Oh, you thought I meant 2006? No, I am way to self serving to reference the year when I could be talking about myself getting another year older.

Yes, that’s right. I got back in Wisconsin and the first thing I did was throw a party for myself. Ok, I admit it. It was just a convenient way to see several of my friends at once so that I wouldn’t have to make a trip to visit them all.

Alas, not everybody made it. I was disappointed by the people who said that they would be there and didn’t show…. and then didn’t call… grr…

But overall, it was a good night. I was totally trashed and crashed at a generous friends place. The next morning I got a ride to my car to discover a lovely new parking ticket waiting for me. Grr… Oh well, it was cheaper than a hospital bill or a DUI

Still driving…. Going to make it in one shot…. Thought it’s late and I have already talked to all the people on the phone that I could rationalize calling. Every time I get a phone call I am magically awakened for a little longer, but alas, No more calls… Ah fuck it, time to sleep.

Doh, I forgot my power nap mp3’s. Well all they did was use brain waves to put me into stage 1 sleep and wake me up in 26 minutes, surely at this point I can just fall asleep and using alarm wake myself up in 26 minutes and get the same stage 1 sleep benefit.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, ALARM, grrr, drive.

Oh shit, maybe the cops will figure out it’s me if I don’t make it to that exit before them. Damn I’m tired, but no time to sleep. I have to catch a criminal (who also happens to be me, but they don’t know that). Man, if I don’t get there first I will totally get busted…..

… (nearly 50 miles of actual driving later) Ok, I have passed all the checkpoints(exits) that I need except one, and the cops are too stupid to figure out that it was me from just the last point, but if I don’t pull over and sleep I am going to fall asleep at the wheel and die and what good would that do me?

[6 or 7 hours later]
Whoa… what the fuck was I doing. Damn, I was dreaming and driving… Bad mojo

Next time I better sleep sooner than later because having your subconscious control your conscious actions is crazy dangerous…

So I was on my way to Wisconsin from Arizona. It’s a Bloody Long Drive (yes, I said bloody, no I’m not British, get over it…). I planned to drive straight through, because I am just that damn hard core. Well, it seems that just sitting staring at an unchanging road forever makes it difficult to stay awake.

So I needed a way to stay awake. A thought came to me. I should pick up a hitchhiker. Being the type who never worries about things (i might have Ataraxia), I decided to make sure that the hitch hiker was really shady looking. Yes, I know you are thinking this is counter intuitive, however I had a reason. The more shady the guy looked, the better I would stay awake having to keep an eye on him.

I passed one guy who looked pretty normal, and decided not to slow down. Then I saw this other guy. Oh, he was the one… He had a big white beard, and an army coat. He looked like he had been hitchin’ for the last 40 years. Upon closer inspection he had some really funky multi colored teeth and smelled like he might not remember how to shower. Yes, I knew this would keep me alert.

I decided to offer him a ride as far as Oklahoma City (250 miles away at this point). He came along and decided to tell me some stories. Stories that helped me stay awake even more. Like the story about how he went to jail once after his place was raided for 40,000 in stolen goods. Then he told me how his sisters place was raided for drugs, but he managed to get away from that.

He informed me that he had survived 3 police shootouts. One of which was when he was hitching and a guy decided to try to outrun the cops to the border. It seems that when the guy finally pulled over (after he had a few extra bullet holes in his car) that he kept his hands up and said he was just hitching and the cops just let him go.

He later told me a story about how he used to be a rancher, and one day was going to sell a bunch of cows to somebody for $.78 a lb. So the night before him and a couple other guys dumped 500lbs of salt into the feed tank. The cows ate the salt, and then drank water all night.

The next morning he said they all weighed about 100lbs more. The guy who bought them even knew of this trick and asked him if he did this, which of course he denied. Then the dumbass who bought them proceeded to pay in cash.

Yes, picking up shady looking hitchers is not for the feint of heart, but damn if it didn’t work even better than I had planned. I was wide awake the entire time, I survived, and nothing was stolen.

Bored? Call me… I don’t pay roaming, and It will be a long ass trip… Need to see me while I am back? It won’t be for too long, so book now, book early.

Ciao

Life never goes how you expect it too. If you would have asked me if I would spend a year without going to Thanksgiving and Christmas with family, I would have thought it to be a low probability, but to then say I would have been doing any of the below things would have been nearly zero.

My Christmas consisted of:
-Working on website (as you can probably tell)
-Lifting weights (yes with my arms built for typing…)
-Doing Laundry
-Playing Castlevania Symphony of the Night and Suikoden 2 (ps1 games) on my PSP
-Started writing a tutorial (to eventually appear on this site) on how to pimp your PSP
-Cooking stuffed peppers for my lunch
-Sticking my feet in nasty green and brown water
-Driving around the empty streets with my windows rolled down
-Watching The Crow while eating gas station popcorn (perhaps not everybody’s choice for xmas movie)
-Cooking my own General Tso’s stir fry for supper
-Filling in some excel forms
-Giving a dog a dirty look to let her know she needs to stop being rotten

Yeah, my day wasn’t exactly traditional… nor christmasy. To have some semblance of normalcy yesterday my friend Ken and I got together and ate a ham and drank some beers. Of course, we did then spend half an hour or so driving around looking for a scale (don’t ask), and then killing things on Halo 2… So I suppose that’s not really traditional either, but the ham has got to count for something.

