Monthly Archives: October 2004

Saturday, I was supposed to go to a Halloween party in the evening. Instead, I spent the whole day being a ham radio geek. I did get to go out to breakfast with my friend Greg and the waitress flirted with me, but that was the only non-geeky part of the day. This weekend was the CQ World Wide DX Contest. That means all the big geek ham radio contesters (the hams with the really big towers, and lots of them) were all on the radio trying to talk to as many countries as they could. I played with my own pathetic little radio for a while, but on Saturday … Continue reading →

Well, not quite, but most of the comments I get seem to be comment spam. And I’d say all the email I get from “women” are either offers for a mortgage, drugs, or just my sister pestering me about fixing her web site. I mean, she’s had it up for a year or something and she’s had almost a quarter of a million hits. All my web sites combined, including the one for the ham radio club, probably get 0.1% of that sort of attention. Well, I don’t do all that much that’s interesting. Unless you consider a constant progression downhill to be interesting. OK, so this isn’t interesting either. … Continue reading →

I think I may have volunteered to be an officer of the ham radio club. I know that’s going to get me all the chix. I better start making a sign-up list somewhere. I bet if I use my 3l33t coding sk1llz and put it on the web, I will be even more irresistible. I better come home and watch TV Friday night. Who knows what trouble I’ll find otherwise.

He’s ex-Marine, very conservative, and in his second round of interviews for a job with the FBI. I asked him to let me know if he was tracking aliens, then I realized that if I buy into the whole alien conspiracy theory thing, it’s all a government secret and he can’t tell me a thing. Man, I miss the X-Files. How about them Red Sox?

Work late (basically watching a guy taking apart a laptop) and watch baseball. Not much interesting about that. The most interesting parts of the day are probably the walk to work (through a semi-industrial area to avoid traffic), the walk back (when it was POURING), trips to the coffee shop (downstairs), and lunch (Wazwan, a shop that’s usually in a Food court, but just happens to be a standalone shop on our block). So nothing much. I really wanted to go to a haunted house, this year. I have less than a week left and it sounds creepy to go by myself. I even wait for movies like “Toy Story” … Continue reading →

So today, on the way to work, I saw a homeless guy with a giant sign that said, “HONK IF YOU HATE BUSH.” As I walked by him, he waggled the sign at me. I told him, “I’d honk if I could,” and he gave me a huge smile. When I went to the ham radio swap meet on Saturday, I saw a friend of mine who gave me his card for speed dating. I guess he’s the local coordinator. My co-workers think I’ll just effectively annoy people in the alloted time, and they’re probably right. So even though nobody cares, I bought some teeth whitening strips to try and … Continue reading →

I helped a friend of mine troubleshoot some simple computer problems and the call was 1:02:03. Good thing it was on my weekend minutes. Even better, her computer works the way she wants it to (I think). Only other bad thing is that my cell phone batteries are about dead now. I wonder how long you’re supposed to be able to talk on the thing before it dies.

And the tyranny it imposes. So I got my gadget (and boy does it take crummy pictures) but downloading the pictures required playing with several different computers. Most of my computers are legacy devices, well, they’re really just junk that my friends no longer wanted. Getting them to work is sometimes a chore. Most of the time I just run NetBSD or something on them and I have no problem, but when I need to run Windows, it’s a real pain. I had to run Windows to get the files off of my new Olympus W-10 toy since it’s not Mac compatible. Here’s a picture of my neighbor’s house with … Continue reading →

I had to go to three travel sites, enter in flight information repeatedly, and call up two credit card companies, all so I could buy my sister’s plane ticket so she can come up and annoy my father. My mother is leaving for Japan, and I can’t do it all on my own. OK, so one of the credit card company calls was to cancel an EBay MasterCard I got so my sister would have more points towards her Free iPod. According to Wired, you can actually get a free iPod if you bully five your friends in to joining and signing up for things. Of course, I’m not above … Continue reading →

My sister is coming to town and she found the cheapest flights using cheaptickets.com. I tried to pay for her ticket, but I didn’t have her frequent flier number, and she wasn’t answering the phone because she was busy watching the stupid TV. “Oh, I had to watch Lost and West Wing.” Well, in the time between 8PM and 10PM when her stupid shows were over, the web site has deteriorated. First, it wouldn’t let me pay for the ticket, then it wouldn’t render. It’s slowly coming back to life. So I started looking up cheaptickets.com on the internet. Searching google, I found that as recently as July of 2001, … Continue reading →

Little Johnny was in his 4th grade class when the teacher asked what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up: fireman, cop, salesman. Johnny was being rather quiet so the teacher asked him about his father. “My father is an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes, if there’s a really good offer, he’ll go out to the alley with some guy and make love for money.” The teacher hurriedly set the other children to work on some coloring, and took Little Johnny aside to ask, “Is that really true about your father? “No,” … Continue reading →

So my sister got me a birthday present and it’s STILL backordered. I don’t really know if the Griffin RadioShark even exists! It’s like a TiVo for the radio and I’m waiting for it for months, obviously, since my birthday was in April. I wonder if it will arrive before the latest gadget I bought myself. I spent three $25 Amazon reward certificates on a silly voice recorder and cheesy camera combo. Nothing like baseball, football, and toys to keep my mind off of politics.