Cranky-D

Topic is the use the words kahlua, adhesive, and design.

Sigh

“My design is to use kahlua as an adhesive.”

“Kahlua. As an adhesive. Are you on crack?”

“Well, it’s all sticky and stuff when it dries after you spill it. So I figured…,” he shrugged.

“Yeah, it’s sticky. That’s because it contains sugar. Sugar water would do the same thing, you moron.”

“Would not!”

“I’m not going to do that with you again. I got tired of that bit when you suggested using Jameson as a disinfectant.”

“Well, that would work.”

“At about 20 times the cost of rubbing alcohol.”

“You’re just mean,” he whined.

“Please, go ‘invent’ somewhere else.”

Topic

I think my entry is quite “eeeeh.” Limp. Lame.

“Congradulations! We sold the movie rights to your book for two million dollars.”

“Wow. Fantastic.” I though how I could spend that money. After I paid all the bills of course. Critical acclaim does not necessarily translate to monetary success, especially after all those novels that were summarily rejected.

“So, do they know who’s going to direct it?” I asked. I hoped it would be Scorcese.

“Two million, my friend. Two. Million. Dollars.”

I began to get suspicous. “Who is it?”

“Schumacher.”

“Who?”

“He did ‘St. Elmo’s Fire,’ and ‘Falling Down.’”

“Huh. Do I have to promote it?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Topic.

“Oh, my bones ache.”

“You always say that. There’s nothing else that could ache with you, you boney bastard.”

“Oh, ha, ha, ha, I haven’t heard that one before. Today.

“I’m working on a joint potion for you right now, Mr. Whiney. You should be rattling around like a newly-bleached skeleton in no time.” She stirred the pot a bit. A toad floated to the surface.

“Oh, ick,” said the skeleton. “What is it with witches and toads?”

“Dooooooooooooooo.”

“Ignore him,” said the witch.

“Dooooooooooooooo.”

“Who is that?”

“The ghost sent to haunt me for paying my bills late.”

“Bummer.”

Apparently you didn’t pray for me

If you recall the post linked above, I joined the den of insanity known as eb@y just last Friday. Already, I have had a negative effect on the place, and it has reft me of what’s left of my sanity. I figured I should, at least, get a post out of the whole thing.

My original intent was to secure one (1) geekly item. Maybe I’ll disclose what it was some day. In any case, it was the first item I bid on, before I got the hang of things. In doing so, I caused a chain reaction which you would not believe.

There was more than one example of the item in question available at the time. I picked the one with free shipping, since that seemed like a “good deal,” ignoring another example whose auction was ending sooner. I already knew what I was willing to pay, so I just started bidding right there, under the assumption that most people would be reasonable as well. Then I just kind of hung on, ignoring the other example, even after I had been outbid. The bidding expired on the first item without my participation, and the total price, including shipping, was X dollars.

G-d, I wish I had just tried to snipe that one. But, dummy me, I didn’t try.

Incrementally, I drove my price up and was matched. Then the other bidder let me know that he was dropping out since he had managed to obtain the item in another auction. So I outbid him by one penny, and no one wanted to match me. I wanted to be outbid a little later, since another example was sitting there with a low bid.

That didn’t last. Someone looked at what I was willing to pay, and the price on the other example jumped. I moved my price limit up again, and tried to snipe the item in two different auctions today. I failed both times, since the limits of other people were higher than mine. The total prices for both were roughly the same, at about 1.75X. Yes, in less than a week the price almost doubled. You can blame me for quite a bit of that.

There were still a few items left, one with a “buy now” price but no bids and one that was being bid on. Tonight when I saw the bids on the other example go over the “buy now” price of the un-bid-upon example, I succumbed. I decided to not wait until the furor died down, since who knows how long that would take?

The total price including shipping was slightly over 2X dollars.

I imagine that the person who just sold the example for X dollars is pretty ticked right now. I know I would be.

