Whoa, nelly.

Been off this pony for a while.

I'll get back on eventually, but the next two weeks are going to involve some seriously hectic changes, including:

1) moving most/all of my worldly possessions about 220 miles SW to Brooklyn
2) flipping my job from working at home in my pajamas and talking to stuffed lobsters to working in an office in pants and talking to real people.
3) ceasing my Krav training up here (for more information, visit Curt's Krav Maga Blog) and picking it back up in Manhattan.
4) oh by the way xmas/new years
5) oh god, oh no, this can't be happening, selling my car?! We'll see about that.

Not much else happening at present.

Crazy times a'brewin though, good gravy.

AnaChrono Trigger

It is the year 12,000 BC. Dalton has stolen your time machine/airship, the Epoch, and is about to make his maiden launch. As a video game villain, he clearly needs to say something both proud and menacing to herald this, his greatest coup to date...



Excuse me?

Just dawned on me...

I've been a non-smoker, uninterrupted, for 6 months now.

Feels like both a laughably short and impossibly long time.

Dear Apple: reprising the reprise

I always forget in the heat of hardware fury how easy it is to be nice to tech support people, and how far being nice will get you as a customer.

Interject: unless you're dealing with the Bender Ball people, who from my experiences are all trained like sheep to be as unhelpful as possible AND to try and sell you DVDs over the phone while you're furiously trying to cancel shipping of shit that you never ordered. I have never balled out a phone service person quite like the time when I called the Bender folk to dispute an unauthorized charge on my credit card and the dude on the phone -- who sounded like the Dog Whisperer -- followed my comment of "Please cancel shipping immediately and remove all of my information from your system" with, "And while you're on the phone, would you like to buy...?"


But yeah, Apple's always pretty decent on the phone, and I have a new mouse in the mail.

That was fast.

Dear Apple: reprise

Dear Apple,

Once again, shame on your Mighty Mouse. The scroll ball is such an intolerable piece of shit that it requires almost-daily maintenance -- in fact, run a google search for mighty mouse scroll ball and all you get is forum after forum of people saying, "I can't believe I keep buying this shitty piece of shit because it's the only thing that scrolls the way I need -- briefly."

So one of the common solutions for a jammed/dysfunctional scroll ball is to flip yer mouse upside down and roll it around vigorously on a sheet of white paper.

Apparently if you do that too many times, however, it will jam the scroll ball in, and then BAM, every click is a center click and your mouse is toast.

And can you unjam the ball? NO! Why? Because Apple doesn't give you a way to OPEN THE F'ING MOUSE. You also can't get under the ball and pull it up because, well, it's a slippery little bugger. Basically, in the process of my daily make-my-stupid-mouse-work routine, I managed to break it in some new, unrecoverable way.

Screw you guys, but bless your 12 month warranty, and failing that, bless your store clerk who will, whether he likes it or not, give me a new one for free under the duress of Furiously Disappointed Customer.

Monetize me

Well, minimal traffic coming through ye olde bloge these days...

So I fired up a possible monetizer at a silly Red Sox fansite in hopes of pulling some special-interest readership and better utilizing AdSense. Will it work? Doesn't really matter. I'll have fun doing it.

Of course, it was foolish of me to try and start a Sox-topic blog in the middle of the NBA playoffs, but there you have it.

Notes to self

Upcoming topics that probably deserve some airplay:

(1) I care about basketball for the second (?) time in my life. Thank you, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, et al.
(2) The Alchemist has terrible food, and after briefly trying really, really hard to like it, I am back to the opinion that it is bad for JP and should be re-replaced by a sports bar.
(3) The Milky Way, in addition to being a phenomenal name for a bar, is moving down to the Sam Adams Brewery lofts. This may herald the dawn of gentrification on JP's proverbial Wrong Side of the Tracks, and I'm not so sure I like it. Also, that dawn might have already been heralded.
(4) In non-bar news...I've been having a really hard time getting burgers to cook a consistent medium rare for me lately. Advice would be appreciated.
(5) There is no number 5.
(6) Actually, there are a lot of restaurants and recipes that deserve some attention. The Mission, for example, is really friggin tasty and has never disappointed me.
(7) Stump.
(8) Adventures in Text Twist.

Ok, cool. At my current pace of output, that should keep me busy for about two years.