by ·0 Comments

Hag in Golf Cart: You need to pay for today.
Me Suddenly Awoken: I already paid for today.
Hag in Golf Cart: Nope, you paid for yesterday.
Me Suddenly Awoken: I got here at 6 AM.
Hag in Golf Cart: That was part of yesterday.  Today starts at 11 and you need to pay.
Me Suddenly Awoken: Ok.

These are the moments where I’m simultaneously happy and sad that I don’t have laser vision.  The shrew in a house dress may have inadvertently helped me as her call to reveille provided enough rage that I didn’t feel terribly tired during the next eight hours of driving when coupled with the focusing power of a Carl’s Jr. hamburger.

North Dakota and Minnesota were more of the same after driving through Canada except that the North Dakota license plate is just close enough to the PA one for it to trigger flashbacks when viewed in my peripheral vision.

Close

to this.

Another difference is that as a side effect of the manifold legislation to jump start the American economy, most of the arterial roads in both states were under some sort of construction.  One of these construction areas was large enough that the best detour consisted of driving 20 miles on dirt roads next to exact rows of spring peas.  These roads had the curious distinction of having a speed limit of 65 but being speckled with stop signs.  Some drivers tackled this by blowing stop signs, others tackled it by humming along at 40 and slowly rolling to a stop.  I tackled it by driving the speed limit and then stopping at the stop sign while watching the former and passing the latter.  Driving is fun.  During the drive I think I crossed over the Mississippi four times each from what seemed like a different direction until I arrived in Minneapolis, made niceties and then rocked some sleep.

All in all I drove 1600 miles in the past 34 hours or about 12% of my entire trip.

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/7393/80504216.jpg

by ·6 Comments

Contains cursing.  A lot.

I wanted to give blu-ray another try after rage-quitting Netflix to see the 900 extra scenes or what have you that were part of the Watchmen Director’s Cut.  Considering the hype, I was expected Zack Snyder to not only guide me through the infinite intricacies of the deleted scenes but to also give me an hand job which I think was added in Blu-Ray 1.2.  Anyway, I tried a few pieces of software and found one I liked that was reasonably priced and purchased a physical copy of it which was $50 cheaper than the digital download.  Maybe that was my first indication that the software was designed by Faulknerian Idiot Man-Children.

I removed the demo and installed the software and immediately got an error message: “0 Days of demo remaining”.  Really?  I understand you ignore the customer’s wishes when he or she clicks “uninstall” and your shitty software leaves turd smears on the rug so when I try to reinstall the demo I can’t because you’re so fucking smart.  But to create a retail release that isn’t even smart enough to know I upgraded from the demo and assume I’m trying to steal your tard-ware?  So, I removed everything, rebooted, ran CCleaner, and still got the same “we assume this copy is stolen as no one actually pays for Blu-ray software so we’re going to gimp your install, fucker” message I received previously.

So, I went through the registry and literally removed every registry key that contained the word “Corel”.  It worked but proved a Pyrrhic victory as I found that not only did every mention of Corel go away, but every mention to something that contained Corel went away… So, every CoreLocation key which tells Windows where the program is broke.  Great.  But at least I can watch the blooper where get to see the side of Silk Spectre’s boobie!

Wanna use legit blu-ray software after using the demo (which is the entire fucking point of the demo)?  All you have to do is nerf your registry to make sure that the secret juju that “protects” their software is gone.  Go Corel!

by ·3 Comments

Now that the New Year has begun I’ve started to go through the Scrabble Calendar.  Each day’s puzzle is more ludicrous than the last with the people who complete them being capable of bending spoons with their minds.

Fake Examples:

What three standard endings can be added to WEEPING for a 14 letter word: SWEEPINGNESSES.

_E_U_ _ A _ R

With a rack of NNPHXTI, what tiles can you lay to spell a type of Egyptian Lily?  NENUPHAR.  Right on the tip of my tongue.

The worst are the “What’s your play?” pages where it’s an existing Scrabble board and you have to make the best play and guides are given like: 50 points – learning, 80  points – good, 190 points – expert and I get around 12.  On the plus side, none of the tiles fall out when I throw the entire calendar at the wall.

Happy spelling!

by ·4 Comments

Joe and I decided to get better at Scrabble.  We’ve played a bunch of practice games and started to memorize the two and three letter words.  Despite this, Chris Fosmire pwned us, partly due to his invented word “THROTLE”, I saw the tiles go down and assumed there was a third T.  I’ll never trust my boss again.

Anyway, after an amazing game of three-at-once words, Q’s on triple letter scores in two directions the scores still barely broke 200 (intermediate players should hit 500 to 700).  In a last ditch effort, we lasted two hours at Teejay Green’s playing two enraging games.  I had the tiles AAEIRTS and I knew there was a seven letter word in there.  After three minutes of staring, I played ATRIA for a whopping 12 points only to find today that ATRESIA would have have net me 76.  If someone had pointed it out to me, Joe and Teejay would have been picking wood out of their teeth.

Words hard.

Joe and I are looking for something new to become obsessed with, preferably something easier to become skilled at like sepak takraw (great video) or Sanskrit (good comic).

by ·9 Comments

Joe and I decided to get better at Scrabble.  We’ve played a bunch of practice games and started to memorize the two and three letter words.  Despite this, Chris Fosmire pwned us, partly due to his invented word “THROTLE”, I saw the tiles go down and assumed there was a third T.  I’ll never trust my boss again.

Anyway, after an amazing game of three-at-once words, Q’s on triple letter scores in two directions the scores still barely broke 200 (intermediate players should hit 500 to 700).  In a last ditch effort, we lasted two hours at Teejay Green’s playing two enraging games.  I had the tiles AAEIRTS and I knew there was a seven letter word in there.  After three minutes of staring, I played ATRIA for a whopping 12 points only to find today that ATRESIA would have have net me 76.  If someone had pointed it out to me, Joe and Teejay would have been picking wood out of their teeth.

Words hard.

Joe and I are looking for something new to become obsessed with, preferably something easier to become skilled at like sepak takraw (great video) or Sanskrit (good comic).