Greatest. Porn. Title. Ever.

And I'm not kidding, either:
IR 4: Inrearendence Day
That easily trumps the former (in my view) champ, The Da Vinci Load.

My Dinner With Jon

As I’ve mentioned before, lately I’ve taken to staying up and watching My Name is Earl and The Office on Thursday nights before going to bed, as for some reason I’ve been unable to get to sleep at my usual insanely early bedtime on Thursday s.
Because I was staying up last night, I couldn’t really ignore the fact that I was hungry as readily as I could if I were just going to bed, so I made myself a sandwich.
A big sandwich.
Afterwards, still feeling hungry, I had the following conversation with myself:

Hey fatty, you done eating or are you going to eat something else?
I might eat something else. What do you care?
I care because your constant eating is going to turn us into even more of a fat ass.
So? Who are we trying to impress? Skinny or fat, we’re not going to win any beauty pageants. So what difference does it make?

That shut me up.
I’d question my mental health if I weren’t so sure that I wouldn’t like the answer.

They Have To Do Something To Make Up For Their Teeth

Brit girls' boobs are the biggest

It's hardly surprising that this study was reported in The Sun, home of the Page 3 Girls, most of whom, such as Keeley Hazell, Lucy Pinder, and Katie Price aka Jordan provide ample anecdotal evidence in support of this claim.

Here You Go...

Someone came here looking for this clip earlier, so I decided to track it down, as it's so appropriate for the day.
It's a Family Guy parody of those silhouette diamond ads.
Enjoy.

Random Pointlessness (With Bonus Cookie Recipe)

Sometime around 4 AM I was awoken by an odd sound that I couldn’t quite place. It sounded rather like static, but not quite.
After determining that it wasn’t coming from my clock or computer, I realized that it was coming from outside, and so I peeked through the blinds and saw a world still blanketed in white and some poor schmuck trying to clean off his car. His scraping of ice was the source of the mysterious sound.
Over the next few hours I was awoken by a similar sound as other brave commuters tried to make their way out of the parking lot.
Given this, I wasn’t surprised when, at 8, my phone rang and I was greeted by Tabitha – that actually is her name – calling to tell me that the dentist office would be closed today, therefore my appointment was cancelled.
After that I went back to sleep for a little over an hour.
Beyond talking to my mother, the only thing I’ve done is go out and clean off my car and move it to a space that’s been plowed out.
Though there was heavy coverage on my car, it didn’t take long to remove it, as it was basically thick, wet snow covered by a hard shell of ice. Further, at the bottom it was beginning to melt, so all it really took was a shove and huge chunks, sliding on the wet surface and held together by ice, would slough right off.
I actually removed the snow on the roof of my car in one piece by simply it off.
The most effort went into moving my car, though even that wasn’t too difficult, just a couple minutes worth of rocking.
The sun keeps poking out periodically, and will likely make short work of the bulk of the snow if it manages to stay out from behind the clouds for a while. Even so, while the actual snowing has long since stopped, the ice is melting, schools have been cancelled for tomorrow as well as today. Why not just cancel them for Friday, too?
I just don’t understand why they think that a little snow and ice is such an intractable problem, especially considering how much money as the county has. Oh well.
Oh, one other thing I’ve done so far is a tutorial on creating a realistic-looking LCD screen. Here is the result, which I’ve personalized:



One thing that I’ve discovered after my upgrade to Vista is that I am able to once again get my LightScribe drive to work properly.
LightScribe is a technology that allows you to use your DVD burner’s laser to print labels on special LightScribe compatible discs.
I bought my drive a computer ago, and had no trouble with it in the HP, but after I’d installed it in the current Hugin, I was no longer able to get it to work, despite trying multiple fixes. It worked just fine for burning discs, I just couldn’t use the laser printing feature. I would get an error saying, “Unable to communicate with drive,” or something to that effect, which annoyed me, as I was always able to get the print preview feature to work, which required that there be a LightScribe-enabled disc in the drive. So it could communicate with it for the preview, but not for the actual printing.
Anyway, turns out it was lying to me the whole time, as once I downloaded the Vista drivers and software for it I was able to print without any problems.
So this is another instance in which I wish software and hardware followed the domestic abuse approach to interface design so that I could slap my LightScribe drive around for lying to me for so long.
What other lies have you told me, LightScribe drive???!
Anyway, this hasn’t really been a productive week.
Apart from going grocery shopping, I haven’t ventured out into the world at all. I still need to do that stupid emissions test and get my taxes done.
I’ve done zip in the way of drawing anything interesting. I had to give up on the one picture I wanted to draw because the low-res screen cap I was using as a reference is just too dark and too lacking in detail to allow me to even try to extrapolate useful reference information from it.
I’ve started on another picture, but my heart just isn’t in it.
I was going to make oatmeal raisin cookies yesterday, but I couldn’t manage that, as I don’t have any vanilla extract and I wasn’t about to drive to the store with there being actual weather outside and everyone in full end of the world panic mode.
I ended up making peanut butter cookies instead, which is okay, but I really had my heart set on oatmeal raisin. Oh well.
(Oh, and for those interested, here’s my three ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe:
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sugar (or Splenda if watching carbs)
1 egg
Mix all ingredients together. Make little balls and place on cookie sheet.
Criss-cross fork impression on top of cookie to flatten a bit. Bake for 8-10 minutes at 350.)
Anyway, I think that’s more than enough for one pointless, boring entry.

