This is Amazing

So a guy nammed "Guy" went to the BBC offices for an job interview. At the same time another guy nammed "Guy" was there to be interviewed live on air as an expert about the online music industry. Read the whole story below, but long story short, the wrong Guy ended up on air being interviewed. He does a pretty good job, actually. I'd hire him.

Read the story and watch the interview.

There should be a Show about this Week

I've tried to get away from writing pointless diary-type blog entries (largely because I've found it robs me of having anything to talk about in real life), but for some reason there are billions of good things happening right now, so I feel like bragging.

First of all, it's beautiful out. We hosted a nice grill out last weekend, during which we spent hours on the porch enjoying the sun and the warm evening that followed. I live for nights like that. Next time we need to do it at a park so we can get some frisbee going, but otherwise it was damn near perfect. Basketball brunch has shed its sweatshirts and long pants, and I've actually felt sweat on my brow the last couple of weeks. It's also very nice to see the the courts have not yet become crowded, which is a good sign for the continued viability of our current location.

A newly freckled Maria has recently recieved promising messages from a potential TA-type job for this fall, which is very cool. She's also finishing up her Kaplan training and expecting a gaggle of friends this weekend. It's nice to know she'll be having a good time with her friends while I'm out of town. Maria happy makes me happy.

I'm heading off on a grand adventure this weekend to the twin cities to have a fantastic long weekend with people I haven't seen for too long. Roof-top grill outs, X1-3, some sort of pool game that may kill Joe, it should be awesome. It sounds like we may be able to stop in Madison on the way home and see Mootzger too. Plus I just ate at Pasta Bowl with Maria yesterday (a very good thing), bought new sandals (much needed), and moved into a new office at work (basically the same, but up one floor and our windows open now).

And we're not even done yet. Today I am eating at Qdoba with Pat and Glen, and then later I'm getting dinner with Pat and Brian Hilgeman. Tomorrow night is the first Euchre night, which should be awesome. Last summer's Euchre night was a resounding success, and I'm hoping that we can recreate that institution somewhere downtown.

So there you have it; I'm having a pretty good week.

Samples of Yupo

On a whim I ran a google search to see if there was any remenant of Yupo (my old website from way back) left on the web. There doesn't seem to be any, at least not that Google has indexed, but I did find www.yupo.com, which is a synthetic paper manufacturer.

It sounds like their paper is rough, tough, stain-resistant, you general cowboy of the paper world. I suppose you use this if you need to take notes in a meteor shower in outter space, or if you want to hang up a note on the door of a dragon's cave or something. Anyways, they have a form where you can request samples, so I did. Hopefully sometime soon I'll get a packet of the most amazing paper I've ever seen.

I'll keep you posted!

Disgusting Babies

So there's this company called "Pimpfants" that sells thug clothes for babies (I heard about it on 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me'.*)

One of their tanktops for babies (which were nammed 'Baby Beaters', but they changed them to 'Lil Beaters') says "My Mom is a M.I.L.F." on it. Translate that out to full words: "My Mom is a Mom I'd Like to Fuck". EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!



*The same place where I heard Billy Connaly say, "When I first moved to America I discovered I could fax for a pizza. I thought I was on the moon living in the future."

Jinx Alert!

So James Locke (not the one from Lost) decided to try saving Life After 208 yesterday. I know it's way too early to declare the blog healthy again, but it was deaed. Dead as fuck, and only a big event would ever shock life back into it, and it appears that Caps may have just posted it.

Yesterday James emerged from a complete media blackout to give us a much-appreciated update on his status down in Florida. That alone was enough to get many back to the friendly confines of Life After 208, but then today he came back and followed with an aftershock of the best MS Paint work I've seen in ages.

If you ever cared about Caps, dinosaurs, Star Wars, or laughing, be sure to check it out. Also, if your picture is on the top of that blog, I think we ought to keep this revival going - we WERE the best blog of 2005, afterall. Imagine the gloating at the Bloggies this year if we could come back and win again: "In seven months we were able to produce more entertainiment than the rest of you could do in twelve. We accept this Travel Scrabble game proudly."

You know, speaking of traditions, Pat was supposed to fly Harry, Arun and myself out to Hollywood (or SOMEWHERE, at least) to play some Euchre at a happening club. That sort of got glossed over, and I'd like to say that I forgive Pat for delaying the trip a bit, and I'm excited to hear where we're going and when!

