There was a terrible tragedy involving my car. The 'coon-skin cap that made my car its home lost its tail. I don't know how it happened, but the tail and the cap are no longer one. The tail just somehow came off. News of this disaster sent waves of sorrow throughout the community. I could hear the nickels under the passenger seat sobbing all morning long. A trust fund will be set up in memory of the cap's dismembered tail. Please deposit your tax-deducatble donations into your own bank account.

There have been reports that Sri reads this web page. Do not believe such lies. It is a vast right-wing consipiracy aimed at destroying my career as a Hillary Clinton impersonator. Sri claims to have seen me doing "that" to a poster of Lacus Clyne but it is well know that I would never do "that" to Lacus-sama. Instead, I would only do "this". As you can see, the reports are simply false.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a very urgent meeting with my web browser to get to.

Wow, look at that. There's no countdown. That's because we actually went to Pizza Chicago (uh, make that Pizz'a Chicago...weird) and used the coupon. This is a ground breaking occurance. The next coupon expires in January or something.

Speaking of breaking ground, I saw the season finale of Prison Break last night. All I can really say is, "Doh!" Well, maybe I could add, "Dude, WTF?" or "Why do I need to wait until frigging March to find out what happens next?" I guess this is what happens when TV 0wns me and my sanity. Wait, what? Sanity? Ha! I have no sanity. I totally scammed TV out of that one. But TV still pwns me. I need Battlestar Galactica to start again.

Speaking of 0wn3rship, we went to BJ's on Friday or something and saw like six (that's right, like six) members of the upstanding Cupertino sheriff's department take a guy (that's right, a guy) out of the restaurant for having booze or something. Underage drinking maybe. That's right, six policemen (actually, it was like six policemen) to lead a nonviolent diner out of a restaurant. OK, it wasn't even six officers who did anything. One guy led him away, and one guy, er, led the rest of the officers away. You see, the city of Cupertino is a very dangerous place to live. With hazards like nonviolent underage drinkers, rice rockets, ducks, and iPod-totin' Benz drivers, I don't know how I managed to survive for so long. I must be a survivor.

Anyway, this holiday was a good one. I hung out with a lot of people who I haven't seen for a really long time and cooked a turkey for the family without any "incidents". Good food, good friends, good times. Yum.

Oh yeah, for those of you who don't check, Sri started updating his livejournal (or as I tend to type it, liverjournal) again. I even subscribed to his RSS feed. But of course, since he never reads this, he'll never know. Mwahahaha.

Countdown: 24 days until December 9

I ate fried chicken last night. I hadn't eaten fried chicken for probably five months. The last time was at Church's Chicken during my second weekend in Austin. Last night, Popeye was over for dinner. And by "over" I mean "over as the main dish". Man, that was some good chicken. For some reason, I had a craving for fried chicken all last week and I finally got around to buying some last night.

My return to the temple of fried chicken has reacquainted my senses (all of them) with the mysterious attraction I have to seasoned poultry drowned in boiling oil. First, my sense of smell crawls out from under my annual blanket of pre-winter congestion and bathes itself in the aroma of the chicken sitting next to me in the car as I take my prize home. Next in line to bask in the glory of fried chicken is my sight. Sure, I'm very nearsighted but even a blurry sight of that golden, flaky skin will illuminate my eyes like the LED fans in those l33t 0v3rcl0ck3r cases. Or like the bulb of a DLP projector when I "accidentally" look into the lens as I walk past it. Or like an xterm when you're trying to scroll to the beginning of a line and visual bell is enabled. Or some other bad analogy. When my eyes have had their fill of the feast on the table, I reach in and grab the tastiest-looking piece of chicken appendage in the box. The rough exterior caresses my fingers like something rough that caresses fingers that's unknown to me because I've never had my fingers caressed by something rough. The slick sensation of grease and chicken juice dancing all over my digits leaves behind a glistening coating of artery-murdering goodness. Finally, the moment I've been waiting for. With months of anticipation stored up, I take a bite into floury fried flesh and let my taste buds swim in the sea of juices my teeth have just freed from avian confinement. The unique blend of herbs, spices, and chicken create a swelling of emotion not unlike the emotion one feels when the latest kernel release finishes compiling. With the skin removed, the bare sensation of the chicken engulfs my palate with a combination of flavors that only chicken can bring. Not one to be left out of a good dinner, my sense of hearing savors the crunching of the crispy skin as my molars grind down the chicken's man-made shell. My ears also add a chicken-eating soundtrack in the background as I eat, but I'm not sure many people can relate to that. When I finish my share of the chicken, I enter a meditative state because for a brief moment here, I came to understand the true meaning of "comfort" in "comfort food".

