (seriously I can hear the little mice grunting trying to roll it down). So I choose not to brush my car off and was treated to an experience much like a horse with blinders must feel like, except there isn't anyone on top of my car whipping me and telling me where to go. On top of that I choose to change lanes a couple of times in my 1 1/2 mile commute to the gym and that caused my car to nearly spin off the road and cause me to crap myself, twice. I then arrived at the gym only to be stared at by the attendents like "What in the hell is wrong with you, don't you know WHITE DEATH is abound". GAAAH!

Autobahn

Nothing to do with the autobahn but I was driving back from lunch today and I noticed that the person driving behind me looked like he had long womanly manicured nails. On top of that their hands were practically gilden with jewelery, thinking back on it I think I might have actually caught sight of the elusive midwestern suburbanite guido. I say elusive because when I think of guidos I think of the east coast/Jersey and we're quite a bit further than a stones throw from Guido-land, err I mean New Jersey. Funny thing about New Jersey, it has the motto "The Green Garden State" however it has 611 superfund sites which is almost the highest in the union, strange though that California has more.

As usual my education these days is done via the History channel and mainly via "Modern Marvels". The autobahn was originally planed out around 1913 and was considered in the 30's when the Nazi's came to power. It however wasn't until Hitler appeared on the politcial front that it was seriously worked considered. Hitler being Hitler felt that this was just another opportunity where Germany could do something to show off the greatness and superiority of Germany. What is vaguely amusing was that initially the Nazi party was against the concept of the autobahn as they felt it was a huge expenditure for something that only the very wealthy could enjoy (Have to own a car to enjoy it, duh), but as I said this was one of Hitlers little projects and well Hitler was crazy. When it was finally built the autobahn averaged one car per minute or if you would prefer another unit of measure 1,440 cars per day. I threw that car per day measurement in because I found a statistic that said the autobahn today handles around 46,700 vehicles per day.

To change this Hitler went and talked to Ferdinand Porsche to see if he could produce a car that could hold five people go 62mph and cost around 1000 Reich Marks. He went to Porsche because Porsche had been previously working on a small car prototype however he couldn't find anyone interested in helping him make them. With Hitler wanting these cars Porsche started to work on a more and more advanced version of his car however by the time he had a model ready to produce WWII broke out and they had to make amphibous (Schwimmwagen) and reglar jeep vehicles. The pictures I saw of these "jeeps" look a lot like VW things, which is interesting because I was always curious why the VW thing looked so well not german. Interestingly the final version of the car was to be called the KdF ("Kraft durch Freude" which meant "Strength through Joy.") Wagon which Porsche did not like as he was A. not a Nazi, and B. did not approve of Hitler. After the WWII England took over the Volkswagon factory, renamed it "Wolfsburg" (still named that today) and started pumping out the Kdf Wagon. By 1949 the English were done and wanted to turn the factory over to someone however the only people interested turned out to be the German government (Ford actually had a shot at running/owning it but thought it a money losing opportunity).

What does that have to do with the autobahn, well nothing so shut up. The initial specs of the autobahn are equally interesting, it's 27" thick compared to American highways of 12". The maximum grade (The elevation change of the road over 100 feet) on the autobahn is 4% (No more than 4 feet of elevation change over a 100 foot stretch) and was done so that you could more easily keep a constant speed even while going up hill. What else... well the concept of on and off ramps was invented for the autobahn, along with grass medians between oncoming traffic lanes oh and a land speed record was made in the mid 30's which topped out at 268mph!

The Germans for lack of a better term have quite Nazi like traffic laws. It is illegal to change lanes and pass on the right, it is illegal to make profane gestures (minimum of $500 ticket) and whether or not charges are pressed is determined by the receiver of the gesture. It is illegal to run out of gas, stop, tailgate on the autobahn and all cars in Germany are required to pass a test to make sure that the are working correctly. The best thing about all these laws is that the cost of your ticket is directly proportional to how much money you have, so someone wealthy might get a $20,000 tailgating ticket while someone with less money may walk away with only a $100 ticket.

Kegbot

Sure I imagine if I have read about this in Popular Science then it's been on the web for at least a year and no this isn't the Kegbot from the beer commercial. You know the one where the midget.... I mean vertically challenged individual is actually inside a metal box distributing beer. There's a point where the Kegbot is starring at the home owners wife in the shower and he says, oh nevermind it's not really important forget that Kegbot, forget it I said! Now leave it up to a software engineer to take something social and primordial and turn it into a scientific experience where one can measure and watch their own downward spiral into a vomit cloud haze of suffering. What were the previous leaps in beer drinking technology, well the kegerator comes to mind as the precursor to the Kegbot and of course there is the beer bong. But how can a beer bong possibly compare with this.... wait a second you can make a beer bong from a tube, and some plastic placemates tapped together, the cost is almost nothing and there's no computer cutting you off or controlling your beer intake. TAKE THAT CRUEL HAND OF SCIENCE!