And while we're doing a site round-up, The Television Review is chugging along decently. We've leveled out at 11 members, with six of us regularly posting. The traffic has not picked up like I was originally looking for, but I've also put zero work into expanding the site (if anyone wants to link to www.thetelevisionreview.com on their sites/blogs, that'd be great). I'm fine with it just being a forum, and I'm actually thinking of removing the rest of the content (which is all just filler junk anyways). I'm in the process of working on an update to the design of the forum, to make it a decent landing page for the entire site.

So Close

I was cleaning out old emails today, and I came across one that I wrote to Maria way back on Monday, June 28, 2006. Apparently on this particular morning I came very close to enjoying a tasty treat before I had even heard the term "Cheese Yummy". Here's the first couple of lines of that email:

>From: "David Ryan"
>To: "Maria Parrott"
>Subject: Time Barrels
>Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 13:42:33 -0500
>
>Hey Maria,
> Well, just got to work, didn't do anything this morning but eat
>Grilled Cheese and shower...

Monster House is a cheap ripoff of Detective House

Back when I was in high school, my friends and I crafted many a great film that was never made (i.e. [Maybe] Those Were the Days), many not-so-great movie ideas that were made (i.e. Sixpack of Sunshine: The California Story), and now one great movie idea that has been stolen and bastardized by an upcoming cartoon movie (i.e. Detective House)

In the upcomming film "Monster House", a house comes alive and eats some kids (as best as I can tell). In "Detective House" a house came alive, helped recover a stolen VCR (with a rented copy of Roller Ball in it), and sort of brought a family together. Also, Detective House featured a character (the Mom, I think) played by Joe's stool with his sweatshirt over it and a toilet brush for an arm. From what I can tell, Sony (the maker of "Monster House"), must have found a copy of the Detective House script, stripped it of all it's genius and glory, and tweaked it a bit to avoid lawsuits. Because, let's face it, there aren't many scripts writen about a house comming to life.

So, in honor of Detective House, I will now try to recall as many details of this unrealized cinematic masterpiece as I can. I'm not sure, but Chris Polley may still have a copy of this somewhere...

Detective house began with the Dad of the family sleeping on the floor of the den. He was covered in big, cut-out footprints. The camera followed the family around as they got ready for the day - the highlite of this sequence was when the sister couldn't find her left shoe, and the Mom yells for her to check the left shoe box, which was a GIANT box I had snagged from Best Buy that would be labeled "Left Shoes" in magic marker.

When the Dad wakes up, his wife (played by a stool*) tells him to get up and return Roller Ball to Blockbuster before they have to pay late fees (a major motiviation in this film was the Dad's refusal to pay late fees on such a horrible movie). He goes to get it, and discovers the VCR is stolen. I'm not sure, but I think he may yell as much to the wife, who tells him to check the VCR box, which he goes to and it's the Left Shoe Box with "Left Shoes" crossed out and "VCR's" written below it (I may be making that part up). But he can't find it.

*The thing about this stool was that it looked amazing. We'd worked it out so that it really looked like a little person, enough to fool you if you came upon it without getting a good look. Just looking at it in person could make you laugh for a few solid minutes.

After finding the VCR is missing, the Dad finds the big shoe prints all over the house, and tracks them ouside. He realizes that someone stole their VCR, with the movie inside. He gets his son, and tells him they're going to have to track down the crook. The Sister has to go to band leassons, but can't get anyone to pay attention to her, and she eventually screams and says she'll just WALK to band leassons! We see her walking down the road in later shots.

The Dad and Son awaken the house by putting two baseball caps together into a detective hat (you know what I'm talking about), and throwing it onto the house. Via amazing special effects the house turns into a human detective, who leads the Son and Dad on some sort of wild goose chase.

Eventually the daughter (still walking to band practice), is stopped by a man in a car who asks her for directions. When she gives them to the guy, he writes them down on the family's VCR! Somehow the daughter gets the guy out of the car, and starts chasing him back towards the family home.

Back home, Detective House has the Son and Dad digging a big hole, and the son is starting to question the house's knowledge in crime fighting, but the Dad trusts him entirely. The daughter chases the crook through the back yard and he trips in the hole. He's caught! Hooray!

After the credits we were going to insert a scene of our friend Ryan playing a big-time movie executive who would be berating us for such a stupid movie idea. "It just doesn't make sense!" Was to be the main point of his rant. This was motivated by the fact that in real life Ryan constantly yelled at us about how the idea didn't make any sense. The End.

5-8-6

I just got two new toys in the last 24 hours; my laptop arrived this morning and I bought a new cell phone last night. My old phone had gotten to the point that I got about 2 minutes of talk time out of the battery, and my service was going to run out in the next few weeks anyways, so I decided to start up an individual contract (rather than the family plan I've been under thanks to my parents) a little early. I was happy to see I qualified for credit; its nice to be making strides in that area.

