Winter at last

The Good News: It's so cold in our house that we can pretty much just leave food out with no ill effect. Which is actually doubly good, since we were doing that sort of thing before anyway.

The Bad News: see 'The Good News.'

PSA: Traffic Circles, Revisited

A while back I published the rules to bicycle traffic circles. I'm sure somebody else has published them too, like maybe DMV or the California Penal Code, but I figured as a public service I would bring the guidelines to my own enormous readership. It seems, however, that my instructions may have been a bit vague, and people keep nearly running over me from unexpected directions. Therefore, I offer the following, more specific advice:

If you are hellbent on demonstrating your free spirit through the use of some sort of non-bike transportation (razor scooter, skateboard, lawn mower, golf cart, bizarre snakeboard thing, UPS truck...) you are actually not exempt from the rules that govern bikes. Maybe technically you are, I haven't looked it up, but going backwards through the circle will still result in a pileup and subsequent beatdown at the hands of angry kickstand-having mofos. In fact, you should probably be more inclined to obey, since of the forms of transportation listed only the razor scooter and golf cart are known to have brakes. I make no apologies to the UPS truck here.

The pack attitude has its advantages, namely safety around predators and aerodynamics. Neither would hopefully apply on the way to grab a tofurkey burger after class. In this context, packs tend to result in congestion and domino crashes. They do, however, allow for excellent networking before the crash and something to talk about later.

Pedestrians: You can almost do whatever the hell you please. I'm going to step down to a slightly lower soapbox and give you some reign here. All I ask is that when you're walking through a busy intersection, you at least act like you're in a busy intersection. I know that you think it looks mega chic to ignore your surroundings, but it's gonna bang up your cool real bad when I deliver you this flying head-butt I've been working on.

VOTE or.....else?

As of right now the polls are still open in most of the country, and we have yet to see who the big winners are. But I can already tell you who lost big this election day: P. Diddy. Four years ago he lead the pathetic charge to get people to the polls, and tonight people are voting in record numbers in spite of his absence. Apparently all we needed were an additional battlefront, a failing economy, a candidate with some personality, and to lose the words "or die" from the slogan.

Story Time

Ok, it is seldom that anything that happens to me gets directly retold on this here internet. But this one is too much to keep to myself.

Monday night my roommates came home late from a bar where they'd been celebrating somebody's birthday. They brought back a friend, let's call him "Archie." Archie was going to crash on our awesome denim couch. Fair enough. G'night guys.

By 1:30am everybody was sacked out in their respective sacks, and I wandered into the bathroom to take out my contacts. While I was doing this I heard somebody rustling around in the kitchen, and what sounded like the oven door being opened and then water running. Ok, I know everybody is already down for the night. Who is baking?

A quick investigation was met with Archie, peeing into our oven. I checked that sentence, it came out like it was supposed to. He was peeing into our oven. The only words I could find were "What the hell?" and I haven't come up with anything better in the days since. The rest of the evening was spent barricaded in my room with my toothbrush and other valuables. When there's a drunk guy in your house who can still walk but can't differentiate between a toilet and major appliances, you don't take that sort of chance.

Hooligans

Dear sir, who stomped down my Obama '08 lawn sign on Saturday night:

Well done. The result of your actions is that I will go get another lawn sign and my candidate's campaign will have another $5 in its treasury. Thbthbthb.

Love,
Not redneck enough to pull that sort of shit, but redneck enough to consider booby trapping lawn sign v2.

PSA: Traffic Circles

It appears that people are once again in need of my services. Unfortunately, those people are probably not the ones reading this. Oh well, the better to amuse me during the coffee break, I suppose.

--

Egads, man, a traffic circle of +4 confusion doth approach! What to do?
There are basically two states of being regarding traffic circles: In the circle and not in the circle. Whenever you change from one state to the other, you are merging. Merge, fool. Do not plunge. Do not dart. Do not bisect. Neither shalt thou count two whilst chatting with your friend, excepting that thou then proceedeth your arse out of the intersection.