I would have apologized to Sri for writing about meat, but since Sri doesn't be reading this, I don't need to. Ha. I'll put that apology in my apology bank and let it earn apologetic interest.

There should be some sort of ode to the biscuits which loyally accompany the chicken right about here but I've become too hungry to write about it.

Oh, I almost forgot. Yesterday, I scored the last box of tissues from the supply cabinet at work. Yes, yesterday was a good day.

Countdown: 26 days until December 9

In the past couple of weeks, I've become excitingly dull. I can't think of a single thing that I did on the weekend that didn't involve a computer or multiple computers or vegetating. Here's some more about my boring life.

Emacs week lasted all of 3 days. Last Thursday, I broke down and launched vi again. I can't believe how much more efficient vi is. With emacs, I couldn't finish a single script without getting pissed off and doing something else. I did manage to edit a few makefiles and scripts but that's about it. When I switched to vi, I pounded out 4 or 5 little scripts within a couple of hours. Work just went by so much faster when using vi. I really missed the "repeat" command in vi. It comes in really handy when I'm coding and I want to do the same thing several times in different parts of the file. I can just do what I need to do once (provided it's in one command), navigate over to the next section that needs the same edits, and then press "." to do the exact same thing. Really cool.

My hands feel less tense when using vi also. I think it's because I don't need to use the Ctrl and Alt keys so much. I don't press the CTRL key proerly. Instead of moving one of my weak-ass pinkies over to the key, I mash it with the side of my hand. This means there are a lot of laptop keyboards that I can't use because the Fn key is sometimes in the bottom left corner of the keyboard instead of Ctrl. But not having to do too many key combinations and keep my hands on the letter keys all the time seems to make my hands cramp up less. Not to mention, it lets me work faster.

There you go. another whole post about a stupid editor. Somebody shoot me.

But wait...there's more! Netflix finally decided to send me the first two discs of Firefly. I can't believe I didn't watch it sooner. It's a drama set 500 years in the future. Obviously, people fly around in space ships and there's some sort of civil discourse in space. But this one has a western theme to it. After having been in Austin for a few months, the ol' western twang seems very comforting to me for some reason. I like the way they talk in the show. On top of that, they curse in Mandarin. That's pretty awesome too. The show focuses more on the characters rather than action or aliens. It's sort of like Battlestar Galactica, but much less serious. I can't wait for the next two discs to come so I can finally go watch Serenity. Oh wait, it's not playing anywhere anymore. Bah. Curse you Netflix. Curse you and your Long Waits.

Countdown: 32 days until December 9

I don't get out much. But that's OK because I can use my vivid imagination to take me on wonderful adventures that normal people pay travel agents to book them on. This week's adventure takes place on a desert island. I'm stuck here with some bananas, a giant cotton swab and a laptop that doesn't have vi on it, but has emacs. Scary huh? Oh, I almost forgot, there's a monkey here too. The monkey powers the laptop and tries to bite me from time to time.

