Elizabethtown

Sunday, February 5th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

So I didn’t want to watch the Super Bowl tonight. I needed something else to do, so I decided to watch a movie. Originally the plan was to watch this, and a bunch of other movies when I am in Covance next week.

However I can always find more to watch and do, so I picked the movie that I was least likely to enjoy ;)

I picked Elizabethtown.

I downloaded it because well… Kirsten Dunst is hot…. That being said, I was not expecting to enjoy the movie. Well not only did I enjoy the movie, but 30 minutes into the movie I paused it and downloaded the soundtrack (so that I would have it by the time the movie was done).

It was not at all what I expected, and for that I am going to recommend it to everybody. True it’s not a crazy psychological mind fuck like the movies I typically choose to endorse, but it holds it’s own merit in the fact that I expected a chick flick, and ended up getting a chick flick WITH A GOOD PLOT, and a fantastic soundtrack.

Uno’s Spinoccoli

Saturday, February 4th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 10 Comments

So I had Uno’s Spinoccoli Pasta tonight. It was fantastic! So I decided to be a nice guy and post the recipe for it here.

However, I spent a good solid 30 seconds searching for the recipe and could not find it, so I assume it is not on the web.

So instead, here is a recipe that I made once for a girl (though I warn you, the end result was extremely good food and no sex… So I recommend adding more alcohol…).

Beef Tenderloin in Cherry Sauce
1 can (16 ounces) pitted dark sweet cherries with juice
1/4 cup ruby port
1/2 cup beef broth
1 teaspoon (drained) bottled horseradish
1 teaspoon tomato paste
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 large bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 teaspoon arrowroot or cornstarch
1 tablespoon mild olive oil
4 beef tenderloin steaks (6 ounces each)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup kirsch (cherry brandy)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 tablespoon grenadine syrup

Instructions
Drain the cherry juice into a large saucepan and set the cherries aside. Add the port, beef broth, horseradish, tomato paste, shallot, bay leaf, and peppercorns. Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until the mixture is reduced to about 2/3 cup, 12 to 15 minutes. Dissolve the arrowroot in 1 teaspoon water and stir into the sauce. Simmer until the sauce is shiny and slightly thickened, 1 minute longer. Strain, cover, and set aside. (This can be prepared a few hours ahead. If you refrigerate the sauce, bring it to room temperature before proceeding.)

Heat the oil in a large, heavy skillet over high heat. Sprinkle the steaks with salt and pepper and add them to the hot oil. Brown the steaks on both sides and cook until medium-rare (about 6 minutes total) or to your liking. Transfer the steaks to a large platter.

Add the cherries and kirsch to the skillet and flambÃe. When the flames die out, reduce the heat to low and add the cherry sauce. With a wooden spoon, scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Stir in the butter and grenadine syrup. The sauce should be bright red. Return the beef to the pan and turn to coat with the sauce. Cook until the beef is heated through, about 2 minutes longer. Season the sauce to taste with salt and pepper, if necessary.

Transver the steaks to warmed dinner plates. Spoon the cherry sauce over them and serve at once.

Wet Sanding

Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Simple theory, I have dry skin… why should I put moisturizer on all the dead skin when I can get rid of the nasty dry skin quickly and THEN put moisturizer on.

To achieve this I decided the best way was to…
go into the garage…
find some sandpaper….
use it to remove dead skin….

Well, I just happened to have some 432 grit wet or dry sandpaper there. Not only that, but it was in good shape!

Gotta say, I have been doing this for 2 days now and it works like a charm. Ok so I still have SOME irritated skin, but there is less, and I don’t have old dead skin sitting there anymore, also my skin is now smoother than it has ever been. On the surfaces I really worked over, I think I could honestly say it is “silky smooth”.

At any rate this theory and follow-up plan of action came to fruition only because it worked to hide my Stigmata back a couple months ago.

Good times.

Lost My Inspiration

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Seriously, I think my creative writing skills have scabbed over this year. I mean it isn’t very hard to come up with something that happens every day and turn it into something slightly funny. Yet I am not keeping up with my posts.

..::Sigh::..

Ok, how about I go back a couple days and write about how my sister and company took me down to the Inferno (local goth dance club). However if I did that, you might be freaked out to hear that my sister was checking out “Buffalo Bill”, and how I had to forcefully prevent her from going out to dance with him (she had nicknamed him “jerky”), for fear for her life (”it puts the lotion in the basket”).

