Archive for the 'nerd stuff' Category

And in the order they were received, no less

It was the middle of the longest lecture on apiculture Charles Mingus had ever sat through and he was beginning to regret giving up his bass, a jazz career overflowing with accolades, and all the money, women, and excitement that came with it. Jazz was a ruritania now that he was mired in the minutiae of “fixed-frame hives” and “smokers”.

In his disclosure of his wishes to the president of the North American Jazz Association for Jazz in America (NAJAJA) to pursue a life in beekeeping he expressed his desire for change. Mingus chuckled as he thought back to writing that going from jazz to bees would be “vicissitudinal to his spirit, his lifestyle, and his artistry.”

“What a magnificent douchebag I was,” thought Mingus, “to use an archaic version of the adjective form of ‘vicissitude’. I must have just thrown it in there because I’m a stupid cockface.”

Mingus contemplated further his life decisions and all the women he could have porked as the speaker droned on about the need to concatenate hive structures and the benefits of the new singular hive designs shaped like an upside-down uvula. Back then any woman would have jumped at the chance to be his penis holster: to have his purple-headed womb-ferret wriggling within their loins.

But now that he’d left jazz women looked at him with eyes full of arsenic.

“‘Irregardless’,” Mingus thought, “that’s a douchey word too. Why do I keep using such utterly pointless words? I am a cock.”

He cleared the phlegm from his throat and ruminated again on the career he abandoned because he worried about being the jazz bassist who had shark-jumped his craft.

At the front of the room slide after slide of oblong, squamous beehives filled the audience with glee. Mingus saw the mostly-male crowd was unaware of their vaginality: their eyes were moist at the sight of beehives! These men were children, really, better suited to playing tag and wiping their boogers on each other. They had no place in the real world. He could take it no longer.

“Listen up, cats, we’re talkin’ ’bout bees! Yeah, they make that sweet honey, but they don’t make the world spin. Let’s cool out on the bees a while, huh?”

His shibboleth was palpable. A crowd of angry, confused, and irritated faces drove him out of the room, and he was happy to go, revealing his callipygian side as he turned to leave. As he reached the door the room heard a malevolent borborygmus, and though Mingus knew it was coming it was so violent and explosive that when it burst from him he pronked.

Paper in the lecture room blew everywhere, and the cockbag at the podium was knocked over by the bowel-blowout. As if by prestidigitation Mingus produced a full upright bass from inside his vest and made his exit from beekeeping forever, leaving a room full of arsemongers and a life of tomfoolery behind.

He was barely out the door when he felt a hand on his shoulder. The shitcock from the lecture was forcibly turning Mingus to face him.

Now that Mingus and the speaker were face to face, Mingus could tell from the speaker’s comb-over and threadbare suit that he was a parsimonious little twat who had long ago nerfed himself through years of coddling and penissockery. He lived a life bereft of adventure.

Mingus bellowed, “Get you hands off of me! Your life is a monument to floccinaucinihilipilification, you shit-faced dildo-sandwich!”

“Why, I’ve never met anyone so ribald…”

“Ribald? I’m the living transubstantiation of emotion into music! Sometimes it gets a little raunchy, but that’s what life’s about. You’re too busy studying insects to notice you anal-riffic meat-wallet!”

“… S..sir,” said the speaker trembling with rage, “I’d thank you to leave our conference now.”

“No, I think it’s time for you to leave you little cock-carnageous bug-fucker!”

And with that Mingus defenestrated the speaker. He then stooped over, gathered up his bass, and free from the inanity of the beekeeping world went on to write a song about the silliness of antidisestablishmentarianism on the bus ride back to his condo, chuckling all the while at the day’s douchebaggery.

And what, bitches? - ACW

P.S. Felching.

I’ll stop talking about my wiiner when I’m good and ready

Because I’m thrilled that Mrs. ACW doesn’t look with scorn upon the Wii, the only video game system I’m aware of to have accomplished that feat, I am constantly encouraged to buy more games and accessories for our Wiiner.

So we bought Guitar Hero.

