How much TV can one man watch? I've been watching an Absolutely Fabulous marathon on and off since noon, despite the fact that I've seen every episode 50 times each. And I'm getting ready to watch a Degrassi:The Next Generation (or whatever it's called) marathon, a show I've just gotten into. (It's a good thing I don't smoke crack.)

Even though I have a satellite dish and can get over a hundred channels, I don't watch that much TV. Recently though, I've found myself watching ridiculous amounts of TV, and I'm not sure why. It's probably my sister's fault; she told me she turns her TV on when she gets home and doesn't turn it off until she goes to bed. Before she came down here I was using my free time to learn the finer points of cascading style sheets, and now I just watch TV. This morning I found myself watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Whenever my sister comes down here we end up watching inordinate amounts of TV. For example: on Christmas Eve the miserable BBC America channel showed three straight hours of Changing Rooms, a show I don't even like. We watched it. Christmas day, the same wretched channel showed ten straight hours of Coupling, a show I like, and we watched it. Yes, ten hours of the same TV show, even though I've seen them all before. It wasn't exactely the most enjoyable way to spend my time.

The day after Christmas my sister left. The Tech TV channel showed a live eighteen hour marathon of Call for Help, and I watched most of it. And since then I've found myself on the couch, remote in hand, flipping through my hundred plus channels, looking for something interesting to watch. Or just something to watch.

I just thought of an idea for a new blog: porn blog. It'd be nothing but learned commentary about porno movies. Unfortunately I don't get to watch new porn anymore so I won't be doing a porn blog. And now that I think of it, this porn blog is a stupid idea anyway. Just forget I even mentioned it. I said forget it!

I've been a little annoyed with myself over the past week for not posting that much. A lot of people have posted a hell of a lot less than I have, so I don't know why I waste time getting annoyed with myself. But then I don't have anything to write about, so it doesn't matter anyway. I haven't done anything over the past several days except watch TV.

Dammit, dammit, dammit! Yesterday I put up a link to my sister's unfinished webpage, then last night she goes and takes just about everything offline. Typical. She hadn't touched it since October 2000, but now wants to revise it.

My sister isn't impressed by blogs. She has a webpage herself that's pretty amusing. Have a look and notice that not only is it not finished, but she hasn't touched it in over two years.

Everything around here has sort of gotten back to normal. The tree and decorations were taken down yesterday. The cards are in the trash. My sister's back in Richmond. And most of the food's been eaten.

I'm so bummed out.

I gave it another go and failed again to install Windows. Linux has this harddrive in it's grip and I can't get Windows to just bulldoze the Linux file system and replace it with a Windows file system. Am I going to have to buy a new harddrive? Honestly, the misery just never ends.

My Windows install didn't go well at all. In the end, after hours of tedium, I just reinstalled Linux--and I didn't even do that right. When, or perhaps I should say if, I get things straight I'll write a longer entry.

What'd I get for Christmas besides software of dubious legality? I got a chair. Yes, a chair. Hopefully the cushion will be a bit more forgiving to my hindquarters while I mindlessly look at junk online.

I also got three shirts, underwear, and money. Thrilling, no?

I've never missed a day on my blog before. How dull.

I'm going to spend the day trying to install Windows 2000. I was going to make my sister install this junk, but she weaseled out of it.

My sister was, naturally, a little disturbed by our revelation of total allegiance to the dark god, Cthulhu, but she soon calmed down. OK, we sedated her; what would you have done? Tomorrow we'll be sucked into a flaming vortex of depravity and murder, after all, it'll be Cthulhumas.

I've noticed most all of the blogs I regularly read have stopped for the holidays. I should be grateful for a few days off from blog reading, but instead I'm oddly annoyed. How dare they put their own families first instead of entertaining me with stories about their wacky lives. Such insolence!

I'm going to be busy for the next two or three or days, so I don't know how much I'm going to be able post things.

My parents are dragging my sister down from Richmond today. Little does she know we've all joined a death cult and we fully expect her to take part in our unspeakable rites.