Yeah, I know what I should have done. A smart person would’ve waited a few weeks or a month until the kerfluffle was over and the price dropped to something more reasonable again. I’m not that smart.

I have, however, learned another lesson. I will not bid on anything until the absolute last minute. Actually, within the last minute is the only time to bid. Any other procedure is crazy, unless you’re willing to wait a long time for a good deal.

I guess a lesson learned the hard way sticks with a person better. At least, I hope it does.

“Hello, my name is David, and I’m an unhinged eb@yer.”
“Hi, David. You moron.”

The topic is surrounded.

“Well, you know what I did then,” said the skinny little blonde sitting across from me, in a voice so high and babyish I wanted to strangle her on the spot.

“Like, what?” said the brunette next to her.

“I told him no waaaaay.”

Dead. She should be dead. I could fix that.

Twittering voices all around me were agreeing with her.

“I would say that.”

“Me toooooo.”

“Totally. What a jerk.”

I had no weapons. I contemplated breaking my pint glass and using it as a shiv.

Then, from behind, a deeper voice. “Here, have some more beer.”

Salvation.

Pray for me

This might be quite a shock, but until yesterday, I have never purchased anything on eb@y. I consider it a scam of major proportions. Auctions are dangerous things, since people often spend more money than something is worth. I guess that’s why auctions are popular with sellers.

It all started when I was online looking at some geek necessities™. I would rather not say what they were at this time, since it makes me feel a bit foolish. Nevertheless, as I was looking to order the latest round of useless items, I discovered some other cute and useless items that were released over a year ago. After a bit of “thinking” I decided to buy them, since they were all available, at inflated prices, from online stores.

The next day, however, I recieved an email stating that one item was not available any more. When it isn’t in the stores, you know it’s probably on eb@y. A quick search turned up a few examples of what I wanted. So, I invented a name and dove into the fray.

As a newbie, I’m easy prey. I ended up overbidding on the one item I was looking for. The auction hasn’t ended yet, and I hope someone outbids me to save me from myself. You see, I had already figured out how this works, and I proved it to myself on another item I needed to complete a geek collection which was only missing two (now one) things to be complete.

I watched the bidding and kept my price well below my limit. For almost a day the price was stable and I was the winner. I wasn’t outbid until almost the very end of the auction, within the last minute. However, I had all my other online activities paused, so I could get instant page refreshes (thank you 1.5Mbps DSL). As soon as I saw the new bid, I put in my new bid limit, and got in about 3 seconds before it ended. Ha ha ha. I paid about $5 less than my limit, and beat the other person by $.50.

Stun!!! as we used to say when I was about 10 years old.

I’ve already given up on one auction which would complete the older geekset which now is only missing one item. Too much money. I know where I can buy that item directly for not much more than the high bid is now. So I’m out.

And if I get outbid on my latest geek item, the one I bid too high on, there’s another one of them I can snipe in a few days. I’m not even going to bid on it until the last few seconds. That’s the luxury of being able to watch eb@y prices instead of working.

The topic was surrender.

It would be so easy. He could just continue to lie where he was. Why move? What’s the point? No one would care either way.

He was tired, so tired. And he hurt. His left shoulder was stiff. It hardly had any range of motion. And why was it sore? He slept on it wrong. He remembered when that much pain was the result of a football game. And the pain never lasted so long.

If he didn’t move, he didn’t hurt. Stay still.

“Daddy, I need help.”

He sighed, and started to move. Joints popped and squeaked. “Coming sweety.”

The topic is to make up a new season.

BTW, this is lame. My writing, that is, not the topic.

Here in the North, in the Great Lakes region, there are only two seasons, summer and winter. Summer lasts almost 4 months when we’re lucky, 3 when we aren’t. Winter lasts about 6 months when we’re lucky, 7 when we’re not.

Then there are the transistional seasons, spummer and fanter. For spummer, the weather goes cold hot cold hot cold hot and stays hot. Spummer lasts at least a month, at most two months. For fanter, the opposite happens, and it usually lasts two months.