Simple? Done.

Return of the List: Things Not to Cheap Out On

Pretty self-explanatory. Don't cut corners on the following items, since if you need them you'd really like them to *work*

Parachutes
Bullet-proof vests
Condoms
Survival knives/blankets/kits
Airbags
Flashback Arrestors
5-second fuses
Fire extinguishers
Deadbolts
Various Self-defense items
Blessed Folders


---
list in progress! help!

Filler. Creepy Filler.

Yeah, it's been a while. Here, watch this and wonder what the hell with me. Also, I just lost the game.

Suck Electricity!

No, not like running the a/c with the window open kind of suck electricity. Think "eat lead, sucka!"

We have a fly problem at the new place. We have dogs, but we're pretty good about scooping the poop, and that doesn't seem to be the root of the problem in any case. There are just a ton of those bastards on the lawn, windows, walls, lights, and anything else handy at any given moment. The options for dealing with this are limited, partly due to having dogs and not wanting to poison them. So, I opted for a fly trap, the kind that's sort of like a wasp trap where they fly in and can't fly out. Florida, I think they call it. badum ching!

The fly trap had some pretty surprising results, and also made me realize just how big this fly problem is. I'll spare you the detailed images (partly because my mom said I would be labeled 'terminally weird' if I put said images on the internet. Yes, I still hang out with my mom. Get over it.) but here is the trap:
Now, imagine that filled top to bottom with fly bodies. I'm guessing there are a couple thousand in there, and it took about a week and a half to fill. I don't even know what to do with the trap, I think I might burn it or send it into space. Currently there are maggots making their way to the top, and I don't care to speculate too deeply about if they were laid or just busted out. Anyway, you should come visit my bag of flies, and probably take it home with you.

Clearly the fly trap is way goddam effective. yeesh. But there are some downsides...is it attracting the neighbor's flies too? And more importantly, the 'bait' in the trap has a smell to it that reminds me of a rotting animal. Well, at this point it could actually be that, since there are thousands of fly bodies in there. But the point is that it smelled that way from day one.

Yesterday I got paid, and today I bought an electric bug-zapper lamp thing. So far there have been a few gratifying pops, and possibly some of me flinging insect insults at, um, bugs. Hey, you'd join me if you had 20 bites on you right now and some damn thing buzzing around your ears.

Filler

While I gather my thoughts, I give you: this guy.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Double Click

When you think about it, it's no wonder my grandparents can't get the hang of this. Here are the rules to double clicking vs single clicking, as near as I can explain them.

If it's a program on the start menu, single click.
If it's a file or folder, such as something in the my computer display, single click to get basic information, but double click to open the file or folder.
If it's a program but you got to it through my computer or explorer, double click to open/run.
If it's a file that you got to using the Internet, including Internet Explorer, single click to run, save, or open.
If it's an icon on the desktop, double click to run.
If it's a button within a program, single click.
If it's an option within a program (file, edit, view, etc...) single click and keep the mouse in the right neighborhood or all hell will break loose. Single clicks from here on out.

As if it weren't confusing enough, sometimes programs take a while to start. If you click twice when a single click was required, it will start twice. If you click once and double click was the ticket, odds are you'll end up sitting there like a doof waiting for your idle computer to "finish thinking." If you try to drag and drop a single click item, you may suffer actual physical harm.

NY: Second First Impressions.

Well, I'm here, and I am reminded of many things. Here are some of them.

-People still use The Club? I did not realize this.
-It is plenty possible for words to be piercingly loud and completely unintelligible at once. Subway stop call outs, for instance.
-For some reason, "No Standing" does not refer to actual standing, and these signs are NOT there to prevent the masses from loitering in the street and gumming up the works.
-It is super muggy and sticky here. Like, the kind of sticky where I can't figure out when it would make sense to shower. I could shower in the morning, but as soon as I step out the door it's going to be all wasted anyway. I could shower at night, but I'm about to sleep and I'm just going to wake up gross. I could shower in the afternoon, but that'd be stupid. So, probably I'll just wait until somebody complains about the smell.

