Archive for October, 2007

Samhain, bitches!

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on October 31, 2007 @ 9:30 am
in Mrs. ACW, awesome, beer, devil cat, house, movies and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 22 Comments

pumpkin carving 013

Mrs. ACW and I did some pumpkin carving the other night, as is our yearly tradition, and I thought I’d share the jack-o-lanterns with you. Not because you care, but because I think they are awesome, and I don’t really give a crap what you think, so you can suck it.

Anyway, here’s the first one.

jack o lanterns 002

I guess this isn’t a true jack-o-lantern per se, because we didn’t really carve it, and because it’s got no candle in it, but it was fun to make anyway. They only issue was that the stupid people who designed this thing were under the impression that it would be positively simple to stab the pieces into the pumpkin. The soft, round-tipped pieces. It was like trying to carve a turkey with a tampon. So I had to break out the drill and pre-drill the holes for the Mr. Pumptato Head Pirate guy. You should also make notice of all the little bumps and warts on his face. I took special care to pick a pumpkin with “character” since I knew I wouldn’t actually be carving it. Next year I think I’m going to use a styrofoam pumpkin and glue the pieces in place so I can just get him down from the attic each year.

jack o lanterns 003

This was my favorite pumpkin this year. I carved Jack Skellington! The pumpkin is actually upside-down, because I thought that little lumpy part at the top really made a good forehead. I cut out the eyes with a knife, but to make the mouth I used a Dremel and sideways-cutting bit thinger. It was slow, delicate work, but I like the way it turned out.

jack o lanterns 004

This Frankenstein Monster was sketched out freehand and then carved with a regular old knife. I was going for a stylized stamp type look, but I did sort of copy the mouth from Bill Watterson.

jack o lanterns 007

Finally, Mrs. ACW carved an Homestar Runner pumpkin. Because we’re internet nerds. I think it turned out pretty good considering the top half is actually kind of detailed with the beanie and underbite profile.

jack o lanterns 011
jack o lanterns 012

Of course the stupid douching cats had to help.

jack o lanterns 015

And here they are lit up.

jack o lanterns 016

Again, super excited by how this one looks.

jack o lanterns 017

jack o lanterns 018

Tomorrow I hope to have more stories about fat children being rude, as is also our tradition.

Upgradified!

Published
by
mokiejovis
on October 31, 2007 @ 9:02 am
in nerd stuff
. 7 Comments

Posted by: mokiejovis

If you find your gaze fixed to the screen, reading this text, then you’re reading it served from our totally awesome new upgradified server.

How upgradified is it, you ask? I’m glad you did. It’s exactly one hojillion times faster. Now that’s precision.

You may or may not recall the old setup. For the non-nerds, I point out that we are officially speed-hole free!

For the nerds: it was a converted POS Gateway-brand machine with 384MB of RAM, about 15GB of 8+ year-old RAID-5 SCSI disks, and a sub-GHz P3. Our new system has 1GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), 160GB of space via a 4-80GB-disk SATA RAID-5 array with one hot spare, and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2.0GHz processor. Woo!

PS: Guh, I was just interrupted whilst writing this post by a software developer - a person who works with computers all day, every day - because she couldn’t figure out “how to make the internet work.” Her first problem? She plugged the phone cord into her laptop. Terrific.

Don’t forget: Happy Hour this Friday at Holy Frijoles! Everyone is invited! Pass it on!

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 30, 2007 @ 9:05 am
in awesome, beer, happy hour, meta blogging and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 8 Comments

What: The October/November AKA Octovember Blogger Happy Hour.

With: Your hosts! Me Danielle and Charissa.

Who: Baltimore Bloggers. Any Bloggers. Blog Readers. People Known By Acronyms on Other People’s Blogs. Me and You and Everyone We Know.

Where: Holy Frijoles, 908 W. 36th St., Hampden

When: Friday, November 2nd, 6pm.

Why: Beers. Bloggers. More beers. More Bloggers. Margaritas. What’s not to love?

All right now, mark your calendars, post away and spread the happy hour love.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

(Lifted almost verbatim from Danielle’s blog)

A good day

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 29, 2007 @ 10:05 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, awesome and food
. 22 Comments

This Sunday was one of the best days I can remember having in a long time. This is not to say that my life is a minefield of bad days with only the occasional daisy poking its head up from the battlefield. Quite the contrary. I have an exceptionally good life. However, there are days that stand out above the rest in their perfection, and yesterday was one of them.