Joe Strummer died. Crap. The Clash are one of my all time favorites, second only to the Velvet Underground.

I stopped by German Guy's blog to see if he'd finally updated. What I got instead was a message from one "Picasso Pete" informing the world that German Guy had killed himself. Does this mean I can take his link down without guilt? I didn't think whoever was doing German Guy would be able to sustain it very long.

Why would anyone learn the Klingon language? Or Esperanto? At one time I wanted to learn Esperanto, but I quickly lost interest. I'd rather learn a useful language like C++ or something. (Not to imply that I'd ever take the time to do something like learn a programming language.) When I worked at my last miserable job they brought in a lot of Mexican workers, many of whom didn't speak English. I viewed this as an excellent opportunity to finally learn a second language, and do it by conversing in the language with native speakers. This never happened. I bought a good book on learning Spanish, but I could never bring myself to speak one word of Spanish to any of these people. Then it hit me, I don't even like speaking English to people I know, so why did I think I'd suddenly want to start speaking Spanish with people I don't know? Ah, but such is the life of complete misanthrope.

I'm going to climb up on my high horse and rant about things I hate in other people's blogs. The first is huge background images loaded from servers on the other side of the goddamn planet. And it's always the same stuff: anime junk, Lord of the Rings, near lifesize pictures of boring Avril Lavigne (or however the hell it's spelled), etc. The second are the results of those stupid tests. You know, those things that say something like, "You are Hawkeye because you live in a tent, make moonshine, and perform surgery on people," or something equally useless. Some blogs have virtually nothing but these things and these pages take forever to load because each stupid image loads from a different server. The third thing I hate in blogs is no uppercase letters. Fourth is instant messaging shorthand: I'm going to lol!!! when i kill you becuz I h8 this moronic nonsense. And the final thing (unless I think of something else) is emoticons. I don't hate these quite as much as the other things above, but they still annoy me. They are useful though, since no one seems to be able to tell when anyone's kidding anymore. The only emoticon I really like is ( o Y o )

I was going to go on a rant about how I had no life, therefore no inspiration, blah-blah, etc., but then I went to Gretchen's blog and ended up having a nasty flashback. On her blog there's a picture of her dog lying on a bed, and the comforter on the bed is, I think, one made by my old employer, Dan River, Inc. I dealt with innumerable sheet sets in this same pattern for three miserable years and every time I see one of these old sheet set/comforter patterns I get a jolt. Once I was flipping channels (back when I could easily afford premium cable TV), I ran across a softcore porno movie where two people were fake-humping on a set of Dan River sheets. I knew the pattern on those sheets even more intimately than those two naked people on screen knew each other.

What did I do at Dan River? The set up was basically three assembly lines inside a large room in a huge warehouse. I was the link between the assembly line and warehouse. The people on the line would assemble the sheet sets, seal them in shrink wrap, count them, put them into shipping containers, and I, with my pallet-jack, would take these big shipping containers and line them up in the warehouse. I also had to put in new rolls of shrink wrap film, maintain the label machine, etc. Tiresome and boring. We also did runs where I stacked boxes on pallets and then lined them up in the warehouse. I had to memorize a fifteen or more box sizes and know what size sheet set went in what box.

I really hated this job.

Since my CD player was already broken, I decided to take the case off and poke around inside. (This isn't exactely a good idea, so I don't recommend it.) I actually had the thing working with minimal fiddling, but, naturally, when I put the case back on it stopped working again. I'm putting it out for the garbage men on Monday.

I finally got a haircut this morning. That's not interesting at all, is it?

I found myself doing a search on Google for the Cheeky Girls. Yes, it's finally happened: I'm officially insane.

I dug out volumes 20 and 21 from under my bed for inspiration (actually I was looking for something interesting to steal for my blog since I've suddenly taken leave of my senses) and read over entries from the past four Christmases. I found nothing to inspire me; it was all too depressing.