This Week: Nothing!

Headed to NY for a vacation week, which may result in no posts or may result in a ton of posts, depending on the combination of interesting shit/busy factor. I'd call it a blog sabbatical, but that would imply regular posts that I'm taking a break from. So, business as usual, as far as the blog thing goes. If you're trying to get hold of me to hang out.....well shit, where have you been all year and why are you only trying to hang out now?

Try shaking it, does that help?

I seldom just plain link out, but this made me really happy.

A Questionable Decision

I'm not trying to knock on religion in general here, but it seems to me that if people are going to argue in favor of the intelligent design thing, they should have to explain why birds are unable to stop compulsively crapping every 15 minutes. Better yet they should have to explain it to my arm, which has its own counter bird-crap story to tell as of today.

The big clear thing in front

of your car is for looking out of. Its really hot now and people have started using those metallic shade things in their parked cars to help keep the temperature down. Apparently it's even so hot that people are starting to think that driving around with the shade still deployed is a capital idea. Anyhow, I actually witnessed this. And lived.



"Well, you should be aware of the cars, and you should know that many of them are driven by people so stupid they can barely operate them..." -Bikesnob

Taking the Lane - a theory

If you as a cyclist find yourself on a multi-lane road with no suitable shoulder or bike path to ride in, good sense and self-preservation demand that you "take the lane," which is basically to own the rightmost lane and ride in the center of it. The law backs this up, in fact. While it is tempting to ride as far to the side as you can, this risks getting doored, and more importantly, encourages slack-jawed fools to try to wedge by you in the same lane. And you don't really trust your life to the spatial judgment of slack-jawed fools, do you?

In the downtown area, essentially all of the streets without bike lanes are one-way, three lanes, 25mph posted limit. Assuming drivers keep it under thirty, the speed differential between a motorist and a cyclist (the kind with the confidence to ride in traffic) shouldn't really be all that great. If you're in a hurry, change into one of the other two lanes and go around. If there's so much traffic that it's actually a pain to change lanes, the cyclist is probably going to outpace the traffic anyhow.

So easy in practice, yet so seldom done. Why? Because driving, at least in a non grand-prix sense, is a lazy activity which seldom requires any exertion on the part of the operator. Looking left and rotating the wheel that you're already holding slightly is cake. There's no way that if you sat a test subject in a laboratory chair, put a wheel in front of them, and asked them to perform this task, they'd ever in a million years rate it as difficult. But when a person possesses some sense of entitlement that says they shouldn't be required to work at all aside from sitting in a padded chair and moving a foot once in a while, turning your head to check and see where the next gap in traffic is becomes this huge thing. It's like settling in to watch a movie and then being asked to actually get up and walk to the television to adjust the volume. Walking 8 feet is no big thing, but now you're all grumpy. Look how many people can't be bothered to use turn signals. You know I'm right.

Stripped!

We've all seen the bike carcass still partly locked up to a rack somewhere but minus a wheel or the seat or something. Sure, it sucks when it happens, but it's common enough that you don't normally take a second glance when you walk by a half-stolen bike. Usually, though, you only see bikes missing parts that are easy to pull in a few seconds, often without tools. Quick release seatpost clamps and wheel skewers are great for quick adjustments, but they all but gift-wrap the parts for thieves. And as if things weren't easy enough to steal, incompetent lock usage factors in. Way too prominently, I might add.


I came across a few carcasses that gave me pause the other day. These things hadn't just been mugged for a few parts, they'd been picked completely clean. And of course, all three were located outside the engineering buildings. Beware the kids with wrenches, for they may actually know how to steal your front dérailleur and put it to use.

Exhibit A: stolen bits include the usual seatpost and rear wheel, plus the rear derailleur and brake, the chain, and the entire front end from the stem forward. AND this one had two different locks on it.