This has introduced a number of interesting behaviors that I’m sure will become full-blown OCD tendencies in no time.

1) It is impossible for me to not rock out while I am playing. I’m constantly dancing around and bopping along with the music, even if it’s The (remarkably shitty) Killers and the horrendous douchebag among douchebags, Brandon Flowers, he of the “ironic” pedophile mustache, is singing. I’m glad I got five stars on that song, because I’d hate to have to play it again. Seriously, does he realize that when he sings he sounds like a whiny baby with a poopy diaper? What a knob. If I have one wish it’s that The Killers and Fallout Boy eventually get into a rumble and they all die.

2) It is impossible for me to not drink while I am playing. Granted, I’ve only played twice so far, but finishing each song to take a swig from that fantastic, long-necked, brown-glass teat of diminishing fine-motor skills is about as close as I’ve come to paradise. I only wish that I could play and drink at the same time, sort of using the bottle like a slide guitar, but I’m not that good yet. And the game doesn’t really work that way. And I would probably break something. Shut up.

3) I have yet to master the “Star Power” usage. On the 360 it seemed to be a lot easier. Just pop the guitar neck up a little bit and viola: star power. With the Wii it can get a little temperamental, so the chance of you seeing me successfully execute star power is lesser than the chance of you seeing me successfully jerk the controller up and down like I’m some sort of spastic freak living in a fantasy world of tiny guitars that are attacking me for some reason and I’m trying to kill them. Also, I’ve yet to successfully pull off a star power activation combined with a Pete Townshend-esque guitar move, so until that day comes, I’m going to keep jumping and swinging my arm until I wind up hurting myself, which is the most likely outcome.

4) This is probably the worst one of all. Now that I’ve played a video game about playing a guitar, I totally feel like I can hang with people who actually know how to play guitar and talk about hammer ons, pull offs, harmonics, and fingering techniques. Double entendres aside, that is, which is what I would normally talk about if I heard those terms.

5) The best thing about Guitar Hero is that I can finally put into practice all the awesome band names that I’ve ever come up with. Seriously, I’m a band-naming machine. Need a band name? Just call me, I’ll do it for cheap. Ready? Here are 10 off the top of my head:

The Crap Monkeys
Flinger
The Gravymaker Express
The Rooster Pothole
Disco School
Satan’s Daycare
Forget the Alamo!
Windsock
Dreampickles
A Bucket Full of Pudding

It’s really frustrating to not pick up the spare

The happy hour last night was pretty cool. As usual, there’s never enough time to get to really talk to everybody, so there are some folks that I would have liked to talk to that I didn’t really get a chance to talk to. To those people I say: your loss.

Also to those people who ridiculed me for having to leave early to feed my cats, I’ll have you know that since Wookie was starving she ate so fast that when she threw up a few minutes later I could see that she hadn’t even chewed any of her food. Her vomit is on YOUR hands.

Finally, Charissa wanted me to tell a story about how I saw a little kid with poop on his face jump out of a car or something. This is what she thinks my blog is about. Well, besides it being a lie, because everyone knows I would NEVER lie, the thought of a kid with poop on his face actually kind of grosses me out. Apparently Charissa is into that short sort of thing.

Let’s commence with the narcissism!

My favorite event on Wii sports is bowling. But like everything in my life that I enjoy, once I begin to enjoy it I also try to start finding a way to measure it. Unluckily for me the Wii measures how good/bad I am at bowling for me, so I’m constantly playing games as fast as I can just to see if I’ve improved rather than slowing down and enjoying the game for what it is: a distraction from the restraining order issued by Zack Efron and the entire cast of High School Musical that keeps me out of New York. Wait. What? That’s not even close to accurate. What I meant to say is that the stats distract me from playing the game as a game.

So I’ll try to keep that in mind as I slow down and try to have more fun with game until I don’t get a strike and find myself screaming at the remaining pin, “Go down you fucking slut! FUCK YOU!” and then angrily mumbling to myself about how the game cheats.

Then I usually switch to boxing so I can punch the bejesus out of a goofy looking cartoon boxer and alleviate some frustration. It’s a nice healthy workout.