There's a basement window only a few feet away from where I'm sitting now; it's one of those sunken things that's about two-and-half feet below ground and mainly serves as a trap for frogs and toads. This morning while I sat at my computer I heard something big crash down into the window. I got up and looked and there was a humongous squirrel that went berserk when it saw me. It shot up vertically out of the window and disappeared. No doubt it's terrorizing other parts of the neighborhood by now.

Yet another person hit my blog after searching Google for the "worst christmas song". I did a search on this myself to see if anyone else had fingered "Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas)", but I never saw it. Why don't people know the true unspeakable horror of this song? It's mawkish and stomach-turning, just the thing for your holiday misery session. I really need to get the word out about this song, it's far worse than the dogs barking "Jingle Bells" or "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer". Far, far worse, because "Please Daddy" isn't supposed to be funny, it's supposed to be heart warming. God, I hate this song!

I really need to start forcing myself to punctuate my sentences in the accepted American way. Notice how I put my periods and commas outside the quotation marks. That's a big no-no in the US version of Edited Standard English. I have absolutely no idea why I started doing it the British way years and years ago, but I prefer doing that way because it's more logical, and it's become such an ingrained habit I do it automatically. I hate putting the punctuation inside the quotes unless the punctuation was part of the original quote because it doesn't make any sense. It actually irritates me that putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks is the correct way of doing it here. And I know for a fact that it irritates some writers that some people put the punctuation on the outside of the quotation marks. Maybe I should hold a contest and challenge all English majors in the US to give me a logical reason why the US way is the right way and every single English speaking person outside of the US is wrong. The prize in the contest will be my toenail collection.

See what happens when I can't think of anything to write about.

I've reconsidered the Cheeky Girls' "Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum) and have concluded that it's not the worst ever recorded, it's just a marginally amusing bit of fluff. The worst song ever recorded is probably Starship's positively ghastly, "We Built This City". Horrible, horrible stuff.

I've been avoiding this all day; I can't think of one single solitary thing to write about. I thought that when school ended I'd suddenly find myself writing those long, magnificent entries like you see on other people's blogs. Nope. I have all the time in the world, but not a worthwhile thought in my balding head.

I've started backing up (on floppies--yeeecchh) all the stuff I've accumulated on my harddrive over the past several months in preparation for the big wipe. A certain someone is supposed to hook me up with a "new" operating system next week. And if this person doesn't come through, I'm going to reinstall Mandrake because it's on its last legs anyway, then after the holidays I'm going get my grubby hands on a copy of Red Hat 9. Actually, I plan on getting Red Hat 9 anyway because I don't want to abandon Linux completely. Exciting, huh? Go on, admit that it's boring as mold spores and be done with it.

People have been hitting my blog through Google searches today. I had another looking for the worst Christmas song, one looking for Maltese Falcon Christmas cards, and one looking for "trigonometry merry christmas" whatever that is. Morons.

Contrary to popular belief, staring at a blinking cursor for ten minutes doesn't inspire anyone to write anything.

I need to get a new CD player; listening to virtually anykind of music on cheap headphones with a too-short cord plugged into my CD-ROM drive isn't even remotely enjoyable.

I'm really dreading the start of the next semester; I have two classes I know are going to be both miserable and time consuming: accounting and business math. I took accounting this semester, but had to drop it because I'd made it almost mathematically impossible to pass the class by getting a 42 on the first test, despite studying longer and harder than I've studied for anything, ever. It didn't help that the teacher was both scary and inept. Business math? I have no idea what this class is about. I have the mathematical abilities of a diseased baboon, so I don't have the usual trigonometry, geometry, calculus, etc. under my belt. I managed to pass algebra after sweating blood over it and never even attempted to take another math class. After all, novelists don't need math. And blue collar workers with no marketable skills don't need it either, I found out after my "literary abilities" failed me. When my high school classmates were wrestling with the Pythagorean Theorem I was wrestling with James Joyce's Ulysses. So all the failure and misery in my life is James Joyce's fault. Curse you, James Joyce!

