I'm sure by now everyone with a Blogger account has noticed the new text ads that have recently replaced the banner ads that previously appeared at the top of our blogs (or rather appeared at the top of the blogs of us too cheap to upgrade). The content of these ads is determined by the content of the blog it appears on. Presumably this system works by way of an algorithm like the one that powers the text ads that appear down the right side of the page at Google. Here's where things get odd. The ads that appear at Google are determined by the specific search request. So my question is, if someone hits my blog by searching Google for erotic grannies or "Communist Porn" (which has happened recently), because my blog contains words like "erotic", "grannies", "communist", "porn", etc., is my blog going to end up with the same kind of porno text ads that you'd see at Google if you searched for erotic grannies or "Communist Porn"?

Mr. Rogers has died. When I was little I loved Mr.Rogers' Neighborhood, but my parents absolutely hated the show because they thought Mr. Rogers was "too prissy".

For one brief shining moment my comments actually worked. And now they're down again. [Sounds of uncontrolled sobbing.]

We've been getting lots of freezing rain. I hope the power doesn't get knocked off. I remember the power being off for several days during a few winter storms when I was little. My mother would actually cook on our wood stove. Yeah, I know it sounds quaint, but it sucked not being able to flush the toilet or take a shower.

We're snowed in again. It started pouring down sleet a little after two and night classes were canceled. No accounting class! And next week's spring break.

Hmmm....my comments are gone again; I could have sworn I saw them a couple of hours ago. Haloscan should lay off the trained chimps they have running their servers and hire some actual people. Or maybe lay off the actual people and hire some trained chimps. Either way, changes need to be made.

Here's a repost of the stuff I accidently deleted during Monday's extended disaster:

OK, I admit it, I can't think of a damn thing to write about. I've been putting this off all day. No, actually I've been putting it off since yesterday because I couldn't think of anything to write about then either. All I had to offer were a couple of depraved links. Unfortunately for this entry I'm falling back on links again, but these aren't quite so depraved. I found them by desperately typing in random words at Google. Sad, I know, but oddly enjoyable.

This is what my blog should've been.

This is the one and only (Or at least I hope) Poop Thesaurus.

This is Japanese. I think it's a videogame. Or something. I don't know.

This and this are sites done some kinda artist. I'm going to dig deeper into these myself when I have time. Or maybe I won't. Sue me.

I was going to drop Haloscan for YACCS, but I found out YACCS isn't accepting any new people. Bastards! One comment hosting outfit that looks promising is Squawkbox. And there's that other one, Eneration, Enetatation, Enterology... Or something like that.

It's official: Haloscan must be destroyed, or at least consigned to the landfill of forgotten online services. I know I shouldn't complain about free services, but these humans are bringing unreliability to untold new heights.

This morning, to cheer myself up, I bought a lava lamp for $10 at a discount store. It's a little slow warming up, but when it finally gets to optimal temperature it's hypnotic. And gloriously pointless. So I encourage each and every person reading this (which these days, according to Sitemeter, is about two people) to go out and buy a lava lamp. Do it for your mental health. Do it because it's enjoyable watching globs of unidentifyable crap undulate in a glass container.

OK, repairing my screw-ups was easy enough using Internet Explorer, but I still need a better reason to stick with Blogger.

Can someone give me a good reason why I should stick with Blogger? I can't think of a reason. I've been playing around with Diaryland and Blog Studio blogs over the past week or two and I'm really considering moving. Blogger's interface is so dependant on Internet Explorer that it's virtually unusable if you aren't running that particular browser.

And can someone remind me why blogging was supposed to be enjoyable? I seem to recall enjoying once before...

This really sucks. I have half a goddamn post on my blog and now I can't get rid of it. Safe mode doesn't work. Nothing works. And then I accidently deleted yesterday's post trying to get rid of this stupid, messed up post. All this because I accidently left out closing quotation marks in a link. The rest of the larger paragraph is gone and none of the following paragraph showed up. It's all combined in one nonfunctioning link. Fuck!

I really messed up things. I posted something with some slightly messed up html and now I have this post I can't edit or delete.

Woo-hoo! I've got my site's daily traffic down to the low single digits! If I keep this up it'll be in negative numbers, if that's even possible.

Has anyone ever had their blog made into a movie? I hope not.

Are there any blogs in weird, obscure, almost extinct languages like [insert the name of a weird, obscure, almost extinct language only known to linguists whose job it is to know about such things]?

Ever notice how people who use one blogging service tend to mostly read and link to other blogs who use that same service? Look at my links; out of 22, half of them are Blogger sites, there's one Diaryland site, and I think the rest are independents who don't use services. And if you go over to a blog hosted by one of the other blogging/journaling/whatever sites like Live Journal, Diaryland, Interactive X, Blog Studio, etc., etc., etc. you'll find that most of the links on them are other blogs hosted by that service. It's like it's a rule: If you have a Blog Donkey blog, you may only link to other Blog Donkey blogs because you're now part of the Blog Donkey blogging community and we want to keep out the riff-raff. But there are no rules as far as I know, besides the kind of stuff Live Journal has with friends lists (which isn't really the same thing--I don't think).