I nerd out about horror movies

Every year Mrs. ACW rents us up some movies from Netflix, and not just the same old tired pablum that YOU suckers are used to watching (seriously, everything you like is stupid, unless I’m something that you like, and then that one thing is awesome, but it’s not enough to redeem your otherwise terrible taste), but the After Dark Horrorfest.

Now, some people aren’t into horror, so they employ other tactics to select movies that would make other people squirm and to provide themselves an ample amount of self-loathing. Us? We choose horror.

You may have heard me mention previously some of the movies we own: Barn of the Blood Llama (bad), Cannibal! The Musical (hilarious), or Dead Alive (awesome movie from when Peter Jackson was a horror director). But don’t get me wrong. I love some of these movies, but they are TERRIBLE. Just completely unwatchable. Blitheringly, mind-meltingly, horrid.

So I hope you understand when I say the movies for the After Dark Horrorfest are even worse.

The 2006 selections featured some real stinkers*, so unwatchable that Mrs. ACW and I chose to watch some of the movies in fast-forward rather than spend the time to see it at regular speed.

So far the 2007 Horrorfest has been about the same. The first movie we watched, Lake Dead, was just kind of stupid, but not quite bad enough that we watched it in fast-forward. They seemed like they were doing a cheap rip-off of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of 1000 Corpses. It was the same old, tired, played out theme of sexy 20-somethings going into the country and being killed by a family of inbred yokels for some reason.

The second movie, Tooth and Nail, was actually not too bad, but it could have been saved by not being a blatant mash-up of 28 Days Later and Firefly. Also, Rider Strong AKA Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World, was in it. Also, all the “good” characters were named after cars, and the “bad” characters named after dogs. Now that I think about it, it was actually really ham-handed and kind of stupid.

Last night we got about 30 minutes into Mulberry Street, and the movie just couldn’t make up it’s mind about whether or not it ever wanted to get started, so we popped the ol’ DVD player into fast-forward. It reached the point where Mrs. ACW was reading Harry Potter and I was watching the screen flick by while narrating, “Okay, now there’s a rat. And the one guy’s upset. I think the rat bit him. Now he’s a rat. Now he’s trying to bite people. Oh, and the girlfriend just got bit. Now the daughter is on a bike. She’s biking home. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. There’s a rat. Nothing’s happening,” and so on. It finally reached the point where even in fast-forward the movie was still taking way too long to get to the end, so I started looking around to find something else in the living room that might be interesting to look at.

The thing that gets me is, these movies are advertised as “the content of these films are considered too graphic, too disturbing, and too shocking for general audiences,” when actually I think the problem is that the movies are either too stupid or too boring, which is really saying something considering how much money the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie made.

That said, I’ve got a real crap-factory at home right now in the form of SS Hell Camp. I wasn’t even aware of the genre of Naziploitation before I got this movie from Netflix, but apparently it’s just all around horrible. According to Wikipedia, it’s still banned in the UK! I have a bad feeling that once I begin to explore this super-niche sub-genre, I won’t be able to scrub its contents out of my brain. I’ll let you know how it is.

*Dark Ride, Unrest, and Wicked Little Things redeemed only by their special effects, Penny Dreadful being the stand out best, and The Gravedancers and The Hamiltons being unwatchably bad. I wasn’t even really interested in watching them in fast-forward.

BGE Peak Time Rebate Program UPDATE

Most of you will want to skip this post unless you live in MD, DE, NJ, or PA and you’re interested in saving some money on your energy bill. Really. Stop reading. Stop. Right now. You’re going to be bored.

Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When I was first enrolled in the program I thought I had passed all the major hurdles. Apparently not. They can’t attach the new meter to my house because of the way our current meter is set up. Right now the old meter has the deck built around it, and apparently the new meter is bigger than the space in my deck. So, no peak time rebate program for me. Boo.

But, because I called to find out what it would take to be in the program, the guy let me know that I could call BGE and just ask to be in the air conditioner/fan program described in the link above. So I’m going to call now and see what that’s all about.