All this aside it doesn't mean that I don't want to make one it's just pretty dorky. I however would like to see one more addition to the Kegbots software. I would like to have different visualization options by which you can track who is ahead in the race towards self destruction. Maybe there could be a race track around which glasses of beer with the pictures of the drinking individuals race, as people drop out they get little vomit icons over their heads and the fall over. Or maybe I can just drink until I hear the little voice in my head say "Now SFB you could stop drinking and sober up or you can keep drinking and most likely start insulting mild mannered rehabilitating hippies". Strangely it's always the war painted college student voice with his hands raised above his head letting out primordial screams that I tend to listen too (Note to self more interesting link to kegbot).This Kegbot thing does get me thinking that maybe I should start working on my own little projects again. These being a WOT (Wheel of Time) information tracking website where as people read and find bits of information about anything in the book they could enter it and link the information to what it is describing in a sort of Wikipedia like fashion. That way I won't have to re-read the tome that is the Wheel of Time every three our four years just to remember why so and so is talking to so and so. I have a database layout, I did it a few years ago I just have get down to actually coding it. Then there's the Christmas/Stocking exchange website that I would like to do for my family, I could use something that's already out there but then, what would be the fun in that, actually I think my SG mentioned that to me. And I'm pretty sure I replied with "What's the fun in that".

While I'm onto projects and inventions this beer belly blatter thing would be great for the Kentucky Derby since they don't allow you to bring your own booze in. The gadget itself is pretty damn cool, I mean it's perfect for a country that A. Does not allow open containers in public and B. Is full of overweight people. It doesn't however change the fact that I'm not entirely sure how I am supposed to feel about the person modeling it. He creeps me out just like the Brawny commercial with the announcer with the deep voice and the "brawny" guy in a plaid shirt cleaning up the kitchen, baking cakes and wiping icing off of dog's noses ICK! Don't get me wrong I'm all about cleaning up one's dog but the way the commercial did it it made me feel wrong and for that Brawny should be made to pay! Pay I said!

Poker in Marysville

There is just something about listening to Radiohead in cold weather. Just like there is just something about listening to (eeek cat smelling my hands) Ella Fitzgerald in cold weather, or drinking Scotch in cold weather. Don't ask me why it makes any difference but in my mind you CAN'T listen to Ella Fitzgerald in the summertime, it just doesn't work, just like you shouldn't drink Guiness on a hot day. It just doesn't appeal (eeeeek cat licking my arm), I'm not sure why but I bet if I was to mix Radiohead, or Ella Fitzgerald with a fine glass of Scotch I might just have one of the better two combinations of things in life. Why Radiohead? I really don't know, but winter time makes me feel nostalgic, and older Radiohead songs tend to make me feel nostalgic. Examples? Ok, what about "Black Star", "Nice Dream", "Fake Plastic Trees", or best yet "High and Dry", I mean come on "High and Dry" is just a great song, a really GREAT song. Then again coming from Mr. 80% (aka Sad Faced Boy) that doesn't mean all that much mainly because I don't really pay attention to song lyrics so much as I listen to the feeling or tone of a song. As I am a sentimental type of person (translated: girl), songs like "High and Dry" really speak to me from a tonal perspective, and I'm not talking about the musical tone of the song so much as I am talking about the tone as in the tone of your voice.

So back to poker in Marysville, normally I would view a half an hour drive out to the middle of nowhere to play some cards as borderline silly. Then again we aren't talking about poker in Marysville with one of my favorite families in Marysville. Let me backtrack here, for whatever reason my previous co-workers at my first job at Worldcom are the guys that I have this strange feeling I would stand by through thick and thin, and it has nothing to do with the miserable work experience at Worldcom that we all endured together. They are all just a great bunch of guys, politics, religion, aside I really just love to hang out with them. I can't really explain it, I mean some of them I have little or nothing in common with, hell half of them were football, wrestling (fill in the blank) stars in highschool while I was a band dork. Some of them are offensive right wing republicans that still support that silly monkey of a President, and you know what I STILL don't care. See because when we hang out we have a good time, not just a good time if I was to describe this like a youth pastor I'd say the communion we have together is singularly different. I wish I could describe or explain the connection I feel with a bunch of people that in my logical mind knows I have very little in common with. Maybe I don't need to and maybe all that need to say to sum it up is that they are my friends.

Back to this poker thing... we had a semi regular poker gathering tonight and it might just have been one of my more favorite poker evenings to date. It had nothing to do with me winning money, having ridiculous hands that required no thinking on my part (which was good in my drunken state). It was the environment of the whole thing, it was talking to my ex-coworkers wife, to his son and daughter, people that I haven't shared more than a dozen hours with over the past few years and even so the whole package together was satisfying. At one point we switched from your garden variety of poker games to a Texas Hold'em tournament and it was at this time where my ex-coworkers wife and his son joined in. For some reason the whole interaction with this ex-coworker of mine's family along with my ex-coworkers created a very enjoyable environment.