I like my new laptop thus far - it's a Dell Inspiron E1505, and it looks sharp. The screen is very nice, though the reflective finish on it may be a problem in bright areas. I suppose you probably get used to it. The keyboard has a good feel and the generally construction seems pretty solid. The mouse buttons are sort of strange - rather than a sharp click they just depress smoothly, making them quieter but a bit less satisfying. I think they'll be fine as well. I tried to install Doom 3 over lunch (thanks to Brammer), but couldn't get the installation to complete. I'll give it another shot tonight. I'm interested to see how well it handles high-end graphics.

Maria and I are visiting Madison this weekend, and I am very happy. I'm definately jonsing for a Madison fix; it's only been a few weeks, but as spring comes around I'm finding that I miss Madison more and more. Mootzgong theorized that this is probably because I remember spring and summer in Madison being the beginning/end of school and summer break; the best times during school. I hope we live in Madison again someday - I could really see living there long-term. I'm not sure I'm equiped to live in Chicago for the rest of my life. So if you're in Madison this weekend, give me a call on my new cell phone. (Which reminds me - I have a new number. If you didn't get an email from me send me one and I'll get it to you.)

The Madison trip is a tiny bit up in the air right now, unfortunately, due to the check engine light in the Neon coming on. I've never had a single problem with Leon Jr. (Leon Sr. was Harry's Neon, RIP), and I'm due for an oil change (actually past the recommended date, but well under the recommended miles), so I'm hoping that the two things are related. It costs $70 just to have the problem diagnosed which really sucks. All they do is plug a display into the on-board computer and read the error code - that shouldn't cost so much. Ah, well - $70 after a year of trouble-free driving is pretty reasonable. I just hope there isn't anything major that will need addressing. Hang in there, Leon - we need you!

Blogs Ship Information Across the Internet

Speaking of shipping, I just recieved notice that my laptop shipped from Tennessee, and is currently somewhere in the state of Illinois (it was checked into a UPS shipping center in Hodgkins, IL just before noon). I'm holding out hope that it may show up on an afternoon delivery run, but odds are they'll attempt to deliver it tomorrow, and I won't get it until Monday (my office is the shipping address, as no one's home during the week). Either way, I'm pretty impressed with a one week order-to-delivery timeframe.

Mootzgarella should be showing up this evening some time to enjoy a weekend of sitting around with Pat and I. While there are no specific plans at this time, I can almost gaurntee a good time. Speaking of Mootzglug, dud you look at Harry's comment on my last post? If not, you should.

Speaking of things you should check out; if you haven't seen Google Earth for a while, you should download the new version. Since the last time I saw it, they added in 3-D geography and basic 3-D models of buildings in some urban areas. It's pretty cool; check out downtown Chicago or New York. I can say that the buildings right around my office are pretty accurate.

Last night Pat and I saw Brick, which I really enjoyed. It was sort of simple and not everything was drum-tight, but I really enjoyed the cinematography and mood of the whole thing. Plus, the kid from Third Rock from the Sun was quite enjoyable. I'd recommend checking it out before you imerse yourself in the explosionfest that must be MI:3. We were also graced with the most decent movie audience I've yet seen in Chicago. I'm sure it helps to be seeing a less mainstream movie in a smaller theater on a Thursday night, but still - thanks, fellow patrons. (Note: that audience would have rated in the bottom 10% of Wisconsin audiences, but for Illinois it was near-miraculous.)

Speaking of movies, X3 comes out the weekend Pat and I will be in Minnesota...

On the home front, there's still no word from Comcast about my bill, and our neighbors managed to leave dog shit on the sidewalk again since I actually had to tell them not to do that yesterday. Think about that; in the 24-hour window since I asked them to pick up after their dog, they failed to do so. This fits nicely into the pattern established when I asked them to keep their cat indoors for 36 hours (while we had to take Ernie out in the backyard), and they let the cat out three hours later. I suppose it's hard to remember things when you're totally baked, huh? What?

Speaking of being totally baked, Harry Brammer is supposedly visiting Chicago next weekend, and alas it is the weekend we're heading up to Madison. Drat and nuts, I say. Luckily, Harry has no reason he needs to be home again any time soon, so I expect to hear he will be staying in town for a couple of weeks at least. I look forward to having Harry in town for a long, long time.

I Hate Comcast and our Neighbors (Rant Warning)

I hate Comcast. I hate them. They are easily one of the worst companies I have ever had to deal with. Not only are their HD channels constantly unwatchable, but they're trying to screw me with their billing.

