Halfbrown

I’ve been thinking about going back to school recently, and since my current vocation is that of a web developer I’ve primarily been looking at computer courses. Of course, I see many of the introductory and even some of the intermediate class descriptions and I think to myself “Hell, I could teach this course!“.

My friend Andrew then points me to a course they are teaching at the University of Washington entitled “COM 480: Ethnography of Online Roleplaying Games“.

Yeah… yet another course I could teach.

Here are some simple and effective tips on keeping your Thanksgiving free from a visit by your local Fire Department:

1. Use 2 disposable turkey pans, one inside the other, (and make sure that neither of them have any holes in the bottom!)
2. Keep lots of baking soda and at least one fire extinguisher close by, and finally
3. Turn off the stove and/or kill the power to the kitchen ASAP if a fire starts up in your oven.

Yeah… believe it or not I’m a good; no, make that a great cook. And I’ve never had an accident in the kitchen before today. Well, there’s a first time for everything and during our pre-Thanksgiving dinner with my mom, let’s just say that things went a little haywire.

I usually roast a turkey in a disposable aluminum pan for an easy post-eating clean up. Everything is usually fine with that, but somehow a small hole got into the bottom of the pan, and once enough grease dripped out it caught on fire inside the oven. Luckily we were on top of things and the mini-fire was contained quickly.

It was still a little scary, but I am happy to report that neither the turkey nor any portion of the house was damaged.

Obfuscated yet pronounceable passwords have always been a favorite with me, and I even went so far as to create my own PHP version of a pronounceable password-generation system about a year ago. But I never knew that there was an actual program that dealt with generating them until I read an OnLAMP article called “Improving User Passwords with apg“.

I bought enough sod at Lowes to cover my backyard and they told me that the delievery folks would call yesterday telling me the approximate time they would get here.

Lies, lies, lies.

I got a call at about 10:30AM from the delievery guy saying that he would be at my place in about an hour.

Lies, lies, lies.

At around 12:15PM he gets here and drops the pallet of sod in my driveway.

Laying down the sod itself didn’t take too long… just shy of 3 hours, actually. And just like when I layed down the topsoil, it started to rain as soon as I was laying the last roll of sod. I guess that was good, since I still had to fertilize the sod after laying it anyhow, and I’m hoping that the rain helped jump-start it’s mojo.

So again I headed in, took some Ibuprofen, hit the shower, and then I had to work from home a little more.

And I’m still exhausted. That’s tough work!

So I did a lot of running around yesterday, looking for the cheapest topsoil I could find to cover my back yard with before the sod I ordered comes in on Friday. I finally got 7 yards of topsoil delivered today (same day service: not too shabby). The problem is that I’m in Washington state, and if I didn’t get it laid out fast I’d have nothing but a huge mud puddle in my driveway since that’s the only place they could deliver it to since we have no rear access to our back yard.

So yeah… 6 and a half hours later I finished shoveling all 7 yards into thew new wheelbarrow I bought and leveled it out in the back yard. Talk about some painful, back-breaking shit! I’m tired as hell. For those of you who can’t picture how much 7 yards of dirt is, imagine the driveway of a normal 2-car garage and picture a 5-foot high pile of dirt that stretches all the way across the cement. That’s what I moved from the front to the back. And sure enough, as soon as I was done it started to rain.

I headed in, took some Ibuprofen, hit the shower, and then I had to work from home for a bit. I was exhausted.

I’ve had my left ear pierced since 1992, and for the last year or so I’ve wanted to get my right ear pierced as well. “Why?” is the question most people ask, and I think that question is odd so my normal answer is “Why not?”. The real reason why is because I’m tired of being asymmetrical… I want both sides done, and that’s probably the main reason. So there.

And keeping with the symmetry theme, I have a 6 gauge in my ear right now, and I had a pair of 8ga. double flare eyelets, so I figured I’d go for that. A lot of places will only pierce 10ga. max, but I found a really nice place in Poulsbo called Silver City Tattoo and got the 8ga. piercing there. The guy who did it was super-nice, very informative, and did a great job. I’m even thinking about getting my next tattoo there, as well.

or the last few weeks I’ve had just this huge wave of hyper-creativity come over me. I know it sounds odd when just yesterday I was bitching about being sick; but that notwithstanding, my head has been spinning with all kinds of ideas. I’ve had to resort to writing them down so that I can do something about them in the future, since I know I’ll never remember them when I want to. It’ll end up being one of those “Oh, shit! What was that one thing I wanted to do that time when I had that idea?” things. I hate those.

Anyhow, I’ve been a writhing ball of creation: drawing, writing jokes for my oft-dreamt of stand-up comedy career, notes for online publishing systems, and reading way too many math, programming, and science books. I’ve even delved back into C programming a bit. Unfortunately my ambitions far exceed my skills in that area, so I port everything to PHP and make it web-based.

I think I’d like to spend about 6 months just getting it all out of my system and writing all the apps, jokes, drawing all the pictures, and doing all of the organization in my office that I want to do, but I know that won’t happen until I win the lottery. And knowing me, even then it might not happen.

So I finally stepped up and got myself a new 8ga. pincher earring. Putting it in after having a 14ga. captive bead ring in for so long kinda felt like I was being ear-raped for the first minute or two, but once it was actually in I was fine.

For those of you not in the know, ring gauges are much like needle and/or wire gauges; the bigger the number, the thinner the metal. Here’s a handy little guide to gauge sizes that I found online.

Eventually I want to get both ears done, but for now I’ve only got the left one done. I might go down to a 4ga., but I don’t think I’d ever want to get bigger than that. It’ll be a while before I travel down that path, however.

We’ve had relatively few problems with our new house; but one of the problems we’ve had is our deck. We’ve had someone come over to fix one of the steps on the deck because one of the facings came off as I went down the stairs (luckily my ninja-like reflexes saved me). However, when the carpenter fixed it, he pushed the stairs off of their nailed connectors, so again I fell on my ass as I went down the stairs.

The superintendent, Jim, came by this morning after I contacted our homeowners association and is having someone come out to fix it. The same guy can also get us rock walls and fill dirt for a cheap price; up to 50% cheaper than the other prices we’ve been quoted (~$3,000.00+), so alls well that ends well, I guess.

Today we bought a new refrigerator at Lowes for our new house. It’s pretty cool (ha-ha)… a nice new side-by-side job with ~26 cubic feet of fresh-food lovin’ on the inside as well as a separate filtered water and ice dispenser. Plus it was on sale since it was a discontinued model. Yeah; “discontinued”, kind of like the year-end models that car lots have for sale at a cheaper price.

Anyhow, we had them hold it until they deliver it on Thursday. That’s when we are (hopefully) going to be moving into our new house. Or have already moved into. Or something like that. I don’t really know when we’re moving in because we don’t sign the papers until tomorrow, then its going to take a day or two for it to get closed.

The builders are going to let us move into the house on Wednesday, however, but since it’s a mid-week move I only have one other person able to help me. This, coupled with the pulled muscle from the other day, is going to be quite interesting as far as getting out of this house and into our new one. The whole house is basically packed and ready to go; all except for a few extra towels, plates, and of course my Dell laptop (which I’m typing on).

Tomorrow is going to be a hell of a day. Actually, the rest of the week is going to be quite crazy!