I read this on the Inet just a second ago, and it made me giggle.
The problem with buying a package of cookies is that I'm torn between gobbling them up immediately, and savoring them. If I gobble them up, not only will I be hit with an immense wave of guilt, but they'll also be gone too quickly. If I wait, they run the risk of being stale. This upsets me the most when it's Milano cookies or Oreos, two brand names that almost everybody on the planet likes. Both my Milano cookies and my Oreos are now stale. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't find the tears.
Welcome to Shelf Life.
It was probably cos I thought a guy wrote that column until now.
Also, I'm exempt from Gummint. Somehow.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Promises
This is an excerpt from my diary. For some reason, I was super proud of it.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 2247 hrs
One year ago today, I sat in Terminal C of Ronald Reagan National Airport reading The Appeal by John Grisham and eating churros (from Cinnabon, I believe). That was a long Sunday. I spent something like six or seven hours alone in that airport. It holds a lot of meaning for me.
When I think of it, powerful emotions awake that I almost never feel. I don't understand them properly at all. I'm not sure where I'd even begin trying. It was a time when I was independent and free. I value independence and freedom, but I've experienced those things at other times, too. [redacted to protect the innocent; they might know whom they are] The architecture of parts of that airport is stunning, having a strange, ethereal quality that almost seems to convey me across time and space. There's also the mental link I hold between that place and Portable Ops, but it's an oddly transcendental one that shouldn't affect me quite like this.
It's one of the most important places in the world, and it's our first anniversary. Many happy returns, hein?
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 2247 hrs
One year ago today, I sat in Terminal C of Ronald Reagan National Airport reading The Appeal by John Grisham and eating churros (from Cinnabon, I believe). That was a long Sunday. I spent something like six or seven hours alone in that airport. It holds a lot of meaning for me.
When I think of it, powerful emotions awake that I almost never feel. I don't understand them properly at all. I'm not sure where I'd even begin trying. It was a time when I was independent and free. I value independence and freedom, but I've experienced those things at other times, too. [redacted to protect the innocent; they might know whom they are] The architecture of parts of that airport is stunning, having a strange, ethereal quality that almost seems to convey me across time and space. There's also the mental link I hold between that place and Portable Ops, but it's an oddly transcendental one that shouldn't affect me quite like this.
It's one of the most important places in the world, and it's our first anniversary. Many happy returns, hein?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Toshokan Sensou
I was glancing around my blog for the first time in a while. I just spend so much more time on the back-end of things. While I was perusing, I happened to see the little tagline that says "What's with all the kissing in the rain, guys?" That goes wayyy back in time to a German chick that I sort of knew. I found a list of "ways to turn your girlfriend on" or something like that on her Facebook page... profile... thing. HerSpace. I reposted it on my blog with a running commentary of why or why not the things listed seemed like good ideas. One of those was "Kissher in the RAIN!!!" (yeah, bad typography, similar to the original). I said something along the lines of "Dude, do what ya want, but kissin' in the dry sounds better to me." That started a huge paranoiac argument and I slapped the rain-kissin' tag on the headliner.
So I started to imagine what kissin' in the rain would be like. Kind of hard cos I've never kissed anybody, but I can try. I can feel like the water on my lover's lips as they brush mine. Same as a regular kiss but wet. Big deal. But I guess it must be romantic or something to go to all the trouble of risking pneumonia just to show a bit of affection.
I saw an albino roach the other day... and my mom bought a copy of The Host (which, I am guessing, is about a necrotic maitre d' who falls madly in love with an unassuming girl-next-door named MJ and almost gets his a... butt kicked by Spider-Man. Still waiting for the second installment to see the thrilling conclusion) and almost put it in the bag with my Navy SEAL picture book but luckily put it in the bag with my brother's WWI history book.
There's an entry in my diary that I'm especially proud of. Not sure why. Just am. I'm considering editing it for content and publishing it here.
So I started to imagine what kissin' in the rain would be like. Kind of hard cos I've never kissed anybody, but I can try. I can feel like the water on my lover's lips as they brush mine. Same as a regular kiss but wet. Big deal. But I guess it must be romantic or something to go to all the trouble of risking pneumonia just to show a bit of affection.