As you may recall, I was planning on cancelling my service last month to switch to RCN. Comcast offered up a new package that would save me $20 a month, and I decided to stick around out of convienence. I just got my new bill today, and it's not for $20 less, but for $15 MORE! I am very frustrated about this. I have no recourse but to send them nasty emails, and having worked at a call center, I know that the people that will respond to them aren't the ones I should be yelling at.

So far as I can tell, I was either flat-out lied to by two different phone operators, or there was some sort of entry error on their end. I'm hoping to recieve a corrected bill and have the whole thing fixed, but something tells me it won't be that easy.

I was also told the new price would be good for a year, but the new bill has three different items that are listed as 3 month or 1 month packages.

I'm done dealing with this headache; the only way the convienece of not switching continues to outweigh the hatred I now feel for this company is if I recieve a long, apoligietic email that tells me everything is fixed and I don't need to do anything more. If this requires one more ounce of concern from me I'm bailing.

In conclusion, Comcast sucks. If you ever have the option to use their service or anything else, choose anything else.

Also, while I'm good and riled up, our neighbors suck. This morning the idiot woman of the idiot pair stopped to talk to me infront of our gate, and asked me to make sure we close the gate when we go through it beacuse their dog got out. How in the HELL is this our fault?? You are so lazy that you let your dog out in the front yard, don't clean up after it, don't supervise it, don't even look to check if the gate is closed, and it's our fault he got out? If you've ever seen this dog, you know it moves at a rate comparable to a tree growing (it's old, blind and deaf). In order for the dog to have gotten out and made any progress, they would have had to leave it alone outside for at least fifteen minutes (nice idea; leaving your deaf, blind, invalid dog alone outside for that long). Of course, these are the people that leave their cat outside over night in the middle of January. They constantly claim to love animals sooo much, and talk about how they love their 'babies', but they are the worst pet owners I have ever seen.

I do not like our neighbors. I actually hate them more than Comcast. This confrontation was actually great in it's own way, though. I was able to cut her off, tell her to clean up her dog's shit on the sidewalk, and walk away before she got to finish talking, which felt good. I'm not the sort of guy to initiate conflict, especially with neighbors, so I am sort of glad she tried to say something to me.

Perhaps our hippie neighbors are in charge of Comcast.

Anyways, Mootzger visits tomorrow, Pat and I are seeing Brick tonight, and ABC is streaming last night's Lost for free (which I missed the first half of due to Comcast's shitty service), so there are plenty of good things to distract me from my burning haterd of various things.

The Titular Line of this Blog Post

When Maria and I walked from the train to our respective buildings this morning we passed the aftermath of what we're told was a horrible accident in which a guy lost control of his van, ran up on the sidewalk and hit some pedestrians. When we got there the whole scene was just a mess of ambulances, crushed street signs, a screaming woman and mobs of people standing around. We also saw two guys get in a fight (which featured a tall skinny guy kicking a big fat guy). All in all there was an extraordinarily weird vibe. I was glad to get to work and find things functioning as they normally would - walking through that made the city feel very alien very quickly.

Other than that, I've taken part of a very slow day at work today to figure out my summer vacation plans and eat at Qdoba with Pat and Glen. I'm planning a few weekend trips including a Minnesota trek with Pat on the 26th of this month, possibly a 4th of July extended stay in Madison and a weekend in Michigan with Maria. The concept of having vacation time at my disposal still feels pretty weird - I'm going to get paid to visit my friends? That's crazy.

Last night I did something very not David-like; I spent a bunch of money. I finally bit the bullet and bought a new laptop; a Dell E1505. The purchase ends a few weeks of looking around at the various options, and generally finding that I couldn't get what I wanted for what I wanted to spend. I had considered waiting for Vista, but I have zero confidence we'll see Vista any time in the next year (besides, Metzger can probably score me a free copy somehow), and I had also considered waiting for the 64-bit dual cores, but mostly just to drive the price of the 32-bit ones down. Then Dell announced a one-day sale that drove the price of a very well equpied dual core laptop down into my price range. I rebuilt the same machine today and found it cost $400 more than I spent yesterday, so I feel like I got a pretty good deal.

I'm very excited about getting back into video editing (just need to shoot something first...) and checking out some games. I haven't played any computer games for the last four years or so, except for The Sims and Battlefield 1942. This means I should have a backlog of several years worth of great stuff to check out. Anybody have any suggestions? I've heard Civilization 4 is a good time, but otherwise I don't even know what's out there, so it's up to you, loyal readers, to tell me what's worth playing.