Exhibit B: We might as well count what's left of this one. Locked wheel and frame, seat and seatpost, stem, headset, fork, bottom bracket, lock holder, and a rock. Both derailleurs are gone, shifters are awol, brakes peaced out, handlebars invisible, even the chain is absent. At least somebody at the bike auction will convert this into one major eyesore of a fixed gear.

Exhibit C doesn't look quite as crud-coverd as Exhibit B, but it's just as thoroughly picked. Somebody bothered to take the stem and the rear brake as well as the seatpost and surprsingly the chain (again!). As with Exhibit B, cranks are gone too, which is no mean feat. Hah. feat. Bike.

Just to check my 'engineers are the piranhas of bike theft' hypothesis, I went for a ride around campus. Checked outside the quad, the lunch place, the bookstore, both gyms, some assorted dorms, and most of the academic buildings on campus. Saw probably several thousand bikes, and the award for cleanest picked still goes to Engineering, hands down. The only semi-competition was found outside the Life Sciences building, where somebody evidently stole the tube and tire from a completely unlocked POS mountain bike but left everything else. I don't know how to interpret that at all. Whatever, my engineering guys are making me proud.

Stairs

It bugs me a little bit when a staircase has an odd number of stairs, particularly when I'm taking them in twos. What really gets me, though, is having a staircase with a landing area in the middle and an even number of steps on one section and an odd number on the next. That's ankle-breaking territory. When the revolution comes houses will only be built in integer stair quanta.

Jerseys

I should probably point out that mostly I mean while on an actual field



I figure it becomes funny again right around semi-pro.

I am some sort of cycling beast!

...and so is anyone else, with a 14:1 mechanical advantage.

I busted my bottom bracket bearing cage yesterday. Here it is in all its semi-catastrophic failure:

The Evils of the Kickstand

Ah, beautiful order.


So you have a kickstand on your fancy little bicycle, and that's cool. Lets you prop up the bike and all. The thing is, it lets your prop it up just about anywhere, free standing. Why would you want to do that? Bikes locked to just themselves get stolen, friend. The 1950's phoned up, and they sound pissed. I think they want their trust in their fellow man back.

More importantly, sometimes people don't know what's good for them. Or maybe it's that they don't know what's good for other people. Or more likely, they're just being inconsiderate. The second problem with being able to deploy a kickstand is that people tend to leave their bikes right smack in the middle of things and clog up the works. Bike racks (and I work on a biking campus, there are thousands and thousands of bike racks) are formed in nice little lines that would please the fire marshal if ever there were some sort of crazy outdoor bicycle parking fire. Even if there are no racks handy, there's nothing wrong with leaning your bike up against a wall or a tree. Not only do you eliminate 2 lbs of unnecessary metal from your ride, but leaning your bike against existing objects helps keep it out of major pathways.

This all sounds very authoritarian, I'm sure. However, people have proved to me time and again that they can't be trusted to do it right, at least not on this score. Here are a few instances, just in the space near my office:



Nice choice of location jacktard.


200 bikes, and 2 idiots blocking access to all of them.

.
This is about as thoroughly in the middle of nowhere as it gets.

My first solution to this was to disallow the use of kickstands on campus, or at least in areas where there are available bike racks. This is pretty much everywhere, as it turns out. Alternatively, we could treat the symptom rather than the ability to park stupidly by just removing bikes parked in dumb areas. This requires a lot more case-by-case enforcement, though. There's also that pesky issue of policing people's personal property when they aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, ie saying you can't have a kickstand when in fact you are one of the many responsible bike parkers around.

Fair enough, policy isn't really my style anyway. I'm much more of a vigilante justice kind of kid. And I know how to use JB-kwik. Henceforth, repeat offenders will have their kickstands welded into the 'up' position, or will be simply relocated to better commune with the local flora depending on how I am feeling and how well prepared I am.

Guilty!

