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Bright but overcast. What a combination. It's like someone lit up the entire sky with flourescent lighting. Kinda sucky. I've been fixing up the counter script again.. It's been bothring me a bit, but I'm cleaning it up. Still got some work to do with it but things seem to be progressing well..
Hey, Sciborg is down. I guess I can't check out any .plans this afternoon.. Oh yeah, Sciborg is back up but it's kinda FUBARed. Hrumph, it's back up again. Hopefully it'll stay that way long enough for me to finish checking for spelling errors..
Went skating this afternoon. I actually woke up late this morning (since I ended up playing Delta Force a bit last night). I got out of bed around eleven.. (which was when the rec skate period started) but somehow managed to make it to school sometime past noon. Okay, I only got to skate for about half an hour or so, but at least I didn't completely miss out! The rink was a little less busy than I had anticipated, but it's a Saturday. Not too many people go skating on Saturdays. (Sundays on the other hand..) Oh well, I got a few laps in at least. I was telling Jax that I really should go skate more because I need the exercise. I think that Jax thinks that I'm overdoing it but I disagree. *tugs at flab around waist*
What the.. Sciborg is down again. Is there a monkey running the computer or something?
Oh yes, I might as well talk about my meal last night. I was planning on making shrimp Alfredo for dinner, and actually, things went fairly well. I was a little short of parmesan, but I could always get some more today. The ingredeants looked fine, the shrimp was cooked, the cream hadn't curdled, and the cheese wasn't green. What surprised me was when I opened up the (new) bag of fetuchine. I looked in and found some dark brown things the size of rice. Actually, they looked like skin shed off of some maggots or larvae that was living in there before. In fact, that's probably what they were. I felt a lot less hungry after that. A new bag too! How the heck did they get in there?!? I broke open a bag of linguine instead.
What is up with my luck with food recently? It's as if all those times I used food that I left in the fridge/pantry/floor too long (and was still good) had started to catch up with me. *shiver* Oh yeah, I threw away the fetuchine.
Since I didn't make enough food (linguine is much smaller than fetuchine) I decided to complement my meal with some ice cream that I had left over from last year. Early last year. I probably should've eaten it earlier since our freezer isn't particularly well insulated and I had left my tub of Chapman's Premium Double Dutch Chocolate (*drool*) ice cream in the warmth too long. It was mostly empty, so you could see at the bottom of the bucket a nice translucent brown stuff that was.. I wasn't sure what it was. I scraped out what I thought was what was left of the good ice cream and flushed the rest out with hot water. And that, as they say, is that.
You would have thought that I would've learned my lesson from last night and last week when I decided to make french toast this morning. *takes breath* Well, I took out the eggs and examined them. They looked fine. Checked out the bread. Seemed okay. Butter? Now how often does butter go bad? Syrup? Seemed sweet to me. Things looked alright so I went ahead. After making the food, I took my first cautious bite. Well, it seemed okay.. I took another bite. Alright, I think the food was fine. I was able to finish my breakfast without losing any of it, which is a good sign. We'll see if I swallowed anything bad.
Gee, I guess the link I had up yesterday was wrong. The place MJO wants to go to is not Freedom Communications (which *checks message* was the link he originally sent me), but in fact just plain old Freedom (which looks quite cool actually).
Ironically, with the fuel crisis going on right now, there was a show on last night about the rise of the automobile. It went on to talk about how the big three automakers were into really large gas guzzling behemoths when the energy crisis hit in the early seventies. It wasn't long after that when everyone started driving smaller and more efficient cars. Now here we are at the end of the millennium, where everybody who has a family is driving a mini, and everone else wants to drive a humvee. Bigger is better as they say (except me, I like small cars - small but not claustrophobic inducing that is). Here we are in another fuel shortage, people are still driving, but there was at least one report of someone filling up and just driving off. People just don't learn do they? Why does history repeat itself?
There were quite a number of interesting points that the show looked at. The one that caught my attention was how the American society has made owning a vehicle a de facto standard for the middle class. If you don't own a car in America, you're a second class citizen. One of the guys who was interviewed mentioned that because of the way we think, there are these imaginary signs on the doors of buses and other mass transit vehicles:
"Losers enter here."
What do you think? I'm inclined to agree but mind you, once I get my own car, I probably won't use public transit unless I had to. Having your own automobile is so convenient. I found one more thing I wanted to mention. One of the "pro-car" supporters (who I think was a VP of one of the big three) raised the point that if the government really wanted to push people towards public transit, then they'd just raise taxes on fuel. Personally I don't think that would work, since I doubt that he would suddenly switch to public transit if gas prices were raised, he'd bitch and moan that taxes are too high and that Americans should have a right to drive as much and as far as they want and that any government that would want to stay in power would reduce fuel prices. Although I don't have any basis behind this argument, look around you right now. Prices are high but people are still driving. This is probably because they perceive this as just a short blip, and that prices will fall eventually. (Just like during the 1970s energy crisis.) What we need is a large and sustained hike in gas prices to ever get people to switch out of their cars and onto the busses. Or even better yet, onto bikes and into sneakers (which would help seeing as we are the fattest people in the world). Unfortunately, I don't think our society is ready for that yet. The American dream, the notion of owning a car, a house, and having 2.4 kids is still firmly ingrained into our ideals that, well, people like me will stay in the minority for a long time to come (and I'm only in the minority because I don't have the money to pay for a car).
Gah. Then again, I could be completely wrong. What do you guys think? Automobiles, good or bad? Will this fuel crisis last? Will it be good or bad?