Still, sometimes this is better than Southern California. There, they just have summer and blah.

The topic was baseball.

Yeah, I’m a few days late. Just playing catch-up.

“What’s that they’re doing?”

“They’re playing a game. It’s called baseball.”

“Hmmm.” His tentacles waved with curiousity. “How does it work?”

“They have two groups called teams. One team waits in that green area. The leader of the team throws a white sphereoid at a member of the other team, who tries to hit the sphereoid with a piece of cellulose fiber called a bat. If he’s successful, he runs towards those white squares. If the other team gets the sphereoid to the white square first, the runner is ‘out’. Otherwise, he’s ’safe.’”

“Huh. And I thought sklortch was weird.”

Today’s topic is a question about those inappropriate names for housing developments.

Not UTI, just insomniac theater. So, I thought I’d get up again and see if the topic had been posted already. It was.

Sarah’s mother put an apple pie in the window sill to cool a few minutes ago. It has already slid off the sill and fallen pie-side down in the grass.

Sarah was out riding her bicycle. She just fell down and scraped most of the skin from both knees.

Over there is Mr. Brown. He’s the one with the walker that just came apart. It appears he has a compound fracture. The ambulance is on the way.

Little Timmy is crying. He just found what’s left of his dog Lassie in the street.

It’s another dismal day in “Unhappy Acres.”

Topic is Bang!

“What was that?”

“I don’t know, but it probably isn’t good.”

“Should I clear the guns?”

“Yeah. Precautionary at this time, but do it. And examine for external sources.”

“Prelimary scans show no weapon hits. Deep scan results in a moment.”

“I guess I’m nervous,” said the first, “because of our cargo.” He could hear the noise from the cargo bay, the hamsters running on the wheels in their cages. Hamsters were sacred creatures on Virgo 4, valued pets everywhere else.

“No contacts,” said the second. “Smooth sailing.”

“Good. Do we have enough food pellets and wood chips?”

“Wood chips?”

If you look at some of the blogs on my links bar, you can find many who will provide you with a nice, balanced perspective of things. I recommend protein wisdom as a fantastic source for the political fallout of Katrina. Of course, you won’t like it if you think the federal government is responsible for bailing out all the people who were left behind.

Remember, I don’t provide links for my rants. I don’t provide external support for my opinions. This isn’t that kind of blog.

I think the sea of humanity begging for relief is the perfectly predictable result of government largesse. If you provide a lot of income transfer to people with the understanding that they won’t have to provide recompense, you get the situation in LANO. That is, if you give people housing and money they will come to expect that as their due. They will no longer depend on their own initiative to survive. Instead, they depend on the provider of sustenance. And when the crisis hit, the people waited to be saved by the same source that provided sustenance in the past. And that source of salvation did not materialize.

To me, this is totally wrong. People should always depend on themselves and their own initiative to survive. The government is notoriously lax in providing anything resembling emergency services. I don’t mean to dengrate the efforts of the National Guard and all other relief efforts, which IMO were great. I just mean that the first line of defense is the person you see in the mirror when you’re shaving or combing your hair or whatever.

What we have politically right now is a huge non-issue. Local government failed to save the occupants of NO. Local and federal gov’t payments to the less fortunate of NO lead to their dependence on the gov’t, where such dependence includes taking care of them when they should have, in some instances, taken care of themselves. All the blame is being transferred by the MSM to the federal gov’t, where it does not belong. The result is, already, that the federal gov’t will assume even more powers over local affairs.

Powers they should not be allowed to have. Powers that are dangerous to federalism.

The constitution is in tatters. It gets shredded more every time someone demands that “someone should do something,” when that someone is, inevitably, the federal government.

The topic is “I’m sorry.”

Also, I’m officially late on this one.