Here you go, Vivas

Fender Update

In theory we have a few months for potential rain left, but right now skies are looking pretty damn clear and aside from kicking up the inevitable allergy-induced snot pools, it looks like bike fenders may be obsolete for the season. Since the PSA I've spotted several more bikes worthy of the stupid fender category. I guess my single-digit readership isn't helping spread the word like I'd hoped. Oh well, I tried.

No.

Wrong again. What the hell is the point of this?

Sigh...

Big Fish in the Puddle

Sandbagging happens. People like to win. I don't need it explained to me, it's fun to be top dog, yada yada. What I don't understand is taking the win day after day without ever accepting a real challenge. Clearly I am getting at something here.

I play on a D league softball team. D is the lowest division, and somewhere between few and none of us know what we're doing. Remember how in T-ball there were more base advances due to overthrows than base hits? Yeah, that's us. Sometimes we hit happy hour at the pizza place before or after the game, and by and large nobody gets too down about playing poorly. Like I said, D league recreational slow-pitch softball.

Since we started playing last year, there has been a team in our league who just beats everybody, hands down. Living shit kicked out, pride stepped on, bases run. Today they beat us 30+ to 1.

Dear other team, what are you doing in D league? There are plenty of other divisions that play at the same field on the same day. C, B, and A leagues to name a few. I'm not sure exactly how competitive they are but most notably they are not the lowest possible league. Is it fun showing up and crushing the teams that came to enjoy themselves and play ball despite not having played in college? Is it actually necessary to wear batting gloves and that thing on your forearm to prevent tennis elbow? Must you talk shit to our pitcher if you don't like the way he's tossing it? Fuck off, you didn't even call small baby bouncies.

I mean fuck. The world has competitive people in it, but what we're talking about here is not competition. Competition is trying hard and beating somebody who put up a fight. This is the point where I bring up the oft-used paintball parallel. My home field is chill as hell. We go out and miss the first game while talking to the field owners and shoot our friends and taunt them if we know them well enough and then break for lunch. Some days the usual suspects are few and the new guys are many. If we wanted we could bring out our super tournament guns and put some serious hurt down. The problem is that we have this aversion against being complete douchebags (sandanas and obsession with shooting games aside). The regulars all gun down to handicap themselves and make it more interesting, both for the new guys and for the guys who have been playing for a decade. And sometimes the new guys shoot me all day, and hey, thems the lumps. Gonna play guns you might get shot


Ok, I'm going to get off this particular soapbox now....that other team is still a pile of stupid heads, though.

Mustache March

One of my friends does this thing - Mustache March. It's actually pretty self explanatory. In the month of March you grow out the hair on your upper lip. For some reason I find myself participating. This proposition is particularly exciting, or perhaps terrible, because I am more or less incapable of growing a proper mustache. Most of the time this doesn't end up mattering much since I am not really mustache inclined. But dammit, it's mustache march and we've got to do something!

Mustache watch, day 3: Stache is well on the way to skeevy. I don't have anything growing in the center, so really what we have is two little stachelets. It is also quite sparse. I expect to become more and more hermit like as the month goes on and I can't stand to be seen in public.

I've actually taken carrying a Bic razor in my bag. Just in case I can't stand it and the stache needs to be taken care of right freakin now. I'm already flirting with that point. Just as well, because with this abomination on my face I'm not flirting with anything else.

Mustache puzzler of the day: There is a style of bicycle handlebar called a "mustache handlebar," named for its resemblance to the facial adornment. There is also a type of mustache called a handlebar. Wrap your mind around that time bomb!

Restoring my faith in youtube

If you search "paintball" on youtube you get 42,200 results. 42,000 of them are of some kid demonstrating his setup and how fast it can shoot and how cool the green accents he put on there look. I don't know what possessed me to click on a link to "Autococker 15bps (balls per second)," but I did. Just a glutton for punishment I guess. This time, however, I struck gold.

PSA - Bike Fenders

Well this space is fast becoming a documentary of me acting like a know-it-all snob, but there are some things I just can't stand. People misusing things in stupid and less effective ways is chief among them.