UPDATE: Here’s the basic process to get more information-

1) Call BGE at 800 685 0123
2) Listen to the menu options twice to be connected to a human
3) Ask about the BGE Demand Response Infrastructure program and the free programmable thermostat OR an air conditioner load control switch. I don’t know if they’ll let you do both, but I guess you can ask. We already have a programmable thermostat, so I didn’t ask.
4) They’ll ask for some address and phone information to look up your account, and then they’ll put you on the list to receive further information about the program. From what I was told you not only get this device strapped on to your AC unit to save you some energy costs, but they also give you a credit for each month you have the thing on there.

My guilty pleasure song

You could mock me. I would certainly mock you.

You could scoff and tell me all the reasons why this song sucks.

Or, you could grow a pair and post your guilty pleasure song in the comments. But I really doubt anyone has a more embarrassing song than this.

Unless it’s this:

Negative bonus points if you’re married and didn’t explicitly ban this song at your wedding.

This not-a-meme-but-just-a-neat-idea borrowed from Stephanie.

It just kind of spirals into insanity

Because I hadn’t done it for a while, I thought I’d take a spin through the old stats page to see how the mental deficients, drifting like flotsam on the currents of the intertubes, were washing up on the sparkling golden shores of my website. Here’s a smattering of dumb people using the internet, and some insight as to how their tiny walnut sized brains work:

“18 year old” “parents responsibility” “michigan”

I can see this one going one of two ways. Either it’s a kid trying to figure out how soon they can get away from their shitty parents, or it’s a shitty parent trying to figure out how long they can oppress the life of their child. Or maybe their trying to find out just how little work they need to do to not get charged for neglect by the state. Whichever way you slice it, they wound up on my blog, and probably got terrible advice.


rehomo beach

This one is a little astonishing, because I’ve never even typed “rehomo beach”, but Angy Hangy did in my comments, and her willy-nilly use of a neologism for a gay beach in Delaware landed me this search.


how to stop cats shitting in your yard

I wish I could help you dude. I really do.

he s looking at her boobs game online

Ah, Romania. Is there nothing you can’t do? What’s that? You can’t teach your citizens how to create a legitimate web search? Oh, well, no country is perfect. Except America. Seriously. Don’t fuck with us or we will bring you our democracy. We invented ass whoopin’ for the sake of ass whoopin’.

house

And what country could possibly have worse searches than Romania? America! Home of the mouth breathing idiot that has more time and money than taste or sense. Really, you just typed “house” into a search engine and immediately got what you were looking for? Do you go into the bread aisle of the store and pass out from shock when you see more than one kind? Also, why are you using MSN Live Search? You must be some sort of post-lobotomy lab-experiment in a competition with rats to see who has a better mastery of the internet, and too bad for you, the rats just identity thefted your mouth-breathing ass.

this is relevant to my interests origin

Another newcomer to the internet, this time from Australia. Bonzer, mate! I’m grinning like a shot fox that you found my website. Ace! We should hit the turps with heaps of Foster’s and a Bloomin’ Onion at the boozer! Well, I’ve got a cane toad in my clacker, so donger the cleanskin and sleepout the yabby and we’ll pozzy the spunk for a corker dingo’s breakfast!

Also, this is a personal note to the person who is still using Netscape 5.0 to access my site:

Who the hell are you!? Is Netscape Navigator 5.0 some sort of magical web browser that no one ever used but is capable of time-travelling 10 years into the future to read a shitty blog?! That’s awesome, but also kind of really lame. Oh, and by the way, September 2001 is really going to suck for you guys, so be ready for that. Also, you might want to stop buying any products from China, unless you’re really into lead. Um, I think that’s it. Keep it dopey double-fresh on the rewind, and hook-up your blingety for me. Yes, that’s how we talk in 2008.