I heard some rustling in the stack of crap under the window. That could only mean that my mouse roommate was active. The little guy was welcome to whatever he could find.

A few minutes later I noticed some motion out of the corner of my eye. I looked down and I saw the mouse, by the light of the television, in the middle of the living room. I moved. The mouse’s legs shot out in all directions, and he ran under the couch and started scolding me.

I left a few macademia nuts on the kitchen floor to apologize.

In honor of “Talk Like a Pirate” day, the topic.

“Arr, wench, a cup of grog for me,” he said.

“What kind of beer do you want?” she asked. “And don’t call me wench.”

“My apologies, lass, ’tis ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day,’ don’t ya’ know. Arr.”

“Should I come back?”

“No, thanks, I’ll have a pitcher of Summit Seasonal. Two glasses.”

“Okay.”

His friends arrived a bit later.

“Arrr,” he said.

“Arrr,” one replied.

“Shiver me timbers,” said the other.

They sat down at the table.

“Another glass, wench,” said the glassless one. “Arr.”

“You don’t know any more pirate phrases, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither.”

“Arr.”

“Arr.”

“Arr.”

I am a contributor to a book chapter related to my thesis work. I was just going over the manuscript. Someone or some thing inserted a bunch of commas where they do not belong. Every time I had a noun followed by the word “which” a comma was inserted, whether or not it changed the meaning of the sentence. In the vast majority of cases, the meaning was changed.

Trying to find all of them would be difficult. Furthermore, the insertions make me look like I can’t write and that I don’t know grammar. Arrrr.

I am frustrated and annoyed. I suspect a computer program was involved. This just proves that computers are evil and need to be destroyed. Quickly, before it’s too late.

Normally, I don’t mention dreams, because they mean little to anyone other than the dreamer. However, last night for some reason I was auditioning for P@ul@ @bdul. I lip-synced a Tom Petty song which has never been written. I danced around and did a little air-guitar in a very awkward manner. No, I wasn’t wearing a dress at the time.

WTF!? Am I going mad? What synapses fired to give that result? Weird. I do not do the air guitar thing. Ever.

I don’t watch the show (that shall not be named so I don’t end up with google hits on it). The only reality shows I watch regularly are the bike building shows, mostly because I like the fabrication part. I have seen a few snippets of Being Bobby Brown, which I will mention in another entry coming soon.

Senility is finally creeping in.

There are many people I’ve known that I don’t understand. I called this “Part I” since I may revisit this topic in the future. Or not.

I’ve had a few people I’ve called friends over the years who apparently didn’t return the favor. This is often the case, really, since rarely do two people share the same level on interest in each other. There is always one who is more interested, and for some reason that often seems to be my role. Usually the imbalance becomes apparent early, giving plenty of time for me to adjust. I’m not complaining, I’m merely describing the reality of the situation.

You should realize that I don’t use the term “friend” lightly. Most people use the word friend to mean aquaintence. I do not.

One such person seemed to be my friend, rather than an aquaintence, simply because of what I could bring to the table at a particular time in that person’s life. The person in question was going through some tough times, and since I had been through a similar experience, I was able to provide advice and emotional support. We had known each other before, but during the time the situation was particularly dominating this person’s life, we had a lot more contact. I assumed things had changed. Since I have very few friends, I tend to value them a great deal. Therefore, I spent a bit more emotional energy on the situation.

I’m sure you’ve been there. If you haven’t, you don’t get out much.

However, once resolution was at hand, and the problems were resolved, things went right back to how they were before. Even less so, it seemed, but that’s a subjective judgement. And I was there, kind of stuck. Surprised, and a little annoyed. I felt kind of used.

Most of my annoyance was directed at myself. I was the one who had misjudged the situation, and that bothers me, since I can usually judge a person’s character and my worth to said person fairly well. The person in question did nothing wrong, really, since my cooperation was both voluntary and not attained using deception. It was, literally, entirely my fault and I take full responsibility.