I saw an albino roach the other day... and my mom bought a copy of The Host (which, I am guessing, is about a necrotic maitre d' who falls madly in love with an unassuming girl-next-door named MJ and almost gets his a... butt kicked by Spider-Man. Still waiting for the second installment to see the thrilling conclusion) and almost put it in the bag with my Navy SEAL picture book but luckily put it in the bag with my brother's WWI history book.
There's an entry in my diary that I'm especially proud of. Not sure why. Just am. I'm considering editing it for content and publishing it here.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Chloroplathts
I'm going to Michigan this summer. I don't think I've ever actually been to Michigan before, except for a quick stop in the Detroit airport. I think I'll list the states I've been to:
Utah
California
Tennessee
Illinois
Kansas
Iowa
the District of Columbia
Alabama
Texas
Nebraska
Georgia
Wyoming
Nevada
Arizona
New Mexico
Oklahoma
Mississippi
Florida
New York
Minnesota (MSP airport)
Louisiana
Kentucky
Maryland
Virginia
Missouri
That's all I can think of, anyhow.
Oh, and I'm going moose hunting in October. I hope that'll be more productive than all the elk hunting I've done already.
Edit: I just found out that my English grade is a 98 and I'm kind of mad about it.
Utah
California
Tennessee
Illinois
Kansas
Iowa
the District of Columbia
Alabama
Texas
Nebraska
Georgia
Wyoming
Nevada
Arizona
New Mexico
Oklahoma
Mississippi
Florida
New York
Minnesota (MSP airport)
Louisiana
Kentucky
Maryland
Virginia
Missouri
That's all I can think of, anyhow.
Oh, and I'm going moose hunting in October. I hope that'll be more productive than all the elk hunting I've done already.
Edit: I just found out that my English grade is a 98 and I'm kind of mad about it.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Sucrets
Once upon a time there was a dude named Steve Stevens. He was awesome. He was so awesome, that he played guitar for Billy Idol. Most people agree that Billy Idol is one of the awesomest dudes ever. It seems to follow that if someone as awesome as Billy Idol relies on you, you must be pretty awesome too.
I've always described Stevens as a "monster." I mean that in at least two ways. First, he looks like a monster. He's got that whole huge black shaggy hair thing going on and he wears some crazy makeup. Second, he's a monster guitarist. No wonder he was picked to play the "Top Gun Anthem." That's the real theme song of the movie Top Gun. Yeah, "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins isn't actually the theme song. They needed something totally hardcore and they needed it to be done awesomewise. So they hired Steve Stevens and some weirdo piano player with a wispy little mustache. The final tune was a mix of anthemic melody and adventurous action-shredding. Perfect for a movie about a guy who tries to... um... Does Maverick fight for justice at all in Top Gun? I know he "finds himself" and joins an elite band of fighters. I guess the dedication it took to do that is the inspiration for the anthem part of the song. The "need for speed" mentioned in the movie, referring to Maverick's maverickness, is well represented by Steve Stevens' solo work halfway through the song.
There's another hero of mine - Simo Häyhä. He's only the most awesome warrior I can think of (who's a real person, anyhow). From what I can tell, he killed over 700 Soviet soldiers in the Russo-Finnish war. And like 540 of that was as a sniper, using no scope. That's pretty amazing. Of course, there are estimates that place his kill record closer to 1,000 total killed, but I'm going to stay conservative for now. He's just an amazing guy.
Now I'm going to maybe play "Top Gun Anthem" again. Or maybe not. I kind of want to watch some anime. Maybe. Who knows?
I've always described Stevens as a "monster." I mean that in at least two ways. First, he looks like a monster. He's got that whole huge black shaggy hair thing going on and he wears some crazy makeup. Second, he's a monster guitarist. No wonder he was picked to play the "Top Gun Anthem." That's the real theme song of the movie Top Gun. Yeah, "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins isn't actually the theme song. They needed something totally hardcore and they needed it to be done awesomewise. So they hired Steve Stevens and some weirdo piano player with a wispy little mustache. The final tune was a mix of anthemic melody and adventurous action-shredding. Perfect for a movie about a guy who tries to... um... Does Maverick fight for justice at all in Top Gun? I know he "finds himself" and joins an elite band of fighters. I guess the dedication it took to do that is the inspiration for the anthem part of the song. The "need for speed" mentioned in the movie, referring to Maverick's maverickness, is well represented by Steve Stevens' solo work halfway through the song.