Well, that wouldn’t be any fun as a post. Hmm, I could tell about shit on my website, but alas the only thing going on here is a bunch of people posting not-so-great questions on my ask-a-smartass page who don’t really understand why I call it ask a SMARTASS. Also if I were to mention this, some people who read this blog who also post bad questions, would get offended. Of course, I would never want that…

I suppose I could write a post about all the great books I am reading, however I am not reading any great books so I would just end up making up my own content and convincing you that it was a notable author so that you buy into it…. But that would take to much effort.

I could tell you about the documentary I watched the other night. It’s all about 1 joke that comedians tell to each other. The point of the joke is it has a beginning and and a punchline, and everybody is supposed to change the middle to suit their personal disturbing tastes.

Here’s the joke: This guy goes into a talent booking agency and says, boy do I have an act for you. The talent agent says ok, what do you do? Alright it’s a family act and first we… [Insert Most Vile, Disgusting, Horrific, Boundry Pushing, Comfort Zone Destroying Garbage you can think of at the time of the joke telling here]. Wow, that’s pretty crazy, what do you call that act? We’re the Aristocrats!

However, you probably wouldn’t get or appreciate hearing about that, so that’s out of the question. I certainly can’t tell you about that.

I could tell how my 300 dollar Ipod Video told me to go Fuck Myself, but I haven’t punished it yet so that would hardly be long enough to fill an entire post.

I could tell you how I cheated on my taxes, but since I didn’t intend to and was just in a hurry to file, that wouldn’t be a very shady story worth mentioning.

I might end up mentioning that the kid who bought my Prelude ended up being an idiot and spending $300 bucks to put the new headlights in, which to me is sad and hilarious all in one because after spending a bunch of time dismantling his car to install the lights, there was 2 ways to finish the job. 1) Break plastic bracket off of lights (aprox time: 5 mins) plug lights in, shim with new metal L bracket if support still needed (.42 cents at local store). or 2) Yank off radiator (aprox time 45 mins), install properly, reinstall everything. Hmm, neither method requires money, 0ne requires a little moxy, the other time. NEITHER REQUIRE 300 $$$.

That however is a sad story of a kid learning that he still has a lot to learn, which nobody really wants to hear about, least of all the one who needs the learning.

I could mention that I actually reinstalled trillian, so you can actually talk to me on whatever Instant Messenger you use, however the likelihood of me being on that often is slim, so I doubt that’s worth mentioning.

I think I will just end up writing a post that says something like “Go Fuck Yourselves”. My reason being that 1) I think it would get a chuckle from you 2) Then I am the bad guy and you will all feel better about yourselves 3) If you actually took the advice you would probably end up even happier and 4) It seems obvious that I really have nothing else to talk about!

Unnecessicarly Long Old Story

Monday, January 30th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments

I had a mirror once that had “blame it on me…. everybody else does” written on it. It came from some stupid carnival game at a local festival. Actually I think my sister gave it to me, but whatever… Call it a family legacy, passed down from the generations.

At any rate it seems it still rings true. I was the last to own the mirror so I get to end up getting dumped on for everything. See my original rant for this post goes back like 9 years or so. When I was a kid who just happened to be very good with computers.

Now I’m sure I was slightly more than cocky about it then, (as that would be the natural progression to becoming a smartass about it) so needless to say at that point I wouldn’t have taken criticism very well.

So when the mother of what I consider my second family starts screaming at me one day about how I fucked up their computer (when I did not), I was NOT a happy camper. See they had gotten some virus, I have no idea how or why, but they didn’t get it from me. The reason I was blamed was because the mother-bot had called Gateway and some dumb fuck making $7.23 an hour told her that “I can’t fix your computer because it’s not just windows 95, it’s like part 95, but part 98, and I can only troubleshoot your 95 problems…”.

…pause… Does that sound rational to you? I mean to me, I can clearly hear the native tongue of a dumbfuckian! But who am I… I’m just some punk kid, lets trust the “experts”.

Of course, since I had given them a bunch of games and things to keep their kids entertained, and had helped keep their computer running, OBVIOUSLY I had also been the one to mutate their computer into a half 95 / half 98 machine.

So now I am angry for getting yelled at for the stupidest most non-existent problem in the world, and am unable to convince the mother-bot that I am not to blame, because a couple years earlier I had played a prank on her where I put a fake virus called “Smiley” in her games folder. See I did that to everybody, but she didn’t sit to wait for it to finish, she yanked the plug to the computer before it could tell her it was a joke. I found it hysterical, and then started putting it on everybody’s computer from then on. Well whatever, because of it I am not trustworthy and some gateway jackass who doesn’t know what a CPU even is said he wouldn’t help her, so it’s now my fault.

