So here’s the scene: Saturday night I had a party to go to. I had invited a girl to go with that said she probably would, but would call me first. I wasn’t holding my breath and to kill some time I went running. It had been raining here for a little bit and in un-AZ like fashion it was really humid out. I went running just after 8pm when it was getting dark and came home sweating balls. My supper for the night had consisted of a handful of trail mix and 2 sticks of black liquorish. Ill concerned about this I decided to not wait for the girl to call and just go to the party. I knew there would be plenty of food there.

On the way into the party I gave one of my beers to a girl on the roof. Mostly because I appreciate things like girls-on-roofs. Got into the party and though I had recognized a couple people from work, I only really know the hostess and my friend Justin as I looked around the room. Then Justin says I need to take his spot because he was leaving. He had been drinking from a jug of water and was ready to leave with th good ol’ “gotta work early” excuse. At the time this seemed like bullshit to me and I expected to have no problem going to work in the morning.

So did I mention there was virtually no food when I got there? Anyways I am kicking back my beers. All 5 of them were gone in a heartbeat and by this time I was kicking back double shots of whiskey. I seemed to be unaffected by the alcohol and my mind remained clear. I know this because we were playing some game where there is a device and it says some words or a name or something and you need to get people to guess it without saying those words. I was getting the words extremely fast and when it got to me I was able to very quickly come up with a way to explain my words to get others to guess. The guy next to me who was not on my team made it a point on several occasions to tell me how good at this game I was.

Towards the end of the party and I am one of the last few remaining people. One of the guys there made something green in a blender and handed me a cup. I drank it and then went back for 2 more refills of it. Now It was weird. I was running, hadn’t eaten anything, and had drank plenty, yet my mind was still clear, I was still walking straight etc… Very odd. I was confident that I could drive and pass a roadside sobriety test so I left. Drove home with no problems and comfortably went to bed when I got home.

Then my alarm went off 2 hours later. I hit snooze 2 times and when I got up I had a headache that just wouldn’t quit. My stomach felt awful and well overall I felt like death. I did not want to call into work, but as I sat down unable to move I knew I had to.

We will fast forward from “felt like death” and go straight to finally being able to go to Wallgreens and buy some Gatorade and B-Vitamin Complex. I knew I was totally dehydrated and that the extreme headache was my brain having all the water sucked out of it.

Well it’s morning now. There is more to it, but I need to go to work and don’t want to not show up for a second day.

My internet connection is moving like SHIT today/yesterday. Partly because my roommate is back and doesn’t understand that it’s better to download one or two files with less connections than it is to grab 8, but mostly because Cox High Speed has been blowing goats recently.

Yesterday I did a speed test and got “97% lower than all other Cox customers” then I yelled at my roommate and he cut down his downloads to 5, which gave me better latency but still 84% lower than all other cox customers. I checked his pc and he was only averaging 60k which shouldn’t mean shit on a 7meg connection when I can frequently download at 1meg a second from popular sites.

The connection keep dropping every 5-10 mins where my router will still be connected but I will have no internet traffic for about 60 seconds. This makes sitting in front of a PC working on a website a huge hairy pain in my ass. I mean not that horrible nasty burning pain, but still frustrating.

I would call and make a guy come out to test our frequency but I can’t rationalize it because 1) i don’t pay for it. 2) I am moving next week and will be buying their 15meg premium connection. If that blows goats at the new place there will be hell to pay!

I want to take a break from the PC and watch Die Hard 4 but a slight miscalculation on my part ruined 3 hours of time and caused it to not be an option.

I suppose I can go running

Look, If I wouldn’t have said they were Sexy/Magical Changes would you have read the post about a site update? A LOT of changes to Rip-Off Theater. I reorganized the way I was loading the flash. There are now more playlists. You will notice there is now a music video and an anime music videos playlist. I hold no concern for what is a new video and what is an old. Only what I like. So there is everything from the Gorillaz / Prozzak to Christina Aguilera and Billy Idol.

One other thing I am happy to have brought back is the audio feeds for my blogs. I will probably start to integrate the “podcast” into each of my posts. For now you can listen to them in the Streams & Feeds section of Rip-Off Theater. Currently it’s a woman speaking which is nice and all but it’s not quite as amusing as when I had Stephen Hawking reading my blog.

Another thing you will notice. I have cracked 2 solutions that have plagued me about my theater. How do I get google video’s secure FLV’s to show without their giant player (while still not incurring their wrath), and also how to make an XHTML compliant DivX web player.

For the DivX Web Player I searched a couple pages of results on Google and nobody had a solution. So I will write an article explaining it, since I came up with my own solution and I am sure somebody else wants it!

Hmm, still haven’t added the affiliate links to my Good Stuff page. I keep thinking of how I want to do it and then not liking the ways I would do it or wanting to make something elaborate to display.