I did a spell-check on the above paragraph and found out I'd misspelled mathematical. So not only do I have the mathematical abilities of a diseased baboon, but also the spelling abilities.

Well, school's finally over and I know I should be elated, but I'm oddly bummed out. My mood probably doesn't even have anything to do with school.

One Christmas at my old crappy, low-paying job, a girl I worked with mentioned she was allergic to "real trees". Why she didn't just say she was allergic to trees I'll never know. Apparently she felt she had to be specific about the trees being real so I wouldn't assume she was allergic to fake trees, or perhaps think she was allergic to both real and fake trees. (And, no, this didn't happen at an alcohol-soaked office party. This was just a regular night at a crummy assembly line job.) Well, that's my Christmas story. And ho-ho-ho to you too, ass-face.

While writing the above in Star Office, I learned something: never put in any kind of HTML because Star Office will think you're trying to make a web page instead of just working on a text file and then it'll try and "help" by formatting the entire document as if it were a web page. So I ended up having to open the file with a text editor and delete every HTML tag in sight. Lovely, just lovely.

Ugh, I have a headache that won't go away. Might have to break out what's left of the Vicodin I was prescribed for my abcessed tooth last year.

I have my last exam tomorrow and after that I'm free, I'm free, I'm free! Then on January 8 the grinding misery starts back up again.

I think I may have finally found a blog written by a lunatic. And if he's not a lunatic then he's either just very, very annoying or just very, very persistant in inflicting his strange and deeply pretentious pose on the world.

Someone did a Google search on "worst christmas song" and my blog was listed seventh. I hope the person doing the search appreciated my John Denver rant. More than anything I want my blog to be a public service, because if I can stop just one person from listening to John Denver it'll all be worthwhile. No, that's a lie; I want people to listen to that song and share my horror.

A few minutes ago I was watching Top of the Pops on that embarrassing travesty of a channel known as BBC America, and heard what is, I believe, the stupidest song ever recorded: "Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum)". That godawful tuneless horror is still stuck in my head. Thankfully this slapped together morass will never be a hit in the US because we don't call bottoms bums, we call them butts. To most Americans, bums are hobos or filthy homeless guys. "Cheeky Song (Touch My Hobo)"? Nah, it wouldn't exactly go over well here.

I should've just muted the TV and enjoyed the display of magnificently pert bottoms, but I didn't. Maybe next time I'll learn. I should stop watching Top of the Pops, that's what I should do.

Oh, the agony and the ecstasy. No, wait...there's no ecstasy. Where's my ecstasy?!

I'm not a big fan of holidays, especially Christmas. I love getting out of school or work for a few days, and there's a few other good things about Christmas (i.e. food), but mostly it's just a month long hassle. I particularly hate Christmas music, which brings me to the point of this post: the worst Christmas song in history. There's a lot of rotten holiday music, but nothing compares to the most criminally vile and nauseous Christmas song known to man or beast: "Please, Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas)". This absolutely appalling monstrosity was a big holiday hit on the US country & western charts in the mid to late 70's, I think. In my research the only name I could attach to it from that era was the dreaded John Denver. The loathsome Alan Jackson did a version in the early nineties. (Country singers just don't have any sense of taste or decency, do they?) Thankfully I haven't heard this musical abomination in years, but I live in fear that suddenly one Christmas while sitting down to dinner with my parents it'll suddenly erupt from the radio like projectile vomit. Then I'll have no other choice but to commit seppuku with a carving knife right there. It'll be a Christmas no one will forget.

According to my astronomy calendar, there was supposed to be a partial solar eclipse, a very slight one, right before the sun went down. So I got out my Nikon SLR, my cheapo 70-210mm zoom lens (the longest I own), my cheapo tripod, mylar filter, and my mylar glasses. Then about fifteen minutes before the sun set, I went out and froze off what's left of my ice-ravaged ass to see absolutely nothing. This is why I rarely even take my cameras out of the closet anymore. I took a few shots through the mylar filter, then went back in. It was so cold, if there'd been a total solar eclipse, I wouldn't have cared.