Now we fastforward to present time.

I fix computers for a living, hey maybe not the greatest living in the world, but I am DAMN GOOD AT IT now. If it is a software problem I can fix it, if it’s hardware, I can diagnose it. 9 times out of 10, I can fix it without erasing or “restoring” the computer.

Well good for me, apparently the mother-bot still blames me for all of her computer problems. Which is the most asinine thing I have ever heard.

1) I don’t live near them anymore
2) When I am visiting, I spend my time on their computers fixing all their problems, for free.

Now don’t get me wrong… They have tried to pay me for my services before, which I won’t accept. However, they have 2 computers, here are the problems on them (which of course are my fault)
——————————————-
Computer #1, that they got from their son, which is very broken. I mean it doesn’t have much ram, and the dvd drive that was in it which was pretty fast… of course, that was stuck in their other old computer, the speakers don’t really work, the mouse is a ball mouse (so it’s dead), and the hard drive, well it got fried.

Now for this computer, I helped them find the cheapest hard drive possible to put in the computer. They ordered it, and I set it up with a new custom built small version of XP, I mainly choose that version because I didn’t have enough time to install and configure the bloated version. Well there was some files that couldn’t copy right and the end result was that it worked perfectly fine until I left. When I left, it apparently died and stopped working right.

So their cd drive is still to slow to install a full version, and I never have the time, so I gave them a faster cd drive, and a self booting free cd operating system called Knoppix, for them to get by on while I was unable to once again erase their hard drive. However even the replacement drive I had gotten, coupled with the lack of ram was still too slow to run Knoppix effectively.

Still not being in their town much, I decide to give them a laptop, as a temporary replacement for the other computer. The hard drive on the laptop is fried also, but it runs knoppix just beautifully, I mean it runs bloody fantastic like. However nobody uses it. Perhaps it’s just too different for them, and they can’t read the titles in the menus to figure things out. Well whatever, ya figure the feel they are down to one computer.
———————————-
Computer #2, not exactly a young pup anymore:
Now, this computer normally works. Why, because I set it up to work correctly originally and for the most part it does just fine. It is not fast by any means, but it works. Little software things break like the macromedia flash player inside internet explorer, which to me is not a reason for me to rush off to fix their computer since they can always just start using a quality web browser like firefox.

Well now they have a new problem, whenever they try to open excel (and probably other office apps). It opens the installer and tells them to insert the install disk. Now, it’s funny. It has worked fine on that install for a couple years, without me doing anything at all to it. However now that they get a problem with it, it is…. of course….. my fault…..

For fuck sake. I am not the cause of your problem, I am the solution. I have always been the solution for all of their computer problems. If they need software, I give it to them. If they need hardware, I give it to them. If they need me to mess with settings to get something working, I do it. If they want more than one computer on the internet, I hook them up a network (which of course is worthless since only one computer works right now…. but whatever).

Everything on / about their systems require time. My time. Which when I am around them, I give it. Which is really funny, because whenever I go over to fix their problems, they say: Oh you don’t have to do that, oh don’t worry about it… Oh we just haven’t gotten around to trying the instructions we gave you we will eventualy; and so on, and so forth.

I mean the problem they have, there are actual solutions to that only took me 1 search on google to find. However most of them result in reinstalling office. Which I WILL DO WHEN I GET THERE someday.

So for now I give the temporary solution: Download Open Office at openoffice.org! I mean this seems like a good solution to me. It’s free, it reads all the microsoft office files and it tries to work just about the same.
————————————————
It just kind of ticks me off a bit. I go way out on a limb to help them, yet I am told that a problem that I DID NOT CAUSE, is my fault. Yes, some of my solutions are meant to be temporary until I can get there and fix the actual problems myself, which seems to me like a catch22, since then I am fucking with their computers and will then be to blame for any future incidents.

The only reason I wrote this post was because I was trying to be the better man. I gave them the temporary solution to their problems and was just going to let it slide that they felt like calling it my fault.

However I kept thinking of it, and couldn’t get it out of my head. So I figured the only way I could get to sleep was if I wrote it all down in some rant. Well this bloody blog is the only place I have got to rant.