I've done a bit of work with the search engine, but right now it's very insecure. It should be able to search for non-alphanumeric characters so have fun with it. I'm currently looking for a way for it to pass non-alphanumerics to the journal entry calendar routine, but it doesn't seem to like what I'm doing so I turned off the highlighting. I also have to order the search results chronologically, so that's gonna take me a while to figure out as well.. *sigh*
Hrumph. The clouds disappeared while I wasn't looking. It's quite a nice day out there now. I think the fields are drying out pretty well, so it may be possible to throw the disc around next week. *crosses fingers* Here's for hoping..
Hmm.. Sciborg came back up for air before going back down again. I guess I won't be doing any checks on Jax or KGL then..
What the.. I think I screwed up my counter script for a little while there. Man, I should stop fiddling. If it ain't broke..
Hmm.. where did those clouds come from? Pretty funky weather we've been getting recently..
One thing I forgot to mention this afternoon. I installed new video drivers onto my computer. Was that ever a chore. I spent over an hour trying to figure out why the new drivers just didn't work. I'm not even sure if they're installed properly (yes, I did uninstall the old drivers before putting on the new ones). The computer seems to be working fine now, but I probably should just have a fresh install sometime soon because the whole darn thing is getting awfully flakey.
Went home and realized that I didn't have enough stuff to make myself any beef stew. Instead, I went and reheated my shrimp Alfredo. Probably because of the inordinate amount of cheese I add to my Alfredo, whenever I refrigerate it, it usually comes out very solid. This time, it was awfully gooey, and sure as heck didn't look very appetizing. It didn't help that I noticed that one of the shrimp had a black spot on it. On closer inspection, the black spot was made up of a lot of little round black pebble sized things. I had no idea what it was and I sure as hell wasn't going to eat it *throws into garbage*.
Tonight is the first night of broomball after our month long break for the sport of kings.. or so I thought. I nearly was late for the game from watching too much of the Pretender and the Leafs/Habs game. I quickly rushed to pick up my stuff from the office before heading off to the CIF. As I approached the door, I noticed quite a number of people gathered around outside. I figured that they were from the previous game, until I got closer and recognized way too many of them. I then looked in the direction of the rink itself and noticed that all of the doors were closed. Indeed, the entire complex was closed down, which is a first since I've never seen the rink closed this early before (gym yes, rink no).
Making it to the group, I inquired as to the current situation and was told that one of them was told by the lady watching the gym that the guy had left about twenty minutes ago. Since they were told this about ten minutes ago, that would make it.. uh.. carry the five.. half an hour ago! What the heck? We hung around a bit longer as more people started to arrive. Unfortunately, all of them were there for the game, and none of them had access to the rink. That really sucked. We hung around for about fifteen minutes before calling it quits and heading home. I went straight to the office (after checking out the field to see how dry it was - not bad) and checked the on-line schedule.
Lo and behold, the schedule shows two broomball games tonight. It also had the phone number for the convener which I immediately dialed. I was greeted with:
"Pizza Pizza."
*blink* I sat there for a couple of seconds before asking for the convener. In the background, I could hear the girl giggling in the background "I can't believe I just did that". I got to talk to the convener who seemed to be as surprised as I was that the games were canceled. Actually, I was quite surprised that he was home since the convener is supposed to be at the game to make sure that all the teams show up, but let's not belabour that point. You don't mention my players, and I won't talk about attendance. Anyhoo, he told me that he'll e-mail all of the team captains with an update on what was going on. We'll see what happens..
T sent me this link. Hmm, I think I have to get that kid back somehow..
Sciborg's back up it seems. Nothing new to report on that end. I better continue with DUH. It seems as if KGL has put up a counter on her site. There's also an interesting quote from SDS as well. You'll have to go see it for yourself. Laz has a short update from yesterday up, as well as a couple of misdirected comments from Tenshi.. (sorry, I found that funny - although I'm not the Mistress..) Jax has something up from yesterday as well, an interesting look at the Indonesian Candle dance (although I've never seen it before.. will you preform it again Jax? =). The only sort of folk dancing I ever did was in elementry school. I think my parents still have pictures of me wearing that weird (Polish? Czech?) outfit. I must find them and burn them.
Ahem, last but not least, Tiffi has a new entry up. But more importantly, she's got a new picture up too! (It's like picture of the month or something.. Waitaminute.. it IS a picture of the month thing.) Anyway, to answer Tiffi's question, the entry is quite interesting, expecially when you're listening to 80s music in the background (like the Miami Vice theme..). I say, go for it girl! Even if you can't go on a date, there's still phone/e-mail/snail mail right? Not like I'm trying to get people together.. not like I do that sort of stuff.. nonono..
Oh man, the Bee Gees! I feel so old.
Oh.. two things that I just found out. First of all, Cat's may be back from the dead. That should be interesting, although I probably won't go back. The second is a little contest that some of you might be interested in. I found out about it on ZDNet, and since the page has to be self contained, that means my page is out (my scripts are illegal *cry*). Oh well, there's still quite a bit I can do..
I best get going. *yawn*
[0 Comments]
Thursday, May 18, 2000 at 19:10:21 (UTC)
Hear hear! Down with the gas-guzzlers!
Actually, I'm thinking of getting an electric car, or a gas-electric hybrid... well, at least I'm Reducing.
Hwansome
Thursday, June 22, 2000 at 16:52:33 (UTC)
After Michael's comments on the Insight, I'm very tempted to get myself one. However, thirty grand is a little on the pricey side..
QYV
Friday, June 23, 2000 at 16:13:47 (UTC)
Some of us just walk, or take public transport. People who are too cool to take the bus are in need of super-wedgies.
(Well, in areas where public transportation is useable, anyway.)
mister virtue