I used to do a lot of astrophotography, but somewhere along the line the novelty of sitting in the dark in a folding chair in the middle of a field in January while taking timed exposures of some damn constellation lost it's appeal.

The last time I really went out did any shooting at night was back in August when we had several days of oddly cool weather. I went out and shot the Milky Way and got eaten alive by mosquitos. West Nile virus was making its way west across the continent and I ended up with a dozen big, oozing mosquito bites on my hands, arms, face, etc. Lovely, just lovely.

There are worse things than mosquitos out there. How many times have I been freaked out by some rustling sound in the woods while I sat there in the dark in a folding chair in the middle of a field? I'd think, It's just deer. Or raccoons. (And the raccoons all have rabies in this area.) Or a skunk. Or an ax-wielding lunatic from the local asylum. Once a few years ago I was in the backyard and heard this noise in the woods that sounded like loud heavy breathing. The odd thing was that whatever was making this sound was several hundred yards away, and it sounded enormous. I thought, Monsters! Then I gathered up my photo gear and headed back into the house. I'm not proud.

Even though we're halfway through exam period, I still have work to print out for my stupid, annoying desktop publishing class. Yesterday the lab was closed, so I couldn't do anything. Today the lab was open and I thought I'd finally gotten lucky. Nope. It's Friday the 13th; there'll be no good luck today. First I realized I'd left one of my floppies at home. (Yes, I still use floppies. Sue me.) Then I jammed the giganto color laser printer with the stupid card stock I bought yesterday. I got the piece of card stock out of the damn printer, but on the LED screen it was still indicating it was jammed. I should have just left it alone since I don't know what the hell I'm doing half the time. So I didn't get to print the two Christmas cards I'd designed. (Don't ask to see them.) I didn't want to just leave the printer jammed and not tell anyone like a coward, so I confessed my sins to the long suffering IT guy, who must be used to (or sick of) idiot students jamming the printers and crashing the computers. He didn't seem too annoyed, in fact he seemed down right chipper. Then I left like a coward.

It's been raining since yesterday, which is sort of good because it's been melting the two or three inches of sleet still on the ground. But it's also bad because here, when it rains a lot, sewer gas backs up into the house. When I got home from school the basement (where I reside) stunk to high heaven. You'd think I'd get used to this because it's been happening for a while. And I should be used to the stench of enormous quantities of dung because I grew up a half mile from a sewage treatment facility. So Merry Christmas to all.

I didn't even realize it, but my blog's just over a month old. How dull.

Last night I actually watched a movie, Dangerous Female, the original 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon. It was quite good. I was surprised at how it was less convoluted than the classic 1941 version, which is almost impossible to follow.

Gripping, no? No.

I did a little more HTML editing at school and I think I'm finally done. I have the email address up, I have the damn links up, I have my stat thingies up, and I have my comments board up; there's nothing else left to screw around with unless I put that stupid BlogHop thing back up or put up that useless PicoSearch thing I signed up for weeks ago and then forgot about. It's all a waste a of time.

I used to spend a lot of time in the public library using the computers because I didn't have an internet connection. (Stop laughing!) The library's near a halfway house of some sort for the homeless, mentally ill, etc., so some of these folks tend to hang out at the library. Once I saw this guy using one of the computers and every few minutes he'd jump up and shake his head like he'd been hit in the face with water, then he'd sit back down and continue whatever he was doing. I was both fascinated and disturbed by his behavior, mainly because I hoped he wouldn't suddenly pull out a big knife and start stabbing people, but also because here was a homeless guy who was obviously out of his mind, and yet he knew how to use the internet. I found this almost inspiring.

God, the public library. I remember when I used to go the public library and check out books, then I'd actually read them. Scary, huh?