Happy Valentine's Day From Threshold

No Valentine's Day would be complete without those little Pepto Bismol flavored candy hearts with messages printed on them, so here are some from me.
Of course, their messages are a little different from "Oh You Kid" or "Be Mine."
It's where a sweet tooth meets bitterness. Enjoy!

That Takes Care Of That

Today's training was postponed due to the weather, so I guess that answers the question of whether or not I'll be going.

Computer Abuse

One new feature of Vista I’ve discovered is that it apparently responds to threats.
Even when I was still using XP I’d made the upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Overall, it worked fine, addressing most of the issues that plagued IE 6, such as some Web pages not rendering correctly.
However, the combination of IE 7 and Vista seemed to introduce new problems with many of the sites I visit regularly. Some of them wouldn’t render correctly, while others would take a very long time to load, while still others wouldn’t load at all.
Those same sites loaded effortlessly on Munin, which is running IE 7 on XP, so clearly it was a Vista-specific issue.
Hoping that enough people would complain about such problems to inspire MS to release a patch, I resolved in the meantime to download Firefox to see if that would do a better job of it.
Everything worked fine in Firefox, so I contemplated making the switch.
Vista must have realized what was going on, though, and decided that it had better straighten up and fly right if it was going to keep me from making the permanent switch, so IE 7 just spontaneously started working properly.
I’ve long been a proponent of operating systems that respond to threats and to physical violence. I call it the domestic abuse approach to interface design.
Error message pops up? Simply smack the computer upside the monitor, and the message goes away and the computer does what it was supposed to be doing in the first place…if it knows what’s good for it.
So this development in Vista is clearly a step in the right direction. I like the idea of my browser doing anything it can to woo me back once I begin to stray. I want my browser to behave like some aging, overweight housefrau who drops the pounds and takes up pole-dancing and starts offering threesomes to keep her husband home in the evenings because she just can’t face life on her own. That’s how I want my computer OS and applications to be: desperate to please me because they don’t want me to abandon them or hit them again.
I’m kidding, of course, though I do often wish that my computer could feel pain, but the coincidental timing of IE working out whatever bug it needed to was pretty entertaining. At a guess, if it isn’t just a coincidence, I’d say that maybe the system switched over to a different rendering engine once I installed Firefox. Does that happen?
Whatever, I still find it kind of funny.
And for those of you wondering why I haven’t just switched over to Firefox anyway, the answer is that I don’t care.
What I mean is, what you might see as compelling reasons to make the switch from the “evil” browser over to the “good” browser, I see as a bunch of ideological nonsense.
IE is already on the computer. IE works. Therefore, I have no reason to switch.
That being said, when IE stopped working, I was willing to make the switch because then I actually had a compelling reason.
Now that IE is working properly, though, I’ll switch back, as I do have some complaints about Firefox that become compelling reasons not to use it when IE is working.
If you use Firefox, good for you; just don’t bother telling me why I should.
Same goes for your favorite OS (though if you do have one that responds to getting physically and emotionally abused, let me know).
It’s rather wintry out there today. Not sure if I’m going to head all the way down to Reston for that training. It’s not especially vital training, and it’s not a whole lot of OT.
Still, it is some OT, so I guess I’ll have to think about it.

Hey You Old People! Get Off My Lawn!