So why do we cluster with our own kind? My guess is that it's mostly laziness and maybe an unwillingness to seek out something new in unfamiliar areas. (It also may have something to do with the fact that some of these blogging services host sites that seem to be ignored by Google. And if the site's invisible to Google it might as well not even exist.) Since I use Blogger, I have to go to Blogger's home page whenever I want to post stuff in my blog. At Blogger's home page they have a list of recently updated blogs, so if I look at new blog, just out of convinience, more than likely it'll be hosted by Blogger. (If this isn't making any sense you can blame it on the fact that I'm all cranked up and bouncing off the walls on caffeine. God help anyone who wants to talk to me on the phone anytime soon.) And when I go to these new Blogger blogs, more than likely they'll be linking to mostly other Blogger blogs also. It's self perpetuating. We build our own ghettos and don't even notice.

Last month, I think, I jokingly made a comment about starting a porn blog. Well, this morning, I found a real one. The first link I hit was this abomination (and this link isn't safe for work--or anywhere else). I hope it's a joke. Really, I do. And be sure to check out the FAQ for the helpful illustrations.

In the eighth grade I knew this guy who'd just moved down here to Virginia from someplace like Wisconsin. In class one day he told a story about a grocery store in his home state that suddenly became very popular because they started selling beef a lot cheaper than their competitors. Everyone was buying this cheap meat. After an investigation, it turned out that the stuff wasn't beef at all (surprise!), but was instead illegally imported kangaroo meat. I have no idea if the story's true or not.

Earlier this morning I stopped at a railroad crossing, the barrier things were coming down because a train was on the way. A guy strolled across the tracks and said to me, "Come on. Go. The train's way down there." He pointed down the tracks to an area I couldn't see because of the trees. I waived him off. I probably could've slipped through with no problem, but I don't usually take risks like that when I'm not enraged. But then again, considering how I feel, I should've just parked my car on the tracks and let the train knock me into the next county.

I botched my accounting test last night. At one point I seriously thought I was going to have to leave the room and throw up. There's a possibility that I might squeak by with a D. I've already dropped this class once before, which means that I can't take it again if I screw it up this time. And if I can't take it again I might as well find another major because two semesters of accounting are required for my useless degree.

I have an accounting test tonight I need to be cramming for instead of wasting prescious time doing my usual slack-jawed cyber-wank. My PC at this point is basically just a substitute TV. I just sit in front of it and look at web pages. Sure, I could say I'm doing research, but I'm not. Nope. I'm just goofing off.

A little while ago I blundered across the fairly amusing BigBlueBlog, and while reading it, I found this link. It's mildly naughty, but I suppose it's safe for work. Maybe. I don't know anything about your workplace. OK, don't look at it. I don't want hear about you getting fired; I don't need that on my conscience.

No school today. We just can't handle snow and ice down here. Up in New York it's not unusual to have twelve feet of snow on the ground. They just dig a network of tunnels through it and go about their business like the inhabitants of a giant ant farm until the spring thaw. But down here if we see a few flakes we mob the grocery stores for provisions and have huge pile-ups on the ever so slightly damp highways.

Blogger's really starting to piss me off. I've had a heck of a time today getting my own and other Blogger pages to load, then I found out that I'm missing a month's worth of archives. I think they're still there, they just aren't linked to. I'm going to suggest they rename this webloging service Clogger.

Things are really frozen outside. The temperature's not going up at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if school's canceled again tomorrow. Wouldn't that be just tragic? I'm devistated at the very idea. Oh please, please let there be a sudden anomalous heat wave to melt all this ice so I can go to school! (Note sarcasm.)

I don't usually leave personal messages to people here, but I need to right now. Hilary, I tried twice to leave comments at your blog but they disappeared leaving only my name, email address, etc., so I emailed the answer to your question. If you didn't get the email then you should probably tell me via email because, as you've probably seen, my comments haven't been working either. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

We had freezing rain last night and fine sleet all day long. School's closed yet again. I'm really broken up about this because I so wanted to be forced out of my nice warm bed at an unnatural hour by an alarm-clock so I can go to a class I hate.

I just read over at Diamond Geezer that Google has bought Blogger. In a longer article I found some info I find even more interesting than the buyout: there's an estimated 1.1 million registered Blogger users, but only an estimated 200,000 active Blogger sites. 200,000 is a far more manageable number than 1.1 million. Sometimes the sheer number of weblogs almost gives me a nosebleed.