It's about time I wrote something other than a few sentences, isn't it? I haven't written a proper entry since Monday night, but that business about the school in Columbia kind of freaked me out a little.

I'm surprised I didn't completely wreck this site by editing the HTML using Mozilla and Galeon. When you edit the code using these otherwise excellent browsers, through some weird glitch, they add and change stuff in your code. Now I may be dangerously paranoid, but I'm not making this up. It's happened to me several times, but never again, because I swear on my enormous collection of porn that I'll never edit my blog's HTML with anything other than that rat bastard browser, Internet Explorer. (Bill Gates, I'll see you in hell!) And until I get a copy of Windows, I'm going to be stuck editing code at school or in the public library like a wino. (Not to imply that the winos in my area specifically edit code of any kind in the public library.)

Remember Sunday when I wrote something about starting another notebook? Well, I haven't touched it since Sunday, which is pretty much how my journal keeping died in the first place.

I managed to stammer my way through my last powerpoint presentation this morning. Glad that nonsense is over with.

I got my first powerpoint presentation out of the way without soiling myself or bursting into flames. Hopefully I can knock the second one out tomorrow morning. (When will this miserable semester end?)

Well, thanks to the fine folks at Haloscan, I got my comments board up and running again.

I have no plans to alter the HTML on my blog ever again using Mozilla, or anything other than Internet Explorer. (Stupid lousy Microsoft dominated world.)

Something deeply bizarre has occurred and I don't know how to process the information. I've been assigned as homework. Yes, you read it right; I'm homework.

Out of sheer boredom a few minutes ago I decided to once again poke through my site stats. Much to my surprise there was an ISP address I'd never seen. I dug further and found out that this new person had hit my blog using a link on an educational site of some sort. I hit the link not expecting to find much, but instead I found that AP English students at a bilingual school in Cali, Columbia had been assigned my blog and a few others to read and compare to whatever highbrow literature they've been reading in class. (I swear I'm not making this up. Go and look before the link's been taken down.) I've always wondered how I stacked up against William Faulkner.

Here's a bit of the course description: "This course will present an in-depth study of great literature from around the world. Writing is also emphasized, and frequent essays, both analytical and personal, will be assigned along with two major research papers. [...] the primary objective of this course is for you to become better critical thinkers, readers and writers."

So it's official, Volume 22 is "great literature from around the world".

I love the internet. I love web sites. I love HTML. Can someone out there please end my misery once and for all?

In my formally functioning comments board, German Guy asked me to link to his blog. Or at least I think that's what he was asking, with German Guy it's difficult to tell sometimes. So I did it, since I do look at his blog everyday. My question is this: Why would anyone want me to link to them? I get like two hits a day from the same two people. (Go look at my site stats, I don't mind, I look at everyone else's.) A link from me is as good as no link at all.

One of my powerpoint presentations was delayed yet again because of an audio-visual snafu: the classroom had the projector but no computer to hook up to it. Lovely, just lovely. The Fates don't want us doing powerpoint. Maybe I'll be able to get one the presentations out of the way tomorrow morning unless the building is overrun by pigeons or something.

Oh, God, I'm going to have debase myself on the Haloscan message board to get technical help.

Hmmm...now my comments thingy has stopped working (not that it matters since no one used it anyway). All I did was add German Guy to my links list. I didn't touch anything else, I swear.

Foiled again. Curse you, German Guy!

For once I'm going to reach out to my readers (both of them) and ask their help in solving a mystery that's been irritating the heck out of me. But first, a little backstory. My favorite thing about the internet is that no matter how trivial, obscure, or stupid your interests are you can almost always find the information you need. For instance, I remembered liking a stupid Saturday morning TV show called The Kids from C.A.P.E.R., so I did a search on Google and found several sites devoted to this show that literally no one has seen since 1978. So I was confident I'd find information on a show my sister and used to watch in the early to mid 70's called, I think, Ready Set Go. But I can't find anything on it anywhere, and my ever helpful sister won't answer my emails.