If you didn’t notice I added a bunch of games to my other games section. Now there are more brain games like Mah Jongg. I would encourage you to try Qwerty Warriors as a way to improve your typing speed. I did it for a long time and my fingers were about ready to fall off when I finally lost. I am sure I was typing past 150 WPM by that time since you are simply typing short words to destroy your enemies…

Today? Not sure what I will do today. I thought I would create the Holiday Calendar but I don’t feel like filling up a database with 365 holidays today. I still plan to do it, I just don’t feel like it. I will probably keep adding stuff to the theater, since I already have an update post for it and won’t need to write another one ; )

New blog posts in all sections… WooHoo.

That’s it. Haven’t perfected cloning yet so I am still only one guy.

A week ago or so they decided that, though there was no “pre-arranged seating” in my department, that they needed to “separate the teams”. Now this was not a logical move at all because everybody pretty much enjoyed where they are sitting and we have about 1 team meeting every 3 months, which consists of BOTH teams meeting up. Anyways, our supervisor got in later than the other one (as would typically be the case). So the other sup decided that he would claim the half that I was sitting on. Despite the other supervisor having the main desk that’s on that half of the room (and still does).

Now we are all floundering to find seats everyday because not everybody has the same schedule everyday. Well one day I was forced to sit at this desk which has some old / dead guy staring at you no matter how low you slouch. I mean I either have to be disrespectful to the dead and flip him upside down or let him stare at me. Well I didn’t want that 2 days in a row.

Did the next best thing and took somebody else’s seat who is fairly territorial (as one should be when they are “batman”….) and I moved his stuff over one desk then sat there. I thought I was crafty when he came in and was like WTF and then decided to move over even one more desk because their was cooties or something on that one (and “batman” has a daily struggle with cooties to begin with, no need to make it more difficult).

Now I am all smug, I have a seat with everything except my nametag (mysteriously vanished, perhaps somebody else wants to be me… well I know a lot of people who do, but they are just creepy stalkers and don’t work at the same place i do…). Just when I think life is good, an old / living guy across from my cubicle starts humming. Now as any person would do, you figure it will go away so you just ignore it. Well what if it doesn’t go away!?

I tried to retreat into my iWhatever I was listening to at the time, but I couldn’t get this old hummer out of my mind. He hummed longer than anybody has ever hummed. I mean I know you gain a lot of experience with these things the longer you live, but DAMN, don’t you have to take a breath? !?

At a certain point I stood up and was going to say something rude, but I looked over at my friend and started laughing and then could not say anything. I mean I know it’s not good to be rude to the elderly but this hummer was just freaking me out. I mean what if I loose all appreciation for hummers in the future!?!???!

I was able to calm down knowing that this was “my Friday” and that I would not be back into work until Sunday and then I don’t think he would be there Sunday or Monday.

The moral of the story is Not All Hummers Are Good Hummers!

What… You think I’m joking? You think I would just declare today a holiday to honor myself because I have a big ego? Hmm, good point… I might… Well damn it, I didn’t!

Today is Saint James Day.

A day to honor me. Yet where are the people honoring me? Do you realize that I had to go to work today?!?!? Granted I skipped the first 3 hours to honor myself, but I still had to go!

Look, I have figured out the problem. You are having a hard time remembering what days are important and what days aren’t. So I have decided to add another section to my ‘Random Thoughts’. This weekend I will make a daily holiday database. Not only will it help you to remember when to honor me, but it will also help you to have an excuse to celebrate.

Everyday there will be a new holiday all of them will be legit, unless I don’t like the legit holidays in which case I will invent a new holiday. A holiday that should have been invented already but hasn’t due to lack of creativity at the Hallmark Company.

Reading a book makes you a bit jaded when a movie comes out. It especially does this when they try to change it or combine more than one book to create the movie.

Well today I watched “Tales From Earthsea”. It was made by Studio Ghibli, which has made many fantastic anime movies such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. This one was a bit different because it was the first movie made by Miyazaki’s son.

Given that I still had to see it. I love Ghibli movies and was a fanatic about the Earthsea books.

What disappointed me is that it was not an attempt at the first book. Instead it was kind of a mix of the third book with with some of the fourth changed to work together. I think I am actually ok with this, but people watching this would be sadly lost if they did not have some background on it.

The first book was the best of them all and as such, should have been the one they created into a movie. If that one worked you could then make another book. The first and second books make very good stand alone stories, but 3,4,5 they do not.

Still the visual quality was stunning and though it will not win any prizes in my mind, the movie was about a million times better than the complete bastardization that the Sci-Fi channel tried to make into a mini series once.