After a morning spent baking a cake and lounging around, Mrs. ACW and I went to the supermarket to pick up our weekly groceries. We made our way through produce and seafood, joking in a way that was amusing us, but I’m sure was nauseating to anyone watching. Still, despite our good time, my cold, pessimistic, cynical, blackened, shriveled heart was lackadaisically seizing away inside my chest cavity, expecting the least and the worst out of people, and constantly having to readjust my expectations downward.

Mrs. ACW and I split up to grab the few canned items we needed, me heading for cannelini beans, she picking up chiles and taco seasoning. After getting the beans I turned around to head out of the aisle and try to find Mrs. ACW, when I stopped to step out of the way of another shopper moving down the aisle, and for a moment, I was standing still.

“Rrrraaaaagggggh!” I heard from the end of the aisle.

I looked up and saw a man with Down Syndrome, and he was pointing at my shirt and making enthusiastic and growling sounds, alternatively. Looking down at my shirt I realized that I was wearing one of the numerous pirate shirts that I own, this one featuring a skull and crossbones prominently, surrounded by the words, “Kiss Me, I’m a Pirate”.

He moved away from his cart and pointed at my shirt. “Do you like pirates?” I said to him.

The woman behind him, who I assumed to be his mother, looked up and said, “Oh, well look at your shirt! He loves pirates!”

“I like pirates, too,” I said to him. He moved closer and touched my chest, his hand patting the skull. Then he leaned in and hugged me.

“Oh, Marty!” his mother said laughing, “Let that man do his shopping.”

He was standing at my side and had slipped his arms under my right arm, and his hands met under my left arm. He rested his head against my chest, against the skull and crossbones, and stayed that way for a few seconds.

“Show him your shoes, Marty,” his mother said while picking through canned products, her bifocals resting on the end of her nose. He made an enthusiastic sound again, and released me, stepping back and lifting his pant cuff up to show me the skull and crossbones emblazoned on his canvas sneakers. As he was holding his pants up, he started making growling sounds again. I figured that’s the sound he associated with pirates.

“Cool!” I said, pointing at his shoes.

Since he’d hugged me, Mrs. ACW had been standing at the end of the aisle, watching everything take place. I moved over to her to put the cannelini beans in the cart, and turned around to face Marty again. He was gesticulating wildly and making happy sounds, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell me. His mother looked over again and translated, “He wants you to know that he’s going to the dollar store after this, but we’ll see how grocery shopping goes.” He nodded, pointed at my shirt again, growled again, then gave me the thumbs up and said, “Cool!”

I gave him the thumbs up too, and then waved good-bye. Mrs. ACW and I continued our shopping like normal, and when we got in the car I said, “I don’t think I can remember the last time a stranger hugged me,” after relating the story to her from the beginning. “Well, you probably just made his day,” she said.

“He made MY day!” I shouted.

Then I went home and took a nap with my cats, and woke up in pretty much the best mood ever.

My absurdly boring life as haiku

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 26, 2007 @ 10:10 am
in house, nerd stuff, school, suhmuhmuh bitch and word nerd
. 16 Comments

Winter is coming
I can tell by less cat hair
Bunched in the Roomba

Swish flop swish flop swish
Windshield wiper is broken
Swish flop swish flop swish

Car starting is a fight
One hundred dollars: new starter
Real problem? Battery

Homework all the time
Never any time for fun
Free time is extinct

Staining a deck sucks
Hurts my back, smell is horrid
Deck stink still lingers

Cinemax has been reading my blog

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 25, 2007 @ 11:00 am
in Mrs. ACW, bitches, meta blogging, movies, nerd stuff, people are idiots, school, sex and work
. 14 Comments

Last week I mentioned my Wednesday night tradition. You didn’t click that link, did you? You bunch of lazy fuckers. I swear, if this were a restaurant you’d all be sitting around complaining about how I hadn’t chewed the food enough for you. “I have to click on a link and open a whole new page and then read a bunch of whole new words to find out the context of what’s going on? Really? Maybe I’ll just go back to MySpace where everyone is as dumb and as lazy as I am.” You twats.

Anyway, since none of you clicked on that link, here’s the important bit:

I have class on Wednesday nights, and since school is so much closer to Mokie’s house than it is to my house, and since Mrs. ACW’s class starts as soon as my class lets out, I usually head over to Mokie’s for dinner. That is, as long as there’s nothing good on TV. See, I get HBO and Cinemax, whereas Mokie gets nothing, so before I go over to his house I call to get him to check TV Guide to see what movies might be showing. Most of the time it’s crap like Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (which I’ve now seen about 5 times), or something like Fried Green Steel Magnolias Under the Tuscan Runaway Bride, so I opt to have some dinner with my brother. But he knows that if something badass comes on, like Bloodsport, or Timecop, or Street Fighter, then I’ll have to go home and watch that instead of coming to dinner.