In my opinion the best thing to come of this buyout is that the all the Blogger sites (like this one!) will be moved over to Google's servers. Google's servers are exceptionally robust, Blogger's servers run Microsoft garbage and are periodically down. This move will be a big plus. Now if Google would just buy Haloscan and Sitemeter maybe we would actually have a combination that worked.

Man, the Haloscan comments have been down since yesterday. I wonder what the problem is, not that it matters.

I dreamed I was traveling through Italy. My unconscious mind even provided a girl for me to travel with. And then I woke up. Boy was I pissed.

I've complained about how cold my "office" is before, but the problem can mostly be solved by wrapping a blanket around myself when I'm at the computer. It doesn't keep my mouse hand warm though. So this morning, in a flash of inspiration, I came up with the idea of a heated mouse pad. Brilliant! Then I checked Google. Of course someone else came up with the idea first.

The entry below was inspired by an entry at By a Woman. I should've mentioned this last night, but, swept up by the muse, it slipped my addled mind. I'm such a dumbass.

All this talk about hoarding duct tape, plastic sheets, and provisions for three weeks or more in case of terrorist chemical gas attack reminds me of something I saw when I worked as a temp at the school for snooty rich girls. I was one two or three other guys they had doing odd jobs, moving furnature, etc. Anyway, we had to go down to a storage room to get something and this storage room was in fact a cold war era bomb shelter. I'm just over six feet tall and I couldn't stand up straight in there because the ceiling was too low. Imagine being trapped in there during a nuclear strike and having to walk around with bent knees the whole time. Of course being trapped in a fallout shelter during WWIII with a load of teenage girls, I imagine standing up would be the least of my worries, but I digress... Now, onward to the point of this interminable story. The shelter had a couple of big hand-cranked air blowers to bring in air from the outside. Remarkably, they still worked. I asked one of the other guys (the smart one who'd actually dropped out of a four year college instead of community college like me), "If everything outside of the shelter was radioactive then wouldn't the air they pumped in also be radioactive?" He just said, "Uh...yeah."

After a dreary day away from my PC, I thought it'd be a good idea to mess around online for awhile. It probably would've been about as good an idea as stripping naked, smearing myself with meat, and jumping into a pit filled with starving wolverines. When a web page simply won't load I get frustrated: when virtually no web pages load I get homicidal. So much for a relaxing session in front of my PC. Sorry, I gotta go and start my axe-murder spree.

Ever since I did all that research on celery-flavored soft drinks on Monday I've had the almost overwhelming desire to drink a carbonated soft drink from a glass bottle. When's the last time I did that? These days everything's in plastic bottles, but there has to be something carbonated in glass bottles that's available in my area. (And please don't tell me to dig an old glass Coke bottle out of a trash pile from behind someone's house, clean it out, and fill it with Coke from a plastic bottle. I've already considered and rejected that option.)

When I was little back in the 70's virtually all the vending machines in my area sold soft drinks in bottles. And how many times did one of my parents tell my sister and I to hurry up and finish our drinks so they wouldn't have to pay the 5¢ deposit for the bottle? That part wasn't any fun. So we'd stand there outside of the gas station forcing down Pepsi or that vile orange Ne-Hi (or however it's spelled). (Mindless nostalgia is a sign of old age.)

I have to buckle down on the accounting, but as I try to read this week's material I can feel my brain actually trying to self-destruct. How can anyone ever study this garbage enough to actually become an accountant? And why am I required to take two semesters of this whale dreck when I have about as much interest in becoming an accountant as I do in becomming a rent boy?

Read the paragraphs below before reading this or hitting the links, otherwise you'll spoil the effect. (And if there's one thing I can't stand it's an effect-spoiling bastard!) Here's a link that explains everything in fascinating detail. This link hits a little too close to home, but it's relevant if you read the bit about the Pepsi Building.

One thing I've never done here is subject you folks to one of my stupid dreams, but there's a first time for everyting. I dreamt I had a 2 liter bottle of thyme-flavored Sprite. It was something made for the holidays; the label had a candy cane on it. The stuff was dark like Coke except it was green. Fortunately, or unfornately, I woke up before I got to taste the vile looking stuff.

The thyme-flavored Sprite reminds me of a bizarre soft drink that actually existed back in the 20's-40's called Celery Cola. Yeah, it had celery in it. I can't even imagine what it tasted like. Occasionally we dig the bottles up around here; they have a pseudo-Coke swirling script down the side. I don't know if was a nationally known soft drink or just a strange Virginia/North Carolina thing.

Yesterday while poking around here, I ran across a link to a fascinating article about web traffic and "power law distributions". Fascinating stuff.

I've been getting spam in my Hotmail account and the return address is my Yahoo account. So, in effect I'm spamming myself--except I'm not; my Yahoo address has been hijacked. And as far as I know there's no way to stop this. At least I haven't had my inbox at Yahoo crammed with requests to stop spamming people.