So I went to sleep mid-day and ended up having a very weird dream. Well, I was driving through what I thought was Fort Atkinson, WI…. But as the dream progressed it now seems more like it was Los Angeles, CA… Anyways I noticed that ‘Holman’s American Karate’ was open again. I had gotten my black belt from them many years ago, but eventually they sold the school one of it’s students.

I am fairly sure that the guy running it now is out of business as once you have been in a small town for a long time people know you are there and have already gone in if they are interested. If not they never will and you won’t gain a lot of new students all the time. Well that and I heard Holman’s stiffed a lot of people in the town and when Gary took over everyplace he went made him pay cash because of it…

So anyways I decided to stop in and take class for old times sake. Of course I somehow had a uniform and everything and went right to the front of the dojo as you typically would if you are ranked higher than the other people there.

Anyways, there was something going on since everybody had numbers on their backs. As the instructor went through the line she questioned a couple people about who they were and ended up referring to them by number. She got to me and didn’t question me being there at all, despite me not having a number, and not actually being a paying student.

When class got over the dojo morphed into a house. Best I could tell, since it wasn’t talked about… was that the house we were in was for the Holman’s and that one of them was sick and had people taking care of them. I am not sure because I never saw them.

We eventually walked out of the house and past some guy who had to argue about something…. I think that’s what he was doing. Well that turned into a conversation with me and a woman and me saying “well he hasn’t been sued yet”. To which it appears a light bulb went off in her head.

I then got into some room somewhere. I would say past the pool, but I am not sure it was the same building or area at all. Anyways, I started making out with this woman that I had been walking with…

Then I woke up…. WTF!?? I have that really long ass dream, that I am guessing was spawned by the fact that I am wearing a “Young’s Martial Arts” T-Shirt (the guy who took over for Holman’s long ago), and then It ends right when it gets good….

I don’t even know this woman, but I could clearly describe the details of her. She was also the one in class who didn’t question my being there, yet in my dream I clearly knew that I was just visiting the Dojo as well as the area I was in I was just passing through.

I haven’t even had any Absinthe (yet) today!

I went to my friends concert tonight. He’s actually one bad-ass drummer. I’m not super impressed with their lead singer as it seems he can only sing in one key… but that’s just my opinion. The rest of the band whaled. Anyways had a few Captains. When I have a few of those and then some other item, we will call it coffee; I then crave a Cigar.

Of course I have one being preserved in my safe at home, but I was not at home so I made due with what the smoke shop next door to the bar I was at had. I am now very relaxed and still have the tingly feeling in my tongue.

It was a small bar they planed at but I was still amused at the girl who just happened to know all their lyrics and was hanging all over the guys in the band… despite my friend saying he had never seen her before. Ah, myspace…. A place to meet groupies… I should collect some groupies.

I am quite tempted to start my own “conjure one” esq-band. I mean I have the software for it, and I know how to do it all. Alas, it will be the same as everything.. Too little time for the things I want to do. I guess I called myself a Jack-of-all-Trades for a reason. I mean if I sat around and instead of dicking with the music instead decided to full on learn PHP instead of just the half-ass info I know, I would be a golden (geek) god.

So one side effect of the coffee/cigar is that your eyes/mouth get all dry. I mean it’s pretty bloody dry in Arizona to begin with, but this doesn’t help. I would go get some visine from my car but honestly I don’t think it will matter. If I got to bed I shall sleep, just that easy.

Hell, I even have a nice consistent ringing in my ears to help me fall asleep. I mean you can’t beat that!

So today I spent a LONG time creating items for my new store. At the moment there is only the site merchandise. I will add the other cool items soon. I tried to make a couple different t-shirts, but at the moment since I have the “free store” I can only make one of each type of item.

One item of note. The Wall Clock. That took me FOREVER to make, all because I had an idea in my head of how to convert one of my Ask-a-Smartass questions into a clock. It turned out pretty well and I have priced it very low as well. If you figure I am only making like 10% on these things. I could jack it up more, but right now I’d rather just see how much demand there is and if there is more consider creating a real store.

I had tons of ideas for the mousepad, but again… I could only create one. I still several items I can create yet but I am going out to see my friends band.

Lemme know what you think of my first attempt to make site merchandise!

I added a bunch of new trailers and fixed all the links to Full Length videos on Rip-Off Theater. I also added a really long Hyolee video to flash (she is SO sexy) and Claymore Episode 16 to anime section (are you watching this yet, you should be).

If there is anything anywhere else that is broken and not working please let me know. Not just on the theater but anywhere. If you try to load a game and it freezes or doesn’t play, Or there is some weird glitch… TELL ME…

Launching a “Store” this weekend. Might only be a couple items for a bit, but they will be REALLY good items : )

I will probably break site updates into it’s own blog this weekend… too many of them lately, mucking up my personal blog. So if you subscribe to this feed for updates you might want to look for the new one.

good times