Did I mention there was enough boot leather Scotch (translated: Laphraoig) that went around to choke a small mule/elephant/chipmunk. I came with a full bottle of Laphraoig and believe me I left with less than a half a bottle and I'm pretty sure my host had about half of what was drank. The uninitiated Scotch drinkers of world may not realize what a hearty bottle of Scotch can do to the brain but let me make some comparisons. Laphraoig is kind of like a dark red wine, or a porter/stout beer (Guiness/Murpheys), except Laphraoig has peat moss smoke filtered through it. So it has all the nasty particulate matter that red wine or dark beer has but exponentially increased which equates to a nasty wicked hangover. The not so kind thing we were telling my ex-coworkers daughter was how she should wake her father up the next day to cause maxiumum pain. Evil to mention but if she actually does it man will it be funny.

BTW one of the pictures posted with all the blurry lights is me driving, should I have been doing that at 2am in the morning, well no but then again I really dig the blurry light photos.

Job quality.

So what would you do if you wrote a process that imported information from an older system to a newer system and you just found out it didn't work because you NEVER validated that it worked? Oh wait I know! Close your door and tape a note to it, that's right class dismissed.

Caws Pobi

Caws Pobi, Welsh Rabbit, Welsh Rarebit or if you would prefer it to be called in it's simplest form "Cheese on toast". I decided last night to make some rarebit out of the Moosewood cookbook, see I had made it I'd say about 4-5 years ago and while it was ok it wasn't nearly as good as my favorite quick food cream chipped beef on toast (aka: shit on a shingle). My wife shudders when I mention cream chipped beef on toast but then again that's my wife and she can't be blamed for her oddities (Where them blocks at?). So I decided last night was again a time to try the Welsh Rarebit but this time unstead of using cheep beer and cheep cheddar I used some quality ingredients. Nothing like using a good block of cheddar cheese and a fine bottle of Dog Fish Pale Ale to take a dish that I would have though should be cheap and make it worth a King's ransom, then again it really did taste good.

After dinner I was vaguely thinking about the origins of Rarebit and was curious if what I knew to be the case was actually true. The bit of information that I had heard about Rarebit was that it is a cheese sauce eaten first by the Welsh because they were either too poor, too stupid or too something to actually catch their own rabbit. I don't actually think the Welsh are stupid, just like I don't think that Polish people are stupid either (even though we do have all of those polish jokes that I remember from grade school), actually I think I remember something interesting about the Polish. Heh strange the way my mind works, I was pretty sure that they deciphered some German code right at the beginning of World War II, I could remember that they did this but what I forgot was that it was the "Enigma" code they broke. What does that have to do with anything, well nothing except that Polish people aren't stupid and I doubt very much that Welsh people were either, most likely just poor.

Strangely Wiki doesn't have too much to say about it other than yes indeed it was cheese on toast, and yes it was a slam against the Welsh oh and yes it has nothing to do with Rabbits other than it doesn't have any in it. Actually the best thing Wiki mentions about Rarebit is this:

In a society where most people could snare a rabbit for the cooking pot, a Welshman was considered by some people so hopelessly feckless that cheese melted with beer would have to substitute.

I mean come on there is just something wonderful about a sentence that uses the work "feckless", I mean I have no idea what it means but then again I really don't care. It sounds offensive, it feels offensive so damn it it MUST be offensive. As far as the history of rarebit goes I tend to like this site more. What I found most interesting about what I read is in reference to how difficult it would have been to prepare it when it was first made. When it was first prepared it would have been a long and involved process in part because to do rarebit you have to toast bread and toasting bread without a toaster my friend well... is hard. On top of that you then have to melt the cheese and poor it over the bread and somehow do all this while keeping it warm (without a single electric range to be found). Come to think of it, cooking anything sounded hard a few hundred years ago. The site went on to talk about how it was prepared using a device called a salamander which was pretty much like an anitique fireside skillet. Me being me and liking history I found another reference to Rarebit that mentioned a little bit about the history though I have to admit the pictures of Rarebit on the site make it look less than appealing. Our English friend mentions that around 1547 an Englishman (Londoner to be exact) named Andrew Boorde was unable to pronounce Caws Pobi correctly. That along with his inability to pronounce the Welsh language (something no one should be at fault for), and his dislike of the Welsh (hated actually) led him to call Caws Pobi "cause babe". In her opinion it was most likely him that if Caws Pobi would have first been called rarebit.

All that history aside if you are going to make it, buy some decent cheddar, don't use a lager or a pilsner (translated: Budweiser, Miller, Bud Light, Miller Light, Coors, etc, etc) use a tasty Ale. I say use a tasty ale because rarebit is nothing but beer and cheese and if your beer stinks and your cheese stinks well then your rarebit will stink. Oh and throw caution (caution I say) to the wind and do KRAZY things like double the amount of horseradish, add some parika and double the cayene. Why? Because I'm KRAZY with 'K'.