I do apologize to anybody who actually read the entire post, as me writing it down only solves the problem of me being able to get to sleep. It will not solve the problem of me being blamed for other people’s problems. It does not leave that happy tingley feeling in your mouth that you get after a good penguin caffeinated peppermint, or that good gut laugh you get everytime you hear somebody say “stick stick”. It just is, what it is, which is me bitching.

Sorry, have a good night.

Sorry no backdating (or hair) this time

Thursday, January 26th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Look, I keep stalling on writing new posts because I have a reputation for backdating posts on days that I missed, however I have been on vacation and have decided this time, NOT to backdate my posts.

Typically yes, I could bullshit a few previous days, but now it’s like 10, and well… fuck that.

I will say that I did however work a bunch on the rewrite of the ask-a-smartass page. However that is just an annoying story since it ends in everything working perfectly except the placement of one word…. one very important word the word…..

Yes that’s right, I am currently SOL so I took the lazy man’s approach and just made the current page go to the bottom of the page on load. I am surprised at the amount of questions it has got, and AM still planning to convert it into a newsfeed though.

So if you typically read my blog posts and are annoyed that I am not writing 10 days worth of back posts, then go and read/write questions on [lyng]AAS

Journey Home

Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Yeah, the trip home from out of state always sucks. Just sit and drive. At any rate I figured my Satellite Radio would be my savior, well I was wrong. I mean I actually listened to it so much on my trip down that 2 different comedy stations were both playing things that I had already heard on my way back!

Return Trip Highlights:

• Discovered NEW foot long crack in my window
• Saw house on stilts, used as advertisement for DICK’s TRAILERS
• Gained definitive proof that southerners enjoy pissing on things
• Got told in Arkansas that I was midekund…
• Ate the worst corndog EVER
• Discovered my car leans to the right
• Gained new hatred for using cash at gas stations

So I’m a Drug Lord… So What?

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments

It’s funny how parents will approve or disapprove of things that you do based on how it effects them….

For example. My mother didn’t appreciate the fact that I became a Drug Lord and earned 151 Million dollars on my first attempt at it. Now I figured this was because she was morally against me becoming a drug lord.

….HOWEVER, the real story goes that she added the “well you still haven’t bought me a little red car yet” clause to the end of her “moral objection”. This leads me to believe that with enough bribery, anybody can be reached.

If you want to become a drug lord too, here is the place to go first:
http://www.geekhideout.com/druglord2.shtml

My blog, as read by Steven Hawking

Monday, January 16th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments

It doesn’t look like many of you noticed this, so I will mention it. The other night I put a couple extra buttons on the website (yes I work on my website while I am on vacation, what’s it to ya????). They at least temporarily replaced the “fish” section above recent blog entry’s.

The buttons are (l-r):
-Auto-podcast version of The Born Smartass!
-Atom/RSS XML Feed link (use this link to insert into rss readers, there are TONS)
-Del.icio.us post button (delicious is a social bookmarking website that is now extremely popular)

You may have absolutely no use for these buttons, but they are there for convenience. The first one, well technically it’s there to make my website visible to the blind, but come on…. It’s just cool to have somebody else read everything you write. I mean yeah, it fucks up the emotion (it has none) and misses some of the words and humor, but it is humorous in it’s own right.

I thought this was fun, and I had to go through some crazy shit to get my entire feed to work and auto-update (since my feed is incompatible with that website’s feed reader). However it’s all good now and should at least give you a laugh.

Syndication feed is a given, either you will use it (because you know what it is), or you won’t.

Del.icio.us icon, I hope to increase my return visits, since in theory there will be more people bookmarking me with it. May not help, but I needed to fill the excess space anyways.

Why’d ya stop

Sunday, January 15th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments

I suppose it was probably just a fluke that a bunch of people went and posted questions on my ask-a-smartass page, but so many happened all at once. I was really thinking it was going to continue.

In doing some testing I discovered that the form on that page was not correctly posting website addresses etc.. so I fixed that. You can now use the page to shamelessly promote your own website url (fyi: probably nobody will click it, but the more links to your own site that other popular sites have the higher your search engine page rank is).

Yes it is still showing in an annoying order where you need to scroll down to see new posts, so it’s hard to see new posts however I am working on changing the output to atom (syndicated feed), so that I can tell the feed to insert on the page in a different order.

Spoiler: I am working on that and a few other things to basically remake this website. When I am done the entire site will be a customizable web 2.0 ajax based page. This will “bring back” the use of this page as “the ultimate start page” instead of just being a videogame hub.

Good times, keep asking questions, feel free to lie about your name and ask different types of questions, just make them ones that I can give interesting answers to.