Did you catch that? Three Van Damme movies mentioned at the end. Three. Because he’s the ass-kickingest Frenchman you’ve ever had a homo-erotic sex-fantasy about, and last night, to my surprise, Cinemax was showing Universal Soldier: The Return. Again, I realize you’re lazier than a morbidly obese Matthew Sweet in a sedentary showdown with an old jar of mayonnaise, so you probably won’t click that link, so I’ll elucidate the important details here:

Universal Soldier: The Return was released to lobotomized audiences across the US in 1999, and though it didn’t win any prizes or acclaim, it WAS directed by Some Douchebag. Though I never saw any of the other Universal Soldier movies, I remained confident that I’d be able to keep up.

The tagline was, “Prepare to become obsolete” but it probably should have been, “Prepare to become stupider”.

Here’s a plot outline from IMDB: “Universal Soldier II [wtf? This is Universal Solider: The Return, or at least Universal Soldier IV. People are idiots. - ACW] continues the story of Luc Deveraux, who has survived his experiences as a Universal Soldier, recovered, and is now working as a technical expert on a government project to revive and improve the Universal Soldier training program. When S.E.T.H., the supercomputer controlling the Soldiers, goes haywire and takes over, Luc is the only one who can battle this elite team of deadly, near-perfect warriors.”

That really doesn’t give you the full flavor of the movie though. If I were to write a plot outline, it would go like this:

Boy meets girl. Boy runs away from genetically engineered super-army with girl… on jet skis. Boy fights former WCW wrestler Goldberg. AI computer tries to kill everyone and take over the world. Girl goes away for some reason. Boy meets another girl. Boy has to go to a nearby strip club to access the internet to hack the AI computer to find out who is also hacking the AI computer at the same time so he can stop the other hacker from continuing to hack. 30 minutes of tits. 5 minute overwrought high-school-drama-department monologue by AI computer after having his “portable brain matrix” implanted in a genetically engineered super-soldier. Boy goes back to fight genetically engineered super-army with girl. Guns and explosions and hand to hand combat. Bad pun. Bad pun. Explosion. Bad pun. Plot hole. Plot hole. Bad pun. Explosion. Plot hole. Bad pun. Plot hole. Explosion. Plot hole. Bad pun. Ironic bad-guy comeuppance. Explosion. The end.

I wasn’t really paying attention to the movie, and I kept switching back and forth between that mindless pap and Mythbusters, so I might have missed some extremely important plot points, but I’m pretty sure that the directorial debut of a stuntman with a script written by the douche who also wrote Darkness Falls doesn’t really require that you watch the whole movie. In fact, I’d be shocked if the 30 minute strip club scene didn’t come about because they were at a strip club trying to figure out what to put in the second act.

“Let’s see, the first act is our introduction to the Universal Soldiers, so there’s lots of fighting and explosions.”

“Yeah, and the third act is the final battle and everything that leads up to it, so there’s lots of fighting and explosions.”

“So what to do about the second act?”

They look around, then at each other, then say simultaneously:

“A bar brawl at a strip club!”

Then they high-fived each other and ordered a round of lap dances to celebrate.

The only ornithological reference to Star Wars you’ll read today

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on October 24, 2007 @ 9:30 am
in awesome, bitches, movies, nerd stuff and work
. 16 Comments

Man, work has been bitch-ass busy, or if you want to get scientific about it, it’s been two metric cubits of business on the Bitch-ass/Depardieu Continuum. Yesterday, it was literally one thing after another. I had a customer waiting for me in the lobby when my boss busted in and started jabbering away and the phone started ringing as I was responding to an urgent email from another client. It’s moments like those when I want to kick my computer off my desk Office Space-style and walk out the goddamned door. (Why are there a million recreations of the printer scene on You Tube? Getting a fucking life people, Jesus. Your mom is tired of scrubbing Cheetos stains out of your tighty-whities.)

It just got so fucking bonkers that I left to take a walk and after getting about a hundred feet from the office I heard this ridiculous noise coming from the sky above me. There was a hawk circling slowly over a small wooded area and two crows were making all the racket while dive-bombing the hawk. One crow would fly just out of the hawk’s reach while the other crow would fly up into the air a bit higher before turning back on the hawk and plunging towards it as fast as it could go. The hawk would bank away from the diving crow and the two crows would regroup and trade rolls before recreating the whole event.