This is your bike fender. You spent $15 on it so you don't end up with the freshman racing stripe painted on your ass when there are puddles on the ground. Congratulations, I applaud your purchase, and your resolve (or lack of automobile) that keeps you riding through inclement weather. Now let's go over how to use this thing:

Your back tire is kicking up mud and water. You would like it to not hit you in the back. You install a 3 inch wide piece of plastic between you and the tire. The tire is 2 inches wide and your back is 14 inches. Well, my back is, and I don't really care how muddy you get.

If you place the 3" fender right next to your back, all you've done is protect a 3" wide strip of your back, leaving an impressive 11" inches of you spattered in mud and leaving people behind you wondering who that skunk kid is. This would classify as a poor use of 15 bones, in my book.

On the other hand, lets say you put the fender closer to the tire instead of close to you. The downside to this is that you no longer look like you're sporting a hefty radio antenna on your ride. The upside is that mud isn't going to hit you. period. Here, I drew a diagram. It's all about cutting down the angle that mud can fly off the tire at.

Granted, the majority of crap will fly off the tire in the same plane as the wheel, since the wheel is spinning on a fixed horizontal axis. Go search centripetal force on wikipedia, I don't feel the need to explain it. However, there are other forces at play here, and unless your fender is placed in an idiot-proof spot, you will be branded an idiot. Until you wash your clothes, at least.

Ok, that was a lot of words. Now here are a lot of pretty pictures for you visual learners:

Good Fender

OK Fender

Overkill Fender

Stupid Fender

What happened, couldn't kick down for an entire fender?


I just plain don't get this one. Maybe some sort of winglet for aerodynamic stabilization?

Dear Friends....

If I get shot in the grill and end up with orange paint up my nose, it is your responsibility to tell me so when we get back to the cars. It was there for four hours and nobody said anything. It actually dried during that time. Thanks guys.

-me

PSA - your fancy umbrella

The stormy season is obviously upon us, and greets us with the open arms that are rain and wind. Fortunately us humans are a handy bunch, and we came up with these brilliant little tarps on a stick to keep the rain off of us. Then we way overthought the problem and figured out how to make our tarps break regularly.

I'm not here to judge how your umbrella looks. I'm not saying that a giant watermelon looking thing above your head won't get you hit, maybe by me, maybe by a total stranger, who's to say. But more than that, I'm saying nobody will need to hit you when your rig collapses and pokes you in the eye.

Take your basic umbrella. It's a 3 foot long stick with folding rods, and nylon stretched between them. A little collar on the umbrella neck slides toward the point and pushes the main vanes out using smaller little connecting arms. It took three lines to describe that, and they get more complicated from there. You have the ones that telescope, you have the ones that telescope and are spring-loaded (mostly awesome for poking your friends with minimal effort. Otherwise not that novel), you have the compact folding ones that bend in three places per vane, and then you have the super compact ones that either bend 21 times or are so small when open that you get to pick which shoulder you'd like to be dry.

Basically my gripe is this: unnecessarily complicated things are way more prone to breakage. We could probably even go back a step - things with lots of moving parts made of stamped and folded metal to questionable tolerances and of unknown material and origin are prone to breakage. The more parts, the greater the chance that you're umbrella is going to be doing its best imitation of a drawer of forks after an earthquake (and we all know what that looks like, sure...). I mean, the umbrella-frame antenna in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure didn't even last, and they had the knowledge and budget of the entire future world backing them.

The strongest thing I could dream up is basically a rigid, permanently open umbrella with maybe a rigid outer ring and some tension cables leading from the vanes to the stem to keep it from flipping inside out. Practicality, however, rears its ugly head. For those of you who actually want to carry an umbrella around, get the biggest thing you'll actually carry. Generally bigger = fewer folding parts. If you don't want the rigid-pole old-school kind, see if you'd haul a one foot long semi-compact. If you get caught with a busted umbrella that folds down to 4 inches, somebody might telescope it out and club you with it. Maybe me, maybe a total stranger, who's to say?