The part I don’t understand about the whole thing is how people can do that sort of thing. Basically, how do you look at someone as a source to use up and discard? And even worse, do I do it too?

I might. That scares me a bit.

A related kind of person is the one who tends to discard whole groups of people when they decide to redefine themselves. I’ve seen it happen directly, and I’ve known others it’s happened to as well. I’m not as sure of the motives in this case. In the previous situation, I imagine it simply requires that you not care all that much about the person you’re using. However, dropping a whole group of friends is kind of strange. Is the person afraid that their friends will call them out on their redefined selves in front of any new people who didn’t know them before their transformation? That seems likely. Or is it just embarassment in general about the person they used to be?

I’ll probably never know.

I’m trying to think of other people who I just cannot wrap my mind around. Right now I can’t think of any.

There may on the topic later, if I can get some ideas the next time I meet with a few friends for beer and conversation.

This was the second weekend of football season. Before the season started, I had picked 3 teams that I could cheer on to victory. I don’t care all that much about it, but it’s more fun to have a team playing that you can support. Plus, I figured with 3 teams to choose from, and all of them having demonstrated a fair amount of talent at some time in the past, that I would have a chance of one of them performing well enough to matter.

As of this day, all three teams are 0 and 2. You can probably name the teams on one hand who have started at 0 and 2 and been in contention later in the season, let alone making the playoffs.

I forgot to check how the Saints did. I think that this year they’re America’s team, because of what they represent. Maybe I’ll follow them instead.

As an alternative, I’ll simply let my irrational hatred for the Cowboys, the Dolphins, and the Patriots guide my thinking. May they all choke.

I finally got tired of looking at my mess. I’ve had a mess since i moved in about a year ago. I still had boxes of crap on the floor. Naturally, given my nature, that only got worse.

So, last weekend I decided to clean up. I filled up the trashcan by mid-day Sunday, leaving just enough room for a trash bag from my landlord. I have another bag of crap on the floor of the kitchen. It reminds me of “The Blob” from the movie of the same name. It has yet to take its fate into its hands and attack, but I remain vigilant until tomorrow, when I can throw it away after the trash can is emptied.

There are still boxes on the floor, but they have been reduced. I have not seen my roommate since I started cleaning. I don’t know if I disturbed his sleeping place or removed his source of food. I swept up a few times during the cleanup just to reduce the mess.

It’s an ongoing process. I unpack one box of crap, make a local mess during the sorting process, and then put the stuff away or throw it away.

I also bought a file cabinet. I needed a place to put all those important papers that people my age seem to accumulate. Bank statements, insurance papers, invoices, vehicle titles, that kind of thing. It’s made of “wood” so it almost looks like furniture. I still have to assemble it. Tomorrow. Or, more correctly, later today, since it’s already today. If I had a job, I’d be getting up soon.

Woohoo!

I learned something today. It was about web hosting.

I was under the bizarre impression that the most expensive part of web hosting was the bandwidth. It turns out I was wrong. The big expense is on disk space.

I don’t use very much space. I don’t have a lot of images floating around. If I go through with my plan to get a cat (her name will be Xena), I imagine I’ll be posting kitty pictures at some point. And maybe a picture of my mouse roommate high-tailing it for greener pastures.

As it turns out, even a modest amount of disk space (say 1 GB, which to me is not very much, considering I have about a terabyte of storage on my workhorse machine) will cost you $36 per month on my provider. That is pretty insane to me. Disks are so cheap.

Live and learn, I guess.

Update: just to avoid misrepresentation, which is not my goal, note that I’ve been told in the comments my host charges $20/month per GB of storage. The price above was the one for a standard plan which includes 1 GB of storage. Also, I am very happy with my service and would recommend them to anyone. I was merely trying to note my surprise at the cost of storage, which still is surprisingly high IMO even at the lower rate. However, I don’t run nor have I ever worked at a hosting service, so I don’t know the expenses involved.