I walked and watched them do this for about 5 minutes when another hawk appeared in the distance and looked like he was about to flank the crows. Somehow the crows sensed what was happening and it broke into a full-on dogfight. Both crows and both hawks swooped and dove and attempted to drive the other species out the local airspace. Eventually the crows forced the hawks apart and divided they were no match for the crows. The crows had better maneuverability and the hawks just couldn’t compete. It was like watching TIE fighters take on a Calamari Cruiser, they couldn’t beat it, but they could fly circles around it.

In the end the hawks were forced off, and the crows flew back to the small wooded area. It was pretty badass, and I was ready to go back into work.

Pumpkin Pluckin’

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 22, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
in potty humor, sex and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 13 Comments

This weekend we went out to a farm to get some pumpkins and some apples when I stumbled across this gourd with an unfortunately proportioned bottom:

pumpkin

If you don’t get it, you probably want to go here. (Work safe!)

Weekly Spam

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 19, 2007 @ 8:47 am
in meta blogging
. 11 Comments

Since the stuff in the word balloons changes randomly every time you load this page, and because all of it relates, generally, to the ACW site, I figured I’d need to do something new with my tagline.

I wasn’t sure where to go to get a constantly fresh source of single-line content for the tagline until I remembered spam! So, as of today, every Friday I’ll be putting up a new spam tagline, as long as I remember to do so, and as long as I think it’s funny, which might be a week, or a month, or FOREVER. I have a weird sense of humor. Many of you probably already know this.

Anyway, let the spamtagging commence!

Here’s a story about staining my deck

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on October 18, 2007 @ 9:30 am
in Glen Burnie, POS Tercel, bitches, happy hour, house and people are idiots
. 15 Comments

After a flood of comments of people asking me to talk about staining my deck I had something of an epiphany: you people are losers. Really? You want to hear about the tedious and tiresome process of me staining my deck over the period of 3 weekends? Wow. What a bunch of fucking nerds. I tell you what, come out to the happy hour on November 2 and I’ll tell you all about the deck. I’ll drone on and on, ad nauseum, much like I do on this here blog except it’ll be “real life” and therefore “just as boring”.

Anyway, I suddenly have a story about the shitty starter on my shitty Tercel going to shit. (I swear, I’m like a walking thesaurus.)

Last weekend my Tercel was having some trouble getting started, so after an entire afternoon wasted trying to find a copy of a Chilton’s guide for a 96 Tercel (surprise! It doesn’t exist!) and finding a retailer that carries a replacement starter for a 96 Tercel that doesn’t cost a hojillion dollars, I decided that I’d just let the car sit in the driveway until I figured out exactly what I needed to do to fix the car quickly and painlessly. So I borrowed my parent’s old, beat-up, never-gets-driven pickup truck to use in the meantime.

I drove the truck back down to my house and parked it in one of the spots in the nearby apartment complex. Now, I must admit that I have a rather ample driveway, but I didn’t want to park the truck in it because whereas 2 cars are comfortable, 3 cars are a pain in the fucking ass. Plus I went out of my way to park the truck in a spot that’s furthest away from any of the buildings, and in a spot that almost never has a car in it, and at the end of a row of 45 other empty parking spaces that are closer to the building. The truck sat in that spot for a whole day and the closest car that parked to it was 4 spots away.

I walk outside yesterday and see my (drunken, shirtless) neighbor talking to a guy as they’re peering inside of my truck. The guy leaves and goes inside the apartment complex, and my neighbor starts wobbling back to his door.

“Hey, is there something wrong with that truck?” I call out. The neighbor wobbles over to me and goes on at length about how a) the truck doesn’t have a parking pass for the apartment complex, b) the guy he was talking to lives in the complex and though he’s nice he wouldn’t trust the guy as far as he could throw him, and he’ll probably call the rental office about having the truck towed, c) that’s why people always park in front of our house, because they’re shacking up with someone in the apartments, and d) they’ll probably tow the truck.

I explain that it’s my truck and he says b, a, d, c. So I say that I’ll move the truck and he says d, b, c, a. I say, “Okay, I should probably move the truck then.” He says, c, d, a, b. This went on for about 15 minutes, and this is why I don’t exactly relish speaking with my neighbor. The repetitive feedback loop of information really wears on my already tenuous grip of sanity.

I was finally able to get my truck moved and figured the whole thing was over until about 30 minutes later when a tow truck came rumbling down our street. He did a lap of the apartment complex and not finding a red truck moved on… until he spied it in my driveway.

I could see from the window that his tiny squirrel-powered brain was churning away, trying to come up with a suitable reason for trespassing in order to tow the truck, and after the smoke poured out of his ears I guess he decided to move on. Or maybe his brain told him, “Need eat. Then poopy.”

But at least I learned something from the apartment-douchebag: territorial suburban pissing contests aren’t just for homeowners anymore.

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