There's another hero of mine - Simo Häyhä. He's only the most awesome warrior I can think of (who's a real person, anyhow). From what I can tell, he killed over 700 Soviet soldiers in the Russo-Finnish war. And like 540 of that was as a sniper, using no scope. That's pretty amazing. Of course, there are estimates that place his kill record closer to 1,000 total killed, but I'm going to stay conservative for now. He's just an amazing guy.
Now I'm going to maybe play "Top Gun Anthem" again. Or maybe not. I kind of want to watch some anime. Maybe. Who knows?
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Itchy knuckles
Does anybody but me ever use the fullscreen mode in browsers? It's kind of neat, and almost handy when you get used to it. The shortcut is usually F11. Try that the next time you use any sort of kiosk that has a keyboard: hit F11. If you're lucky, it's only like Opera or Internet Explorer in fullscreen mode, displaying a custom webpage. I did it the other day at Carmax. Of course, it was only IE5 displaying the Carmax webpage so that customers could search the Carmax inventory conveniently. I changed some setting or other so that people would have a harder time going places other than that site. Helpful ol' me.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Read the Readings
This is your first HTML lesson with Dr. RT (Panzer Time!). Since students are not allowed to address professors by their first names, you will refer to me from here on out as Dr. Panzer Time! or as Panzer-Time!-Sensei (or as Panzer-Time!-Sempai, if you are so inclined).
Since nobody anywhere knows how to manually embed an image, and since I'll be embedding images in this lesson, I'll start with embedding an image. It works like this:
In that picture, you see a snippet of HTML. On the end you have the little corner things. That's what tells the browser (Firefox or Safari or Internet Explorer) what parts of a page are code and what parts are plain text. In HTML, everything is done with "tags" that have the little angley corners on them. In most cases, you put the tag with the instruction you want, like "b" for "bold," followed by some text that gets made bold, followed by another tag that has "/b."
The "img" tag, which we just saw, works a little differently. There's only one tag for one image. It closes itself - that's what the slash is for. It has the word "src" followed by an equals sign. That tells the image tag where to look for the actual image. The URL, in quotes, does that. The URL I used for that image was
"http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u158/RT_Jones/1.jpg."
Next we have the "a" tag. The "a" tag is a lot like the "img" tag in that it has an equals sign and a URL. However, the "a" tag usually wraps itself around text and has a separate closing tag. Check it out:
This time, instead of "src," "href" is used. "href" stands for something like Hyper-Reference or something like that. It's only ever used with the "a" tag, but it does the same thing as "src" does in the image tag. Notice that there's a few words in the middle of the two "a" tags. These are what's used for the link - linking is what "a" tags do.
There's more things that can be taught, but that's probably all for now.
Just for fun:
<img src="http://www.pe.com/imagesdaily/2008/06-25/berlin0625_300.jpg" />
goes to:
Since nobody anywhere knows how to manually embed an image, and since I'll be embedding images in this lesson, I'll start with embedding an image. It works like this:
In that picture, you see a snippet of HTML. On the end you have the little corner things. That's what tells the browser (Firefox or Safari or Internet Explorer) what parts of a page are code and what parts are plain text. In HTML, everything is done with "tags" that have the little angley corners on them. In most cases, you put the tag with the instruction you want, like "b" for "bold," followed by some text that gets made bold, followed by another tag that has "/b."
The "img" tag, which we just saw, works a little differently. There's only one tag for one image. It closes itself - that's what the slash is for. It has the word "src" followed by an equals sign. That tells the image tag where to look for the actual image. The URL, in quotes, does that. The URL I used for that image was
"http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u158/RT_Jones/1.jpg."
Next we have the "a" tag. The "a" tag is a lot like the "img" tag in that it has an equals sign and a URL. However, the "a" tag usually wraps itself around text and has a separate closing tag. Check it out:
This time, instead of "src," "href" is used. "href" stands for something like Hyper-Reference or something like that. It's only ever used with the "a" tag, but it does the same thing as "src" does in the image tag. Notice that there's a few words in the middle of the two "a" tags. These are what's used for the link - linking is what "a" tags do.
There's more things that can be taught, but that's probably all for now.
Just for fun:
<img src="http://www.pe.com/imagesdaily/2008/06-25/berlin0625_300.jpg" />
goes to:
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