Posts tagged as fragments
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- Friday, January 20, 2012:
Friday Fragments as the lawyers say, the hilarity is in suing ⋄ Other than a complete lack of stickable snow, 2012 has been pretty good so far. The weather has impressed no one, least of all Booty, but at least no one I know has been stabbed, shot, or killed in a tragic blimp accident. ⋄ Unlike most years, my mental year tracker immediately rolled over to 2012, and I have yet to accidentally write 2011 on any checks or documents. However, I can only be good at a small number of things at any given time, so this is balanced out by the fact that I consistently have to think to remember whether I'm 32 or 31. ⋄ Five years ago in 2007, I was just coming to the end of a three... - Friday, January 06, 2012:
Friday Fragments even 2012 needs some fragments ⋄ Happy New Year! With six days of the new year under my belt, I can now add "living in 2012" on my resumé -- it's at least as much experience as everyone else has, and this is how most people grow their resumés. ⋄ Our original New Years plans involved a quick trip down to Charlotte to see an old friend of Rebecca's. However, as we were in the middle of packing on Friday morning, Booty decided to make life more extreme with a urinary tract infection. Everything is more extreme with bloody pee. ⋄ Booty is doing much better now after antibiotics, and we were able to invent alternative New Years plans that kept us closer ... - Friday, December 02, 2011:
Friday Fragments like tiny moles of insubordination, burrowing deep into your brain ♠ Wasabi is my favourite spicy condiment because it shows up, stays around just long enough to impress, and departs without any lingering spiciness. More things in life should adhere to the wasabi principle (also sometimes called the one-night stand principle), including buffalo wing sauce, Harry Potter movies, and election season. ♠ We had sushi from Wegmanns on Tuesday night. Comparatively speaking on the "crappy sushi you can eat in the comfort of your own home" scale, Wegmanns sushi is more expensive and has more variety than what you would get at Trader Joe's or Safeway, but lacks the pure economic punch of Cos... - Friday, November 04, 2011:
Friday Fragments the most exciting thing on the way to Baltimore is Scaggsville function randomChar(string) { var i = Math.floor(Math.random() * string.length); return (string.charAt(i)); } function randomLetterUp() { return (randomChar("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")); } function randomLetterDown() { return (randomChar("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")); } function randomNumber() { return (randomChar("1234567890")); } function randomPunctuation() { return (randomChar("!?@#$")); } function randomPassword() { return (randomLetterUp() + randomLetterDown() + randomLetterDown() + randomLetterDown() + randomNumber() + randomNumber() + randomPunctuation()); } ♠ The... - Friday, October 07, 2011:
Friday Fragments a beacon of impartial news reporting ♠ I've been doing more cooking recently to increase my portfolio of low effort meals. Recently, I've made easy cheesy peasy chicken, and pasta with shrimp and diced tomatoes. On Monday night we had Cornish Game Hens, which we garnished with Sodium, Midnight Peppercorns, and pretensions. ♠ I don't think that the name "Cornish Game Hens" really makes them feel any fancier than they actually are. I'd be just as likely to buy them if they were called "chicken midgets" (but less so as "small children of chicken"). ♠ Speaking of chicken, the Classic Banquet Chicken Dinner now only contains a thigh and no drumstick. Having ... - Friday, September 09, 2011:
Friday Fragments it's like Roseanne meets Firefly ♠ The flooding is barely noticeable in our direct neighbourhood, although I may have passed Kevin Costner with gills holding up a sign that said, "I told you so!" on the Fairfax County Parkway. Fairfax schools are also closed for the day, and government personnel are allowed to stay home and unexpectedly get work done. ♠ When I was barreling through my public school education with complete disregard for retention, I never got to get out of school for something unique like a flood or a limnic eruption. The closest to catastrophe we ever came was the ice storm in January 1996 which kept us in the house for 4 days. Althoug... - Friday, August 26, 2011:
Friday Fragments why you can have nice things ♠ When the earthquake struck knocked politely on my lawn, I was busy in the kitchen installing outlet covers. One variety which covers a dimmer switch and socket next to each other was not available in stores and had to be ordered online -- this type is called a "2-gang 1 rocker 1 duplex" cover, which incidentally sounds like a very good pilot concept for a sitcom in the ghetto. ♠ Now that the earthquake has finished trending, I'll have to come up with my own original content to milk for website traffic again. Faux catastrophes like a Mineral earthquake are perfect for my mock mock tag, which has been woefully underused thi... - Friday, August 19, 2011:
Friday Fragments the non-rhyming limerick of life ♠ I'm 90% certain that this picture of a fat cat on failblog.org is NOT Booty, mainly because of the presence of a cat-door. Logically speaking, installing a cat-door into a real door defeats the purpose of the real door -- when I throw Booty out of a room, I want to ensure that she STAYS out. I suppose putting food in a box with a very small entrance might be a good exercise inducer though. ♠ Speaking of exercise, I discovered Mike's (of Mike and Chompy) Wii Fit pad while cleaning out the basement and decided to fire it up to see what I've been missing. The device told me I hadn't exercised in over 800 days, which is longer than my marr... - Friday, August 05, 2011:
Friday Fragments the reason your kids are so popular ♠ You only have two days left to win a $15 Amazon.com gift certificate, in celebration of this site's 15th birthday. As of 10 AM this morning, there were only 6 contestants -- you don't want to lose to the guy that used a <blink> tag OR the guy that tried to use it and failed and then had to edit his post. ♠ I also took the opportunity to give this page a very minor facelift yesterday -- by the age of 15, it should at least have a pair of hairs or maybe some boobies growing in unexpected areas. I'm trying new fonts as well -- this one may not be the final, but Trebuchet MS is getting stale. On the right, you can find link buttons to t... - Friday, June 24, 2011:
Friday Fragments good times, bad food ♠ Now that Rebecca has finally seen Labyrinth , the Chilly Down scene is one of her favorite things to watch, after this Friskies commercial . I remember thinking that the wild gang was really creepy when I was young. I also used to fast-forward through the stupid ballroom dance later in the movie because I felt that it didn't advance the plot, and it detracted from the more important parts with mazes in them. ♠ Speaking of mazes, the eastbound Dulles Toll Road at 495 is easily the most poorly designed interchange in the area right now. Between the overhead signs that identify five lanes when there are four and the giant ... - Friday, June 03, 2011:
Friday Fragments a tungsten filament of insight ♠ Last night saw the release of DDMSence 1.9.1 . This release provides a seamless interface to all of your social networking sites, allowing you to "friend" a Myspace user from Facebook or play Farmville from Linkedin. Actually, I'm kidding. This library has no mainstream crossover appeal at all, not unlike Dennis Kucinich in 2004. ♠ The next release of DDMSence will be 1.10.0, because in the technology world, periods are separators, not decimals. Perhaps I should start working some planned obsolescence into the numbering scheme with DDMSence 2011, or some immediate obsolescence with DDMSence Vista. b... - Friday, May 06, 2011:
Friday Fragments a dramatically fluctuating wavelength of awesome ♠ Our basement is currently filled to the brim with the detritus of human consumerism, since our Naughty Alder cabinets arrived on Wednesday afternoon and are currently crashing rent-free next to the stainless steel appliances, including a dishwasher which will replace the current anemic appliance which could be more aptly described as a dishdampener. It doesn't actually clean the plates anymore -- it just soaks them thoroughly and heats them to a temperature incapable of aiding in water evaporation. ♠ On the porch is the new Weber Spirit grill with cast iron cooktop, which replaces the 7-year-old Char Broil special which survi... - Friday, March 11, 2011:
Friday Fragments more razzle, less dazzle ♠ Our weekend at Brightwood Farm last weekend was a ton of fun. It's a working organic farm, and also has a wooden cottage nestled on a cliff over two merging creeks. We sampled a bunch of farm wines (including a few made from elderberries), and enjoyed the company of sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, donkeys, guinea hens, three giant guard dogs, and a herding dog that knew how to chase chickens back into the coop without eating any. We will definitely return! ♠ While driving out into the countryside, we learned that the Nissan Pavilion is now named the Jiffy Lube Live Pavilion (and has been for at least a year). I'm not saying that the old name was any better f... - Friday, February 25, 2011:
Friday Fragments one month closer to John Cusack on a giant boat at the end of times ♠ I recently read an article in the Post about the pervasiveness of red light cameras around the region. Personally, I don't have any problems with properly calibrated red light cameras, because people who run the light long after it has changed are pretty douchey by their nature. ♠ Of more pressing concern in my book are speed cameras. Speeding is a very green offense, because it reduces the number of cars on the road at any given time, increases productivity while decreasing travel time, and breaks up those viscious slow-moving pockets of drivers that threaten the throughput of roads. Plus, when you have a ... - Friday, January 07, 2011:
Friday Fragments antidisestablished in 1983 ♠ Happy New Year! We've got one full week down in 2011, but there's still no sign of flying cars or people on Mars. Obviously, pop culture movies are not a good foreteller of the future. Thinking back to 1997, I don't believe that Skynet was anywhere near sentient, although I may have seen a few Eliza clones in one of the chatrooms I used to frequent. ♠ Since I knew the original Terminator 2 movie by heart, it was a little jarring to watch to special edition with about 20 minutes of extra footage recently. For the most part, the additions actually improved the final picture, although the beginning dragged a little too much. ... - Friday, December 10, 2010:
Friday Fragments independent, ignoble, and illegitimate ♠ Yesterday afternoon, I finally got around to putting up our Christmas lights -- just three months late according to the definitive calendar of Costco. Unfortunately, we're down to a single strand of my classic non-Christmas-coloured lighting, which barely wraps around the edge of the porch. The display is so anemic that it merely looks like my house is attending a very staid rave, rather than bombastically celebrating the coming of Santa and/or Jesus. ♠ I am no longer big on giving or receiving gifts at Christmastime, probably because we were overloaded on complete collections of He-Men and Legos as kids. However, if you feel slighted that y... - Friday, December 03, 2010:
Friday Fragments official sponsor of official sponsorship ♠ While driving through Seven Corners on the way home from DISA on Wednesday, I realized how much of my childhood geography was defined by the locations of game stores. My preteen topography was bound by the Software Etc at Seven Corners Mall (where we bought Zork I), the Babbages at Springfield Mall, the Egghead Software on Route 7, and the Lionel Kiddie City on Little River Turnpike. If there was a chance to earnestly scan a game until my parents got the hint and bought it, I probably knew the way to get there, even at age 9. ♠ The other night, I was in the local Gamestop in search of an alternative to the many hours I waste playin... - Friday, November 19, 2010:
Friday Fragments better Nate than lever ♠ The diligent readers with incredibly little to do at their jobs have probably noticed that the daily update has slipped later and later in the day since midweek. This is not a trend I intend to embrace -- it's just been one of those weeks where I'm filled with brilliantly brilliant ideas to write about during the day, and then zero motivation to prepare an update when I get home at night. This should improve next week, as the holidays approach. You may even get to see one of those near extinct post-types: the Newsday Tuesday. ♠ When not avoiding the duties of updating this web page like a grandfather without Ex-lax or Metamucil, I've been releasing a new patc... - Friday, October 15, 2010:
Friday Fragments how is this month half over already? ♠ I've been walking all sorts of miles every day for my company's fitness drive, but there's no tangible proof (not unlike the moon landings) since I seem to have lost my pedometer in New Hampshire. ♠ The handstand picture on the right shows the first time it wriggled its way off my belt, after which I somehow managed to find it again on the way back down Piper Mountain. Between there and Dulles Airport, it went missing yet again, probably because exercise is for losers and this point needed to be driven home with a mystical sign. ♠ It's interesting how easily mystical signs can be confused for coincidence. For example... - Friday, October 01, 2010:
First Anniversary Weekend Happy Anniversary to my delightful wife! On Sunday the 3rd, we get to eat some more of Anna's mom's delicious cake. - Friday, September 24, 2010:
Friday Fragments now seeking commercial partnerships to name your baby "Urizoné" ♠ As part of a drive to improve company morale (and to inure us to the day when the RFID chips are implanted in our armpits), everyone in the company is wearing a pedometer for a month. The competition started while I was at the beach, so I'm already about a week behind, but it is interesting to learn that my stride is two feet eight inches (taller than some piccolo players) and that I average 1.5 miles a day even when I'm not doing anything (once labeled by Tammy Hale as "the purposeful Uri stride"). It's an interesting diversion, but I do not love the device so I am not a pedophile. ♠ Based o... - Friday, September 17, 2010:
Friday Fragments out of time and out of clothes ♠ We're back from our quickie trip down to Emerald Isle, NC where we enjoyed the beach with Sam and Kristen. Mid-September is the perfect time to hit Atlantic beaches, since the beach is mild, the water is hot, and the kids are all back in school (except for the surprising number we saw on the first Friday morning who were obviously truant and/or home-schooled). ♠ Overall, Emerald Isle was nice, but on par with the Outer Banks, which are an hour and a half closer. Since I am still in the mindset where time in the car equates to time not at the beach, and not "another part of the vacation to be enjoyed", reduced travel time always adds bonus po... - Friday, August 20, 2010:
Friday Fragments the stage was surrounded by screaming groupers, probably there to see the bass player ♠ This has been an incredibly long week, during which I was sick and still working, so I really have nothing new to report, other than the fact that the census ends on Monday, and people who comment after Monday at 6 PM will not be able to win the cash prize, which in my economic opinion, is very fiscally irresponsible of you and highly deserving of this horrible single sentence paragraph. ♠ In non-BU news (Byews), Rebecca has finally left the T-Shirt business to go back to school for physical therapy, so if you were hoping to get further discounts on soft dryer-unsafe shirts hanging off... - Friday, August 13, 2010:
Friday Fragments softer, weaker, slower ♠ With some unanticipated free time on Wednesday, I downloaded The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to the Kindle. Despite the numerous online reviews that the book is "soooo long" and takes 200 pages to get moving, I enjoyed it. I suppose a slower, more methodical reader that likes to read each sentence aloud and then chew them twenty times before swallowing the concepts might get bored before it gets good, but I found that the pace of the book was just fine. I started the second book of the trilogy last night. ♠ I can think of very few intentional trilogies that were high quality all of the way through -- most barely manage to bat 2 out of 3. S... - Friday, July 23, 2010:
Friday Fragments a roller coaster of smug ♠ Our trip to the West Coast was good fun, in spite of the fact that the airlines are becoming stingier with each trip. We spent a few days in Spokane, Washington for a wedding, followed by three days in Berkeley and San Francisco. At the end of the Berkeley leg, we rented a Hyundai Elantra and spent four days in and around Santa Cruz. I'll probably do some sort of write-up next week. ♠ Based on my experiences with the free XM in our San Francisco rental car, I finally canceled my home account after months of wobbling back and forth. XM's musical output was roughly on par with a freshman bassoon audition right after they merged with Sirius, and it h... - Friday, July 02, 2010:
Friday Fragments a periodic table full of elephants ♠ I'm almost done consuming the giant bag of Costco chicken nuggets that taste like a sponge in a carpentry workshop. I generally scarf down ten as a quick flavourless lunch and have found that they're only useful as an edible plate for barbeque sauce or ketchup. ♠ When I was in afternoon day care in elementary school, we often had snacks of celery and peanut butter. While some kids might opt to down the peanut butter, leaving a spittled celery stalk behind, I didn't really like either ingredient, and would just double up on fruit juice. ♠ I was also never a fan of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and eventually ass... - Friday, June 18, 2010:
Friday Fragments celebrating a Kelley-free Virginia, at least for a couple more months ♠ Sorry for the delay in writing this noise -- I was busy getting the CompTIA Security+ certification this afternoon after eating a leftover steak n' cheese half from Omia's. After doing so many practice questions from horribly edited exam books, I made out with a 97%. I try to get a new certification every two years ago to prove that I am dearly invested in my career and staying current. ♠ The biggest pet peeve I have about the certification prep industry is how poorly written every "cram"-style book is. In the cheap book for this certification, over 30 questions had incorrect answers, and most were Englis... - Friday, June 11, 2010:
Friday Fragments advocating getting knocked down rather than knocked up since 1962 ♠ It's proposal season at work, and my advancing years at the company mean that I actually have to get involved this time around, so website updates may occasionally fall back on a clip show over the next couple of weeks. I do feel good about my proposal skills though, since the last effort I was involved in went off without a hitch , or maybe with a hitch. ♠ Government contract proposals would be much more interesting if the competing companies could face off in a Survivor-style challenge, with last company standing receiving the contract. Something like "The Bachelor" might also be interesting, b... - Friday, May 14, 2010:
Friday Fragments how did I forget this tagline last week? ♠ Last night after a run in the park, we went back to Omia's Pub and Grille for dinner where I had a delicious Supreme Steak and Cheese Sub, topped with mushrooms, onions, peppers, lettuce, tomato, and enough mayonnaise to cement a house together. ♠ For a fun trick to freak out your friends: wash out a mayo container when it's empty and fill it up with plain yogurt. The next time someone comes over, pull the mayo jar out of the fridge and nonchalantly start wolfing it down with a spoon. Delicious! ♠ There's a song on one of my Dr. Demento CDs from the 90s called "Delicious", which features two people getting incr... - Friday, May 07, 2010:
Friday Fragments ♠ Yesterday, Rebecca left for a camping trip at the Grand Canyon, so I can now invite strippers to house parties with impunity for the next few days. If you are a stripper in need of a venue, and are also willing to bring steaks, let me know. ♠ We grilled some hamburgers on Wednesday night, and discovered that a year-old bag of Costco patties reconstitutes pretty well in spite of freezer burn. My six-year-old grill is on its last legs now though, and a new one might be in the cards in time for summer grilling season. ♠ Speaking of replacements, I'll need to replace my twelve-year-old scanner at some point, since it finally stopped working during the preparation for a Memory Day p... - Friday, April 30, 2010:
Friday Fragments ♠ Nestled in the bosom of all the DDMSence and work that I've been up to, I found some free time unclaimed by lame sci-fi books and decided to pick up a key for the Starcraft II beta (using my elite credit card connections with Amazon.com). ♠ I've only had time to play four or five games so far, but it seems like a good blend of familiar and new: the charm of Starcraft I mixed with the interface of Warcraft III. It even comes with a grid-based hotkey mapping built-in (where all the keys you hit are in the QWERT area so you don't have to memorize the first letter of each action). ♠ In the image on the right, the Protoss ships are apparently trying to fertilize the Terran outpost. ... - Friday, April 23, 2010:
Friday Fragments: Photo Edition Lazy Needs shelf space Mowed Reading Cute Released Thawing Delicious Prostitute propositions police chief School lunches a threat to national security Police find suspect neck-deep in manure - Friday, April 02, 2010:
Friday Fragments he's my newt ♠ The weather is finally nice in the evening, as shown by our 7:45 PM run through Sterling Park, which counts as my weekly effort for ACR (arterial clog reduction), also known as "carbon credits for eating bacon". Rebecca has gotten me in the habit of doing something at least once a week, since I'd otherwise have no incentive for working out ever. After our Puerto Rico trip, full of frijoles and grease, I came home two pounds lighter. ♠ I was never a big fan of running -- the farthest distance I used to go was the seven mile trip from the Crew boat house to the airport and back, and now I'm happy with a loping gait for a half hour or so. This is also why I did sprints ... - Friday, March 26, 2010:
Friday Fragments less weekend rain, more weekend grain ♠ On Wednesday night, we had a late dinner at a little Lebanese restaurant in Sterling's excuse for a clock tower shopping center called Sahara. It was fairly inexpensive and tasty -- I'm finding that saffron rice is slowly approaching the "like" levels of my usual rice proclivity: a bowl of soy sauce topped with medium-grained white rice. We would definitely go back again. ♠ I started using Yelp to review things at the end of last year, but stopped before too long after reading about all the seedy extortion they're involved in. I'm currently trying to find a successful business model for the URI! Zone that involves extorti... - Friday, March 19, 2010:
Friday Fragments quivering with anticipation like Jello ♠ Things I did instead of writing a Fragments column: Worked on my super secret project yesterday afternoon. Had the enchilada sampler at Tortilla Factory for dinner last night. Watched an episode of Fringe , which we're tepidly trying to get into again. Got a full eight hours of sleep. Went down to Bailey's Crossroad for emergency work support this morning. Black people must leave, NJ Walmart announcer says Medieval child's brain to unlock human thought processes Scientis... - Friday, February 26, 2010:
Friday Fragments it's the frickin' Wiccan baby ♠ Happy Birthday to my Dad, who turns 65 right today! In one more year he can start draining the social security tanks of imaginary cash, in a similar manner to the way that the IRS taxes poor people. ♠ I haven't counted as a poor person since my $4.80/hr Computer Science internship at PEPCO years ago, and it's especially noticeable now that I get to participate in that whole "joint filing" scam (which could also be a method of torture on 24 ). Maybe I'll use some of the tax refund for the greater good, like research into richer steak cows or Performing Arts in public schools except for orchestra, choir, drama, and guitar... - Friday, February 19, 2010:
Friday Fragments a goofy keychain in the Cracker Jack box of life ♠ Now that all the major home renovation is done and there are no further rusty nails to remove from my basement, I thought it would be the perfect time to renew my tetanus vaccination, which has lapsed like a bottom drawer gift card ever since I went to summer camp in 1991. I got the new booster at the same time as a Hepatitis A vaccine to ward me from all the hep cats I will meet traveling next month. ♠ As a result of the shots, my shoulders are both swollen up like one of those short, self-conscious body builders at the gym. Until the white blood cells can quell the civil unrest in my deltoids, I could easily get a... - Friday, January 29, 2010:
Friday Fragments melts in your mouth and most other intrinsically heated environments ♠ While exercising on Wednesday night, I managed to smash my left pinkie between two seven twenty pound dumbbells, so accept my apologies in advance if this post is a little light on Q's, A's, and Z's. Were I still playing World of Warcraft, I would have trouble casting Vampiric Embrace and circle-strafing. ♠ Circle-strafing has always felt like a nonsensical moonwalk-inspired action in shooter games -- try approaching someone at the mall and see how difficult it is to run in a circle around them while keeping your gun trained on them at the same time. I'm more inclined to believe the physics ... - Friday, January 22, 2010:
Friday Fragments bringing about change like a 96 cent vending machine soda ♠ In the new features department, you can now hover your mouse over any of the links in my Bloglog to see the date when it was updated. I've also merged the "Friendly" and "Trendy" blogs into a melting pot, since I like to think that my cohorts are both friendly AND trendy, and this also makes it easier to publicly shame the folks who are behind on posting tidbits of their life for public amusement. If there are other blogs I should take a peek at, please let me know. ♠ The contents of my Bloglog have evolved over time, but I'm still trying to limit the number of funny picture sites I browse -- while they're all funn... - Friday, January 15, 2010:
Friday Fragments the blubbery crust of fat on a bowl of refrigerated corned beef ♠ Today, I will be illustrating my Fragments column using the pen and tablet I got for Christmas. The technique is much harder than I expected, because you are looking at the computer screen for visual feedback so you can't look at the tablet. It's especially tough when you end a line and have to move the pen to a new location. My apologies in advance if I draw a picture of you and you end up looking more bovine than you normally would on a Friday -- I will improve! ♠ Maybe for a future update, I'll draw a picture both with the tablet and by hand , perfecting their beauty until they are completely id... - Friday, January 08, 2010:
Friday Fragments brazenly breaking the boredom barrier ♠ My latest side project to reduce site upkeep is to sort and transfer all of my photos into my Picasa account . After deleting several hundred variations of "This is Booty sitting on a bed", I still ended up with a sizable collection, and have migrated over all the Cat Pictures, the Delta Mu pictures, my personal pictures from 1979 - 2004, and the Marching Virginians pictures. ♠ When I ran the MV Trumpet website eleven years and twenty pounds ago, there was a media embargo on any pictures that might show recognizable alcohol bottles (since the site was linked from the main Virginia Tech pages). Necessary Photoshopping (before ... - Friday, December 11, 2009:
Friday Fragments Also an anagram for "Farmstead Frying" ♠ Yesterday, as I opened a new pack of mini Beefaroni tins for my 10:30 lunch, I noticed that the metal lids were now tattooed with bold, loud warnings. Apparently, beefaroni lids are sharp when you peel them back, and someone couldn't figure this out on their own. ♠ I've never accidentally slashed my wrists on a Beefaroni lid, but when I worked in the school nurse's office in elementary school, I once stuck my tongue to a metal ice-cube tray to see if it would stick. It did. When the nurse inspected my tongue, she asked if I had "eaten any sharp food this morning, like Doritos". ♠ It's been a while since I had Dor... - Friday, December 04, 2009:
Friday Fragments more dangerous than a "raging hadron" collider ♠ At work, we've just wrapped up work on a short-fuse prototype named EADS, which is a better acronym than the original ADS for multiple reasons: a) URLs with /ads/ tend to get blocked by Ad Blockers, b) writing ENTERPRISE on anything makes it seem much grander (try it on body parts), c) when Scottish people talk about the site, it will sound like they're talking about AIDS, and d) there will be so much room for naming future functionality like POOPHEADS (Planning and Operations-Oriented Projected History). ♠ I've kept pretty busy for the past two weeks, so I'll probably take the afternoon off and nap on the couch with ca... - Friday, November 20, 2009:
Friday Fragments the reason that every weekend is warm ♠ Last night, while Rebecca braved "the city" to see some indie hipsters performing at the Black Cat, I braved Centreville to see the band concert at Stone Middle School. I'm not sure which was more surprising: the fact that there were two hundred and fifteen 7th and 8th graders in two separate bands, or the fact that parents were overflowing the gym as if a football game were in progress. ♠ Flashing back 19 years to my seventh grade winter band experience, I recall the presence of 32 band members, maybe 40 parents, and no one recording the entire concert as a movie file on their cellphone. On the plus side, we had an auditorium, a location... - Friday, November 13, 2009:
Friday Fragments since today is unlucky, he knew that the bank wasn't open on the first of the month ♠ I've come to the conclusion that Pandora.com is secretly owned by certain musicians who use it to nonchalantly inject their music into places it doesn't belong. No matter what types of music I express interest in, be it Chicks that Sing, or the Contemporary Hawaiian genre, sooner or later Jack Johnson's going to come along and croon about his pancakes or some other retardedness. I'm half tempted to start a Death Metal station just to await his inexorable arrival. ♠ I don't really understand the draw of Metal as a kind of music. I understand that noise can be an aspect of music (after all... - Friday, November 06, 2009:
Friday Fragments offering the secret of the universe as a self-study decryption exercise ♠ After six and a half years of a Pentium 2, I finally got a new computer at work that zooms along at the speed of speed. "puffin" will now be the birthplace of amazing coding miracles, and "llama" will be relegated to the pile of useless machines that ultimately turn into webservers because they can't handle anything more complex. ♠ There are only two problems with the new computer -- it's running Vista, and it has no AGP slots for my World-of-Warcraft-era graphics card. How am I supposed to get any raiding done at only 12 frames per second? Then again, that's a phenomenal speed for someone who makes eye... - Friday, October 30, 2009:
Friday Fragments teetering on the edge of the sphere ♠ I don't really care for the new format and typeface of the Washington Post. It's as if people living in an Arial world suddenly rediscovered Times New Roman and thought it was a great idea, despite the past examples of New Coke and the original Roman Empire. Now it just feels like I'm reading a very liberal edition of USA Today with a harder crossword puzzle. ♠ When I was pretending to be a doctoral student at Florida State, we would gather for lunch at The Loop where my lunch would consist of the $2 side of fries and we'd tackle the USA Today crossword puzzle as a group. This got me into a daily crossword puzzle habit that ran from 2001 to... - Friday, September 25, 2009:
Friday Fragments the last Fragments column for a month, so if I make it horrible, you won't miss it ♠ I've been listening to several new CDs in my car, including new releases from A Fine Frenzy, Ingrid Michaelson, Gabriella Cilmi, and Muse. We also discovered that Muse is playing at FedEx stadium next Tuesday, which would be exciting if they weren't opening for U2 -- artificially jacking up the ticket prices and forcing attendees to sit through a telethon for Bono's cause of the week. ♠ Speaking of causes of the week, our office is in full-fledged donation mode. I have nothing against any particular crusade, but it seems odd that the disease with the best marketing campaign should get the m... - Friday, September 18, 2009:
Friday Fragments now accepting micropayments ♠ Despite being sick for the first few days of the week, I had a successful thirtieth birthday and received good loot. My presents included, but were not limited to, the new Muse CD which I'm listening to as I type this, hardcover editions of the d'Aulaires mythology books , the new Mario & Luigi DS game (which I may have purchased for myself), and a Virginia-Tech-themed cornhole game from my sister. ♠ The cornhole game will go well with the VT umbrella and 8-foot inflatable Hokie Bird that my parents got me. Apparently, they all needed to remind me of which college I attended, since the memory is the second thing to go when you turn thirt... - Friday, September 11, 2009:
Friday Fragments indirectly responsible for the erosion of decorum, civil liberties, and foothills ♠ Wedding preparations are nearing completion, two weeks ahead of schedule as befits a URI! operation. Last night, I gathered up the classiest of photos featuring me and Rebecca for the perpetual slide show that will flash incessantly behind our table at the reception, like a really annoying billboard at the Verizon Center -- one that you can only escape by consuming more free wine. ♠ A worser fate than billboards involves gas stations that play TV ads while you pump your gas. If they're going to spend all that money on an embedded TV, they should up the sound quality to a level higher than "mar... - Friday, September 04, 2009:
Friday Fragments only eleven days to thirty ♠ Life has been pretty busy this week, between work, webmastering as a community service, and wedding planning. One of our recent activities was to select wedding ceremony music, and we're currently trying to find a place to tastefully fit Boobies by Carlos Adolfo Dominguez into the processional. ♠ We have also brought painting back as an after-school activity in the URI! Household by hand-painting the numbers for our wedding tables. And if people scoff at the crude Tempera primary colours, we can just say Ella did them and suddenly the childlike innocence of the numbers will be considered cute. ♠ When I would spen... - Friday, August 21, 2009:
Friday Fragments the back-to-school edition, or if you're old, the keep-on-working edition ♠ Health officials in the US are warning that we're going to see a 2nd surge in swine flu cases during the fall flu season. In general though, the even-numbered periods of disease are only dangerous for minorities. As they say, "white people only get the clap on 1 and 3". ♠ The Clap was one of many ailments I didn't fully understand when I was a little kid. Back then, I thought that shingles sounded like a very painful pooping problem, and elephantiasis made your face look like an elephant. ♠ Elephants are also in the news in France, where a mayor is trying to ban them fro... - Friday, August 14, 2009:
Friday Fragments we put the fragments in Fridfragmentsay ♠ Today is my sister's 33rd birthday, and in an effort to be Green and reduce landfill JPEGs, I'm reusing the birthday picture from last year, in which she was apparently "on the lamb". Happy Birthday! This also means that there's only thirty-two days until I, myself, turn thirty. ♠ There aren't a lot of new milestones I'll have reached by the time I turn thirty, since I already own a house and eat regularly at Popeyes. I even Googled "age thirty milestones" and found this unintentionally amusing excerpt published by the Institute for Christian Economics. The main points I learned from this article were: "A retarded pe... - Friday, August 07, 2009:
Friday Fragments two pickles, no onions, and hold the quality ♠ One of my new projects that I hope to stick with is running a couple times a week with Rebecca. We head over to the forest in Claude Moore Park for a half hour, and we have yet to see LESS than 8 deer on any given run, sometimes as close as five yards away. Hopefully I don't abandon this running project, because I want to make sure my knee is in good shape before all the hiking we plan on doing in Hawaii. I certainly don't want to turn into Gimpy McPeggy again like I did on last year's trip to Europe. ♠ Because every good creative genius (or mad scientist inventor) should have a wellspring of abandoned projects, I am no lon... - Friday, July 24, 2009:
Friday Fragments it's like Crocodile Dundee meets the Pianist ♠ This past Tuesday, I finally went back to the dentist, but since over a year had elapsed, I had to do another "initial inspection" instead of a cleaning. This means that they spend twenty minutes taking X-rays so they can overcharge my insurance provider for useless procedures. As expected, they immediately harped on the time-bomb nature of my wisdom teeth and told me that I should see their oral surgeon. ♠ I then told them that, last year, their oral surgeon had said it would be too risky to have the teeth removed. Their reply was, "Oh, he's been turning down almost everyone, let's send you to a new one." If you knew that, why... - Friday, July 17, 2009:
Friday Fragments celebrating the last day in this century when it will be 07/17/09 ♠ I'm in the process of overhauling our home network, because there are far too many computers to maintain (four desktops, two laptops, and a netbook) and I don't want my house to start resembling the Math Emporium . And since my computers have been assigned animal names, I can say that I'll be cannibalizing llama for spare parts to beef up koala, and I just installed Debian Linux on puffin. I'm planning on switching over most of my archival computers to Linux, although I'll keep my main desktop on Windows XP for gaming. ♠ Speaking of gaming, I cancelled my World of Warcraft account again a couple we... - Friday, July 10, 2009:
Friday Fragments for quitters, not fighters ♠ Today is Cow Appreciation Day , so if you dress up like a cow, you can get free food at Chick-fil-A. They seem to have many fun promotions for their food -- if you camp out in front of one of their new stores for 24 hours on the day before it opens, you also get free chicken sandwiches for a year. ♠ Although I confess to having eaten the Dietrick Express chicken sandwich for five dinners a week regularly in college, I would probably get sick of chicken (sicken) if I ate it every day for a year. However, I have eaten Shells and Cheese for five meals in the past twelve days. ♠ Speaking of food, w... - Friday, June 19, 2009:
Friday Fragments an automatic party foul of epic proportions ♠ This month, we've seen more rain than a Korean Music Festival although we're still patiently awaiting the arrival of Anna & Ben's second daughter, who I've decided to name Stella. In my capacity as village teacher, I'm not sure what sort of misinformation I will teach her, although preliminary reports suggest that I was successful in teaching Ella that 2 + 2 equals Cow. When I last asked her what 2 + 2 was a couple months ago, she moo'd. ♠ I'm predicting today that Anna & Ben will eventually have 6 girls: Ella, Stella, Bella, Kella, twins Mella and Yella (sponsored by the drink corporation), and a lone boy, aptly named Fella. They... - Wednesday, June 17, 2009:
Memory Fragment Media Day a triple threat of memories, old photos and fragments ♣ This picture was taken around 1991 at our powerful 486 computer with 5 1/4" drive, 3 1/2" drive, and tape drive. It had 256-color VGA and an Ad Lib card, but only 24 of the colors ever worked. I am playing Ultima 6, based on the hint book open in front of me. ♣ A wild party at Rosie and Jen's house in February 1998, where we played Twister and Uno. I still have that shirt, but I haven't worn it since the last time I was incarcerated at Denim Penitentary. ♣ At Mountain Lake in May of 2000. Paige is deciding that the rock f... - Friday, June 05, 2009:
Friday Fragments paving the way to the future with straw and hippo spoor ♠ As you can see from the visitor map on the right, the popularity of the URI! Zone is starting to resemble the early stages of an avian flu pandemic, although I've had trouble penetrating the South American markets. The African and Asian hits, as well as most of the Eastern European hits can be safely ignored since they usually just want to steal my musical research. ♠ I'm perfectly happy to be past the stage in my life where I have to read treatises of questionable merit and write papers about them. Nowadays, most of my writing is either for this website or for design specifications at work that show how alie... - Friday, May 29, 2009:
Friday Fragments because End-of-the-Month Media Day requires me to actually take pictures ♠ There are only 127 more days until our wedding. Since the number of days can now fit in a single byte of data, we figured that it was probably time to get moving on preparations, and we have now booked airline tickets to Hawaii for the honeymoon, finished our wedding website, and booked the DJ, ventriloquist, ice sculptor, pony rides, and a Beatnik poet for the reception. ♠ We also added the final items to our Wedding Registry, which was difficult because I am yuppy and already own tons of crap. However, we managed to get the essentials in place, including a copy of How to Date a White Woman: A... - Friday, May 22, 2009:
Friday Fragments your reliable source for manatee-based news reporting ♠ After last week's bout with the swine flu, I was sick-free for just two days (luckily the two days of our vacation) before coming down with tonsilitis, a malady with a preponderance of i 's that makes your tonsils look like moldy potatoes and makes swallowing like giving birth in your throat. ♠ Actually, I think that only women are allowed to make birth jokes, in the same way that only Asians are allowed to call themselves yellow, so I'll say that it makes swallowing feel like you're peeing nickles, but with your throat. To get the mental images of these physical atrocities out of your head, here is a picture ... - Friday, May 15, 2009:
Friday Fragments breaking two drought-ridden weeks of defragmentation ♠ I'm feeling better now, having subsisted solely on ibuprofen and Nyquil for the past week, instead of the wussy antibiotics I surrendered to the last time I was laid low by major illness . ♠ There was actually a very slight chance that it could have been swine flu, since I work with a DBA who spent last week on a military base five miles from the Arizona-Mexico border. This is the same guy who also lived in my basement in 2004. ♠ I never did take Jim Barry's idea to turn my basement into an extended stay residency location for needy composers. I guess I like my leases to end eventually. Zin... - Wednesday, May 13, 2009:
Journal Fragments random excerpts from my first year of grad school ♣ September 3, 2001 : Yesterday evening, I went to the department head's house for a music theory welcoming picnic but it's actually next week. Luckily no one was home so I didn't look completely dumb. ♣ October 14, 2001 : Mark was drunk and telling Kathy his opinions of people in our Pedagogy class and labeled me as the "quietly competent" one. I've heard that before... ♣ December 1, 2001 : In the afternoon, I went out to eat with Mark, Mike, and Beth, and then Mark, Mike, Jim, and some other composers went to Irish Pub with Dr. Wingate for happy hour. I split a whole pi... - Friday, April 24, 2009:
Friday Fragments ♠ Yesterday, while driving down to DISA for the eight hundredth time, I saw road crews busily erasing the dotted white lines from Sterling Boulevard and replacing them with pinked zigzags of merriment. I had half a mind to steer the car as the zigzags dictated, but then remembered my experiences from childhood, where zigzagging my bike always resulted in a crash of some sort. ♠ I presumed the lines were to warn motorists of the bike path and found out that I was right . That article's a little too short to mock in a Newsday, but I'd definitely like to mock the fellow from Connecticut who's complaining about having to walk his bike across a four-lane highway . The appropriate solutio... - Friday, April 17, 2009:
Friday Fragments a roundhouse kick to the Internet ♠ Exactly three weeks ago, I started a new Warcraft character on a new server after learning that Kelley had the secret shame of playing the game. We are now members of the Delta Mu guild on Dawnbringer. Leveling up is ridiculously easy now, and the new character is already level 67. Maybe in 2 more levels, we'll be able to convince Doobie and Philip to play as well. ♠ Besides playing games and conscripting my dad to build a closet in the basement, I've been busy at work because our four month "sprint" is finally drawing to a close at the end of this month. When not assisting clueless users with testing or accidentally calling a woman with a ... - Friday, April 10, 2009:
Friday Fragments where April showers bring Jack Bauers ♠ Happy Birthday to my Mom who turns 28 today! Yes, she's one year younger than I am, either because there was a skew in the space-time continuum resulting in 1985A, she is curiously aging in reverse, or "the island is like a skipping record". ♠ If I could travel through time, I would just go back to yesterday and prevent myself from smashing my hand against the doorway while running down the hall, which resulted in a divot of missing skin from my index finger -- it now looks like a roll of cookie dough attacked by a spoon. ♠ I didn't take a picture of my injured finger because I posted a picture of moldy bread yesterday ... - Friday, April 03, 2009:
Friday Fragments like a fragmentation grenade filled with FUN ♠ The weather has been damp and rainy all week, to the point where my lawn is so oversaturated that I sink two inches into the turf when I go out to get the newspaper in the morning. ♠ Speaking of oversaturation, if I have to hear Metro Station's "Shake It" on the radio one more time I'm going the shake the moles right off the lead singer's face. Any time your song repeats the same word five times in a row, you need to learn more words. ♠ Worse than "Shake It", though, is Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" which not only has a mind-numbingly repetitive chorus, but also uses Autotune ... - Friday, March 27, 2009:
Friday Fragments soon to be published in audobook format and Braille ♠ The latest addition to the real-life URI! Zone is a hand-me-down 52" TV from my parents, who are constantly questing to partition the rooms of their house with bigger and better TVs like Japanese Shoji screens but with liquid crystals instead of rice paper. The artifact correction algorithms in this TV are so advanced that DVDs of Arrested Development look exactly like a true documentary and even over-the-air LOST looks like a wholly different show, closer to a 3D soap opera than an antenna broadcast. ♠ With a TV that functions this strongly in the image department, I still have zero interest in ever upgrading to... - Friday, March 20, 2009:
Friday Fragments it's time for your sea sponge bath ♠ Congratulations to Kathy Smith who successfully defended her dissertation and is now a doctor! I don't know what her research was on, so I'll presume it was on The Overuse of Vowels in the Lyrics of Modern Music. ♠ " I went to a doctor... all he did was suck blood from my neck. Don't go see Dr. Acula. " - Mitch Hedberg ♠ Now that Kathy knows everything there is to know about music, she's going to have to find something else to do with her time. I recommend pitching a dramatic sitcom like Grey's Anatomy but with people from music academia. The music history geeks would sit at their own table in the cafeteria, ... - Friday, March 13, 2009:
Friday Fragments an unlucky case of d?ja vu ♠ The latest change in the real-life URI! Zone is the complete replacement of the heating and air conditioning system. The work was done efficiently and reasonably priced by Cascades Comfort Services, and when the new system spins up to heat the house, a high-tech whirring excites the ears, like you just stepped onto the Tube. ♠ Speaking of Tubes, work has started on the Silver Line , so the Metro will extend out to Wiehle Avenue by 2013, and that location will have more going for it than just being a made-up word in Boggle. ♠ I'm hoping that the station there also gets an exotic sounding pronunciation, like "Vi-elle"... - Friday, February 27, 2009:
Friday Fragments the 1294th most popular Friday destination on the Internet ♠ Following the "success" of their Drive Hammered, Get Nailed campaign (which only resulted in an increase in drunk driving arrests around the sorority floors of the University Commons at GMU), the Fairfax County Police have launched new LED signs with the message, Accidents don't happen... They are CAUSED. It seems like this sign is more confusing than helpful, since an accident which is caused does, in fact, eventually happen. In fact, I predict that accidents will actually increase around this sign as cell-phone drivers try to wrap their brains around the anti-tautology, run out of brain waves, and drive into a ditch.... - Friday, February 20, 2009:
Friday Fragments all the booze that's fit to pint ♠ Rebecca says hello from Puerto Rico, where she is eating ice cream with her college friend, Alice, using up six days of leave that expire on March 1, and learning what it's like to be in a place that isn't quite a state (although this could also have been done cheaper with a trip to Alabama). ♠ With Future Wife #1 in Puerto Rico, I've spent the last couple nights adding improvements to the URI! Zone. I cancelled the Event Calendar idea because it was useless and derivative (and sites like Facebook do it better anyhow), but maybe I'll borrow something useful, like the ability to turn someone into a Vampire, or email notifications whenever s... - Wednesday, February 18, 2009:
Memory Fragments Day ♦ Back in the days when Chompy wasn't an agoraphobic recluse like Sigourney Weaver in Copycat , we used to take her to various locales that passed as parks around Tallahassee, where she'd do her best to escape. Once, she broke free and did a 100 yard dash towards the nearest highway. Since smokey Mike had the lung capacity of a third clarinetist in marching band, I had to pursue, and tackled her mere feet from the road. ♦ In fourth grade TAG class, there was a chubby black kid with thick glasses who we could always get a rise out of by telling him a bee was chasing him. He would flail madly about with a squealing voice like a saxophone mouthpiece. Once, he gave an oral book report on D... - Friday, February 13, 2009:
Friday Fragments the sixth Friday the Thirteenth since Friday Fragments began ♥ Sometime in the past week, the twelve families living in the house on the corner finally packed up and moved away. I have nothing against group housing (as I've taking in a few homeless music majors in my day), but this house was the epitome of a bad neighbour -- 6 cars clogging the street with 1 SUV always parked on the lawn, an open air trash pit because they couldn't afford trash service, multiple carpools that honked when they arrived instead of walking up to the door, and people sitting outside on the stoop at all hours of the night. ♥ Last month when their power was turned off for a few days, they bought a gas... - Friday, February 06, 2009:
Friday Fragments fresh from France ♠ This week's LOST was good, although the whole "flash" concept is already getting old to me (flashes just aren't the same without nudity). I also called the source of the glowing light immediately, as evidenced by the IM I sent to Mike (of Mike and Chompy) IN REAL TIME. ♠ I feel like they're throwing a few too many new concepts and characters into the mix for a "second to last" season -- if this were a book or a symphony, the unfolding would occur in the first four seasons, with the fifth being a tightly winding spiral to the final season full of explosions and revelations. ♠ This is also how I plan to structure my life -- by thirty, the ex... - Friday, January 23, 2009:
Friday Fragments the underpants of the Internet ♠ A song that I'm currently addicted to is Sweet About Me by Gabriella Cilmi, yet another artist from the "my-voice-is-way-too-mature-for-the-fact-that-I'm-only-sixteen" ranks (like Joss Stone). I first heard it on XM Radio, and have been repeating it regularly ever since I downloaded it. ♠ Even though it currently stinks, I've decided that I'll renew my XM subscription for another year, because CDs get old and I can't imagine actually learning how to use the old-fashioned radio to find songs. This is more important now that my CD player sounds a little staticky, following the electrical problems I had last week. ♠... - Friday, January 09, 2009:
Friday Fragments devolving the week into fragmented chaos ♠ Someone started a Facebook group for T.C. Williams High School Marching Band alumni this week, so I've been busy scanning and uploading a bunch of embarassing photos and reconnecting with long lost members. People in the band were obviously the coolest kids in school, despite the fact that the uniforms made us look like we were in a live action production of the Nutcracker. ♠ In my senior year, my dad was the defacto band photographer, and it was my job to take the most recent week's set of pictures to the band room and post them on the bulletin board. Kids could buy their favorite prints for a quarter, and since I was also in charge o... - Friday, December 19, 2008:
Final Fragments ending 2008 with a bang, like this: 2008! ♠ While looking for those Tropic Thunder clips for yesterday's post, I realized again how dangerous browsing YouTube can be for productivity. Last year was crowned by "Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Sound" , and I'd say that the two most memorable videos this year are the French Orangina commercial with the weird sexy animals, and the Ernie and Bert gangsta-rap (audio not safe for work). ♠ I don't think I could ever make it as a gangsta-rapper although I'll try anything once. I have been hard at work on my Museday expansion, which will come out next Tuesday for anyone that likes th... - Friday, December 05, 2008:
Friday Fragments keeping you emotionally, if not physically, warm today ♠ In all the hubbub of the Month of Thanksgivings, I forgot to mention that Paige, Male-Paige, and Mini-Paige came to visit me while in town from Houston last week. I didn't get a chance to take any pictures, so I just stole one off of her blog. To celebrate their return from Spain and the baby in a proper fashion, I heated up some leftover ham from Thanksgiving #2 and served it with all the fixin's. ♠ Ham was the meal of choice for the middle dinner to break up the neverending parade of tasteless turkeys. Maybe next year I'll nix turkey completely and come up with a more tasty Thanksgiving tradition. Wouldn't the Pilgrims ... - Friday, November 21, 2008:
Friday Fragments the numerator in division by zero ♠ The price of the Tuesday Special at Popeyes has gone up fifty cents, but this added expense comes with flexibility: it is now the "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday" Special, which means that I could have cheap chicken three days a week if I really wanted to, although eating the equivalent of a whole chicken every week is a little sickening. It would definitely need to be alternated with Shells and Cheese every other day or I would honk. ♠ When I stepped off the elevator this morning at work, the entire lobby was cloaked in the sickly smell of vomit, putting a whole new spin on being sick of work. It's also possible that a stomach flu is going a... - Friday, November 14, 2008:
Friday Fragments bisecting the month of November like a slightly busted compass ♠ Not enough people posted an embarrassing high school story yesterday. I had planned to illustrate them all with cutesie Post-It note art but it's really not worth it unless I hear some more incriminating details. If I don't, maybe I'll just have to make an animated graphic of Katie Lucas falling over with a shotput and put it in the banner at the top of the page. ♠ Do you remember the good old days when there used to be an animated llama in the banner? Right about now would be when Turkey Llama made an appearance, since Thanksgiving is right around the corner. ♠ The Fifth A... - Friday, November 07, 2008:
Friday Fragments one of the coins is not a nickel ♠ I'm not a big fan of this feebly foggy, rainy weather. At the beginning of November, it should either be globally warm with sunblock, melting icecaps, and residential polar bears, or below freezing with enough snow on the ground to warrant telecommuting. Cold weather rain is just a waste of everyone's time. ♠ Speaking of the water cycle, I'm on a water kick at work. This seems to happen every six months or so, on the day when I stand at the free-soda fridge and realize that I can't stand the thought of one more sickly-sweet Lipton's Green Tea. ♠ The only reason I drink Green Tea at work is little nutrition sticker with "0 calo... - Friday, October 24, 2008:
Friday Fragments the crazy glue of Internet society ♠ I've read over 1300 pages of Java Certification texts in the past month, and am now ready to take the next test in the series identified by a jumble of too many letters (at 10 AM this morning). In order to pass, I have to get 49 out of 69 questions correct, which is an obscenely low 71%. Of course, it's only obscenely low until I fail with a 70.5%. ♠ Live-Blogging Fragment: I got an 89% on the exam! ♠ Speaking of easy grading, there's a drive to dumb down the grading system afoot in Loudoun County. They want to lower the A threshold from 93 to 90 so everyone can be an equal-opportunity dumb sm... - Friday, October 17, 2008:
Friday Fragments fortified with nutella and verbs ♠ The neighbour's new dog was outside barking at 3 AM this morning with one of those annoying alto clef frequencies that are impossible to tune out (no doubt it would go well in a symphony orchestra). This pain in the neck was accompanied by a more physical variety. Having slept on it wrong a couple nights ago, I can now only turn my head about ten degrees in any direction (that's 0.18 radians for Math majors). ♠ If this neck pain had come ne(ck)xt week, I could have just stuck a few bolts in my neck and been Frankenstein for Halloween. Unfortunately, it's still a little bit early to be dusting off the costumes. This year, I will not be reprisin... - Friday, October 10, 2008:
Friday Fragments thwarting Windows Defrag for the third year running ♠ Traffic has spiked incredibly this week, probably due to the casually dropped news of my engagement . Surprisingly, I got more traffic from the engagement than I did when I posted the link to the nearly nude cheerleaders in Idaho -- I guess monogamy is not 100% dead yet. Here's another picture of the ring, since it should be worth about 25 female visits today. ♠ Now that I've won the marriage primary, I suppose I should campaign to get the relationship accepted by the general public. I promise free kittens, Guinness, and those leftover wedding coozies that Rebecca found at work with " To Have and To Hold ... - Friday, September 26, 2008:
Friday Fragments armed with Category 3 farce winds ♠ The URI! Zone saw a sharp uptick in page views (exactly 222) on Tuesday when I happened to link to the story about cheerleaders taking off their skimpy outfits and putting on something more modest. I need no further proof than that to confirm that you all are perverts and that boobies run the Internet. ♠ I should discuss cheerleaders more often to artificially boost the popularity of my site. I could even create little Flash games where you have to pull cheerleaders out of a human pyramid, Jenga-style, or Strip Hangman, using a disrobing cheerleader as the model. Of course, these tactics might also get my site picked up by the FBI Porn ... - Friday, September 19, 2008:
Friday Fragments the Rosetta Stone of blogging bridges ♠ My birthday week has drawn to a close in a fairly predictable fashion -- everyone I went to high school with boggles at the fact that I'm still in my twenties, and everyone else says something along the lines of "Well, 29 may have been low-key but next year you'll be THIRTY!" Twenty-nine was pretty nice as greengrocer birthday's go -- my woman made me cake, I played Pin the Tail on the Llama, and had a four-day work week. ♠ Also on my birthday, Ryan Christopher Wright, 4th son of Jen (Anna's eldest sister) and Lloyd Wright, was born. I don't have any pictures to share, but I'm guessing that since his name is so much like mine, he also loo... - Friday, September 05, 2008:
Friday Fragments three-time winner of the BUlitzer Prize ♠ Last weekend, we had an impromptu Labor Day picnic where Rebecca got a great deal (Buy One, Get One Free) on melons. We grilled giant ribeye steaks and floundered around the backyard playing badminton until it was too dark to see. This weekend, my parents are giving me a birthday dinner with ribs on Sunday afternoon, to celebrate my continuing adulthood and the fact that I wasn't eaten by predators or run over on the highway as a child. ♠ There was a time when I could wake up solely to the tinny beep of my watch alarm. As the inexorable trek to Age 29 progresses, I'm finding that I usually don't wake up until the annoying backup... - Friday, August 29, 2008:
Friday Fragments one part Friday, two parts rain, mix with fragments and serve ♠ The bottle caps in my Magic Hat beer sampler from Costco have slogans written inside them. The slogans run the gamut from weird ("Upon the Fruits of Our Yeast, You now Feast"), to racy. I'm guessing you're supposed to be drinking Magic Hat at a fr(h)at party and then giving the bottle caps to cute girls like heart-shaped candies. Wouldn't you want to go home with someone who could do magic and promised to give you his "wand"? ♠ Speaking of racy drinking, parents are up in arms over a ridiculously campy Orangina ad featuring anthropomorphized animals ... - Friday, August 08, 2008:
Friday Fragments official fragments column of the 2008 Summer Olympics ♠ Being the 8th of August, today is a mildly awesome day, because 8/8/08 is like having four 222s , and everyone knows that quads beat a three of a kind. ♠ In last week's impromptu midweek poker game, quads never showed up for me (except when I stood up in a muscular fashion). The game was won handily by Dissertation-Kathy, with Florida-Mike and Theory-Chris as runner-ups. The fact that we played with the oddball Florida rules is suspect, since all three winners had played with them before. ♠ The first rule had us deal all the chips out of the box. There were so many on the table that we might... - Friday, July 25, 2008:
Friday Fragments bow-legged, knock-kneed, and legless ♠ It's been a busy couple weeks for web improvements and I'm 100% pleased with Kattare as a hosting company. If you need a hosting company than can handle more complex sites with a support line that's actually useful, and don't mind given away a decent chunk of your disposable income, I would definitely recommend them (and not just for the 15% kickback I would get for referrals). Since I moved over, I've been busy writing a Java forum and gear database for my Warcraft guild , and excreted the last pooplogs of the PHP language from the bowels of this site, replaced with healthy whole-grain Java. ♠ For the less technical readers,... - Friday, July 18, 2008:
Friday Fragments below the equator, fragments flush in reverse ♠ The plan for this weekend is the annual camping trip in Gore, VA to celebrate Sam E's birthday. Last year's trip was surprisingly quiet, other than the Confederate rednecks all-terraining in their pickup trucks at 3 AM. No doubt, this was because the last Harry Potter book came out at the same time, so everyone was engrossed in finding out that Snape was a sled. ♠ Apparently there are no major book releases threatening this year's camping trip, although this weekend marks the release date of CHESS CRUSADE for the Wii -- because apparently it's much easier to move a pawn with a Wii Remote than your hand. ♠ In othe... - Friday, July 11, 2008:
Friday Fragments ♠ After over four years of living in Loudoun County, I finally signed up for a Loudoun County library card. It wasn't because I'm running low on books to read -- it was just because I wanted to check out back issues of Consumer Checkbook for Heating and Air Conditioning company reviews and I was too stingy to get a subscription. ♠ My library card is labelled in a low-tech way with a felt-tip pen, but at least the librarian had good handwriting. On the high-tech side, the card also came with two keyring-sized copies that seem to be all the rage these days. ♠ I have never had a keyring card of any kind, even for groceries or movie rentals. My keyring is quite bare,... - Friday, June 27, 2008:
Friday Fragments contains more sodium than generic brand soy sauce ♠ Yesterday on the way to work, I saw a flashing highway sign that said "DRIVE HAMMERED, GET NAILED" and was sponsored by the Fairfax County police department. This unfortunate slang might actually increase the number of drunk drivers on the road. No doubt, they were channeling Katie Melua's Sailboat song where she sings, "If you were a piece of wood I'd nail you (to the floor)". ♠ There haven't been a lot of horrible songs on XM recently, although Groove Armada's "I See You Baby, Shakin' Dat Ass" made a surprise reappearance last week. Other than that, the worst song I've heard is CSS's "Music is My Hot, Hot Sex" ... - Friday, June 20, 2008:
Friday Fragments that doesn't take wooden nickels ♠ Work has been pretty busy this week, which might be why this week's entries are shorter than usual. Have you submitted your captions for Wednesday's Caption Contest yet? I rely on my readers to self-entertain in situations like this because I'm far too busy doing secret work and playing Mario Kart. ♠ I unlocked Birdo in Mario Kart a couple days ago. Ms. BJ is a medium-weight driver that speaks purely in farty sounds, and is a perfect choice if you would rather play Mario Fart. She farts around turns, makes farting noises when she passes people, and farts despondently when you drive off a cliff. Definitely worth the price of unlocking. &... - Friday, June 13, 2008:
Friday Fragments the unluckiest column of the month ♠ Congratulations to Paige and Matt who have a new daughter as of May 29! Because all new babies need to start out life with an online gaming handle to get ahead, Paige has given her the nickname, Senorita Clementina. You can find pictues of the newbie on Paige's site (click on the link in the left sidebar). ♠ It's too bad that Clementina wasn't a boy, because then Paige could contribute pictures to Guys Eating Stuff (also in the left sidebar). ♠ Now that there are officially more babies than adults in the readership of the URI! Zone, I've decided that the next major feature to add will be a Fantasy Baby Draft, where you se... - Friday, June 06, 2008:
Friday Fragments two parts vermouth to one part yogurt ♠ This week marked a break in a four-year tradition: Fridays are no longer Popeyes For Lunch days! The Cheers-esque franchise near my home where my order is always prepared as I walk up to the counter has the same meal discounted on Tuesdays. By going then, I pay $3.18 instead of $4.68 (a 32% savings!) which nets me about $70 a year. Some other cost-cutting measures I plan on employing include getting my car to run on tap water ($1440 a year) and feeding my cats carpet shavings instead of dry food ($100 a year). ♠ Speaking of cat feedings, Booty was a right bastard this morning, starting her breakfast routine at 3:30 AM instead of 5 AM and carr... - Friday, May 23, 2008:
Friday Fragments the only thing standing between you and total anarchy ♣ This weekend marks the official five-year anniversary of my life in the full-time job world. In that time, I've risen from lowly software engineer to CEO of the company, only to lose everything in a tragic whirlwind of blow and hookers, resetting myself back to a software engineer. ♣ It used to be tradition to receive a really nice watch of your choice for up to $250. As more and more employees stretched the rules and tried to convince HR that "this MP3 player also has a clock in it", they got rid of the watch rule and just hand out $250 bonus checks in the mail. I'll probably spend the check on blow and hookers, since most hook... - Friday, May 16, 2008:
Friday Freshened This coming July will mark three full years of the Friday Fragments column, and since many of my readers are spawning children that need to be roped in as soon as they learn to read, I though it might be worthwhile to come up with some alternatives to the Fragments column that will breathe new life into the site and increase readership. Here are a few possibilities: ♣ Friday Freestyling : In which I create freestyle raps about topics submitted by readers and make amateur recordings backed by a MIDI beat box. ♣ Friday Fraternities : In which I ridicule one Greek organization per week until they have all been ridiculed. This idea would also allow me to occa... - Friday, May 09, 2008:
Friday Fragments ♠ Last night's LOST was pretty good, and much better than the episode before it. Dave Matthews mercenary is still scary, and the lack of beach time was good. They should really give Desmond more to do than sit around looking Scottish though. There are no more episodes before the three-hour season finale (which will play out over the next couple of weeks). ♠ The energy of this season is another argument in favor of twelve-episode serialized dramas -- you get in, tell your story, and get out. A show with 22 forty-minute segments to fill is obviously going to have some stinkers in the mix (like Jack confirming yet again that he doesn't believe in miracles, or Sydney Bristow falling i... - Friday, March 28, 2008:
Friday Fragments pissing around before a fortnight one off ♠ A major installation we were supposed to be doing at work got delayed by paperwork, so instead of spending Friday in a deep, dank lab typing rm -rf / , I decided to take the remainder of the week off to supersize my two and a half week vacation. It worked for NBC primetime in 2001, it can work for me. ♠ It's almost sad to realize that after deducting all this leave from my leave pool, there's still over 80 hours of leave remaining. I could take another two weeks off to do something meaningful, like leveling one of every Warcraft class to 70, but that wouldn't be nice to the people at work. I guess I'll just save it up for a trip to P... - Friday, March 21, 2008:
Friday Fragments ♠ I still don't understand the draw of Amy Winehouse. Her song, Monkey Man comes on XM all the time now, and it sounds like she's barely sober enough to phonetically sound out all the lyrics . Maybe people just like the real-life drama aspect of her persona, since she's on so many drugs that she could easily pass for a cocaine-addled animatronic puppet. ♠ We went to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner on Wednesday night for giggles' sake, and had some surprisingly tasty pizza while watching various stuffed animals sing the alphabet song. Because of corporate downsizing, Chuck himself was the only animatronic puppet present -- the rest of the gang (like the dog... - Friday, March 14, 2008:
Friday Fragments beware AIDS in March ♠ Ella came over for a playdate yesterday so she could show off her many talents, like dribbling spaghetti down her chin, sticking her fingers in sockets, and chasing cats. She has also learned how to greet Booty: (2MB WMV). She's not a LOST fan though -- by that point in the evening she was a victim of narcolepsy and intrigue. ♠ I thought LOST was clever last night. We picked up on the fact that the Sun/Jin story in the future was not what it seemed, since the actors' scenes seemed so LOSTianly delineated, but we didn't see the final time shift coming. I also noticed that the date on the tombstone was the date of the plane crash, and we susp... - Friday, March 07, 2008:
Friday Fragments immensely satisfying as long as you're illiterate ♠ I haven't made any more progress in Warcraft, because I've spent all my online time playing Warsong Gulch, which is obviously the most entertaining portion of the game. When you reach the endgame, you can either spend eight hours in a cave waiting for people to eat and drink, or you can do twenty-minute pick-up games where you get to beat people up. The latter is much more rewarding. ♠ My Warcraft time will probably decrease since Rebecca's returning from Guatemala this Sunday. Also, Super Smash Brothers Brawl comes out for the Wii on the same day, so I'll have to have a Wii-party sometime soon. ♠ EBGames actuall... - Friday, February 29, 2008:
Friday Fragments ma-ma-say ma-ma-sah ma-mah poo-sah ♠ Last night's episode of LOST was probably one of the most well-crafted episodes of any TV show in a long time. LOST generally does pretty good at season finales, but it's hard to isolate any one episode as a "great" episode. This was one. ♠ I did not realize, though, that Dave Matthews worked on the freighter, though it makes sense since Stand Up was a really crappy CD and he needs money for legal fees in the old case where his tour bus took a dump on a boat full of tourists . ♠ It turns out that the writer's strike will work quite well for my schedule, since the final completed episode of LOST wil... - Friday, February 22, 2008:
Friday Fragments the literary equivalent of Florence Foster Jenkins ♠ Welcome to the 222nd edition of Friday Fragments! It's an apt way to open 222 Day (February 22nd) -- if you are unfamiliar with the 222 phenomenon, you can read more about it in my February 22, 2006 entry: . ♠ This is actually only the 116th episode of Friday Fragments, but that wouldn't be quite as impressive for an opening fragment. However, you could argue that there are 106 more episodes until the 222nd, and if you treat 106 as the numbers 10 and 6, then the next SAT number in that sequence would be 2, and it would be the THIRD number in the sequence, hence 3 2's = 222. Done and done. ♠ Speaki... - Friday, February 15, 2008:
Friday Fragments more fun than a bottle of inert gas ♠ Happy day after Valentine's Day! Anna sent me an article that highlights the threat of World of Warcraft this Valentine's Day . "A generation of neglected, unsocialized feral fatties awaits us. " Only if they roll a druid. ♠ Obligatory Warcraft fragment: Plinkette is level 68 and just entered the Blade's Edge Mountains. Pinkly continues to sit in Ironforge making swiftness potions all day long. Plinky now has a Gnomish Poultryizer and has gone 29 - 1 in Warsong Gulch since creating it on Wednesday. I'm assessing whether to create a second one just for kicks. ♠ Loudoun County real estate assessments... - Friday, February 08, 2008:
Friday Fragments hot to trot like a tater tot ♠ I saw this image over on Dad Gone Mad. Who knew that family planning had such an easy and eloquent solution? ♠ One problem with weekends is that most of the blogs in the sidebar get updated even less than they already do during the week. Shape up, people! We require more reading materials. ♠ This weekend, I'll be taking Rebecca to the airport at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning (before 5 AM is ungodly, after 5 AM is normal). I'll also be playing a little poker, doing my taxes, and going to Costco to buy an additional pallet of toilet paper. ♠ Even though it's crappy tree-bark two-ply toilet paper, I feel like i... - Friday, February 01, 2008:
Friday Fragments ♠ I managed to catch a case of what was either elephantiasis or a flu-like cold on Wednesday which is the reason there was no update that day. I spent almost all day Thursday sleeping it off, but did make sure that I was awake for LOST in the evening. ♠ The twist at the end of last season's LOST could have very easily destroyed the show if handled improperly, but after watching the season premiere, I'd say that they've not only managed to meet expectations, they've also revitalized the show in a big way. I give it two Booty's up. ♠ My tenth grade English teacher, Mrs. Riviere, had three grammatical rules she was fanatical about: Use because of instead... - Friday, January 25, 2008:
Friday Fragments because even some crappy half-assed sentences are more exciting than work on a Friday. ♠ Congratulations to my Mom, who has now won three of the four Caption Contests on this site. She wins a $10 gift certificate for her efforts, easily outscoring all the other permutations of Mr. Ed and Tony Shaloub. Entries were also submitted by Mike (of Mike and Chompy), Jaood, Rebecca, and myself. ♠ With Mom winning all the Caption Contests and Kathy winning all the Name-That-Tune Contests, I may have to invent some new contest types that skew differently. Some possible ideas: Spot the PHP Syntax Error, Name all the Pokemon, Organize the Pregnancy Symptoms by Week, or Name that Tuba Soloist.&n... - Friday, January 18, 2008:
Friday Fragments contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance for saturated fat ♠ I hit level 61 in World of Warcraft last night and made my first trip into the Outlands, the expansion pack world that I'd never been in before. Graphically, the new world is as impressive as anything Blizzard has done in the past. I'd like to see a full-length feature film by the Blizzard team -- they could probably give the Pixar guys a run for their money. I'm glad that I got a faster graphics card when I bought this new computer though, otherwise I'd be stuttering through the world like an Arban double-tonguing etude played by a twelve-year-old. With the Geforce 8600 GTS, everything is smooth and speedy. &spad... - Friday, January 11, 2008:
Friday Fragments It's Friday. You ain't got no job. ♠ Have you submitted a caption for Monday's Caption Contest yet? If not, you're missing out on a chance to make a really easy $10. That's more than some trumpet players make in a week! ♠ The deadline for submission is today, which is handy since tomorrow is 12 of 12 , and you'll be busy documenting your life to prove that it's more exciting than it seems. I wasn't sure if I would do 12 of 12 again this year, but then I realized that I'll be in Barcelona on the 12th of April, so it would be criminal not to. ♠ Speaking of criminals, I'm really tired of all the caucus coverage in the media r... - Friday, January 04, 2008:
Friday Fragments at least 75% as tasty as Tuesday Tenders ♠ I'm highly satisfied with my new Canon Powershot A650 IS. Taking quality pictures is so simple that a handicapped three-toed sloth (hence, it has one toe) could do it, and the batteries last for several days of heavy usage before requiring a recharge. The only negative (note the photography pun) I've found so far is that the memory card is inserted into the battery compartment, which makes it slightly more annoying than normal to switch it out. ♠ The picture below was taken at the Baltimore Aquarium last weekend, using the camera's special "Aquarium" setting (one of several special settings that includes Fireworks, Underwater, Indoor... - Friday, December 14, 2007:
Friday Fragments The final Fragments column of 2007 ♠ I received an email invitation to my company's holiday party last week. You can ignore the now-typical January date (because scheduling things in December is so stressful for everyone, so it's better to place the party alongside the delivery of the first post-Christmas credit card bill). What you can't ignore is the location: the office. While I do like our office, it's definitely not the proper setting for anything labelled as a party. Were both the Hyatt and the Elks Lodge Community Center booked up already? ♠ I would be more mocking of this if I actually attended office parties, but that fact that I don't takes away some of my moc... - Friday, December 07, 2007:
Friday Fragments helping you to feel like an alligator in a handbag factory ♠ Don't forget that tonight at 7 PM is the deadline for voting in the Museday poll on the left sidebar! You can listen to all the samples in Tuesday's post. ♠ Many people have sent me cards and letters wondering why my crotch seems to be emanating heavenly light in the photo from Tuesday's post. As a matter of fact, that light is actually coming from my pants, and not the lamp I keep under the desk for when I tinker inside my computer. It makes life pretty difficult when trying to fall asleep, but it's great for reading in bed. Life is trying with a heavenly body like mine. ♠ Other non-believers wrote in to s... - Friday, November 30, 2007:
Friday Fragments only twenty-seven shopping days until the day after the day after Christmas ♠ Metrobus advertisements are out of control now, especially the environmentally safe buses that supposedly run cleaner than others -- they're wrapped in a technicolor outer shell with flowers and jungles like someone mated a caterpillar with a box of crayon. ♠ You know those vans with advertisements and directional arrows emblazoned across the sides that just sit on the edge of the parking lot to entice drive-by customers? A few days ago, someone had backed the Dunkin' Donuts van into its spot, which made the giant arrow point at Chik-fila instead of Dunkin' Donuts. ♠ Later that same day,... - Friday, November 23, 2007:
Friday Fragments Sterling's longest running Friday-themed column ♠ The final "Month of Thanksgiving Dinners" dinner took place last night, and immediately afterwards, my fridge was packed with two gallons of cheddar cheese soup, a pound of stuffing and gravy, a pound of mashed potatoes, five buttermilk biscuits, two pounds of leftover turkey, two bacon-wrapped scallops, three pounds of tomato-roasted lamb, two pounds of cooked ham, a small leprechaun named Hal, five cinnamon pears, a quarter of a homemade chocolate pie, two uponened packs of bacon, and fourteen Miller Lites (as you can tell, I've been working hard on those, having originally started with thirty-six). ♠ With the dinner over and the ... - Friday, November 09, 2007:
Friday Fragments revealing the secrets of the universe to the unworthy since the dawn of time ♠ Newest in the series of "songs where you compare yourself with inanimate objects is Katie Melua's new single, If You Were a Sailboat . This came on the radio the other night and I could help but to burst out laughing at the line "If you were a piece of wood, I'd nail you (to the floor)" . Obviously there are no hidden double entrendres in that lyric, or at least no more than in the line "If you were a house I would live in you" . ♠ When I first heard of Katie Melua, I kind of liked her music, but now it seems like every one of her songs sounds exactly th... - Friday, November 02, 2007:
Friday Fragments it's sixty degrees in November -- somebody screwed up ♠ The high temperature over the weekend is supposed to be 66 degrees (Farenheit, you dirty Euros). This is completely unacceptable for a Fall season, and I may decide to sue someone. I guess there was some truth after all to Al Gore's claims of global warming. Luckily, I have a book ready to take advantage of his success. ♠ Since I generally spend 98% of my day behind a desk, in a car, or in my house, I first noticed the unseasonable mildness on Wednesday afternoon, when I was putting a spare tire on my car. I had to do this, you see, because I somehow managed to run over a giant hex bolt within fifty yards of my home on the way... - Friday, October 26, 2007:
Friday Fragments fast-acting relief from the pains of coherency ♠ The actor that plays Jin on LOST was arrested for suspicion of drunk driving last night, so I guess they're going to kill him off next season. LOST has always been MADD's moral compass, since the three other actors who had major traffic violations were all killed off in the long run (I can't mention names since Rebecca's not caught up yet!). ♠ They recently got Jack Bauer again for drunk driving, but somehow I bet that 24 would not maintain its trajectory to syndication if they killed HIM off. Alternately, they would write the scene where Jack finally dies, and on every take, Kiefer Sutherland would come up with a new met... - Friday, October 05, 2007:
Friday Fragments a fifth of october is not nearly as good as a pint of guinness ♠ I finished the second season of Prison Break this week -- it was a fun watch but the final episode suffered from "we should end this show now but we want to set up another season and make more money" syndrome (see also, the end of Alias' fourth season). ♠ Last night I started watching the Heroes pilot on the recommendation of Rosie and Jason. It's neat but hasn't really hooked me yet. So far, I think it would be a far cooler show if it were completely about the adventures of Hiro, the Japanese office worker who can "bend the space/time continuum like Star Trek". ♠ One of the char... - Friday, September 28, 2007:
Friday Fragments now with onions ♠ Last week, I had my first bison burger at Joe's Montana Grill -- it was tasty but not that much different from a normal burger. Montana Grill also uses Earth-friendly straws, which must mean that they won't annihilate you with a ray gun if they ever arrive on a spaceship. ♠ On Wednesday night, I strayed off the beaten path of American chains to eat in an Ethiopian restaurant in Arlington, where we had tibs with spongy bread. It was pretty tasty. ♠ For work or for play (or to search out new members for my covert prostitution ring), I've been through Arlington every day this week. That's a nice fifty-mile round-trip every twenty-four hours, which m... - Friday, September 21, 2007:
Friday Fragments the critically-acclaimed literary sensation in the tradition of Hop on Pop ♠ The final portion of Extreme Makeover: The Three Year Home Edition has begun and there are now six-hundred-forty-five square feet of carpet in my basement, ready for unrolling. My dad and I tried to go with the fifteen-foot carpet rolls this time around since the space is so big down there. They're a little more awkward than a standard twelve-foot roll (not unlike a social face-off between a software engineer and a systems administrator), and ooze off the tailgate of the truck like a drunk Mexican on permanent siesta when you try to get them home. ♠ Before I tore down the basement, ... - Friday, September 07, 2007:
Friday Fragments now available in four designer colours ♠ Writing about the Paper Mario series yesterday reminded me that I have outgrown the age of gaming nirvana. There was a time when I could buy, play, and beat nearly every game in existence, when people didn't have jobs, TV shows didn't have seasons on DVD, girls had cooties, and even the weakest game was worth a complete playthrough (I even beat Stonekeep ). ♠ Nowadays, it's the rare game that will convince me to play for more than a few days at a time. Even with highly enjoyable games, I'll buy with every intention of playing a lot, and then letting it atrophy after just a week. I think I've even reached the point where I'd rather... - Friday, August 24, 2007:
Friday Fragments the literary cure for syphillis ♠ A recent glance at my server stats shows that the Americans continue to charge cowboy into my website -- a veritable Pac-man on the pie chart, consuming all lesser countries in a single obesity-driven gulp. ♠ I'm guessing this means I should cater more to my target audience, with NASCAR Day, Fat Day, We Require A National Language Day, and Eating Fake Chinese Food Day, since getting Chinese carryout is an American pastime that every child must experience at some point. Canada is a "close" second on the chart, so I can also talk about ham and tooks. ♠ Sometime in the past year, I seem to have started pronouncing the word, toa... - Friday, August 17, 2007:
Friday Fragments useless filler, not unlike the hour of TV on ABC before LOST comes on ♠ Today is the last day of work for my old project manager. On the positive side, it bumps me up in the food chain to a Technical Lead again (two slots away from Despot), but the downside is that I'll probably spend more time commuting to the Skyline office in Bailey's Crossroad until they hire a new onsite liaison. I've already gone twice in the past week, which is almost as much as I went in all of 2004. ♠ I've been up to my neck in work this week, which is quite a bit of work when you're as tall as I am. As a result, I haven't had as much time to devote to things like coming up with ingenious puns for this website o... - Friday, August 10, 2007:
Friday Fragments the DeLorean of fragment-based columns ♠ I have the day off today and you don't. Happy Friday. ♠ As I was charging to my Leave account this morning (a grand total of -2 Hours since I worked extra last week), I noticed that I currently have 296 Hours of Leave saved up -- this means that I could ostensibly take seven full weeks off from work and backpack across Europe. Alternately, I could sell it all back and buy a Winnebago (Fully equipped, big kitchen, water bed . . . AM-FM, CD, microwave). I always intend to use up more vacation time, but whenever I get around to charging, it seems like I've worked enough hours to cover the deficit. ♠ Speaking of backpacki... - Friday, August 03, 2007:
Friday Fragments a clinically proven method of testing your mental acuity ♠ Ever since it flagged www.dooce.com as Pornography, I knew that the "learning" Web Filter at my job was a bit overzealous. My presumptions were confirmed yesterday when I tried to visit a Department of Defense site and found it blocked for my protection. I guess the filter is worried that I may be doing a Google search on semi-automatic weapons and bombs for a Postal-style operation. Luckily, I ordered the potassium nitrate from home. ♠ It's been another hot and dry week, which means I've spent lots of time indoors (a highly unusual occupation since I generally spend three out of five weekdays backpacking the Appalachian tr... - Friday, July 27, 2007:
Friday Fragments celebrating the two year anniversary of the Friday Fragments Fhenomenon ♣ It's been a busy week -- I have not stopped running since the camping trip last weekend (I'm running as I type this). Hopefully, I'll have some time to slow down and relax tonight -- maybe to wash a few crusty dishes and clean the Matterhorn of poop that has undoubtedly taken over the litter box in the basement. ♣ I just cleaned the litter boxes last night, but sometimes Booty is full of poop, much like the senators who are currently lobbying to filter the entire internet to protect the kids from boobies. The only harm you will ever come to from boobies is if you happen to be walking next to a spritely Amazon w... - Friday, July 13, 2007:
Friday Fragments ♣ 2007 is already halfway over and barrelling towards its inexorable conclusion, even though July has always been the least frenetic of months for me. Having written a full year of daily posts since the previous site anniversary, I tend to get a little burnt out on updates when July rolls around, as can be seen by all the updates I did in July 2002 . ♣ As recently as three days ago, I'd actually planned on making July "Let's take Wednesdays off for the entire month and see how long it takes readers to catch on" month, but seeing Brianne and Philip reload the page every twenty minutes for updates on Wednesday morning guilted me into writing about English class. ♣ Unli... - Friday, July 06, 2007:
Friday Fragments a cancer-free way to surge into the weekend ♣ Depending on what my afternoon schedule of sleeping and napping is like, I may go into D.C. for another Jazz in the Garden concert. The trip is so much easier when you don't have to bother with the Blue Line which has a route that mimics the old BASIC "snake game", where you try to make your snake as long as possible without eating itself. Tonight's trip will effectively increase the number of times I've gone into D.C. in the past 6 years to 6. ♣ Speaking of repeating numbers, the odometer in my Accord hit 55,555 miles last Friday, which means I've driven about 25 miles per day over the last six years. Not bad for someon... - Friday, June 29, 2007:
Friday Fragments it's the end of the month as we know it ♣ I finally got around to posting all of the pictures I've taken this month but we're tragically short on days to devote to another Media Day. Instead you can pick your poison here: Home Improvement, June Festivities, and Jack's Wedding Booty and Amber ♣ Some of these breathtaking photos have never before been seen by human eyes, like the photos from Rebecca's birthday last week, where we went to the Sequoia in D.C. (the cheap outdoor part) and bumped into Jack and his groomsmen partying late into the night. They were still there when we left around 1:30 AM, but Jack was ... - Friday, June 22, 2007:
Friday Fragments ending the week with all the style of a hillbilly clown in a tuxedo ♣ The end of June has quite a few overlapping birthdays which means that a lot of parents were "doin' the dirty" at the end of September. On the birthday menu today are Rebecca and Brianne -- happy birthday! For a gift, they each get a fake party hat Photoshopped onto their stolen pictures. ♣ Photoshopping stolen pictures is the best. If I don't get 100% participation in yesterday's census, Chompy is going to be completely shaved, greased up, and pushed down a Slip N' Slide. ♣ I never owned a Slip N' Slide when I was a kid, since we did the more traditional (read: cheaper) "jump through the spr... - Friday, June 15, 2007:
Friday Fragments an effective tool for keeping yourself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight ♣ I spent Wednesday evening holed up in the under-construction bathroom. I was either busy sanding down the spackled walls for painting (and, in the process, inhaling fourteen cubic tons of spackle dust so I can sneeze out a lifesize figurine of Scooby Doo in about three days) or composing a video ransom message from my terrorist cell. I have the bomb made. Have you cleaned your sniper rifle yet? ♣ Several years ago when I used to play first-person-shooter games, I was always the annoying guy holed up with the sniper rifle, picking people off from afar -- especially on that UT2004 capture t... - Friday, June 08, 2007:
Friday Fragments because I have the day off and you don't ♣ Today's post is probably slightly later than usual because I took a day of leave (which means I only have 256 hours, or 32 full days left, OH NO) following an evening of sheepish debauchery. Actually, I had planned on taking leave, but worked so many extra hours at the beginning of the week that I get the day for free! That's economic. ♣ Last night was Lamb Night 2007. A few folks came over for dinner and I slaughtered one of the sheep that lives on the common ground behind my house. I cooked my signature tomato lamb garnished with rosemary, and a side of instant mashed potatoes. It shear was great. My freezer was full of stale-tasting ice from th... - Friday, June 01, 2007:
Friday Fragments making the world a better place by donating all proceeds to Popeyes ♣ As you can see from yesterday's pictures, I had a small intimate barbeque last weekend, where I baked my popular cookies, made my secret onion dip, and cooked fourteen giant kosher hot dogs and twelve not-as-kosher hamburgers. ♣ I also bought two cases of beer for the barbeque (Costco had a sale -- $24 for 24 Coronas) and somehow, the nine drinkers managed to consume forty-five bottles by the time the night had ended. All of this alcohol apparently had the side effect of tilting the poker game in my favour. ♣ As previously mentioned, I finally won a poker game with nine other players and walked awa... - Friday, May 25, 2007:
Friday Fragments Retrospective a nostalgic look at memorable fragments from the original 2005 columns ♣ July 22, 2005 (the very first column) : I always knew the French were a little wacky but now they've outdone themselves. The posters on the right are actual images from their new "Prevent AIDS" campaign. I have applied a Gaussian blur to the salient man ass, since that's not necessarily the first thing you want to see in the morning. Kids, make sure you don't have le sex with a spider, because that's how l'AIDS circles le globe. The previous sentence is the result of four years of high school French. ♣ July 29, 2005 : Three times in the past week, I have mistyped "bridge" instead of "bride"... - Friday, May 18, 2007:
Friday Fragments the 82nd edition of this column since July 2005 ♣ On Wednesday night before LOST, I ordered some pepperoni-mushroom-black-olive pan pizza from the local Pizza Hut delivery franchise. When the carrier came to the door, he glanced at his receipt and we had the following conversation: Pizza Guy: "Dude?" BU: "Huh?" Pizza Guy: "You Dude?" BU: "Yeah, I'm a dude." Pizza Guy: "No, is your last name Dude?" BU: "No, it's Uri -- why?" Pizza Guy: "My receipt says you're Dude." [shows me a receipt that definitely says "Pizza for DUDE " over my address] BU: "Dude?" Pizza Guy: "Yeah, Dude." BU: "Well yeah, I'll be a Dude if it gets me pizza." ... - Friday, May 11, 2007:
Friday Fragments you can tell it's the weekend because of all the clubs ♣ Wednesday's LOST was really good, and set up great expectations for the last three hours of this season. In a peculiar-for-a-money-grubbing-media-network move, ABC announced that LOST would have three remaining seasons of sixteen episodes each, so we'll finally figure out what Jack's tattoos mean and why Hurley's still chubby when I am thirty years old. ♣ Eleanor didn't think too highly of the episode. In fact, she slept straight through it and her Bon Jovi / Rod Stewart hair grew another four inches. ♣ I mowed the lawn after work yesterday, because it's in that fast growth stage where you have to choose ... - Friday, May 04, 2007:
Friday Fragments a blank check for the bored soul ♣ I just heard through the grapevine (where the grapevine is an e-mail from the dad) that Aaron and Lisa Ulm had their firstborn, Allison Elizabeth Ulm, last month. It now feels like there are BABIES EVERYWHERE, and I can't walk down the street without tripping over a misplaced baby. Allie Ulm was born just two days after Eleanor Ahlbin, which should give the latter a slight but noticeable advantage when they all compete on the first season of Infant Survivor. ♣ Even if you have no gladiatorial babies of your own, you should enter yesterday's Caption Contest, because the winner gets $10, which is easily enough to buy a baby in any developing third-wor... - Friday, April 27, 2007:
Friday Fragments by gum, it's still Friday ♣ I decided to try the Mike Catania timetable of posting, in which the post for a particular day can go up anywhere from one to seven days after the actual day, as if he were on a mysterious island so far from the International Date Line that the line is a dot to him. ♣ Actually, I was in the DISA Lab at Bailey's Crossroad shooting trouble (POW). I left for work yesterday morning at 6 AM and didn't get back here until late this afternoon, so I didn't have the time or a computer upon which to write today's entry. I still don't have very much time because I am being attacked by cats who have not eaten in thirty-two hours, and my dinner is cooking i... - Friday, April 20, 2007:
Friday Fragments because bulleted lists are far easier to write than paragraphs unless you're stuck with MS Word ♣ It's been an arduous week in an emotional holding pattern for me, which definitely affected any urge to write my usual cheery and lighthearted pulp. To propitiate for this paucity of pleasant posts, I promise that next week will play proprietor to a particularly pernicious panoply of puns, and maybe a Cat Media Thursday thrown in for good luck. I am mostly back to normal now, because Asians are resilient (as shown in the classic physics experiment where you roll an Asian off a two-story building and watch how far they bounce back up). ♣ I'm still annoyed with the media for giving so much... - Friday, April 13, 2007:
Friday Fragments two monkeys, fifteen minutes tops ♣ Less than twenty-four hours after making fun of Reston's personal Light Brite system in my 12 of 12 notes, I drove by this morning to find that all the construction lights were shut off. I guess this goes to show that if you put your mind to it, your website can accomplish anything -- it's not a lost cause! ♣ I thought Wednesday's episode of LOST was enjoyable, and have high hopes for the remainder of the season. I still think the season stumbled a bit with the worthless filler episodes right in the middle -- who cares about a tattoo? ♣ I also called Juliet being a plant the entire time. What would make the story especi... - Friday, April 06, 2007:
Friday Fragments ♣ Congratulations to Anna and Ben who had their first daughter, Eleanor Grace Ahlbin, this morning at 4:41 AM! She weighed seven pounds twelve ounces and was twenty inches long. I do not have any pictures of the nooblet yet, so here is a picture of a twenty-inch trout. If this trout weighed roughly the same as a kid's bowling ball, it would be a good candidate for Eleanor-replacement (in case Indiana Jones was trying to steal her off a pedestal in the hospital). Note, though, that they probably don't look anything alike. ♣ I could be pardoned for mistaking a baby for a fish though. I went to my optometrist on Wednesday afternoon to update my prescription (since there's a kooky Virginia law that says your p... - Friday, March 30, 2007:
Friday Fragments it's that time of the month again (the end of it) ♣ Work has continued on the home improvement front this week as I tore up two layers of linoleum flooring dating back to 1978 in the kitchen. This is a dangerous job for the anemic, since the sharp edges have given my hands more nooks and crannies than a fork-split English muffin. With the help of URI! Zone readers, like Diana, who can see more than two and a half colours, I also picked out some gold-yellow curtains for the living room, which really accentuate the Asian geopolitical undertones of my house. ♣ Once the kitchen floor is redone, I'll need to find a new place to stash Anna's piano, which is about to celebrate its third yea... - Friday, March 23, 2007:
Friday Fragments this is your brain in drag ♣ The earache I had on Monday finally stopped hurting by Wednesday and now I'm just deaf in one ear like I was during the Great Christmas Earache of 2004 . Earaches are the only thing that can make my ears bleed outside of a Contemporary Music Festival, and this one did manage to lay me low for a couple of days. ♣ Bleeding ears are not normally fodder for discussion here, but I'm trying a new shock-value thing to up my ratings -- it worked for Fear Factor! ♣ Between all the suffering and painting and flooring and wenching, I've picked out a new project to occupy my time in the coming months: I will become a contributo... - Friday, March 16, 2007:
Friday Fragments packaging the detritus of my wisdom into easy-to-digest bundles ♣ I've managed to get a little painting in every day this week except for one, and paint fumes have now reached a critical level, causing me to feel high like a monkey dangling from a very tall tree. ♣ Though this analogy isn't particular good, it does allow me to reuse this picture of me one final time before I relegate it to the trash. Reuse means I get to expend less effort, which transitively means that I have more energy in reserve, for the day I'm pursued down a long narrow alley by an escaped lion. No one ever expects an escaped lion, and then CHOMP(y), they're breakfast. Doesn't it look like I'm hanging fro... - Friday, March 09, 2007:
Friday Fragments broadcasting coded messages about aliens since 2005 ♣ Congratulations to Philip and Kara on the birth of their first daughter! Sadly they did not name the baby "Malibu" -- Madison Grace Barbie was born on Sunday, March 4, weighing 5 lbs 15 ozs. Mother and child are doing fine . ♣ The next baby on the baby-assembly-line will most likely belong to Anna and Ben. Since their due date is March 27, I am now taking bets on the actual date of birth. The person who guesses the closest to the actual date will be allowed to name their baby. I have not yet cleared this contest's prize with the parents-to-be, but I'm sure they won't mind. My vote is for March 28, and since I have... - Friday, March 02, 2007:
Friday Fragments disjointed, anticlimactic, and hard to understand, much like the average jazz trumpet solo ♣ Last month went by incredibly quickly -- I don't know why but it really felt like the month was two or three days shorter than normal. Despite this, I was able to remain my usual productive-BU self, as personified by Mike Catania in this guest post from 2004 . ♣ Among my accomplishments for the month of February, I wrote two new songs, hosted two poker games, took off five days from work, painted and carpeted one room and a hallway, refloored one foyer, met three new people, went on two dates, beat two video games, finished one project at work, read four books and half a book... - Friday, February 23, 2007:
Friday Fragments bite-sized biscuits of wisdom for the soul ♣ The shredder I purchased last week works pretty well, and devoured six inches of documents like a starving Art History major turned performance artist, clocking in at just under five minutes. It also has a setting that lets you destroy CDs and DVDs in seconds, which is both useful and entertaining -- truly a technical achievement on the part of the designers. ♣ At work, my team received a Technical Achievement Award for the five-month sprint we did for our latest release. Ironically, only three members of the team went to the company's "Let's Pretend Christmas is in January" party where the award was presented, since everyone else was too ... - Friday, February 16, 2007:
Friday Fragments a doctor-recommended cure for sexually transmitted dizziness ♣ I finally finished cleaning out my file cabinet yesterday after work. I tried out a new system -- instead of carefully and meticulously filing anything and everything I've ever owned, I removed all the bills and receipts older than three years old (The old artwork and drawings I kept for slow days where I can write more in the "What's In My Messy Drawers Day" series). This weekend, I'm going to purchase a little shredder. ♣ I used to just take all my identity-theftable paperwork to the office to shred, but the ten-year-old shredder there can no longer slice up a voided check without a horrible jam which then require... - Friday, February 09, 2007:
Friday Fragments the red-headed stepchild of American literature ♣ My week of vacation time is coming to an end, and I didn't have as much time to play Where In The World is Brian Uri! as I would have liked, but I still think the week off was a success. I was just returning from a day trip to the Great Wall of China when I realized that this weekend is the third anniversary of buying a house and living in Sterling. ♣ This also means that I've been out of grad school for almost four years. In celebration of four years of real life without bankruptcy, illegitimate children, meth habits, or gang initiations involving loss of digits, I will eat Popeyes for lunch today -- two piece meal, dark meat, mild, ... - Friday, February 02, 2007:
Friday Fragments makin' a world of diff'rence since 2005 ♣ To capitalize on the success of my new state song (it's a foregone conclusion that mine will be picked since I know a former Mayor), I have also written the marching band arrangement, a crucial piece of any pre-game show (560KB MP3). I am also in talks with Wynton Marsalis to record a series of technically perfect but emotionally uninteresting jazz solos over the chords, to be placed on a CD and sold at Starbucks. At the very least, this should start to build public recognition of my work. ♣ So I don't get added to a list of dissidents, I would like to state that I don't necessarily endorse Northern Virginia seceding from Virginia At L... - Friday, January 26, 2007:
Friday Fragments the 67th edition, a must-have for collectors ♣ Last night I started moving furniture and books out of the office in preparation for next month's plan to renovate. I'm going to do the usual fresh carpet and paint plan that turned my three bedrooms into "airy bits of heaven on earth". A season of Extreme Makeover: BU's Home Edition is infinitely better than the ABC variety -- who needs Ty Pennington when you have BU with Hammer? ♣ The Hammer is one of the few Zelda set-pieces not present (yet) in the latest Wii edition, Twilight Princess . I'm about halfway through it now and it's definitely classic Zelda -- 50% frustratingly annoying and 50% inspired. For every ... - Friday, January 19, 2007:
Friday Fragments it's like chess but with a more powerful king ♣ Today is the last day of my ridiculously extended work weeks, and I plan to celebrate by having Popeyes for lunch and then going home for some imported liquors and ho's. Sure I do that every Friday, but this time it will be special . ♣ I've been working so hard that I've forgotten how to not work. To put it in perspective, there's been eleven weeks since the beginning of November, which anyone who passed algebra or owns a Texas Instruments calculator can translate into 440 regular work hours. My hours for that period as of yesterday evening were hovering around 700. I probably worked more than your Verbal SAT score. &nbs... - Friday, January 05, 2007:
Friday Fragments the culmination of 230 years of American Independence ♣ Yesterday afternoon, Philip sent me a picture of his developing progeny, little Malibu Barbie. With his offspring and Anna's sharing a due date, I'm sure March will be a rather busy month for cigar makers. It won't be long before we find out that the Kelley is the proud daddy of triplets. Wouldn't that be a scary start to the new year? ♣ Looking back, 2006 was overall a good year -- not too dramatic and not too dull, which is perfect for a status-quo maintainer such as myself. If there's one lesson I learned from 2006, it's that you cannot listen to the theme song from Picture Pages without getting it hopelessly stuck in your he... - Friday, December 15, 2006:
Friday Fragments propogating my madcap descent into irrelevance ♣ I write this on Thursday night, having just returned from a high stakes poker game at work in which I came in 21 of 24. For those readers who spent the majority of early algebra class staring at that one girl who seemed to hit puberty eight months before anyone else, this is equivalent to 7 out of 8, which is actually slightly better than I do in home games. In those games, I am quite familiar with the term "dead last". ♣ Most of my losses can be attributed to the level that I play the games at -- I don't consider all the intangibles of poker when playing a hand, like which cards have already been seen, whether I have an 88.88 ch... - Friday, December 08, 2006:
Friday Fragments six parts ADD to one part vermouth ♣ Wii straps are breaking all over the world, causing untold damage as controllers go flying across the room . "...our understanding right now is that even beyond our expectations people are becoming more and more excited playing with the Wii." said the president of the company. The creator of Super Mario Brothers chimed in with, "We are looking into the situation to see if there are additional methods to encourage people to kind of calm down so they would never throw away the controller itself". ♣ A first step wouldn't probably be telling people do not let go of the controller! I suppose that the followup would be to h... - Friday, December 01, 2006:
Friday Fragments spreading the seed of holiday spirit like a woodfinch drunk on eggnog ♣ To get this holiday month off to a holidaic start, I've made my cats wear Santa hats around the house, and pulled the Santa Llama out of moth balls for this site. ♣ I read an article in the Post the other day about the holiday decorations in Target. The always-eccentric fellow they had designing the stores decided that Santa and wood elves were no longer relevant to the Christmas idea. If you go into a Target this week, you'll find sharp angles, reds, greens, and whites, and a general theme that evokes a very modern feeling of the holidays. ♣ You won't find any Wii's though. You will find nine mi... - Friday, November 17, 2006:
Friday Fragments leading the fight against teenage rickets since 2006 ♣ Time has just flown by this week. In a season where I'm working as much on the weekends as the weekdays, the best milestone of passing time is the writing of this weekly column. To recap: I made a meal for seven, came in fourth out of five in poker, read Expert Spring MVC and Spring WebFlow cover to cover, gave a demonstration of our project to a room brimming with corporate suits like an outlet sale at Big and Tall, taught a lesson on Best Practices and Design Patterns in Java, nursed a sick Burmese python back to health, attended a sales pitch for performance management software in exchange for free pizza, and prepared my note... - Friday, November 10, 2006:
Friday Fragments posted solely to appease the four people that visit on a Federal Holiday ♣ Whenever there's a holiday on which people don't have to be at work, the number of visitors reaches that of a live performance of Popo Zao. This is why I usually don't update on holidays. ♣ There was a time when I posted every day of the year, but my writing is like a precious natural resource which must now be conserved so it will never run out. If I am the natural gas of the blog world, then we should all hold that gas in for as long as possible and hope that Peak URI! never comes. ♣ Now that the election is over, I expect oil prices to rise immediately. Had they stayed up before the election, it ... - Friday, November 03, 2006:
Friday Fragments how Kenyans learn English since 2004 ♣ Pussycat by Wyclef Jean is a pretty catchy tune (400KB MP3). Usually I find his songs ranging the gamut from Annoying to Unnecessary, but this one's got a neat sound and uses resampling to good effect. ♣ The two pussycat interlopers are invading the house again, sleeping in other peoples' beds and eating their porridge. They're here for the weekend because Kathy's off at the glamorous Society of Music Theory conference in scenic Los Angeles, which is probably a rip-roaring good time for music theorists, but akin to watching a pothead try to move a cigarette butt across the coffee table using only the powers of his mind at 3 AM... - Friday, October 27, 2006:
Friday Fragments Halloween Edition, now with 50% more bats ♣ Police are on the lookout for a criminal. Call the station if you've seen him. ♣ Never have I ever called a television hotline or tried to be the ninth caller in a radio contest for random prizes and fame. I have called radio stations twice for requests, and both times they had never heard of the song. Stupid radio stations playing only the songs everyone already knows. ♣ This three-part movie trilogy of Lake and Titan's last visit to my home has a recognizable and quite apropos song for its soundtrack: (#1, 2MB WMV), (#2, 1MB WMV), (#3, 3MB WMV) ♣ The Staples Copycat commercial &... - Friday, October 20, 2006:
Friday Fragments nuggets of wisdom made with all yellow meat ♣ I'd originally planned to spend yesterday afternoon painting my front and back porches with my dad, but the grumbly fog with its 95% humidity shot that idea down. Instead, I spent the afternoon working from home. Luckily the sprint-like conditions of the past three weeks are now wound down like an exhausted grandfather clock. ♣ As you can see in the picture, the stoop of my porch is larger than the picturesque roof and railing above it. There's three square feet of useless space outside the railing on either side of the porch which I only use on a yearly basis to set up jack-o-lanterns. I think at one point in the house's twenty-eight yea... - Friday, October 13, 2006:
Friday Fragments the reason why your kids are so ugly ♣ I had actually planned to do Chad Darnell's 12 of 12 this month, but time flew by like Harry Potter to an Angst-Ridden Teenager Conference, and it was almost noon by the time I realized it was the 12th. You can still visit his site to see pictures from everyone else's day. ♣ As for my own, it was about the same as usual. I got to work at 6:09 AM (I know the exact time because you have to sign in and deactivate the alarms if you're the first one in), worked until 1, came home and made a ham and mayo sandwich with three pieces of 97% Fat Free ham, worked for another two hours and then went to Boston Market for dinner with Anna a... - Friday, October 06, 2006:
Friday Fragments The leading cause of childhood blindess in Norway and its environs ♣ The premiere of South Park which revolved around World of Warcraft was hit or miss. It was too WoW-centric for non-WoW-fans to enjoy, but not quite enough to really make it hilarious to people who play WoW. It had its moments though, and definitely got a ton of the cliches and absurdities correct. ♣ The premiere of LOST was pretty good even though it's once again taking us in a different direction without answering all of the old questions. I think this could be a really strong season -- I just hope they don't keep giving flashbacks to the people with boring lives. I'm glad they brought back Henry Gale as a main cha... - Friday, September 29, 2006:
Friday Fragments Nature's way of telling you to eat more fiber ♣ As I write this on Thursday evening, a massive late-season thunderstorm is ripping through Sterling with the pent up aggression of a rabid poodle made to dress up in sweaters one too many times. It's nice living in a place where all the power lines are buried underground because the power never goes out. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't gauge the strength of the storm by the color of the satellite map online. I might have to look out the window or something. ♣ The only time I ever go to weather.com anymore is when a storm is likely. In college, the site used to possess near-homepage qualities, because you always had to be concerne... - Friday, September 22, 2006:
Friday Fragments ♣ Like a dead pigeon blown off the 40th floor of the Empire State Building, my Warcraft time has fallen dramatically since I "won". This gives me more time for a smattering of Renaissance Man pursuits like composing, reading, exercising, and organizing my life, and Lazy Boy pursuits like sleeping and watching DVDs. I also touch my cats, but in the tactile petting sense, and not the role model sense. ♣ I've started my almost-annual reading of the Light and Shadow series by Janny Wurts which is both a blessing and a curse. I love this series and almost know it by heart, uncovering new layers of meaning and symbolism every time I read it, but I also can't just read one book... - Friday, September 08, 2006:
Friday Fragments more regular than a mule on Metamucil ♣ If you missed the comments section from Tuesday, you can see pictures from Kelley and Kathy's Hawaii Beach Wedding Extravaganza featuring first-runner-up from the Bob Barker look alike contest here with the password "Anini beach". ♣ Another Kathy has been at another beach this week enjoying the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto, so I've had two hyperactive kittens running circles around my house this week. I've refrained from posting pictures since I went overboard with cat pictures last week, but here's just one so Kathy will stop bugging me. Lake likes to sit on my shoulder while I play Warcraft. ♣ The ne... - Friday, September 01, 2006:
Friday Fragments ♣ To open the day with something of a meta-segue from yesterday's post, I'll be taking care of Kathy and Chris' two kittens starting this afternoon and running through next weekend. I have an open betting pool to see which one Booty will devour in a single bite first: Punchy or Lake. I also have a feeling that the two kittens are probably smarter than Amber and may play tricks on her all day long. ♣ The playing habits of cats are so peculiar. You can wad up a ball of paper and throw it in the living room, and the cats will not particularly care one way or the other. However, as soon as you've turned your back and are not paying any attention, they'll be beating the crap out of that paper ball like it was b... - Friday, August 25, 2006:
Friday Fragments I'm thinking of a number from one to ten, and I don't know why. ♣ I've been temporarily sidelined by a mild case of pneumociatic triclociglucosis, a completely made up term to describe the bug I caught on Monday which gives me a sore throat, a cough, and stinging allergy eyes. I spent Wednesday at home relaxing and Thursday at home working which, on the bright side, saved me 28 miles worth of gasoline. I probably am not contagious, but I figure it's better to stay home than infect the multitudes of coworkers I would come in contact with. I'm still not fully recovered and it's actually gotten a little worse, so I'll probably only work a half day today. ♣ It wasn't all bad ... - Friday, August 18, 2006:
Friday Fragments making the world a better place one fragment at a time ♣ Every Friday when I pick up my Popeyes lunch on the way home, I drive through downtown Herndon. On one particular street corner, there's always some poor schmuck in a Statue of Liberty outfit advertising some sort of accounting firm or somesuch. His understudy is an un-costumed fat guy in a lawn chair sitting next to a sign advertising a furniture liquidation sale. It's such a high class town. ♣ Liquidation sales seem to be quite the racket these days, especially considering that it's always the exact same store going out of business. It's not a bad business model if you think about it -- get some crappy goods, mark them up 300... - Friday, August 11, 2006:
Friday Fragments because it takes more paragraphs and makes the update look much longer than it really is ♣ There are some stories on CNN.com that just don't require a multimedia experience, and the one on the left is a prime example. Another example of text you'd never want to see on CNN.com: " Watch as Auntie Maybell shows off the three foot tapeworm in a jar that she had surgically removed from her intestines ". ♣ There was an article in the New York Times about tapeworms the other day that was illustrated with a raw fish wrapped up like a birthday present with a ribbon of tapeworm. I bet there is an entire untapped market of "stuff you can make out of a tapeworm" from ribbons to Slinky'... - Friday, August 04, 2006:
Friday Fragments a weekly way to win the war of words without wasting witty topics ♣ Ex-roomate Kelley Corbett and ex-girlfriend of ex-roommate of other ex-roommate Kathy Hanna are getting married today in Kawai, Hawaii! (Kathy is the girl). No doubt they will have a kid named either Kasey or Klyde, and move into the country where they can live in rural Fincastle with "The KKK Family" painted idyllicly over the doorway. Congratulations! ♣ Since the cute couple eloped, in a manner of speaking, I now have a free weekend in the middle of September which I would have otherwise spent in Staunton, Virginia, speed-trap capitol of I-81. Maybe I'll have a 27th-birthday-oriented barbeque and invite friends fro... - Friday, June 30, 2006:
Friday Fragments because June is so last month The URI! Zone has a new viewer, Lake, who is one half of the dynamic duo that is Lake and the other kitten. I forget what Kathy and Chris decided to call the other one so I'm going to presume that it's called Punchy until I hear otherwise. Lake and Punchy are still only three months old, so they're tinier even than Sydney and Amber were when we first got them. I met the new kittens on the block at Chris and Kathy's birthday barbeque last weekend. You probably weren't invited because they hate you. I have another barbeque tomorrow, this time down in scenic Colonial Beach with an entire cadre of someone else's nieces and nephews. The nice thing about knowing Cat... - Friday, June 23, 2006:
Friday Fragments Short and sweet, like an Asian hooker Plinky is now Rank 8 and now gets random messages from strangers when wandering around towns. It's kind of like being a famous rock star, but without the ho's and fresh fruit backstage. The funny part about my #163 standing in last week's tally isn't that I actually made it to 163, it's that there were 162 people with even less of a life than me. By the end of the grueling weekend, our team had won 43 games and lost 30. After each day, I was not thinking clearly and unable to type complete sentences. It was kind of like being drunk but without any alcohol. I never get ... - Friday, June 16, 2006:
Friday Fragments because no one wants to write with coherency on a Friday Today is the Day of the Gaping Orifice, during which my dad and I will be installing a new window on the back wall of my house. Festivities start at 8 AM and I'll be sure to take plenty of pictures so I can publish them in my forthcoming book, Windows For Dummies . This also means that I have today off from work, but it's not really a vacation since I ended up working extra last week on some time-critical bugs. This, in turn, delayed all my shopping excursions last weekend from Saturday to Sunday which means I didn't waste as much money as expected on cool stuff since many stores aren't open on Sunday morning. &... - Friday, June 09, 2006:
Friday Fragments Always exciting, never stale, much like English muffins in a vacuum Kim decided to end her long-running blog this week, which was tragic. In its place on my Bloglog, Mark Connor gets the coveted lower-left corner spot, clinically proven to draw the eyes of an upwards of three (3) visitors per day. To maintain the circle of life and to give me reading fodder, one of you read-only leeches should start up a blog of your own and post in it regularly. I will even plug you here like a leaky skiff. We must do everything possible to prevent the blogging world from becoming lopsided. Because my neighbourhood is still semi-rural, there are only sidewalks on one side of the street, if at all. In ever... - Friday, June 02, 2006:
Friday Fragments A traditional Korean delicacy for your Friday morning blues LOST actress, Michelle Rodriguez, avoided jail time for her DUI for the second time. She was sentenced in Hawaii and served one day of time before being allowed to walk, and then she was rearrested in California because she had been on probation from a previous DUI incident. She then served a few hours of a two-month term in an L.A. jail before being allowed to walk, after which she "celebrated her release at the Tropicana Bar". Someone needs to give that woman a pimp-slap back to reality. She's not a very good actress, she doesn't come off as someone I would invite to one of my rocking dinner parties in interviews, and sh... - Friday, May 26, 2006:
Friday Fragments I tried Rob's cornstarch thickening idea with my latest batch of Egg Drop Soup and it worked out quite well. The only caveat is that you need to continue stirring the mixture until it's ready to be poured into the soup or else the cornstarch will clump back up again, and no one wants a slurry with the fringe on top. I almost considered putting a punny show tune in every fragment today, but I didn't have nearly enough time or patience to follow through. My week has been long, arduous, and onerous, so I apologize if any of this week's past posts lacked the normal polish and pizazz usually associated with my Pulitzer-possible production. Alliteration is a f... - Friday, May 19, 2006:
Friday Fragments where the Internet elite mingle with the ragtag dregs of society When I first sat down to write today's entry, I didn't have a clue as to what I should write about. Normally I have a small short-list of one or two sentence ideas that didn't quite fit anywhere during the rest of the week which I digest into the intellectual diarrhea which explosively spreads across the Internet, preserved forever in the Internet Archive . With the Internet Archive, you can metaphysically go back in time to the halcyon days of your youth. You can see what the Chompblog looked like in its first month of existence (very yellow), or how Google's layout has changed (very little). It will not, h... - Friday, May 12, 2006:
Friday Fragments What do you get when you cross a cinchilla with a molerat? I decided not to do 12 of 12 this month, because I wouldn't get the results up until Monday at which point no one would care anymore, and because today is probably going to be the least interesting day of my week. Egg Drop Soup Week was a success. I've got the taste perfected -- now I just need to work on thickening the broth with more corn starch and making the dropped egg more silky and less rubbery. If this computer progamming thing doesn't pan out, I might be able to find work in a Good Fortune restaurant making the soups. Tragically you will not be able to find Chef Uri!'s Egg Dr... - Friday, May 05, 2006:
Friday Fragments Fast acting relief for your urge to do any work today So apparently I've been wearing a pink watch for about three months now, ever since my old one died. I did not realize it was pink, since to me, it looks 100% silver, but I stuck it in Photoshop which cannot tell a lie when it comes to colour. You may now proceed to mock me mercilessly for my fashion sense. I still think it's silver, but this leads me to wonder how many articles of clothing I own that are an unfortunate shade of silver. While cleaning out my laundry room yesterday, I found a grey (yes, it's definitely grey, maybe with a tinge of blue) sock behind the washing machine. If you have done laundry at my house in the past two ... - Friday, April 28, 2006:
Friday Fragments My mind is a swirling miasma of scintillating thoughts and turgid ideas I updated my smiling visage on the About page since the old picture was almost two years old, and did not accurately reflect the substantial increase in hotness and maturity I've gained (I've got a +2 to maturity). The new picture was taken during my Blacksburg trip with my camera set to the highest resolution, coincidentally named Superfine™ , which is also the caption of the picture. AM I RIGHT? About a year ago, I got tired of swapping tiny camera cards in and out and always running out of photo space so I bought a 512 MB card at Costco for some obscenely low price and haven't look... - Friday, April 14, 2006:
Friday Fragments Because bullets and stream of consciousness make everything better No one is at work this morning. Not even the clowns that wake up earlier than I do and roll in at 5:00 or 5:30. I guess that's what makes it a good Friday. According to MONEY magazine, I have the #1 job in America: Software Engineer . The article does a good job of outlining the pros and cons of being one, although I'd argue that software engineering doesn't necessarily cause eyestrain and back, hand and wrist problems -- the type of person that makes a good software engineer is probably going to be spending hours at his computer getting carpal tunnel every day regardless, so they might as well get paid fo... - Friday, April 07, 2006:
Friday Fragments Rachel gets to be in the tagline because it's her birthday today Banquet Chicken Pot Pies have cost-cut, and now their pie tin is made of cardboard instead of aluminum foil. This is not good news for the crust-taste, which is 95% of the reason you eat a pot pie. The essay portion of the Java exam was about as exciting as the staid one-story testing facility I took it in on Herndon Parkway. I did have to share the testing room with some guy taking a different test, and I'm sure I distracted him with my machine-gun style of typing on a keyboard, especially since the spacebar had years of accumulated human filth on it and would almost stick with a satisfying click after every word. Luckily the four... - Friday, March 31, 2006:
Friday Fragments Where to come for all your weekend fragment needs I think my left leg must be an inch shorter than my right. When I wear loose-fitting jeans, I always end up walking on the left cuff. There's now a big hole at the base of my jeans similar to the hole you would insert a lip disc into if you were one of those zany African tribesman. Despite this, I prefer loose baggy jeans because then I can wear a belt, and pliant leather belts are fun to wear. The amount of clothes that fit me properly has a direct correlation to the number of female friends I have that buy me clothes for birthdays and holidays. If I didn't know any, I would be doomed to a life of threadbare duds that shrank in the wash.&n... - Friday, March 24, 2006:
Friday Fragments You need a Chiquita Banana sticker on your forehead Yesterday at the gas station, a crazy animal lady with bumper stickers all over her car and one pants leg rolled up to her knee decided to warn me about skyrocketing gas prices as I got out of my car. Why does every single person in the latest Old Navy commercial look like they're anorexic? All I see are a bunch of vaguely human-shaped torsos with spindle fibers for limbs, dancing in performance fleece. How is performance fleece different from regular fleece? If it doesn't involve tap-dancing sheep, I'm not really interested in the answer. There are now rumours that Isaac Hayes never actually left South Park, but that he ... - Friday, March 17, 2006:
Friday O'Fragments with guest appearance by Molly O'Malley the Llama "Fecundity" looks so much like "feces" that there's no way I can ever associate it with positive connotations. Paige (Oompa Loompa Girl on this humble site) will be moving indefinitely from Texas to Spain tomorrow so husband-Matt can pursue his position at Exxon. That's a whole 'nother country! They've already boxed up all their crap and put their house on the market, so she will now spend her days attempting to learn Spanish and starting a travel-blog so she doesn't have to write emails to everyone. Good luck Paige! I've often considered what it would be like to pick up and move out of the U.S. The reason I nev... - Friday, March 10, 2006:
Friday Fragments Where pop culture and no culture collide Bimonthly trips to the Burke Branch library were regular parts of my childhood existence. As a wee'un, I always checked out the tape/book combos that came in those ragged plastic bags with the white plastic rack hook. The most frequently borrowed book was the one where Cookie Monster sang "C is for Cookie". Later on, I regularly checked out D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths which was a massive hardback tome of illustrated myths (I had a Greek Myth fetish as a child). I must have checked that book out at least once a month. I also tried the Norse Mythology book by the same author with the same illustrated gimmick, but it just wasn't as cool.... - Friday, March 03, 2006:
Friday Fragments The Fun Dip of Internet Culture Yesterday I released an updated version of my Warcraft III mini-game, Micro Frenzy . You can go download it over at www.nohunters.com or right here in the Games section . It's only got a few minor improvements in it, but I figured that I might as well update it since more people seem to be playing it these days. If all you clowns would put down your four-year-old game and commit to paying $156 a year for a World of Warcraft subscription, you would find a much more satisfying addiction in store for you. I hear that Kathy is planning on dropping her doctoral work in favour of resuming the WoW habit that she picked up while living in my house la... - Friday, February 24, 2006:
Friday Fragments The illegitimate offspring of The New York Times and The Sun You know you ordered too many checks when they all list your address as Centreville, you moved out of Centreville in February 2004, and you have at least two more boxes of fifty checks each still unopened. By now, I've even given up on the pretense of scratching out the address. It doesn't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things since the only things I pay for with checks these days are the mortgage and my cable bill. Yes, Adelphia still doesn't have online billing. This is 2006 -- even my visits to the bordello can be Pay-Pal'd. Season One of The 4400 started o... - Friday, February 17, 2006:
Friday Fragments Giving Canada, Australia, and the U.S. something to enjoy together since July 2005 I received the following note from Dave McKee (david.mckee @ vt.edu) yesterday: This spring, Dr. Allen Bachelder will retire from Virginia Tech. After almost 30 years of service, Allen and Florie will move to Michigan to begin life after work! The house is sold, the new house has space for the MGs, and they are excited. We are saddened for our loss, but excited about their future and ours! Dr. Bachelder will solo with the University Symphony Band on our April 20 concert. I have asked him to select a work and I'm going to also ask him to play "A Trumpeter's Lullaby". At that point, the fun begins - I'd like t... - Friday, February 10, 2006:
Friday Fragments I just make the fragments. It's your job to combine them into the Optimus Prime of the English language There was an article in the Washington Post Home section yesterday about couples who live in tiny living areas . One couple lives in a 416 square foot studio, which is roughly the size of the two bedroom apartment I had in Florida. I could very easily live in a tiny area as a single person, since I'm only three feet tall and sleep standing up, but just couldn't fathom sharing that space with another person. Even married, I can imagine there are times when I'd just want to be by myself -- not because I plan on marrying a wretched ho who never stops talking, but because by nature I'm a qu... - Friday, February 03, 2006:
Friday Fragments Fifty monkeys, two hours tops The Oscar nominations have been announced with a whole lot of Crash going on. This is good for me because it means I can block off the last week in February for my completely wrong Oscar predictions, since it's something of a tradition now. Also, check out the trailer for the new movie, Brokeback to the Future . I finally watched 40 Year Old Virgin two weeks ago. It was funny but about 20 minutes too long. I wish that they would stop making unrated-uncut versions of the DVDs unless the extra bits are actually worth watching. Two other movies from last year that I want to see but haven't g... - Friday, January 27, 2006:
Friday Fragments Fifty million visitors can't be wrong, unless you ask them something they don't know On Wednesday it was snowing sideways in Reston for about thirty minutes. The temperature is all akimbo and fluctuates between 20 and 50. It'd be nice if there were beachy weather so I could go to the beach. I would walk eight miles down the beach, steal a little boy's scooter to get back, take a nap in a hammock, and then dig a hole. That would be my Monday. Anna, have you started looking for beach houses yet for the summer? Get on that. See how I used that last fragment to ask a question of a reader that should have been done by e-mail since no one else cares about it? That's called an effective use of In... - Friday, January 20, 2006:
Friday Fragments Happy Who the Hell Put Bush Back in Office Anniversary Day A tiny icon started flashing over my Instant Messenger Tray Icon last night and it's still flashing this morning. I'm not sure what it means, but I'm going to presume at this point that Running Man is low on radioactive isotopes (and/or multivitamins) and needs to recharge soon or my contacts will be lost. Here's a picture of a typical night in the BU household -- BU is multitasking between watching LOST and writing zanily satirical news updates while Booty sleeps on her fat ass and Amber eats the venetian blinds cord. They found more bin Laden tapes threatening violence, but the U.S. Threat level is not going to g... - Friday, January 13, 2006:
Friday Fragments I've already received several calls from talent scouts about the music video I posted yesterday. VH1 wants to feature me on a box of Totino's Pizzas, alligator purses, and a line of wheelbarrows. American Idol, here I come! I like to think that there's a big fat guy sitting right in front of Alito in this picture, and no one can see around him. Or the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl. It's been years since I added anything to the Olio section, so I thought I'd mix things up by posting this article my dad sent me last month . It's about the many legal troubles surrounding Virginia Tech's Audubon Quartet. It comes from the New York Times, but it's no longer availa... - Friday, January 06, 2006:
Friday Fragments Spouting nonsensical nonsense like a whale with a blowhole, and it's pointed right at you I beat Fire Emblem: This Title Didn't Really Need a Colon last night after dinner at Anna's family's house. Maybe I'll devote one of next week's updates to a full review, providing a small reminder to my readers that before I was an international playboy, I had humble beginnings as a kid that played a lot of video games. I used to get up early to play games before school started. I can remember being up at four in the morning trying to get some time playing the very fun, but poorly-named Ultima VII: Part 2 on our 486 before running off to Crew practice. Getting up early didn't ... - Friday, December 30, 2005:
Friday Fragments It's the end of an era! I hit every green light and got to work in seven minutes this morning. I love my commute. Some work friends moved from Del Ray in Alexandria to Herndon yesterday, so I'm sure they'll have so much commuting time freed up that they won't know what to do with themselves. If you missed the stealth announcement in December 26's comment section, Kelley Corbett and Kathy Hanna are all engaged and whatnot. They started dating in 2001 when Kelley (my roommate from college year #4) lived in Foxridge across the street from Anna (my roommate from college year #5) whose current roommate was Kathy's ex (and he, at the time, was dating the girl living upstairs from Kelley). Kelley... - Friday, December 23, 2005:
Fri-hohoho-day Fragments There's a Mariott Springhill Suites in Herndon next to the Fairfax County Parkway, but the sign is busted, so all you can see from the road is "cHill Suites". That, in my opinion, is a much better place to stay. I don't think I've ever heard a single remix I've liked by Mylo. It takes zero talent to loop a one-bar vamp for four minutes, and even less to think you are being artistic by doing so. I was roused from my slumbering party last night by incessant rapping around 11:15 PM. It wasn't Eminem making a housecall, but two Loudoun County policemen knocking on my neighbour's door and shining flashlights in the windows. Eventually they moved around behind the house and went in the patio door, alt... - Friday, December 16, 2005:
Friday Fragments The last time I was in Costco, the cashier looked at my membership card and flagged down a manager. I thought they had discovered my secret identity as an agent of the Zambian Black Rose, but they just wanted to tell me that I was eligible for a Costco Executive Card, based on the amount of money I spend there. I don't know whether to be sad or proud that I spend more than the GNP of Burkina Faso on a household of one. I guess I just can't resist the bulk boxes of Velveeta Shells and Cheese. When I was a kid, my dad always bought us a yearly copy of PC-World, almanac/mapping software, in hopes that we would learn something. One day I looked up the country with the lowest literacy rate and it was Burkina Faso. Th... - Friday, December 09, 2005:
Friday Fragments the best update idea I ever done stole Would you believe me if I told you that this was the 21st Fragments column I've written? That means that many of you have had nothing better to do than visit diligently for over five months now. Get jobs, slackers. In honor of its 21st edition, I will be taking the column out for drinks and a "(space)bar crawl" tonight. We will subject ourselves to multiple shots of alcohol like old prose and hopefully predicate our night with a few prepositions from sorority chicks. To put this duration in perspective, and to alleviate the recent decline in name dropping, here are some fun times to consider: Brian Uri! has been alive for 314 mo... - Friday, December 02, 2005:
Friday Fragments where the upper crust of the Internet come to read my musings and post in the comments section I always knew there was something fishy about that woman. You have to wonder how she bought cars for everyone when she's obviously pouring all her profits into her ice habit. Here's a brief sample of Nickelback's Chad Kroeger singing every syllable as if he's getting punched in the stomach (136KB MP3). Someone really needs to get him some vocal Metamucil before he gives himself an embolism from straining out that musical poop. Have you ever looked at the top of a soda can before you open it? Especially in the case of sodas from the company fridge or soda machines, you can ... - Wednesday, November 23, 2005:
Wednesday Fragments what the heck If you missed yesterday's explanation, I'm doing my Fragments column on Wednesday this week so I can take a mini-sabbatical from updates over the Thanksgiving holiday. I'm like Bill Watterson, except my cartoons suck and I don't have worldwide name recognition. Based on which days the holidays are going to fall on, this will be the last vacation from updates I'll be taking this year. If you aren't visiting this page with Firefox, you're missing the dancing turkey-llama in the upper left corner. Here's a video clip that will show you how much richer your life could be: (249KB WMV). If you don't care about turkey-llamas (which taste a lot like turduckens), here's a clip of my ... - Friday, November 18, 2005:
Friday Fragments Like a rainbow of joy in your mouth, except you can't eat it and it's not particularly colourful A very strange weather front went through our area on Wednesday. We didn't get any rain, but an ominous stain of thunderstorms rushed by on the horizon all day long, in a hurry to get to the Northeast like a stampede of hungry office workers who have just gotten an e-mail saying that there's free food in the kitchen. The end result of this strange cloud migration was that temperatures dropped near freezing, and it is now far too cold to do anything but sleep and sit in front of space heaters. I really need to buy a new fleece soon -- preferably one that zips up rather than goes over your head, because the latte... - Friday, November 11, 2005:
Friday Fragments Because there is nowhere else suitable for stories about bull semen Happy Birthday Kelley Corbett! I have not seen Kelley since Pip's wedding two summers ago, so he's probably a grey-haired hippie with a potbelly by now, but that's what happens when you finally turn 18 and pass the puberty exam. The previous statement is probably a good example of why I get profanity-laced globules of sarcasm from Kelley via e-mail. And, he is actually 24 or something. You may find it unusual that I'm posting on a federal holiday. Federal holidays are only good excuses for killing updates on days where I actually have to think of something to write about, and Friday never qualifies as such... - Friday, November 04, 2005:
Friday Fragments Because it's Friday and no one wants to read a novel $75,000 in bull semen was stolen from a Maryland farm this week . There are so many ways to make fun of this crime that my head has exploded and is now leaving a trail of brain fluids wherever I walk, much like the what will happen to the thief's thawing cargo should he not own a portable freezer. The authorities have already brainstormed ways to catch the crook (like a lack of genetic paperwork at a sale), so this should really be a seminal step in building a nationwide repository of information to prevent future thefts. That's actually a picture of a lady siphoning bull semen up there. I did a search hoping to find a f... - Friday, October 28, 2005:
Friday Fragments A weekly column which eliminates any need for coherency The Hokie's new uniform is funky-looking. Asymmetrical styles don't appeal to my anal sense of order and the white lines on the shoulders make them look like one of those costume shirts with the naked lady outline (generally worn by an obese redneck). Luckily the uniforms don't seem to affect the efficacy of their offense, since they beat BC 30-10. Frank Beamer was quoted in the Post as saying something to the effect of "For Nike, we change uniforms." It's cute that he resisted getting new uniforms until Nike decided to pay him $80,000 to go with the millions of dollars he gets for being a coach. I think it's funny th... - Friday, October 21, 2005:
Friday Fragments A weekly column promoting ADHD as an alternative lifestyle Amazon.com reader reviews are occasionally very entertaining. I can see the advertising slogan now: Friends: The Complete Tenth Season - Not as gay as you expected! The Hokies creamed Maryland 28-9 last night, and looked reasonably good doing it (despite a third quarter mini-game of Catch), and I didn't even notice any sportscaster fumbles on the name of our quarterback. Chris recently bought Jason a copy of World of Warcraft for his upcoming birthday, and they named their characters Mikus and Markal, in honor of sports commentators everywhere who cannot tell the Vick brothers apart. &... - Friday, October 14, 2005:
Friday Fragments If any of you commenters without a cute icon for your comments wants one, please e-mail me with a picture or the URL of a picture. I will crop it and make it appear on your posts. Comments icons make it easier to read or ignore deep thoughts from your favourite fellow readers ("Oh, there's Kelley's picture five times in a row, I guess I can ignore the comments page today"). I recently read this article saying that IKEA would be more successful if they raised their prices a bit and made the service more high-class . This might be true for some stores, but I think IKEA is fine for what it is -- a big-box store with do-it-yourself furniture selection that needs no service. In fact, lower the prices and g... - Friday, October 07, 2005:
Friday Fragments It's no secret that people have invented sticky labels that peel off without leaving any residue. What I don't understand is why this stuff isn't used on everyday household items you buy in the store. Most of the goods in my house have at least 25% of the label left on, generally on the side facing the wall. On a similar note, I hate the thick form-fitting plastic molding that seems to have replaced boxes for most electronic items. If you try to open one with scissors, you first must fight through the double-wide ridge around the outside. When the scissors blades have passed that obstacle, that ridge then acts to block the handle of the scissors and slice your hands open as well. Speaking of pla... - Friday, September 30, 2005:
Friday Fragments AskJeeves is considering getting rid of Jeeves as the site mascot . This is a disappointment, because it will mean that I can't make smarmy graphics for my news posts anymore . I'm not sure why they would choose to get rid of such a recognizable icon -- it would be like me dropping my last name and hosting www.zone.net. Where's the fun in that? The only site mascot that really needs to go is the Office Paperclip. At the least, they should replace him with the Microsoft Search Puppy. Both are annoying, but I'd rather anthropomorphize a dog than an office supply. One of the ads on ABC proclaims "We put the SCREAM in TV!". What the heck. Generally when you put expression A into expression B, e... - Wednesday, September 28, 2005:
Airport Fragments Airports are always filled with an unsettling nervous energy because as soon as you enter, you effectively relinquish all control over your travel plans until the time you arrive at your destination. The lines, the security checkpoints, the delays and groundings, and the seemingly random switches in gate numbers and times all seem to conspire against your trip. There are only two positive aspects to a plane ride: the greatly decreased travel time, and the novelty of seeing your house from way high up. My flight didn't serve peanuts. Instead, they had fat-free Sun Chips. I like looking at road maps, and am pretty good at correlating a destination on the map with what I see when driving. I realize... - Friday, September 23, 2005:
Friday Fragments In honor of my trip back to Tallahassee this weekend, I shaved off my goatee, so now I look exactly like I did when I lived there. Actually, I'd been considering shaving for a few weeks, since I've had the fuzz for about two years and I wanted a change. This is coming from the guy who rearranges the furniture in his house at least twice a year. My chin is now as smooth as a baby's ass, and I bet my being carded at the grocery store would increase by 15%, except for the fact that they already card me 100% of the time. I don't know if it's legal to use "baby" and "ass" in the same sentence unless your baby is trekking through the Nevada wilderness on the back of a donkey, so just presume that that is the case. &nbs... - Friday, September 16, 2005:
Friday Fragments Finally, the media gets something right. The other day, the Washington Post ran an apology for replacing death notices with paid advertisements , except they never really apologized. Using my innate translation skills, I have interpreted this notice as: " Your loved ones will still be dead tomorrow, but we need money today. " There are scars all over my hands from an active childhood and years of working in the tar pits. I can only remember how I got three of them. One of them I got by playing with a disposable razor in a babysitter's house when I was four or five. Another came from a bowsaw accident where my finger got a little too close to the blade. The third was th... - Friday, September 09, 2005:
Friday Fragments Loudoun County loves to repave roads that don't really need it. Just last week they tore up a five hundred yard section of pavement that was in reasonably good condition so they could lay a new coating of asphalt over top of it. They should invest that money in hiring someone to make crank calls to the Herndon Police Department -- maybe that would get rid of the retarded speed trap on Wiehle Avenue that's been out every day this week. Herndon's been on their naughty short-list for a while anyhow, ever since they decided to make the new day laborer site right on the Loudoun/Herndon border. I smell civil war. At the request of some of my readers, I've been trying to keep my updates shorter -- usually between one and two... - Friday, September 02, 2005:
Friday Fragments Martha Stewart is getting a new Apprentice-like show. When someone is voted off Stewart's island, the catchphrase is going to be "You don't fit in." This is easily the worst catchphrase in the history of reality television, and would only be effectively traumatic on a show about seventh grade girls. If a bad catchphrase is a requirement of the show, there are plenty of other lame ones they could have used, like "I'm going to tell the SEC about you" or "You get to wear big momma's ankle bracelet". I'm still working out the kinks in my own reality show before I present it to NBC (because they obviously need the Nielsen help the most), but I think the losers will be forced to pay me large sums of money and do work around my house. ... - Friday, August 26, 2005:
Friday Fragments Only half the usual number of people showed up to my Jazz presentation yesterday. Either everyone is on their end-of-August vacation, or people really hate Jazz. I had three people approach me before the seminar to say that they hated Jazz (and what it turned out they hated was combo jazz). I think most people today equate Jazz with the song on the babysitter's mix tape from Jerry MacGuire . In a particularly generous moment of ambition, I added fourteen new items to my 222 Things About Me page so there's only six more to go before the list is complete. Is there anything about me you'd like to know that's not covered? Let me know via my comments section because I'm running out of ideas.... - Friday, August 19, 2005:
Friday Fragments I don't find Gatorade commercials refreshing in the least bit. When I see famous and not-so-famous athletes sweating profusely and the sweat seems to caramelize into M&Ms of salty bodily fluids, I don't think, "Oh boy, that is refreshing. I shall have to try drinking some Gatorade so I too can sweat in pastels." I just think, "That's pretty gross." If the Tidee Bowl Corporation ever invents a diuretic, I sincerely hope they don't show famous people peeing blue pee. I suppose a laxative, "Tidee Bowel" would have an even worse commercial. How the heck do you spell Tidee Bowl anyhow? Speaking of commercials, here's a funny Milk commercial forwarded to me by Anna: (1MB WMV) Lost: Se... - Friday, August 12, 2005:
Friday Fragments I buy the 50-bag variety pack of snack chips at Costco which I then keep in my office to snack on for a month. The worst part of these packs is always the Nacho Cheese Doritos -- they have no real taste, and why eat Nacho Cheese when you can eat Cool Ranch? Apprently I'm in the minority, because there's always twice as many bags of these chips as there are any other type. My feelings changed this morning when I half-heartedly tore into a bag (you have to spread them out so you don't end up eating nothing but Doritos in the last week of the month) and discovered that they've changed the flavour. Now, Nacho Cheese Doritos have a very mild zing to them which greatly improves their quality. The Cheetos and Fritos are still better th... - Friday, August 05, 2005:
Friday Fragments I won another Spanish lottery yesterday. This time it was the El Gordo Loteria Primitiva, which translates roughly as "the fat Stone-Age lottery" (I'm at least 15% positive about this translation). For people keeping score, this is the second Spanish lottery that I've won . I plan to use my winnings to buy gift cards for regular readers, and to promote world awareness. We all live in the world -- it's time you realized that. The results of the last poll on children are listed in the entry from August 2. Fifty percent of those responding do not want any kids at all! I'm currently in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration to promote Uri!Zone as a viable form of contraceptio... - Friday, July 29, 2005:
Friday Fragments Operation Sidewalk has finished Phase III. We will be moving on to Phase IV: The Final Phase this weekend. My lot will be several tons heavier upon completion, and the subsequent sinking will make it so I don't have to stand on tiptoes to open the front door anymore. That was a short joke, get it? I'm short. Fantastic Four was a fun, cheesy superhero movie. Not a movie you'd want to see multiple times, but entertaining in an over-the-top way. I think the villain found the Green Goblin's evil mask at a yard sale and reused it. They're making a Transporter 2 , another absurdly action-packed vehicle starring Jason Stratham, who also played fun badasses in Transporter&nb... - Friday, July 22, 2005:
Friday Fragments I liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory better than the original movie, and I'll post a full review on Monday. When calculating the tip for post-movie munchies, I did my usual 15% plus whatever it takes to round to the nearest dollar and came out with $2.22. Someday soon I should make a page listing all the crazy places that number has appeared. This month is rapidly becoming the month with the wordiest updates ever, aided by the fact that I finally bought a tiny notepad to write things down in the car, and the half hour I set aside each night for writing. Runner-ups include February 2004 (Oscar picks), February 2002 (the week-long essay on the evolution of video game music), and April 2002 (reviews of S...