PSA: WD-40

In the spirit of the holidays, I bring you this PSA regarding WD-40.

"There are only two tools you need. Duct tape and WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, WD-40."

This has been bugging me lately. Maybe its because its the time of year when people feel obliged to buy gifts for, among others, the rough and tumble manly men who adhere strictly to the duct tape and WD-40 regimen. (adhere!) Don't get me wrong, duct tape and WD-40 are both terrific in their own rights. As far as I'm concerned WD-40 is the master of its game for what it's supposed to do. The trouble starts when people start declaring it universally helpful and applying it where it shouldn't be used. At this point you have a pile of guys thinking they've got it under control, maybe grunting a bit, and ultimately using a terrific invention to break shit further. For shame.

Let’s start at the start. WD-40 stands for “water displacement attempt number 40.” Forty was just the time that it happened to work. The job of WD-40 is to get rid of water. Along with this goes getting rid of rust and gunk, as well as preventing the same. If properly used it’s slick as hell. When it comes to these tasks, you’ve got the magic bullet. And it smells pretty good.

What WD-40 isn’t is a long lasting all-purpose lubricant. For that, you want grease, oil, graphite, Teflon, something not this. The thing about WD-40 is that it doesn’t really have staying power. It dries up, blows off, runs away, I have no idea what it’s actually doing, but after a while it just ain’t there no mo. The other (and significantly worse) thing about WD-40 is that it eats petroleum based things like some kinds of plastic and rubber. Like I said, it’s a bit of a solvent and it kills water. It’s not really meant to grease everything under the sun, tough guy. So before you douse your [whatever] with the yellow and blue can, remember that in two days your orings, seals, and plastic bushings may have turned to gum.

So what to do...how about this: If you own a hammer, a pipe wrench, and a tape measure and try to get everything done using only those tools, go ahead and WD-40 this hell out of everything. It's not really going to make it worse. If you own calipers, torx wrenches, a torque wrench, or gaskets of any sort, consult the goddam manual.

Gratuitous video of guy smashing WD-40 can:

2008: Resolutions

Usually around this time of year I try to figure out what I resolved to do last year and reflect upon how quickly I not only failed to do so, but completely forgot what I resolved. 2007 was different. I don't think I even got around to resolving anything. That pretty much set the tone for the year.

2008 has a resolution, at least. I figured everybody's doing it, might as well. The thing is, all I could come up with was "Get to it." Feeling pretty good about it though- if by this time next year, I can look back and say, "Man, 2008. I really got to it." ...well yeah, that'd be cool.

...aaand we're back

After a not-very-well-earned sabbatical, we now return you to your very nearly regularly scheduled attempts at humor and insight. Sorry.

The christmas season came and went. The season kicked off as usual, with me and my dad getting into the holiday spirit by swearing a lot. I feel no remorse about this - there's always something wrong with the fucking christmas lights. You get all the way done and discover that one of the strings died while you were putting it up. You take that one down and replace it with another string containing an equal number of lights, only to find that this string is 3 feet shorter than the last. I will never understand why 70 lights at 4 inch spacing does not consistently result in 280 inches. Then you accordion everything downstream of that over 3 feet to match, and you end up not making it around the last window. So you add another string, and now you have an extra 20 feet of lights that you have to hide in the bushes. This cycle would go on and on forever without a) better planning or b) an eventual "eh, that's good enough" attitude. Guess which we usually end up on. Once I achieve this frame of mind, I usually have about three-and-a-half weeks to let it fester before last minute panic forces me to shop for gifts. If the mall is crowded, you're all getting extension cords.

At the moment it's storming like a righteous mofo. Blowing so hard that whole trees are coming uprooted! Actually it's kind of awesome. If the weather is going to be crappy, it might as well do it in style. Get interesting for a bit, then get done so we can go outside and have a picnic or something. Maybe not quite Katrina interesting, but there are falling sticks to dodge and random crap strewn in designated no strewing places. Why yes, that is a SodexHo food cart in the hedge. Thank you for noticing.