Apparently today was Old People Stand Defiantly in Jon’s Way and Stare Blankly at Him as He Tries To Maneuver Around Them Day at the grocery store. Why is it that old people are the first to complain about people being impolite, but are the last ones who even consider being polite themselves?
It’s really not that much to ask for you to move your damn cart out of the way, is it? God knows you’d be calling me a whippersnapper if I didn’t move mine out of yours.
*Sigh*
Going grocery shopping was the major event for the day, though after I got home and ate lunch I had to walk down to the mailbox to send out a birthday card for my nephew Todd, so that was one more trip than would be typical that I made out into the world.
Tomorrow I drive in to work for a little training session, and Wednesday I have a dentist appointment.
Cut Girl With Big Boobs Who Can’t Say Massachusetts (CGWBBWCSM) called this morning to confirm my appointment, though she mistakenly said that it was on Friday. When I said, “Friday? Uhh…” she said, “I meant Wednesday,” which made more sense to me.
This time around when she called she actually identified herself – she usually doesn’t when she calls or when she answers the phone – so I thought that I might be able to refer to her as something other than CGWBBWCSM, but there was static on the line when she said her name, so I didn’t quite catch it. It sounded like it might have been “Tabitha,” to which my (internal) response would have been, “Really? Tabitha? Okay.”
Maybe I’ll just start referring to her as Tabitha anyway. It would make things simpler.
I also still need to bring my car in for attempt number three at getting an emissions inspection.
And of course somewhere along the line I need to get my taxes done. I’m not going to do them myself this year because it’s my first time as a homeowner, and I have that $10,000 prize money to claim. Really not looking forward to my taxes this year; besides the prize money, I actually earned almost $10,000 more than I had last year.
Speaking of money…

My Ill-Gotten Gains Department:
As I’m sure you know, unless you live in a cave, Anna Nicole Smith died last week.
I have nothing to say about her life, or her death, other than it’s a shame that her little girl will have to grow up not knowing her mother. Regardless of what you or I might think about the kind of mother she would have been, the fact is that her daughter is going to grow up only knowing what people tell her about her mother, and most of what she’ll see…well, it’s a shame.
In any case, as apparently nothing else of note happened anywhere in the world, on Friday CNN had non-stop coverage of the “developing story.”
As various reporters and pundits sat around rampantly speculating as they waited for any real information, which was apparently on its way that afternoon, some of the people at work decided to start up a pool betting on the cause of death.
Someone made a list of choices and went around asking people to throw in money. When they got to me, I had no intention of actually participating, but couldn’t get a word in edgewise as the options (Heroin, Meth, Coke, Trimspa. Natural causes weren’t even considered a possibility, apparently.) were read to me. I started to explain that I wasn’t interested in participating, and was citing the fact that I thought that this early in the investigation that the cause of death, much as it had been for her son’s death, would be undetermined initially.
All they focused on was me saying “undetermined” and decided to add that to the list, then badgered me to put some money in. So I put in a dollar, and gave it little more thought, until it was announced that, as I’d predicted, the cause had not been determined yet.
So I won.
The grand total was $10.
Obviously the whole thing was in poor taste, and I’m not proud of the fact that I participated, even inadvertently, but I’m also not going to turn down some extra cash.

An Open Letter To The Lady By The Mailboxes Who Smelled Nice

Hello:

You won’t remember me, which is just as well because you also won’t be reading this, but we crossed paths on Thursday evening by the mailboxes as we were walking back to our respective cars.
You smelled nice.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to hit on you or anything. After all, I really didn’t even get a look at you, and if being attracted to someone by looks alone is shallow, where does being attracted to someone based on scent alone fall?
Besides, at this point I’m long past even bothering with hitting on women.
Anyway, the point is that I want to thank you for smelling nice because at that time I really needed it.
You see, I was stopping to get my mail on the way home from work, where I had just recently spent time giving the shift handoff to the person taking over my station.
What you need to know about this person is that his breath gives me an excuse to use the word fetid.
Noxious is another good word.
So is cachet, though it doesn’t actually apply in this case; it’s a good word and I seldom get to use it, so I’m just throwing it out there now while on the topic of good words.
Anyway, to return to the point, his breath is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever encountered.
It makes me think about Monitor Lizards, whose bite is toxic, not because they produce venom, but because their teeth are coated with the decaying remnants of previous kills.
That’s how his breath smells to me: like rotting meat.
Worse, not only does his breath broadcast outward, it hovers around him like some sort of aura. It’s as if his very being is suffused with this odor.
And it’s not just that it’s a bad smell. It’s more profound than that.
With the heavy stink of decay and rot it’s as if you’re confronting your own mortality as you stand there, eyes watering, breath held, with the muscles of your face trembling with the effort to keep from wincing too visibly, you are not just facing an unpleasant odor, you are confronting your own mortality.
On this particular occasion the smell had burrowed its way deep into my nose, periodically launching an olfactory assault as I drove home, and only finally being driven out by your clean, pleasant scent, that was rather like fresh lilacs, and which hung heavy, though not unpleasantly so, in the air as you walked past.
So thank you.

Gratefully yours,

Jon (The guy who breathed deeply and desperrately of your scent as you crossed paths by the mailboxes on Thursday evening)