I'm not sure about the title. Was it Ready Set Go or 1-2-3 Go or Get Set Go or what? Here's what I remember about it: it was on PBS in the mornings and afternoons, it dealt with teaching kids physical fitness, it was black and white, and it was hosted by a British woman. It was probably made in the mid-60's. I don't know if it was an old BBC show or a US show hosted by a British woman.

I haven't been able to find it in any TV reference I've looked at online. I've even searched through UK television databases like TV Cream and TV Ark, but I haven't had any luck.

I don't know why I want to know the name of this program because my sister and I hated it (but yet we watched it often, I seem to recall). If I don't find some information on this stupid, inconsequential TV show I'll go insane. And insanity's simply not an option during the holidays. Surely, someone somewhere has seen this show. (I also submitted this query to Jump the Shark, but I doubt it's interesting enough for them to bother with.)

I'd planned on writing a much longer entry tonight, and for once write something amusing instead of something stupid or boring, but I can't think of a thing to write. Big surprise, huh?

I actually left the property today and went out to buy supplies. The roads are clear of snow and ice, but we still have a serious moron problem that needs to be addressed by someone. I don't know what's more dangerous on the streets, ice or morons.

I'm really getting sick of the excruciating nonsense I have to go through to publish something in my blog. I had to use three different browsers to get the below entry in my blog. First I pasted it into Opera, next I attempted (and failed) to publish it with Galeon, then finally I published the stupid drivel with Mozilla. Please kill me. Or buy me a copy of Windows.

My twelve year old CD player finally died, and right in the middle of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. Now what? I tried playing it in my computer, but those cheap plastic speakers sound worse than a two-dollar transistor radio. Looks like I'm going to be stuck with vinyl and (shudder) cassettes. At least I have some good stuff on cassette like Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power and a couple of Flamin' Groovies albums. I guess I'll live. But I have no Wire, no Television, no PJ Harvey, no Radiohead, no Undertones, no Yardbirds, no Beach Boys, no Richard Hell and the Voidoids, no Nick Drake, no Richard and Linda Thompson.... Maybe I won't live afterall. Oh, God, I ain't gonna make it! Hmmm...maybe in a way this is a good thing. Now that I think about it, I have a damn fine record collection that I never play because I'm always playing CD's, so I should take advantage of this situation and dig into my dusty vinyl. Oh, who am I kidding? This sucks.

School's canceled today, too; this is going to screw up everything.

I did something odd a little while ago, I started a journal in a notebook, something I swore off months ago. Volume 22 isn't a journal or a diary, I don't know what it is. I need a record of my day to day life and this blog ain't it.

I'm snowed in. School's canceled today. I'd really wanted to get that stupid powerpoint thing out of the way, but now I'm going to have to wait until Tuesday at least. I have no idea if school's going to be canceled tomorrow or not. The snow and sleet don't appear to be melting much at all. Ordinarily I'd be thrilled to miss a day or two of school, but I have desktop publishing homework I really need to do. And did I mention that it's freezing down here? At least the power hasn't been knocked out.

Managed to drive home from school in the snow without flipping the car over.

Tomorrow I have do the first of my two powerpoint presentations. I hate powerpoint. Who invented this annoying program? Powerpoint is nothing but a glorified filmstrip projector. I just hope that during the presentation I don't have a panic attack and/or piss in my pants.

Do any of you ever do a Google search on your own name? I have a fairly common surname so there must thousands of people walking around with my name. Once I spent a strange afternoon at Google going through pages and pages of garbage that listed people with my name. Not one of the people listed was me. I typed in my sister's name and not only was she the first person listed with that name, she was the only person listed with that name. So I guess my parents exhausted what little creativity they possessed on finding a name for her. By the time I showed up they were exhausted. ("Why don't we name it 'Scott'?" "Uhh...whatever.") But it could've been worse. What if my parents had been hippies who did a lot of acid back in the late 60's and named me Rainbow Numbnuts or something even stupider?