Movie reviews, cat vomit, and fish

1) This weekend I went over to my brother’s house so we, along with my younger brother, could work on a birthday present for my mom’s 60th. My niece had just finished watching episodes 4, 5, and half of 6 of Star Wars. I took a break from working on the present to play with her, and I was asking her to find different characters among the toys scattered on the floor, and she was able to easily find Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Darth Vader, and Yoda without any trouble. She was babbling incessantly about Darth Vader and Chewbacca, holding them by their legs and flying them through the air, eventually tucking Darth Vader under her arm and picking up a TIE Fighter while making flying sounds. I obliged by picking up the Millennium Falcon and chasing her with it. She seemed to really be getting a kick out of the whole Star Wars thing, so I asked her, “Did you really like the Star Wars movies?” and she kind of shrugged and said, “They were okay.”

2) The good cat, Wookie, woke us up early on Daylight Savings morning by yarfing her breakfast all over my jacket. It actually cleaned up so quickly and easily that I was tempted to not throw it in the washer, until I picked it up and noticed the distinct bouquet of half-digested kibbles and cat-innards. Into the wash it went.

3) Mrs. ACW recently bought a fish for her pre-school class. After much in-fighting, wheedling, consternation, back-stabbing, and compromise, they came up with this list of names:

-Chomp
-Dolphin
-Humpback Whale
-TV
-Spongebob
-Daddy (kind of really weird)
-Rocky
-Rainbow
-Orange (The fish is blue and red)
-Troy (from high school musical, I am told)
-Mr. Fish

and her favorites,

-Mr. Nachos (a close second, and if that one dies or they get a second
fish, that’s going to be his name)

-Spider-man (The name they picked)

I hereby decree that all pets shall be henceforth and forthwith named by preschoolers.

BGE Peak Time Rebate Program

So Mrs. ACW and I have been selected to participate in an energy-saving experiment with Baltimore Gas and Electric this summer. BGE selected about 1000 homes at random to participate in what they call the “Peak Time Rebate program”, and we were lucky enough to be one of them.

Basically, it works like this: BGE will run the program for 12 days between June 1 and Sept 30. Essentially, they’ll let us know by phone, email, or even text a few days in advance when a “peak day” is coming. (Can you believe that? Text? I’m shocked at their acceptance of modern technology.) Then, when the peak day rolls around all we have to do is reduce our energy usage between 2pm and 7pm.

“Ha ha, sucker,” I can hear you saying now, “They’re just duping you and some other suckers into reducing your energy so that they don’t have to brown-out the state for a few days this summer.”

Yeah, I was skeptical too, but they’re providing incentives out the ass. First of all, just by calling to see if I qualified to participate in the program they gave me $15. Not bad for 5 minutes worth of work.

Next, they’re going to refund me for every kilowatt hour I reduce off my average usage. So if they measure that I normally use 1000 kWh per month and on a peak day I use 5 or 10 kWh less, they’ll pay me about $1.16 for every kWh reduced. That means $5.80 or $11.60 (or more) for doing nothing! Even better, there’s no penalty if I don’t reduce my usage during peak days. At this point my plan is to flip all the breakers on everything except the refrigerator on “peak” days. I don’t care if the cats suffer for my cash.

Once the experiment ends in September, and if I don’t bail out, which I won’t, they’ll pay me another $100 just for participating. This is on top of whatever I earn through reduced usage and the $15 they paid me initially.

Finally, the coolest part of the experiment are the tools they’re giving me to help reduce energy usage. They’re installing a device on my air conditioner/heat pump that will cycle on and off while the air conditioning is on. The air conditioning will stop, but the fan will keep running for a few minutes to blow around the already cold air, then the AC will kick on again, then off again while the fan stays on, etc. So they’ll be saving money FOR me. How can I lose?

The other cool thing that we get is an Orb! When I read about these in Wired a few months ago I thought, “Man, I’ve GOT to get one of those.” It keeps track of any number of things, but in this case, it’ll be our energy usage. So we can see if we’re using more energy than we need to be using and I can yell to Mrs. ACW, “Hey, the orb is red. Stop doing whatever you’re doing! Jerkass.”

I know I’m totally nerding out here, but I’m totally psyched about this, and can’t wait to see how it goes. And there’s really nothing nicer than getting paid a fat wad of cash for having a lower energy bill.

Whimsy 2

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