Yep, life is different, but that’s not necessarily bad. I like where I live now and though I look forward to being able to see my friends and family in a few days, I dread going to the miserable cold. I get cold here when it’s in the 50’s, though granted I tend to not have a coat on..

Oh, so everybody’s going to go out with me in Madison on the 29th right??? No my plans aren’t set in stone for the day yet, as I don’t even know when I will be getting into town, and I think I have plans in Fort for dinner…. However I do assume to end the night in Madison (and perhaps convincing Paul who plans to go out with us to let us go back to the hot tub at his place…. but I haven’t done that yet, so don’t hold your breath).

Anyway, if you don’t make it I will try to see everybody I can, but I doubt that I will be in town for more than a week.

Hmm… I wonder if I should leave the winter version of the site up until 07 or if I should pull it down after tonight. I don’t have random artwork with it, just one piece of artwork and I’m sure that will get old. Well I guess you will know if I took it down or left it up by the time you read this post since most of you won’t read this tonight. If you missed it, too bad… Look for it next year.

Ok so you know those little travel packs of Kleenex they sell at gas stations? Well I bought some of those. I also bought some Black Liquorish flavored Altoids. Mmm.. Yum…. Well anywho, despite the tissue being inside a plastic wrapper and the Altoids being in a metal container, apparently they felt it necessary to merge.

Every one of my tissues has a strong liquorish smell to it. It’s a good thing I like liquorish. In fact I rather enjoy the Kleenex smelling like them as well. Though I’m sure passengers who used one would probably not feel the same.

Well this got me thinking. If I could give the smell and therefor the subconscious associations that go along with liquorish with just a tissue…. Then surely I could put other smells into my snot rags.

Think about it. Apple Pie Tissues, or Absinthe Tissues…. or dare I say it… Sex tissues! (I think they already exist…. just people don’t blow their noses on them.. hmm perhaps this flavor is not a good idea).

See I believe the best course of action now that I have left my job would be to start selling Smartass Tissues…. For when you just gotta blow. I mean jelly belly has some nasty ass flavors, but they sell a ton.

Oink: downloading not counted against ratio until jan 2nd: Take the opportunity to download the Depeche Mode vs. Album I think the guy called it “Big Fights”, interesting mashup… Or do what I did and download a ton of random artists that I have never heard of… Since isn’t that really the purpose of it all anyways?

Other site that wishes to remain mention less: downloading counted as half during holidays AND they have power user advent calendar that gives you random amounts of megabytes added to upload every day.

I am very impressed with the small touches that have been put into vista, I mean simple things like when you can’t copy one file and copying would give you an error and crap out (in every previous version ever). Now it tells you about it and asks you what you want to do with that file and then finishes the operation.

There is a search box that as soon as you hit the windows key on the keyboard you can type in, it is FAST to find programs and also doubles as a run box…

The control panel had a major overhaul with TONS of new things you can do, and again more little touches like the fact that disk defragmenter is already scheduled to run and does it without screwing up things you are working on.

Drivers…. OH this is huge… 1) You can have the new driver install search subfolders of any folder. This will save me SOOOOOO much time. 2) Windows update ACTUALLY updates drivers with ones from manufacturers and finds them. It downloaded a new video driver for me, and after that I did an experiment. I choose my “generic plug n play monitor” and told it to search windows and it found and installed my BenQ monitor driver. Technically since that was not identified already as a BenQ monitor, that feat alone is very impressive.

Aero… Ok, not a small feature. You can’t use this unless you are using Vista Premium or Ultimate… Once you are you still can’t use it unless you have a video card that was written for direct x 9. That means that if your video card was made in 2005, you are SOL to see aero. Aero is not only a gorgeous hardware rendered semi-transparent blur along all the windows and applications, but also has some other features. Like hitting Windows key and then tab opens a 3d looking program switcher.

I put Vista on my laptop to try it and see if it could work on only 512 mb ram. It does, though it gave me a 1 out of 10 for performance on their rating system and I can’t use Aero. In the same vein, games now require a performance rating to play them. Vista comes with a bunch of games and all of them run on a 1 performance, but recommend a 2. A lot of people will be very happy to see they have added a mahjong game to the list of old classic solitaire games.

I like the fact that menus don’t show up on any of the windows or internet explorer etc.. until you hit the alt key. This will probably confuse the crap out of some people for awhile since I know most people only use the mouse and don’t learn shortcut keys, but I think overall they show the most needed features with various toolbar buttons.

Volume control is now application based. So a new program could add it’s own volume control to the snap-in interface which will let you pick all your favorite settings and not get blasted by audio on websites.

Overall, I am very pleased. There are some very annoying things about it too, but I will get to those in the next post.