It's supposed to snow (or something nasty) tomorrow. This sort of thing stops being fun once you graduate from high school and have to do grown-up stuff like drive yourself to school or work. One great thing about this area is how it can't handle snow; in other parts of the US it'll snow six feet deep and everyone goes about their business, but down here in Hick Town, if it snows an inch there're cars literally upside-down in the middle of the street. We rednecks simply can't tolerate that much snow. The average winter temperature down here is in the forties.

Can anyone explain to me why the female nipple is supposed to be so obscene it can't be shown on American network television, but yet the male nipple is completely inoffensive? This whole nipple double-standard makes no sense to me; either both female and male nipples are obscene or both aren't obscene. (I vote for the latter.) I defy anyone to give me a non-religious based defense for this ridiculous nipple double-standard. Free all nipples, I say! (Sorry, this is about as controversial as I can get. Mainly I just want to see naked women on regular television; is that too much to ask?)

I'll be glad when this week's over. I signed up for classes, but I still have those two miserable powerpoint presentations to do. I'd rather get up in front of class and disrobe than do powerpoint.

Well, as you can plainly see, I've sort of gotten some of my blog/HTML problems solved. I gave up on doing it at home since copying and pasting in a bad version of Linux can at times be like using a slot machine (or an atom-smasher), so it's easier (for a mouth-breathing pinhead like me) to do this sort of thing in Windows (although Notepad is a shitty excuse for a text editor). My goal is (was?) to get my code modified to the point where I had everything the way I wanted it, then I could just forget about it and post away. Right now I just want the damn page to work properly; I don't care what it looks like anymore.

I feel like a competitor in the Special Olympics for Webmasters.

I deleted the remnants of the Blogspot thing. Maybe I'll put it back one day, but I don't know just how much further I can push my luck.

Just as my writing gets duller and dumber, my site traffic starts to increase. It will never cease to amaze me that anyone in their right mind would want to read any of my drivel.

Tired of this blog? God, I know I am. Well, why not have a look at a good blog for a change? Or try this one.

Well, the Extreme tracker thing works just fine, but I still don't know how most of the Blogspot code just disappeared. Eventually what will happen is I'll screw things up so badly that when one of my regulars (either one of them) hits my page it'll be blank.

Looking at my page I see that somehow I managed to screw up the Blogspot rating thing, not that anyone ever used it (or anyone elses). The code to the Extreme tracker also doesn't look right, but I haven't tried it out yet. How did I manage to mess this stuff up? I wasn't even changing anything in this part of my blog. God, I'm a moron.

I'm such a complete idiot. I tried install a comments board (Haloscan) and, naturally, completely botched it. At one point I had the comments link appearing at the end of each entry, but it wasn't a link, it was just blue text reading Comments (0). Kill me now. Please. Why does every little piss-ant thing on earth have to be absolute sreaming agony?

I've noticed the occasional baseball bat on British TV shows; are they that common in the UK? I saw two of them on EastEnders yesterday. Aren't cricket bats just as effective and more plentiful? (And if the Queen Vic were in the US, at the first sign of trouble, Peggy Mitchell would come around the bar with a sawed-off shotgun.)

I've noticed that the best blogs seem to be written by either women or gay men. Speaking as a straight male, I'm jealous. Maybe us straight males are too busy grunting, scratching, and wanking to bother writing anything of worth.

I'm the most boring person on the face of the earth.

People who do blogs with dark blue letters on a black background should be fined. Why are there so many blogs with ugly, virtually unreadable layouts?

Last night I fiddled around with the links list and I figured out what was wrong with my sloppy HTML. So I'll probably put both the email address and the links list in the sidebar tomorrow at school since it's easier doing this sort of thing with IE than with Mozilla.

Exciting, no? No.

My vacation's all but over and now the horror I've been dreading since late August is upon me. In the next ten days I have to get up in front of two classes and do powerpoint presentations. I also have to talk to my advisor and get signed up for next semester's classes. I'd rather eat dirt than do any of this stuff.