The purpose of this desert island fantasy/nightmare is so that I can see what all that fuss about emacs is all about. One of the reasons I like vi so much is because I can move the cursor around without moving my hands from the home row of the keyboard. Using the h, j, k, and l keys, I can move left, down, up, and right respectively. With emacs, it's ctrl-f and ctrl-b to move forwards and backwards one character and ctrl-p and ctrl-n to move up and down lines. Today has been one really annoying buffer filled with jjhhh and :w. I had no idea it would be this hard to adjust to emacs. So far, it's been hard to do work because just about everything I do uses a vi window. The only exception is when I write e-mails because I use pine which lets me use an alternate editor to compose mails. Of course, that alternate editor is vi.

I'll give emacs a week to see if I can not only get used to it but use it as effectively as I use vi. It took maybe a week before I got used to vi but that was after using pico so I didn't have any hard habits to break. So far though, the movement keys are really tripping me up. I use ctrl-w and ctrl-b to move forwards and backwards one word at a time with vi. It's a quick way to get to somewhere in the middle of the line. Sure, emacs has meta-f and meta-b but it's harder to reach for the ESC or the alt key than I thought.

And what the heck is up with those auto-save files that emacs leaves all over the place? Dude, stop cluttering my filesystem you silly editor!

OK, this monkey is driving me crazy.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to start up my old MythTV project again. I gave up last time because my cheap-ass tuner card wasn't really supported by the kernel yet (specifically, the remote wouldn't work) and I couldn't get the machine to wake up with and RTC alarm. It looks like there's a patch to get the remote to work so I'm going to give that a try. I got a new CPU/mobo combo which looks like /proc/acpi/alarm might work. So instead of a Duron 900, I'm using a Sempron 2800+ now. It's a much beefier machine. If this works, I want to see if I can put another tuner in there and encode two channels at the same time. That would be cool.

That's all for now. I need to go train a monkey to eat those stupid auto-save files.

Countdown: 35 days until December 9

I've been reading a lot of blogs where people type, "I've had a lot to say but no time to write it all down." The blogs that don't contain those words imply that the blogger has a lot to write down but nothing to say. Blogging really is the most useful activity on the 'net and will eventually lead to its downfall. Being a good netizen, I'll do my part and dig yet another pothole on the information superhighway.

That was a disgustingly beautiful use of words that I really dislike. Re-reading that made me sick.

I don't remember a time when I've looked forward to a weekend more than this weekend. It's not like I'm going to be doing anything special this weekend and that's the beauty of it. I feel like I've been terribly productive this week (both at work and outside of work) and that's never a good thing. But not having anything to do on the weekend isn't a good thing either. I need some sort of a hobby or something.

Squirrels...how does one get rid of them? They're clever little furballs. They can climb up anything that, well, goes up. They can jump across chasms like Mario when you hold down B and get a running start. On top of that, Oregon Trail teaches us that squirrels are small and fast and not easy to hit with a rifle. They also don't give you much food. These buggers are unstoppable. Oh, what's that? You think they're cute? Dude, take a good look into their evil, black eyes. They're not cute. They're pure evil. I saw a plastic owl at Home Depot that looked like it might be a good way to scare off squirrels. Because the furry little punks might figure out that the plastic owl poses no threat to their evil plans of world domination, I'll need a plan B. Here's where things get tricky. I'll put a motion sensor inside of the owl (it's hollow) to detect an approaching squirrel (or bird, or cat, or buffalo). The motion detector can then set off a number of different "actions." While I'd like for the owl to shoot frickin' lasers out of its eyes at the squirrels, that might be slightly disastrous because it'll probably miss and burn down the house. Owls have pretty bad aim when it comes to photo-emitting firearms. Another idea would be to shoot BBs in its general direction. That would be fun too, but BBs shooting out of an owl's eyes is more disturbing than lasers. Another option I've been entertaining is to play some sort of sound. Since the owl is, well, an owl, I'll make the owl make an owl noise. And if that doesn't work, I'll play an Ashlee Simpson song. That should scare most things away.

My deepest apologies go out to the brave bits that died during the making of this waste of bandwidth. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten...until tomorrow.