In accounting you have a debit side and a credit side and the numbers in each column must balance or the whole thing's wrong. Going through each account, painstakingly entering each figure, making sure every adjustment is correct, double checking your sums, and then finally adding each column to reveal a perfect trial balance is truly grand. Or so I imagine. Every time I do it I end up with something like an unexplained $35,000 discrepancy. So I nitpick, I agonize, I rant, I rave, I threaten, I weep, I rip out what little hair I have left on top of my head, I beg, I plead, I curse the gods until I finally find whatever mind numbingly stupid mistake I made that screwed up everything in the first place. I fucking hate accounting! I'd rather be sodomized by a tree sloth than spend one more second adding up columns of figures.

I'm old. Really, really old. Ancient even. This numbing fact was hammered home last night while listening to some records. (You know, vinyl.) I still haven't bought a new CD player to replace the one that died before Christmas, so I've been listening to creaky old vinyl and cassettes I bought back in the 80's. I've been playing Hüsker Dü's New Day Rising way too much lately, so I dug out the first Clash album and the first and third Velvet Underground albums. It was that damn first Velvet Underground album that got me. I looked at the worn, moldy sleeve (and for you younger readers, the sleeve is that square cardboard thing the big flat round thing goes into) and realized that this reissue that I bought in 1985 was as old now as the original 1967 album would've been in 1985. Ugh. And I'm not even going to mull over the Devo album I bought back in 1979.

I took a break from my accounting homework and checked my site stats. (What else am I going to do?) I found that apparently someone from Australia had hit my site from a link on somekinda Libertarian online magazine. I went and had a look. I looked some more. I kept on looking, but I'll be goddamned if I can find any link to my site. Anyone got any ideas? And why would any political site link to my inanity?

Here's a link to some strange movie reviews that focus on how accurate the typefaces in recent historical films are. Really.

Everything's covered in ice, so school's been cancelled yet again. Yippee. Now I have the whole day free to do my accounting homework. Ugh. I welcome death.

Last night in accounting class I slipped my mechanical pencil into my shirt pocket and promptly stabbed myself in the left nipple. I tried not to yelp.

And since this is the second time this week I've mentioned my nipples, I'm going to try and refrain from mentioning them again until at least next Monday.

It's supposed to snow yet again tomorrow. Isn't it odd that every single week it snows on Thursday and/or Friday? Naturally I welcome the snow and yet another four day week. I don't have any pressing work that requires me to go to the computer lab, so bring on the torrent. All I want to do is screw around online and eat M&M's.

Existence is so overrated.

I should be doing my accounting homework right now, but I'd rather make out with a chimp than do accounting. I should also be practicing my keyboarding since I can't type without looking at the keys (despite the fact that I've been typing since the mid 80's), but I'd rather have the chimp rip my arms off and beat me to death with them than spend anymore time at a keyboard.

I need to find some kind of way to relieve stress that doesn't involve smashing everything in sight to rubble. I don't know where my destructive urges come from, but I've had them my whole life. Maybe the doctor dropped me on my head at birth because I was so damn slippery. All I know is that for the past week or two the urge to smash things has me more than a little preoccupied. In the computer lab I want to hurl the monitor across the room after I make a typo. On the street I want the other drivers to go hurtling over cliffs that aren't even a feature of this area's topography. What can I say? My caveman urges are taking over. AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!

Today a teacher at school, who's been touchie-feelie with me, touched my right nipple. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe I'm just irresistable. Hell, once he practically had me backed into a corner of his office. My question is this: why does this sort of thing always happen to me? And if it has to happen to me, why can't the teacher be, you know, female? The really funny part is that he's not even one of my teachers.

I really, really, really didn't want to spent the better (and I use that word lightly) part of a Sunday afternoon reinstalling Linux. And I really, really, really, really didn't want to have to end up re-reinstalling Linux because I'd fucked up something.

I hate my life.

Auto racing is evil. Evil! This morning it occurred to me that the Rolex 24 from Daytona was probably on, so I flipped over to the Speed Channel (how convenient). Now I'm hooked. I just wanted a taste. I thought I could handle it. It's just a bunch of guys driving around and around and around, but yet I have to watch it. Why? It's stupid. It's probably good that I was watching the news all day yesterday because if I'd known a 24 hour enduro was on I would've watched it all day and most of the night. Evil!

I went to the thrift store this morning like I do most Saturday mornings. They had a TV on and I saw the news report of the space shuttle burning up on re-entry. Naturally I left to go home and watch the news, but it struck me as odd that I'd find out this way since I'd both been watching TV and been online prior to leaving the house and saw no mention of it. I found out about JFK Jr.'s plane crash in the same store in the same way. And I found out about the Sept. 11 attacks by seeing CNN coverage on dozens of TV's in the electronics section of a department store.